Texas Liberators - Melvin Waters (September 14, 2011)

SLOAN: All right, this is Stephen Sloan. The date is September 14, 2011. I am with Mr. Melvin Waters. We're at his home in Dallas, Texas. Mr. Waters, thank you for sitting down with me today. This is an interview with the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Liberator Project. Again, Mr. Waters, thanks for sitting down with me today. I'd love to start by finding out a little bit about your background. I know you were born in Lancaster, Texas, but if you can tell us a little bit about your early life.

WATERS: Well, I'm told that we left Lancaster pretty--uh, pretty close to my first birthday. And I think we lived in Italy, Texas, for a few months and then 00:01:00we came back to Lancaster. My dad tried a little farming there just about the time that the farm prices--or cotton prices all took a dive. And he had to come to Dallas, he and my mother, and started working to pay off their debts for their little adventure. And they left me with my grandmother in Lancaster. So that went on until my mother got pregnant with my little brother, who is--was four years younger than me. And he--then I lived with my mother--with my parents in what is called Trinity Heights, part of Dallas. And after my brother was 00:02:00born, we sold our house, and my dad was going to transfer to Lubbock, Texas. At that time there was just a gravel road between Dallas and Lubbock. And finally he backed out of that to be with the family and everything. His family and my mother's family were all in Lancaster. So then I was--I was in another part of Trinity Heights that we moved to after selling our house. And I started grade school and went to a place called Trinity Heights in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.

SLOAN: You talked about--this was during the period of the Depression, of course.

WATERS: Yes, I was born in 1925, and the Depression, of course, hit 1929. And it didn't hurt us as much as it did other people. My dad went to work--when he had to go to work in Dallas, he went to work for Fleischmann's Yeast, which was a--as a salesman. And we got through the Depression in pretty good shape. Then in 1940--'41, I guess, right after Pearl Harbor, so it would have been in '42, my father lost his job. He was always heavyset, and he came up with diabetes. He 00:04:00lost quite a bit of time, so they replaced him. Of course, protection for employees was not enforced as much then as it is now. But we had a harder time in the latter part of the Depression than we did in the worst part of the Depression. And we decided to move to Lancaster, where both of my grandparents lived at that time. And then I went to high school. We moved there just in time for me to go to high school, so I went to high school in Lancaster, Texas.

SLOAN: What are some memories that stand out from that time in Lancaster?

WATERS: Huh?

SLOAN: What are some memories that stand out to you from your time in Lancaster, there in high school?

WATERS: Well, of course, I went back to Lancaster kicking and screaming and left 00:05:00all my friends and everything in Dallas. But looking back over it now, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. A place like Lancaster was a bedroom community. Half the people there worked in Dallas, and it was a--at that time, it was a beautiful little town. And it had an electric train that went all through there and that went all the way to Waco. And you could ride to Dallas nearly every hour. And it sounded like the commuters that they had, on a small scale, like they had in New York. But it was a great place for a child to grow up in. You had a small community, you could roam the streets. My mother and dad 00:06:00never knew where I was, contrast to today. But looking back on it now, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. And I got to play football a little bit. And made a lot of friends in Lancaster.

SLOAN: Yeah, you mentioned the Interurban. I've heard people tell stories of the Interurban Railway that would run back and forth.

WATERS: Yes. It was a passenger--electric passenger train that would have one or two cars. And, funny thing, one of my great-uncles was the first man to drive to 00:07:00Waco, and another of my great-uncles drove the last one from Waco to Dallas.

SLOAN: Oh wow. So were you able to take that to visit your friends in Dallas?

WATERS: Oh yes, yeah. And later my wife--after I was married, we couldn't find a place to live in Dallas, so four years we lived in Lancaster, had two daughters while we were there. And when we had our second daughter, we just decided we had to have a house, and so we built a house in Oak Cliff. But those four years we was there, my wife worked part of the time, and we used the Interurban to go back and forth to commute to our job in Dallas--to our jobs in Dallas.

SLOAN: About how long was the commute from Lancaster to Dallas on the Interurban?

WATERS: It was less than an hour. It was about forty-five minutes to downtown Dallas. I know one time we--as young men we would--we got to where we would ride the Interurban up to Dallas on a Sunday afternoon, three or four of us, go to a movie, find something to--there was snack places all over Elm Street in Dallas, between the movie houses, and eat, and go back. And I think there was three of us that time, and collectively we had ridden the Interurban up. And then 00:09:00collectively we lacked a nickel having enough money to get back. And we went all over downtown Dallas at nine o'clock at night trying to find somebody that'd give us a nickel. We finally found a young man that we knew from Wilmer-Hutchins. Wilmer-Hutchins was kind of our rival in football and sports, and so we weren't real friendly, but he was nice enough to lend us a nickel.

SLOAN: (laughs) Well, when your father lost his job, did you have to go to work to help support the family?

WATERS: No, no, my grandmother--my grandfather had given me a pony when I was a year old for my first birthday. And I kept a horse for--well, of course, I'd 00:10:00trade--or he would trade horses for me--ponies for me to get me--because their life expectancy is not that long. So I had, probably, three ponies. And finally when I outgrew that and we were in Lancaster, and he had stables in Lancaster. So I had all the horses I wanted to ride, or I had more than I wanted to ride. He wanted me to exercise horses all the time. And so I sold my pony and invested it in some cattle. I finally had about thirty head of cattle, and that was going to be my college money. It would have been enough probably for a year, maybe. At that time tuition in Texas was twenty-five dollars a semester, so it would have 00:11:00lasted maybe a year and a half, two years. But when my dad lost his job, unknown to me he started using that fund. And so when I graduated from high school and I went to my grandmother and said, "Well, I need my money now," she said, "Your father has it." Well, my father had already--we'd been living off of it for about six months, so there went my college fund.

I went to work that summer for the county of Dallas, working on the road gang, just shoveling pea gravel. Then I got on the bridge gang. And then I got promoted up to driving a gravel truck. I was making three dollars and twenty 00:12:00cents a day. So I saved enough that summer to go to college a year on. I never did make the year because of the war. And then when I came back I thought I had the GI Bill of Rights. We thought we had the GI Bill. I started to North Texas with a neighbor of mine, who had been in the air force, and we'd been roommates at NTAC [North Texas Agricultural College] before we'd gone in the service. And I found out--about two or three weeks into the semester, I was notified that I did not have the GI Bill. So I had to pull out of school.

I had worked for a while for Dallas Power and Light before I had gone into the service, and I went back to work for them. They said that they didn't have to give me my job back because I was a temporary employee, but they would employ me. But they wanted me to advance myself, wanted me to go to night school. And I said, well, I wanted to go to night school. And so I went back to work for Dallas Power and Light. Six months on my old job and they promoted me to a little bookkeeping job. Then about six months later, they put me into the general accounting and that started me.

SLOAN: Started you on your CPA career.

WATERS: Yeah.

SLOAN: Well, before the war when you first went to college, where did you go to college?

WATERS: North Texas Agricultural College in Arlington.

SLOAN: Yeah, UTA [University of Texas--Arlington] now, right?

WATERS: Yeah, uh-huh.

SLOAN: So what sort of course work were you taking?

WATERS: Well, I made a mistake. I started taking engineering, because I was good at mathematics. Every--all of my teachers told me, Well, you ought to take engineering. And in engineering, two times two is not always four, and in accounting it is always four, so it makes a big difference to me.

SLOAN: That's right. That would make a difference.

WATERS: Or it did to me. But anyway, when I came back--I was showing you some pictures earlier. And I don't know whether you noticed the young man that was looking--was looking outside the camp, and was looking up, but he was about twenty-seven years old, from Sacramento, California. And I went overseas with 00:15:00him, with eighty-nine other people, but he would--then I got thrown back with him again after about six months, which will come out in the story later. I got thrown back with him. He and I were in the same ambulance there for several months, and he kind of was--kind of became my big brother and he was always saying, "Melvin, you've got to be a CPA. You've got to be an accountant." And his oldest brother was, and he just idolized his oldest brother who was a CPA in Sacramento. So when I came home and I went back to that job, they said, Well, what are your ambitions? I said, "I want to be a CAP." And they said, A CAP? 00:16:00What's a CAP? (laughs) I finally learned it was CPA.

SLOAN: (laughs) Well, so you're taking your engineering classes, and you're already getting a sense that that's not where you should use your skill in math, I guess.

WATERS: Yes.

SLOAN: So were you--at that point--you said the war was already going on. Were you aware of--kind of keeping track of what was going on with the war?

WATERS: Oh yes, I was a senior in high school when--sixteen years old when the war started. I remember December the sixth well. And I was so upset and all that 00:17:00I wanted to quit school and go in the navy, because I always heard of these under-aged guys getting in the navy, and see the world. And my mother said, "I am not signing any papers for you until you have to go. You've got to wait for the draft." And I don't think I wanted to go that bad anyway, because I did want to finish school. And my dad, even though he had never gone to college, or my mother, was always hammering into my head that, you know, when you get out of school, it's going to be necessary to have a college degree, because of the way times are changing. And so I never did get my degree. I got hours stacked on top 00:18:00of hours, but they were always in the accounting field. I didn't take courses like I should have taken, like English. And going to SMU [Southern Methodist University], I'd have had to have taken religion.

SLOAN: Well, you seem to enjoy learning. I haven't mentioned it, but you've got a class this morning you've got to get to later on, so--

WATERS: Well, they came up with the opportunity here that we could go--if you're sixty-five years or older, you can go to college for twelve hours a year free in 00:19:00the state of Texas, so I took advantage of that.

SLOAN: Oh, that's great. Well, so you're aware of the war. You are not quite old enough yet, and so you're keeping track of the war. You said you went to college not quite a year. Can you tell about leaving college that first time?

WATERS: Oh, I left college early. I left college in--I went home for Thanksgiving. Never did go back. I went down to the marine corps recruiting office with a friend of mine that I played football with. And he was going to join the marine corps, so I went down with him and saw him off. It was one of those deals where--I don't know where his parents were, but it was one of those deals where he went down, took a physical, and left that night. So I went down 00:20:00and held his hand, and they talked me into taking a physical. And so I told my parents about it and my mother said, "You're not going anywhere. I'm not going to sign papers for you." So I was home, and I was going to start to school in the second semester taking business administration. And my dad told me, he said, "If you want to go into the marine corps, you can." And I said, "Mother won't sign the papers." He said, "Well, let me work on that." So finally he talked her into signing my papers and I went up. And, of course, I had taken a physical 00:21:00along with my friend in the latter part of November. I went up and left to go to San Diego on January the second. And then when I got to San Diego and started through my physicals and stuff out there they had for us, I flunked, got sent back. I was discharged from the marine corps. And so I came back in the spring of 1943.

And my next-door neighbor who had been my roommate in NTAC had joined the air 00:22:00force under a new plan. They were taking in seventeen-year-olds, and when they got eighteen they would call them up for cadets. He had done that, and he was waiting to go into the air force. So I went up and talked to them and told them I had this medical discharge over my head. And they said, Well, if you can pass our mental and you can pass our physical, and you say you can, I will get you into cadets. So I passed the mental. I went down to take the physical. I was flying high, and they hit me right in the face again: You've got high blood pressure. So that kept me out of anything for over a year. And I went back to 00:23:00school in a different way. I got a job at the war plant out in Arlington, or Grand Prairie, and they sent me back to school, night school, in Arlington. So I went back a semester of school in Arlington. And when I went back to work--and all this time the draft board in Lancaster was telling me they were going to send me up with the next group. I was supposed to have gone and left in September of 1943. And they didn't call me up, so I went to the head of the draft board. Being Lancaster, you know everybody and everybody knows you.

SLOAN: Yeah.

WATERS: And he said, "Melvin, why don't you just give up?" And I said, "Well, 00:24:00give me a chance anyway. I think I can pass the physical. I've been going to the doctors," and so on and so forth. They had no thing for high blood pressure in those days. A pill for high blood pressure didn't come out until about 1960. So he more or less told me I might as well just give up.

And so I had taken a job with Dallas Power and Light, a day job. I stayed--North American Aviation there was working seven days a night--seven nights of--or six nights a week. So I got a day job. And while I was on this job with Dallas Power and Light, I read in the Dallas Morning News--in the want ads, I saw they were 00:25:00looking for ambulance drivers for immediate service overseas. And so by this time this was the spring of 1944. I had a young man who was about a year older than me that I was working with that had a similar experience with the marine corps and the draft board. He was a year older than me. I showed him--I showed him the ad. And so we called the telephone number that afternoon and got an interview the next day with the person who put the ad in. A fellow by the name of Stephen--I can't think of his last name right now.

But anyway, he was an insurance man, had his own little insurance practice. And he said that he had been a driver for the American Field Service in the First World War. It seemed that he was studying with some other American students that were studying in Paris. And when World War I broke out and Paris was under siege, they jumped in and got some taxi cabs to go out to the battlefields and pick up wounded and bring them back into a certain hospital there in Paris. So after the siege was over with they decided they'd like to continue that service, 00:27:00and so they formed the American Field Service. They got their parents to buy them some ambulances which were manufactured by the Ford Motor Company in the southern part of France. And they served with the French, giving these ambulance driving services until the Americans joined the war. And he told me that his son was overseas in Italy at that time with the American Field Service. So we told him our story. And he said, "Well, you're the type of people we're recruiting now. I think both of you have a good shot of being offered a chance to go 00:28:00overseas." And so we put in our application. We did. We waited around. And they had us take shots.

And finally--we fooled around a couple of months. I didn't think we was ever going to go. I thought the war was going to be over before we even got in. And what the problem was was transportation. All the shipping was going to England, and we were to be with the field service in Italy. They had a contingency in Italy. They had one in India-Burma. And we chose to go to the one in Italy. And 00:29:00so finally we got called up to New York, and we just missed it. Evidently, I found out later, some guy who joined up months after we did got overseas before we did, and the reason was the shipping--while we were on the way to New York the opening came up to send some people overseas. We weren't there. These guys lived in that area and they were shipped over. So we got to New York, and we got stuck in New York for a couple of months, which wasn't too bad. (Sloan laughs) They had a place downtown, what we call a brownstone, on Fifty-First Street, right behind Saint Patrick's Cathedral. So we stayed there a couple of months--about seven weeks, I think. So we was riding about in New York, and 00:30:00really it was an enjoyable seven weeks.

SLOAN: I bet.

WATERS: And we had some ex-drivers from World War I who wanted to ask us out for a weekend in Connecticut. And they treated us quite well in New York. And finally we were called down to--well, we had--they had an office in the Cotton Exchange Building, right off Wall Street, and we were supposed to go down every other day to check in with them. So they finally said, Well, we've got the shipping to get you overseas. And while we--Autry Rollins was the name of the 00:31:00other fellow that went with me from Dallas. We were the first in our unit to get to New York. And in the brownstone that we were staying in there, we started getting people in. Every week, two or three more would come in. And finally, when they told us that we were going to ship out the next day--so we all got prepared. And then there were some guys we never had seen before joined us. And when we got to Grand Central Station to catch our train, there were about twice as many guys waiting--there was as many people waiting for us as we had in our 00:32:00brownstone. So we ended up with ninety people going overseas in our unit.

SLOAN: Wow.

WATERS: And so from Grand Central one evening, we started out at about--I had met a young man that afternoon that we got from Alabama. We got to talking. And Autry Rollins and myself did not have very much in common. We had joined up with two or three other guys there, and so we had a clique of about five. I got to 00:33:00talking to a couple of other fellows and found out that I had more in common with them. He liked to play cards and some other things. So we had a card game going about midnight that night when we found out that we were in Washington, DC. And the way they did back during the war was the capitol was lit all the time. And so we broke up our game and went out on the platform of the train and watched as we circled around Washington, DC. And as we circled, we could always see the capitol and how brightly lit it was. It really was done that way for a symbol. And then, the next morning, when we woke up we were in Richmond, 00:34:00Virginia. We had breakfast in Richmond, caught another train out to the east, and went into a camp called Camp Patrick Henry. And it was an embarkation camp. We had thousands of troops that were out there, getting ready to go overseas.

SLOAN: Did you--any training or orientation, how much of that did you have?

WATERS: Well, while we were in New York we had some, I guess you'd say, lectures from veterans. In fact, the ninety of us that were going back overseas, thirteen 00:35:00of them were returnees. In other words, they were--if you stayed overseas two years, you'd get a thirty-day leave back in the States. So these guys were on leave back in the States after serving two years. They were sort of the backbone of the organization, I guess. And we would have lectures. I wouldn't call them seminars, but we pretty well were acquainted with what we were going to do and how to do it. In fact, I got paranoid right before I ever got overseas by booby 00:36:00traps and mines. I mean, they just drilled that into us. Don't ever pick up a souvenir. Watch where you step. One of our fellows, after we had been overseas a couple of months, stepped out of his ambulance. He was driving along a very busy highway and saw some Canadians out in a field demining the field, and they had an accident. And so he stopped to see if he could maybe transport somebody to the hospital. When he stepped out of the ambulance, he stepped on an anti-personnel mine, blew his foot off and lost one eye. Now, I don't know the 00:37:00connection between those two, but anyway. So we really got paranoid. Well, I did, on that.

But really, the training--after we got overseas--it took us thirty days to get there. We did get training for the five days that we were in this camp, but the training was how to abandon ship, how to take care of ourselves on the ship. It was all about getting over there. And we were on this Liberty ship, which was a tanker that they were turning out one or two of them a day, out of the shipyard. And they were very--well, they thought if they made two trips, they got their money out of it. So they weren't very well put together, I guess you might say. 00:38:00I didn't know that at the time I was on one. But we got training in abandoning ship. And we learned how to use a gas mask, and we put it on. Then we learned to--I can't think of what I was going to say now. But anyway, we took shots. I had a card with all of the shots I had taken. I only needed one booster. And they put me in line, and I said, "I don't need all these shots again." Oh, they won't hurt you. Before I knew it, I was going down the line. I was being shot from the left and right. I had all the shots over again. And I had unnecessarily 00:39:00had a couple of sore arms for a couple of days. But going overseas, it took us thirty days to get to Naples, Italy.

SLOAN: Well, what was it like to be finally going overseas? You had tried and tried and tried.

WATERS: Oh, everybody was just thrilled to death. We had been issued Canadian battle dress uniforms in New York. And we had had to buy our dress uniforms. And being summer--well, we did have a jacket, a khaki jacket, but most of the time you just went in the shirts. You had to wear a tie all the time. We got to the 00:40:00port of embarkation that morning and got out of the trucks. And there was just trucks unloading everywhere with American troops. And we looked kind of funny, the ninety of us with English battle dress jackets on, shorts, all of it. The Canadians, Kiwis, and Australians and all had the same battle dress and sometimes with a little different shade of brown or green or dark green. But anyway, I was surprised. They had a band there, and they were all marching down to this pavilion and getting on the ships. I was surprised in looking around at our groups, because I had been in the military for school for a few months. And 00:41:00I'd been in the marching band in high school for four years, so I pretty well knew how to do close-order drill. But I was surprised and pretty proud. We was marching along with these American soldiers, and keeping our own.

And we got down to the ship. We had an old gentleman in New York that was second in command. He had been in the field service in World War I. I think his name was Mr. Wilson, if I remember right. But anyway, he had on a--he was the only one not in uniform out of the tens of thousands of troops there. He had an old briefcase and an old felt hat on, and he had come down with all our records, to get us through--we had to have passports to get us through and on our way. So as 00:42:00we went down to get on our Liberty ship, man, we marched along with the Americans. And we got down there and the band was playing all kinds of marches, and we started up the gangplank. And old man Wilson--we called him old man Wilson; he was probably in his midfifties. (laughs)

SLOAN: He was a young fellow. Now you'd call him a young fellow.

WATERS: Yeah. The only civilian around. And he shook our hands and told each one of us, he said, "I'll be here to greet you when you come back." So that kind of put a little tear in your eye. And so about halfway up the gangplank--and they had given us American equipment: canteens, mess equipment, gas masks, helmets. 00:43:00And they told us not to strap under our chin, not to strap the helmet on, because if you fell into the water, it'd break your neck, so we had to leave it--leave it dangling. And going up the gangplank, my helmet, kind of, got down to my eyes. I had both arms full. And the band all of a sudden quit playing a march, and it played "We'll meet again / Don't know where, Don't know when." It was a British song ["We'll Meet Again"], and why they played a British song, I don't know. I guess for us. And I kind of looked behind me, trying to keep my helmet on, at the guy, and he had tears in his eyes, and I had tears in my eyes. 00:44:00And the guy in front of me, he turned around and looked at me, and he had tears in his eyes. (laughs) So we'd always remember that. But Mr. Wilson, in making that promise he said, "I'll be here when you come back." Later in my stories, I've got something about him again.

SLOAN: So you went from Virginia to, you said, Naples?

WATERS: Yes.

SLOAN: Naples, Italy.

WATERS: In a nine-knot convoy, thirty days at sea.

SLOAN: Well, talk about landing in Italy and your first impressions of Europe.

WATERS: Well, on our ship going over, we had a submarine attack right before we 00:45:00got to the Baltic--I mean, not the Baltic, but the Mediterranean. And we had just gone to bed at ten o'clock when the alarm went off and the lights came back on. And my group of guys that I was with at the time, or three of us, we had bought out all the Coke in the commissary. We had a case of Coke, and I was custodian of it. And we were in the forward hold with three hundred Puerto Ricans. And everybody was trying to find their life jackets, because we'd been 00:46:00playing musical chairs with life jackets. By the time you laid one down, somebody would pick it up and you didn't have one. That night I was lucky enough to have one in my bunk. Anyway, we was just all sitting there. They told us to be prepared to abandon ship. So we was all sitting there with whatever gear we thought we had to take with us. So I started giving away these Cokes to all these Puerto Ricans around me. And so a couple of days later, after everything was said and done, one of my buddies said, "Now, how about one of those Cokes?" Then I wasn't very popular with my two friends, you know.

But I guess the most beautiful sight was going through the Straits of--I guess 00:47:00the Straits of Sicily, between Sicily and the boot. We went through one Sunday afternoon, and that was several hundred miles below Naples. Finally, the next day, which was a Monday, we landed in Naples. We pulled up to the dock, and we disembarked onto the side of a ship that had been sunk and was laying on its side, and that's what we got onto when we got off of our ship and went on 00:48:00ashore. And Naples had a big harbor and the city, kind of, built around it. And way out was the Isle of Capri. It says it's in their bay, but it's so far out you can barely see it. At that time, that was used for a rest area. Convalescent soldiers who were getting out of the hospital and weren't quite fit to go back 00:49:00to general services again would be put out there. I was never fortunate enough to ever get out there. But we stayed one week in Naples. We were at the far end of the city, hidden from the bay, on the road called Via Roma. Our camp was right--the main street of Naples kind of took a little dip and then went up and dead-ended right into our camp. The street running north and south was the Via Roma, which was the way to Rome.

And we spent a week there, daytime, and then one or two nights, getting acquainted with our ambulance. Ambulance was a Dodge, American Dodge ambulance. Very sufficient, best--to me it was the best-built and best vehicle in the war. Of course, everybody else will tell you it was the jeep, but it had the most powerful engine. Later, I'll tell you about how we used it one time. But anyway, it had four-wheel drive, and not any of the English equipment had four-wheel 00:51:00drive. And that was--I don't know how you got by in a place like Italy without that four-wheel drive. And we learned how to maintain it. We had to grease it by hand once a month. We learned all about maintaining the ambulance. And then we learned, of course, about driving. Believe it or not, we had five guys in the unit that had never driven an automobile. So we had to teach them how to drive.

And then we had a lot of training on night driving, because at the front the most light that you had on your ambulance was a slit light, and all it was good for, if somebody's coming down the road, they could see you. You couldn't see 00:52:00anything except their slit light. But on the front, you couldn't even use those. So we practiced a guy getting out with a cigarette and putting it in his hands so it could not be visible to anyone but someone right behind him. And you would drive behind that fellow walking. And that was to be used in very severe cases. I never used it. The times I had to drive at night I was--one thing about it, we'd take the windshield down, and it was pretty--pretty cold sometimes, but it 00:53:00made you see better. Near the front a lot of times, they would throw light--these big spotlights up to the clouds, and light would bounce off of them and it would give us a little bit of light. But I don't know. I had developed what I call cat eyes. I could see very well. It's funny now, I'm legally blind, but at that time I could probably see better at night than any other fellow in the outfit.

SLOAN: Well, did teaching the five how to drive go without incident, or did you run into any trouble teaching those guys?

WATERS: Oh no, we had one guy that was in our group--we kind of broke up in groups to learn for that one week. And we took it on ourselves to teach him how to drive. And he jumped the car around quite a bit, but they finally--I'm 00:54:00surprised that they--because I had driven two-ton gravel trucks and everything else, and my granddad's pick-up, and we'd pull a trailer with cows and horses. And I had plenty of training, and to not even know--and I even drove a trailer truck. But to come in there without ever driving an automobile, I don't know how they did it. But they--evidently, they all learned enough to get by.

SLOAN: So you had--was there room for--how many men could you put in the back, as far as stretchers?

WATERS: We had--you could put four stretchers, two on the floor and two hanging. That Dodge ambulance was a wonderful place to sleep at night, I'll tell you. I 00:55:00slept in tents a lot of times, and I'll tell you, that that ambulance was a lot warmer.

SLOAN: I'll bet, yeah, out of the elements.

WATERS: Oh yes, yes. Yes, we were very fortunate there.

SLOAN: So I'm interested, as you interacted with--did you have any interaction with the Italian people while you were there in town?

WATERS: No, no, not very much. We went on two mercy trips while I was there. One of them wasn't a really good trip. We were driving down the road--we were stationed up in the mountains. Two of us in the ambulance, and we were driving. We had been snowed in for about ten days. We finally got out, and they'd brought 00:56:00some gas down to the hospital. We were with a Polish artillery unit. And they had gone back into a rest area, which was--which had been a little village that in peacetime probably was a ski resort. And we were going back that afternoon, trying to get back before dark. Didn't want to drive in the mountains any more than we had to in the dark. But anyway, a truck in front of us, an English truck, had swerved over and hit two Italian pedestrians that were walking up the road, and knocked them over in the ditch and just went on. I mean, they 00:57:00purposely hit these Italians. The British and the Italians did not like each other because they'd been fighting each other in the desert for years.

And so we stopped. One of the fellows was okay, but the other one, found out later, he had a broken shoulder. And we picked him up and put him on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance. And they couldn't speak English; we couldn't speak Italian very well. We finally got it out of this other guy, they wanted us to--we were going to take him to the next town to the civilian hospital. And he let us know that they wanted to stop. Their house was right on the road. A lot of families lived together. The grandmother and grandfather was always (laughs) 00:58:00in the house. We stopped there, and when we got through, that ambulance was dragging. We had so many people in the back of that ambulance, standing, that we could barely close the door. Every relative that was in that house wanted to go to the hospital with him. So we took him to the hospital and found out that he had a broken shoulder. Then we decided that we had to be on our way. And, of course, they were all so--I mean, they were speaking in Italian, we were speaking in English, but they were so grateful to us for helping them. And so finally we went on and we did get back before dark.

But another time, later when we were stationed down in the valley, and I was at 00:59:00headquarters. And one of the guys told me, he said--it was getting to be spring and there was a little more light. He said, "After supper tonight, I've got to make a run for a civilian to the hospital. I want you to go along as a stretcher-bearer." And I said, "Okay." And he got another guy. We went into this cul-de-sac off the highway, and it seemed like it rained or snowed all the time. And any time you got off a hard surface road, you were up to your fenders in mud. We got into this cul-de-sac with this mud road, and we got to a point where we couldn't go any further, even in four-wheel drive. So we said, Well, we're 01:00:00going to have to go by foot from here on. So he had told me to bring my rubber boots, thank God.

When we got out, I went around to get the stretcher out of the back of the ambulance. And I stepped out of one of my boots. I'm standing on one side there, (laughs) with mud about two feet deep. I finally worked myself over without falling and got back in that boot. The house was up on a higher plain. So it had a yard, and it was full of Italians. And we got up to the house. And what it was, we were taking a pregnant woman--and I mean, she was due any time--to the 01:01:00hospital. And, of course, there were three of us. They met us--the minute we came out of the mud, they were standing there with glasses of wine. And they had bottles--not bottles but flasks of wine, you know, and they were giving us wine, and it tasted pretty good--warmed us up. And by the time we got that woman on the stretcher and leaving, I couldn't have stood up if the mud hadn't held me up. (both laugh) We had to carry that very pregnant woman back in the mud to the ambulance and then back out of there.

SLOAN: Well, you mentioned something there I wanted to ask about. What did you think of the Brits, and what was the relationship with the British like?

WATERS: Well, I had very good--two very close friends. One was a British sergeant that I met in Naples, and another was an enlisted man in Germany at Belsen. I got very attached to both of them. But a lot of times, we had about thirty, thirty-five drivers, or ambulances, and probably an extra five or six men, extra drivers, so we had about forty drivers to about thirty-five ambulances in each platoon. And we had about five Brits that were attached to the platoon. Now, my first platoon in Italy, there was only one Englishman that 01:03:00I had any trouble with, and he was the mechanic. And he seemed--he had a little power over us because we had to--he had to inspect our ambulance, and we had to make good whatever he wanted us to. We didn't get along with him very well, but the others we got along with very well. And then I met a couple of English fellows one time when we were back in relief, back in--well, a lot of times you would be on the front, and then you would move back several miles behind the front in a secondary position. And I met a couple of RAF fellows who were 01:04:00spotters more or less. I mean, they took care of these spotter flags and things like that that would say to the planes--it would show them that they were one mile from the front or two miles from the front or something like that. And we got very well acquainted with a couple of those fellows.

When I went into Germany with a new unit, we had--I had a very close relationship with the cook, because I used to wake him up a lot of times in the morning or when I came off guard duty. But the rest of the ones that were 01:05:00attached to us in Germany weren't very friendly. I don't know why, they just--as a rule. And they would talk to us and tell us how they didn't like the Americans, but we were the exception, you know. But they said, Oh, they drank too much and they bragged too much and all this and that. The Italians and the British didn't get along very well. The Italians and Americans got along real well. I got to Germany, I was very surprised how friendly the German people were to us, and I made some friends with some of the Germans.

SLOAN: Well, talk about when you moved out, when you were--left camp--you broke 01:06:00camp there in Naples, and moved out from there.

WATERS: Well, after a week we broke camp. We were put into a flatbed truck. And it had a tarpaulin on the front of it that went on top of the cab. And it was kind of irritating because we couldn't see in front of us like that, with that up there. In other words, we couldn't stand up behind the cab and look. So we was going up the Via Roma, the road to Rome. And about, oh, ten or fifteen miles 01:07:00outside of Naples, there was an accident. And we were told, he said, "Okay, fellows, you're going to see your first casualties of war now, so be prepared." We drove by, and there were three bodies laid outside of the road with blankets on top of them. And they said--we had--the English were driving us, there were three of them. There was a driver, a spare driver, and a mechanic. They all sat in the cab. And then we had some veterans with us that were going as far as Rome, and they were the ones that were telling us what everything was. And we had a--one of our guys had married an Italian girl, and they were just riding 01:08:00from Naples with us to Rome. She had her bicycle in the back.

And we were told--at that point, the veterans were saying, Half the casualties in the war are friendly fire or accidents. And I really came to know that that was true. There was a lot of accidents, and there was a lot of friendly fire. In fact, I got involved in some of it. And another saying, when we were on the ship, they said--well, I guess it was after we got off the ship that we were with some of the British at their--we had a club in the camp there. And it was a 01:09:00transit camp. That meant guys going to and from the front, maybe from the hospital, they'd go to this transit camp and wait until they could get a ride back to their unit. And they said, You're going to find that when you touch your foot overseas, that patriotism is going to be left behind and you're going to step into self-preservation. And that was very true. Once you got overseas your thoughts were, Take care of yourself, get through this. And I think when the 01:10:00guys that won a Congressional Medal of Honor and the Silver Star and all that--and I've read this and I believe it, that it was just adrenaline running. That whenever the opportunity or the problem came about, you just automatically went into doing whatever was necessary to do. And it wasn't so much an act of bravery, at the time, even though it was. It was just a reaction. Really, everybody was trying to--no one was trying to get killed, in other words.

SLOAN: Yeah. So they're transporting you guys to--where was the front at that point?

WATERS: At that time the front was north of Florence. They transported us--we 01:11:00went through Mount Cassino [Monte Cassino]. We could see the--we could see the monastery, or what was left of it, and it was still smoking. And it had taken more bombs than any target had in the whole war. And that had--the American and British troops had been held up there by the Germans for months. And then, after 01:12:00we got through there, we went over to the--took a road over to the seacoast, and saw where the battle--

SLOAN: Oh, hold on, I wanted to stop real quick. Oh, my battery died.

pause in recording

SLOAN: All right, Mr. Waters, you were taking us to the front.

WATERS: Yeah, as we left Cassino, we went to Anzio on the oceanfront. And we could still see pieces of broken artillery. And it looked like--of course, the battle had taken place five, six months before--or had ended five or six months 01:13:00before, but still had pieces of cannons and trucks and all still laying around. It looked like it might have been a Civil War battlefield. Then, when we got into Rome, we got a pretty good tour of Rome because we had to take this driver and his wife to her family. It was a pretty good trip to Rome to drop them off. And then we went back to a café to have lunch. It was kind of a sidewalk café. 01:14:00It had an awning in front. We were sitting inside the café, and I ducked down under the awning and looked across the street, and there was the Coliseum. We were right on the road that kind of semi-circles around the Coliseum, and we were in a restaurant. Some thirty years later, I went back to Rome with a tour, and my wife and myself were over at the Coliseum. I looked to the west, and it kind of dipped down and then it went up to the road. And there was the 01:15:00restaurant that I had eaten at thirty--and it was still there.

But anyway, we left Rome. It had been raining but not on us. We were missing the showers, and we got up in the hills beyond Rome that afternoon, had a rest stop. We got out and looked back on Rome and then some rain behind us. And there was a rainbow, the most beautiful rainbow I've ever seen, and the end of it was over St. Peter's Cathedral [St. Peter's Basilica]. We looked back--at first we were looking back at Rome, because it was late afternoon. And it looked like they had 01:16:00a fire in Rome, and we were all looking at it. We said, Looks like there's a fire in the west part of Rome. What it was was the sun on St. Peter's Cathedral, and it was St. Peter's Cathedral that was throwing the reflection.

SLOAN: Oh wow, beautiful.

WATERS: It was a beautiful sight. And that old tarpaulin that was in our way--where we were standing there, the grass was damp. It had rained. And I don't know how we were missing the showers, but we were missing them. And anyway, we got back in the truck, and riding and seeing the scenery and laying 01:17:00down and resting and all. And then about--oh, I don't know, it was a little bit after dark, it started raining. And then I realized--I appreciated the tarpaulin at that time. I realized why we had that tarpaulin. They pulled that tarpaulin over us. We had our luggage in the forward part of the truck, and we were standing, or sitting down, all of them in the rear end of the truck. Then we pulled that tarpaulin over us. And then--oh, I don't know, it must have been about nine o'clock, we stopped. Pouring down rain, and they wanted to know if any of us had to go and relieve ourselves. So we all got out in the rain, and 01:18:00man, to get back up under that tarpaulin was nice. And then I found me a nice--I got up on top of some of the luggage and found me a place. And the tarpaulin was about twelve inches above my nose. I found me a nice, clean spot without any mud. Everybody's shoes were muddy. Trying to keep away from the mud. And I could hear that rain hitting that tarpaulin on top of me, and it kind of had a cozy feeling. And it was cool.

And then, about ten o'clock or so, our truck stopped. Now--then I realized why 01:19:00they had a mechanic with them. And they were out in the rain working on that truck. I don't know when they fixed it because I woke up the next morning and dug myself out of the back of the--under the tarpaulin, and we were at an abandoned factory. It was just south of Florence. And it was pavement everywhere. We got out and it was wet, and the air was cool. And, of course, it wasn't raining anymore. The drivers had made some tea for us, and we had some type of bread or cake or something that we ate with our tea. And really, under 01:20:00the circumstances, it was probably the best breakfast I ever had. (laughs)

From there, we went into Florence. There's kind of a circle on the south side of the river, Arno River, and it goes up into a little--well, to a place on top of the hill there, and had a big statue of David up there. We came in just how we 01:21:00came into Rome; it was right at the top of that circle. And the circle down had a lot of nice villas there. One of those villas, they pointed it out to us, had been taken over by the field service, and it was a convalescent village--villa. And I got to stay in it a few days, later in my stay in Rome--in my stay in Italy. When we went down in the--the Germans had blown all the bridges except one, and that was the famous covered bridge. Of course, it didn't take transportation so much because it was kind of a commercial bridge. It sold 01:22:00souvenirs and stuff like that. It was covered. But we crossed an army-made--army-constructed bridge to the other side of the Arno River, and then went outside of Rome to the northeast.

We ran into the--or stopped for lunch in a place that was the headquarters for one of the two ambulance companies. I don't remember which one, but either way 01:23:00it was a villa inside of a compound. I mean, they had a rock wall and it was in squares. They walled the north side, the east side, the west side, the south side. And the villa was right in the middle and all the rest of it was a rose garden. And you had four ways into the villa, which did not look like an Italian villa. It was a single-story, nice house. But we had lunch there. And it was the creepiest feeling because there was wire strung on each side of the paths, four 01:24:00paths coming in, with the little stickers on them that meant mines. So that rose garden had not been demined. You could not step off of the path. And it was a kind of eerie feeling, to eat lunch knowing all these explosives were all in the ground around you.

SLOAN: You could tell you were getting closer to the war.

WATERS: Yes, yes. And that night we got into--at that point we separated into different units depending on--we each--that had to be 485 headquarters. We had 01:25:00two companies in Italy of four platoons each, 485 and 567; 485 was the company I was in. We were taken to the platoon headquarters that night. And then we stayed there a day, kind of resting up. And then the second day we were carried to the front. And we had a station on top of Mount--Monte Grande, which was the tallest mountain in the chain north of Florence.

SLOAN: Can you talk about your--once you got to the front, what your impressions or what stands out to you?

WATERS: Well, we didn't have any--we certainly didn't have any paved roads. We had to go up this canyon. The river was at the bottom of a canyon, and there was road on one side, on the east side. And it just gradually went up until finally, five or six miles or more, you were at the top of the canyon. And then there was a little village over on the other side, but to get to that village you had to go on a bridge, and the bridge had been blown up. And so then there had been a 01:27:00bridge put in by the Americans called a Bailey bridge. And there was nothing on top, and all the strength of the bridge was underneath the bridge. And it was kind of leery going. I went to the bridge in Colorado. I can't think of the name of it now.

SLOAN: The Royal Gorge?

WATERS: Royal Gorge, yeah. This--when I went to the Royal Gorge it reminded me 01:28:00of this canyon and bridge. It was about the same width and everything. But it had no upper structure on it, which means you feel like--a little uneasy when you went across, especially when you could feel it giving. And so anyway, we crossed over that into a little village, and it was right at the foot of a mountain. And then we went nine miles up this mountain, Monte Grande. And it was unpaved, did not have any sides on the road. In other words, you could go right off the road, down about five thousand feet or more. We got nearly to the top, 01:29:00and we had a traffic problem. We were in a jeep, but we had a traffic problem. There had been some shelling on the road by the Germans. It was under German observation, the road was, for the whole nine miles. And they had--their German artillery had hit a truck for the Seventy-Eighth English Division. So I saw my first war dead at that time. As we passed--finally passed it, it was still smoking and some bodies were laying out to the side.

And we kind of had a--well, I can't think of the name of the town, but anyway, we had a surgical unit there at the top of the mountain. It was about two miles from the front but about five miles by road. And we could see the crest of Monte Grande about two hundred feet higher than what we were, about two miles as a crow flies from us. And where this surgical unit was under tents, next to that was about three English twenty-five pounder cannons that were dug in. Kind of 01:31:00strange to me that the artillery was right next to the surgical unit. And then we had, oh, about half a dozen ambulances up there. And what they would do is they would bring them from the bottom of the crest of Monte Grande. We had an aid station, and the aid station then would send down to the surgical facility. And then we would move them from there down to the bottom of the mountain. And 01:32:00then they would be taken over there by the English, and would be taken. And there were little small--about halfway down the canyon there was an indention in the side of the canyon, and there was a little, small hospital there. So that was the first place where you could see female nurses. But the road down to Castel del Rio was the village at the bottom. The Germans would open up their 01:33:00artillery on the road every afternoon. And so we drove it--as a rule we drove it twice a day, once at night and once in the daytime.

SLOAN: So you get assigned your ambulance and you're working?

WATERS: Yeah, well, we first got up there--these guys who'd been there for several weeks and were all worn out. Eyes were bloodshot and everything else. So we gradually took over from them. We first set up a tent with three of us in it, and I think we slept in there maybe one night. And we got assigned ambulances. Of course, we slept in our ambulances from there on. I remember I went down there--first trip I took down I got--I had one--I had four bad patients. One of 01:34:00them was unconscious. We didn't know whether he was alive or not. And the orderly--you're assigned an orderly also, a British orderly. He was always checking on him to see if he--to see if he was alive. And they started shelling us, and, of course, there were potholes all in the road. Your top speed was about nine miles an hour. I had to deliberate, do I go fast and have a very rough ride to get out of the shelling, or do I just stay in the shelling and try to get as comfortable a ride as possible? And I know I had one of the fellows in 01:35:00the back there saying, "Yank," he says, "I'm hurting like hell. But," he said, "If you can go faster I can take it. You do what you think necessary to get us out of this." And another guy said, "I'm with him." Then there was a third guy that started hollering every time we hit a bump. And he'd holler and he'd cuss me out.

And so, anyway, I was in between, so I got out of there quick as I could, and hitting all these potholes and all. I could see the shells hitting below as we 01:36:00were going down. I could see--out of the corner of my eyes I could see the mountainside to my left, and I could see when the shell would hit, explode into the side of the mountain. And so, anyway, I got them down to the bottom. And when we were unloading and this guy that was complaining and cussing me out and everything, when they brought him by he just gave me a dirty look. (laughs) I don't know. I sat down on the curb--and it was my first experience--I sat down on the curb and kind of had my head down in my hands, I guess. And my orderly 01:37:00came by and sat down beside me and put his arm around me.

SLOAN: It was a rough first trip.

WATERS: Yeah, it was. It was.

SLOAN: So there was an open space between you and your--there's two of you in the cab, I guess?

WATERS: Yeah.

SLOAN: And there's an open space to the back.

WATERS: They come right up to the back of our seats.

SLOAN: Okay. So they're right there.

WATERS: Yeah. In fact, the orderly--the fellow that we didn't know whether he was alive or not, the orderly was putting some gauze under his nose all the time to--

SLOAN: Keep him awake.

WATERS: --to see if he was--to see if he was alive.

SLOAN: So the orderly was assigned to your ambulance?

WATERS: Huh?

SLOAN: The orderly was assigned to your ambulance?

WATERS: Yeah. One night we made a trip down. And of course, at night you had no 01:38:00lights. And it was cold--the snow on the ground and at the top of the mountain. And my grandmother had knitted me a hood, so I had that hood on, and it really came in handy. And so we had a pretty rough drive down, because you had no railings on the road whatsoever. I mean, if you go over the side, you've got five thousand--at least five-thousand-foot drop. So I'm just fortunate. And then also they were throwing some light up to hit the clouds. And that's at the top. Now, when we got about halfway down, we didn't have any help at all. So after 01:39:00making one of those trips at night, the first time I made it, we got back. I guess we started at about two o'clock in the morning, so I guess we got back--at least after four o'clock when I got back in bed. And then about eight o'clock the next morning I heard a bang on the back of my ambulance. I thought, Oh goodness, what in the world is this? And I opened it up, and stuck my head out, and here's my little orderly standing there with some oatmeal and tea. (laughs) I wanted to kill him.

SLOAN: (laughs) So you're operating--now give me an idea of time frame. This is around what time?

WATERS: This was in--this was in November.

SLOAN: November of '44.

WATERS: Forty--forty-four.

SLOAN: Yeah, yeah.

WATERS: And I know when we left that--when we finally pulled out, we started pulling out one ambulance at a time. And I was under the weather, and so another guy was driving me out, or driving us out. And we hit a paved road, and I told him to stop. And he stopped, and I got out. And I kneeled down in the middle of the road and kissed it. And I got back in. He said, "What in the world was that?" And I said, "I promised myself, if I ever saw a paved road again I was going to kiss it."

SLOAN: (laughs) So--

WATERS: Because we were working with mud up to our hubcaps, in some cases.

SLOAN: In bomb craters and all sorts of things.

WATERS: Oh yes.

SLOAN: So y'all pulled out. How long were you in that position before you pulled out?

WATERS: Oh, about ten days. I went from there--I was sick, and I went from there to the hospital and our convalescent home--villa in--

SLOAN: It was in Florence, wasn't it?

WATERS: Florence. And I was in the hospital a week and then came back out. And then I was--I immediately was posted with the Polish. And it was a--and then it 01:42:00was almost Christmastime. And we went to a villa on top of this little mountain in the--on the backside of Predappio, Italy. That's where Mussolini was born, in that little village. But then it got spring and I was about--I had my ambulance all fixed, all my clothing and everything ready to leave the next morning for a post. And this was in the last part of March, I guess, first part of April.

And after dinner that night somebody came in the front door. And it was chilly out there. They were all bundled up and all. And they took our commanding officer into a room off to the side. Then they were in there about thirty minutes, and then they came out. And I was just about ready to go to my ambulance to go to sleep, because I was leaving early the next morning. And our lieutenant said, "Well, we've got a problem here." He said, "They want ten volunteers to go with Company 567. And all we can say is that you'll be leaving 01:44:00Italy. And we need ten volunteers." There was eleven people there, eleven people volunteered. He said, "Okay." We got down and--"We'll just take you by seniority." And so they turned to me and a friend of mine that came overseas together. They said, You two are tied for the tenth place. And there was a deck of cards on the table. And our lieutenant said, "Why don't y'all draw cards to see who goes? High man goes." I turned a trey. The other guy turned a deuce. So I got to leave Italy.

And we went out on the other side of--just outside of Leghorn [Livorno, Italy]. 01:45:00And we left that night. We joined the 567 down the other side of the mountain. And we went to our campground where we stayed a week or ten days, something like that just outside of Leghorn. And then we went to--from Leghorn they took us by LST over to France. Can't think of the name of the port, but anyway, we were 01:46:00taken to France. And then outside the port there, we stayed a day or so, and then we started our trip up through France in the Rhone Valley. And it was getting spring, and it was some beautiful flowers in the valley. We could see the snow-capped mountains off to our right over in Switzerland and southern part of France. It took us six days I think it was, to get to Belgium. And then we went into a little town of Waregem, Belgium. Then we stayed there for a few days. And then we went from there to southern Holland. We were there a few days.

We had four platoons of about thirty-five ambulances each. They all--three of the platoons got stationed--got projects to go on, and we were sitting there. All of a sudden, they said that we were going into Germany. We were going to take the Ninth General Hospital into Germany. That night we were--that day we went down to the southeastern part of Holland and spent the night. And the next morning we took off with the Ninth General Hospital. And unknown to us we were 01:48:00going to Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. It took us two days of wandering around the northern part of--or the west part of Germany. And why it took us so long to go such a short period, I mean, such a short trip, I don't know. We were less than two hundred miles.

SLOAN: Was that area fairly secure?

WATERS: Yeah, we had pockets of resistance all along and we had to dodge them. And it was towards the end of the war; at that time it was in the latter part of April. It took us two days to get to Belsen. And we did not--I don't think we 01:49:00knew we were going to a concentration camp. In fact, I'm pretty sure that we did not know. All we knew, we was taking the English hospital into some destination in northern Germany. Thought it was just moving a hospital. And the afternoon that we arrived at Belsen, we--there's a city named Celle, Germany, that's twenty miles due south of Belsen. Belsen is a town. Bergen I think is also a town. But we were in convoy, and all of a sudden, the convoy slowed down. And then--I was probably in the first half of the convoy. And as we came up to the 01:50:00end of the forest that we were in--we'd been in this forest for about twenty miles--and we looked over to our left, and there was a camp over there. And the gates were open on the camp. Then there was about a half a dozen or so men in striped uniforms just wandering around. I mean, it was like they were in a daze. I don't know how we--I don't know. I don't remember that we knew much about 01:51:00concentration camps and all or not. But the gates were open and they were free to do what they wanted to do, and it just seemed like they were wandering around like zombies.

And then we went on past the camp. And about a mile, a mile and a half north of the camp was a SSS [SS] barracks. It had been a training--there had been a training facility there since, oh, about the middle thirties, I guess. There were dormitories built, two rows of them. And in the middle there were some wooden buildings, one-story buildings. The dormitories were about three, four 01:52:00stories high. They were the SS barracks is what they were. I don't know whether it was built for a cavalry post or not, but it looked like that these little wooden, part-stone, one-story huts that were in the middle, between them, might have been a place for horses. Might have been a cavalry--built as a cavalry post, I wasn't sure.

But we went on through the SS--turned, we turned back toward the west and went 01:53:00outside the camp into the forest there and found us a place to build a camp--build our camp. And then we spent the night. And then all but one--one or two ambulances went back to pick up the remaining half of the Ninth General Hospital. We went back in one day and returned in one day. And while we were gone they'd had a bombing from a German plane. And then we only had one casualty. And then we had another casualty, a guy that died of typhus, so we all ran down and got our booster shots. The British had left two hundred and fifty engineers there, or an engineering company. And the camp had been without food 01:54:00and water for a couple of weeks. They said from the time it was liberated until the time we got there, ten days to two weeks, they had lost sixty thousand people. When we got there, there was forty to fifty thousand left in the camp. It had started in 1939 as a prisoner-of-war camp for Russian prisoners, and then they had added the concentration camp onto it. It was probably one of the smallest concentration camps that they had. Covered less than fifty acres.

SLOAN: Can you talk about when you first went in the camp and just what you remember?

WATERS: Yeah, we went in--the first day we went into the camp, I went in as a stretcher-bearer. And the English had all kinds of protective gear on; we didn't. They'd just spray us, so we all were grey-headed there for a couple of months, spraying us. They'd spray us down the back of our neck and all. And we went in and there was a medical team. The doctors would, or a doctor would say which patient was too far gone, and we'd skip those. And we were in a women's 01:56:00section, and they would--the doctor had a couple of orderlies with him. They would strip off the clothing of a person and then wrap them in a blanket and put them on the stretcher. We'd carry them out, and we would help them get the women on the stretcher. And there was one woman just fighting us like everything. She thought that we were taking her to the crematorium, which they did. They took--sometimes when they went in to get the bodies and there were some that were not quite dead yet, they would pick them up and take them to the crematorium also, evidently.

And so, anyway, in the camp it was dead bodies around. They had some Germans who 01:57:00were in a flatbed truck going around picking up bodies. We would pick up women--we would pick up a woman and beside her was a corpse. But--then you had to watch where you walked because there was filth everywhere. The engineers had got them some water by detouring the creek below the camp into the camp. They had latrines built by just digging a trench and putting boards over it and drilling holes in the thing. And it was all out in the open, and women would 01:58:00just go up and squat on the top of the hole. And there was dead--there was an open grave on our side that they were putting about a thousand to two thousand bodies in. We had to drive right by it going out. And they had Germans standing in the bottom of the pit stacking bodies. And I remember one time the--a lot of times people's eyes would be opened, and it looked like that they were staring 01:59:00at you. I don't know how many of those graves that they had. I think some of them might have even been up to four thousand in a grave.

I got by pretty well. I think I had been pretty weak when I was in--first got to Italy, and I had to really build up my tolerance, if that's what you want to call it. I was kind of--I'd said, Well, if I'm going to do the job, I'm going to have to get, I guess you might say, indifference. And later, I thought that 02:00:00maybe I wasn't as--maybe, I don't know how to say it, but maybe I was too hard. Didn't have the sympathy and all that I should have had. But after the war, it really didn't bother me. It bothered some of the guys pretty bad. Some of them had to go home. Afterwards, I stayed and went to India after the war in Europe 02:01:00was over with.

I--years later--I mean, I never lost any sleep. I never had any nightmares about it. And one Sunday afternoon I went to see a movie with my wife called Sophie's Choice. And it was about a Polish woman who was sent to the camp. I know it wasn't Belsen, but it looked--you know, on the screen it looked a lot like Belsen. But it had some features that Belsen didn't have. And she had to make up her mind--the SS officer told her that. She had a boy and a girl with her, and 02:02:00she had to choose between one of them; the other was going to be sent to the gas chamber. She wouldn't make her choice, and he said, "Well, we're going to take both of the children then." So she finally chose to save the boy. And anyway, after the movie--it was a Sunday afternoon. And we got out and got in the car. And I don't think I'd ever talked to my wife about Belsen. I talked a lot about the war, because I traveled a lot and saw a lot of things, but I didn't talk too much about Belsen. And I broke down, and my wife didn't know what in the world 02:03:00was going on. I think that's the first time that I had really had the compassion that I--and I felt bad that I didn't have more compassion when I was in Belsen.

SLOAN: You were there for several days working as a stretcher?

WATERS: We--yes. I didn't do a lot of work in the camp after that. I'd drive an ambulance one day, stretcher a couple of days. We weren't in the camp about ten days. Took about ten days for us to clear it out. The war ended while we were in 02:04:00the midst of our work, and we stayed on. The war ended about May the sixth or seventh. And I think it was May the--I thought it was May the twelfth or twenty-first that the camp burned. We--I know there wasn't very many--a lot of guys, after the war was over with, even before we were--we had quite a few spare drivers, so they started going on leave and preparing, some of them, preparing to go home. We got down to barely having enough drivers to drive our ambulances 02:05:00back out of Germany. But we--I can say I'm not too sure of--I know we cleared the camp out in about two weeks or a little less. Got most of them out in a week.

There was--when we got there, there was six hundred a day dying in the camp, and at the end there it was down to a hundred a day. We would take them up to a--one 02:06:00of these little huts I was telling you about that ran between the barracks. And they would take them in there and strip their clothes off of them and de-lice them and cut their hair, and get the lice out of their hair and cut their hair, and scrub them real good and put new clothing on them. And then they would move them into the hospital section. And there at the last we had German nurses that were doing the first cleanup on the patients, and then they were moving them into the dormitories which had--SS dormitories that had been turned into hospitals.

And the operation, I guess, had been over with quite--several days, and I was in 02:07:00the camp. And there probably wasn't a half a dozen people in the camp, I don't know. They were going here and there and everywhere. A lot of them had gone to Paris on leave. And I saw this black smoke going up into the sky. And some--I asked somebody, I said, "What in the world is going on?" And somebody said, "They're burning the camp, or what's left of it." So I jumped in the ambulance and drove down there. And, I mean, that was the blackest smoke I'd ever seen. I know I wrote in my account of it that it looked like the fires of hell. And I 02:08:00guess it was probably within a week that we left and took our ambulances back into Holland.

The minute we got back to Holland, I left the unit with several other guys and we went to leave--to a leave in Paris. And then when I got back from leave in Paris, we stayed a little, short time in Belsen--in Belgium, and then they shipped us to England. We were in England about ten days, I guess. And then, I 02:09:00guess, we had about--in 567 we had about 250 personnel, and 75 of us shipped to India. And then about 75 from Italy shipped to India, so we ended getting together in India about 150 drivers. And, of course, before we ever even got our ambulances there the war ended. And we messed around a month or so and finally got transportation. And they flew us back to England, and--by way of Israel, which was not Israel at the time, but Palestine--Palestine. Even spent one night in Iraq. Spent four days in Pakistan, which was not Pakistan at the time. I had lunch in Libya. And they flew us back on converted bombers. And they had taken 02:10:00us out to India through the Mediterranean, the canal--I mean the--I'm trying to think of the--

SLOAN: Suez, Suez Canal?

WATERS: The--we had to go through the locks of the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, and then the Indian Ocean and went out to Bombay. And then went down to the southern part of India. And then the war ended. And then I went on leave to 02:11:00Calcutta. And then we came back and then started flying home. And we got to England. We stayed thirty days in Wales waiting for a ship. And we finally shipped home on the Queen Elizabeth. And I think we were four days, something like that, four days into--a fellow at Halifax. They put us on a train. It took a couple of days to get everybody off of there. And we were the last ones off. Put us on a train one evening late. And we rode from there to Montreal through Quebec. From Quebec to Montreal is 150 miles, and it took us--it started snowing and a blizzard, and it took us from eight o'clock in the morning until three or 02:12:00four o'clock the next morning to get into Montreal. We got into Montreal. There was a private train waiting to take us to New York. And you know the gentleman who said that, I'll be there to meet you? As we--our train pulled in, and it was two o'clock in the morning when the train pulled in. And smoke was coming up, and you could hardly see, there was so much smoke up there. And I looked over there, and there was that gentleman.

SLOAN: There was Mr. Wilson.

WATERS: As we got off our train, they told us, Quick as possible get on the other train. It's a special train waiting to pull out. We'll pull out once y'all get on. And he was standing at the bottom, and shook every one of our hands and said, "Welcome home."

SLOAN: That's great. Well, you know, going ahead a bit, of course, we talked 02:13:00before we started recording. You went back for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

WATERS: Yes, uh-huh.

SLOAN: Can you talk just a little bit about what that meant to you to be there for that?

WATERS: I didn't know how I was going to feel. But with my family and my wife and all, well, I held up pretty well. And I know that there were seventy-two of us that were there. And to go back, I was the only--there was only two of us that were able, physically able, to go back at that time. And one was eighty--he was eighty years old, and I guess I was--I guess I was eighty. He was a 02:14:00physician in New York City and couldn't leave his practice at eighty. (laughs) And so I went by myself to the reunion, and took my family with me. And I know I was--I was standing in the entrance that they now have for the camp. I was standing right there in the middle of it. And I said, "Where is the main gate? Where was the main gate?" And one of the fellows with us says, "You're standing on what was the main gate." It had grown up so much. I mean, there was an open field out there back sixty years before. And it was all timber out there then, 02:15:00and trees. They had carved it out of the corner of a forest, and then the forest had grown back. And I know my wife told me--I said, "This doesn't look like it." And my wife said, "Well, a lot of trees can grow in sixty years."

SLOAN: You talked about it being an emotional event, that emotional event you had with your wife. Was this--I'm sure this was emotional as well?

WATERS: Well, not as much as I thought it would be. Just the way it was carried out. There were--we went inside and they had a special place for us to sit. The rest of the family didn't get to sit there but--(phone rings) my wife and I had 02:16:00a special location. There were four speeches. I mean, the ceremony lasted a couple hours. There were four speeches. And only one of them was in English, and one in German, and I don't know the different--French. Different people got up, but we all had printed--(phone rings) we had printed programs that outlined their speeches.

SLOAN: Well, is there--I know that we're getting up against the deadline. You've got--are there some other things that I should have asked you that we didn't get 02:17:00in to?

WATERS: Oh, of course, I could talk for two days, but I don't know which one would be of interest. I know I was a young man that had barely been outside the state of Texas before World War II, and then to go halfway around the world and back--I often think more of it really, about the travel that I did, and the people that I met, and then the scenes and all that I saw.

SLOAN: Well, I want to--I know Robert joins me, we want to thank you for your service overseas.

WATERS: Well, I don't feel like I did that much, but I feel like I more--I know my son once said--when the war in Europe was over with, which was right, I had come off of guard duty and I was sound asleep. And all of a sudden the roaring of guns and everything--in fact, in celebration they shot out the top of our tent where we couldn't even stay in it anymore when it rained. But I know my son said, I woke up and said, "What in the world's going on?" And somebody said, "The war's over. And I said, "What war?" But it wasn't quite that easy. (laughs)

SLOAN: (laughs) All right, well, thank you Mr. Waters. (phone rings)

end of interview