A hitch in the cavalry, a court martial, and a tank named Ann-Marie
Part 1 of my interview with Lieutenant Bob Hagerty
When I spoke with one of Bob Hagerty’s sons, he said his father never talked with him about the war. So I sent him a transcript of my 1993 interview.
Cincinnati, June 12, 1993
Bob Hagerty: There’s something that just occurs to me, you know, maybe other people have expressed this to you, but there were really two kinds of personnel in the 712th Tank Battalion. You had those who were at Lockett and those who weren’t at Lockett.
Aaron Elson: Lockett was the cavalry?
Bob Hagerty: Lockett was the cavalry camp. And a guy who joined the battalion, like you quoted an officer who joined the battalion in Normandy, he wasn’t one of us. So there is that distinction. Maybe some people that you interviewed have brought that up. Because even though I was at Lockett, I was there a brief time, so I didn’t really qualify as a real cavalry man. The guys, the real cavalry guys, had been there so long they had a streak on their face where the strap, they’d wear the campaign hat kind of forward and then the strap would be cut under the nose. They wouldn’t do it under their chin, that was a rookie who did it under the chin, but some of these guys, they had a deep sunburn, all except for the strap, and they were proud of that look. That wasn’t an unusual, odd look that they wanted to conceal or explain or were embarrassed about. You were proud of that. That said you were out there; those guys would typically go out maybe on a couple-week campout, and they’d set up interdiction areas where Mexicans would come across the border. It was kind of a pitiful use of a good soldier to do border patrol, but that’s what they did some of at the time that I joined them.
Aaron Elson: How did you come to join them? Were you drafted or did you enlist?
Bob Hagerty: I was drafted right out of Norwood. In fact I went to Fort Collins, which was kind of a receiving area right across the river in Kentucky. I went to Fort Collins, you got a uniform, got some shots, got your hair cut, and pretty soon they published a list and your name was on it, and I happened to be sent out to Fort Riley, Kansas, which was of all places a horse cavalry replacement training center. I didn’t even know how to mount a horse. I didn’t know which side you mounted him on. I was afraid of horses to be honest with you. They’d snort, and when they’d throw that switch, you could picture that hoof just breaking your leg. We had guys in the basic training at Fort Riley, they just dissolved in tears, I'm telling you, all the manliness was stripped away, and these guys would say “Sergeant, I can’t do it.”
And he’ say, “Get in there!”
“Sergeant, I can’t do it.”
“Get in there and fight!” And he’d kind of shame you.
Aaron Elson: Were these city guys?
Bob Hagerty: I guess, part of it was that, because if you’ve ever been on a farm you had something to do with animals, and you wouldn’t have such an unreasonable fear of animals, but I can remember my own feelings. I had a fear of being kicked, and a fear of being thrown. When we were out riding, if we had riding, equitation they called it, we had that maybe an hour, maybe a couple of hours in a day, and I always had a notion to myself, whssht, of me going one way and the horse going the other way. And then at Camp Lockett, god, it was really severe at Lockett because there we were, Morse [Johnson] and I met each other at Fort Riley, I think he had enlisted in the service out of Washington, D.C., but he wound up in this basic training unit that I was assigned to at Fort Riley. So we were acquainted there, and he had a wonderful education, with Cornell, Harvard Law School and all that, working in a bureau of the government in Washington, so he could have chosen some cushy war production job or something, but he elected not to do that. But anyway, he was there in training at Fort Riley, then he was in the group that I was in that was sent to Lockett, and at Lockett they kind of had an amused look, “Fort Riley, huh?” They could quickly tell that you didn’t know a hell of a lot because you don’t get that in basic training. But one of the things they did at Lockett which was harsh, Aaron, they would have days when the riding might consist of exercising the horses, and we frequently didn’t have enough men available for that kind of exercise, but all the horses could be exercised, so you know what they did? They’d say, “Today we’re gonna ride one and lead two.” I mean, here you are, sitting on that horse, trying to keep your position and handle the reins correctly, then with this free hand, you’ve got two ropes, and each rope is coming off the bridle of a horse that you’re gonna be leading. God, and the horse you’re riding wants to go this way, and the crazy damn horses want to go this way, and the cavalry men, I don’t know how true this was, the cavalry men would say, I forget their exact expression, but to them, a guy who, say a soldier or cavalry man who let a led horse go was no cavalry man. They disdained that. But my thinking was, I’m supposed to let that horse drag me out of the saddle, and I meet the ground and get all bruised and banged, and what do I prove? How manly I am? And I was thinking, that only proves I’m crazy. And I thought, I don’t care if you think I’m gutless, I’ve got to deal with that, but this horse is not going to pull me out of the saddle. Some guys did get pulled out of the saddle. There might have been bets. If a horse decides to go one way and the other goes the other way, you know.
Aaron Elson: Did that ever happen to you, that you got pulled out of the saddle?
Bob Hagerty: I never let it happen. I let go of the rope first.
Aaron Elson: And you took a lot of heat for that?
Bob Hagerty: Oh, you took some heat for that. Because, like the sergeant for instance who might be in charge of that little exercise, when you bring the horses back to the barn, the sergeant has to okay the grooming. You need to call him over and say, I think his name was Fowler, say ‘Sergeant Fowler, my horse is ready.’ And he’d come over and feel underneath his barrel they called it, his legs, and he’d say ‘Not good enough.’ So you groom it some more. And Sergeant Fowler would look at the horse, ‘Not good enough.’ It was his way of getting back at you.
Morse, I remember somebody telling me, maybe he told me himself, that his folks had sent him to some kind of a camp out in the Western states, I guess to toughen him up or something when he was a young boy, and he learned how to ride horses and whatnot, and he wasn’t bragging about that, but he was comfortable around horses, and you could tell that. He was in charge; the horse wasn't.
But getting back to the start of this, the guys who were at Lockett, particularly early at Lockett, who went there in 1940 — I came into the Army in January of ’42 — those guys had a two-year jump on me and a two-year jump on Johnson, and I don’t mean that they learned a hell of a lot because the war hadn’t begun until December of ’41, so these guys had about 18 months in the service before any war was declared. So there probably wasn’t a sense of urgency in their training at that time; they did a lot of things over and over again. I can remember a, funny it seemed, they just had this little encampment, and the battalion was there, and up on a little hill, kind of behind where the barracks were, they had a, I forget what they called it, not the Beer Tank because we weren't tankers at that time, but it was a place where you could drink after hours; I mean soft drinks and they had some beer up there. But when a fellow was promoted, if he went from private to Pfc., one stripe, it was a big deal, because there were a hell of a lot of privates and not many Pfc’s. So you can imagine how significant it was when Jule Braatz, who was drafted like all the other guys, when Jule Braatz at Lockett was made corporal. Some of them were there years and years without being promoted; they took that pretty hard. “A bleepin’ rookie makin’ corporal? And me, who reenlisted and reenlisted and reenlisted,” of course he’s not as skilled as Braatz and he’s not as smart as Braatz, and he never will catch up with Braatz. But what I was going to tell you was, at this old beer shack, you’d wet ’em down, they called it, and when you got promoted you’d better either have some money or borrow some money because the guys were drinking on you that night. And this wetting down, that was like a religious ceremony. You couldn’t say I’m not gonna wet ’em down. Oh no, you couldn’t do that. And of course you wouldn’t be inclined to, because this was your night, when you wet ’em down. Then later on Braatz made sergeant. That really set ’em off. But again, the guy was good. He was damn good. He just had a knack for getting the best out of people. [Jule Braatz was the platoon sergeant my father, Lieutenant Maurice Elson, reported to in Normandy as the replacement for Braatz’s platoon leader, Lieutenant George Tarr, who was killed on July 3, 1944.]
Morse and I had been at Fort Riley, and when the training period ended, like 13 weeks or whatever it was, you expected to be shipped out. About everybody’s name got on a list to go somewhere, but just a few names didn’t appear, and among those few were Morse Johnson and Bob Hagerty. Jeez, where are we headed, I wondered. Then, it turned out, the first sergeant told us that based on considerations, the captain decided he wanted to hold us over to help with the training of the new increment coming in. “All right,” he says, “let me see. You're [rated ] as being training,” so meaning I had some free time and whatever, it sounded pretty nice.
So Morse and I had two 13-week periods instead of one. And a lot of what you did that second 13 weeks at Riley was by way of helping in the training of the brand new men. Often maybe the principal activity that morning might be the company falls out, form ranks and so forth, everybody’s present and accounted for, and then we march off somewhere. And I’d be in charge of the group. Maybe there’d be a hundred guys on the road, and maybe Morse might be in charge another day. But these guys, they’d be marching, you can’t march them like a bunch of cattle. This guy’s out of step and this guy’s out of step and this guy’s talking and nobody gives a damn, now you don’t even look like a military unit. You can’t have that. Especially with rookies. So you try to have precise commands. And I got to where I could really be heard. Or you know you’d get ’em prepared for a left turn or this or that. And I got a big kick out of that. I can control this group. I mean, there wasn’t anybody gonna challenge me and say “I don’t like the way you give commands.” They have to do it the way I say do it.
When Morse and I got out to Lockett, we’d only been there a couple days I think, and the principal noncommissioned officer outside of the first sergeant was the ranking what you might call field sergeant, and it was Ace Fisher. [I would eventually conduct a lengthy interview with Ken Fisher]. He was a longtime veteran in the peacetime army. Here he was, we’d entered the war, he’s in it for the duration, and he had to deal with raw rookies like myself and Johnson and other people, and that’s all part of soldiering, whether you like it or not, some of that has to be, but I remember shortly after Morse and I arrived at Lockett, the first sergeant, he’s like every sergeant, he's overworked and underpaid, and here you guys show up on the train, now he’s got to deal with finding you a place in the barracks and so on. So he told us which barracks, so we dragged our stuff over there, big duffel bags and everything, we’re sitting on a bed chatting, and an officer walked in. And of course, having in mind our experience at Fort Riley, we jumped off the beds and Ten-Hut! And this lieutenant said, “We don't do that here.”
Let me tell you about Fisher, Aaron. Fisher was a guy who’d been in the Army long enough that he knew what to do, and he knew damn well he knew it, and he knew that you knew it, and you don’t take on anybody like Fisher. But anyway, he must have decided, these guys are here, and most of the company’s out in the field on some border patrol, maybe they’re gonna be gone a week, two weeks, but you want the people who are still in camp, there are always some of those, it’s necessary to have some kind of drills or this or that, you go out and ride the horses. But Fisher was drilling us his idea, and I had one idea of drilling at Fort Riley, but Fort Riley’s a lot of fun, when you get a unit marching along and they’re marching along and then you say turn left and you’ve got ’em moving and there’s some energy, they’re beginning to feel like they’re a unit, they know how to march together and so forth. We did a lot of that at Fort Riley. So here we are out there with Fisher, and I guess he was on his throne, and I don’t know if I was first or not, but he must have said, “You take charge.” So this I liked, I felt comfortable doing. And I could see Fisher over on the side like “This is a drill now, boy.” Whenever I’d come in, and he was good enough to say “Good job, fella, good job,” I got a big kick out of that.
Then later, I think Fisher was always the type of guy, they were trying to figure the right place to use him, because he had a lot of skills, and when the war was moving along, we were pushing the Germans back but there was still heavy combat while we were catching up to them, there was no doubt about who was going to win the war. At that time, Fisher must have been with either Headquarters Company or Service Company, and he’d bring the truck caravan up. This is duty I would least like, because lots of times you're bringing that up under cover of darkness, and you look at a map, and if map reading isn’t one of your strengths, you could very well get on the wrong road, and then find it awfully difficult to come back, you know, where do you turn off a mud road, so he had this bringing the gas trucks up, the ammunition truck, and maybe some food if it was necessary. Then he’d bring up the mail if there was any. He was always welcome; when you saw Fisher, he could tell you what’s going on. Is Braatz out of the hospital, or this or that, you’d get some news of what was going on with people. And he was quite welcome. And the thing that I liked about him was he had this degree of self-confidence. If the map said you do this and do this you’d wind up here where you want to be, and here he comes, and his trucks with just the blackout lights on, and it had to be hairy because those trucks, and Fisher in his jeep leading the trucks. It was a tough job. Now if a guy who’s up there trying to knock out German tanks, he maybe doesn’t see it as a tough job, but it seemed to me that Fisher deserved a lot of credit. And I’ve seen him only at a few reunions; he doesn't come often, but when I see him, I’m glad to see him, because to me, he did his job very well. Now some of these guys who come, like the guy who was the chairman at Harrisburg, Joe Fetsch, he was a driver, and god, he had the toughest job next to Fisher, getting out driving where he’s supposed to be.
Aaron Elson: That amazed me, because he’s such a happy go lucky guy. I asked him what he did and he said he drove a gasoline truck.
Bob Hagerty: Do you know how heavy that gasoline is, Aaron, those five gallon cans? God, that is heavy. And to wrestle with those today, tomorrow, every day, boy, he was a good man. I think that was the nice thing about the battalion, that there was respect for whatever your job was. Like Robert Harris, I don’t think you ever met Robert Harris ...
Aaron Elson: No.
Bob Hagerty: He was a bank clerk, and you can imagine the kind of fellow in your mind that would be a bank clerk. Anyway, he knew how to type, and that almost ordained what he was gonna do in the service. So he wound up as the company clerk. And he liked to drink. He sometimes drank way too much. But he had an ability to mimic, not people who were nearby or contemporary, but he could do Peter Lorre, or Humphrey Bogart, or others who were targets for mimicry. But this Harris, inasmuch as he could type he winds up as a company clerk. He was small, his shoulders were about that wide, but he made up in humor what he didn’t have in size. And he was fun to be with. What I'm going to tell you, that being the company clerk often meant that he had to be all the way back at battalion headquarters, where all the reports were made, after action reports and this or that had to be typed. It was a surprise, you know, you go a mile behind the lines and you think Where in the hell is the war? I mean, all these damn guys eating hot food? And they’re dressed nicely and they look like their uniforms have been laundered recently. Harris was back there, and if you haven’t been up, you don't realize what a strain that puts on a guy. Because he would come up like with the payroll, and I think maybe part of the routine was that you had to sign for your pay to show that you got it, and that was necessary at least on payday. I suppose you didn’t get any money at all, it was all going home in allotments, but there was still something to be done. So Harris would come up with the payroll, and if you’d been up front for a while you just have a sense of what that noise is that you’re hearing is, if it’s close or not, it’s gonna land way back there, you don’t wince at every noise. But Harris winced at everything. Or he was diving for cover or clutching his helmet or something, and you’d kind of laugh and say, “Bob...Robert...Robert, for god’s sake...”
“Yeah, you can say that,” he said, “but I’m scared,” and you didn’t mind. He was a lot of fun, a great guy. He loved Morse. He just thought Morse was terrific.
Aaron Elson: Now Morse, with all that education, he was a private ...
Bob Hagerty: When he went in. He didn’t use his credentials to come out with a nice, he could have been judge advocate’s department, or something easy. He could have had it made. I don’t think that means that the other side of the coin is true, that he wanted combat above all, that kind of thing. I don’t think Morse would say that. He said, no, I just didn’t want any favors. Whatever happens happens. But he was a good man. And the guys, you know, they loved to banter with him because he could really make you use the gifts god gave you. You’d get into a discussion with him about philosophy or sociology or this or that. The guy was so widely read, you couldn’t say “Well, I nailed Johnson tonight.” The best you could say was you almost held your own.
In fact, the colonel, Kedrovsky, who just died, when the war ended we were at a place called Amberg, a permanent type garrison the Germans had used, and they had nice facilities, extremely nice facilities. One building you almost knew right away it was an officers club, and we ate dinner on linen. This is so neat, I mean a month ago all the grubby stuff we’re eating out of a can, and here we’re eating on linen. And there was never any hurry; in an officers’ mess the cooks or whomever can’t come out and say “Okay fellas, clear out,” they’re gonna lose their job. So there was none of that shoving out the door. And consequently if we got into a long discussion about something, so I didn’t realize we were getting an audience, but one time, some orders came out, you know, orders might come out any day for any reason, but this particular time orders had come out with Kedrovsky’s signature that the following named personnel will be a member of the court martial board. And I couldn’t believe it. I mean, there’s Johnson’s name on there, and I think the trial judge advocate, he’d be the prosecutor, and who's the defense counsel? Robert Hagerty.
I couldn’t believe it. I went to Kedrovsky. I said, “Do you realize what you’ve done here? Here’s a highly trained advocate and you're telling me to represent defendants against his skills.”
He said, “You won’t have any trouble. I've listened to you guys argue in the mess. Now you’re just going to be arguing for me.” At the time I thought, that was an onerous assignment.
Aaron Elson: Now tell me, did you actually preside over court martials after the war was ... what sort of things would people be court martialed for?
Bob Hagerty: Stealing. Stealing government property. One guy stole a jeep, disappeared, but it was found. Drunkenness. Assaulting an officer. We dealt with some pretty serious matters. There’s a different level of court for different crimes, like we couldn’t try a man for murder. He had to go before I think you call that a general court martial. And ours, I’m not sure of the name, I think it might have been called special. But within our limits, we didn’t lack for defendants. One guy, he’s been written up in the other bulletin that O'Riley puts out, this guy, he’s now deceased I believe, when he was alive he was frequently communicating with the executive secretary of the 712th, and I used to get a big kick out of reading, “Everett said this, or Everett said that” because Everett was a pain in the ass. When the war was on and we had these courts martial, I think I defended him three times. Once as we were getting on the boat to leave France, we’re going home, I mean the whole thing is over. You’re gonna be back with your family, all the people who love you, what could be sweeter? Jesus, what could be sweeter? And this turd, he couldn’t even control himself under this condition. And here he is communicating...
Aaron Elson: What sort of things, what offenses was he charged with?
Bob Hagerty: As I remember, I think his first offense was he took a jeep without authority. He must have just run through the gate, disobeyed the person who was trying to sign him out. And then he was away without leave because he didn’t come back the same day. In fact he was shacking up somewhere with a person, I don’t know whether it’s a German or a displaced person of other nationality. He must have been away about three days. Then the other thing I remember particularly about him was when we went to Marseilles to prepare to ship out, there were passes to allow you to go into Marseilles, and the word was put out that Marseilles was a tough place, and if you were looking for trouble you’d sure find it down there, but remember, you’re going home, don’t get yourself messed up. We were only in Marseilles a short time, and I got a call one morning that my friend had been brought in by the MPs. What did he do? He struck an officer in the performance of his duty. Now you’ve got to be nuts to do that, because that’s serious. And the officer happened to be a member of a unit that was shipping out, and we couldn’t convene a trial right away. You can’t do it on the spot, you have to have depositions and all that. So the only way that this officer could help us in the prosecution, or help Morse in the prosecution, was to be allowed to make a deposition.
Here, Everett is in camp, he’s under arrest, and this officer, when I went to visit him for his deposition, he had a huge bandage around his head, that covered his ear, and I learned that his ear was partially severed, he was hit so hard. And I got the deposition and Morse got what he needed and then this officer was allowed to ship out with his unit, because he was on a boat and heading home before the trial was ever convened.
The funny part about that, of course it seems funny now, it wasn’t so funny then, but what struck me was that the judgment of the court martial — Clegg Caffery was the officer in charge, he’s the presiding judge, and there were several other ranking officers from our battalion that were members of the court, but the judgment of the court, I guess was announced by Caffery, it so incensed Kedrovsky that he fired the entire board.
Aaron Elson: What was the judgment? What did they do to him?
Bob Hagerty: He largely got off.
Aaron Elson: And the officer he struck, was he a 712th officer?
Bob Hagerty: No, he was some unit we didn’t know anything about. It just happened to be a unit shipping through, there were thousands of soldiers in that Marseilles area. I don’t remember the particulars now, because I was really in a quandary.
Tape 1, Side 2
Bob Hagerty: The defendant had elected not to take the stand, and in the case of my friend Everett, he could have been the world’s worst witness putting him on the stand, and by keeping him off the stand, I deny Morse the opportunity to cut him up on the stand, and then further than that, you can take the other witnesses and you kind of learned this pretty quickly, you can take the other witnesses and the more positive they are, the more likely it is that you can find a chink in their story. Like I think the principal MP, the principal eyewitness who saw the blow struck, he wasn’t six feet or ten feet away or fifteen feet away from where Everett threw this punch, he was all the way across the street, in the time of dusk. And pretty soon, if you keep after him within the limits the court will permit, you can get him to say something like maybe. Then he begins to hedge. So it did present a dilemma to the court, because within the limits of what I could do, I was making the most of it, or so I thought at the time. And so did Caffery. Everett was obviously away without leave. He was there in Marseilles after the curfew hour, there was no question about the fact that he was guilty of some element of the charge. But was he the man who struck the officer or was it another? There had to be a question mark there with that. So I guess what happened was Everett was not guilty of the more serious charge but guilty of the lesser charge.
I was real glad we got on the boat because I thought if I’m never gonna see Everett again, this is really neat. But that’s probably part of peacetime service, all this stuff that goes on, that happens because people are being people.
I remember that I was so concerned when this first trial was coming up, god, I got the manuals on court martial procedure, and I read too much, I couldn't remember whether it said this way or this way, and I had visions of Johnson cutting me up. Not because he took delight in it, but because he had that skill. And then when, I think the colonel was sitting back, saying, “Boy, I made some pretty good appointments there,” until he got a decision he didn’t like, then "whsssht," You’re all unemployed.
Aaron Elson: What was he like, Colonel Kedrovsky?
Bob Hagerty: I would say, my notion of him, Aaron, was that he really worked at his job. For instance I can remember, I don't know why it sticks in my mind, but we were I think somewhere in England, and the battalion commander left it to Kedrovsky, who was second in command at the time, he was a major, he left it to Kedrovsky to do things like drilling the whole battalion in preparation for some battalion ceremony, and I can recall Kedrovsky coming out, and there might have been an order published that A Company would lead, followed by B, followed by C, but it was interesting to watch Kedrovsky be in charge of this because he had mastered every move that A Company was supposed to make, and B, and C, and D, and consequently, he knew your job as well or better than you knew it, and if there was any indecision or whatever, he could say “Captain Cozzens...” He didn't try to show anybody up, but he was just good at doing the job he was there to do. And when the battalion commander, he was really a sick guy ...
Aaron Elson: This was this Whitside Miller?
Bob Hagerty: Yeah. But when he was relieved they didn't move Kedrovsky up. It could have been done, but they sent in this new man, [George] Randolph, and then fortunately for us Randolph turned out to be a first-rate soldier, and right at home in a combat situation.
Aaron Elson: Was it Kedrovsky who Whitside Miller ordered to double time in front of the whole battalion, or at the parade grounds, some ceremony?
Bob Hagerty: That was another officer, not Kedrovsky. I’ve forgotten the guy’s name now. I think he was a major, too.
Aaron Elson: Baxter Davis.
Bob Hagerty: He was made to look like a horse’s ass, you know, that was a terrible thing to do.
Aaron Elson: What were the circumstances? Because I don’t have a military background, often I’ll hear something three or four times before I realize that it’s, like this Baxter Davis having been ordered to double time, the first time it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary. But a couple people have said it was such a terrible thing for him to order his ...
Bob Hagerty: I mean, to show him up, you know, in front of everybody. An officer doesn’t do that to a fellow officer, or as a commander you don’t do that to your second in command, because he’s holding him up to ridicule. I mean, how is that man going to function the next time he’s commanding somebody to do something. I remember Kedrovsky saying that to me, though, he came up, he would come up once in a while, when you were in combat, or maybe if you had a little temporary period where you were out of contact, and might have a day or two to wash clothes or something, and he came up on one of those occasions, I think I’d already been commissioned in February, the war was nearly over, I guess it wasn’t so long after, he came up maybe sometime in March or April, and we were talking, and the other guys were talking, there was a free give and take, I mean it wasn’t real strict. You have an officer, you don’t talk unless I say talk, there was none of that; it was all very casual. In fact, the officers didn’t wear the emblems, because that was thought to be an invitation for somebody who could see it. But anyway, he’s up there visiting, and we were having this conversation, and he said, “Lieutenant, come over here, I want to speak to you.”
I got over where he was kind of separated from the men, and he was commenting on the way the men were dressed. He said it’s fine to be friends, but the time’s gonna come when they’re going to react instantly what you want them to do, and you’ve, you know, created a relationship that doesn’t produce that instant action. You could regret that. I want you to think about that.
Because before I was commissioned, some guys called me Bob of course, like Morse or Sam MacFarland, but an awful lot of guys called me Hag. The supply sergeant at the time was Charlie Vinson, then he later became first sergeant, and he always said Hag this and Hag that, which was all right, I didn’t mind that, but Kedrovsky didn’t think that was very smart of me. Maybe it wasn’t. He was an officer, but he came in early, well before Pearl Harbor. I think when you’re an enlisted man for a good amount of time you tend to separate the officers from those who have some stars and those who don’t, and you kind of think of yourself as being more knowledgeable than you are. So there was probably merit to what Kedrovsky was saying. And not reason not to consider this was good advice.
I remember, I don't know why it pops into my mind, but one of the last actions of the war, you know, when you were actually firing at them, being fired on, guys being hit, hurt, whatever, I think almost my whole crew was injured, and I had to take another man’s tank actually, then carry on with the infantry. Remember Herman Pascione, you didn’t know Herman? I think that day he might have been my platoon sergeant, and my tank was disabled, and my crew was largely disabled, and I told Herman I’m going to take your tank and your crew, and see if you can get a jeep and take these guys back and get another tank. But the action was such that my tank was first, and then a fellow named Harrington, he was the sergeant in charge of the second tank, and the one German gun hit both Harrington and me. It was kind of strange.
Aaron Elson: One shot?
Bob Hagerty: No. It hit us separately. But our intention was, we had come down, say, Kincaid Road, and we were told that there was a farmhouse in which there were a number of Germans just down this side road. And the infantry made a little detour, we made a little detour, and I think we fired a few shots in this barn, and the Germans came out with their hands up. So the infantry got them flushed out and got them started back toward the rear, and that action was apparently over with, so then we were going to go back onto the main road, such as it was, and I pulled out first, and we had our hatches open, you know, after the little firefight. We pulled up to the road, Harrington came behind me, he pulled on the road, first thing you know, somebody hollered “We were hit!” and I went back and Harrington’s tank was smoking. It was all so fast, and this German was off the road in a little wooded path. He had laid his gun I guess on that little junction, and when he saw something he fired. And we didn’t find out until later, that was a disabled German tank up there, couldn’t move the tank so he decided to make somebody pay. And he did. And in the action, Harrington’s driver was killed, and one of the first vehicles that came up behind the column, it was just tanks and infantry, a jeep came up and the chaplain was in the jeep. Normally he wasn’t up front, looking for action. I don’t know why he came there that time, but anyway, he arrived, and he said, “I’m glad to see you.” Because I said, “Yeah,” I said, “You know, Shannon didn’t make it.”
He says, “I know, but you did.” Like that was more important. It was a strange thing to say. But you didn’t often have men killed inside the tank; it didn’t happen a lot. I think in the case of Harrington’s tank, it might have been the same shell, you see, Shannon was driving with his head out. We didn't think at the moment that we were in danger. We’d just cleaned out that danger, so he’s driving with his head out, and the shell that hit Shannon broke the leg of his loader. But an armor piercing shell has got a hell of a lot of velocity, it’s going to do some harm, because it was already rattling around in the tank.
I never did go back to the chaplain and say, “What made you say that?” But what made it sad, though, was this must have been, I'll bet it was within a week of the war ending, and the Germans were giving up right and left. You’d see huge groups of them being marched to the rear. It was obvious that their back was broken. It was only a matter of making it official, and this Shannon was a married guy, he had children. It seems such a sad thing, for him. He had been a replacement. I don't know how long he’d been with us, but he’d been with us long enough that there was a lot of good feeling toward him.
And the captain told me to write the letter, which was customary, and you don’t expect to get an answer or an acknowledgment or anything like that. You try to stress the fact he was a brave man doing what he had to do.
Aaron Elson: The captain at that point was Ellsworth Howard, or Ed Forrest?
Bob Hagerty: I think it might have been George Cozzens.
Aaron Elson: Oh, Cozzens would have taken over for Forrest after he was killed?
Bob Hagerty: No. See, Forrest never became company commander. So I think the rotation was Merrill at the outset, and then he was injured, and I think maybe [Ellsworth] Howard took over for a period. He was injured. Then I think it was [Lester] O’Riley, who didn’t have a whole lot of combat experience, but O’Riley might have been next in the rotation, and then after the Bulge and whatnot, I don’t think O’Riley was injured, I think they just made a replacement of him, for whatever reason. Back in headquarters you don’t know what’s going on with them, but I think they decided to remove O’Riley into some administrative job, and then I believe the next person to come aboard was Cozzens. And Cozzens I think lasted through the end of the war, because I know he was our captain when we were in Amberg, in the barracks situation.
Aaron Elson: Okay, so now you said that Cozzens asked you to write the letter ...
Bob Hagerty: About Shannon. Otherwise all that stuff would fall on Cozzens and that wouldn’t have been fair, because he wouldn’t even have known the man that closely. It’s within the platoon that the guys closely knew. Well, I was looking at, you probably read it Aaron, a book called Battalion Surgeon...
Aaron Elson: Somebody just lent that to me. I've been reading it. I’m about halfway through. Jack Sheppard in fact loaned it to me.
Bob Hagerty: Boy, they died in bunches, didn’t they?
Aaron Elson: The infantry?
Bob Hagerty: Just imagine, if you’re gonna try to take possession of that garage back there, and the Germans have guns trained on that driveway, and the only way you’re gonna get that garage is if you can absorb a hell of a lot of casualties to take it. That’s about what it amounts to. And some of your casualties would be gruesome, horrible kinds of wounds, disfiguring wounds. But that’s what the infantry pays to take a given piece of territory. The tanker’s got it easy, when you stop to think about it, with all that armor around you. Every once in a while he gets hit by something that can pierce the armor, but it isn’t often. The guy in the tank has got a far different job than the guy out there on the ground. So talk about infantry, if he lives through that assault there’s another one after it, and another one, and another one. It’s terrible. And you see their bodies all over the place. But again, that’s the role the infantry plays, to take ground, occupy ground.
Aaron Elson: And yet, a few people have said that the infantry wouldn’t want to be inside the tank for anything.
Bob Hagerty: They don’t feel comfortable there. It’s intimidating to them. All that machinery and whatever.
Aaron Elson: They called them rolling coffins, somebody said.
Bob Hagerty: If they get hit, it can be pretty bad. I think a guy, I don’t know whether it was B Company or C Company or somebody new, one day he was out with an infantry unit that was surprised, I think, by German armor that they didn’t think was there, but I believe the platoon he lost four of his tanks, a number of guys killed. [this likely was C Company’s first platoon, which lost four tanks and nine men killed on July 10, 1944] It was gruesome. it could be a coffin I guess, given the circumstances. But it could also take a hell of a lot of small arms fire.
I felt comfortable, but at the same time [I didn’t envy] the infantry what they had, and do you know how cold they were, how miserable? Every time you stop you try to dig a foxhole against that unyielding ground. Then you’d pull up somewhere around morning because you’re gonna kick off, do something, and here are these guys with frost all over their beards, and the snot freezing on their faces. About all they can get to sustain them is hot water and a little Nescafe or something. I guess, really, that’s why so much of wartime literature is on the light side. You can’t just go page after page describing gore and pain.
“I’d go to reunions and it was like walking into history.”
Aaron Elson: Surprisingly enough, a lot of books, like Battalion Surgeon do, although that was privately published. I haven't read a lot of books about the war, but I guess they intersperse it with the light stuff. That’s what I love about the 712th; there’s so much light stuff interspersed with some of the terrible things, that it really gives a different perspective. And sometimes I say to myself, why am I doing this? I started out, I just went to try to find out a little bit more about what my father had done. I’d go to reunions and it was like walking into history. I don't think there’s anything like it in terms of capturing some of these accounts, and I just, the AARP, the magazine, they just did a big feature, they asked readers to send in their war experiences, and they got a thousand responses, and they printed a few of them, and the accounts that they printed, some were colorful, some were gruesome, but they didn’t come close to some of the stories that I’ve heard at the reunions and in some of these interviews. I think it’s gonna be a hell of a book if I ever find someone to print it. But I’m not too worried about it. I think sooner or later ...
Bob Hagerty: It’ll connect.
Aaron Elson: Yes. But in the meantime, I don't want to wait to connect before, like Colonel Kedrovsky, it’s too late, a year ago I thought, gee, I'd like to interview Kedrovsky, and at the last reunion I learned that he was really ill, and then Tony D'Arpino lent me a videotape of the memorial service at Fort Knox, which I didn’t go to, where he gave his speech, and it was really touching.
Bob Hagerty: It was a good talk. I was very glad that he was agreeable to come, because there’d been so many invitations which he didn’t accept, for years. You know, here we are reunion after reunion, is Kedrovsky here? No. Is he coming? No. For the reason, usually not a real good reason you’d call valid, and you’d wonder, what’s it gonna take to get the man to show up? Or does he want to show up? This was the outfit, he was the leader, he went from lieutenant to lieutenant colonel, he’s got to be proud of what he accomplished, and why doesn’t he come and rejoice with us? But I guess he had his reasons, whatever they were. But happily he did show up for the one that really mattered. I think Sam MacFarland had to do a lot of pushing and shoving to get him to come to that one.
Aaron Elson: Did you get a chance to look at the list? Was Sam Cropanese in your platoon?
Bob Hagerty: I don’t think he was. I could say he was A Company but I don't think...
Aaron Elson: Steve Krysko, was he in yours?
Bob Hagerty: He wasn’t in mine. There was a guy named Hostler I think.
Aaron Elson: Mike DePippo, was he? They must have been in a different platoon. I haven’t interviewed Mike DePippo, but Steve Krysko, he was in Amberg after the war.
Bob Hagerty: I remember him, a tall blond fellow.
Aaron Elson: He edited the Tank Tracks [the battalion newsletter], I think he did.
Bob Hagerty: There was a little guy that he hung with, short stature, muscular, I think somewhere along the way, maybe before we went into combat in Europe, this guy asked for a transfer and got into an airborne unit, and he found his niche with those airborne guys, like you say in your book, they carry long knives, they kill quietly, but my recollection is this fellow and Krysko, I won’t say this, you know, I always thought they had a relationship. It could happen, it happens all the time, they come out of the closet nowadays, they march and they protest and whatever. At that time, it was much less common; I think it was carefully concealed or something because they desired not to make waves. I guess you’d get a pretty good argument as to the soldierly effectiveness of a man who has those sexual preferences. How good is he? Would you like to have him for backup?
Aaron Elson: That's interesting. Krysko lives in the same building in New York that I lived in for years. I just met him. I saw his name in the roster book, so I called him up, I thought they put my address under the wrong person. I lived there for twenty years, so one day I looked up Krysko and he’s been in the building for 35 years. We must have passed each other in the hallway dozens of times.
Bob Hagerty: What did he do, did he share that with you?
Aaron Elson: He worked for American Express. He recently retired. But he was like an assistant to the president. He traveled all over the world.
Bob Hagerty: Did he have family?
Aaron Elson: No, I don't think he ever married. And he said he was ill a couple of years ago; he had I think Epstein-Barr, and he thought he was going to die, and he threw away everything except the little battalion history book. He had a lot of photos. He threw them away. He wanted to make things easier for his sister if he passed away.
[In 2012 I received the following email from Steve Krysko’s niece, informing me of his passing:]
* * *
Aaron Elson: I wanted to ask you, you said you sent home a photo of yourself standing in front of a tank with the name Ann-Marie. Do you remember that? You told me at the Harrisburg reunion.
Bob Hagerty: That incident involved my father’s mother, my grandmother. She had a number of children, many of whom she lost, childbirth, or smallpox or diphtheria or whatnot, and I think she actually raised three boys including my father and two girls. One of them died at the age of 16. But of the two girls who survived, one’s name was Ann, the other was Marie. And it happened after the war ended, they tried to keep us busy with things, you know, make you combat ready because the thought was, you could very well be shipped to the Pacific and be included in the invasion of Japan, so it wasn’t like we were wasting time out there. And they had a big, like a maneuver area, you could practice skills that would be necessary in combat. I can’t think of the name now, of course an outstanding German name like Wappenburg, or some name like that. But that was a huge maneuver area where you could go and practice. And at one point there, there was a fellow named Medich, Joe Medich, he was a huge man, but anyway Joe had this tank and he was taking some pictures one day, and I think I was standing alongside his tank just balancing on my elbow, and his tank was named by him for whatever reason, and it had printed on it Ann-Marie. And he took my picture alongside his tank and later gave me a copy, and I must have sent it on home, and my father ultimately showed it to my grandmother, and she said “Praise be to God, the boy has named the tank after the girls!” She just assumed that immediately, no one said otherwise, and she was delighted about it. She never got to tell me about it because she died before I got home. But that little mistake gave her a lot of pleasure.