Texas Liberators - Chester "Chet" Rohn (December 14, 2011)

SLOAN: This is Stephen Sloan. The date is December 14, 2011. I'm with Mr. Chester Rohn doing an interview for the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Texas Liberators Project. And we're in Mr. Rohn's--his daughter's house in McKinney, Texas. Mr. Rohn, thank you for sitting down with us today.

ROHN: You're welcome.

SLOAN: You welcomed us in, and as I said I'd like to go fairly slow in leading up to--we're going get to your experience in the service, but I want to talk in broader terms about your life.

ROHN: Okay.

SLOAN: So you were giving me some interesting information about your family background. Would you mind sharing that with us?

ROHN: Sure. Well, I think you mean my--my grandfather and great-grandfather. They were all from the old country, Austria and Germany. And they were Forty-Eighters. And they didn't like the--one of them didn't like the Duke of 00:01:00Coburg, or wherever he was, and so that's why he came. But I think a lot of it was they didn't want to be in military service, and they weren't making enough money doing what they were doing. And so they--all of them eventually came to United States and finally ended up in the greater Milwaukee area.

SLOAN: And what was your father's profession?

ROHN: My father had a shoe factory.

SLOAN: Had a shoe factory there?

ROHN: Um-hm.

SLOAN: And how did he do during the Depression?

ROHN: I guess it was tight, but I was kind of young and I didn't know the difference. I didn't really know there was a Depression, you might say.

SLOAN: You had food to eat.

ROHN: Oh yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah. (laughs) But what are your--some of your early--well, you already talked about how you love Wisconsin, so what were some of your early memories of growing up in Wisconsin?

ROHN: Well, we had a lot of family around us. On my mother's side, there were five children in the family. My dad just had a brother. So I had a lot of cousins. So my grandfather [Henry Manegold] on my mother's side had a big summerhouse on Pine Lake. The map is over there on the wall.

SLOAN: Um-hm, I saw it, yeah.

ROHN: And I spent all of my summers there. I took my shoes off in spring, put them back on in the fall. I had a motorboat. I had made it into a makeshift sailboat. Of course I couldn't tack with it, but I could--with my motor, I could motor down to the south end of the lake--prevailing winds always were from the south. Then my cousin had made a mast for me and drilled a hole in the front seat, and my aunt sewed a sail--heavy, heavy--whatever. And I would take the 00:03:00motor off, put it in the boat, put an oar--we drilled a hole for the oarlock, and that was my tiller. And I'd sail with the wind two miles all the way up to the other end of the lake. And then I'd do the same thing over. No, I had a great childhood. My grandfather, I think he must have retired at fifty, I don't know. He went somewhere every year--Hawaii or Florida or Europe. And one year he took my part of the family. We went to Florida for a couple months. But he was a real buddy, and he was a hunter. He used to go to South Dakota every year for a couple weeks to hunt pheasants. And fisherman, he liked to fish deep-sea off the Florida coast. So he taught me a lot of--a lot of things. So I had a great childhood.

SLOAN: You took a lot of fish out of Pine Lake.

ROHN: Oh yeah. Yeah, I put a setline out a lot of times at night. And I'd rush 00:04:00down to it at daylight and haul the setline in--see what I got. Sometimes there was a garfish, sometimes it was a northern pike. You never knew what you were going to get.

SLOAN: Did you do any work at your father's shoe factory?

ROHN: Yep, I did. When I was in eighth grade, he put me to work one summer for part of the summer counting skins. The guy who would, sort of, make the shoes, he would give me an order in square feet of leather, and I had to come up with--all the skins had a chalk mark on the back of these tanned skins. They want, like, black calf, you know, and they wanted thirty-four square feet. So I had to come up with skins that nearly matched that. So I learned to do that. And used the parcel post machine for special orders of one pair of shoes to some dealer that didn't have the allotted stock. So I learned a little bit about 00:05:00business that way.

SLOAN: Um-hm. Well, you already told us a little bit about what you did you for fun when you got a little older. Can you tell us about your trip to Texas?

ROHN: Yeah, it was spring vacation of '41, in March. And three of us decided we wanted to see the Alamo. So we hopped in the car that--my buddy's father gave him a brand new Desoto, so, you know, we were living pretty high. And didn't have interstate highways, so it took a long time to get down here, because you had to go through every town on the way. But we went to Dallas first for three or four days, and then over to Fort Worth, and then down to San Antonio, and just had a ball.

SLOAN: Something happened in Hillsboro, though, you already--

ROHN: Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. We got arrested for speeding in Hillsboro. I didn't know they had a speed limit, but I guess they did in Texas. And so it 00:06:00cost us a little money. Not much, but we were a little stressed out because we didn't know if we'd have enough money to get home.

SLOAN: Well, was the Alamo worth the trip?

ROHN: Oh yeah, yeah. And we wanted--they had the airbases down there. I'm trying to think of the name of the field. There were two major fields. And one was Randolph Field for fighter training, and we wanted to see that. And these trainers, boy, they really looked like modern fighter planes to us. They weren't, but they looked like it. You know, slung--low-wing type of deals. And we picked up a soldier on the way down. And he had to go to Fort Sam Houston, so we interviewed him all the way down about the army and so on. We were seventeen. Eighteen.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ROHN: Had a lot of fun.

SLOAN: Were you following--did you have any idea what was going on Europe around 00:07:00that time?

ROHN: Yeah, to some extent, but--in fact, I had even heard one of Hitler's speeches, in German, they put on the radio. But it didn't make that much impression. Yeah, Roosevelt said, "We're not going to war," so we believe him.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ROHN: But the war really didn't affect us. We were just coming out of the Depression. I think the war was responsible because all of our [heavy industry]--we were part of the buildup there, all of the heavy machinery. And Allis Chalmers, A. O. Smith, all these big companies were really producing for England. So we knew that was going on, but the war was a long way away. There was no television. Whatever you knew, you got from the newspaper or radio. And the war made some impression on us, but not that much. It did later on.

SLOAN: Well, I know in December of '41, that changed.

ROHN: That changed. I was in college by that time. Yeah.

SLOAN: And where did you go to college?

ROHN: University of Wisconsin in Madison.

SLOAN: Ah, wonderful.

ROHN: Yeah.

SLOAN: What was that like, in--what was University of Wisconsin, Madison, like in 1941?

ROHN: It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I got into a--well, I joined a fraternity, and I was kind of a party boy. But I was in chemical engineering, if you can imagine.

SLOAN: What made you interested in chemical engineering?

ROHN: I wasn't. My dad said to me, "What do you think you'd like to take?" I said, "I don't know." So he said, "You know, engineering's a pretty good field." And I'd had a lot of math and science in high school, but--so I said, "Well, that sounds good to me." So I started out twenty-one credits as a freshman. And 00:09:00it was--I--it was way over my head. But now the war is starting to come on. And of course, every day, every weekend there was a party for somebody who was leaving for the service. And I got to the end of my first semester of my sophomore year. And my dad knew the guy on the draft board, so he knew exactly when I was going to be called. And he worked it out so I could finish that semester. So then I was called, and off I went.

SLOAN: It sounds like it would be more fun to be in a fraternity at University of Wisconsin.

ROHN: It was a party school.

SLOAN: Yeah. I think that would be more fun than entering into the service.

ROHN: Oh yeah. (Sloan laughs) No, we--

SLOAN: (laughs) It was hard to leave college, probably.

ROHN: Yeah--oh, I didn't want to leave. But we had parties every weekend, and--I 00:10:00was party chairman, and then I was vice president, and finally, I was president, and I loved it. I didn't want to leave school. But, you know, the army came. Everybody was leaving, and we knew we were all going to be called so it wasn't that traumatic. I don't know. I probably knew two people in my life that didn't serve in the army, the navy, or something. So it was just the natural thing at that time.

SLOAN: So you enlisted when?

ROHN: I didn't enlist. I was drafted.

SLOAN: I mean, you were drafted when?

ROHN: Yeah. In early '43.

SLOAN: Early '43.

ROHN: Just before my nineteenth birthday. In fact, I turned nineteen the week that they gave you off. You were inducted in the beginning, before you even got into service. You had to go down, have shots and a few things from downtown Milwaukee. And then that week that they gave you off, I had my birthday. And 00:11:00then I was off to the war.

SLOAN: Well, can you give us a description of your introduction to military life?

ROHN: Well, I wasn't too happy about that. You had to take a lot of guff. I went to Fort Sheridan, Illinois. That was the place that all the Wisconsin draftees went to, or anybody entering in the army. And I think I was there about four days, five days--enough to get more shots and army clothes and so on. And off we went. We had no idea where we were going. So we got on a train, had a three-day trip to Oregon. And I went to Camp White, Oregon, in southern--in the southern part of the state. That's where the Harry & David pears come from, if you're 00:12:00familiar with that. Beautiful country but very rainy. And I wasn't too happy with that. I mean, basic training was a lot of junk, you know. And everybody yelling at you and you didn't know what you were supposed to do. But we finally learned. I learned on a Springfield rifle first, before we got M-1s, the Garand.

And one day they--I was told, Get in your--my class A uniform and report to such-and-such a building, down on the main street. I didn't know what in the world was going on. So they put me in front of a board of colonels and everybody else. They don't tell you, I mean. So I had to salute, you know, with all these guys there. And sit down and they said, Well, son, you didn't do that well in college, but would you like to go back to school? And ho-ho, yeah. So then I 00:13:00figured out Wisconsin probably--I learned about the ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] then. I knew Wisconsin had a chapter. And I knew a lot of girls at school, so I thought this would be great. And I was sent down to California to the Star Unit, which was Stanford University. And the Star Unit would take everybody from what was called the Ninth Service Command. That's the whole West Coast, including Utah and the rest of them. And they dispersed you to the different units, teaching anywhere from language in one unit to engineering.

So I ended up at Santa Clara University, finally, after about four or five weeks at Stanford. And I ended up at an engineering school. And because I'd only had a year and a half--you were either in the beginner's program or the advanced program. Well, I was in the beginner's program. And I started taking the same 00:14:00darn stuff I had just been taking in Madison. And by that time I knew I wasn't ever going to be an engineer. But it was--I loved Santa Clara. Get up to San Francisco every weekend. The West Coast was probably the best place, if you had to be in service, to have your training, because the people were very conscious of the war there with Japan. And at that time a Jap sub had shelled Santa Barbara, and they were sending over bombs--parachute bombs, some of which landed in the forests in Oregon, started fires. So everybody was very cognizant of the war there, and they treated servicemen like kings.

I would go to San Francisco with two dollars in my pocket and come back with a dollar and half after a whole weekend. You got a nice bed. We had some fellow 00:15:00that--in fact, he was from Milwaukee--retired man. And he was in some organization, and they took over an old warehouse, made a hotel out of it. I think it cost us fifty cents, and you had a nice clean bed. You had all the coffee you could drink, with a free breakfast in the morning, showers, and all this stuff, and it just cost you next to nothing. The cable car rides were practically nothing. Movies were half price. The entertainment in San Francisco was fantastic.

And I used to love the big bands of the swing era, so my--I used to drum, too, when I was in high school, on my own, you know, in the basement. And my hero was Ray Bauduc. He was the drummer for Bob Crosby's band. And Bob Crosby had--I 00:16:00don't know what you'd call it. I guess it was kind of a New Orleans-type music and so on. But Ray Bauduc was the drummer for this band at the Stage Door Canteen. So all the stuff they did were like "Smokey Mary" and "The South Rampart Street Parade" and so on. So I got to sit on the stage, right next to the guy, and I thought that was great. They fed you. Pepsi-Cola had a big center on Market Street. And you could get all the Pepsi you wanted for free, and hot dogs and hamburgers were a nickel. So that's where we ate our dinner each day. In the morning, we would get on radio shows that wanted to have some servicemen on. You got a beautiful free breakfast there. And, God, I loved it. And later on, I did the same thing down in Hollywood, when I was with the Eleventh Armored Division.

SLOAN: So how long were you at Santa Clara?

ROHN: The program lasted--I think it was nine months. So I got to Santa Clara--let's see, I would guess it would be about May of '43. And they scrapped the whole program. Now, we knew this was coming. So we thought, We don't want to end up in the infantry, my buddies and I. So we got permission to go back up to San Francisco and take the physical for the air corps. So we decided we wanted to be pilots. So we passed all the--everything. And then the program--ASTP ended. The next thing I know, I'm on another train to Southern California, to Camp Cook. And Camp Cook was a huge area for armored training. You needed a lot 00:18:00of square miles for that. So these guys--well, you know, we were the rookies getting in there, and they ragged us. And so we said, Heck with you guys, we're going to be in the air corps. So they didn't call us and didn't call us. Soon we found out they didn't need any more pilots at this part of the war. So we were stuck. I ended up in the engineers.

And I don't know why, but some of my friends ended in the artillery, the armored artillery, and some of them in tanks. But I was in the armored engineers. And I liked it. You get to work with a lot of explosives. We had to intercept booby traps and be able to take up antitank mines. That was one of our big things overseas. And our job was to stay with the tanks and do whatever they needed to 00:19:00keep going. And we would be up all night taking mines out of the road in Belgium and hearing the German truck ahead of us. And usually it was snowing. And they were throwing the mines on the road. You couldn't dig. I mean, it was frozen solid. So these big antitank mines they were putting on the road, and we're coming up behind, you know, about five hundred yards behind them. And we couldn't blow them because we weren't allowed to let people know we were doing this. So we'd drag these mines off to the side of the road. And then the next day, the tanks could use that road for whatever they were going to do.

So that and building small bridges, small treadway bridges. Europe has streams and stuff everywhere. You know, major and minor rivers everywhere. And we never would build anything that took more than two hours. Then the rear echelon would come up and build bigger bridges. But if we hit a stream that the tanks couldn't 00:20:00get across, we would throw pontoons over and treadway and get that thing over and they could take it. During the Bulge, we were infantry. Everybody was infantry. We were so shorthanded, and they had lost so many men between Normandy and Bastogne. There was an awful lot of heavy fighting and heavy losses. So they needed more bodies. And we were getting these poor guys that had been in the army maybe six weeks, and they sent them to us. They barely knew how to fire their rifle. And it was terrible because these guys were some of the first casualties over there.

SLOAN: I wanted to go back and ask you a couple of questions about--before we get to Europe, your demolition training--did you do that at Camp Cook?

ROHN: Yes.

SLOAN: What was the focus of your training there? What were you doing there to get ready? Because I know this was all new to you.

ROHN: Well, we had to work--be able to work with a lot of explosives. Now, we had dynamite, which is not a military explosive, but they used that for training. It's too touchy. In fact, we used to take sticks of dynamite and throw them, and one out of three would explode by just throwing the stick. But they had a thing called nitrostarch, which was very much like TNT. It came in the same kind of block. So we used that, but it wasn't as powerful. So we used nitrostarch a lot of times. We'd have what they called the combat village. It'd be a whole village that was built there, and you had to go through and look for snipers or anybody. And, of course, they booby-trapped all the doors. And you had to be careful because some of our guys got hurt by these booby traps. But that's how we learned how to do that.

And we'd learned all the weapons. I was able to shoot weapons that I never shot in combat. I never shot a bazooka over in Germany, but I learned how to do it in California. I learned how to throw grenades. What else did we shoot? Fifty caliber. And I loved to--I used to be on the rifle team in high school, so I had no trouble with that. And you could get various levels, you know, up to--whatever, like sharpshooter and then these different steps. So I qualified and made expert on everything because I loved to do it.

SLOAN: Well, you grew up hunting, too. Yeah.

ROHN: Some hunting, but mainly I was--we had--in my high school, we had a shooting range in the basement. I went to a private high school, and we had a shooting range. And my son-in-law kids me. He said, "You're the only guy I know that could carry his rifle to school." But I did. I had a beautiful .22-caliber, heavy barrel and everything. But I didn't leave it at school, but I took to 00:23:00school. And a case, a beautiful case. And we'd go in the shooting range, and then we would shoot against military academies. Most high schools didn't have rifle teams. But I loved that, because the bull's-eye was the size of a .22 bullet. And you were supposed to hit that bull's-eye.

SLOAN: Wow, yeah.

ROHN: And, you know, it was a short range. I don't know how many yards--fifty feet or whatever it was. But I loved that. And so we shot a lot of stuff. At Camp Cook they even gave us fireworks when we would have a training thing with the infantry. You had to crawl up under artillery fire. And we got these guys used to shells going right over their head and exploding about fifty feet in front of them. And we were supposed to harass the poor infantry. So they gave us these fireworks, and we'd throw these bombs and stuff at them. They used to get 00:24:00so mad at us. But we had a lot of that. There was a thing that was used, but we didn't use it afterward. It was called the snake. I don't know if you ever heard of that.

SLOAN: No.

ROHN: It was a tubular thing with a tube that was like this, like a double tube, and then it was jointed. And it kind of went like this and a tank could push it. You know, it was a hundred feet long. A tank hooked onto it and it had all this high explosive in it for maybe forty yards. And the tank was behind it, pushing into a minefield. And then there was a target on it, and they'd use their .30 caliber machine gun to hit the target. And bingo, and it would clear about a twelve foot-wide path that a tank could take. So we had a little experience with that, setting that up, but we never used it overseas. Although I understand it 00:25:00was used in some areas--

SLOAN: Was used--

ROHN: --to clear roads, yeah.

SLOAN: I see, yeah.

ROHN: It beats trying to find them by hand or with a bayonet and all that stuff. But we could do everything that the infantry could do because we had infantry training. But in addition to that, we had all the mine work, you know, and that's what the engineers did.

SLOAN: Well, did they have a pretty good idea, by that time, of what sort of devices you were going to run into, that the Germans were using? As far as mines go?

ROHN: Oh yeah. We saw, like, the S-mine. They called it Bouncing Bettys--jump up five feet. We saw samples of that in training. And luckily, none of our guys happened to hit one of those because those were deadly. The other mine that was very bad was called the Schu-mine. It was made of wood, and the only metal thing in it was the spring on the plunger. And they could put a block of TNT in there. 00:26:00And if you stepped on it, it could blow your foot off. And that's all they wanted to do. It was to wound you enough so you were no good as an infantryman. And they'd scatter--these were cheap. They scattered those all over. But you had to keep your eyes on the ground on those. They didn't bury them. They just maybe let the snow cover them up, or whatever.

SLOAN: Well, how did you--you could only visually detect those, I guess, because there wasn't enough metal in them to detect them?

ROHN: Well, but most of the time--you know, you took a bayonet and--if you thought there was going to be something. But Schu-Mines were--it was a nasty thing because it didn't kill people, but it sure wounded a lot. And then they had a lot of other ones, but the Bouncing Bettys were the bad ones. They were full of ball bearings. It wouldn't explode until it got up to about five feet. And then the idea--you know, it would cover quite a wide area. And we saw some of those. We'd see them, and we'd put a block of TNT and blow them. But when I 00:27:00first got to France, I thought, I'm going to watch every step I take. Well, that lasted about five days or something like that. I mean, you just hoped you weren't going to hit something. And there were--Germans used a lot of mines. (telephone rings) Oh, let me turn that thing off. Is it all right if I get up?

SLOAN: Yeah, sure. (telephone rings again)

pause in recording

ROHN: Hand grenades, we threw those in training. The only time we'd throw them in Germany was we went trout fishing. We'd go in these streams and we'd line up and say, one, two, three--and these were fairly deep streams, and we'd throw these things in. And as fish would come circling, yeah--we gave them to the villagers. We had no way we could cook fish anyway. But there are a lot of trout streams. But the weapons training, the M-1s, the carbines, .50-caliber was good. 00:28:00Everybody knew how to shoot all those because--yeah, your gunner--one of your gunners could be wounded, so somebody could step in. They knew how to do it.

And I liked my machine gun. It was outdated. It was a 1903 or whatever model complete with a big water jacket on it. Later on they had the same thing, but with a--just a heavier barrel that wouldn't freeze up. But it had the same mechanism in it. But I never put water in mine. How could I? On a half-track, where are you going to put the water, you know? So you learned how to shoot the thing dry. And you never did more than about five shots, and then you let go of the trigger, and then you went five shots. Otherwise the barrel would freeze up and you couldn't shoot anymore. So that was what I shot most. I don't think I ever shot at any Germans with my rifle.

We had to carry a rifle, too. But luckily, once the Bulge was over, then we were on tracks. Before that, we walked and sometimes for miles. You couldn't have vehicles in the Bulge. There just wasn't room to run them. And a lot of our work was at night. And then during the day we'd be infantry because we were shorthanded. So they said, "You--here, you--this platoon, take this sector." And you sat in a foxhole and froze.

SLOAN: Well, before we get to Europe, I want to go back and just ask you if there are some stories or memories that stand out to you from your basic training in Oregon.

ROHN: Not too much. I didn't really have full basic training because I got picked for ASTP. I mean, a lot of hikes--there was a mountain there, and every 00:30:00day you had to go up the mountain and down the mountain. And learning how to shoot army rifles and so on, carbines. Nothing really special.

SLOAN: Okay. When did you get word that you were going to be deployed, to Europe?

ROHN: Well, I don't think we ever got word. I mean, you knew you were going, but you didn't know the date. And so the summer of '44--hang on, I missed the invasion. But we were doing a lot of maneuvers in California. It was all desert there. It was where Vandenberg Air Force Base now is, where they shot all the missiles. That was Camp Cook. And we had miles and miles of territory that you'd go, because some of our problems took us miles. You know, the--everybody, the 00:31:00tanks, the half-tracks, the trucks. So it was a big, desolate place.

(laughs) One thing happened that was--it wasn't really funny, but it sounds screwy. Our artillery hit a train, because there was a coastal train. It was a passenger train. And they shot--I don't know, I think it was probably a short round or something. And shell fragments went right through the diner. It didn't happen to hit anybody, but it kind of hit the train. Made the news and the paper anyway. So we were shelling our own trains.

But we had a lot of--you know, they would always have a problem. And you go out, and here's today's problem, and here's what you're going to do. We'd build a bridge or it'd be charge a pillbox or whatever. We learned to use the, like, 00:32:00Bangalore torpedoes, if you ever heard of those. It's like a big stick charge. Never used it in combat, even though I wasn't--

We bypassed--as an armored division, we bypassed a lot of trouble. We used to go fifty miles a day in Germany with a whole division. And so we didn't fight in towns. We would learn to fight in towns. That's what the combat village was, you know, so you could--second story and some kind of snipers. But we never did anything--we were in little towns, but not city fighting. We didn't do any city fighting. We would bypass it because we were supposed to be forty miles down the road by nightfall. So I didn't mind that part. I liked that the war would--it got to be almost pleasant. We were attacked by planes, of course. And that's 00:33:00most of the shooting that I did, was at planes. Occasionally at German infantry but most of it was at ME-109s or Focke-Wulf 190s. They'd come from behind you and the columns--we had columns that were ten, twelve miles long, and that'd be only one combat command. And another one would be taking the parallel road four or five miles away. So the Germans used to try to hit our columns, just as we did theirs. And I didn't like that too much. But we never got blown up.

SLOAN: Well, we had talked about, I think, before we started recording, you were a rear gunner on a half-track?

ROHN: Yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah.

ROHN: We had a .50 caliber ring mount on the front, and a post mount on the back. I could swing the gun, but it was on a post. But that was a .30 caliber. So we had--in the column there was a lot of firepower. Even the trucks had ring 00:34:00mounts on the passenger side of the cab. So even the truck would have--most of them had a .50 caliber. And of course, the tanks and the rest of it--there was quite a bit of firepower there. So they didn't--when they attacked, they were pretty careful.

SLOAN: What was it like to operate one of those .30 caliber guns?

ROHN: It was very easy. I mean, it fed in the left, and the belt came out this side. You know, a lot of crazy things happened during the war, and I--we were setting up in France. We were--near Belgium. And I wanted to check out my gun. And so I had my crew--in France, they used to have big mounds where they buried potatoes. And they would last all winter long. And they would be mounds ten feet 00:35:00high. So I was just, kind of, sighting in on this darn thing, and cows were down there and everything. And in a machine gun, there are two ways to load it. You do it this way, push the belt in, then you pull it back and let it go. That pulls the shell out but doesn't put it in the chamber. Then you pull it a second time. So at first it's half-loaded. Or you can let the latch up, lay the thing in, put it down. It's already half-loaded. So when you pull it one time, now it's fully loaded. So we were going to try out--

SLOAN: I think I know where this is going. (laughs)

ROHN: We were--you know, we were checking it out, and it was a time--it was right around Christmas and we didn't have an awful lot to do. So I was sighting in on these cows and stuff. And I wanted to--I'd never put the water jacket on, 00:36:00but I thought, I'd better know how to do this. Never did use it later, but you had to screw the thing on the front. And then it would--you know, the water, when it got hot it would expand, and when it got cold it would go down, so you had a circulation. And it kept that barrel--the barrel in the machine gun, it was only about as big as a rifle barrel: very thin. And it was in the bottom of that round chamber so that the heat went up, of course, and this took the heat off the barrel.

So, anyway, I was sitting down in front of the gun trying to get this thing on. The muzzle of the thing's right there. One of the guys--he's sighting it, you know, while I'm doing that, and that kind of stuff. And I didn't think anything about it. So I got that thing on and then I went back. And for some reason I pulled the trigger and the darn thing went off. I thought it was half-loaded. 00:37:00And I was sitting there with that thing fully-loaded, and if this kid had pulled the trigger that would have been the last of me. But, I mean, stuff like that happened. There were a lot of accidents in the war, awful lot of accidents. Yeah, guys would get caught between two vehicles and legs crushed. There was a lot of that. It wasn't all gunshot wounds. There was one--oh, we had all kinds of crazy things happen.

I got a--which I'll give you, if you want it. A little girl, across the street, she was in eighth grade. She had an assignment to interview an old duffer. So she thought of me, and she came and she said, "Opie"--and they called me Opie then--"Could I interview you? I have to do this for school." I said, "Sure, come on." We spent the whole afternoon. And I'm trying to think, what can I tell her that an eighth-grade girl should know? You know, you don't want to go into horror stories.

So I told her about this one time in Germany when--at night, you always went 00:38:00into a little town, took over all the houses and put the guard out, because our division was alone out there. And we were sitting ducks if we didn't get some guns and the tanks around, everything else. So, anyway, we went to this one town. And we used to have a generator. And we found German wire, which was made of pure silver. And you wouldn't believe it. It is much more conductive than copper is; silver is. But they didn't have copper. And so a lot of their wire was silver. We'd get that silver wire, and we could light a house using that generator. But first we had to darken all the windows and everything else; put curtains up. But then maybe we could get one light or two lights on. So we had 00:39:00that. And we had all the--we used to nail paper or whatever we could find there so that light wouldn't show.

And all of a sudden there was this god-awful blow. I thought we were under shell fire. Oh, right outside our window in the--and the whole window frame came in. And I look out, and the building next door is just collapsed. Oh my God, you know, we're under shell fire. What it was, some of the jokers in our company found a safe in the basement of this building. And we had the original plastic explosive, which was called composition C2, I think. And they had put this all on, but they used--they said, Oh, we better have a lot more of this to make sure we get this door off. So they did that and put a fuse and left. And it blew the 00:40:00durn building down. If you'd--the whole thing collapsed on itself. So I told her about this. And I got a copy of this--she had to write a paper on it. The thing that impressed her is those poor people that lost their house. And I said--I said, "Now, Ash," I said, "I didn't do this." But all--she was thinking of the poor people who must have lived there. I mean, I thought it was kind of a funny thing that happened, but--anyway. So she was going to interview me for something else. I don't know. She has all these projects. And she's a writer. And she wrote up, and she got an A on it.

SLOAN: Oh, that's great. Good.

ROHN: But there were--things like that were happening all the time. And in retrospect, they're funny. They could have been bad, but a lot of funny things happened.

SLOAN: You know, dealing with the explosives that you were dealing with, and the 00:41:00instability of some of the explosives you were dealing with--

ROHN: And we didn't use dynamite.

SLOAN: Yeah, I know.

ROHN: Dynamite we didn't carry because dynamite--if a bullet hits it, it'll go off. TNT, you can shoot a bullet through it and it won't. But we had a lot of different kinds of explosives. And the plastic wouldn't go off, either, unless you used a cap, a dynamite cap on it. But we were so used to handling that stuff that we--you didn't think about it. It was just second nature. We used to blow hillsides down. The Germans had a habit of--when there was a switchback--and you get into, like, in the Rhineland, the--it was just like this, because there was a lot of little rivers and things. And the only way to get across these--they didn't go through the hills, they just went this way and zigzagged up to the 00:42:00top, and then they zigzagged down--just kind of a country road.

So the Germans used to bury a--oh, maybe a 500-pound aerial bomb in those roads. And then nothing could get through, because if a tank tried to go around it, they could either end up twenty feet down or hitting the wall. And so we used to go up, and if it was the right kind of soil, we had a posthole digger and we'd put twenty, thirty pounds of TNT and blow the hillside down. And then our dozer would come and smooth it out so the tanks could get across. So there was that kind of stuff. Whatever had to be done, we were there to do the cleanup work or whatever it was, or build a bridge or--some of it was kind of fun, but some of 00:43:00it wasn't. I've never lifted--we had to put--do you know what a Bailey bridge--have you ever heard of a Bailey bridge?

SLOAN: Uh-huh.

ROHN: All right. That was a British invention. And we did it in training. And that's when I knew I didn't want to put one of those things up, because it took twenty of you to carry one member. And it had all these--you know, the bridge was like this, the side of the bridge--heavy. Oh! And twenty--even with twenty of you, it just about broke your back carrying this thing and putting it in place. So we only built one of those overseas, thank God. Other than that, we did the little treadway stuff.

But we still carried an awful lot of stuff (unintelligible). Stuff I would not even think of trying to lift now, we would carry, sometimes for miles. I had to carry--as the gunner, I had to carry not only my rifle and my pack and all the stuff that's wrapped around you--your water bottle and first-aid kit and that stuff--but I had to carry the tripod. And my assistant gunner carried the barrel 00:44:00and receiver. The tripod for a .30 caliber--I don't know exactly what it weighed. It was probably close to fifty pounds. So you put it on your back and then put your arms over like this, over the two legs this way. The other thing would hit you in the back, the other leg. And then I had two boxes of ammunition. And then my assistant gunner had the barrel, receiver, and he might have even carried the ammunition. Then I had an ammunition carrier too, because these things ate up a lot of shells fast. But, you know, how we all didn't have hernias, I don't know. I'm sure some of the guys did.

SLOAN: You were happy when you got your half-track, after the Bulge.

ROHN: Yeah, we didn't --then we didn't have to do that. But you'd have to lug it--in Belgium, we'd have to go and guard, let's say, a bridgehead. And the 00:45:00officer would say, "Just a little further. It's just over the next ridge." He didn't know, you know. I threw my whole gun down one time. I was just--I just had it: "Heck with this. I don't give a damn if Germans are around or not, I can't take another step." Oh, they all got ahead of me and I thought, This is foolish. So I picked all the junk up and went on.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to go back--you shared a little bit earlier about, kind of, your first thoughts or impressions when you got to Europe. If you could take us back and share a little bit about when you got to Europe and, kind of, your first impressions of Europe. (pause) I know you landed in France.

ROHN: Yeah, we landed in Normandy; in fact, in Cherbourg. That was in December, just before the Battle of--Battle of the Bulge started on the sixteenth of December. We landed, I think, about the fourteenth. And I don't think we'd even 00:46:00heard about this yet. It took a little while for news to travel. But our first job was going to be down along the coast. Lorient and Saint-Nazaire still had German divisions. They'd been bypassed. But the Germans could be supplied from the sea. So, you know, they might have two, three infantry divisions in these ports. And our infantry couldn't seem to clear them out. So they said, We're going to send our armored division to see if that'll work. So we were going to go down to Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, and that was going to be our first project. And we got started, and then they said, There's some trouble up in Belgium. You guys are going to Belgium. And that's the first we knew about the Bulge.

And it took us, I think, three days and three nights to get the whole division 00:47:00from the coast of France up to the Bastogne area--at least that. We never stopped. And that was kind of hairy. We got in there at night. All these tracers are going off, and I thought, What am I doing here? That was our real first taste. We'd had--we had, oh, a few attacks by individual Germans in France, but nothing to speak of. But the first action we had when we got up into Belgium--and middle of the night--and, oh, we lost a third of our tanks the next day. We had 150 tanks in the division. We lost fifty the first day. And Ted Hartman was one of the guys in those; he was a tank driver. And he told me some 00:48:00horrible stories. He was lucky. He wasn't hurt, either. But a lot of his friends were killed. Tanks were--I wouldn't have wanted to been in a tank. I mean, it was claustrophobic. They were uncomfortable. And in winter they were colder than heck. There was no heaters in them. And this I got from the tankers; I never--I was in a tank over in training, but I never got into it, otherwise. Uncomfortable, bumpy, and dangerous, because if that tank got hit--you know, they used to call the Shermans the Ronsons. I didn't know if you ever heard of that.

SLOAN: Unh-uh, no.

ROHN: Because they would flame up like a Ronson lighter. It was gasoline. The Germans had oil, they had diesel. But if the Sherman got hit in the gas tank, that was it. Those guys burned. And you had one escape hatch, out the turret, 00:49:00for five guys to get out. I didn't--I wanted to be able to on my own feet and run if I had to, you know, not be cooped up in a metal coffin. But, oh, there were just so many things happening. As I told you, I was watching my feet when I first got to France, because we were--we know a lot about mines, and that's the last thing we wanted to step on. But after a few days you didn't think about it.

A lot of guys got hurt by mines. I was next to one that blew up, but not when I was there. We were guiding trucks up a slope. And this whole road was frozen, but there happened to be a Teller mine that was frozen in the road. I don't know how many vehicles had gone off--over that, but it didn't explode. So I was right 00:50:00in that area, and then I was called to go to another area about a hundred yards away. And wham, this thing went off and blew this truck. And I thought, Wow. I was just there two minutes ago. There were a lot of those instances, you know. Everybody had close calls. You don't even know about the close calls you had because bullets are whistling around. Yeah, I lost my ammunition carrier--he was a nice kid--with a mortar attack. The Germans were great on mortars. They had an awful lot of them, and they were good. Those guys knew how to shell the mortars.

SLOAN: They were accurate, yeah.

ROHN: Oh man. We had mortars, too, but the Germans had bigger ones, and more of them. And there was artillery. Of course, the eighty-eight was probably the most feared artillery piece. And they were accurate. Those guys could--I saw them put 00:51:00a shell through a--we called an M-8--a six-wheeled vehicle for our scouts that would go out in these. Very lightly armored. They had a little thirty-seven-millimeter peashooter on top. But their main idea was to find out what was there and then get the heck out of there, and tell the tanks where to go and where not to go. But I saw an eighty-eight track this guy. He's going across the field, and they put the shell right through it. How they could do that on a moving--because these guys could go forty miles an hour. An awful lot of burned-out vehicles, both American and German.

SLOAN: Any other memories that stand out from the Bulge?

ROHN: Oh yeah, a lot of memories of it. That was--the worst part was the 00:52:00weather. I think that was worse than the enemy because it went below zero for a while there in late December, and we didn't have winter clothing. And we didn't have winter shoes, you know. We just had our shoe boots. I mean, it's like a shoe, only with a high top on it that lapped over. And these were no good for that kind of weather. And we had wool uniforms, but it wasn't padded or anything else. And we finally got shoe packs which had a felt insole and was much warmer, but that was after most of the cold weather was gone. It was good because we had mud then, later on.

SLOAN: So what strategies did you use to keep warm?

ROHN: Well, the first thing you did when there were a lot of pine needles, you took our bayonets and we'd slash low branches and put that down for our bed, 00:53:00maybe get pine needles this thick on the bottom of our hole. And I wasn't in individual foxholes. We had to dig a machine gun foxhole because I had my assistant gunner with me. So that was kind of like a shape here, the gun was there, and we'd get around this way and then that way, which was kind of nice with two of us because one of us could sleep while the other stood guard. But most of the cold--we learned the cold comes from the bottom, not just from the top. And you better be--you know, you can have all the blankets you want on top of you, but you got to have insulation below. And that's what the pine needles, pine branches did. So we would really make a bed. And I think I only had one blanket to put over. But at least down in the hole you didn't have the wind. It 00:54:00was a little warmer down there and you could finally fall asleep. My grandson's here.

But the living conditions were the worst part of it. Absolute worst part of it. You were always cold, plus you were always tired. There were some times, if we had two or three hours of sleep in two or three days we were lucky. And you could be talking to somebody and they'd fall asleep talking to you on their feet. And this happened to all of us. We were exhausted, dirty. I had two showers in almost five months. They only--there'd be a big ring around your mouth as far as your tongue could go; you could clean this part. The rest of us, 00:55:00we hadn't shaved--didn't want to shave because it was too cold. But the bath would be out in the middle of a field, and they'd give you a shower in this weather.

In Belgium, as I said, it was zero sometimes, or below. I don't know how cold but, oh, ice everywhere, snow everywhere. And they said, All right, you guys, you're going to get a shower today. We'd all breathe.(??) That meant going out in the middle of a field. They would put--I don't know what they had, but it wasn't a tent for going around like this because the guy giving you the shower is up on a ladder above you. And you had--they gave you thirty seconds, I think, to soap up and another thirty seconds to dry. And here you are, stark naked, and just this canvas around here. And then you got to get outside and dry. Oh my gosh.

SLOAN: Sounds refreshing.

ROHN: Well, it did knock a lot of layers of dirt off. And the other one I got was in Worms, near the Rhine River. We took over a house, and, of all things, they had a water heater, a coal-fired water heater. And we were able to get coal, put it in, and heat that up, and we could each take a bath. And over the next ten hours, our whole squad--oh man. And that was great. But other than that, we were dirty. The filth was--you were just caked with dirt. But so was everybody else, you know. And why we didn't get more--I did get dysentery over there, by the way. And I was stuck in a German block house for about three or four days. I've never been so darn sick in my life. But why we didn't have more people get that. And it was from drinking water out of a stream. There probably 00:57:00was a dead horse ten yards up the stream or something. So the living conditions, to me, were the worst part of the war.

And then they gave us mittens. First, they gave us nothing. We had, I don't know, some little thin thing. But this was a big, leather thing. Three fingers went here, and then they had a finger hole for here and a thumb hole here. There was--only problem was they didn't get together with the rifle manufacturers to figure out your trigger finger could not go in the trigger housing of a rifle. So when we're out on patrol at night--I mean, you know, it was kind of spooky. And I was not going to not be able to fire if I had to. I mean, you'd see a tree and you'd swear it was moving or something like that. Walking on, we were silent, no noise. We even took the stacking swivels off our rifles because they 00:58:00would clank. So, anyway, here you are; my left hand was fine; I kept that big mitten on. This was a, like, sheepskin type of thing. It was great. But I didn't dare have this out. So I--the other mitten was in a pocket, and my hand just froze. But, I mean, our clothes were not made for that kind of weather.

Now, we weren't as bad off as the Germans in Stalingrad or anything like that. But we sure didn't have real winter gear ever. I don't know what the thinking is. You know, before they crank up and can get the stuff, the season's over. So that was the worst part--and trench foot. You had to keep taking your shoes off and massaging your feet. Your feet were always wet later on, when the thaws came in. Always wet, because it went right through these boots. So it [was] just 00:59:00uncomfortable. It's one thing doing that for a day or two, but when you do it day after day after day, you think, Is this ever going to change? So that was the bad part of the winter for all of us.

SLOAN: Well, you know, I've talked to some servicemen that have talked about how low morale got in the Bulge.

ROHN: Yes. And I was surprised--now, I watch the different history channels. I was surprised at the amount of desertions. And I only learned this in the last couple years. I never heard--I know of one guy in our company--or our battalion, I guess, that left. I never really thought he deserted, but most of us thought he was kind of nuts and all(??). We captured this guy two months later, and he came in surrendering with some Germans out of the forest. But we captured him 01:00:00way far away. I don't think the guy even know who he was. But other than that, I don't know of anybody that talked desertion, wanted to desert. It was just the opposite. You didn't want to get away from your buddies, because everybody had a buddy that--you know, you had somebody watching his back. And we were awfully close. Plus, the fact I'd been with--my best buddies were in ASTP with me, in my squad. I had five of them, which was unusual that five would end up in one squad of ten men. But these were the guys that I went on pass with, I played golf with, I went to Hollywood, and all that stuff. So I just didn't know some things I'm learning now on History Channel.

And the other thing, with the atrocities that happened, some of this guy 01:01:00and--Peiper, the guy that led the Bulge, if you may--Joachim Peiper. It was his group. He didn't do it, but one of his officers just lined guys up and--one man was telling this story--just shot his whole squad in the back of the head. So I learned a lot of things that, if I knew then, then I would have been really scared.

SLOAN: It's a good thing you didn't know.

ROHN: I didn't know a lot of these things. And you never felt you were going to get hit. At least, I didn't. And I think most of the guys felt that way. It was always going to be somebody else. And yet, we saw guys getting hit every day. You know, you're afraid, but not to the point where you ever thought of walking off. But I guess it was quite a problem. They say Paris was full of American GIs 01:02:00that had deserted. And Eisenhower finally had this guy shot. I don't know if you know that story. I forgot what the man's name was.

DeBOARD: Slovik?

ROHN: Slovik, something like that, yeah. They made a movie of it. But he did it. He said, "I don't want to do this, but I got to make sure the army knows you can't do this." But nobody that I knew in my company or battalion was talking or even thinking of going away. You wanted to stay with your own friends. We didn't want to--guys that--when I had dysentery, they wanted to send me back to a base hospital. I said, "I'm not leaving." I wasn't, because I knew what would happen. They'd steal all my souvenirs, and you'd get sent to a repple depple, which was like Camp Lucky Strike or something. And you'd end up in--you had no idea. You'd never end up with your own outfit. So second you were or hurt, you just didn't 01:03:00want to go back.

SLOAN: You stayed there, yeah.

ROHN: Oh yeah.

SLOAN: This is a good point to talk about some of your souvenirs. You were showing us before we started recording your rifle--

ROHN: Uh-huh.

SLOAN: --that you've got. Can you talk a little bit about the souvenirs that you got while you were there?

ROHN: Well, helmets, bayonets, rifles. I got this double-barreled shotgun with a rifle barrel beneath it. A lot I got out of a castle later on. Not too many--one--let me get up just a minute and I'll show you. (retrieves item) At the end of the Bulge, I found this. This is a German thing. In fact, it's still got the old swastika here. We were so cold that--you know, the army didn't give 01:04:00you earmuffs or anything--but I wore this under my American helmet. And, thank God, there's rabbit fur, I guess.

SLOAN: (laughs) That looks warm.

ROHN: Yeah. Oh man, what a difference. And I wore it even after we're on the track, moving through, because it was pretty cold until late April or something. But now when I think of it, if we had ever been captured, and I had on some German equipment, I wouldn't have made it. And my pistol, I got a Walther pistol here, .30 caliber, .32 caliber. In fact, I got the same model that Hitler shot himself with in there. But I carried that, because I thought, you know, if something happens and I lose my rifle, I wanted to have some firepower. But if I'd been captured with a German pistol or anything German on me--I know that 01:05:00now. Makes me shudder. So sometimes I'm more afraid now of what might have happened than I was at the time.

SLOAN: Well, you were young and bulletproof then, right? Yeah.

ROHN: Yeah, we were all young. And that was the secret: we were all young. We were all eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Anybody over twenty-two was an old man. And that's how you made it, because you were much more optimistic than the older guys were. Much more, yeah.

SLOAN: Well, can you talk about when you knew momentum was shifting during the Battle of the Bulge, when you felt like things were changing?

ROHN: Well, we started getting more prisoners. And I was only in the latter half of the Bulge, not the beginning. I didn't get hit like these poor divisions that were sent there to rest. Yeah, we came to relieve the pressure. Bastogne had 01:06:00been opened up. The Fourth Armored came in ahead of us, and they opened the corridor because the 101st was completely surrounded--the airborne, and a couple of infantry divisions. And they couldn't be supplied except by air. They would parachute this stuff when they could, but most the time the planes couldn't fly. They used DC-7s--what do you call them? C-43s or something, like our original airliners. And that was the old army standby. It was a good plane. But they couldn't even fly those because the weather was just so bad. The ceiling was so low. So that meant no air cover from fighters, and it meant no supply. So these guys were down mainly on ammunition and medical supplies.

So the Fourth Armored got in there and opened the corridor. And you know the story with McAuliffe and everything else. He had already decided he wasn't going to surrender the city and so on. And so the 101st was able to hold out because now they got supplies. We came around the western side of the Bulge. And I was in Bastogne once; our track had been hit and was being repaired. And so I was in Bastogne for, I think, two days, one time. And it was pretty much smashed up. But, anyway, then by that time, we got around Bastogne, and there was a town called Houffalize. And the First Army was in the north, the Third Army in the south, and the Bulge split them. And with the First Army, the British, although 01:08:00the British didn't do a lot in the Bulge. In order to pinch it off, they had to come from the north and we had to come from the south. And we pinched off a lot of them, but a lot of them did get away. Well, as soon as we pinched it off at Houffalize, I mean, we knew this was going to be it. But it still lasted another three, four weeks. And then we got to the Siegfried Line right after that.

SLOAN: Yeah, you're covering a lot of territory after that. You're moving quickly.

ROHN: Not right away. Our main--the main time that we had a lot of speed was after we crossed the Rhine. Before we crossed the Rhine, the Rhineland, there were a lot of little battles everywhere. Every river, every bridgehead was being defended by them. Sometimes we'd make a few miles, then we'd have to back off 01:09:00and go somewhere else. It was mixed up. I mean, we didn't know what was going on, you know. You knew your own outfit. But we didn't know how many divisions were here, there. We knew some of them, but in the army they don't tell you anything. They said--they'll tell you where you're going next: Okay, go down this road, and when you come to that crossroad--and so on.

When we got north of Bastogne, there was a little town called Bourcy. And one night we were going to take mines out. And we were told to go up this road north of Bastogne, and when we got up to this crossroad there'd be an MP there who was to tell us which road to go down. Okay, and then we were going to take mines out. So we got up there. We were in a truck because our half-track had been shot 01:10:00up. And so we had no machine guns on it, on the truck. We had our rifles, and we had cases of mine detectors that we were going to use. You've probably seen these, right?

SLOAN: Um-hm.

ROHN: So we got up there, and the guy says, "This way." And so we went that way. And things got quiet and quieter and so on. It was awful spooky at night when there are just a squad of you, you know. So the truck driver was probably driving five miles an hour. And we kept going, and finally we could see the outlines of the shadows of a town with some buildings after we'd gone about five miles. So our staff sergeant was up in the cab, and he said, "When we get in here, I'm going to ask somebody where in the heck"--and he says, "This can't be the right road." Well, we get in there, and there are all these shadows moving around. And so I immediately--I had fallen asleep. And I was supposed to bring 01:11:00my machine gun but I didn't. I had a blanket over me. So I got up. And as I felt the truck slow down and come to a stop, I said, "Where in the hell are we?" Shut up, they said. We're in a German-held town.

All of a sudden, I see a guy walking. I could have reached and touched his hat. He had a white cap on like those caps up there--they never wore helmets unless they were under fire--and that meant German infantry. And here we are, and there's all this motion. And then we looked, and way beyond the back end of the town was on fire. And oh my God. And then we had to back around, and the driver back and forth. But the sergeant had gotten out and walked up to a guy to ask directions of a German soldier. So by this time we're all wide awake now. And so he's trying to back this--and European cities and squares are--you know, 01:12:00everything's narrow. Some of these villages go back five hundred years. So there was no room. And he finally jockeyed that thing around. And he said, "Now, go quiet," until we went out, and our rifles pointed looking back. We expected to be machine-gunned or something. Nothing happened. Nothing happened.

And then we said, Well, now we got to get back into our own lines. Does everybody know what the password is? We said, What was it? Oh yeah, okay, that's right. And so we said then to the driver, When you hear anybody halt us--say halt, you'd better halt. He said, "Don't worry." And so we come up, and we see these two shadows, tanks. And some guy yelled, "Halt!" And he jams on the brake. We all gave the password at the same time. And our tanks said, How did you--where are you coming from? You're not supposed to be down there. That's 01:13:00German territory. (laughs) I mean, these kind of things happen, you know. Nothing happened. (Sloan laughs) But when we talked about it later, it was funny. At the time, it wasn't.

SLOAN: It was anything but funny, yeah.

ROHN: Oh God.

SLOAN: So you were doing a lot of small bridge construction, I guess, as you're moving.

ROHN: Not a lot.

SLOAN: Not a lot?

ROHN: Not a lot. Probably five or six small bridges when we had to. I mean, there were other parts of the engineers doing them, make sure they're--a lot of our platoons were doing it. We didn't build that many, as I say. We only built one Bailey bridge, and then we built maybe five treadways that I can remember. But a lot of it was taking out the darn mines at night, you know. So that was what we did during the Bulge. Then we did the same thing in the Rhineland, but now we're finally on our track, our half-track. And we didn't have to walk and 01:14:00carry everything everywhere.

But it was a busy time in the Rhineland. That was a whole separate campaign. In fact, one of our battle stars--you got battle stars for--you won one Central Europe, one for Rhineland, one for the Ardennes. So one of them was the Rhineland, the Rhineland-Palatinate, I guess they called it. And we went in different directions, and we finally ended up at Worms, on the Rhine River. But all this took awhile because there were a lot of troops in the Rhineland. Took a tremendous number of prisoners. But then the worst part of the war was over. That's where I got my bath, in Worms. So that was kind of nice, plus get into a house for a change. And then we crossed the Rhine, and then we took a northerly course and went around--I'm sorry, just a--(reaches for book) this is our route, 01:15:00the red line.

SLOAN: Okay.

ROHN: It's our whole route from England all the way through. And Bastogne would be, I don't know, somewhere around in here. And so we went up here to Brohl and Zella-Mehlis and all of this. And there was activity, but now we're starting to make miles. And here, we were going--I don't know, this must be three hundred miles. And we'd go sometimes fifty miles, not every day. But which is a lot, when you think of--

SLOAN: Oh yeah.

ROHN: --all the tanks and all the--here's Mally's grandfather right here. And he was with--this was one of our commanders at one time. But he was a permanent colonel in the coast artillery. There's no such thing anymore. But for Colonel 01:16:00Turley, it was a--he was there(??). So, anyway, this kind of stuff happened. What other stories?

Toward the end of the war, I guess we'd--we were just about to get into the Austrian border. And for some reason we'd been sent back, probably to fill a shell hole or do something--or bulldoze something or whatever, blow something up. And we got completely lost from our combat command. We had to catch up. And, all of a sudden, out of the woods--so here we have our three half-tracks for the platoon and a peep. We called jeeps, what other people call jeeps, in the Armored Division they're called peeps. Anyway, just the four vehicles going along, and all of a sudden out on the highway steps this whole formation of 01:17:00soldiers. They were Hungarians, and they wanted to surrender. And we said, Well, you're going to have to follow us, because we're looking for our combat command. And they--you know, they'd been impressed by the Germans [to] surrender. Now they lost all their infrastructure. They didn't have any food. They had nothing. And I don't know how big--it was probably a regiment of Hungarians. And all they wanted to do was get something to eat, surrender and get out of this war. So, anyway, we didn't get up to our combat command that night. So we found a couple of barns. And then we slept right through that in this barn, and off we went. We finally found the MPs to turn them over to, because there's nothing we can do with all their prisoners.

Another time, we were assigned to guard the end of the column. The columns were 01:18:00what they call combat commands. In the Armored Division you had a CCA, CCB, and CCR, meaning reserve. And we would go from one to another, wherever they needed you, you know. The engineer battalion was much smaller than the other battalions, but they didn't need as many of us. So today we're going to be in this column. So they said, You guys are going to be assigned the rear of this column. Mainly ambulances, food trucks, stuff like that--bridge trucks. And we had to guard the back end of the column in case of air attack or whatever. So, all of a sudden, we're going along. Well, it's a beautiful day. And the whole column comes to a stop, and all of a sudden traffic starts coming back the other way. We said, What's going on? Some of these guys yelled, There's a Tiger tank up ahead! Well, turned out there was no tank. But we had--our lieutenant says, 01:19:00"This is our responsibility. We have to go back, get these guys, and get them back in column. It's our responsibility."

So one of the trucks was a Bailey bridge truck. And these things were huge, long things. And we got up to where we had--where they had all run, and the truck wasn't there. So it was our job to find that darn truck. So we questioned some civilians. They said, Oh yeah, some German soldiers got in it, and they went down this little country road. So we thought, Oh man. So Lieutenant said, "We got to get that truck." Okay. So we had the lieutenant's peep and our three tracks. And we're going down this country road, oh, probably five miles. We finally get to a little town. And we went in the square, and there's our truck. But no soldiers around it. And it looked all right. So we rounded up the 01:20:00civilians in the square, lined them all up against the buildings, lined our guns on them, we said, Where are these soldiers? Well, they finally said, Well, yeah, they're in the different houses and buildings here. Well, we didn't know how many or what. But we had to go out and find them. So I went--I kicked open a barn door. And it was the one and only time I ever put my bayonet on. I kicked open the barn door, and there's a girl milking a cow. Well, she screamed and I just about dropped my rifle. It was a comedy. And finally these German soldiers started coming out of the houses with their arms up. And we got about sixty or eighty of them.

SLOAN: Oh my gosh. Wow.

ROHN: What were we going to do with them? And then all the townspeople--I don't know if they were--they must have been from the same town or something, but they 01:21:00knew all these townspeople. So these people--women started running and packaging sandwiches for them to take to prison camp. And it was like--as I said in one of the magazines I wrote an article for, it was like sending your kids off to camp. So we piled these guys into the track. I couldn't even get into the track. They're right behind my loaded machine gun. I'm standing on the mine racks on the side, holding on. We put them on the Bailey bridge truck. We used every square inch because we had to get these guys back to a major highway and hopefully find some MPs to get rid of them, because we had to get in our combat command. Well, everything was fine. These guys only wanted to get out of the war; it was getting toward the end.

And by now it's starting to get dark. And Lieutenant had a map, which I'm sure wasn't very good. We didn't have very good maps. He said, "Well, we're going to take this road. I think this is where--the way we want to go." So now it's 01:22:00getting pitch dark, and I mean dark. One of those moonless nights, you know. So I don't think he was driving more than ten miles an hour. And so we are--here we are. I was in the rear half-track. We're going along, and all of a sudden I hear yelling from the front. The lieutenant's peep bumped head-on into a German staff car coming the other way. The German staff car turned off the road, went down, and turned over down in a little valley. Behind that was a big self-propelled gun. So one of the guys in my squad, he went, put a grenade down his gun, and blew it. And behind that were about fifteen, twenty trucks. I don't know. It was so dark, you could hardly tell. We went off in echelon formation. And I'm--being the rear, I was the farthest one out because we had to get a shot at these guys. 01:23:00They're--by now, the Germans are shooting at us. We could see all the rifle flashes.

And so our three tracks went out, and we had six machine guns going on them. So it just lasted maybe five minutes. In fact, my sergeant and I--I was shooting this thing, had all these flashes. Sergeant said, "Okay, Rohn, that's enough. You got them." (Sloan laughs) None of our guys got hit. One sergeant got a bullet that creased the top of his shoe. And nobody else were hurt. And now I don't know what time it is. It must be ten thirty, eleven at night. And we still haven't found our combat command. We had--you know, we didn't have a place to sleep. So we kept going, kept going. And turned out they weren't too far away because next day, the guy said, "What were you guys shooting at? These bullets are coming over us." They were down a mile over, but there's these tracers; 01:24:00they're going there. And we said, Well, we ran into some Germans. And they said, My God, we thought we were under attack. (both laugh) And this kind of stuff happened all the time.

SLOAN: Well, you know, you were talking about when you--I know you speak a little German. Did you talk to any of the prisoners that--when you had those prisoners with you, the German prisoners?

ROHN: Oh yeah. I had a sergeant, he was a graduate of the University of Stuttgart, real sharp guy. Now, these were all SS prisoners. And I was a little leery about that. I couldn't carry a gun in the prison camp. I had to stash it out.(??) And that didn't bother me, but these were kind of wise guys, and they--I didn't trust them. But I had no problem with them. We were building mess halls. Our army said soldiers have to have mess halls, you know. You're ever in 01:25:00the army, if it says you do it, that's what you do. But we had taken over--this was a former German Army camp, and we made a prisoner of war camp out of it. And we let all the Wehrmacht guys go. There were so many people, displaced people and ex-German soldiers. And we didn't want nothing to do with Wehrmacht. But we had to keep all the SS because they're looking for war criminals. So these guys, they were given work. They could--they would work. If they worked, they got two meals. If they didn't work, they got one meal. Now, when I say a meal, they probably got a hunk of black bread and coffee.

It was a terrible problem trying to feed people at the end of the war, because for about a three-month period there was just--we couldn't get the food over fast enough. There was nothing in Germany except rutabagas and maybe turnips and 01:26:00potatoes. All the men had been in the army, most of whom now are all prisoners or they're dead. The women couldn't plow because all the horses were impressed by the German Army. So they had to do everything by hand, and in the countryside they could raise little gardens. And they were--could probably raise enough to feed themself. If they were lucky, they might've had a cow to have some milk or something for the kids.

But the people in the cities--all the infrastructure was kaput. There was no electricity, there was no running water, there was just no heat. They had nothing and no way to get it to them. A lot of the roads were just blocked; you know, rubble twenty, thirty feet high from all these collapsed buildings. So the people in the cities were actually starving. And it was really bad. But, anyway, 01:27:00I would take the prisoners when they were building the mess halls. I'd tell them what to do and then they would build--do it. And I would requisition carpenters, because I said, "I don't know a damn thing about building a building or anything like it. But I want a guy who knew how to build stairs," that kind of thing. Because the mess hall would be here--or the kitchen would be here, and the mess hall that we're joining to it, a hundred feet long, would be on a different level. So we had a step inside going up or down. I didn't know the first thing about building steps. But I got carpenters. And I would ask--(telephone rings) the sergeant--I'd say, "Now, I want to make sure (telephone rings) you give me good carpenters, because I can't do it." He said, "Oh, don't worry." And we did. (telephone rings) We had guys that were--oh, that darn thing.

BAUM: It'll just--Dad, it'll go off. Just let it go.

ROHN: Yeah. (telephone rings) Well, anyway. So we built these things, (telephone 01:28:00rings) and each mess hall had to have a--or each kitchen had to have (telephone rings) two mess halls attached to it. In the German Army they ate in their barracks. They'd go to the kitchen and get all their stuff, you know, and they'd go to their (unintelligible). The American army said no. So, I mean, that was kind of funny, but that's what we had to do. So I learned a little about how to put footers in and level it out and put a floor in. Then we could get premade sections of windows, so you didn't have to do that. And roofs we had to do, and we could get the--what do you call it?--the trusses that go like this on the roof. Those were already premade for us somewhere. There were a lot of little lumber mills out in the country. So I always had a truck, and I'd get a couple of prisoners to do. We'd load the truck, and we'd go back.

And they knew that if they worked and did a good job, I'd get them some food 01:29:00because these guys were always--all they do is, Oh, hunger, hunger. So I'd go to a farm, and I'd get these turnips that were this size, huge things, or black breads. And I couldn't get a lot, but, you know, I'd trade cigarettes. That's the way you--that was money over there then. There was no--(coughs) there was no printed money that was of any value. And so I'd get whatever I could buy, and then these guys could share. And the sergeant had--he was allowed to carry a penknife with a blade about that long. And it was up to him to cut these big turnips into equal shares. I can still see sixty, seventy guys looking to see if the size of their portion was going to be big enough. And I asked him, "Don't you want to take this back and cook it?" Oh no, no, no. Destroys the--whatever 01:30:00the food value. They ate the turnips raw, and the black bread.

SLOAN: So now, this is what period that you're doing this work?

ROHN: Oh, this is after I ran--was running a motorboat. This probably was August. We ran a motorboat in July, out in that lake.

SLOAN: Yeah, it was in Austria, yeah.

ROHN: Yeah. In fact, there's a picture of me back there on the darn motorboat. So, anyway, there were a lot of crazy things, you know.

SLOAN: Well, I want to go back before we get too far ahead and talk about the Mauthausen--

ROHN: Mauthausen. Yeah.

SLOAN: --experience. Yeah, Mauthausen, yeah. And so I'd like to know when you began to learn that these sorts of places existed.

ROHN: We had heard about these camps, but we didn't know much about them. We 01:31:00knew there were camps; we knew that way back. There were concentration camps. And we heard their prisoners were being killed and all that. But it didn't really register till we started seeing the dead prisoners in the striped uniforms all along the road, coming from the north down to Mauthausen. And I hadn't seen any of that anywhere else in Germany until we got to the village of Cham, C-h-a-m, which was right along the Czech border. And then from there on we followed--our unit wasn't allowed to go into Czechoslovakia. We had to go down, straight down into Austria. Remember, there was the--what they called the national redoubt was supposed to happen down there, where the Germans were going to make their big last stand. Which never happened, but it was a real threat. 01:32:00Eisenhower thought there was going to--this is one of the reasons he didn't want to take Berlin. He wanted to clean this war up and get rid of this national redoubt, because if we ever got into mountain fighting, it would have been terrible.

So, anyway, when we got to Cham and started going along the Czech border going southeast, we started seeing more and more of these bodies lying around the ditches. And I mean dozens and dozens and dozens. And we--What's going on? What--and then we figure, Okay, they're concentration camp prisoners. Why are they killing them here? You know, I'd never heard of Mauthausen. So we got down to the city of Linz, and that is right--six miles, seven miles from Mauthausen. And we took Linz. We took Passau first, then we went over to Linz. And at Linz we met the Russians coming up from Vienna. And their armies were just squeezed 01:33:00between the two. That ended the war because there was no more territory. I have to take a pause for a--

SLOAN: Sure.

pause in recording.

SLOAN: Well, I want to stop you before we get to Mauthausen because you mentioned something that I've been wanting to--I've asked servicemen about, and that was meeting the Russians, because I know that's a memory that a lot have. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

ROHN: We met some Russians who had been prisoners before the end of the war. And very few Russians could speak English. None of our guys could speak Russian. But I did meet one guy that--I think he probably went to college or something, and he could speak English. They came in and came to talk to us, out of the woods. 01:34:00And they had been hiding there because they'd escaped from wherever they had been captured. So we didn't see much of them. But when we got to Linz a lot of them came in. They came in armored vehicles. They came in hayracks. They came with their wives, some of them. And I wouldn't say we got along with them that well.

First of all, we couldn't talk. But these guys were gun-happy. And they were taking automatic pistols, whatever was on hand, you know. And we'd say, Geez, the war's over! Nobody wanted to get killed after the war is over. And they'd want us to drink their vodka. They'd come put their arm around you: Here, take the vodka. I can't say that we had--first of all, they didn't last long. We weren't allowed to do that. The Russians didn't want us to be with their 01:35:00soldiers. I saw guys with probably five wristwatches on this arm and five on that. Then they'd come up to you and put it in your ear and, Yeah! I don't think they even knew what a wristwatch was. A lot of these were just peasants; they probably had never been more than fifteen miles away from their home. So I can't see that--I can't say that we fraternized with them. It wasn't--we couldn't talk. And we came--they came and sat in our half-track, and they were all happy-go-lucky. And most of them were drunk when they got there. But other than that, the Russians kept their men away then. And we weren't supposed to--we couldn't go in their lines.

There was a big deal about who gets the German prisoners. The Russians wanted to 01:36:00get all of them. They said, If they fought in our territory, then we want them, even though they'd come into our lines and surrendered. So I guess Eisenhower said, "Well, all right, we'll do that." But a lot of them we had to forcibly take back. Not me, but some of the others, with army trucks. And these guys were jumping off trucks going forty miles an hour because they were so scared of the Russians. And they had reason to be.

So I can't say we did much with the Russians. You know, we saw a few prisoners, and then we saw a Russian army coming from Vienna. They met us with our Dodge trucks in some cases. But it only lasted a short time. The Russians were not allowed to be around Linz, and we were not allowed to go over there, except the original couple days that--yeah.

SLOAN: Okay. Well, let's go back to Linz and you were talking about when you got 01:37:00news of Mauthausen.

ROHN: Well, we got news as we were going down there. We took Linz, and then, of course, we knew about Mauthausen. And then by that time Patton said, "Every man of the division has to see this." So the day after liberation, I was in Mauthausen. And I don't know how to explain it, but it was the--first of all, you could smell it way before you got there. The corpses around there--they had what they called the hospital yard, and it was what they--where they put people that were dying. Nothing to keep the weather out, you know. You just stay behind this barbed wire till you die. And I'd go--we'd stand, and these people would stare at you with a blank look, and all you could do is stare back. We had--some 01:38:00prisoners who could speak English acted as guides. I mean, they took us into the gas chamber, and they took us into the morgue or whatever it is, where they knocked the gold teeth out. And so we saw all that. They took us to the crematorium. We were in that. And in the barracks.

And some of these guys were imprisoned because they were newspaper people from Czechoslovakia; anybody that was against the Nazi regime. Mauthausen was built back in the thirties, not as a concentration camp but as a prison for German civilians and I think also to provide a labor source because all--they had a big--I don't know, limestone or granite or whatever they--they say that the city of Vienna was built with stone from Linz. And they had one of the big quarries 01:39:00there. And all the prisoners finally did that, but early on these were just German prisoners, you know. It looked more like a big federal prison than the pictures you see of Auschwitz, which were all these hundreds of barracks and out in the open. This was a big stone edifice and everything else. But they had a bunch of crummy barracks in there, too, where they'd put in, like, four or five to a bed. And it ended up just being a death camp. Anybody that went to Mauthausen wasn't ever going to get out.

Now what happened was, when the German guards knew we were getting close, they put the Volkssturm in place, and the SS guards ran away, although we did capture 01:40:00a few. In fact, I think I saw five or six in a holding cell. They tried to spit at us through the little eyehole. They had a peephole. And [when] they knew we were looking, they would try to spit on us. I know all of them were hanged the next year. But it was--it was pretty bad. And the camp hadn't been cleaned up. Our bulldozers had to bury the people and the bulldozer just pushing the bodies into a trench. There were so many--I don't know how many were dead when we got there. It seemed everywhere you looked there were dead people, some of them stacked up. The crematorium wasn't big enough. They couldn't burn them fast enough. So that's why we ended up burying them in trenches that were a hundred 01:41:00yards long. It was just--just awful.

And a lot of the prisoners escaped when our--I'm trying to think what unit it was that got in first. But the gates were open for a while, and a lot of them--boy, all they wanted was get out of there. So there were thousands of them around the countryside. And we had to go and round them up because they were dying. They were out pillaging in farms. And they were--there were some murders, you know, women and children that they--they were like--they were like animals. And if they ate any normal food, it would kill them. (coughs) Our medics were fine for our division but not for twenty, thirty, forty thousand prisoners. So 01:42:00they brought in extra doctors. Oh, it was a months-long thing to get things back to some semblance of normalcy and save those that could be saved. But I would guess that probably after we captured it, at least ten thousand more died. (coughs)

They were just living skeletons. You'd look at somebody--the guy just be standing there, stark naked, on the other side of the barbed wire, and he'd just look at you with these vacant eyes. And you didn't know what to say to him or anything. His knees looked like this because everything else--I could have put my hand around a guy's thigh or here, with my fingers. And their hips were huge and their knees were huge and their heads were huge, and their rib cages stuck out all over. It was--their waists, about that big around. I couldn't believe 01:43:00some of them were alive that I saw standing there. I thought, How could anybody even be alive? You know, maybe they weighed forty, fifty, sixty pounds. And you looked at them and they were probably guys that weighed 180 at one time, or 190 pounds. It was terrible. Disease--luckily we'd all had all kinds of shots, so we didn't get sick, but there was typhus and typhoid and you name it. They were dying from everything you can think of. It was something so different than we had been used to seeing. We saw a lot of dead Germans and a lot of dead Americans, but nothing like this. It's almost impossible to describe. And together with the smell, it was unbelievable. We couldn't believe it. We just 01:44:00couldn't believe it. But there it was.

SLOAN: I think I know the answer to this, but why do you think Patton sent the division down there--wanted everyone in the division to see it?

ROHN: Well, they wanted us to see what they were doing. He said nobody--you know, unless they see it, they're not going to believe it. (sighs) I don't know. I just don't have words to tell you how bad it was. And must've--I don't know how long it took to clean up. Way after I was gone, I suppose. I was in the area for, well, about twenty days or something, and then I got sent to run the motorboat. Then I got brought back, and they were going to disband the division. I was sent up to another unit--I don't even remember the name of it, up in 01:45:00Germany, and that's where I worked prisoners. And--

SLOAN: At Mauthausen, did you get a chance to talk to any of the--besides this tour guide that you had?

ROHN: Oh sure, uh-huh.

SLOAN: Do you remember any of the conversations that you had?

ROHN: No, except they were telling us and showing us what happened and telling us how it happened and what happened. I guess we were just numbed after seeing it all. But we got a tour of every different part of it. They had, like, coroners' tables with the drain where they put the bodies after they were gassed or after they died. And they had to get the gold out of their teeth first. (pauses) Yeah, and that was only Mauthausen. I wonder how many--there were 01:46:00hundreds of these camps. And on our tour last year, we saw the subcamps that I had never been in, and one of which was called Gusen. It was inside of a mountain. And that's where--guy that wrote this book--

SLOAN: Jacobs.

ROHN: --Mike Jacobs. He worked in there making Messerschmitt parts. You hadn't read his book yet, have you?

SLOAN: I have not read it, no.

ROHN: Yeah. But he goes into detail of what he was doing. And that's why he survived; they needed him. Because all the labor were--most of them were concentration camp prisoners. But there were others that weren't necessarily in a concentration camp but they were brought in from every country in Central Europe--Holland, even. They were all in there just to work, and a lot of them on 01:47:00munitions, because the Germans didn't have enough manpower left to run these factories. And some of these prisoners were machinists, and they could do a lot of these things.

SLOAN: One of the things that I know that they talk about with Mauthausen was the stairs out of the quarry, the long stairs that the prisoners would climb out of the quarry.

ROHN: Yeah, with a big rock on their back. If they couldn't make it, they'd throw them down--down the stairs and kill them.

SLOAN: You talked about it being different. Like, the other--you saw other death, but it hadn't prepared you for what you saw when you got to the camp. Did it change how you thought about the enemy or how you thought about the war, what 01:48:00you were doing in the war?

ROHN: Oh, I'm sure it did. I mean, we knew the Nazis were bad. I make a big distinction between the average German soldier and the SS and the Nazis who perpetrated this. The average German soldier didn't know what was going on in these camps. And not all the SS that--what they call the Waffen-SS, they were the fighting men, they weren't all that bad, but there were enough bad ones in it. Yeah.

You ever hear of the non-fraternization order? We were told we weren't supposed to speak to any civilians after the war. Well, that was stupid because, number one, there were a lot of good-looking girls in Austria. And there were a lot of 01:49:00kids, little kids, and they wanted chewing gum. Oranges. In fact, during the war, we'd go through a town, whole damn town's on fire. I remember Easter Sunday it was on fire, and whole families standing there, just looking with a blank look as we're going through. But for some reason I had some oranges. And I threw one to a kid, and he caught it. And he looked--I don't know if he'd ever seen an orange. I said, "Apfelsine! Apfelsine!" And his parents knew what it was. But the children suffered a lot. Not so much in the country because, again, they could grow some stuff. They weren't starving. But the kids in the cities--you know, there was no gas, no--they couldn't get coal to them, drinking water. People were sick.

Our army medics had a tremendous job at the end of the war. And it was lucky--the one lucky thing is now it was summer. Think if it had been zero out or something. I mean, it would have been--people kept dying all that summer of starvation, because there was no way our ships could bring enough food to feed twenty, thirty, forty million people. And it was just running with people. We had to be on roadblocks--oh, a good month after the war was over, stopping people because they--no, we couldn't let anybody in our lines. We had to see their ausweis, their papers. Wanted to know who they were and why they were coming there. It was a very terrible period. Now, at least we ate. We didn't eat very well most of the time, but at least we had food in the army. But the 01:51:00Hungarian army--I mean, hundreds of thousands of them, with no kitchens, no food, and no infrastructure at all. I mean, everything had evaporated. So they would wait at the end of our chow lines. And you couldn't scrape your mess kit into the garbage. Oh no. They'd come with a can: Put it in here. And we just didn't have enough to feed them all.

Or that or cigarettes, because cigarettes they could trade for anything. Cigarettes probably were more money--more for money than anything else. A pack of cigarettes to a person was worth an awful lot because they could get food with it. Most of the civilians sold whatever they had. You know, you could buy Lugers and you could buy cameras, Zeiss Ikons and all that stuff with cigarettes. They were not allowed--we had German marks and Austrian schillings, 01:52:00all printed--it's called Allied money. And it was--but only we could use it. Civilians had nothing they could use. Nazi money was no good. It wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. And nobody wanted it. So it was a barter economy for months. And a lot of those people sold every possession they had just to be able to feed their families until the farms started producing again, and until food could come over from America. I mean, even the English were at the point of starving for a long while.

SLOAN: Yeah. It was that next fall, I guess, before there was foodstuffs--more foodstuffs.

ROHN: Oh yeah. Oh, it took at least that.

SLOAN: Yeah. Well, I want to transition to a happier experience. Tell me about 01:53:00your assignment in Austria: how that happened, how that came about.

ROHN: My--are you talking about the rest camp?

SLOAN: Yes.

ROHN: Well, as I say, the captain asked, one time, "Who can run a motorboat?" And it was the one and only time I volunteered when I was in the army, because I knew that couldn't be all bad. And I didn't even know where this lake was. It was about twenty miles away. But next thing I know, I'm on a truck and over there. They showed me the motor--these were huge French motors, I think about this big, stood this high. You had to run them standing up. I don't know if you saw that picture. I'm running it standing up, holding onto this bar, and you turned it. They were only two cylinders, but they had cylinders like a truck. And there was no speed, but they could push one of these storm boats that held--I could put twenty people in it, easy. And that--they could push it right 01:54:00through anything.

So, anyway, some of us from the engineers got to run the boats. Some of us ran the ice cream. They made ice cream. We had fresh--oh man, beer, all--we got all the little breweries going. We had all the free beer we wanted. And we got the only good food that was coming over from America, I mean, hams and turkeys and so on. And entertainment. The Strandbad, the pavilion was built out over the water, and it was like a big dining room but also a stage. And Europe has a tradition of little circuses that go around. So these people would come--maybe it'd be a circus of five, six, seven people. They'd have some trained dogs, and they'd maybe have a gymnast and maybe even a singer and so on. But they would come. Every night we'd have a different one of those. And I didn't want to go home.

SLOAN: It was a University of Wisconsin frat party.

ROHN: (laughs) Yeah, well, there weren't any--it wasn't all of that, I don't know. But, anyway, we did have good food there: butter, milk, anything that you wanted. They did it just for the rest camps. But being part of the staff, I got the same things all the other guys got coming in only for a couple days. And my buddy and I, my--the fellow that's in that first picture, he was my assistant gunner. And he went to Cornell University, and I got to know him real well up in ASTP at Santa Clara. And--oh God, we'd been on--we had wedding parties where they needed a military wedding. We would volunteer. We knew that meant good food and drink. We'd done all that stuff. We played golf. But, poor guy, he died 01:56:00about twenty-five years ago. I just got a letter about year and a half ago from his son. And he said, "My name is Tim Kussie." He said, "I found a letter," and he said, "I think you were in the army with my dad." And, of course, I wrote him back. And I sent him copies of all these pictures. But his dad died when he was fairly young, and he didn't know enough about his dad's history. So I was able to fill him in on--

SLOAN: Oh, that's great.

ROHN: --on stuff. It was kind of neat. Yeah. Trouble is, I'm just so old and I'm running out of friends. There's one guy I went--I'll show you. Oh my goodness. (moves to retrieve item) We had a very active division. And I wanted to show you 01:57:00this magazine that they put out for our final reunion, if I can just get to--

SLOAN: Oh sure.

ROHN: --my cabinet here. (opens cabinet) This was our final book that our division association put out. And I--

SLOAN: This was the final reunion that you had--last year?

ROHN: The final--yes, this was last year in Louisville, Kentucky. And my daughter gave a speech there, and that speech is in there. I wrote a couple articles and things like that. We had an ammunition train while I was still down at Linz that had to be unloaded. They said, We got a number of SS prisoners; you 01:58:00guys just guard them. So we went down to this railroad bridge that crossed the Danube River and got an engineer to back this train into the river. And we--can you imagine?--throwing all this live ammunition into the Danube River. But that was different in those days. But that's what we had to do.

So these wise guys, instead of handing the crates down, they decided they'd throw it. There was a catwalk, wooden catwalk, next to the train. And they would throw these things through the girders. But the trouble is, they got into some Czech mines that you could not deactivate the mines. They were live in the mine--in the box. And I don't know what a box held. An antitank mine is, I think, about this big, weighs about twelve pounds. And there were probably six of those in the crate. And I was out--oh, probably two or three railcars away 01:59:00from this one car. And this god-awful explosion went off. This guy had thrown a crate of these things--SS prisoner--hit a girder, bounced back on the catwalk, blew a hole about eight feet wide in here. Blew one prisoner off into the river, killed at least two others. And the officer said, "Well, I guess we won't unload it here, anymore." So we took it up past Linz toward Mauthausen, out in the country, away--he said, "Get away from any of the civilian areas if you can." So we found a huge field that wasn't too far away from buildings.

But we got the prisoners, they unload this car and--just the one railroad car. 02:00:00And we had made three huge piles of the--that were all mines, and put them fifty yards apart. Gave this one SS guy--we didn't want anything to do with that stuff anymore, so we gave him the block of TNT and a long fuse and, Go and light it. They'd sent me--there was a long rise, and they sent me up above because there were bicyclists going along--civilians--and I had to warn people, "You can't go here. We're blowing stuff." So I don't know, I'm maybe a hundred yards away, up the--up this long thing. All of a sudden, there's this god-awful explosion. All three piles went at once (unintelligible). And it knocked me flat on my back. I can still see this--flames coming up this way. But I can still see the tiles. They had all these tiled roofs--like Italian tiles, whatever you call them. 02:01:00Tiles all went up. These people were so darn mad it blew all the tiles off their roofs. And they were three hundred yards away, four hundred yards. Oh yeah. So I don't know whatever happened. They took us off that detail, and I don't know what happened to the rest of that train load.

SLOAN: Well now, what--so what interrupted your paradise that you had there in Austria?

ROHN: They were going to disband the division overseas. So I was called back to this little town, Schwanenstadt, which was right near Linz, where our company was. And they said, Rohn, you're being transferred out. And so one other guy from the company and I were put on a train, and we ended up at, I don't know, one of the camps, like Lucky Strike or one of these. But first we went to 02:02:00Liège, Belgium, and then to Lucky Strike and so on. And then they sent me back down into Germany. And that's when I had to start working prisoners. Now, I'm with some outfit. I don't even know the name of the outfit. I was with two or three of them, you know. They were all rear-echelon engineers or whatever.

And so then I was sent back, and I worked at Grafenwӧhr, which was the largest German Army camp, I think. It is now the American headquarters for all American troops in Germany and Europe. And we help train NATO troops there. And Grafenwӧhr goes back a hundred years. Permanent buildings. I mean, the barracks are all like big apartment buildings. And a huge place, a training area. And we had taken it during the war, coming down. I'm back there, living there. And then 02:03:00I went to the prisoner-of-war camp each day and requisitioned the prisoners and so on. And then got them back. And what other assignments?

Meanwhile, I was going to Paris a number of weekends. And I got to go to Switzerland for a whole week. The army had a trip. I think it cost forty dollars to go for a week for everything: meals, transportation. So many guys could[n't] care less about seeing things. They wanted to shake dice or whatever. But I wanted to see things, and there were so many things in Europe. And I love history anyway, and there's so much to see. So I took every advantage. If there was a trip going somewhere, I said, "I'll go." So I had a ball in Switzerland for a week. I mean, all of our food, all of our entertainment, cable car rides 02:04:00and see the Jungfrau and all this stuff. They even arranged dances with local girls for us. (laughs) And got another trip up to Luxembourg City for three days.

But I liked going to Paris. That was fun. We could go on any railroad in the country, in Germany, Austria, wherever, because we controlled all the railroads. And all you needed was a valid pass. So I could go from Linz, Austria, to Paris and back; it didn't cost me anything. When I got there, they had free beds for us. And, of course, I always took a carton of cigarettes, at least, for trading material. And the French were all over you right at the railroad station: Cigarette? Cigarette? And we'd say, Well, how much will we get for it? Because we'd trade it for French money, and then we could shop and get stuff. And there were--they had a number of things. Paris had been liberated, I believe, in about 02:05:00August of '44. Now, this is almost a year later. In fact, I had spent V-J Day in Paris. When was V-J Day? That was--

SLOAN: August, yeah.

ROHN: --August, wasn't it, yeah. So Paris had been liberated at least a year before I got to see it. Because when we went up to the Bulge, we bypassed Paris and so on. So they had a lot of civilian stuff there, and I loved it. And there was so much to see in Paris, gosh. You couldn't see it on one weekend.

SLOAN: Paris was a good place to be on V-J Day.

ROHN: Yes. (both laugh) Yeah, I was--oh, we were glad. See, I think the reason we were kept that long in Europe--I didn't have enough points. And every time that they needed people, they would just raise the points, you know, so there was no way to get out. But everything was based on how long you were in service, 02:06:00how many months, how many months overseas--I didn't know what the criterion was, but that's how you got out of service. And I had almost enough a couple times but not quite. But I was glad because I was having so much fun over there. And going to see shows in Paris and--go to all these plays. The top of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and Napoleon's tomb. It just went on and on, things to see that I'd read about and I knew about. Now, do you teach history or not?

SLOAN: I do teach history.

ROHN: You do teach, too.

SLOAN: I teach US history, yeah. Twentieth-century US history.

ROHN: Twentieth-century US--okay. I wish I had taken history. Never had a history course. That's just terrible because that's what I like the best. See, I have Civil War and World War II. And I belong to the [Milwaukee] Civil War Round 02:07:00Table and have since the early 1960s. And I just can't get enough to read on it.

SLOAN: And you've already confessed you like the History Channel.

ROHN: Oh gosh. There's several of them that I watch, yeah. And I'm learning things I never knew about at that time. I'm not as interested in the war in the East, or in Japan, because I wasn't there, I guess. But the European war, I'm very interested in it.

SLOAN: Well, you know, I get the sense you had no desire to be a career military man.

ROHN: Oh gosh, no. (both laugh) No. I mean, I was glad to be overseas after the war.

SLOAN: Sure.

ROHN: I'd like to stay there. As I say, I didn't want to go home. I was having so much fun. But I finally got home in January of '46. And it was right--I could 02:08:00have barely gotten into the second semester. I wasn't ready to start school. So I worked with a friend of mine. And his father had a picture postcard company that made all these postcards. And we took the pictures. We--you know, these old cameras, you put the little film pack in and you add--our film was the same size, and there was an outline on the glass that you--whatever you saw, that was what's going to be on that postcard. And that was fun. We spent the whole summer in the--not the whole summer but six to eight weeks of the summer anyway in the upper peninsula of Michigan at resorts, taking pictures of their lodge and a picture of people holding fish and all that stuff. And even went to Mackinac Island, photographed their dining room, which was so big we had to actually paint the picture with light. We opened the lens, and then we walked out in 02:09:00front and you went like this with--we had some big lights. And we'd stop, we'd go down and waited some more because this thing--oh, it was about a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet long, this dining room. Have you ever been up there?

SLOAN: No, I have not, no.

ROHN: You haven't? Well, it's a huge hotel. It's supposed to be the biggest porch in the world, you know, this huge porch. So we went over there. I had a lot of fun.

SLOAN: And so you--did you enter in the University of Wisconsin that next fall?

ROHN: Yeah.

SLOAN: Go back to school?

ROHN: Yep. And I didn't take engineering.

SLOAN: (laughs) What did you take?

ROHN: Oh, I switched it. I had twice as many science credit[s] as I needed for a BS degree. So I took--I finally got a degree in econ, a BS in econ. I took commerce, which now I guess they call business or something. And when I switched into econ, I kind of liked that. But I liked the partying the best, I think, at school.

SLOAN: I--(laughs) it's too bad you can't major in that.

ROHN: Yeah. (laughs)

SLOAN: Well, I would imagine, with all the GIs coming back it was quite different.

ROHN: Oh, my roommate was thirty years old. He'd been working as a civilian on the Manhattan Project. And he couldn't even then tell me much about it, even though the bomb was exploded. But that's what he was working on. But he was thirty and back in school, because he hadn't finished his degree. It was kind of diverse. We had one group, like, incoming freshmen, and so on. And then we had a lot of guys that had been through four years of service in the--and so they were older. But it didn't make any difference. And the school was probably--I know it was at least twice or three times as large. I think when I was there we were--early, it was maybe twelve to thirteen, fourteen thousand at the most in 02:11:00the--in '41, I started. But when I went back, they couldn't build buildings fast enough. Most of my classes were in Quonset huts until they could build new buildings, because I think we jumped up to fifty thousand or better. I don't even know what it is today. You know, just like University of Texas is huge. But we got a nice campus there, right along--it's all lakes. I don't know if you ever seen a topography--

SLOAN: I've got a good friend that works there. It's beautiful. Yeah, it really is.

ROHN: Well, there are five lakes, and there are two principal lakes. And the city, with the capital, is built on a narrow isthmus--whatever you call it, between the two big lakes. And then the campus goes all along the lakeshore. My fraternity house--everybody--all the fraternities had piers. We had iceboats and we had sailboats. Yeah, that was a great place.

SLOAN: But eventually they told you you had to leave.

ROHN: Yeah, they made me leave. (Sloan laughs) I didn't want to. I started in '41 and I graduated in '49, so I told everybody I went to college for eight years.

SLOAN: (laughs) But I know when you graduated you stayed there in Wisconsin. So what did you make your career in? I know it probably wasn't a direct path, but--

ROHN: I went to work for a subsidiary of GE, which is Hotpoint, for their--we were a distributor and we had dealers all around Wisconsin and upper Michigan. And I worked for them. I was sales promotion manager for a while. And later I went to work for Dictaphone, selling those. And then after that I went into business with my brother-in-law and another friend, and we were headhunters, recruiters. I did the sales management recruiting. And so we had our own 02:13:00business and--just a small thing.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to ask about--you talked a little bit about reunions, going back for unit reunions. You told me a story about the first one you went back to, but I'd like to have that on recording, what that experience was like for you.

ROHN: Well, the first one was in Chicago, of course, which is real near, so I could drive right down there. But I just didn't know anybody. You know, you get in a--our division was, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen thousand, maybe fifteen with added units. And the only ones you know are right in your own company. And then you don't know everybody in the company. That's a hundred and fifty people. You know the guys you live and work with every day. So none of those fellows in my squad or in my platoon that I know of--maybe they were there, but it was a big--we had huge conventions for a while. I said, "Oh, I don't want to do that." 02:14:00And yet, I kept all the newsletters that kept coming and various things like that.

And then, finally, I decided, Well, this is the final. I better go to that one. Plus the fact we had just been in Europe on our battle tour, and now a lot of the people that were on this tour--like Ted Hartman and his daughter were on it--and they all came back to Louisville. So it was kind of fun seeing them. But we had four hundred people at the final reunion. And I think there were--I think they said eighty-three or eighty-four veterans actually, that were still alive or were well enough to come to it. And that's why they decided to pull up stakes. And they gave us a filet dinner for four hundred people that was out of 02:15:00this world. I mean, they had all this money to spend. And then the rest of it they spent on something. They told us it was something for veterans, I guess. You know, they donated twenty, thirty thousand dollars that they had in the treasury for them.

BAUM: The band. Tell them about the band.

SLOAN: There was a band. Your daughter said you need to tell us about the band.

ROHN: At the reunion?

SLOAN: Uh-huh.

ROHN: They had a band that was just like the big band days, the swing era. They played all that same music. And these were kind of old gaffer--how old were they, honey?

BAUM: Oh, I don't know, my age maybe. Fifties.

ROHN: Pretty old, huh? Okay. (laughs) And, anyway--but, I mean--even women in the band--but, man, could they play. And it was the old type, the kind with all the brass: trumpets and trombones and clarinets and the bass fiddles and on and 02:16:00on. And boy, they did a job. They really played beautiful swing music, which all of--that was our era. And I still like it. I've got all the CDs in my car, so--

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to end by talking about your trip that you took in 2010 back to Europe. You told me a little bit about it before we started recording, but your battlefield tour that you went on in Europe.

ROHN: Well, it was our battle tour. It wasn't a real battlefield--

SLOAN: Oh, battle tour.

ROHN: --because we covered the whole--and I don't know how many hundred miles it is from Bastogne down to Linz, but I'm sure it's got to be four hundred anyway. It was a fifteen-day tour, but the first couple of days we went there, we went to the different cemeteries. They're extremely impressive. We went to a military cemetery--which is all US property, by the way. And we went to--in Holland 02:17:00there's one, and we went to one in Belgium. And then the one in Luxembourg, the big one, is Hamm, Luxembourg, which is right near the capital city of Luxembourg. And very impressive. They do a--the United States does a tremendous job caring for these cemeteries. And the legations--wherever--whenever veterans come there, they always send representatives over, and there's kind of a ceremony. They brought flowers that we could put on the graves. But they're so well tended that I was quite impressed with them.

SLOAN: You went back to Mauthausen on that trip.

ROHN: Oh, that was the end, yeah. We ended in Mauthausen on the ceremony of the sixty-fifth anniversary of its liberation. That was all timed so it worked out. 02:18:00And all these people came from all over. They had a parade of people--we had all these VIP seats that they put out for the old gaffers. And these--parade of people came with their flags and huge wreaths of flowers to put on--I don't even know what it was--some kind of memorial. And it lasted for several hours at least. And delegations came from all over the world. Some, there were only four or five people; others, there were twenty, thirty people. It was very impressive. And all of them had had their nationals as prisoners--even China, which surprised me. But it was a--it was very impressive.

And we had our--as I say, our own ceremonies there. And met an awful lot of people; there're just so many people. And I've got people I still want to see. This one guy that's in this--my magazine that I gave you, wherever that is; his 02:19:00picture's in it. He was one of the prisoners at Mauthausen. And my impression is, he was not Jewish. I think he--I know he's Polish. But he was caught in the underground, or whatever it was. He was out there hunting Nazis in the woods or something. They caught him, and they stuck him down there. And he lives somewhere in Dallas. And we met him on the--we had a dinner cruise on the Ohio River one night--one of the nights. This thing went on for a whole week. We only went for about three days. And so we had a great dinner on that. We had a great ceremony down at the--where the gold is stored--

BAUM: Fort Knox.

ROHN: Fort Knox, you're right. At Fort Knox. That's--Patton Museum is there. And a wonderful museum I'd been to a number of times. And we have a memorial to 02:20:00every armored division. There's a memorial. And then they retired our colors--the Eleventh Armored Division--and they're permanently in the Patton Museum. So they had a nice ceremony. Army band there for us. And it was well done. It was well done.

SLOAN: I'd like to end at Mauthausen. You mentioned before we started recording about a gentleman that came up to you to thank you there at the ceremony. Do you mind telling that story for me?

ROHN: Yeah. He came up to me and I knew he was American--dressed in a suit and the way he talked. But I'd never seen him before. And he came up and just--all he said was, "Thank you for saving my wife." And I thought, What wife did I save? You know, it didn't register at first. And then, later, I found out he was the husband of one of the babies born in Mauthausen. And the three of them got 02:21:00together. The one guy happens to be a professor at the University of Wisconsin. He started one of their medical programs there. But he and his mother were still alive.

And he was born either--I think, on an open coal car coming down. All three babies were born within about an eight-day period. And the reason they survived--the guards were now leaving. None of the guards wanted to get caught. So here these babies--how the mothers could keep them alive--now, sure, it was May, but it was not warm. And, you know, whatever rags they had to wrap them in, I don't know, but with nothing else in the world. And these three babies survived, and they all became honorary members of our division association. But 02:22:00they didn't know each other. And I knew about the one woman because she lived in Britain, and she was in one of our publications. So I knew about her. I knew about Mike because Mike had given a speech at one of the conventions that I didn't go to, so I knew a little about him. And that's why I made contact with him. But then there were two others.

So the reason they got together--the son of one of these people is a film producer or something in New York City. And he decided that his father should know what his roots were, and now that they were going to be going to this, that he should get together with the others. So he made the arrangements. And they never met each other until, I think, the morning of our banquet or the morning before that in Linz. They stayed at the same hotel, and they talked with each other for about three hours. I mean, they were just great people. But I got to 02:23:00know this guy, so I went to see him last year in Madison. I drove out with my sister, and we went to lunch. And he--you know, having nothing. And then--and they went to Israel; didn't like it there. They finally were able to get a visa or whatever they needed to go to the United States. Came to Chicago. The mother started, I believe, a jewelry business. He worked for his mother. He put himself through school, got a medical--his medical degree, I've forgotten where--at--

BAUM: Northwestern.

ROHN: --Northwestern? Northwestern or something. Went to a number of different schools, Michigan, Northwestern. Ended up as a professor of--what, honey?

BAUM: Emergency medicine.

ROHN: Yeah, in Madison. So I called him and made arrangements to go and see him, because I didn't--we didn't have enough time to talk to all these people. There were so many people that you met. And there just wasn't enough time. So I was 02:24:00glad to see him again. Now, this other guy, this Polish fellow that was in the underground, I've got to call him. I want to take Christian down with me. I had a brief time to talk to him on the riverboat. But that night at the banquet, it was just jammed with people. And there's so much to talk about, and I really--there wasn't much time and so many people to meet. But it was great, and Christian liked it.

SLOAN: Well, you've been real generous with your time. I know we've taken a lot of your time this afternoon, but is there something that you should have had a chance to talk about that you didn't get a chance to talk about?

ROHN: I don't know. God, I've been doing so much talking here. (both laugh)

BAUM: Dad, I have a favorite story. I don't--and you might have told it, but 02:25:00would you just tell him about the children, I think it was in Linz? And the little girl that you--

ROHN: Oh no, that was up in Germany, honey.

BAUM: Okay, well, will you tell that story?

ROHN: At the apartment I lived in? Yeah.

BAUM: Yeah.

ROHN: When I was working prisoners up there we lived in apartments. And I always liked those little kids. They'd come around, and I always had candy from home or from someplace, and they knew it. And boy, that's all you needed, chewing gum or candy, and kids came. Oh, I used to--they would come in the mornings. They'd come in, and they just loved to talk. And some of them could speak English. Others could not. And I think I had up to eight or ten kids in the apartment some mornings. And they were kids all the way from maybe two years old to eight or nine years old.

And I had one little girl, and she'd always come and sit on my lap. She's a cute little girl. She knew to smile, you know. She couldn't speak English. She 02:26:00couldn't speak much German, either, (laughs) but she was no more than two. And her hair was so dirty, and that bothered me. So I told the older guy, I said, "We're going to wash her hair." So I got--I had some hand soap. I didn't have shampoo but hand soap. So the kids helped me, and we got her bent over the washbowl, washed her hair. All she did was smile. But she was so cute.

And the kids everywhere were so cute. They'd--the kids had nothing. They weren't all starving, but there were kids that didn't have toys and didn't have fathers. An awful lot of them were minus fathers because, you know, the German Army was wiped out in Russia. Most of them had a mother somewhere. And they were happy little kids, but they didn't have anything. They didn't have toys to play with, and I just felt sorry for kids like that. And they were anxious to talk and try 02:27:00to learn some English words. So I had them teaching me German, and I would teach them English. Oh yeah, that was fun.

SLOAN: Well, Mr. Rohn, I want to thank you for your time today. I want to thank you for your service, and you sharing your story today with us. So anything else that you want to add before we stop?

ROHN: (laughs) I better not. (both laugh) I'll use up all of your tape on there.

DeBOARD: We got six hours left. (all laugh)

ROHN: No, I don't regret any part of it. I got home. I didn't get killed, so--

SLOAN: Amen.

ROHN: I got home. For the most part, I was well over there. I saw a lot of guys that weren't that well-off, but I don't regret a bit of it. Not a bit. And I 02:28:00learned a lot. It was my chance to really delve into places that I'd read about, I knew about from grade school on. Like going into Notre Dame and going into Napoleon's tomb and so--it was some experience.

SLOAN: Yeah. A long way from Wisconsin.

ROHN: Yeah. And I had fun. You know what a stammtisch is?

SLOAN: No, I don't.

ROHN: A lot of restaurants in Germany will have one big table in the restaurant where anybody that wants to can sit down. They'll have private tables, too, but then this--you know, a table for twelve. And it's for people who just would like to have some company. So I had my friend there with me, and we sat at this one. And this guy and, I think, three women came in and sat with us. And the one woman could speak a little English, and I could speak a little German, so one way or another we got talking. And the man--he spoke German only, and he had one 02:29:00of the women ask me where I was in service, where I served. And I said, "Well, I was in the Ardennes." And he said, "I was, too." So, you know. That--that was fun. I learned a lot over there. I learned a lot. When are we going back, Mal?

BAUM: Soon. (all laugh)

SLOAN: So the story will continue--

ROHN: Oh yeah.

SLOAN: --in volume two.

end of interview