Texas Liberators - William Danner (March 6, 2013)

SLOAN: This is Stephen Sloan. The date is March 6, 2013. I'm with Mr. William "Bill" Danner. His apartment--we're in his apartment complex, the MonteVista apartments, in El Paso, Texas. This is an interview for the Texas liberators of World War II concentration camps oral history project. Thank you, Mr. Danner, for sitting down with me today. I'd like to start with some of your earliest memories and a little bit about your--I know you were born in Elwood, Indiana, but some of your early memories of life there in Indiana.

DANNER: Well, one of the first things I can basically remember was my granddad. I can remember seeing this white-haired old gentleman sitting back in his wicker rocker. And I would come in, and he would call me Southpaw or Tarheel. And that 00:01:00was my granddad. And he passed away in 1928. So I must have been about five years old at the time. I was born and raised within that area in central Indiana. We lived on farms at some times and lived in the city. I graduated from Elwood High School in 1941. Elwood was the home of Wendell Willkie. And he caused me and a couple of others to get kicked out of history class a couple of times because the teacher we had lived in Willkie's home. And he was a hot Democrat, and we was always razzing him about it.

I started college in the fall of '42, Franklin College at Franklin, Indiana, and was drafted in February of '43. While I was at Franklin College the first time, I was pledged and joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and have been a 00:02:00member for many years. In December '43, I was initiated. I was in a military uniform. I was on leave from Louisiana State University. The army had a specialized--Army Specialized Training Program. They were going to teach us to be graduate engineers in eighteen months. And I was there when the invasion took place, and they sent us all back to the army. I took my basic training at Camp Swift, Texas, in the artillery as a forward observer for the--I can't think now what the--

SLOAN: Was it forward artillery?

DANNER: Forward artillery observer. I was a radio operator for forward artillery. After the ASTP, I was sent back to the army, and I went to the antitank company, 414th Infantry Regiment of the 104th Infantry Division.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to go back a little bit, if I could, and ask you a couple of questions. So you said you grew up on the farm. Was your father a farmer primarily?

DANNER: My father worked several things. He was the hired hand. But we had a great life on the farm. And I learned to be a farmer. And I thought when I graduated from high school that that's what I would be, because in high school, I majored in vocational agriculture. I took all the agriculture courses, but 00:04:00some time in my senior year, I decided that was not it, that I wanted to go to college. I did not have the right credits--enough of the right credits to go to college, so I went to the school board and asked them if I could go back to high school for another year and take the courses I needed to get into college, and they agreed. And I went back to high school for the fifth year.

SLOAN: It was a lot of work on the farm growing up.

DANNER: I learned a lot of work on the farm. The fellow that my dad worked for, he put me to work, too. And I could remember he gave me a check one time. This was back during the Depression. A check for five dollars, and down in the corner where it says, "For", he put "piddling." But just odd jobs on the farm that I could do, I did.

SLOAN: You know what you spent your five dollars on?

DANNER: I don't remember. And I met his son years later, and I said something 00:05:00about this. And he says, "I have all of Dad's checks." He says, "I'll see if I can find it. If I can find it, I will send it to you." But I never got it. I would like to have had it.

SLOAN: So your family did all right during the Depression?

DANNER: Well, we lived. I taught school. I would talk about the Depression, and I'd tell them that my dad was offered a job on a farm for five dollars a week. And they says, How did you live? And I says, "We lived great." Well, how did you do that? I can't live on five dollars a day. I says, "Everything come off the farm. The only thing we had to buy was salt and pepper and sugar and flour." And that was it.

SLOAN: Yeah. But what sort of farming was he involved with? Was it wheat?

DANNER: Just a general farm. We had wheat and corn. He kept feeder cattle in the wintertime. The fellow that my dad worked for had feeder cattle in the wintertime, and just general farm work.

SLOAN: Well, when you were young, what were your chores around the farm?

DANNER: Well, I drove a tractor. I learned to drive a tractor. I could plow a field. I could plow corn--cultivate the corn and take care of the animals. I learned how to milk. Fact is that I come in from high school one night late, and my dad got me up at four o'clock in the morning. And it was cold, and we went and milked the cows.

SLOAN: (laughs) That left an impression on you.

DANNER: It did. Don't stay out late. (laughs)

SLOAN: Did you have siblings?

DANNER: I had a sister. The fact is, I had two sisters. One of them was born a 00:07:00year and a day after I was, and she died on her second birthday. And my other sister passed away in 1970.

SLOAN: Now, you said you didn't have enough credits to get into college immediately. Had you taken time off school?

DANNER: No, I had--most of my courses were agriculture courses. What I needed was some more math and science courses. I went back to school. I took advanced algebra, solid geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, and physics.

SLOAN: I see.

DANNER: In one year.

SLOAN: Did you enjoy school?

DANNER: I enjoyed school. One time, when we were on the farm, I did not. I failed the fifth grade. I had to go back and take another year there. But other than that, I had a good time in school. I was involved.

SLOAN: What'd you do for fun?

DANNER: I think, at that time, when I was in high school we did our own thing. There was a group of us that I would run with. There were four of us, four boys and four girls. We dated. And we would--not steady-dates. We would go out and one of us would be with one of the girls; the next time, we would be with one of the others. We just enjoyed ourselves. I know, I taught school for ten years after I retired, and somebody would say they were having a party. And the first thing they want to know, How many kegs you going to have? And the kids would ask 00:09:00me, Well, did you drink when you were in high school? I says, "No. I don't know of anybody that did. If they did, they kept it a secret." And they went, Did you have a car? No. The only one that had a car was the son of one of the morticians in town, and he had a Model T Ford.

SLOAN: (laughs) Which wasn't sporty by any means.

DANNER: No. I tried to play football, but I wasn't an athletic type. But we had fun, clean fun, as I said, because we could go out in the evening and enjoy ourselves. The night after we graduated, I had been doing part-time work for one of the undertakers at their--his office was right next to the school. And I 00:10:00asked him if I could use one of the limos after graduation. We went to a neighboring town. We saw a movie, Alexander's Ragtime Band. We went to the movie. We went back home. There were four couples, and we went to each home and had part of breakfast. This was all set up beforehand with our parents, and that's what we did for graduation fun. And nobody drank. It was just a good time.

SLOAN: Yeah, that's great. Well, take me through this transition to college. So you had a desire to go to college. You went back and took your extra courses. Did you know where you wanted to go?

DANNER: I knew at the time. I was raised as a Baptist and Franklin College is a 00:11:00Baptist school, and that's where I wanted to go to school. I was accepted, and I started there in the fall of 1942. And I did not get a semester completed before I was drafted. I dropped out of school, was drafted, went into the army, and when I got out of the army, I went back to Franklin in January of '46.

SLOAN: Now, were you following the war much, or did you have connections to the war before you were drafted? Do you have--did you have family that were--

DANNER: No. I had an uncle, one of my mother's brothers was a member of the Indiana National Guard, and that's about the only--I know that he was always going off to summer camp before that and the like, but other than that, no real connection with the military.

SLOAN: All right, so you get your draft notice. Do you remember your reaction?

DANNER: Well, not really. I knew that I would be drafted. I would get a draft 00:12:00card. We all had to register. I knew that I would be called. Of course, it was 1943 before I was drafted. I left Indiana. Was drafted at Fort Benjamin Harrison--inducted at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis. We left there on the--ironically, on the fifth day of March, 1943. It was five degrees below zero. We had on our wool uniforms, our wool underwear, the whole works. Three days later, we landed at Camp Swift, Texas. It was eighty-five degrees. And there we were, still in winter clothes.

SLOAN: Now, when did you take your exams for placement into the ASTP?

DANNER: Well, when we went in, we were given intelligence-type exams. We were 00:13:00going through all kinds. And I think that's where they got the information, because I was never called to take a test to get into this. I was given orders to go. Everybody--a lot of the people that went into ASTP were out of the air force, army air force [United States Army Air Corps] at the time. And they had--a lot of them were sergeants and the like, but everybody was reduced to a PFC [Private First Class]. And I went to Louisiana State University, and we lived in the rooms underneath the stadium. But when the invasion happened, we were all sent back to the army.

SLOAN: So you were taking, for a brief period there, engineering classes.

DANNER: Just regular college courses.

SLOAN: Regular college courses.

DANNER: I saw something the other night, talking about the advancement. When we were going there, all the engineers had a big scabbard on the hump to their belt with a slide rule in it. And we were taught in math classes to use a slide rule. I just seen this the other day, something on TV, they were wanting the square root of something. And the guy had the slide and the gal there with the little calculator. And that quick she had it, and he was still sliding back. But it's--the advancement that I've seen over the time has been, to me, fascinating.

SLOAN: Oh yeah. Well, we're going to talk about where you ended up your career. And boy, you saw a lot of technological changes in the period you were in the 00:15:00military. So ASTP is canceled, and so they transfer you out of LSU.

DANNER: I was assigned to the 104th Infantry Division. They had just finished their maneuvers from Camp Adair, Oregon, down to Yuma, Arizona. We met in some place in the desert outside of Yuma, and we were there just a short period of time. We were in a tent camp out there. We loaded on board trains, and we went to Camp Carson, Colorado, where we finished our training to smooth out the rough spots. And in August of 1944, we left Camp Carson for Europe.

SLOAN: So, now, what sort of training were you doing in Fort Carson?

DANNER: I was with a regimental antitank company. We had fifty-seven millimeter 00:16:00antitank guns, and our crew was thoroughly trained. Everybody within the squad was trained for every position on that gun. I guess we were lucky. When we got to Europe, we were lucky enough to never encounter a Tiger tank.

SLOAN: So there in Colorado, you were doing target practice and--

DANNER: We were just--gun drill, what was referred to as "Cannoneer's Hop." A lot of times, we would just be in the company area--or if we were out in the maneuver area, we would be driving down the road in a convoy, and, all at once, somebody would holler, "Action." And we were off the truck, get the gun ready, set it up to where it was to be, and that was it. And a lot of times, it was 00:17:00fun. Sometimes it'd get kind of boring. Our gun had trails on it that had to be opened. And one time it--one of the jobs that I was doing at that time, I was supposed to step between the trails when they opened them. And I was faster than they were, and I stepped across them when they opened them. (laughs)

SLOAN: Ouch.

DANNER: Ouch, but no problem. We just wanted--everybody got a big kick out of it.

SLOAN: More than you did, I'm sure. Well, I'm interested to ask. We were to a period now where you've been in the--how are you taking to army life at this time?

DANNER: Well, to me, it was something that had to be done. And I think that was the thing with most of us at the time. I cannot--well, I don't remember any big 00:18:00riots or what-have-you, whatever you want to call them. After the service, everybody went back to what they were doing. I don't remember people having, what is it, post--what do they call it now?

SLOAN: Oh, post-traumatic stress disorder?

DANNER: Yeah. I came back, I went back to school, and life was normal. And most--there were a lot of former GIs back at college, and everybody seemed to fit together and work. That's what had to be done. But nobody went to Canada to keep out. It wouldn't have done them any good because they'd already been drafted up there.

But I came from a military background. My eighth generation great-grandfather had come from Germany in 1725, sometime in about that time. They left Germany for religious oppression. He had four sons. Three of them were in the American Revolutionary War. The one that our family is derived from is referred to in the genealogy as the revolutionary soldier. My great-granddad was in the Civil War. He died later as a result from a wound that he received at the Battle of Chickamauga. My dad had a brother that died--that was killed a month before the armistice in Germany--in France in World War I. Of course, I was drafted. And I 00:20:00had two uncles that were draftees. Well, the one was called from the National Guard, and my dad's youngest brother was a draftee in World War II. As far as I know, everybody just went back to what they were doing before.

SLOAN: Yeah. Well, I'd like to go back. So take me through leaving Camp Carson.

DANNER: We left Camp Carson in August of '44. I think that somebody said there was twenty-seven trainloads. We went up through Chicago, I remember. And one of the fellows in the squad that I was in--we parked along a railroad siding up there in Chicago for, seems like, hours. And he says, "I live three blocks right down the street." But he could not get off the train because we were travelling 00:21:00under basically secret orders. We shipped out of New York. We landed in Cherbourg, France, on the seventh day of September, ninety-one days after the invasion. We were the first division to land directly on the continent from the States.

SLOAN: What was memorable about the crossing? Did you go over on a Liberty ship?

DANNER: We went over on a ship that was commandeered from the Germans after World War I. Now, we went--the two trips, the over and back, one of them was on the John Ericsson, and the other was on the George Washington. Now, I don't know which one was which right now. But we went over on a regular ship, but we were loaded with troops. Now, I think the compartment that I was in, I think, was about twenty-seven feet below the water line.

SLOAN: Any U-boat scares on the way over? Any U-boat scares on the way over, or were things pretty well calm?

DANNER: We were in a big convoy. I guess, it was one of the largest convoys that they said at the time. But we had no problems. We had boat practice almost every other day or so, I think to just keep people busy, keep people alert. We unloaded on a barge that was set up as a pier in Cherbourg. We were encamped in a small apple orchard, our company, in a small apple orchard at Bonneville, France, next to the--along the coast. We had to go out every morning and pick up all the apples that had fallen off the trees. And then that day the French 00:23:00farmer would come through and pick--he had already had his apples picked up.

SLOAN: (laughs) So that's--you got to France when?

DANNER: In September of '44.

SLOAN: September, '44. Now, what were some of your first impressions of Europe? It's a long way from Elwood, Indiana.

DANNER: It was very, very--different. I know, they had these things for the guys to relieve themselves along the street, and they would just have a thing. And they would be in there, and they'd turn around talking to their wives or other people. And it was strictly--out of this world as far as--to me. I was not used to something like that. But other than that, we were not in France too long. We 00:24:00made a couple of different moves in there. I remember I voted in my first presidential election from a foxhole in France in 1944.

But then we moved up into Belgium and Holland. And one little town, we were outside, I think, a day or two before we actually got into combat. We went into this Belgian town, and there was a movie. And we went, three or four of us went to the movie. When we came out of the movie, there was one little old lady there. Came up to us, and she invited us to her house for dinner. We gratefully accepted, and asked her if there was anything that we could do. And she says, well, her husband was an invalid and they had trouble getting milk. So the 00:25:00next--that night, I got into the mess tent. I midnight-requisitioned a gallon can of milk, and we took it the next day. And there were about four Canadian soldiers there also that she had invited, and they had taken SPAM. And she had spaghetti and meatballs that was made with SPAM, and it was good. And I don't know how many pies that lady had baked, but she would bring you--after we finished the meal, she would bring a big piece of pie. And by the time you had finished it, and you couldn't say no, she had another piece sitting down there in front of you. But it was just--the people were so grateful at that time that they would almost do anything.

I remember one night, we stayed--normally, after we got into there, we would try 00:26:00to find someplace inside to spend the night. We spent one night in a windmill. And I was surprised. You see a picture of a windmill, and you do not realize just how big they are until you actually see one. It was enormous. But just the countryside and the people were all--but we were up in Belgium and Holland about a month, a month and a half, a short time.

SLOAN: Okay. Well, who'd you vote for, in '44?

DANNER: What's that?

SLOAN: Who did you vote for in '44?

DANNER: I don't remember. I can't--

SLOAN: Was it--did you vote for FDR?

DANNER: They were running against FDR. I did not--I did not--I got to be truthful.

SLOAN: Well, I could tell from your Willkie comment earlier that you didn't vote Democrat.

DANNER: Well, our family was Republican. My dad was always involved in politics. 00:27:00And every time an election was over--he'd get involved, and after it was over: "I'm done. I'm through with them." But I do--

SLOAN: That was a tough period for Republicans. Yeah.

DANNER: Yeah. I remember going back when Roosevelt was--who was it? Al Smith, ran against--

SLOAN: Hoover.

DANNER: Hoover.

SLOAN: Yeah, in '28, yeah.

DANNER: Yeah. And I can remember we were down at the Republican headquarters. And the results were coming in by telephone, I guess, but they was always posting the results. Afterwards, we went down to a local restaurant in town, and we had a hamburger. I can remember that as the first time we ever went out to eat. But we went and had a hamburger. I think it cost a nickel. (laughs)

SLOAN: That was to console--well, no, he was happy. He was happy. To celebrate, yeah, Hoover's victory.

DANNER: Yeah. But--

SLOAN: Well, you--now, I know somewhere in here you were offered a promotion, was that right?

DANNER: We were offered, over in Germany in World War II, three of us were offered promotion to assistant squad leaders and squad leaders. And we turned it down because we had enough problems taking care of ourselves. That was--I guess, at that time we did not want the responsibility of other people's lives. But we had a good platoon leader. And he would come down and take one of the guys from the squad to go pick a new position when we had to move. And we asked him and 00:29:00said, Why don't you take the squad leader? He says, "You don't know, one of these days, you may be the squad leader." And that's just the kind of training that we had. Everybody went with it.

SLOAN: Now, this--when you were in France, and I know, moving up in Holland and Belgium, most of that area was fairly secure--(both talking)

DANNER: Yes.

SLOAN: --by then, yeah.

DANNER: Yeah, it was. And where we were to start with, we didn't see any results of what had happened before. But we moved through, I guess, some of the--we were normally--our platoon was normally right behind an infantry company, within a hundred yards or so. But some of them really had some rough times up in there. At night, General Allen, our division commander, pulled a lot of his attacks at 00:30:00night, because he figured he could--that the Germans were not ready for night attacks and that he would save a lot of lives. And I think he did. Throughout the time that we were there, we had 195 consecutive days on the line, with contact with the German forces. We spent the winter in the Hürtgen Forest in Germany, one of the coldest winters they'd had in years. And it wasn't too pleasant. (laughs)

SLOAN: Well, I'd like for you to walk me through when you first encountered the war, the moment when you realized that you were involved in the war.

DANNER: When we got up into Belgium and Holland, we set up a gun position on a road--covering a road. We had the gun pretty well hidden, and we divided up. 00:31:00Well, we were set up in teams to pull two hours of guard and rotated. And nothing, we saw nothing at that time. A couple of days later, we were moved into another position, and we had a small counterattack. We moved back a few hundred yards, not far, but the lieutenant we had had us pull back. And then, from then on, as far as I can remember, we went straight on through.

There were times that we would get hit with a barrage of a few artillery rounds. I can remember at night, sitting there, you could hear the Germans--you could pick out the machine guns. The Germans, the machine gun they had had a much faster rate of fire than our little old water-cooled jobs. They finally got rid 00:32:00of the water-cool. But you'd hear the tat-tat-tat, tut-tut-tut, tat-tat-tat [imitates two machine guns] just the difference. And they were close enough you could hear, and you were wondering just what was going on. A lot of times, we did not know the situation. We would move into a position, we knew we were--stay alert, watch out, watch what was going on. That was about it. We did what we were told.

SLOAN: Um-hm, yeah. Did y'all encounter any tanks?

DANNER: We never encountered a tank. Thank goodness for that. Because I don't think we would have--with what we had and what they had, I don't think, at the time, that we--now, if we could have got a broadside, fine. But I saw some of 00:33:00those tanks after they had been knocked out by heavier material, heavier ammo.

SLOAN: But that thick armor plating and that fifty-seven millimeter--yeah.

DANNER: And besides that, the Germans, a lot of times, on the front of their tanks they had concrete. They poured concrete over the front of them in addition to the armor plate. We did have a fire mission one night to fire harassing fire. This was about Thanksgiving of '44, on a road junction where the Germans were pulling back. And they figured that our--we could harass them enough with what we had to keep them moving. We fired 256 rounds. We had two and three rounds in the air at all times. We could see the tracers. And we couldn't hear for three 00:34:00days afterwards. And that was before you had ear protection.

SLOAN: Well, you hear pretty well now.

DANNER: Yeah. Well, I don't--(laughs) I forgot my hearing--I wear hearing aids.

SLOAN: But you hear pretty clearly. Yeah.

DANNER: Yeah. I spent a lot of time after I went back in the army on marksmanship detachments. Not detachments, but there was a lot on marksmanship, both rifle and pistol. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed rifle matches.

SLOAN: Well, I know in December '44, which we're moving up a little bit, the Bulge begins. So if you could, kind of, give me your perspective of where your unit was during the Bulge.

DANNER: We were in Düren, Germany, along the Rur River, and we were about two--maybe 150, 200 yards back from the river. We had troops down on the river, but they were in guard positions as much as anything, because we were there over a month--about a month or so. And I had our gun set up. It snowed and it was nicely camouflaged and covered. One night, they told us to stay inside and turn--put out all the lights, make sure that no light was showing, that there was a German patrol coming across the river and not to bother them. And we stood there and one looked out the window, and watched the German patrol walk up the street. A little bit later, they went back. The next night, they sent over a 00:36:00combat patrol. And the cannon company behind us, they called their forward observer, and says, What's going on down there? And the only thing he would tell them, "The fish are eating well." Because they were--artillery fire on the river, they were crossing.

SLOAN: So they opened up on that combat group.

DANNER: They opened up on the combat patrol. And we could sit there in the basement of that house. We could hear the rounds going overhead. But the one nice thing that we did there, we found a German ice cream hand-crank freezer. We had a fellow in our squad that had been a cook in New York. He got all the stuff we needed to make ice cream. We set the freezer in a tub and packed snow around it. We got the ice cream ready, we put it in, and we packed snow around that. 00:37:00But we had nothing to flavor it with, and we went down the street to a German drugstore. We're looking for something to flavor our ice cream. We saw this bottle that had cherries on it, and we thought that would make good flavoring. We went back and put it in our ice cream. We found out it was cherry cough syrup. But we ate our ice cream and our platoon sergeant called it "Incredible Ice Cream--or Ingenuity Ice Cream," because we made do. (both laugh)

SLOAN: It kept you all from coughing, too, probably. Who knows? So, you know, I know the other vets I've interviewed, you're always looking for something else to eat, something a little more exciting than--

DANNER: We were always well fed. We got our rations. And at the time that we 00:38:00were in Düren, Germany, we holed up in a basement. Everybody had a nice--we got a bed. We were living high on the hog as far as that goes, as far as combat. We had a stove where we could heat our rations. If we had something else that we wanted--if we went out and found potatoes or something like that that we wanted, we could cook it. Had space and the ability to cook. And the GIs always took care of themselves. I don't think--I don't remember going hungry. We had a ton and a half Dodge as the prime mover. We had a rack built up on the exhaust manifold. And when we were on the road, our rations went in that rack. And when we had time to eat, they were hot. I don't know whoever come up with the idea, 00:39:00but it was a good one.

SLOAN: (laughs) Did you develop strategies to keep yourself warm?

DANNER: Yeah.

SLOAN: In the cold.

DANNER: We--a few times, I think, I can remember being cold, but not extremely cold. Not to a dangerous or freezing, but in the Hürtgen Forest that winter it was cold. You could dig a hole and get in it. And you could--we had enough clothing and equipment to keep warm.

SLOAN: Well, take me through when the Bulge breaks and you're able to move from that position.

DANNER: We crossed the river when the final push started on the way to Cologne. And we were in that area. We pushed across and the resistance, at that time, was 00:40:00beginning to lack. There were still some pockets that were difficult to break, but we were moving pretty rapidly. The night before we went into Cologne, we could not get our guns up. So we divided in--or split up into bazooka teams, two of us to a team. We went up with one of the infantry platoons. And that night, before we would go into Cologne the next morning, the Germans threw in a barrage that felt like you could just reach out and grab a round coming in. If you had a baseball glove, you'd have been in good shape. And I was thinking, This is the end. This is as far as we're going. That they finally consolidated, and that's 00:41:00it. We got up the next morning, walked across the city of Cologne. They routed one German soldier out of his own house, sent him back to a POW camp. We found out later what they had done is throw that barrage in on us that night to keep us in under cover, so they could pull all their troops back across the Rhine River.

SLOAN: I see. So it was cover for their retreat back across the Rhine.

DANNER: And we crossed the river a few days later, south of the Remagen bridge, because the Remagen bridge was gone. I can remember this pontoon bridge. They had this sign on there, says, Built by Jepson of Jayhawk, assisted by--something that started with a "J"--the US Navy. Jayhawk of Jackpot. That's what it was. And assisted by Jepson, US Navy. Crossed the pontoon bridge.

SLOAN: You know, I'd like to ask, because you already talked about you were a man of faith, and you were a Baptist, and church had always been important. Are there times when you're dug in and you're under artillery fire that you really turned to prayer or those sorts of things?

DANNER: Well, I guess we were concerned.

SLOAN: Yeah.

DANNER: I can remember one time over there in a German gasthaus, a chaplain came in. There was beer and the guys were drinking. He come in, he scooted everything down the bar, set up his stuff. We had a chapel service. After it was over, he says, "The bar is open," and went right back to it. Oh. In our reunion last August, one of the chaplains from World War II was there, and he held a memorial 00:43:00service on Sunday morning. But I remember the chaplains. One of them, they threatened to court-martial him because he disobeyed an order. He went out with the medics to help bring back wounded off the battlefields, and he was told not to. But they didn't court-martial him; they presented him with a Silver Star. There were chaplains available all the time. The times that they were involved--but they would come up and hold service wherever, whenever and wherever.

Now, my wife and I, I guess, in one of the couple of places in Germany we were very involved with a chapel. When I retired, we sort of got away from it for a 00:44:00while. And a friend of ours was going to the chapel out at Biggs, which is now Fort Bliss East. And we got to going out there. And a lot of the people at that chapel are retired, and they're holding the chapel together because it's a Sergeants Major Academy Chapel. Of course, they come in in August and leave the next year, and so it's a continuing process of keeping people there. But we show up on Sunday morning. And my wife and I were very involved in the chapel. And I know that the chaplain, the one chaplain out there was very--was at the house quite often from January until she passed away. She told him, she says, "I'm 00:45:00ready to go. I got two requests. I want a closed casket, and I want a graveside service." And I told Chaplain Jeffries, I says, "I will go with the closed casket, but we will have a chapel service." And a week ago yesterday--or, a year ago yesterday, we had the chapel service, and she was buried at Fort Bliss. And on my way to chapel every Sunday morning, I stop--and I talk to her. This past week has been difficult. They said we were husband and wife, we were a mother 00:46:00and father. She and I were great friends. She was my pal, my buddy.

SLOAN: Yeah, sixty-five years of marriage. Yeah, yeah.

DANNER: We were married in November of '46. I graduated from college in '49. I would go someplace and go to work, and I would be enthused. In six months, I was fed up with it. Nineteen-fifty, I enlisted in the reserves. I got into a unit that needed NCOs, and because I had prior military service, I got two quick promotions to an E-6. In 1953, November of '53, I went back on active duty as an 00:47:00E-6. And at that time, I was a senior NCO, because they just had E-6s and E-7s. But I finally made E-7. When I made--got promoted, I didn't get to change my stripes. I moved from an SFC [Sergeant First Class] E-6 to an SFC E-7. But when I decided to go back, I told her--I said, "I would like to go back to the army, if you will approve." I says, "If not, if you don't want to go," I says, "we part friends." And she says, "I took you for better or for worse. We'll go." And I had one out of--I went back in November '53, I retired in '71, and in that time I had one unaccompanied tour. We had a lot of fieldwork and the like. We 00:48:00were--maybe a week at a time, but that was the longest--

SLOAN: She went with you everywhere.

DANNER: She went--we spent six years in Germany. I had the unaccompanied tour in Thailand, and then we spent the last tour--it was in Okinawa. And our daughter was married at that time, and our son was still with us. And I think--I think it, the tour in Okinawa helped him in his business. When he first got into this business, they were doing a lot of work with Japanese, and they were just starting. One of the meetings they had in LA [Los Angeles], one of the big wheels from the Japanese company was there. And Bill's company needed some 00:49:00up-front money. And they finally got it, but this old Japanese guy was ranting and raving. After it was over, they left there and Bill's partner at that time says, "Boy, I thought we'd lost that job." Bill says, "No, He was just holding--keeping up face, holding face." Because the Japanese--he learned this from Okinawa, he learned part of the Japanese customs. That's how they--

SLOAN: Maintain face, yeah. Well, I'd like to go back. And so we've crossed into Germany. So you're moving--take me through the Hürtgen Forest. I know--

DANNER: We were--the Hürtgen Forest is between Aachen, Germany, and Düren. I have a book upstairs that's called The Longest Battle. And in that length of 00:50:00time--it's nineteen miles from Aachen to Germany--or to Düren, and it took us over two months to battle our way--not just our division, but the whole bunch, the whole army along there. It took that much time just to clear through that much--that territory. The Germans were still putting--at that time, were putting up a good battle. It was rough. It was cold. It was miserable. But we survived. We got through. And when we--I guess, about Christmastime, it started to slacken off a little bit. Now, I could never place whether we were--I think we were probably in the south of where the Bulge actually took place. We were far enough 00:51:00where we were just in a holding pattern at that time. When we were in Düren, Germany, it was just a holding pattern there while they were clearing out at Bastogne. We--as far as my--where I was, we were never in any real--I guess we were in danger all the time.

SLOAN: Sure.

DANNER: But I could never remember any critical times, other than that night in Cologne. But other than that--we were concerned. I was concerned. But that was one of the times over there that I was really concerned about my safety and 00:52:00everybody else's. Just the fact of what they were doing. One night we were sitting along a roadblock, no moon, not knowing where we were or what was going on, and we heard a bloodcurdling screech. And I think everybody jumped about that high. We found out the next morning we were sitting beside of one of [Hermann] Göring's estates, and that was one of his peacocks let out this screech. And I've never heard anything like it in my life.

SLOAN: Well, as you said, things break in late January, February. You're moving much quicker on into Germany.

DANNER: Into Germany and the like, and we had a few rough spots, but normally you could move through pretty fast. The fact is, one night, we were with the 00:53:00medical unit, and they had a German regiment surrender to a medical unit. Of course, to the medical unit because the highest officer in the group was a medic. But we were with--our platoon was with a medical unit moving up. And it was funny at the time because the doctor didn't know what to do with them (laughs)

SLOAN: But it was a sign of what was going on with the Germans.

DANNER: It was a sign of what was going on. One place we were--and a thousand times since then, I wished I had kept a journal. I could remember some of these things that happened. We were sitting--set up on a hill, and an open field in 00:54:00front of us and the woods off to the left. And this little old lady, every day, would go out in the woods with a basket and come back. Well, one day, I decided to keep an eye on her. She went out there, and there was a German soldier who was her son. She was taking him food. He was hiding in the woods. His war was over. But we took her and her son back and turned them over to the authorities, but I think they released them.

And then, there was one walking across a field about five hundred yards out. Our lieutenant was there, he says, "Drop a fifty round behind that guy's heels. I want to go get him." And I fired one round, and I think it hit about three feet behind him. And he says, "I didn't want you to scare him to death. I want to talk to him." But he went out and brought the man back. But that was--I loved 00:55:00that .50 caliber. That's one reason I wear hearing aids, because I put it up in a belfry in Düren, in a school, and I was shooting out across the area. But it backed up into the belfry and it perforated an eardrum. But that--I don't know. It was an experience. We moved across. We got moving pretty fast at times. We got to Nordhausen.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like you to walk me through that, just coming upon Nordhausen, because I know it was unexpected. And the factory, and then the--

DANNER: We did not get into the factory, but we saw the bodies.

SLOAN: So you approached the camp first.

DANNER: We approached the camp. I know somebody come back and said, "They've found a concentration camp. They've taken it." And we went up to see what was going on. And there was bodies. A building there that had stairwells, and there were bodies stacked under the stairwell like cordwood. They were laying out in the streets. And the medics come up. They brought up a medical battalion because some of them were still alive. Some of them were so weak that just a weak, warm broth did them in. They were that far gone to start with. And the people of Nordhausen, they denied knowing it was going on. But they found out in a hurry. They came out and had to clear up all the bodies. All the male residents of the city of Nordhausen, they had them out picking up bodies. But we were there just 00:57:00a couple of days after that. Then we moved on, and that was--

But I still cannot realize why people deny the fact that it took place. I know it did. I took--I--I saw it. We had other places where we got into towns or places where they had this slave labor. They were--and the people we saw, some were Russian, Polish, all nationalities of people that were just slave laborers for the German forces. And I hope we go back. I'd like to go into the--the factories at Nordhausen were in a cave. That's where they were building the rockets, were in the cave. And I would like to go back and have a chance to even 00:58:00look at those, to see what--see what remains there. But I know in sixty-something years, there's not going to be much I'm going to recognize.

SLOAN: Well, did you get a chance to--did you go into the camp and tour the camp of Nordhausen?

DANNER: Well, it was just a big factory building, like a factory building. And that's where they--I've seen the pictures of some of the others where they were just stacked into places. And the food that they got was not--I guess, warm water with maybe potato and cabbage stuck in it, but that was the food they had. And they were just worked to death. Now, we did not get in any of the places like Ausch--what, Auschwitz?

SLOAN: Auschwitz, yeah.

DANNER: And the like, where they had the big ovens. But this was just a factory. And these people were just worked, worked to death.

SLOAN: Did you have any interactions with any of the people that were in the camp?

DANNER: No, we didn't. The medics were doing their work, and we tried to stay out of their way. They had a job to do, and I felt for them for what they had to put up with there. But the people were just skin and bones. I try to--you see these guys at these athletics events with these suits on that cover their body. Well, that's just about what they looked like, with the skin stretched over a skeleton. And that's--it was a horrible sight to see, and, as I said, it 01:00:00just--it's difficult to think how can people deny the fact that this happened.

SLOAN: Did you have any--had you heard of these sorts of places before?

DANNER: I guess we'd heard of them, but--and I don't--as far as I know, we came upon this, as far as I'm concerned, unexpectedly. But they found it. And there were two of them, Nordhausen and Dora, the two concentration camps that the 104th was involved in liberating. And it's a horrible picture to see. You just 01:01:00can't realize the physical damage that was done. And I think, most of these people that died in these camps like Nordhausen, I think, they were all buried in a common grave. Where they would bring in a bulldozer and dig a grave, and the bodies were all placed in there with no--nothing done. Just, I guess, to cover them up, to get them out, and keep the disease and whatever, any kind of something spreading is just--sanitary reasons as much as anything.

SLOAN: Well, now, were you--you mentioned the people from the town coming out to--did you witness that, where they came out to help?

DANNER: They were--they brought some out to show them. Well, I remember they did 01:02:00have some, and they were just starting to clear up when we moved through. And there's not much recognition of that, but I know they did bring them out to clear the bodies out. But other than that--in the unit history I've read some of it, but I don't recall seeing any of it. And all of those places over there where these concentration camps were, the Germans denied it. Denied even knowing they were there. And how? Their propaganda minister must have been great, because they did not--they would not confess to knowing these places were there. They can't keep something like that that close.

SLOAN: Well, you know, one thing that other liberators have talked about is 01:03:00comparing that scene to a battlefield, and how it's different.

DANNER: In the battlefields, I think, bodies were cleared up. The GIs, both sides--and fact is, there's times that they called truces over there so that wounded and the like could be cleared off of a battlefield. I know this had happened. But there there was nothing. These people--I don't know who stacked them. Whether they had the people that were the slave laborers to clean out the bodies and stack them up like that or lay they out in the streets, but they were laid in a parking--like a parking lot, just rows and rows of bodies. But there was still a few that were alive.

And the fact is, there were a couple of ladies here--I moved in in January, or in June. There were a couple of ladies here that come out of a concentration camp. And Genie, the nurse--they had a large memorial service, Holocaust memorial, at the Jewish synagogue over here on Thunderbird. And on Wednesday, she called me, and she says, "I will be by Sunday afternoon at one o'clock and pick you up to take you to the memorial service." And, sure enough, she was there. She picked me up, and we come out here to the synagogue. As people came in, she introduced me as a liberator, and they were all thankful. And then, Mr. 01:05:00Kellen was a survivor of one of the--the Holocaust. And I'd met him before. I've been involved in two or three of the other Holocaust memorials. And he was there, and Genie told me, she says, "Mr. Kellen wants to talk to you." And we were going to go out to lunch. And Mr. Kellen wasn't feeling well, and they had to cancel the lunch. I haven't seen Mr. Kellen or heard from him since. This is where Genie got my information. One of the units at Fort Bliss made up a big thing about the memorial, and they have it on the wall down there at the museum.

SLOAN: I see.

DANNER: They enlarged it and put our pictures, and that's where she saw my picture.

SLOAN: I see. Well, you talk about these occasions. What has it meant to you to 01:06:00be recognized?

DANNER: Well, I guess I feel proud that I helped somebody else, in a way, in a small way. But it--I feel good about it. I don't know. It's a good feeling to help somebody, or be involved in trying to help history. History, I like. That was my main deal. I wanted to be a history teacher. But it's a good feeling to be recognized as somebody that did good for someone else, if that's a way of putting it, I guess.

The one that they had over here at the synagogue, they had all the veterans that were there to stand up. And we were sitting way in the back. And the other noises, I didn't quite understand. Genie poked me in the ribs and says, "Stand up. Stand up." So I did. And there at the end, the lady that was the emcee of the program, she says, "We are honored to have a liberator in our midst today." And she started through the biography that they had on this memorial that they had out at Fort Bliss. And Genie again was poking me in the ribs and telling me to "Stand up. Stand up." And I stand up for myself then. It was--people appreciate it. At least to me, it showed their appreciation, even though the 01:08:00Jewish community itself, the people that were not involved, they appreciated it. And the ones that were really involved in the Holocaust, the two ladies here, they appreciated somebody that knew what happened, that could tell what happened.

SLOAN: So you spent a short time at Nordhausen itself.

DANNER: Yes. We spent--I guess maybe a day or a day and a half. I know some of us did walk down there and see what was going on. The medics were taking care of what they could do, and we moved on. We still had a job to do other than that. We ended up--well, this was, what? In April? And, of course, just shortly after 01:09:00that, it was all over. We were in a little town. Our battalion, the first battalion of our regiment, went around behind the city of Halle to block off any Germans coming out, to try to hold them within the compound of the city. And then, we ended up in a little town about thirteen kilometers northeast of Leipzig, Germany, called Krostitz, K-r-o-s-t-i-t-z. There was a schoolhouse, schoolroom there, and the schoolmaster's house was attached. And our squad was staying in that schoolroom when the war was over.

One night, he came into the schoolroom and wanted to know if we would like to 01:10:00come into his house and just talk. And he spoke enough English that we could get along. It was a fine conversation. We tried to get him to take down his blackout curtains, and we could not convince him that the war was over, that he did not need blackout curtains. But he went around the table and he asked each individual in our squad our name. And the first guy was--his last name was Mahoney. He says, "Ah, Irish." And he went around to each man, and he could tell the ethnic background. And he got to me, and I told him Danner. He says, "Ah, Deutsch." And I can remember one of the towns that we went through an apartment house, we were clearing it. We would go through after the infantry and make sure that the buildings were clear. And there was an apartment there with the name 01:11:00Danner on the door. My great--eighth generation great-grandfather came from Germany.

SLOAN: I know you had the chance to encounter--Russian troops were there as well in the--

DANNER: One Russian troop and that was the biggest man I'd ever seen in my life. These German people come up to me and they were saying something about this Russki, Russki. And I went down with them. They motioned me to go with them, and I went down, by myself like an idiot. And there was this big guy sitting there, rattling off in something. And I--"Ja, ja, Deutschland kaput." And I turned around and left. (laughs) But there was some funny things that happened, you 01:12:00know, but I wanted no part of that guy. He was big.

SLOAN: I know at this point you don't have enough points to get out of the army. I know they're on the point system. So you hadn't accumulated enough points to be discharged yet, had you?

DANNER: No. We were one of the first divisions that was redeployed from Germany, from the Europe battle, back to the States. And our orders at that time were to go to San Luis Obispo, California, get all of our equipment back and get it unpacked and get ready. And we were to go to Manila in the Philippines for amphibious training. And we were to be one of the invasion divisions about forty miles below Tokyo in Tokyo Bay. The day my thirty-day leave was up when we came 01:13:00back from Germany, the war with Japan was over. Then, we went out there and they set us up as a discharge station. As the companies--as the guys with the points were out and the companies grew smaller, they started consolidating companies. And they needed cooks. I couldn't see doing close-order drill and the manual of arms. And I went in the kitchen and trained as a cook. I spent my last few months in the army as an army cook.

SLOAN: Well, what was the reception like in New York that July?

DANNER: We landed in New York. Thirty-five thousand troops from Germany landed in New York that day, the same day. They brought out a boat of, I think it was 01:14:00at that time, a WAC band, women, on one side of the troop ship, and fifteen thousand troops went to that side of the ship and almost capsized it. After that, they started bringing out one on both sides of the ship, but there were thirty-five thousand troops come back from Europe that one day.

We went into Fort Dix, New Jersey, and got in there late at night. The mess sergeant apologized that he did not have steak dinners for us, because that's what they were giving the troops when they came back. But he says, "I guarantee you, you will have a steak for dinner tomorrow." The next day, we had steak. They loaded us onto cars, on railroad cars, Pullmans, what-have-you, and took us 01:15:00mainly to an area where we were going to spend our thirty-day leave. We got into Indiana. Out of Indianapolis, we started down to Camp Atterbury. The train stopped along the football field of Franklin College where I went to school. And the young lady I was going with at the time, she was over there in the dormitory, and I could not get off the train. We got a thirty-day leave, reported back to Camp Atterbury, and I ended up at San Luis Obispo, California.

SLOAN: Well, what was the homecoming like?

DANNER: It was great. I got home. Well, I got discharged, and I went back to 01:16:00Louisiana State. I went back to Louisiana State University because a lot of friends I knew down there. I went to the fraternity house, and they says, Where are you staying? I said, "I got a hotel room." That won't do. They went down and checked my stuff out of the hotel room, and I stayed at the fraternity house for two or three days. When I got home, it was about two o'clock in the morning, and at that time you did not lock doors. I went in through the back. Of course, we always come in by the back where we lived. That was the quickest way home, was up the alley and home. And I went in and I laid down on the couch in the living room, and I pulled my overcoat up over me.

My dad got up the next morning, and he came down. And he's getting ready to go to work. He said, "Well, I'll be damned. You finally decided to come home." (laughs) But that was, I guess--afterwards, after I got back into school the 01:17:00next year--I'd worked for JC Penney in high school. I went up home for Easter, and I forgot to take a dress shirt to go to church. My dad and I walked down to the Penney store on Saturday morning. And I walked in and Mr. Squire, the manager of the store when I worked there, walked up, handed me a sale book and a pencil, and says, "Get to work." And I told him, "Mr. Squire, I did not come down to work. I come down to buy a shirt." He says, "I need somebody here that knows what's going on." And that made me feel good. It was a small town, ten thousand people.

SLOAN: So what were you studying in school when you got back in?

DANNER: I wanted, at that time, I wanted to be a coach and teach chemistry. That was my dream, I guess. I was taking chemistry courses. And we had a good chemistry professor there at the time. I could take his class notes and I would have a student plan, a lesson plan for that particular class, because he was so thorough in the way he did it. And then, he left and they brought in a young professor. And he might have known chemistry, but he could not teach me chemistry. So I changed my major to sociology. I have a degree in sociology. My first job after I got out of school was an assistant cottage supervisor at the 01:19:00Indiana Boys School, at Plainfield, Indiana. I went to work at six o'clock in the morning; I got off at eight o'clock at night. I had about two hours off an afternoon. I had one day off every two weeks, and one weekend out of every four, and that was a lot of hours.

SLOAN: Yeah.

DANNER: I left there and went to a bank in Indianapolis as a teller. I ended up, when I went back into the army, I was an expeditor in Class Q allotments at the Army Finance Center in Indianapolis, at Fort Benjamin Harrison. And then, by being in reserves, I found out how much money those guys were making. They were making more than I was, and I got tired of working two jobs, so I went back to the army.

SLOAN: Now, when you went back in, what was your assignment right when you went 01:20:00back in?

DANNER: I went back in working there as an expeditor. What I would do--we had these people. The people were processing allotments for the military, and they would come up with something that they didn't know how to take care of. They would give it to me or one of the other expeditors, we would go find out the problems, get it solved, and go back and tell them what to do. One day, I was going through checking on something else and I come across two files. Had the same serial number with the exception of the last four, and they had been transposed. And I thought, That is funny. We got two people here with the same name and identical numbers, social security numbers. And I got to looking, and 01:21:00all the correspondence for that allotment was a master sergeant. All the correspondence was written by a lady, handwritten check--mail. The letters would be written, mailed from the same post office at the same time, the same handwriting.

I went back and I told my supervisor. I says, "I think I have found something here," and I told him. He says, "You go back and check the pay vouchers way back to when. Find out how much this"--and I went back, and the allotment was immediately dropped, but every time at the change of station, this lady would write two letters and mail them. What had happened, someplace along the line, some clerk had mistyped the last four numbers of the serial number. But this--I 01:22:00guess, maybe she did not let her husband know that she was getting two checks. But this was one thing--my wife knew as much about what was going on as I did. She kept track of everything. If something didn't seem right, she was on the phone finding out, getting it corrected. But this allotment was stopped right then. I don't know whatever happened to these--

SLOAN: (laughs) Well, how did you end up in a missile unit?

DANNER: I was an MP. I liked the MP. I wanted to make it a career. The military--I was a desk sergeant, and I handled the desk. We worked eight hours and was off twenty-four. And I got involved with the MPI, Military Police 01:23:00Investigators, in a lot of the cases that we had. And they wanted me. They wanted me to be transferred from MPs up to their MPI, and my company commander would not release me. That's one thing--doing a good job kept me where I didn't want to be, because there were no promotions. And I knew if I got into MPI, I could proceed on up into the criminal investigation. Most of those people were warrant officers. And I could have gone to school, an MP school, and took what I needed and could have gotten the promotions. But he would not release me.

And about that time, they were coming out with the missile systems. And I thought, Well, that's a new field. I could get into it and maybe have a little better chance. I applied for the Corporal missile school in ground guidance, as 01:24:00they called it at the time, here at Fort Bliss, and was accepted. And I came out here to school. And I went through thirty-two weeks of school. I got out. I was assigned to a unit here and got into the unit. The battery commander says, "I have all the ground guidance people I need." He says, "You have electronic training. Would you be willing to go into the assembly and test section?" I said, "It makes no difference to me. That's fine."

When I was at school here, when I left the MPs, they had the specialist training at that time. My company commander, I did him a favor. He asked me if I would accept an E-6 specialist so he could keep the NCO rank. And I says, "That's 01:25:00fine, because I'll be going to school, and that's fine with me." I got out, I went back to the unit, or assigned to a unit, and about a week after I got there, I got a new assignment as a job. I went in to the battery commander. I says, "Now that I'm working as a non-commissioned officer, I would like to have my NCO stripes back." And that night, he handed me a set of orders, converting me from an SFC specialist--or an E-6 specialist to an E-6 NCO.

I spent ten years in the Corporal missile system. The last unit I was in was the last Corporal unit in the army. It deactivated. They sent in a Pershing unit in Germany. I was assigned to it. The unit wasn't even there. When I did come back, I decided I'd had all the missile training units that I wanted. I went to the 01:26:00Pentagon and got my assignment changed to engineer school at Fort Belvoir. And went through several classes and stayed on at Fort Belvoir for--I was there for four years and had an instructor group teaching diesel engine turbine generators. And I had to work with them. I had instructors, and I had to do the lesson plans and scheduling, class scheduling and the like. I enjoyed that, and I taught classes.

But then, they come up with a course, a 621A MOS, Military Occupation Specialty, which was heavy equipment maintenance. I took that course. And after I got out of that, finished the course, I applied for warrant and was assigned, or got appointed as a warrant officer of heavy equipment maintenance. The job I had 01:27:00there, if I could have found a civilian job like that, I'd have probably stayed in it. But I was program manager for engineering equipment rebuild. We would get a telegram from Vietnam telling us that we were sending back twenty CAT-12 graders, Caterpillar road graders. They would be on the island at such-and-such a time. It was my job, when those graders got on the island, to have the parts to completely do a depot rebuild. They were completely dismantled, and it was my job to see that those things were--when they left the shop, they were like new. 01:28:00That was an interesting--

SLOAN: Yeah, you enjoyed that work.

DANNER: That was good work. I had a good crew to work with. And only one lady over there gave me a problem one time, caused me problems. They sent back some small Caterpillar tractors that the army had bought for the Vietnamese. And they were not in the US Army inventory. So I went through and I changed all the military part numbers to Caterpillar--or changed all the Caterpillar numbers into--and this was when computers was done on cards. And I made up the list of parts, and I sent it. And I had to run through the computer. There were some, a few gaskets and seals that were common, but not enough to worry with. So I went 01:29:00back and reconverted all the numbers into Caterpillar.

I set up a letter with all the parts that we needed, the number we needed each, the price per each, the total cost, the whole works. I took it back to this one lady. She was, I think, a GS-14. I took it back to her. I said, "This is what I have done: one, two, three." I said, "All this needs is a procurement letter for a private company." I said, "I'm not pushing anybody, but the closest place to get these parts is the Caterpillar place in San Mateo, California, or straight to Caterpillar itself." And the colonel kept wanting to know--we had a meeting every week, and the colonel wanted to know what's the status on the Caterpillar, 01:30:00on the dozer. I says, "Well, I've turned it over to so-and-so." Well, check with her and see what she's done. And she had sat there and doing the same thing I had done. She was doing the whole thing over. When I left the island in August of '71, she was still converting part numbers.

SLOAN: They may still not have those dozers done.

DANNER: They still may not. (laughs) But then, so many of these people were doing--they were keeping their jobs.

SLOAN: Yeah.

DANNER: That's what they were doing.

SLOAN: Well, how was the transition back out of the military?

DANNER: I came back. I went back to school. I was living in a fraternity house. And of course, all these GIs, most of us were ex-military. We'd sit around at 01:31:00night and tell stories. We had this one fellow that was in the air force. He was a gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific. And there at the end, he would tell about--they would fly off of one island up someplace. They were dropping supplies on what is now Korea, at that time it was Formosa. They were dropping supplies up there--

SLOAN: Taiwan, yeah.

DANNER: --for the prisoners that were there. And on the way back one time, they stopped. They were having problems, and they stopped in an airport, one of the army airfields that night. And they stole a jeep from some--and they put it in the bomb bay. The next day, they got ready to leave and the post was almost closed. And they told the pilot that they had this jeep that they were looking 01:32:00for in the bomb bay. And they were out someplace over the Pacific. He says, "Open the bomb bay doors and dispose of that thing." (laughs) They dropped it in the Pacific. But he would come in at night, be about half-tanked. He would say, "And there we were, twenty thousand feet over Undy-Bundy." The next morning, we'd get up and he'd sober up. We'd ask him, Hey, Dell, where's Undy-Bundy? "I don't know, never heard of it." (both laugh) But went back to school, and it was just like it was before. We went to class. Of course, I started in the fall of '42 and--

SLOAN: Fall of '72, right?

DANNER: No, I started back to school in the fall of--or, started college in the 01:33:00forties, originally.

SLOAN: Yes. Yeah.

DANNER: I got back and started back in in '46.

SLOAN: Yeah.

DANNER: And that June, my class graduated, the class that I would have been in had I not been in the service. And you talk about somebody being downhearted. And I was about ready, at that time, to just drop out of school and go back to the military. And one of the young ladies on the campus, she was just a friend that I knew, and she set me down that afternoon and talked to me all afternoon and talked me into staying in the school. And I forget who it was, but I should have gone back and thanked her one thousand times for that, because due to that 01:34:00I did graduate, I was happily married, and life was great after that.

SLOAN: Yeah. Well now, when you retired in '71, what did you do after that?

DANNER: We thought we were going to live in Colorado, as I said, but then we moved back to El Paso.

SLOAN: Yeah.

DANNER: And I had worked part time up there in Colorado at Sears. It was part time. We came back, and I really hadn't decided just what I wanted to do. I worked several different jobs. I would be--go work at the state personnel employment office, temporary. And finally, I decided, by golly, I was going to 01:35:00go back to school. I had GI Bill left. I went back. I took enough courses to qualify to get my certification to teach. I needed eighteen hours over what I had, and I took fifty-one hours. Most of it was history courses. Just to--I had the time and the like.

And in 1977, I started teaching, at that time was called an alternative program. These were habitual truants, troublemakers and the like, and they were put into a classroom. And we had to teach them all the classes that they had, English, history, whatever. We would go to the teacher and get their lesson plans, and we 01:36:00would teach it. I had two young ladies in the classroom with me. And then, finally, I was the only one in the room. And it was right across the hall from the assistant principal's office. These students were isolated from the rest of the student body. The classroom door was closed. They brought two young men from one of the junior high down there one time and put in that class. One of them come up to me one day in the classroom, and he said, "What would you do if I hit you?" I says, "I'd grab by the nape of the neck and the seat of the pants and throw you right across the hall to Mr. Elwood's office." That was the assistant principal. "And I wouldn't even bother opening the door." He says, "I was only kidding." I says, "I wasn't." He didn't know they was messing with an old 01:37:00army--old warrant officer and NCO. But I never had any problems after that.

SLOAN: Well, you were talking about, before we started recording, about how you enjoyed teaching history.

DANNER: Yeah, I would get into American history. My student teaching was in Western settlement, and to me, that's the most interesting part of history. But then, you get into American history, and I would open the book and I would look to see where we were. And I closed the book, and I would start the lecture and telling stories about what I knew at the time. They went, How do you know all this? I was there when it happened. You know, you get raised during the Depression and the like, and you know what goes on. As I said, I would tell them a guy gave--my dad was out of work. Or about two family friends--or family all 01:38:00living in the same house, trying to survive. A man came to the door, offered my dad a job for fifteen--or five dollars a week. And the kids would say, Well, how did you survive? Great. We would go to town on Saturday night. My mother and dad would give my sister and I a dime, and we'd go to the movies. We'd get a nickel to get in the movie and a nickel to buy a bag of popcorn. And that was it. We lived great. We had plenty. We weren't--we never suffered, but that was--but I enjoyed history.

I took one of the classes in Russian history. But I just enjoyed the--I had some 01:39:00good professors. One of them really did me a favor. One of the final exams, I misread the schedule. And I'm sitting in the student union going over my notes for that particular test. And this gal walked in from the class, and she says, "You missed the history test." Oh. And I went dashing back over to the room, and I told the professor. I went in and he gave me the test. And when they all finished, he says, "When you finish the test, you bring it down to me and I'll"--but he gave me a break.

But I enjoyed kids. And I got along with them. I knew who I had to get on. I knew who I could tease and joke with and the like. And, of course, being here in 01:40:00El Paso, a lot of them are Hispanic. And one day, a bunch of them in the back of the room was cutting up. I says, "You guys settle down, or I'm going to get the Mexican mafia after you." And then, We are the Mexican mafia. (laughs) I knew who--I could read people in that way.

And I had one one time--I had a student teacher the last semester I taught. After she got on her feet into the classroom, I would leave. That was her class. I went in one day after she had had a class. They had a test that day, and I walked into the classroom to see how she was doing. And she says this one student came in to her, said he had an appointment with his counselor. Did he 01:41:00have a pass? No. I said, "Let me check." And I went and his counselor says, "I haven't seen him all semester." So I went back, I picked up the class grade book, I put a big red X in for him for that day, which meant an unexcused absence, that he could not take his test. I called him in. I talked to him. I said, "Now, if you want to graduate, here's what you have to do the rest of this semester. You have to maintain at least a seventy-six average just to graduate." I said, "If you want help before class, I'm here every morning at seven o'clock. You come in, and I will help you. I will not give up my lunch hour. If you want to stay after school, you let me know a day or two ahead of time, because I normally have things scheduled after school, and I want to be able to help."

Well, he never asked for help. And he came in when he found out he wasn't going to graduate. He came in, and he got all over me. He said, "I'm going to tell the principal you helped these girls and you wouldn't help me." Well, about the first thing I ever told a class when they came into a classroom, "If I can help you, if you need help with this course or any course, come and talk to me. We'll see what we can do." Because I wanted to see them graduate. And I said, "If you want to talk to the principal, that's your prerogative." But I beat him to the principal's office, and I told him what happened. He walked in. Before he could say anything, the principal says, "We'll see you in summer school." But that's--

And I had one in the alternative program. His biggest problem was English 01:43:00language, the lack of English. And he would get frustrated and start missing class and what have you. And I'd get him back on line; they'd put him back in the class. The next thing you know, he was back again. And I told him one time, I says, "You're going to have to do this on your own and stay in class," I said, "if you want to graduate." And he came to me one day after he was back in the class and handed me an invitation to his graduation. Because he had settled down and gotten serious enough, got into class, and graduated.

SLOAN: Well, that was the time when teaching was most rewarding, in times like that. Yeah.

DANNER: Yeah, that makes you--and I had quite a few students that I wanted to see graduate, and I tried to help them. But as I said, I liked the kids. I build 01:44:00youth clubs for the Optimists [Cielo Vista Optimist Club]. I built three youth clubs. And this last one, the principal at Western Hills--the Optimist club I belong to are partners in education with one of the elementary schools on the East Side. And the principal they had when I joined this club is the principal at Western Hills now. Her mother and father are members of our Optimist club.

And I would go by Western Hills almost every--I go out that way when I leave up here. And I called Toni. I'd thought several times I went by this school, knowing that Nancy was the principal there would probably be an easy way to get a youth club started. And I called her mother one day, and I said, "Do you think 01:45:00Nancy would be willing to have an Alpha Club, which is elementary grade, at Western Hills?" She said, "Well, I'm sure she would." She says, "Let me give her a call, and I'll have her give you a call." Couple days later, I got a call from Nancy. She says, "I am interested in this Alpha Club." Says, "Come over." She set up an appointment. So I went over and talked to her. I had a notebook with all the information in it. She called me. I took it over and explained to her what it was. She said, "Well, let me look this over, and I'll give you a call." And about a week later, she called, and she says, "I have thirty kids." And then we're going over Friday and present them with their charter.

SLOAN: Well, that's great.

DANNER: And our club, we pay all their--it doesn't cost the kids or the school a dime. We pay all their dues; we pay for the charter to charter the club and all. And the fact is, on the twenty-second day of May, we are going to take them to the zoo, at no cost to the kids. What aggravated me--we did this two years ago. And I had to drop out because that's when my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And I had to drop out of helping them with that. Somebody else had to take over the work that I would have done. But anyway, they set up the tour. And some of our club members wanted to go. They thought they were going to get a free tour of the zoo. But when they found out they had to pay their own way, 01:47:00they couldn't help. But me, I am going to the zoo. I will pay my way, and anybody else that wants to go, I will help them.

SLOAN: Well, you continue to work for the benefit of kids. I know you like working with kids.

DANNER: Yeah.

SLOAN: Well, Chief Danner, we've taken a lot of your time this morning, but I want to make sure. Were there things we should have asked and gotten into that we didn't get a chance to talk about?

DANNER: Okay, whatever, I'm free. My time is--

SLOAN: Were there some--as we wrap up, are there some things we need to talk about that we haven't talked about so far, maybe that we've missed?

DANNER: Well, I don't know. I've been on the Internet, iPad, working with it. And I went back to this little town that we were in at the end of--it's probably 01:48:00not little anymore. But I would like to go back there. When I get to go on the tour, I'm going to see if--the possibility of going back. And they have a middle school there now that has an email address. And one of our ladies at the chapel is German. And I asked her if I would write a letter to this school, if she would translate it into German for me to send back to them. And she said she would be tickled. But I would just like to go. Other than seeing--going through Nordhausen again, I would like to go back. This is a little town that's just off the beaten path, a couple of kilometers off their interstate system. Because we're going to end up in Berlin. And Halle, Germany, and Leipzig, Germany, are 01:49:00like that. They're close together, then in between is the road that goes to Berlin. And I would like to just go back, if I could. I know that old German schoolmaster is not there. He is probably long gone. But just to go back and see. But that's--and maybe--the time that we spent in Düren, Germany, because we were there longer than any place else.

I don't know that I enjoyed the military service during that time or not, but I think we were trained. We did our job. The fact is, before we went to Germany, up at Fort Carson, General Allen had them set up, supposedly, a German bunker. 01:50:00And we had a live ammunition practice out there with a fire drill. Military fire going--ammo going overhead. You could hear the bullets snap, and gives you some idea of what to expect. And the infantry unit proceeded down, and we fired on the pillbox. So those guys knew what they were facing. But I think we had good training. The jobs that I did after I went back, I had good training. I don't know how many courses I went through at Fort Belvoir. It seemed like every time you turned around, they had a school of some type. Maybe only a week or a matter of hours or some kind of a course that you went to that helped you do what you 01:51:00were doing.

I went through an instructor's training course. Charm school is what they called it. And you'd go in, and they'd tell about the things you should do and should not. They said, You never tell a class to take your seats, because if you--over there, you go into a class with those instructors, and you say, "Gentlemen, take your seats," they'd all pick up the chairs and say, Where you want me to take it? Or, you ask a question. You would say, "Bill, can you tell me so-and-so." I can't, but Joe can. But that--they teach you how to ask questions, how to conduct the class. And then, of course, I'd help--when I had the classes there at Fort Belvoir, I had to schedule the classes, schedule the instructors. We had 01:52:00two classes a day. We had a day class and a night class. This was during Vietnam. I learned a lot about power generation.

SLOAN: Well, Chief Danner, I want to thank you for your time today.

DANNER: Well, I appreciate it.

SLOAN: We want to thank you for your service as well.

DANNER: And if you would like, I think we could go right into the dining room and have lunch.

SLOAN: All right, well, let's talk about that.

DANNER: Okay.

end of interview