Texas Liberators - George Wessels (March 2, 2012)

SLOAN: All right, this is Stephen Sloan. This is March 2, 2012. I'm with Mr. George H. Wessels. We're at his home in San Antonio. This is an interview for the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Texas Liberators Project. Mr. Wessels, thank you for letting us invade your home this afternoon.

WESSELS: Oh, you're welcome.

SLOAN: I'd like to go back and start--we're, of course, going to talk about your military career, but I'd like to go back and start a little bit about life in Iowa. If you can tell me just a little bit about your family and your life there.

WESSELS: Well, I was born out on the farm--actually a little town called Matlock that was not too far from where Sibley is. But I was born on the--out on the farm. The doctor came as far as he could with his car and then my father had to go get him with the bobsled because it was--and anyhow, I was three years old 00:01:00when they moved to Sibley. And then I grew up on the farm there and went to the eighth grade there. And then I had to help on the farm because my parents owned two farms up there, each 160 acres. So I never did go to high school.

SLOAN: You were at home working.

WESSELS: Right.

SLOAN: So what's cultivating corn like?

WESSELS: Well, that's--plow and discing, cultivating corn, everything. (laughs)

SLOAN: Yeah, it's hard work.

WESSELS: Oh yeah. And then in '44, when I turned eighteen, I registered for the draft. And went to Fort Dodge for a physical, and they asked if I wanted to be 00:02:00in the navy or the army. And I said, "The navy." So I took a navy physical. Then a couple months later they called me up. I go to Fort Snelling. And they told me--I said, "I'm supposed to be in the navy." They said, Sorry, navy's full. He said, "You're in the army." (laughs) And that was it. And then I was at Fort Snelling, I guess, for about a week, all told. And then they discovered that I was only about three months--eighteen years and three months old, so they couldn't put me in the infantry. So they sent me to Camp Stewart, Georgia, for radar and searchlight and antiaircraft training.

SLOAN: Did you enjoy that training?

WESSELS: Yeah. What we had--see, we had infantry basic for half the day, and 00:03:00then we had the training for another half the day. But we had finished all of our radar training--I had gone through all of the infantry--the infiltration course twice, and the--fired all the weapons and everything. And we were all set to go out in the field for our two week bivouac, and that would have completed our training. But they canceled the training and shipped our whole battery to Camp Robinson, Arkansas. And put us back to the--like, the sixth week of infantry basic. So I went through all of the stuff all over again--went through the infiltration course twice again, fired all the weapons again.

SLOAN: Well, do you think your experience in your radar training, kind of, planted the seed for you being interested in the air force later on?

WESSELS: Well, it--yeah, it helped because the--when I took the test to join the air force, why it--I had a real high percentile, so--

SLOAN: Well, what do you remember--what are some stories you remember from basic, either time, the first or the second time?

WESSELS: Well, mostly it was the hikes. And one thing I remember also, I had a toothache, and then I had a decayed tooth. I went to the dentist at Camp Stewart, Georgia. He said, "That's going to have to come out," he said. So he put a shot in there, and he says, "Go sit out there for about fifteen or twenty minutes," he says, "And I'll call you back in." I walked out and sat down. And I hadn't sat down but--not even I think--I guess five minutes, and they called me back in. And he goes (sound effect)--I could hear it crack, you know. He said, 00:05:00"Does that hurt?" I says, "Yes!" (laughs) He says, "That's funny," he says, "It shouldn't." Wow, and he pulls it out. He crammed my mouth full of cotton and stopped the blood and sent me back to the barracks. And then that afternoon I had to go take a, like, a ten mile hike.

SLOAN: I can see why that stands out as a memory.

WESSELS: Oh yeah. I still have that tooth missing over here. (laughs)

SLOAN: Well, now, had you traveled much out of Iowa?

WESSELS: Not before then.

SLOAN: Yeah, not before then.

WESSELS: No, unh-uh.

SLOAN: So this was you--

WESSELS: No, I think the furthest I got was Sioux City, Iowa.

SLOAN: So this was really a new experience for you.

WESSELS: Oh yeah, completely. It's the first time I rode on a train. And then--well, they put us on a troop train from Camp Stewart to Camp Robinson. So then after we finished basic at Camp Robinson, I got a ten-day leave to go home, 00:06:00and then I had to report out to Fort Meade, Maryland. This was about the first part of January of '45. I had the leave and then I went--reported out to Fort Meade. And then, at Fort Meade, they had us participate in a live fire demonstration for the congressmen and stuff like that. They wanted to show them this new proximity fuse they had developed for the artillery, where they could put air bursts over the enemy artillery. So we did a mock assault--did a mock 00:07:00assault wave, and they fired that stuff out ahead of us.

And then, after that, why--a couple days later went to New York, and then got on the Queen Elizabeth. And it just took us six and half days to go across from New York Harbor to Glasgow, Scotland. We got off the train, got on the--I mean, got off the boat, got on the train, went to Southampton, on the coast--on the English Channel. Got off the train, walked on an LST, went across the Channel. There were about four hundred of us crammed into the tank deck of that--at the bottom of this LST, and there was about two or three inches of this old greasy water. (laughs)

SLOAN: So you didn't spend any time in Southampton.

WESSELS: No.

SLOAN: You got right on the LST to go across the Channel.

WESSELS: Right, off the train and on the LST. And then we got across the Channel and the--they didn't want to run all the way up and drop the ramp on the beach because all they had to do was--they have an anchor in the back of those things. They can drop the anchor and then run on up and then drag themselves back off with the anchor. But they were afraid they wouldn't be able to get back off. So they dumped us in about knee-deep water. Now, this is in--(laughs)

SLOAN: Yeah, this is in winter.

WESSELS: Right. And the English Channel there. So we all got soaked up to about our knees, you know.

SLOAN: So welcome to Europe.

WESSELS: Yeah. Welcome to France. (both laugh)

SLOAN: So what was the situation there once you got into France?

WESSELS: We got to France there, and then we got on trucks and rode on trucks for a ways. And then we got on some of these old forty and eight boxcars and went from there to close to Belgium. And we got off and got back on trucks. And then they drove us on up to the Seventy-Fifth Division Headquarters.

SLOAN: Which was where?

WESSELS: Oh no, no, wait a minute, no. We--because we stopped at a replacement depot first, repple depple, in Maastricht, Belgium. And we were there about two days, and then we got on the trucks and they drove us on up to the Seventy-Fifth Division headquarters.

SLOAN: What were the--what were the reports or the conversations about what the situation was that were you getting from--?

WESSELS: Well, they were--they were right up to the Maas River. They were sitting on the west bank of the Maas River, and the Germans were on the other 00:10:00side. And what had happened, the Germans had opened the spillways on the dams upstream, and then they blew up the mechanisms to close them. See, and then they caused the Maas River to flood, so it wound up being about a mile wide instead of just a quarter of a mile. So we just--when we got off the trucks at the Seventy-Fifth Division Headquarters, General Porter was the division commander. He welcomed us, and he said--(chimes in background) he said, "Welcome to the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division." He says, "You may have heard about R&R, and all that stuff," he says, "But forget it!" He says, "We're going to attack, attack, attack until this is all over." That's exactly what he did, but, of course, we didn't get started for about ten days. We sat there on the west bank 00:11:00of the Maas River. We finally got across, I think, on the--on about the--oh, I guess probably the first of March, somewhere in there.

SLOAN: Well, you were under fire, though, across the river--were they firing across the river?

WESSELS: Well, yeah, if--when--if they could spot a target, yeah. Yeah, we went on patrols there, but we never--we only sent one patrol to try to go across the river, and they wound up about ten miles downstream, so we didn't do that anymore. We just patrolled the riverbank there. And we--we were on an outpost, once, at the foot of this bridge--there was a collapsed railroad bridge that had collapsed into the river and the girders and stuff were still sticking out of the water. And they were afraid that the Germans might try to infiltrate across the girders, you know--send patrols across. So we had an outpost there. We were 00:12:00in there one night, and they started trying to come across. And our squad leader--the--we were actually attached to a British--British Army. And we--they had issued us some British grenades, and--but they didn't tell us that it had a four second fuse instead of a seven second fuse like ours. (laughs) So--

SLOAN: That's a big difference.

WESSELS: So our squad leader--there were, I think, six of us--because that was all that was in the squad at that--there were only three people in the squad when I joined, and then three of us joined and made it--our squad the six. We were still six short, but the whole squad was over there. And the squad leader, he took a grenade there, and he pulled the pin out, and he counted--you know, "One, two, three"--about three, and then he threw it. And it got out maybe a hundred feet or less, and it blew up. He said, "Holy Crud!" He says, "Don't 00:13:00count, just throw the darn things!" So that's what we did. We threw about--I don't--maybe half-a-dozen grenades. And the Germans, they took off and went back. (laughs) But that was--that was hairy.

SLOAN: Yeah, it sounds like it. It sounds like it. So y'all were there waiting for an opportunity to break through and cross?

WESSELS: For the river to go down, yes. They--finally we got across the Maas River. And I don't remember too much between it and the Rhine. And I know, we were moving all the time, all the time, all the time. And so it only took us about, I guess, ten days from the Maas River to get up to the Rhine River, because it was my birthday on the tenth. And we'd dug in on top of the dyke, my 00:14:00assistant BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] man and myself. It was just an outpost up on top of the dyke there during the--we just manned it during the night, because otherwise, they could observe and they could see you. But for the rest of the time there, we'd--we were back behind the dyke in a farmhouse.

And my assistant BAR man, he was Polish, from up in Connecticut. And--(laughs) he decided--we found some potatoes down in the basement. He decided he was going to make some potato pancakes. So he lit a fire in a stove. I guess the wood he used wasn't dry enough that--evidently, they spotted smoke coming out of this chimney. And the next thing we knew was--we had a lookout up in the second 00:15:00floor, out the window. All of a sudden, he yells, "ME-109!" Well, and everybody--(sound effect). He jumped out the window and sprained his ankle, and the rest of us, we dove down in the basement. He came along and he--actually, he took all the windows out and most of the shingles and stuff--those slate shingles off the roof, but nobody got hurt. And then he went on around. And then our antiaircraft stuff behind us, they opened up on him and then all of a sudden his engine conked out. He went back out across the river. And he just dove headfirst into the riverbank on the other side. Never did see the pilot get out, so I don't know if he survived or what. He may have waited until dark before--because he was--you know, real plain sight. (laughs)

But then after that, a couple days later we moved to an old warehouse. It was 00:16:00right on the riverbank and actually in front of the dyke. It had some steel--sliding steel doors and an iron beam hoist that went out where they unloaded barges up into the warehouse. And, you know, we stayed there about two weeks, waiting for Montgomery to get all his artillery and stuff built up.

SLOAN: And you were attached to Montgomery's--you were attached to the British?

WESSELS: Right, Montgomery? Yeah, General Montgomery. And after we crossed the Rhine we reverted back to General Bradley. But that was not until about a week after we had crossed, because the British had running rights across the bridge that we had built, because they had to support their people also.

But anyhow, we were in this warehouse. And this one night, a German patrol tried 00:17:00to come across the river and we spotted it. I was sleeping. We were sleeping up on the second floor. (laughs) There were beds up there. But the--our--we had--these sliding steel doors, we had them open about--oh, I guess about eighteen inches and then had my BAR set up back inside. So it was dark inside where, you know, they couldn't see you from across the river. But my assistant was the one on duty, and I was upstairs sleeping. And all of a sudden I heard a gun--all this firing and (laughs) I jumped up and went down. And well, John Kotkowsky, my BAR man, he--assistant--he was firing. We also had set up a .30 00:18:00caliber light machine gun in there, and they were also firing. And then the patrol never did get more than about halfway across and it--it went on down the river.

But after all the firing was done and everything, my assistant--he was always lazy. He would never refill the magazines because the BAR had a twenty-round magazine in it. So I'm sitting there filling up the mag. It was about my time to come on anyway, so I was sitting there, filling up my magazines out of the machine gun belt. And all of a sudden the machine gun goes "Bow!" And what had happened, they hadn't cleared it. They left a round in it, and the barrel was so 00:19:00hot it ignited the thing. (laughs)

SLOAN: Oh!

WESSELS: It's a good thing I was sitting on the side, you know.

SLOAN: Yeah.

WESSELS: And anyhow, but that was the only time they ever spotted us. They had a--there was a fifty-seven millimeter antitank gun dug in behind the dyke, right off to the right of our--the warehouse. And whenever they'd spot a target or something it would fire. It, I mean, that thing went along for a couple of weeks, you know. I still think I have hearing loss from that, but--

SLOAN: Oh, I'll bet, yeah.

WESSELS: --because that thing had a muzzle blast that it--like forty-four hundred feet per second, they were firing right straight, directly across and knocking down church steeples or any tall buildings that could, you know, house observers.

SLOAN: Well, did--we had talked before we got on, that your father and grandfather immigrated from Germany.

WESSELS: Uh-hm.

SLOAN: So did you speak German? Do you speak German?

WESSELS: A little, not very much there. I couldn't speak English when I first started grammar school. But then my sisters and brothers, we all went to the little one-room school out there in the country. So I could speak some, but they had it on my record that I could speak some German. But it was a Plattdeutsch, they called it, Low German? Came from up in the northern part of Germany. And a lot of people thought, you know, it was Low German, that it was a lower class. That wasn't what it referred to. They came from the Low Countries.

SLOAN: Yes. (both laugh) Well, the other thing that came up I wanted to ask about was what did you think of the Brits, kind of, interaction with the British?

WESSELS: Well, I don't know. From what--there was a radio communication outfit not too far from where we were on the Maas River. And seemed like they were only drinking tea. (both laugh) And then--well, they issued us those grenades. They also issued us some rations, and I got the GIs from that. And then we got to reading on the cases where they were in. They were packed in 1925. (laughs) So I didn't think too much of the British.

SLOAN: Yeah, I would think, yeah. That soured your opinion of them, I'm sure. So when did you finally get to break out from this position where you're in the warehouse there near the Rhine?

WESSELS: We were--when we crossed the Rhine--the same situation again, I was upstairs sleeping and my assistant was down there, down below. And then all of a sudden this huge artillery barrage started. I mean, it just--everything was shaking, and dust was falling. And I got up and I went down. And my BAR--my BAR man, he had the BAR, and he was standing back. And there was some bird-colonel had set up his--I guess he was a regimental commander from the Seventy-Ninth Division. Because Seventy-Ninth Division, they made the crossing. They came through us. And that artillery barrage, it just went on and on and on, and it 00:23:00was terrific. And I guess, the Seventy-Fifth, they moved out, went across and after about an hour or two later, German prisoners were coming back across, and we helped guard the prisoners. Had them in a bunch there, just bunched them up. And they were all completely out of it. They were dazed, they couldn't do anything. (pauses) You try to talk to them or something like that, they just kind of look at you, you know, and their eyes'd roll and--(laughs) They were tormented. They really caught it.

SLOAN: Were you able to use your German to communicate with them at all?

WESSELS: A little bit, yes.

SLOAN: Yeah, just a little bit, yeah, yeah.

WESSELS: But not very much because I had forgotten a lot of it. And we never 00:24:00spoke it at home anymore, though my parents still spoke it to each other but not to us kids. And anyhow, we--we had to set up defense perimeters around the bridge, so that combat engineers could build a pontoon bridge just below from where we had been. So we moved down there and spent about three or four days doing that that day. They put me out, well, me and some other BAR men and also riflemen out on the barges, to fire at anything that came floating down the river. They were afraid the Germans might try to float mines down the river. So we were doing that and firing at all these little bunches of twigs or anything 00:25:00else that came. And some of our slugs, I guess, must have hit anchor cables or something because the engineers, they had us stop. They said, Don't do it anymore. And so they put a barge about a hundred yards upstream from the bridge, and then they just ran us out there on a little outboard dinghy thing. We'd get out there for about two hours, or until our ammunition ran out.

SLOAN: Did you ever hit any mines or see any of that?

WESSELS: No. I must have burned up--I don't know, probably two thousand rounds. (laughs)

SLOAN: Shooting at twigs.

WESSELS: Yeah, shooting at anything, you know. All kind of debris come floating 00:26:00down. And actually we got strafed. I had just gotten back to shore when one of these German jets came over and strafed the--strafed the bridge. But he must have been a rookie pilot or something because by the time he started firing he was too--too fast and too far. And heck, his slugs and stuff hit the river about a quarter of a mile downstream. But the poor guy that relieved me, he jumped out of the raft and in the water and hung onto the raft. (laughs) He had to crawl back up soaking wet. He still had to put his two hours in out there.

SLOAN: Yeah, talk about the cold. I know it was cold.

WESSELS: Yeah. But yeah, our--mostly, what bothered me the most was when we dug 00:27:00a foxhole there, the ground was still--it wasn't frozen anymore but it was real cold, you know, ice cold, and it'd come right up through. And all I had to sleep on was a poncho, just a poncho. Because whenever we dug in we would always--after we had crossed the Rhine, when we would dig in we would always cover our foxhole with some tree branches and logs and stuff like that, then shovel the dirt we had dug out of the hole back on top because they'd fire artillery rounds into the tree tops and then you get tree bursts, and that stuff would come right straight down on you. So we usually always tried to put a roof 00:28:00over our foxhole. If we had time, that is. There was one day, I think, remember we--I don't remember what day it was but we were moving pretty fast and we'd stopped. And every time we'd stop, we'd always dig in because you'd expect a counterattack. But one day there I think we dug four foxholes, and nothing ever happened. No counterattack, no anything. And we'd move on.

SLOAN: Well, now, once you got--once you left that position on the Rhine, you moved fairly quickly forward, didn't you?

WESSELS: Yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah, yeah.

WESSELS: Yeah, we started out on the thirty-first of March. And we finally--the division finally got the clearance to, you know, start using the bridge. And 00:29:00then--but we--yeah, we started our first attack on the thirty-first of March, there across the river. And that was the same day when--actually, when we ran into those slave labor camps, and that other battalion took that synthetic rubber plant.

SLOAN: If you could take me through that, I'd like to hear how you came upon it and what you noticed and--

WESSELS: Well, we were just--we were just--actually, we were advancing up the road in column actually, and, you know, with your fifteen--five-yard interval between you. And we were just moving on up, and then these buildings off to the side there, kind of like a stockade. But evidently the Germans had taken off. 00:30:00And then the prisoners inside there had broken--I guess they broke down the gate or whatever. They were already coming out, and they were all over the place. But as we went by--we couldn't stop there. Our squad leader said, "Don't stop. Don't mingle. Don't stop." So we kept going. And, oh, a couple of them grabbed my hand, kissed my hand. And then after that, I stuck my hand up under my BAR sling so they couldn't get ahold of it. Because they were all covered with scabies and--well, we thought they were scabies, but I guess what they were were sores from malnutrition.

But they looked horrible. And they were emaciated, skinny. I had never seen, you know, all the time--I came from Iowa. I had never seen anybody that thin. And we 00:31:00saw a few yellow stars for the Jews on them, but there weren't very many. And they--we didn't even know actually at that time what it meant. We thought they were, like, trustees, or something like that, for the prison camp. We didn't even know they were just political prisoners and stuff like that, because we thought that we had probably let loose a whole bunch of crooks and stuff. (laughs)

SLOAN: Because you--had you heard of any of these camps or--?

WESSELS: Not before then.

SLOAN: Not before then.

WESSELS: We didn't even know it when we went along there and that--you know, it was a slave labor camp. We didn't know. They told us later on, about three to four days later. They said, Oh, that was a slave labor camp that we went in. But 00:32:00then, the rear echelon, they came along and they took care of all that stuff. They even interviewed--according to the book, they even interviewed one guy that was a--he had actually volunteered to work for the Germans because they were going to send him--send his paycheck to his family. That's according to the book, now, that's--well, we didn't talk to any of them.

SLOAN: Yeah, but they were obviously happy to see you.

WESSELS: Oh, they were very happy, yeah. There were big smiles on their faces.

SLOAN: So they came out to kind of greet y'all as you were going by.

WESSELS: Um-hm.

SLOAN: So how much time did you spend in that area?

WESSELS: Oh, I don't know. We weren't--we kept moving. And we reached our objective with--just the edge of the forest there that afternoon. So we were 00:33:00digging in, I guess, about four, five o'clock, something like that, in the evening there. I know it wasn't quite dark yet. We were digging in. And this is when, I guess, the Germans saw us. And we saw them about the same time. We didn't see him until he had fired this eight-round nebelwerfer thing off the top of the tank. We were so close to him, though, that he went right over the top of us and then way back behind us. So I guess maybe battalion headquarters or regimental headquarters probably caught more of it than anybody, but I don't know if they hit anything or not. I think the Germans were just as startled as we were. First thing we got was the noise, and as soon as we heard the noise, we hit down into the hole. And then after the screeching was gone there we got up 00:34:00and looked out. And here goes this German tank. He's running like a rabbit going--(laughs) taking off.

So the next morning we jumped off again. And they always had an artillery preparation before we'd jump off, about five minutes. We hated that because we would rather catch them sleeping. All the artillery did was wake them up. And we would, you know, attack and--most of the time, I mean, they kept running there. We just didn't give them time to reorganize or anything like that.

SLOAN: Yeah. Yeah, you were quickly advancing then, I guess.

WESSELS: Right. Yeah, we were doing, like--heck, anywhere from ten to twenty miles a day. (pause)

SLOAN: Well--

WESSELS: See, at that time, it wasn't the Ruhr Pocket yet there. That didn't happen until about a week after, I think, around the seventh or eighth of April, somewhere in there. They finally closed that. That was armored--armored infantry. And we had been more or less, kind of, attacking straight east, and then we turned and started going south to clear out the pocket. But that kept up for days and days there. We'd get these little small towns. And usually there'd 00:36:00be white sheets hanging out all over the place, and we'd just go on through, no big problem. Until we got to this one town. I think it was Castrop-Rauxel or something like that. We'd cleared the town and started up this long slope toward the next town. The towns in that pocket, Ruhr pocket, there were all, like, about maybe three or four miles apart, little villages. And our squad was up on point. That's--we'd usually have two people clearing out on the right side and the left side and then the point, and then the rest are strung out behind you at fifteen--fifteen feet, or five-yard intervals.

We had just started moving out of the town, and boy, all of a sudden all hell 00:37:00broke loose like a Chinese New Year. In the movies they show these bullets going zing, zing. They don't zing. They pop, they crack, just like a rifle shot when they go past you. We found that out when I went through the infiltration course there in training. But, boy, we hit the dirt. And fortunately, the road, it was a very old road evidently. All through the years, I guess, it had cut down and cut down, so that it was cut down to about that deep. So we crawled back on our stomachs, back into the edge of town. And when we got back to the edge of town, we jumped up and ran into a house. Anyhow, while I was laying out there trying 00:38:00to make up my mind whether to move or stay there until it got dark or what, all of a sudden I had this urge to eat the candy that I had in my--from my--(laughs) if I was going to get hit, I was going to get hit with a sweet taste in my mouth.

SLOAN: You don't want to waste that candy.

WESSELS: (laughs) Anyhow, I laid there and I ate the candy, and every now and then it'd pop over me. Finally, I wanted to wriggle out, and I thought, This isn't going to work. So I crawled on my stomach back up and jumped up and ran over into the house. There were about three--three more of our squad were in the house there, and some of the others were still further back. So we were in the 00:39:00house. And I guess it was about two hours later or something--oh, my assistant BAR man, he was one of the outside scouts that were--he and another guy. They got pinned down further up than we did, up the hill. John, he's firing at what he thought were the machine gun nests, I guess. I don't know if he knew where they were or not. The other one with him, he took off like a scared rabbit and made it back to the edge of town. Then John, he laid there, and all of a sudden he took off and did the same thing. He made it back, but he had two bullet holes 00:40:00through his pant leg, and his buckle on his combat infantry boot was shot off. So he got back into the house, and then we had to wrap him up in a blanket because he started going into shock just from the--you know. But after a while he was okay.

And then later in the afternoon, the lookout that we had up in the second floor of the building, he called out to the squad leader and he says, "Hey, the Jerries are doing something over there. I see some telephone poles they're waving around." So the squad leader goes up there and he says, "You idiot. Those aren't telephone poles. Those are eighty-eights on tanks." (laughs) I guess they were gathering to do a counterattack on us there in the town. And so they called 00:41:00in--they called in right away for air support and artillery. And I guess it wasn't--I guess maybe, like, ten minutes later there--about three P-47s came in. They bombed the tanks there. They took out all the tanks. And then they made a big circle and came around and strafed the infantry and broke up the whole thing, I guess. Because we didn't--we didn't fire a shot. We just watched it out the window, you know, in there. Was like sitting there watching a movie.

And then, we'd dug in just on the edge of town there for the rest of the night. I was standing on the side of the building, not in front of the building, on the side of the building because I thought, you know, over on our other flank was 00:42:00our troops. And my assistant, he was about thirty feet out in front of the building there, and he was digging in his--digging a foxhole there. And all of a sudden, Pow! There was a bullet hit the wall about eighteen inches or maybe fifteen inches beside my head. I dropped like I'd been shot, scooted around the corner and got back in the building. And John, he stayed on his stomach and crawled back into the building. A sniper had taken a shot at us, I guess. But I had--little peppered with the concrete and mortar chips and stuff there on my face. But I just brushed them out, and it was no problem.

But next morning we moved out and--actually in an assault wave instead of a column. And what they had done early in the morning, they sent the mayor--the bürgermeister of the town, they sent him up to the next town with a white flag and told him to tell the bürgermeister over there that if we get so much as one shot from the town we're going to call the 47s in, the P-47s in, and level the whole town. So we just walked in.

SLOAN: No resistance there.

WESSELS: No resistance, yeah. They were gone. So we did that with several others, (laughs) that worked so good. We did that through a lot of little towns. The big cities were the ones that--I think it was Dortmund or something 00:44:00when--the outskirts of Dortmund we ran into resistance. But we had gone through this rail yard, and there was--we found three of these V-2 rockets on three flatbed railcars. And they were just sitting there. The rail--they couldn't move out because the rails were all tore up--the whole railroad yard was tore up from our fighter bombers, had blown everything up. But we didn't even get a chance there after we stopped at--we didn't even get a chance to go back and look at them. The OSS came right in behind us and sealed off the area. But that was the first time we had ever seen one like that. We had seen the buzz bombs go over but--

SLOAN: Not the V-2s, yeah.

WESSELS: Um-hm. Now, this was a V-2. The buzz bombs were V-1s. Yeah, we'd see those every night from a foxhole--they'd be going over, especially there in--in Holland, when we were still in Holland. And when we'd gone from the Maas River to the Rhine River, we'd dig in. There was one time, a whole bunch of strings of toilet paper came floating down from our bombers--streamed on over. The guys up in the air crews had written on there. It said, "Go on home, boys, it's all over!" (laughs) That was funny.

SLOAN: Well, as you said, you just kept pressing and pressing and pressing.

WESSELS: Right.

SLOAN: No R&R.

WESSELS: No nothing.

SLOAN: No baths.

WESSELS: No baths.

SLOAN: (laughs) No, just kept pressing forward.

WESSELS: No baths. I didn't have much of a beard or anything there. I was trying to grow a mustache. I have a picture of myself there after--right after we had moved out of Germany after V-E Day. I was trying to grow a mustache, and it so was light there I had to use black shoe polish to--(laughs) to make me look a little older. (laughs)

SLOAN: There's nothing wrong with that.

WESSELS: But that kept up, and then toward the last couple weeks in April--and actually it was our last day on the line when Ninety-Fifth Division came up and relieved us. But we had gone through this one little village and there was--just 00:47:00gone past a farmhouse on the outskirts. And all of a sudden there, we had a couple mortar rounds come in. And I thought, What? Oh. So everybody ran for cover or hit the dirt. And I was close to the farmhouse, so I ran for the farmhouse. And got right up by the door, and another one hit. It must have been a concussion round or something, because it just felt like somebody had come up behind me and just gave me a real hard shove like that. And I hit the door, you know, and broke the latch, and I went through the door. But I wasn't hurt. No shrapnel or anything. Had a couple of bruises. I always carried two grenades in my field jacket buttonholes. The pocket flap had a buttonhole in it. I used to always carry two grenades in it. But I had two bruised breasts there. (laughs)

SLOAN: Where you fell?

WESSELS: No, where I hit the door. (laughs)

SLOAN: Yeah--oh, where you hit the door.

WESSELS: And then, that was all they fired at us. I guess it was about maybe three rounds, or four rounds. They probably didn't have any more ammunition maybe, or something. But we moved on a little further then. And then we stopped and started digging in for the night. I guess our artillery must have caught this one German officer. He was riding a horse. And we went just past him a little bit, and then we started to digging in. I went back to see whether or not he still had a Luger, but somebody had already beaten me to it. But the horse or 00:49:00that officer, neither one of them, didn't have any blood or any sign of any kind of wound or anything on them. They must have just gotten killed by the concussion or something, I guess. And so we dug in for the night.

And I guess about, I don't know, about nine, eight or nine o'clock at night--it was dark, squad leader came along all the foxholes. And he says, "Get your gear on, we're moving out." And I thought, Oh hell. Here we go. Another night attack. We had done just one other one, and they had fired this white phosphorus artillery rounds. And that was eerie. That was like--like something you see in a movie there. It's these little spirals of smoke coming out of the ground where the white phosphorus was still burning. And here we were, we're attacking--

SLOAN: Through it, yeah.

WESSELS: Yeah. But that was eerie. But this wasn't the same thing. We thought, Oh heck, you know, another night attack. And we cussed, like usual. (laughs) And then squad leader, he says, "No," he says, "We're moving out. We're being relieved. Ninety-Fifth Division's coming up to take over." And oh boy! Talk about happy.

SLOAN: (laughs) So where'd you go once you were relieved?

WESSELS: We started moving back to the rear, walking. And once we got out of artillery range, well, then we just formed up in a regular formation. We kept spread out before, you know. And then, I guess, we must have, I don't know, 00:51:00walked. We marched for several hours, because I think it was after midnight already before we stopped. And I guess it was probably a regimental headquarters we got back to or something. Or maybe division, I don't remember. But anyhow, they said, Oh, they're going to have a movie for us. So we all get over there, and we crowd into this building. And then this colonel, he comes in and he says, "No," he says, "We can't have movies," he says, "We're still in artillery range and we might reckon get hit by artillery." So no movie. The next day then we got on trucks and we went to this little town of Berleburg. We started doing occupation duty. And I was--we went out on patrol a couple times up into 00:52:00the--this was in a, kind of, a forest area. And somebody had said he heard gunfire, but we went out on patrols up in the hills there, and we never did find anything.

SLOAN: All that area was pretty well secure at that time?

WESSELS: Yeah, um-hm. So then we went to--our company moved from Berleburg to another little town called Niedermarsberg. And there was a--they called it a marine hospital, but it was actually a psychiatric ward for the wounded and all the ones that had, you know, went berserk from combat fatigue and stuff. They had German veterans from North Africa in there, from Italy, and from Germany 00:53:00itself. And that was the duty there. I was sitting at the entrance there, and we had--there was a table. And there was this German girl sitting on one side of the table, and I'm sitting on the other side of the table with my BAR and hand grenades hanging in my belt, and all that stuff, looking real fierce. And we weren't supposed to talk to them or anything like that. This non-fraternization thing going on. But she could actually speak fairly good English, and the little German I knew, so we got along pretty good on that because we could speak as long as it was--just had to do with the hospital. So that was pretty good duty there. I just sat there. I enjoyed that. She was a nice young gal about the same age I was, I guess, probably twenty, nineteen or twenty. And she was the 00:54:00daughter of one of the civilian doctors there.

SLOAN: So what was her opinion of Americans?

WESSELS: I don't know. She didn't seem to hate us or anything. She said, "Oh, maybe you can help me with my English." So that's what we did a lot of times, just sitting there.

SLOAN: So were you there on V-E Day?

WESSELS: Yeah, right.

SLOAN: Were you at that post on V-E Day?

WESSELS: Yeah, then our--yeah, on V-E Day our platoon leader, Lieutenant Anders, he was a tech sergeant when I joined the platoon. And he got a battlefield commission for what he had done during the Bulge. He had led a charge up this hill that captured a hill and stuff. And had got his earlobe shot off. So they 00:55:00promoted him with a battlefield commission to second lieutenant. But, anyway, he called us out in formation. And this was toward the evening, about, I guess, about five o'clock. We were getting ready to go to chow. And he said, "Well, boys," he said, "It's all over. Today is V-E Day." So then he had a--he was already getting a liquor ration. He split his liquor ration with the whole platoon there. Everybody held out their canteen cup and they put about maybe a jigger in it. So we all toasted to V-E Day. I still do that now, every V-E Day. 00:56:00I have a glass of wine, and I toast the first platoon. (laughs)

SLOAN: That's great.

WESSELS: And then that was about it. Then, I think, about the twenty-second of May we left Germany already and went to France. We were supposed to redeploy through the States to the Pacific. And we got to France. They had all these camps set up, but they didn't have any servicepeople to run them. So our division was one of the first ones there. So here we are, we get the job of running these what they called assembly area command camps. I wound up--anyhow, the first sergeant, he had us out there in formation. Old Sergeant Johnson, he said, "Well, all you guys that earned a combat infantry badge and a couple of 00:57:00battle stars are now PFCs." (laughs) We were all promoted to PFCs. So I wound up with a couple other guys in--it was this Camp Brooklyn. They called it Camp Brooklyn. They named them all after cities--US cities--there: Camp Brooklyn, Camp Boston, Camp New York, and stuff like that. And we were at Camp Brooklyn. It was right near Suippes, France. It was S-u-i-p-p-e-s or something like that.

And the army had set up a ration warehouse. This was where the mess sergeant could come and pick up their rations. It was a ration breakdown. And because I 00:58:00could speak a little German--they had a German, young German officer there. Actually, he was a veterinarian that was in the horse-drawn artillery. The Germans still had horse-drawn artillery. He could speak some English, and I could speak some German, so we could converse pretty good. And he had about ten enlisted German PWs. And I would call off to him what we wanted. The supply sergeant would drive up with a truck, and they'd hand us his requisition sheet, you know. And I would call off to this German officer, and he would tell his PWs what to put in the truck. But this went on for--we were still doing that when--actually, when the Japanese surrendered in--

SLOAN: Oh, August, yeah.

WESSELS: --in August. I think it was up until about sometime in October. And then the whole division picked up and left. They had enough troops in there, service troops and stuff. We went back to Germany, to Munich. And we were there, and then they deactivated the division there, in Munich, I think it was. And then all the high-point guys--they had these--you got a--points, you know, different points for--it was, like, five points for each battle star and five points for each medal, and then you got one point for each stateside service and two points for each overseas service. But then all the high-point ones, they were the original Seventy-Fifth veterans. They went on back to the States in 01:00:00December and January. And then they deactivated the division.

They transferred--I went to an ordinance maintenance outfit in Nuremberg, from Munich to Nuremberg. And I was in that--was in the shop there for a while as a parts clerk. They started training me as a parts clerk. And then, I don't know, for some reason or other they needed somebody in their Third Army motor pool. So here I get sent over to the Third. I was still in the same organization but went over to the Third Army motor pool. I got there, and the motor pool officer was some young army air corps first lieutenant. Yeah, we had jeeps and these little 01:01:00weasels and all of that stuff. And it was the start of winter again. And this was, like, December of '45. And we started getting these little weasels. They would come in in a big old wooden crate. And we'd uncrate them there, and we'd service them up. And then we'd hang a test drive sign on them because we didn't have a trip ticket. (laughs) We'd be running up and down the street in Nuremberg. And we'd go take a joyride in them along in front of the Palace of Justice. The Third Army motor pool was only about a mile up the street from this Palace of Justice where they were going to have the war crimes trials. I was in there about--I guess about two months. And then they transferred all three of us.

Oh, anyhow, this young first lieutenant in the motor pool--we didn't have any GI 01:02:00driver's licenses, so he got out a bunch of blanks. He'd just signed us off for every--(laughs) we could drive everything from a Sherman tank to a semi to whatever. And I was driving a two-and-a-half-ton six-by for a while, and I drove the semi gas truck there for a while, stuff like that. I almost rolled that thing over one time there. Whenever the trials were in progress in that Palace of Justice, they called it, they'd have a tank sitting at each corner. Then they had machine guns and stuff up on the roof, and all of that. And then they detoured you around it. So I had gone over to pick up a load of gasoline for the 01:03:00motor pool, over at the gasoline dump. And I was coming back. And boy, that detour, it was just almost ninety-degree turns. I almost rolled that thing over into a canal there. (laughs) Tires screeching, brakes screeching, and I was praying that the thing was going to turn. And it did. (laughs) But that was the only hairy moment, actually, in the motor pool experience.

Oh yeah, one time we were--they had us take a bunch of half-tracks out to this disposal area. I was driving one, and I knocked the corner of a house out when I 01:04:00went around a corner with it. But I didn't even stop. I just kept going. But we were out there. And then they had us taking all the ammunition out of the tanks. They had a whole bunch of tanks and armored cars and half-tracks and all that stuff parked out there. They had a bunch of us out there, taking the ammunition out. And some of them guys, they were just picking that stuff up and just throwing it out, you know. It's a wonder we didn't blow ourselves up.

But anyhow, then I got transferred to this place outside of Nuremberg. It was in the quarters for the engineers that had built the Nuremberg Stadium, the huge stadium that Hitler used for all of his grand meetings and stuff. It had the big 01:05:00swastika on top of it. They blew that off. So that was gone when we moved out there. But we could still see the stadium from our quarters there. And then I was there--oh, I was just driving a truck and the CO, commanding officer--he was a lieutenant. He was a First Lieutenant Greenley or something like that. His name was Greenley or Greenfield, or something. I don't remember exactly. But he got about four of us ex-combat infantrymen and made us, like, into a SWAT team. They issued us all an M-4 [M-3] grease gun. That's a forty-five caliber sub-machine gun. It looks like a grease gun. And he put me in charge of that thing.

And then one day I was sitting there in the dispatch hut. We had a stove in there with a chimney and all that stuff. And we was just sitting in there, chewing the fat. All of a sudden, Pow! Here comes this forty-five slug right through the--it hit the stovepipe and knocked the stovepipe off and went out. One of my troops there had checked out his M-3, and he went rabbit hunting with it. And he was on the other side of these railroad tracks that went all up and ran along there. And he followed a rabbit up there with that forty-five slug. He fired up over the top of the railroad embankment. That slug went right through our--it was up high, up above us, but still, you know--anyhow, so Lieutenant 01:07:00Greenley, he disbanded--(laughs) disbanded this--

SLOAN: Disbanded the squad then.

WESSELS: He said, "We'll take a chance with the Werwolves." (laughs) That was the only thing they were afraid of, that there might be, you know, some underground resistance, but it never did develop. And then about a month or two later, the lieutenant, he sent me to automotive parts clerk school. I went from Nuremberg over to Heidenheim, Germany. And I went through the automotive parts clerk school and graduated, and stuff. And then I was waiting to--he said he'd send a jeep to pick me up. So I'm sitting there in the barracks there, waiting--or the quarters there, waiting for this jeep driver to show up. And this first sergeant that was in charge of the place there, he comes in and he 01:08:00says, "What are you still doing here? You were supposed to have cleared the building by one o'clock." I said, "I'm waiting for a jeep driver. A jeep's coming to pick me up." He says, "No, you're out of here. It's already one fifteen, and you're out of here right now." So he had two guys. And he said, "Escort this man over to railroad station and put him on the train." (both laugh)

They escorted me, put me on the train, and shoved some orders in my hand. And I looked to see where the heck I was going there. I asked the conductor, I said, "Where are we going?" He said Augsburg or someplace like that, from Heidenheim. So I get to this--I thinks that's what the name of it, I don't even remember. 01:09:00But anyhow, I got off the train there. And fortunately, they had a Red Cross club not far from the railroad station. I went in there and checked in at the Red Cross club. And then they got me a ride on a train going from there up to Nuremberg. So instead of getting back on a Friday afternoon like I was supposed to, I didn't get back until Sunday afternoon. And this lieutenant, he says, "Where the heck you been?" I told him what happened. He sat there and he looks at me, and then he started laughing. (laughs) He says, "Yeah, our jeep got there about half hour after you were gone."

SLOAN: Oh. (both laugh)

WESSELS: And then, after that, it was only about a month later then, he got 01:10:00orders to go back to the States and I got orders at the same time. But he asked me, he says, "You got a choice. You can go back to the States right now, or you can take a--" I think it was, like, a fifteen-day leave to go to Rome, Italy, and all that stuff on a tour thing. And he said, "That, or you can go back to the States with me." "I'm going back to the States." So we rode a--we had a jeep. So I sat in the backseat with our duffel bags, (laughs; chimes in background) and we drove from Nuremberg to Frankfurt. Then we caught the train at Frankfurt and went from there to Le Havre, France.

And we weren't at Le Havre very long. We processed out and got on an old Liberty ship. That was the Sea Devil. I have pictures of it. I don't know if you want to 01:11:00see them or anything. But it took us, I think, ten full days to come across from Le Havre to New York. And I wound up with a bunk all the way up forward in the forward hold, right where it's the--the prow slopes down like that. My bunk was right up against there. Every time that thing would hit a wave it would go, boom! That went on for ten days, boom! And then a little rough weather there, and all of a sudden the screws would come out of the water and the whole ship would just shake.

SLOAN: Oh gosh.

WESSELS: But that was--I spent most of the time up on deck. I didn't even go to my bunk there. I slept up on deck. And then we got back to New York. Got off the 01:12:00ship, and Red Cross girls were all waiting there for us with milk and cookies and doughnuts. And I asked for a shot of scotch instead, and they says, No, we don't have that. But that was--things moved fast then. We got off the ship and got on a train, went to--I think it was Camp Shanks or something like that, it was called, New York. Got off the train there and went right into the mess hall. And they had a huge steak dinner for us. And this was, like, ten o'clock at night already.

SLOAN: I know you were anxious to get home.

WESSELS: Oh yeah. And then the next day we processed out. We went from there to 01:13:00a movie theater. They separated us all into different areas of the country where we were going, to be discharged. So I went to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, by Chicago. That was about the nearest separation place for me because--for northwest Iowa. It was only about--I was there about two days, processing, and then I was discharged. I ran out the gate to catch the interurban from Fort Sheridan to the railroad station in Chicago. And he was just starting to move. I threw my duffel bag on the railroad track in front of him. (laughs) He had to stop. I picked it up. He opened the door and got up, and he just gave me a 01:14:00little dirty look and that was it. He didn't say anything. So I got on. I got to the railroad station. It's a good thing I'd caught him because the train that I was supposed to take to go to Iowa, I think I only had about a half hour to catch it.

I had about three or four hundred dollars of cash in my pocket then, that had--they gave us a hundred-dollar mustering-out pay in cash and then also our--whatever pay we had coming. So I got on the train. And I forget, I think it was in Liberty, Iowa, because I think that's Hoover's hometown. We stopped there for about an hour or something like that, and I got off the train. It was just a 01:15:00coach. I got off the train and went in the restaurant there. They had a restaurant there at the station. Got something to eat. And the waitress there, she looked at me and she said, "Boy," she says, "you're so cute, I'm going to take you home with me." (laughs) I said, "Oh no, you're not." (laughs) And then got back on the train.

And then I was sitting there, there was some guy sitting by me. And he says, "You know," he said, "if the war had lasted six months longer," he says, "my dad would have really made a killing in selling uniforms." And I looked at him, and I said, "You better get out of the car here," I told him, "because if you don't get out of this car, I'm going to throw you off the damn train." (laughs) He 01:16:00froze. The conductor came along. He says, "What's going on?" I told him. I say, "You get that SOB off my car, here," I says, or "I'm going to throw him off the damn train." I told him what he had said. But I'll tell you, that conductor, he turns right around, he says, "Come on," and put him in another car.

But after that, then everything was uneventful. I got back to Sibley. And this was in the afternoon. And wasn't nobody there at the station. They didn't--so the station keeper there, he let me use the phone. So I called my folks there. They lived out in the farm there. My sister-in-law, she came in and picked me 01:17:00up. She was staying with our--my parents at that time, my brother and her.

SLOAN: Yeah, I know you were excited to get home.

WESSELS: Boy, got home and everything seemed so small. It seemed like all the rooms were real small and the whole house seemed like it was real small. Then I walked in the door, and my dad and my mother, they just looked at me like--like I was a ghost or something. (laughs) Finally, they unfroze. Then the first thing my mother, Oh, she had to go there and feed me. She had that old German syndrome, you know--(Sloan laughs)--you've always got to feed them.

SLOAN: Well, now, so I know later you're going to have a career in the air force.

WESSELS: Right.

SLOAN: But I guess for a time there you were helping out your folks on the farm.

WESSELS: Yeah, I did that until they moved to town, and then my two brothers took over the two farms. I still helped off and on some, but then I started working with my brother-in-law. He had a farm of his own at that time. He was married to one of my older sisters, because I had four older sisters and three older brothers. And so I did work with him and also did some carpenter work with him. That went on for about four years. And then, finally, I got tired of it, because I wasn't going anywhere. I was running my brother-in-law's corn picker 01:19:00and his combine and stuff, doing custom work for the other farmers around there. I got a dollar an acre for each acre. So I made pretty good money that way because I could run through about thirty acres a day, sometimes forty, depending. So I was making about thirty, forty dollars a day. That was--you know, minimum wage was like, a dollar and a quarter. But I got tired of that.

Then I told my dad and mother, I says, "I'm going to go enlist in the air force. I'm tired of this." My dad said, "Oh," he says, "what do you want to do that for? I'll go to work and help you out if you want to start farming." I says, "I don't want to be no farmer. I don't want anything more to do with a farmer." So 01:20:00called this air force enlistment station in Omaha, Nebraska. That's about 180 miles south of where we had lived. And I was asking them a bunch of questions. They said, "Well, we're going to be making a round-trip up there through Worthington, Minnesota, and down through Sibley," he says. "We can meet you there." So when they came down they stopped by our--you know, they actually stopped by the house. They just sat there by the table. Actually, I more or less tentatively enlisted right there.

But then they told me what day to report to Omaha, you know, for their testing and swearing-in ceremony and all that stuff. And so I guess about a week or two 01:21:00later, I got called and told to go ahead and report on such-and-such day there. Caught the train from Sibley and went to Sioux City, and then from Sioux City down to Omaha on the train. And took their tests and everything, and I had a real high percentage--percentile score on entrance exams and stuff. So they told me, they said, Well, you're going to have to lose one stripe to join the air force. And there was an army recruiter who was also in the same station there. And he says, "Why don't you come back in the army? We got a slot for you out in the Seventh Infantry Division out in California." He says, "You can have your 01:22:00old rank back," because I was corporal when I got out. I said, "No, thanks. No, thanks." So I joined the air force, and they sent me to San Antonio to Lackland Air Force Base as a re-enlistee. I was there a week or so, and then they made--I was there as an element leader because I was pretty good at giving the drill commands. And took a bunch of tests, and then they sent me to A and E, aircraft and engine school, up at Sheppard Air Force Base. And I completed that. I was the runner-up to the honors student there. And they sent me to specialized R-4360 aircraft engine school at Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois.

When I checked in there, lo and behold, here's the first sergeant sitting there behind the desk, and he's got a combat infantry badge on. And here I walk in with a combat infantry badge. His eyes got big and round. (laughs) And he says--well, I was a PFC, of course, the other ones were--the other guys were privates. So he says, "What I'm going to do, I'm going to set up an honor barracks here," he said, "and then I'm going to put you in charge of the honor barracks." So here I am, I get there, and he said, "The only thing, you got to go and postpone your class for thirty days." I said, "Okay. I can do that."

And so we got started with this, got it set up and had this one empty barracks. We had repainted the whole inside of the barracks. And where the footlockers would sit we made frames for the footlockers to sit in, and made little square blocks with a round hole in it for the bunk beds to sit in so they wouldn't be moved. They always stayed dressed up. And it was real sharp looking. All of the honors students, as long as they kept up their appearances and stuff like that--boy, he would judge them, you know, the ones that would come in. And so then after a month of that, I stayed in the honor barracks and I started school. 01:25:00And after I finished class--I finished school there, I was the honors student there. I made the best score for graduation.

And from there they transferred myself and three other guys. They put me in a--oh, while I was there, they made me a corporal. (laughs) So less than six months after I joined the air force, I had my old rank back anyhow. So I went to Randolph Air Force Base over here as an engine mechanic on B-29s. And we were there four years. And then when I re-enlisted, I met the wife here in San Antonio. We got married, and then--I re-enlisted in April, and then we got married in July. And then in August, they sent me to the Japan for eighteen 01:26:00months. So she stayed here and worked, and I went to Japan for eighteen months in the air force, the Twenty-Second Troop Carrier Command. We flew in and out of Korea. The Korean War had just ended, and we flew a mobilization exercise into an airstrip just below the demilitarized zone. And it was this--it was made of this little pierced steel plating, the runway was. There wasn't any concrete. It was just all that pierced steel plating. And we were flying these big old four-engine C-124s off of that. We were only about eight miles from the demilitarized zone, so they issued us each a thirty-caliber carbine and gave us each one magazine of ammo. That was weird. Go up there on a maintenance stand and work on an airplane, and you carried your carbine with you all the time.

SLOAN: Well, I know we're running low on time but I want to ask you about--you were telling me about the Cuban Missile Crisis before we got on. And just--I know you were back--

WESSELS: Okay, yeah.

SLOAN: --in the States, if you could tell me a little bit about that.

WESSELS: Okay, I was--we were stationed at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. We got there in June of '62, and then that missile crisis happened in October. And all of the dependents that lived on the base--most of the--all of the wives and the children--they took their children, they went and camped out up in the mountains when it happened. This is on the twenty-second of October. And I called her brother in Boise, and he had his wife come down, pick Madeline [my 01:28:00wife] and the kids up, bring them back to Boise, because I had to stay on the base. And--because we had, like, we had thirty minutes warning if, in other words, if the Russians launched a missile at our base. And we were a prime target because we had those nuclear-armed B-47s and all of those--of course, the missile sites. They were about thirty miles out in the desert. But so Catherine [Karnowski, sister-in-law], she came and picked Madeline and the kids up and took them to Boise. And I stayed out on the flight line. And they brought us some cots out there to sleep on and some blankets. And they brought the chow out to us. So we were all cocked and ready to go.

SLOAN: Yeah, you said in fifteen minutes you could have got--been airborne--

WESSELS: We could have launched all of our--the whole fleet. All of our--all of our missiles and all of our bombers, yeah. We had to beat that thirty-minute time limit.

SLOAN: Well, I want to go back and just ask you a question about--because one of the reasons why we're here is the--the experience you had with those that came out of the slave camp there.

WESSELS: Yeah.

SLOAN: If you could talk just again about just the impressions you--do you remember your feelings from that period and your impressions?

WESSELS: Oh yeah. Yeah, I was--I mean--I was, you know, just completely amazed. I had never seen anybody that thin, skinny. I mean they looked terrible. Their cheeks were always sunken in and sores all over and the ragged clothes on. And 01:30:00then the squad leader, he said, "Come on, keep moving! Don't mingle! Keep moving, keep moving."

SLOAN: Yeah.

WESSELS: Well, that's what the squad leader was for.

SLOAN: I know it was hard to do that.

WESSELS: Yeah.

SLOAN: Yeah, you wanted to help them.

WESSELS: Because some of the guys, you know, wanted to give them K rations or something like that. And he says, "No, no, no, no. Don't give them anything." He said, "The rear echelon will take care of them." So that's what--and then the rest is history. (laughs)

SLOAN: Well, is there anything else I should have asked you about that we didn't get time to? I know you've got a commitment. I don't want to take too much of your time.

WESSELS: Oh, I can't think of anything else. We pretty well covered everything, all the ups and downs and the scary moments. The first--the first attack--when 01:31:00we first attacked, that was the scariest, actually. Your stomach was in knots, and sweating it out. Once we got moving then we felt a lot better. Then the squad leader, he told us--he said, "Well," he says, "If you survive the first twenty-four hours," he says, "You'll probably make it for a week. If you make it for a week," he says, "You'll probably survive for a month. And if you make it for a whole month," he says, "You might be able to last through the end of the war." So there wasn't any limit to the tour or anything. You were on the front--you were on the line until you either you got hit or killed, one or the other.

SLOAN: Yeah. So it was day by day.

WESSELS: Right.

SLOAN: Yeah, yeah.

WESSELS: So every morning you would jump up--except for when--like, when we were on the Maas River and when we were on the Rhine River we had the defensive positions. We got to rest up then and take it easy. Didn't have to dig any 01:32:00holes. We could just sleep. We figured if the Germans would shell that warehouse if they did spot us, they would probably fire eighty-eights into the first floor. So we slept on the second floor. And we didn't even bother to look up on the third floor of the place there. And I think a couple days before they crossed the Rhine, we finally went up and looked, and there were a whole bunch of barrels of wine up there. (DeBoard laughs) Yeah, the squad leader, he says, "I am not going to let those rear echelon SOBs have any of this!" And he took his Thompson sub and shot them all full of holes. Wine ran all over the place. (laughs)

SLOAN: You could have been enjoying that the whole time you were there.

WESSELS: Well, we did fill our canteens. (both laugh)

SLOAN: Well, Mr. Wessels, I want to thank you for your time today. And Robert and I want to thank you for your service.

WESSELS: Okay. Well, you're welcome. Haven't told all these war stories in a long time. (both laugh)

end of interview