Texas Liberators - Robert Anderson (May 17, 2011)

SLOAN: This is Stephen Sloan. The date is May 17, [2012]. I'm with Dr. Robert Anderson in his home in Lubbock, Texas. I'm here with Robert DeBoard. We're doing this interview with the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Texas Liberators Project. Thank you, Dr. Anderson--

ANDERSON: Okay.

SLOAN: --for sitting down with me today. Well, let's begin--let's go back to Chicago. Let's start in Chicago. And tell me a little bit about your family and some of those early memories in Chicago.

ANDERSON: Well, let's see, the best I can say is that both of us have come from Swedish families. And I lived in--in my early life, I was very closely associated with a Swedish church. The denomination is the Covenant, the 00:01:00Evangelical Covenant. At that time it was Swedish. So my early, early years were centered on Sweden, really. I mean, you know, our--all my grandparents came from Sweden, and my parents spoke Swedish and so on. But unfortunately, they didn't speak Swedish to us.

SLOAN: Ah.

ANDERSON: And I lived in the South Side of Chicago and went to elementary school and high school--Calumet High School in Chicago. And when I was about eleven, my father passed away. And then, later, my mother passed away. And I lived with my 00:02:00sister. I will--well, I do want to say that Iris and I met when we were about fifteen or sixteen at a church Bible camp. Because she also comes from Chicago and an ethnic community--very much more so than myself, actually, in the vicinity of North Park University.

And I'd always wanted to go to school. And since in the late--early forties and so on, there wasn't much money, when I graduated from high school, I started at Illinois Institute of Technology, which is the old Armour Engineering school. I started in a co-op program. In other words, we went to school one semester and then worked a semester, and so on. I was in that program, and I started in '42. 00:03:00At the time I was, like, eighteen and a half, or something like that. And while there, of course, the war was going on, and many of us enlisted in the army or air force or--all four services at that time. So I wasn't drafted. We anticipated going to school. At least, I was in the air corps and anticipated going to school for a degree, but in March of 1943 they called us all up. And that was it, after about a year of school.

SLOAN: I want to go back and ask you--I forgot to mention that Iris Anderson is with us. She is watching. You can't see her on the camera, but she is watching, and she's here. I want to ask you a couple questions about some things you've 00:04:00already mentioned. In particular, kind of, the Swedish upbringing, you talked about that being very much a part of your early life.

ANDERSON: Right.

SLOAN: What did that look like? I know you said language they didn't necessarily pass down, but what did that look like as far as, I guess, holidays and food and all those sorts of things?

ANDERSON: Well, the food was very Swedish. Although, we did find in our numerous trips to Sweden later on that folks that I lived with--all the Swedish folks, they cooked as of 1900. It wasn't contemporary Swedish cooking. And we always had the Swedish holidays. And at church--I think this is the correct, we went to Julotta, which is the service at Christmas Eve. And my father was an organist in 00:05:00the church. I didn't know anybody else but Swedes, although I lived in a--I hesitate to say it this way, but another, broader ethnic community that was Roman Catholic. And so I was (laughs) actually a minority, whereas Iris lived in a Swedish community in Chicago. And we--I suppose this might be of some interest. We had Irish mafia bootleggers in our neighborhood, very close to us. 00:06:00I always like to tell the story that I remember as a kid, when I was very young, Al Capone coming down the alley with his machine gun, shooting up our neighbors. And so I never went out with my daddy and shot rabbits. We had the Chicago mafia trying to knock off the neighbors, which they were succeeding in doing to a certain extent.

SLOAN: I can imagine that would be a memory that would stay with you.

ANDERSON: Well, it's a memory.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ANDERSON: The leader of the family that were involved was Spike O'Donnell, and he's--you can find him on the Internet, on the Web. He's got--interesting histories about him. So that was my early time.

SLOAN: I guess in that neighborhood, the Swedes were more, kind of, caught in the middle. They weren't necessarily involved in South Chicago.

ANDERSON: No. No, they were not involved at all.

SLOAN: Now, what did your father do as an occupation?

ANDERSON: My father was very fortunate. He was a salesman. And he was not tremendously affected by the Depression, although all our friends were. And he traveled quite a bit, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, but he died in 1936. So from then on, things changed quite a bit.

SLOAN: Yeah. But the family weathered the early part of the Depression fairly well.

ANDERSON: Yeah. My brother, older brother, passed away about three months before my father. So--

SLOAN: What a tough period.

ANDERSON: Let's go on.

SLOAN: I understand. Was your sister older, that you went and lived with--your sister?

ANDERSON: Yes, my sister was--let's see, she was born in 1913, so she was eleven years older than me. And she'd been married, but subsequently divorced, and--but I was very close to her. Well, I should be. In other words, until I went to the army, she basically took care of me.

SLOAN: Yeah. Well, we--what were you studying? I know later where you ended up as far as your intellectual pursuits, but what were you interested in as a kid? The sorts of things that--

ANDERSON: Well, I went into IIT, and generally it was a business program, so my 00:09:00first positions as a co-op student was in accounting. But I was not a great accountant. And it was during that first year and a half at IIT that I had my introduction to psychology.

SLOAN: I see.

ANDERSON: And then after the war, I decided to go that route.

SLOAN: Which--what was your exposure to psychology during that early period?

ANDERSON: Well, I took a course. And a very dramatic old professor, who I subsequently went back to after the war. But it had quite an impact on me. It was something I did well in.

SLOAN: Do you remember what it was about, at that age, about psychology that stimulated, kind of, your interest?

ANDERSON: No, it was more just a general course, you know, the basic course.

SLOAN: I see.

ANDERSON: And my mother had been very, very ill. And I was associated, or had a lot of experience in hospitals, and so on.

SLOAN: Well, let's go forward a bit. You talked about the decision to enlist. And you didn't have to enlist, so can you tell me a little bit about what you remember, the reasons behind deciding to enlist?

ANDERSON: Well, the recruiters came to the university. (laughs) And they encouraged us to enlist, and everybody did. I mean, you know, if you weren't in the--weren't being drafted--I was eighteen--if you weren't drafted, why, you 00:11:00weren't so good. So we had a choice of, you know, coast guard or marines or navy or air force or army. You could enlist. And we did that, but as I said, with the idea in mind that you would complete your education. People in the navy programs, they generally completed their programs. But the people in the army and the air force were pulled out and sent to various camps.

So it was March 1943, and I went through the normal routine, you know, and wound up in St. Petersburg, Florida, for basic training in the air force. And we had a 00:12:00real rough time. I lived in a hotel that they had taken over as a barracks, but went through all the preliminaries, you know, the marching and all that stuff. And then following that, I was assigned to training as a radar operator. And I spent time doing some instructing and so on, in radar, which was new at the time, and had quite a bit of experience around Bradenton-Sarasota, Florida, and that area, which was very primitive then. Then this business about the ASTP came out. Are you familiar with that?

SLOAN: Yes.

ANDERSON: The Army Specialized Training Program.

SLOAN: Yes.

ANDERSON: And so I applied for that, and I was accepted. And my induction to 00:13:00that was at DeLand College in, I think--I can't remember, it was near Sanford, Florida, near Orlando, that area. And from there I was sent up to the University of Georgia in Athens. And this was in Engineering. And the idea was that we were to go on and finish our degree programs, but as you probably know, there's a lot of information about the ASTP, there were some two hundred and fifty thousand young men who were in the ASTP programs all over the nation. I don't know if Baylor had one. I know University of Texas, El Paso, Texas Tech--I don't think 00:14:00Texas Tech did have a program at that time. But we were spread out all over. My neighbor, I think, was at the University of Washington or Washington State. And then, let's see, I went in ASTP around October '43, started the University of Georgia at Athens. In March of 1944, General Marshall decided--have you heard this story before?

SLOAN: No, no, please, we need to have it recorded, you know. (laughs)

ANDERSON: Oh. In March of 1944, they decided that the ASTP program was expendable and they needed troops to fill out the divisions that were going to Europe for the big invasion.

SLOAN: Yes.

ANDERSON: And so they canceled the two hundred and--the programs all over the nation. And all of us were put into various divisions. The only ones who were not put into--taken out of the program were the people in the medical schools. So you'll find a few physicians around, and we have one of them living here, who went through medical school in the ASTP program, and of course, they never--they weren't through until after the war.

SLOAN: Well, do you remember the moment you heard the program was canceled and you were being--

ANDERSON: Oh boy. We didn't know what was going to happen. I mean, they put us on a bus, and we went down to the Tenth Armored Division. And eight hundred of 00:16:00us went into the Tenth Armored as privates. Of course, the Tenth Armored was an established division. It formed in 1942, so it was--I mean, they had the officers and the enlisted people, and the non-commissioned officers and so on, and we were just--we just filled in. I was fortunate, since I had been in radar, I was put into the Signal Company, the 150th Signal Company. But many of my friends either went to be tankers or infantry, and so on. I probably wouldn't be here if it hadn't been that way. And so we went in in March of '44 and by September, the division was sent overseas.

SLOAN: By that point, you knew what you'd trained for. You knew what was next. Well, you knew you were probably going to Europe?

ANDERSON: We just knew we were going to Camp Shanks in New York. We didn't know where we were going. We assumed, as an armored division, we were probably going to Europe.

SLOAN: Well, I wanted to ask because you were talking about it earlier, what did you think of army life?

ANDERSON: What did I think? I am not a soldier. You know, I adapted. I did what I had to do. But it wasn't my thing. And you just--you just did what you had to do. There was no real love for it, and so on. Although a great deal of loyalty developed, as you can see here from what I've told you about my activities with 00:18:00the Veterans' Association. So we went to Europe, and--

I want to mention one more thing about ASTP. A number of us who were in ASTP, at least in the Tenth Armored--and I'm sure Dr. Hartman, my neighbor, will tell you from the Eleventh Armored--after the war, we were involved in a Veterans' Association. And as the years have gone on, the leaders of those groups, like the Western Association, became the leaders of the Veterans' Association. So I have been the president of the Tenth Armored Association. But we've all come up to leadership positions because we were all very well educated. Most of us continued on with our education in various forms, either completing a bachelor's 00:19:00degree or going on for doctorates, and various levels like that.

SLOAN: That's interesting.

ANDERSON: Well, it is, because here I was, a buck private, you know, at the bottom of the hierarchy, and now I have become a leader in the group. And I think it's very interesting.

SLOAN: Had you traveled much in your younger years? I know later on in life you traveled quite a bit, but had you traveled much in your younger years?

ANDERSON: Prior to the army?

SLOAN: Yeah.

ANDERSON: Oh no. We spent a lot of time in Michigan but no.

SLOAN: Well, what--I mean, this is all a lot to take in. Not only army life, but going overseas and--well, going to the South, first of all, probably had to have 00:20:00a little bit of culture shock.

ANDERSON: Well, I'll tell you, if you're from Mississippi, or have lived there, and experienced when I was at the University of Georgia in Athens. I had a girlfriend, and her father was a professor at the University of Georgia. And they invited me over for Sunday dinner. Which, you know, you don't turn that down. So I went there, and it was a very formal, Southern family. And at the Sunday dinner, they served some stuff--white stuff in a bowl. And they passed it to me. And I looked at it, and I couldn't figure out what the heck it was. It was hominy. And I didn't know how to eat it. And it just was--(both laugh) you 00:21:00know, it was a shock. And that was--but instead of the potatoes, it was the hominy. That was my first experience, really, of the Southern culture.

SLOAN: Yes. And if they had doubts about you before, they probably had more doubts.

ANDERSON: Pardon?

SLOAN: If the family had doubts about you before, they probably had more doubts after your dinner. (Anderson laughs) Well, let's go up to shipping out from New York. Can you talk about that process?

ANDERSON: We went to Camp Shanks. That was in New Jersey, I think.

SLOAN: New Jersey.

ANDERSON: Yeah. And we were put on ships. I was put on one of the old Liberty ships. These were the old seven-knot freighters. And another part of the 00:22:00division was put on a passenger ship, which promptly ran aground as we headed out. And so we joined a convoy going across to Europe. I think it took fourteen days, because we could only go as fast as the slowest ship. We were on the slowest ship. I don't know how many of us were on the ship, but it--you know, the bunks were stacked up three and four, five high, and so on. I think the one memorable experience I had on that is that it became very rough in the mid-Atlantic, very rough. And the old ship was very light because all it had on it was the soldiers. And so the stern would come up and that old propeller would--(sound effect)--you know, she'd come out of the water. But they wanted to 00:23:00keep us busy. So they decided that one of the things that would keep us busy was to do guard duty. Because you could never tell, you know, who might try to climb on that boat.

SLOAN: Let me just--I think this recorder has stopped for some reason. Oh--let me--you want to stop that?

pause in recording

All right, you were telling me about being assigned to guard duty.

ANDERSON: Being assigned to guard duty. So we each had to spend a few hours with our rifles, guarding. And my assignment, in the middle of the night, during the biggest storm they had out in the Atlantic, was at the stern of the ship. You know, that's the back of the ship. And I was the guard against any Germans climbing up (laughs) onto that ship. And I stood out there for a couple hours, 00:24:00you know, with that rudder coming out of the water. And that wasn't a very pleasant experience. (Sloan laughs) And it made me decide maybe I was wise not going into the navy. But I was very--one of the fortunate ones that I didn't get sick. But a good number of the men were sick.

And so we finally got over to Europe, or calmer waters, and my division was the first division to land directly in France. And we landed in Cherbourg. And Cherbourg had just--let's see, that was in late September, and so on. And of course, the invasion was in June, so they had just cleared out that whole 00:25:00Normandy area. So we came in at Cherbourg and did our staging--what they call staging, in other words, getting ready, in Normandy. So my first experience in Europe was in Normandy, with the hedgerows, and so on. Living in pup tents, with a lot of rain.

SLOAN: What was some of your initial impressions of the situation there, when you got there in September?

ANDERSON: People were poor. I mean, I had never seen that kind of--it was farm land. I had never seen a house where the people lived in one side and the cows lived in the other side. And, you know, it was really very rural. And I had never heard of the various liquors that they had. Of course, soldiers always go 00:26:00for the liquor and try to buy that. I'm sure that every army in the world, the first thing that soldiers head for is where's the booze? But there was none available. So it was very rural, and the hedgerows were so different, you know. And we did our jobs in getting ready to go into combat, which we had no idea, at my level, no idea what was going to happen.

SLOAN: Well, what was the mood, what was the conversation like, do you remember, among the men?

ANDERSON: What was it like?

SLOAN: Yeah, I mean--

ANDERSON: God, I wish this rain would quit. (pause) No, I'm--at the level I was, 00:27:00that's, you know, that's where you were. And then you had your various assignments to your units, but we had no idea what we were getting into. Absolutely not.

SLOAN: And you were in the signal corps.

ANDERSON: I was in the signal company.

SLOAN: The signal company. But you were doing wire--

ANDERSON: I was a wire man, yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah, you were a wire man, yeah.

ANDERSON: Yes, you had to climb telephone poles and lay the wire. And at that point we had two vehicles in our unit. Not in the signal company, but in our unit. One was a halftrack, and the other was a jeep. In an armored division, they didn't call them jeeps. They called them "peeps." So we had those two vehicles, and they had reels of wire on them, you know. And you had the climbers and all that sort of stuff. And the telephone switch board that--I don't think 00:28:00we carried one, but we did have one. So that's what we were learning how to do, of course. A guy like myself hadn't been very well-trained because we hadn't been with the division before. So we came in as pretty raw, pretty raw.

SLOAN: Well, not much in your radar-operator training was helping you.

ANDERSON: Oh, nothing. Nothing.

SLOAN: So the staging area there, you're doing training and getting ready to begin your advance, I'm sure.

ANDERSON: Correct.

SLOAN: That's in, you said, in September of 1944?

ANDERSON: Well, it wasn't--it took us--yeah, because we went--I think it would be in the book there. But we left there in either late October or early 00:29:00November, I don't know the date, and headed out across France to the, quote, "front lines," which was at that time around Metz, in Alsace-Lorraine region. So we went through Paris. My first experience in Paris was riding down the Champs-Élysées in a halftrack, under the Arc de Triomphe and on the way. And now this is not a, I suppose, an appropriate memory, but in riding in the halftrack, they didn't stop for anything. And I just had to go to the restroom. Of course, there was none available. So all I could do was hang out the back of 00:30:00that track, going down the middle of Paris. (laughs)

SLOAN: That's a very appropriate memory, and I guarantee you it's not in that book. (both laugh) So that's your first introduction to Paris. Well, I was about ask if you had any interactions with Parisians while you were there.

ANDERSON: No, not Parisians.

SLOAN: Yeah, but in the countryside, did you have much interaction with the French?

ANDERSON: Not as we were going through, no, because we were moving. And so we would just stop for the night.

SLOAN: And of course, all this area was very secure.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was all secure, yeah. And so we went through France all the way up to Metz, which is close to the--what is it? The Saar River, Moselle, in that area. And that's the Maginot Line, really. And so our first combat 00:31:00experience was trying to penetrate the Maginot Line with the tanks, and so on.

SLOAN: Can you walk me through that experience? Just, you know, you're a soldier, but that first experience where you realize, Okay, this is real and we're at war.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was not for us in the signal company. What we would do was run wire from the either division headquarters to Combat Command B, which was equivalent to a regiment, or from Combat Command B up to battalion. So this was more or less of a stable front. And there were forays trying to go through the Maginot Line, but we did not--Oh, I heard a lot of artillery, but it was not 00:32:00intense combat at all. And the first real combat that I experienced was we went up to a town called Thionville, which is on the Moselle, close to Luxembourg. And at that point we went through Thionville, and parts of the division were the first army division into Germany. It was the border.

And I suppose another experience that I had in Thionville, or outside Thionville, which is a very lasting, uncomfortable memory, is that we didn't have a lot of heavy clothing. We were getting it gradually, but we had--as a 00:33:00wire man you had to go out and you work with your hands, so you had gloves. And I lost a glove. And there was no other glove, so I was out a glove. So we were parked on a road in the convoy. And I looked over there, and there was a whole pile of soldiers, dead soldiers. They just lined them up on the road, you know, and then they were waiting for the mortuary trucks to come and pick them up. But they were mostly German soldiers. There was one American who was from our division, had the night before been killed. So I went through those, looking for gloves. I found a glove. And--excuse me. (pause) I took from a young German 00:34:00soldier, and on his belt, he had "God is with us." Gott mit uns. I'm sorry. I've had post-traumatic stress syndrome. (pause) Some of this really gets--sixty-five years of that. (pause) I'll be okay in a minute.

SLOAN: Oh, don't apologize, and please take your time.

ANDERSON: But my thought was, Jesus, I've been praying to God all my life. And he was my enemy, but the same thing. It didn't make sense. It didn't make any 00:35:00sense at all. (pause) I thought I had this under control, but it still comes back.

SLOAN: Well, you know, to have that sort of intimate encounter with the enemy and identify, that had to be a very powerful moment for you.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was. You know, What the hell are we doing here?

SLOAN: Yeah.

ANDERSON: So we went through Thionville. And then that area, Metz area, and if you want, you can read it in the book. And this was in December, early December. Around December thirteenth, fourteenth, and that was when the Germans broke 00:36:00through on the Bulge. Now, we were just south of Luxembourg. And the Germans had broke through, and the southern end of their line was in Luxembourg. You probably have heard this before.

SLOAN: So it was right above you. You were right below the Bulge, yeah.

ANDERSON: And so General Patton, in all his wisdom, said, "We've got to stop the Germans, Tenth Armored Division." (pause) So the Tenth, on the sixteenth of December, was sent up to Luxembourg. And I remember the first night in a Luxembourg billet. And the division was split up. Part of it went to the front 00:37:00in Luxembourg, and the rest of us in CCB (pause) were sent to a town called Bast--(pause) Bastogne. (softly) I'm sorry. But we were sent to Bastogne, and our division was the first troops to stop the Germans. I'll show you what 00:38:00happened to me, get myself together here a little bit. I haven't done this in a long time. (pause) And we were the wire platoon that's attached to CCB, so we were the only wire group that--halftrack and a jeep.

SLOAN: This is the map?

ANDERSON: That's the map.

SLOAN: Oh, I see.

ANDERSON: And as you can see, the whole German army was coming down. Our tankers and infantry stopped the--do you want me to wait?

SLOAN: No, no. You're fine.

ANDERSON: Anyway, we were there about eighteen hours before the 101st Airborne Division. And if we hadn't been there, (sound effect) the Germans would have come right through.

SLOAN: That's right.

ANDERSON: But if the 101st hadn't gotten there, we would have been eliminated. And as you probably know from history, the town was surrounded. And we did our duty. We laid our wire. And it was--that's what this comes from. So starting with the eighteenth of December, until early January when I was evacuated, why, 00:40:00we were there. And it was--but you didn't think about the--I wrote a little book about this. You didn't think about, you know, you were going to die, because if you did, you were gone. You just did what you had to do. (pause) Well, you have a little Scotch?

SLOAN: (laughs) Now, we know that's water.

I. ANDERSON: He didn't ask for it.

ANDERSON: My wife has been through this. And so we--I don't know what to tell you about Bastogne except that it was a pretty rough experience.

SLOAN: Well, I know--in that period, it's every moment, right?

ANDERSON: Pardon?

SLOAN: There's no relief from it. It's constant.

ANDERSON: There's no relief. Yeah, we were surrounded for about five or six days. And I remember when the--six days. I remember when the air drop came in and C-47s dropped supplies to us. And we were down to basic rations and no ammunition. Our track had been blown up. It was just--but we had--I remember when McAuliffe said, "Nuts." You know, with the German surrender demand. But, again, at my level, we had no idea how bad it was. We had no idea. And of course, this has been glorified in the movie with Patton, and the Battle of the Bulge, and all this other stuff. And the latest one is, let's see, that one with--what is it? Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks--Brothers--?

SLOAN: Oh, Band of Brothers?

ANDERSON: Band of Brothers.

SLOAN: Band of Brothers, yeah.

ANDERSON: But they never mentioned the Tenth Armored, our division. Because we were there, right with them the whole time. But, you know, it was a glorified thing, now. It wasn't one then. So in mid-January, sometime around there, I wasn't feeling too well. I went to the aid station. And my eyes were yellow, so I had hepatitis. (laughs) Which is probably from the unsanitary conditions. And I was evacuated at that time. Went back through hospitals in Paris and Le Mans, France. And was sent back up to my division and joined the division in Trier. 00:43:00And our division had just taken Trier at that point. That was probably in early March. And from that point on, I was with the division until the end of the war.

SLOAN: Of course, the situation in March was a world of difference than January.

ANDERSON: Well, yeah, but Trier was--had just taken. That's quite a--you know, it was an old Roman town, and so on. And I remember, when I got there and joined the group again, why, they had just broken into some champagne factory. So we drank champagne out of a tin--(laughs) a tin cup. (laughs) But we went--from 00:44:00there, we went through--they just broke through, went through Kaiserslautern, up to the Rhine River. And that was--there would be pockets of German resistance, but we were moving quite rapidly. So we came to the Rhine River around Mannheim-Ludwigshafen. Are you familiar with this geography? That's on the Rhine, and went across there. And the first city that we stayed in for a couple days was Heidelberg.

And at this point, we had moved into the Seventh Army from the Third Army, because we were going south. So I had my first experience in Heidelberg at that time. I was there for a couple days, because we didn't stay too long. And then 00:45:00the division continued on south, and you know, we just moved tremendous distances, and we'd hit pockets of resistance and so on. And we were just doing our duty, laying wire and keeping up with them.

SLOAN: So were there--did lines of communication stay pretty well open at that point?

ANDERSON: Not the German lines that we--

SLOAN: No, I mean the Allied lines.

ANDERSON: Yeah. Yeah, we were able to keep them open. And we had radio, and so on. But they were moving awfully fast. And they had a great deal of difficulty around Crailsheim, but I was not involved in that. I suppose another experience, I went to a--we went to a town and stayed a couple days, and I can't remember 00:46:00the name of it. I think it was Öhringen. But there was an old German castle there, or palace, that we stayed in, actually. And it was an old German--I forget the name, Hohenlohe. It's very similar to the name of Queen Elizabeth's husband's family, for, you know, he was from Germany. And I remember being in the garden of that place, and this very elderly gentleman came out. You know, there was no resistance. And the servants came up to him and backed away from him. You know, it was real royal sort of behavior. And it was such a contrast to, you know, the supposed Nazi regime and so on, and the military aspect of 00:47:00Germany, to see this really Old World stuff. So I managed to liberate, I think, a little suitcase and fountain pen. That was--you never stole anything, you just liberated it.

SLOAN: Liberated it. There was a lot of things liberated.

ANDERSON: A lot of things were liberated. And so we continued on, south. You want me to get into this camp business?

SLOAN: Yeah, if you could. If you'll begin by talking about, you know, anything you had heard of places like this, or--

ANDERSON: We heard nothing.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ANDERSON: Now, at my level, we heard nothing, absolutely nothing. We didn't know what we were getting into. We just knew we were going south. We knew we crossed 00:48:00the Danube River, at Ulm. And, you know, I hardly knew "Blue Danube Waltz," but we were just going south. We knew we were in Bavaria. And we knew that--I guess one of the things that really hit us and hit me was the contrast between France and Germany. France and the Alsace region was poor. I mean, it was, you know, very rural. Soon as you went into Germany, it was clean. It was just like home. And nobody was a Nazi. We always billeted--you know, we'd come into a town and say, "Raus, get out." And we would take over their homes. It didn't make any 00:49:00difference, you know, where the heck they went. But we didn't have to sleep in pup tents. But it was such a contrast between people who were very clean and spotless, and so on, and the French, who were very rural and, you know, close to poverty level. I remember that very clearly. So, on we went.

SLOAN: Well, yeah, let's talk a little bit about--oh, one thing. Were you taking on prisoners of war?

ANDERSON: We were taking on--in the book, you'll see that we were taking on tremendous numbers of prisoners. And they were young. They were young kids, many 00:50:00of them. But we liberated thousands of them. Not liberated, but took thousands of prisoners. And you'd see them marching down the road, you know, being guarded and so on. I had no contact with them at that point.

SLOAN: Well, let's move into the--when you're getting into the Landsberg area or--is it Middlebaum, Mittenbaum? No, I'm saying it wrong.

ANDERSON: Memmingen.

SLOAN: Memmingen. Okay, when you get into the Memmingen area and you begin to hear of the camps.

ANDERSON: Didn't hear it. We just went into the camp. I mean, my experience--I have to talk about my experience.

SLOAN: Yes, well, take--I want to go through your experience.

ANDERSON: My experience was, all of a sudden, here we are, we're in a camp. And 00:51:00seeing those--those barracks that they have there. And, "Don't talk to the soldiers." There's a lot of Americans here. You can see their picture. Don't talk to them. I remember that, because there might be German spies. Now, I'm sure at the higher levels, they were--they knew what the situation was. And that was my first experience at seeing men--people with the striped uniforms that you've seen in the pictures. So that they--whether--the picture here is of American prisoners, but there were really a lot of real concentration camp people.

And the other thing that struck me was they were--they looked like Mongolians. And they must have been from Russia or something like that. But there was a lot of people that didn't look like Germans, or didn't look like us Caucasians. They 00:52:00were obviously from a different ethnic group. And they were wearing the striped uniforms. And they were--they were milling around and so on. They didn't want us to have any contact with them. See, this was the first day that we were into this situation. You may not be familiar, or maybe you are, with how we are fed. You're fed off the back of a truck, and they have three GI cans. And you dip your--throw your garbage in one, and you dip your mess kit into another and you clean it, and then rinse it off over here. And what I remember is those guys in those uniforms standing by the garbage, (sound effect) eating it.

SLOAN: Any sort of sustenance that they could get.

ANDERSON: Pardon?

SLOAN: Any sort of sustenance that they could get.

ANDERSON: They were eating that garbage. And we left.

SLOAN: Now, you were instructed for security concerns not to interact that much? So that was the concern?

ANDERSON: Yeah, yeah. See, that was the first day, first and second day. And I just remember--and I can't tell you--verify this in any way, I just remember, "Don't talk to them. Don't talk to the Americans."

SLOAN: Can you describe what the camp looked like? Or what you remember the camp looking like?

ANDERSON: Well, I remember barracks buildings, and very crude, crude barracks buildings. And bunks stacked three and four high. And I can't remember much 00:54:00more. It was, you know, southern--in Bavaria. I can't remember the mountains at that point. But it was--we had driven through Memmingen, I remember that, and there was a nice city. And they--there was no resistance.

SLOAN: Well, I can imagine, from how you describe, you know, them looking for any sort of food--the appearance. You talked about the stripe, but I imagine the condition, you noticed, of the--

ANDERSON: But they weren't the prisoners of war, you know, because they found--there was about three or four guys from our division who had been captured during Bastogne who were in the camp. I never saw them, but apparently they identified themselves. And they were all still in their uniforms or, you 00:55:00know, their army clothes. But I never saw those guys too much. It was mostly the guys eating out of the garbage can.

SLOAN: Had it been a work camp? Do you know if it was a work camp?

ANDERSON: I think it was a work camp, yeah. It was not a death camp. Well, I mean, I'm sure people died right and left, but it was a work camp. But that--Dachau, I think we might have been--they call it a stalag number, but it probably was some offshoot of Dachau, or something like that. My neighbor, Dr. Hartman, will tell you about that.

SLOAN: Yeah. So did the prisoners that were in the camp stay around, or did they leave while you were there?

ANDERSON: Oh, they--I don't know. I don't know.

SLOAN: Y'all kept moving.

ANDERSON: Huh? We kept--we kept going south. So we went south. And my unit, CCB, went into Austria at the town of Füssen, F-u-s-s-e-n. And this was our first entry into Austria. And, within a day or so, or within a day, we were in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Garmisch-Partenkirchen was the center of the 1968 Olympics. And it was in Austria, near the Zugspitze. The Zugis train in Germany. The mountains, you know. And at that point--this is around the first of 00:57:00May--that was it. So we occupied Garmisch from that point on until September.

SLOAN: Well, you told me your impressions of France and Germany. What were your impressions of Austria?

ANDERSON: Beautiful. Beautiful. As a matter of fact, while I was there, Zugspitze had--it's quite a tourist area, and there was a train that went up the mountain. And I remember taking the train and the cable car all the way up to the top, to Schneefernerhaus, the snow house. I did my first skiing at over ten thousand feet there. And we just used that area. And it was a beautiful area. 00:58:00Subsequently, after the war, it became a recreational center for American troops. It was beautiful. Stayed in the--put us up in the Bahnhof Hotel, train station hotel, and from there we did our job of laying wires, you know, getting communication going. We never found a Nazi.

SLOAN: Well, where were you when you heard of the surrender?

ANDERSON: Right in Garmisch.

SLOAN: Yeah. And do you remember how you responded when you heard?

ANDERSON: It was relief. It was relief. But all we could think about was, I suppose now we have to go to Japan. And that, actually, was the--that was the 00:59:00word. You're going to go to the East. And it was no question about that. So we were there for some time. And I became sick in Garmisch and again was sent back to a hospital in France, Nancy, France. Nancy, France, which is near Metz. And while there, I was looking through the roster of the Red Cross workers, and I saw this name. And I said, "My God!" It was one of my sister's--and one of my family's best girl--my sister's best girlfriend, was in the Red Cross, Lois 01:00:00Nelson. So I immediately had a contact in the hospital with Lois. And I became a sort of a volunteer for the Red Cross there. It was fun. And I went back and joined the division.

And then in September--they had a point system, you know, number of years in service and so on. And then you went home, depending upon how many points you had. I did not--since we came in--most of us came in late to the division, we did not go with the division to leave in September to go back to the States. So I was assigned and sent to the Seventy-First Division in Augsburg, Germany, 01:01:00which is a little bit north, and stayed there for some time, doing nothing.

SLOAN: What did you do to pass the time?

ANDERSON: Nothing. (laughs) It was--oh, I think I did some work in finance, but really, nothing much. And then we started the trip home. Went through Antwerp. Never got to England though. And I arrived back in the States in mid-January after a ten-day trip across the Atlantic again.

SLOAN: Well, I'll ask. I asked about V-E Day. Where do you remember hearing the news of V-J Day?

ANDERSON: Yeah, I think I was on a train, coming back from the hospital, in the 01:02:00forty and eight car. They used to put us in forty and eight cars. You know what a forty and eight--

SLOAN: I do not know what a forty and eight car is.

ANDERSON: Forty men or eight horses. It's an old--it was not a passenger car. But that was the name, forty and eight, and I remember that. It was not--I don't think the impact really hit us, but we realized that we wouldn't be going to Japan.

SLOAN: Well, I know you were anxious to get back home.

ANDERSON: Oh yeah.

SLOAN: We've already established, you didn't want to be career-military.

ANDERSON: I established--oh, I had a girlfriend over there, and I gave it some thought. But fortunately, I decided that wasn't the route to go. So I came back. 01:03:00I think I was discharged January 16 from Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois. Immediately went home to Chicago. I think a week later, something like that, I called Iris, because we had been in correspondence, and went up to her house on the north side of Chicago. And, Iris, can you describe that? Is she there?

SLOAN: She's there.

I. ANDERSON: No, you tell it. You tell it to them.

SLOAN: She wants you to tell it.

I. ANDERSON: It's your story.

ANDERSON: Well, I remember going to her house and it was in this, again, this Swedish community. And I think we saw each other, and that was it.

SLOAN: Were you Swedish enough for them?

ANDERSON: Her father was an immigrant. And her mother had lived in Sweden. And she lived in a--it was really a very ethnic Swedish community, with North Park University, which is--at that time was very Swedish, church-related school. But it was--we had known each other from church experiences when we were kids. So the church I went to and the church she went to were part of the same denomination. So we were very familiar with--although, I had--not familiar with her father's Swedish accent.

SLOAN: So were you married that spring?

ANDERSON: We were married that--when was it? Oh, May.

SLOAN: May?

ANDERSON: Yep.

SLOAN: Uh-oh, you may have an anniversary coming up.

ANDERSON: May 25, wasn't it, Iris?

I. ANDERSON: Yes.

SLOAN: You better remember that.

ANDERSON: In the Swedish church. (Sloan laughs) And at that point, I had already started Illinois Tech. And then I transferred to the University of Chicago. I had about a year and a half, or something like that. And my professor, Dr. Boder, at Illinois Tech suggested I go to Chicago. Now, it was very interesting about Boder. Boder was an old Latvian immigrant from years back, who had gone originally to Mexico and did some work down there as a psychologist, and then 01:06:00came up to Chicago and became a professor at Illinois Tech. But he had Jewish background. And after the war, right after, he got the idea of doing oral histories with people who had been in concentration camps.

SLOAN: Interesting.

ANDERSON: And so he took an old wire recorder and went over to Europe to interview concentration camp survivors. And the interesting thing was that the wire recorder at that time was patented and developed at the University of Chicago. Or rather, at Illinois Tech.

SLOAN: Oh, was it?

ANDERSON: Yeah. And I remember having a professor by the name of Hayakawa who subsequently was a senator from California, brought that into class--this was 01:07:00before the war, and demonstrated it to us. But anyway, David went over to Europe, and he recorded all these interviews with people. He came back, and he had all these wires. Now, you guys don't know what a wire recorder is. But if that wire becomes goofed up, I mean, you've got problems. And it was just a very thin wire. So he gave me a little job of helping him, sort of, straighten out those reels of wire. Because when he got over there he didn't realize there was a different current. You know, we have 110. It was 220 over there. So there was a different speed associated with--those damn things didn't wind correctly. So he had all this data on wire that was almost impossible to regain. He 01:08:00subsequently has written a book about that, by the way, those interviews. It's David Boder, B-o-d-e-r. I don't have a copy of the book, but he did publish it. And I'm sure through Amazon or through your--through the--

SLOAN: Through the library.

ANDERSON: --through the libraries, you can find that book, but it would be some of your best information about the experience of the concentration camp--the death camps.

SLOAN: Were you able to save any of the recordings?

ANDERSON: No. I don't know if he did. I just spent time with him in his home. And that's when he introduced me to classical music and so on. They were very--very German. He had lived in Germany, and Austria. So that was a very 01:09:00interesting experience. But anyway, I went to the University of Chicago. And at the time I went--Iris, were you pregnant then? Yeah.

I. ANDERSON: Yes, I was very pregnant.

ANDERSON: We didn't control things as well back then.

SLOAN: (laughs) You would have scheduled this differently if you had thought about it, yeah.

ANDERSON: And we were living on the North Side, and I'd take the streetcar and elevated train down to Chicago. And Iris helped me quite a bit. We had some contacts.

I. ANDERSON: Before you got into Chicago--

ANDERSON: Pardon?

I. ANDERSON: Before you got in--started the University of Chicago, you had that ruptured kidney--ruptured appendix.

ANDERSON: Oh yeah.

SLOAN: Oh, your appendix ruptured?

ANDERSON: Up in there, and I went to the Swedish hospital. Nowadays, it would be nothing, but then, it was quite a bit. Iris had to go down to the university and 01:10:00register me, didn't you?

I. ANDERSON: I had to go down to the university at about eight and a half months pregnant to register you at the university. Fortunately, we had a friend down there that helped me.

ANDERSON: Our friend, one of our friends down there, was from the same Swedish community. We had two friends, and one of them was, at that time, an adjunct professor or something like that. And he subsequently became president of North Park University. So I started out in psychology, went into psychology at that point. And I suppose another relevant thing is that's when this darn post-traumatic thing really hit me. And so I went over to the counseling center 01:11:00in Chicago and asked for some help. I didn't go to the VA. Probably, my life would have been differently if I had gone to the VA, because a lot of soldiers did. So I started out in psychotherapy there. And at that time, in 1948, a professor had come from the University of Ohio to Chicago to take over the counseling center. And he was probably, at that point, one of the outstanding psychologists in the United States. His name was Carl Rogers. And he's published a tremendous amount. I don't know if you've ever heard--

SLOAN: I've heard that name.

ANDERSON: Yeah. And he was director of the counseling center. He was not my therapist, but I became influenced by that experience. And that's when I moved 01:12:00into clinical psychology.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to ask you a little bit about that, because it is an unusual--I just know--my wife's a psychologist--she has said not a lot of psychologists, especially that do clinical work, had necessarily been in counseling themselves. So how did that--do you think that experience--how did it make you feel about psychology, or going into psychology? Do you think that changed your career path?

ANDERSON: Well, it helped. I had about three hundred hours of therapy, but I never had any medication or anything. And I never--if I'd have gone to the VA, it would have been different. So I had--you know, my life was built around that. And I subsequently--oh, I had--see, Chicago at that time did not give a 01:13:00bachelor's degree, so I went in for the master's, and then decided to go on for the PhD. And I worked with Rogers. Rogers was my dissertation advisor. So--

SLOAN: I joked about it earlier. What was your PhD research?

ANDERSON: Oh, it was--it was a study of psychotherapy, and physiological measurements during therapy. And it was published. And I worked on that, and became an--oh, they called them an extern, and I was hired by the counseling center to do things. My last appointment was as a United States Public Health Fellow in Clinical Psychology. But I continued working with these people. All I 01:14:00knew was working in a therapeutic environment. And Rogers was so different. At that time he was, oh, probably the most controversial and the most well-known psychologist in the nation, and actually, in the world. Because, while at the counseling center, people used to come in from all over the world to study with him. And our situation was so different than most graduate programs. The graduate students were involved in the decision-making processes. So I had contact with people, brought them over for dinner from--priests from--I remember one priest, a Jesuit from the Netherlands and people like this. And it was an eye-opening experience really, so different from our old ethnic background.

And so, 1952, two of my colleagues there who I was very close to, we were graduate students--one of my professors went to the University of Texas, Carson Maguire. And he brought in Bill Kell, who was a graduate student ahead of me. And then, he brought in another guy who I was very close to called Ollie Bown, Oliver Bown, at the University of Texas. And they needed another psychologist at the counseling center there, so they put the finger on me. So we got in our old Hudson and came down to Texas in 1952. And talk about culture shock. That was 01:16:00culture shock.

SLOAN: And you settled in the Swedish community? No, I'm just--(laughs)

ANDERSON: No, not exactly. We--oops, I'm sorry. So we started out there. And I didn't have my degree. I was ABD [all but dissertation]. And that was '52. I finished up my dissertation in December of '54. And, well, I'd gone up to Chicago for my master's. I didn't walk for the PhD, which I regret very much, because there's that Rockefeller Chapel, beautiful ceremony. And so I had my PhD then, and then nineteen--this is '55, early '55--a position opened up at Tech 01:17:00[Texas Tech University]. And I was recruited for it. And they paid more money. I think it was a couple thousand dollars more a year.

I. ANDERSON: It doubled your salary.

ANDERSON: Huh?

I. ANDERSON: It virtually doubled your salary.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was--so I came up to here in a dust storm.

I. ANDERSON: Talk about culture shock. Whoo.

SLOAN: (laughs) Austin was one thing, but Lubbock is a completely other thing.

ANDERSON: My first experience with Lubbock, coming up for the job interview, was I flew Braniff Airlines. No, it wasn't. It was before Braniff, in a DC-3, coming up here. And it was a dust storm. And that airplane tried to land here at the airport about four times. It couldn't make it through the dust storm. So they went up to Amarillo and landed up there, and we took a taxi down to Lubbock. And 01:18:00that was my introduction to Lubbock, Texas. (laughs) So we decided to take the job. It was more money. I mean, you go where the buck is. And faculty positions were hard to come by at that point.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ANDERSON: So we started out here.

SLOAN: Was that because a lot of GIs were graduating with degrees?

ANDERSON: Yeah, yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah. It was a flooded job market.

ANDERSON: Excuse me. You want to turn it off for a minute.

SLOAN: Sure.

ANDERSON: Nothing like growing old.

SLOAN: Now, Iris reminded me of a story you need to tell, back at Bastogne.

ANDERSON: Well, we were laying wire in the town. You know, we would just go through and lay wire any place. We didn't worry about telephone poles, just put 01:19:00it over houses and everything. And the order went out to the civilians that if you got caught cutting wire, you'd be shot. So sergeant came down, he says, "They caught an old boy clipping some wire over this doorway. You and the other guy, you go up. Take the jeep and go over there and get that guy." And so we drove through the town and the guy was under guard. What you did, you had your jeep and there was a steel pole, iron pole, that went up in front of the jeep, and they used that so that when you go down the road, it would clip wires. And so he would sit on the front of the jeep, on the hood, and then hold onto that.

And, of course, the order was, If he gets off, shoot him. And then he'll be 01:20:00executed when he gets back. And the sergeant says, "Well, you guys are going to have to shoot him." And I thought, Oh my God! You know, the impact of having to execute somebody. So they interviewed him, the officers interviewed him, and they decided not to execute him. If I had had to do that, I don't know what would have happened. Because that was--it's one thing when people are shooting at you. It's another thing when, you know, you stand somebody up and just murder them.

Oh, I suppose another experience was I was up on a pole, fixing a wire in Bastogne, and all of a sudden, mortar shells kept dropping by. I thought, 01:21:00They're aiming at me. Because they were only about a mile away. And so I came down that pole, and I said, "I'm not going to be a wire man when I grow up, I'll tell you. I'm going to go back to school." But anyway, we changed our focus a little bit, and I became very much involved in rehabilitation work, training rehabilitation counselors, and subsequently went up through the ranks at Tech. In the sixties I went into private practice as a psychologist. I was part time at Tech and part time at practice, so I was right over here at the hospital.

SLOAN: What sort of population you were working with in private practice?

ANDERSON: Anything that could be referred to me. I called myself a psychological general practitioner. And we became very much involved with kids and so on, children with learning disabilities. And finally, my friend who was a department chair came and said, "Come on back to the university. We'll give you tenure, and we want you to direct a program." But I did it on the condition that I could continue in my practice, because I had pretty well established here. I was the first psychologist in private practice in Lubbock with an office in a medical facility. And I continued--came back to Tech and continued with that. Let's see, I quit Tech when I was seventy. That was eighteen years ago. But I continued my 01:23:00practice up until, oh, four or five years ago, Iris? No, we hadn't moved here. It was before. Over seven years ago, we stopped. She was a psychologist, also. It was a good career. So I've had a very close career with psychology in a medical setting.

SLOAN: Well, you know, to think of psychology, the changes you saw in the field--

ANDERSON: I could not practice now. I could not practice now. It's like the old physician, you know. You know the words and everything, but really, the technology has changed so much, and the whole focus.

SLOAN: Well, when you say you couldn't practice now, what are the things you're thinking of when you say that?

ANDERSON: Oh, the techniques. There's two things. One is the whole emphasis upon billing and so on. We didn't have any of that stuff, the insurance stuff, which is killing these people. And the other thing is that neuropsychology. I was doing some of the original work in that, but it has moved far beyond where I was when I was playing with it. Because one of the guys that I went to the University of Chicago with was one of the leaders in development on some of these tests, Reitan. And then the cognitive behavioral stuff, and the old 01:25:00psychotherapy as I knew it--I mean, Freud is out of the business. We were very influenced by Dreikurs, Adlerian psychology, and--very much so. We had Rudolf Dreikurs down here to Tech. But I mean, that's--they just don't--things have changed. I would say this. Our daughter--our granddaughter is a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, in psychology. But she's not a clinical psychologist, believe me. (Sloan laughs) She's a research psychologist in what they call cognitive psychology. Her mother and daddy are both psychologists, and 01:26:00the old clinical psychologists, but that's not the way to go right now. I don't think.

SLOAN: Well, it was a wonderful career for you, it sounds like.

ANDERSON: It was a very good career. That's why we're here.

SLOAN: But it's interesting, you mentioned earlier--I just caught a hint of it, if you had been working with a psychiatrist at the VA versus going in to psychotherapy, how that might have changed--

ANDERSON: Well, probably I would have gotten on medication at that time, what they were using. I could have been a patient at a VA hospital. Well, you know, you had one big one at Waco. You had a big one at Temple. But it just would have 01:27:00been different.

SLOAN: Well, you got to experience the benefits of--

ANDERSON: I had the experience with Rogers, which had a lasting, lifelong effect.

I. ANDERSON: The medication was Thorazine, wasn't it?

ANDERSON: Pardon?

I. ANDERSON: The medication was Thorazine back then?

ANDERSON: Yeah.

SLOAN: Thorazine is what they were using.

ANDERSON: Yeah, Thorazine, the VA shuffle.

I. ANDERSON: It had some side effects that were not very good.

ANDERSON: So it--I did it the hard way, but I did it the good way.

SLOAN: Well, there's a lot I could still ask you, but I want to be sensitive to your time. Are there some things that--we've remembered a couple of stories. Are there some things I should have asked you about, can you think, that we didn't necessarily cover?

ANDERSON: Well, I think one thing that is very interesting is that while I was 01:28:00at Tech, we started to get students--some students wanted to go into the army. The deal was if they enlisted in the army as graduate students, they would be inducted into the army as--(telephone rings) as second or first lieutenants. So I became a consultant to the army. And so I spent time on consulting visits to William Beaumont Medical Center. Iris and I have been up to the Pentagon to visit with the chief psychologist up there, and I've been to several different 01:29:00army settings. So here I was a buck private, and now I'm a consultant for the medical corps. That was a good experience. And we trained quite a few psychologists who went into the army, and then they--as soon as they got their degrees, or as they went into active duty, they became captains. And one guy went all the way up to be the chief of psychological services for the army.

SLOAN: Well now, I also wanted to ask you because you mentioned it earlier, reunions. I know you've been involved in reunions.

ANDERSON: Yeah.

SLOAN: What has that meant for you over the years?

ANDERSON: Well, I became involved about, oh, fifteen years ago, late, to the national group. And then, about seven or eight years ago, they had this western 01:30:00chapter. And I've met with them. And it was a smaller group. And, of course, at a reunion what you do is play "I remember when," you know. And subsequently, I went up. We had a reunion here once in Lubbock, which was the best one they've ever had. It--it's been a good experience. The group is getting smaller, obviously, but all of us are younger. None of us were officers, because we were all--hell, we're--here, I'm eighty-eight, and I'm one of the young ones. (both laugh)

SLOAN: That's a good feeling, when you get to be one of the young ones.

ANDERSON: Yeah. And I probably won't continue much longer because they've been 01:31:00having these reunions out in Phoenix, and that's just--I can't drive anymore on the highway. It's just too much. But it's been very, very good, very good. And, by the way, as I said before, the ASTP boys are the ones that have gone up. (Sloan laughs) I think our current president--no, current president is a son of a veteran, but the last few presidents have all been ASTPers. That, to me, is interesting.

I. ANDERSON: I think it's a tragedy, because that was a primo crop, and then they went and put them in infantry and stuff and mowed them all down.

SLOAN: Yeah.

I. ANDERSON: It's terrible.

ANDERSON: Some of the divisions--I may not be exactly historically accurate, but one of the divisions that was sent up to man the front lines before the Bulge 01:32:00was the 106th Infantry Division, which was composed of a large number of ASTP boys. And they just sent them over there. And that was supposed to be the quiet front. And they put those boys right up there in December, and that's where the Germans hit. And they were--they were devastated. And we had--our infantry had high casualties, too. So, many of the lower-level people were. They were nice, bright college boys.

SLOAN: Well, Dr. Anderson, I want to thank you for two things, for your time today and for your service to our country. And I know Robert wants to thank you for that, too.

ANDERSON: Well, thank you.

SLOAN: Robert, were there any questions that you wanted to ask?

DeBOARD: I did want to follow up on the ASTP. I wanted to revisit that. If you could talk a little bit more--we had discussed with another veteran, who was not in the ASTP program, and he discussed a tension when the ASTP men arrived. Was there any tension in the Tenth Armored Division?

ANDERSON: Well, all our commissioned officers at that time, they already had their ranks. And I don't think there was a lot of--hell, we were just cannon fodder. And I think there, if anything, there could have been some resentment, We got a bunch of untrained guys, but I didn't feel that tension. And very few of us went up in rank, because we moved so fast and got into this combat. And 01:34:00hell, they were devastated. I forget our casualty numbers, but they were pretty good, the wounded and so on.

I. ANDERSON: Well, your training was not very--

ANDERSON: The training was not good. And a lot of these boys going into the infantry units, they weren't trained at all. And I resent that. I resent that. Not my service as such, but the fact that, if you read the history of the ASTP, you'll see that General Marshall and a couple of the others didn't want this program in the first place. And subsequently it went through. And then it was wiped out, you know, in March of 1944.

SLOAN: Yeah, overnight, yeah.

ANDERSON: You'll find that out from Dr. Hartmann, too.

SLOAN: Well, thank you, Dr. Anderson.

ANDERSON: Okay. Sorry I had a breakdown.

SLOAN: Oh no.

end of interview