A novena, deja vu, and a battlefield commission

Part 2 of my 1993 interview with Lieutenant Bob Hagerty

Bob Hagerty, front row, left, with other officers from A Company, 712th Tank Battalion at Amberg, Germany, after the end of the war in Europe.

For Part 1, click here

Aaron Elson: And you also said that your mother did a novena.

Bob Hagerty: A novena lasts nine days, or nine intervals, nine weeks, I’m sure it was nine days. And a novena is usually timed to end on a day that’s significant in the life of the person you’re praying for. So she was I think having a nine-day novena in honor of St. Ann, who's the mother of the blessed virgin. St. Ann’s feast day is when the novena would end, and her point, whatever it is that you’re praying for, might be realized. And again it might not. No is also an answer, you know, as they say. But in Mother’s case, she was praying I think for my safety, and the safety of my two brothers who were both in the war. She had a lot to pray for. And on the day the novena ended she and my sister, who was living at home at the time, were going to Mass in a nearby church, and they came back from church, and they’d barely put their garments away and were getting ready for breakfast, when the doorbell rang and it was a telegram from the War Department telling them that I’d been injured. No more details than that. But coming on the very day the novena ended, the hoped for results had been far different. She had to confront this telegram, and all the questions that it raised. I think it might have said slightly wounded, or severely wounded, which could be amputation of a leg, so slightly wounded doesn’t sound quite so bad. But yet I can’t rush into print and say “Mom, here’s the real story” because it won’t get through the censor, you know, if you're being too specific you might give away where your outfit is located. But I think I told you what the circumstances were. I had a peculiar situation come about. I was operated on in France, and as soon as I could travel I was put on a plane that just had wooden planks to sit on, and this plane took off and I could look out the window and see the Channel, and it was such a picture to see England from the air; I'd never seen that, and all these beautifully bordered fields, some are very small, I guess a guy’s back yard, with all the hedges around it, and it was just such a beautiful sight, and the plane was just kind of rocking along and then pretty soon it began to come down for a landing, and I thought, “This looks familiar. Why does it look familiar?” And soon we were on the ground, they opened the doors, helped us out, and there was an ambulance nearby. And I got into an ambulance about the last person in it, so I could look out the back windows of the ambulance door. I knew I’d been here before. And it developed it was landing in the area that we trained in in England, it was called Swindon. And the barracks that we had lived in and had vacated only recently, those barracks had been converted for the use of kind of a reception hospital. And that’s where they were taking us, to the very barracks that we had left. And I remember, I got my dressing changed and the nurse gave me a bath. I guess maybe I got some clean clothes, and they took us from there, put us on a train to go further inland to some convalescent hospital I guess you might call it. But I was so struck by the fact of landing in the very area that we had left.

Aaron Elson: Was that your hand, the turret hatch fell on your hand?

Bob Hagerty: Uh-huh.

Aaron Elson: That happened in France?

Bob Hagerty: Right at the beginning, what they called the assault on the island...

Aaron Elson: Seves Island?

Bob Hagerty: Whatever that island was, it was a prominence of water that had been drained away, isolated us, a donut or something. But we had, I think we just started that very morning firing over the infantry; presumably we’d soften up the area. As it turned out it was a real costly failure. We never did chase the Germans off that island, and they killed a lot of our people, and wounded a lot of our people, I mean our people, infantry, in addition to some tankers we lost there. But one peculiar thing, when I got injured, the aid station was up ahead, and there was stuff flying all around us. I felt very uneasy about leaving the tank.

[In an earlier post, I suggested that Bob Hagerty’s injury, from the tank commander’s hatch slamming down on his hand or his fingers, caused him to miss taking part in the three-tank patrol Lieutenant Ed Forrest led for three miles behind enemy lines, when they had to shoot their way back. But that had to take place in early July of 1944, and the assault on Seves Island (where my father was wounded the first time) was near the end of July. A tank platoon had two sections, with three tanks in the first section and two in the second, and Hagerty either was in the second section or did take part in the patrol and just didn’t recall it as he was involved in so many dramatic actions over the next ten months.]

Tape 2, Side 1

Aaron Elson ... Doc Reiff?

Bob Hagerty: Only that he was the battalion medical detachment, and I see him at reunions. But I didn’t have contact with him. We didn’t work together. We don’t have any reason to be in touch with each other. I mean, the medics, it’s kind of difficult, your relationship with him, maybe you'd have a once a month checkup to see if you had caught a veneral disease or something like that, and that wasn’t anything very delightful. And yet he’s conducting this medical exam. It was onerous to us because the assumption is there, you know, you’ve gone out and done something stupid, and furthermore you concealed it, etc., and now we’re gonna find it.

Aaron Elson: When did you rejoin the battalion after you recovered?

Bob Hagerty: It was a long time. I would say I was injured in July, and I know it was after Thanksgiving when I came back, maybe closer to Christmas, because a lot of the fighting, the breakout, the race across France, the fighting at Metz, even that had been recently concluded, and the battalion, maybe not the entire battalion but I know A Company, was in kind of a fallback position. Maybe the regiment they supported might have been temporarily off the line, because we supported a whole regiment, so the 358th might have been off the line, because when I came back, they sent a jeep or something up to the replacement depot; they’d got word that I was out there, and here we’d been promised that you’d go back to your outfit if you were wounded, and I think as a morale factor they weren’t sure that we knew that. You weren’t gonna be shanghaied into some outfit you had no knowledge of. So my outfit knew I was there, they sent a jeep up and brought me back, and all of a sudden, look at these guys four months after, and I’m hearing war stories about what George Colton did, and I'm thinking, “George? George Colton? The guy who worked in the library? The dainty, sweet, pardon me kind of fellow? You're gonna tell me about George’s heroism?”

Aaron Elson: Do you remember what the story was?

Bob Hagerty: I think it was probably that night, you know, when the German tanks stumbled into our bivouac? Morse was there. and he knows that story better than I do because I wasn’t there but George Colton was decorated for that particular night. [This would have been Sept. 8, 1944, at Mairy, France. [More about this in a future Substack, although George Colton’s action has not come up in my interviews.]It struck me as odd because George was so sensitive and gentle. He wouldn’t say boo. But often that was the kind of guy who’d rise to the occasion. You know, it was really something. Eugene Crawford, he was my gunner, and we started out together in France. He was my gunner when I was injured. And I suspect he probably took over the tank, then they sent up somebody else for his position.

Aaron Elson: Eugene Crawford was in the tank at some point with Sam Cropanese, but this was after you would have been injured. This was at Avranches, and Caen, because when I went to interview Jack Sheppard I also went to see Sam Cropanese because he lived not far away.

Bob Hagerty: Was this in Texas?

Aaron Elson: No, this was in Florida, about a month ago, and I didn't know what to expect, but he gave such a colorful description, with such wonderment, but he described when they were being bombed at Avranches; he said the bricks were raining on the tank from the building, and he said he and Eugene Crawford were both crying in the tank. But Eugene Crawford, Sam, Joe Bernardino, there must have been some movement of personnel.

Bob Hagerty: There had to be probably some juggling. I came back very late in the year, and I find that Crawford's an authentic hero. Here's a guy who’d been my gunner, he was a sweet, charming Southern guy, just a delightful fellow, and by golly, since I’ve been gone, I think he’d been decorated twice, which was rare. And it later turned out to be the criteria for a wartime visit to the States. They would bring him back, and he would have a chance to be a wartime presence in the States. And then you talk at bond rallies or something in your hometown. But I think the criteria, probably the number one criteria was to have been wounded twice, or lacking that to be decorated twice. So Crawford fit one of those categories, and he was allowed to go home. Which was, it was so delightful you couldn’t comprehend, you know, here you’re going home. I mean you’re going to be out of this. And who knows, by the time you go through channels to get back, the war might be pretty far advanced. But I just found it captivating that this real decent, kind, likeable fellow Crawford was, that he somehow rose to the occasion. Some guys told me about some incidents involving real close-in fighting, where a lot of the time it was just pure guts whether you stayed or ran, and Crawford had distinguished himself, which pleased me a whole lot. But, you know, the twist that it took, though, was really painful to me, because the commissioning of enlisted people had barely gotten off the ground at that time. We only had one, which was (Jule) Braatz, he'd been commissioned maybe in August or September, something like that, and nobody else after that. And officers were coming in and getting killed, and getting hurt and going out, more officers would come in, we’d lost more, and yet they weren't appointing from the ranks, and then Crawford gets an opportunity to go home, then following that here come commissions from the ranks, and where was Crawford? He was in the States. And just a totally likeable, favorable candidate. And he belonged, if anybody belonged, and yet he’s out of the stream you might say. And I can’t tell you what my feelings were when I saw him when he came back. And there I’m an officer, Johnson’s an officer, Olsen’s an officer, Sam’s an officer, [John] Pelletiere was later moved from our company to another company so they could give him a commission. You know, Crawford was surrounded by guys who’d been commissioned, and yet I think if you’d asked each of us we’d admit that Crawford was superior. And yet the war ended not long after, maybe a month or so after he came back, and you say well, that's just the breaks of the war. I don’t know how he felt; he was too much of a man to talk about that. I think he was glad to be alive, the war was over, soon we’re all gonna go home. Except the parties involved would soon forget what you were, whether you were a captain or a corporal.

Aaron Elson: Do you remember Bynum, the driver, a tank driver? Pine Valley?

Bob Hagerty: I remember, you know, to the extent that he was a character, with that funny nickname and all, and his Bob Burns type of a lingo. He had nicknames for everybody, and he’d walk in an odd gait, you despair of a guy like that marching, he couldn’t march. He’d take these forty inch steps. But he was a lot of fun, and he kept you honest with that brand of wit that he had. And yet you know you think of the circumstances of his death, and god, you know, it’s terrible to die like that.

Aaron Elson: What were the circumstances? I just know he was killed. I don’t know the circumstances.

Bob Hagerty: He had an inexperienced officer in the turret, and this guy mistook the fire for something else. They were being hit by high explosive shells, which burst on impact, and I wouldn’t want them to shoot at me all day with high explosive shells, but I’d feel pretty safe if that’s all that they had to shoot at me. And that’s what was hitting Pine Valley’s tank. But this lieutenant, Lippincott, he was a pretty new guy, and the story I got from Sam MacFarland, [who was] in that platoon, the story I got was that Lippincott ordered abandon the tank because he figured, you know, we’re going up in flames. Maybe he knew that it was high explosive and maybe he figured the armor piercing was going to come any minute. But for whatever his reasons, he told them to abandon the tank. And I think as they abandoned the tank, just a closely grouped collection of people, I guess there were five of them, and the next shell hit among them. It killed Pine Valley and it killed a third person [Lieutenant Lippincott and Frank Shagonabe were killed]. Only two guys got out of it. And that was probably December or January, I mean Pine had survived the war to that point, and along the way you develop some instincts, and some reactions that are probably going to prolong your life. But it seemed to me that you can’t put all the blame on Lippincott, maybe he did what he thought was right at the time. Pine might have lived if a different guy had been up in the turret.

It seems funny that the guys who drove the tanks, they had a real spirit of closeness, like Percy Bowers and Pine Valley.

Aaron Elson: Was Percy Bowers killed?

Bob Hagerty: M-hm. And Dess Tibbitts, he drove a German tank. Big Andy, he drove.

Aaron Elson: Now, who was Big Andy?

Bob Hagerty: Robert...

Aaron Elson: Anderson? Was he killed?

Bob Hagerty: Robert? No. In fact, I don’t even know if he was injured. It’s really pretty neat, when you think how vulnerable he is, but he went through it, I know he had no injuries. Sam MacFarland had no injuries. I don’t know if Howard Olsen had any injuries. Morse didn't get any. But the guys who drove the tanks had this feeling about each other. I think they felt like they had some skills that were honed a little more than the average.

Aaron Elson: I don’t think I put it in the book yet, but Tony D’Arpino, who was in C Company, he drove a lead tank the entire war. He was in the platoon leader’s tank, Lombardi, Charles Lombardi.

Bob Hagerty: Oh yeah, Charlie Lombardi.

Aaron Elson: He drove his tank most of the war, and he said being the driver of the lead tank, every turn that you made in the road, you didn’t know what was coming. He wasn’t boastful about it, but he said his tank had the best oiled escape hatch in the platoon. He said the second he stopped he put it into reverse. He had the fastest tank in reverse. But it had to be so nerve-wracking because all he had was the periscope to look out of. And he said that the gunner had the gun, and the tank commander had the periscope, he had other things, he had a .50 caliber machine gun, but the driver, all he had was the levers.

Bob Hagerty: That's true. Of course the driver, a lot of your survival depended on his skill, particularly avoiding getting bogged. Try and get out of the tank and pick up some cables and find a way, pull you free if it can’t, that gets dangerous.

Aaron Elson: Was Bussell ever your driver?

Bob Hagerty: I think he was always in another platoon, not mine. I think, let’s see, I was the third platoon, he was in my platoon of course, but I think he was with Goldstein and Charlie Bahrke. Bussell, I remember him, he was so heavy, he had the biggest rear end, boy oh boy, and you thought, that guy is gonna get in that hatch? He had been a tanker before we came to Fort Benning from Camp Lockett, so he was one of the cadre that was going to help train us. And we look at him, he had this big stomach, an even wider rear end, and yet in getting in the tank, he had a shimmy that he did, that he was in there now. I mean there wasn’t any forcing himself or getting scratched or scraped, no, he was in there now. And I remember, I’ve told you this, Aaron, but after the war ended, within a short period of time, maybe a period of months, I’d get a call at random that somebody was down in Cincinnati and tell me how to get to your house. And it would be some Army person. And on one of these occasions it was George. I think he lived in Indianapolis. But he was in Cincinnati and he wanted to come out. And I don’t think I warned my father in advance. My father had this awful habit of asking, “What do you weigh, son?” And I just knew he was going to ask George. I was hoping he wouldn’t. I felt it might be a sore spot with him. And George was big as ever, maybe bigger. And pretty soon, Dad said, “Son, what do you weigh?”

And George had these real bright blue eyes, and he said “About a hundred and ninety-one, Sir” [laughing] You’re a liar! Of course to Dad that sounded wonderful because he weighed 130 all his life.

Aaron Elson: Your father was real thin?

Bob Hagerty: He was real thin. About 5-9 and real slight.

George Bussell

Aaron Elson: Tell me a little bit about your ancestry. Your background. How did your family come to live out here?

Bob Hagerty: My parents, I guess you can begin there, my mother was a mixture of Nolan, which is Irish, and Berning, which is Dutch, and my father had a mother whose name was O’Regan, so he was Irish on both sides of his family. Anyway, my father was Irish 100 percent and my mother was half-Irish.

Aaron Elson: Were they both born here?

Bob Hagerty: My father and my mother were both born, I wouldn't say in Cincinnati, my mother might have been born across the river in Covington.

Aaron Elson: I mean in this country.

Bob Hagerty: Both of them were born in this country. And out of that marriage, my parents had two daughters older than I, then I came in third, I was the first boy, and then I had two brothers and a younger sister, so there were six children in the family, and my mother's parents had lived in Norwood for some time prior to her marriage, and her father, I guess property you know wasn’t really so dear in those days, and her father owned almost all the lots in a given rectangle, and some time after my mother’s marriage, I guess maybe after some children arrived, my grandfather caused a house to be built that he would own but that my mother would occupy. So that house was built right close to where my mother’s parents lived. We grew up there, all six of us grew up there, and went through grade school and high school. In those days college wasn’t thought of as being something kind of desirable. There may have been a notion that it was worthwhile, but my parents, neither were college graduates, and they were really promoting the idea of us going to college. As screwy as it might sound, Aaron, college at the time, in the middle Thirties, the early and middle Thirties, college was about $150 a semester, and yet people weren't flocking to go there. It wasn’t that the price was so good, it was that $150 was so much. So unless I had really promoted the idea that I really wanted to go, I’ll do whatever it takes, sell papers or whatever, if I had really promoted it I might have wound up in college. Very few of my classmates went to college. And this would have been in the middle Thirties, and we had the lingering effects of the Depression. Really, I think it would have sunk the Roosevelt administration without a war to intervene.

But anyway, there we were all grown up, through high school most of us, and then the war came. And there wasn’t a big surge of enlistments and so forth, at least not in my family, the thought was if I have to go, I’ll go. If not ... Along the way I got one piece of advice. A bunch of us used to hang out on what we called the corner. There probably is a corner in everybody’s recollection. We would hang around the corner. Most of us played on the same baseball team, and we followed the Reds and we talked baseball stuff. Anyway, when the war came along, one of the guys who hung around with us on the corner enlisted, and he was put in the medical corps, and then after he did his basic training one night he came back to the corner, and he was our first soldier, first guy in a uniform, his name was Walsh, and he was gonna tell us what to look out for, what to do and so forth because he figured they were gonna get all of us, sooner or later they’d get all of us, and one piece of advice that he laid on me was that when you go into the Army at the very outset, before you’re assigned to a unit, they’re gonna give you a battery of tests, and he said, “Bob, whatever you do, take it seriously, give it your best shot, do the best you can.” He wound up, I don’t know what criteria but he wound up being chosen for officers training school. And over the period of the war he became a captain and was an administrative person in a medical hospital. And keeping his advice in mind, when they had these tests out here, mechanical aptitute and some kind of it was just an intelligence test I guess was another, when I took these tests I did do my best, remembering what he said, and a long time later, when I asked somebody why was I being held over at Fort Riley, Kansas, because I wasn’t a horseman, I wasn't the best shot in the company, nothing that said “Hey, this guy’s a standout soldier,” but I remember asking somebody, why would I be chosen to help train new men? He said “Well, the captain looked at your test scores, and he said, ‘We’ve got to keep this guy. He's got something.’” Because I had this abnormally high intelligence test. So what Walsh told me had some value, I guess.

Aaron Elson: Now what about your two brothers who were in the service?

Bob Hagerty: They were both younger. The one next to me in age was employed here at Procter & Gamble, and he and a number of his colleagues, a lot of them college-trained people of course, they decided why would they let the Army choose for them, why not they choose, so along that line of reasoning, a number of them, including my brother Joe, volunteered for Air Force pilot training. And I met some of these guys when they were in Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, and I was at Fort Benning, and I was impressed, they were top-notch, you could just tell they had a future. And there were these guys doing pilot training. Some of them made it through. Joe flunked the pilot training, for whatever reasons, he then opted to go to bombardier school. And he went through that successfully, and was commissioned an officer as a bombardier. And he later became like the squadron bombardier, in Italy, I think he flew out of Foggia, and flew a lot of missions, never was shot down, thank God. And I think he wound up as a captain, met a girl he fell in love with in Texas, and he got married when he came back.

And then my kid brother was just out of high school I guess when the war came along, and I think he went through the draft. He got into what they called the Army Specialized Training Corps where they send you to college, and he was at Carnegie Tech I believe, doing this college training, I don’t know what they were preparing him for, whether it was something in the ground troops or in the Air Force, I don’t really know, but whatever they were doing, I think the Bulge came along, and the Army began to reassess what it was getting ready for; it looked like the war could be a prolonged thing. They didn't entirely dismantle but they materially changed this Army Specialized Training Corps, and Don was pulled out of his unit in Carnegie Tech and wound up in some kind of transportation corps outfit, and pretty shortly was sent to Europe, and he wound up spending the war as kind of an administrative person in a rail marshaling yard where they put trains together and whatnot. He was in this marshaling yard in suburban Paris, and it wasn’t intolerable duty, he had an eight hour day, maybe ten hour days. In fact once when the war was over I visited him there because he had lasted out the war, and I think he got probably to be a sergeant or staff sergeant, something like that, probably did his job well, he was very conscientious, but thank God he survived the war.

And as we came back, Joe getting married had no desire to maintain any contact with the Air Force, he felt glad to be alive, so he severed his association, whatever the options given to him. And Don wanted to go to college, he was the only smart one among us, he wanted to go to college and get on with his life. And one of the easy ways he could do that was to go through the ROTC program, which gave you a little stipend every month. So he managed to finish college at Xavier University right here in Cincinnati, and he got a commission in the bargain. But then the Korean War happened, probably within a year of graduation, so he was pulled back in as an artillery officer. And I was pulled back in because I had joined the Reserves, foolishly as it turned out. I thought it was an innocent choice; it turned out to be much more than that. So when the Korean War came along Joe by then was a father, he was free and clear, but Don and I were both back in the service, in a whole different ballgame.

Aaron Elson: You were sent over to Korea also?

Bob Hagerty: And Don was too, as an artillery observer.

Aaron Elson: And were you in tanks there?

Bob Hagerty: M-hm.

Aaron Elson: What was that like?

Bob Hagerty: It was totally goofy. We didn't have the equipment. We didn't have trained men. I was commanding a tank company, I don't think any one of them had an MOS number that identified him as a tanker. They were scrubs, called from here and there. In fact the colonel, when I arrived in Korea I was taken to this regimental headquarters, the colonel told me that he was in the process of forming a tank company. He determined that I was the senior among three people who’d arrived that day, so he said “You’ll be the company commander.”

I said, “Where are my men?”

He said, “We're in the process of assembling them.”

That told me I was going to get all the eight balls, all the screwups.

“Where are the tanks?”

“We don't have them yet.”

We finally wound up, the group we were assigned at the outset, maybe a dozen or twenty of us, until later on more men began arriving, but at this particular place where they sent me was near the bivouac of the tank company that was part of their regiment, among the group of people there, Aaron, we had one just ... I mean the Chinese could have come over and rousted us and we'd have been off to a prisoner of war camp. It was goofy, that's the best way to put it. And when we did get tanks, then we couldn't get parts, for things that broke down or malfunctioned, there was no such a thing as a part, and we found out, asking questions and whatnot, that the only way you got the parts was through a system of barter. And we could call on the Turks, and if we had some pekoe tea or something that they wanted, we’d trade certain elements of food for certain parts. They didn't give a damn about the value of the parts, they were only lookng at how much they were going to enjoy a meal. And our combat consisted mainly of reconnoitering in force. You’d take a prominence out there, maybe a hill 319 or something, and we'd go out there and the infantry goes out, and we’re delivering a lot of support fire and the infantry is shooting mortars, and we dislodge the Chinese from that hill and we occupy it. Then it’s growing late afternoon, we go back home in time, it’s evening, for the mess hall, we give up the hill and they reoccupy it, we’re back to where we started. And you’d have people killed or injured or whatnot, for goofy exercises. But that was the war during that long dragged out period, they were meeting at Panmunjom trying to hammer out a peace that they could live with. But on the road into Korea, I got there probably about July of ’51 and I came back home in probably about April or May, so I wasn’t, maybe I was in Korea nine months or ten months. But the Army had a scheme then, they separated you into categories depending on the nature of your service in the Reserves, and the period of time for which you could be expected to serve, and I think most of the men in my kind of situation were called Category 4 officers, and Category 4 officers could only be kept in the service something like 17 or 19 months, something like that, so if you agreed to go in voluntarily which I had been, then I became a Category 4, so my service began I think in January 1951, so 17 or 19 months from that date would have been spring or summer of '52, and one nice thing they did was they started you home early enough to be sure that you got there well before that expiration date. But they didn’t want any Congressmen camping on their doorstep hollering about their constituents. So I think maybe I came home a month or two ahead of the actual ending time.

Aaron Elson: Had you been married at that point?

Bob Hagerty: No, I wasn't married. I was engaged at the time. I had a real strong incentive to get home. It was much different coming home from World War II. I had no involvement, but here, I’d given Betty a ring prior to the time I left her to go to Seattle to be shipped over to Japan, so I had about a 15-day delay en route they call it, and I just drove home from Fort Knox which is where I was stationed, so I was home the same day that I left Knox and I had 13, 14 days there with Betty and my family. It was really neat.

Betty and Bob Hagerty

I had a funny thing happen, Aaron. On the day that I was to leave, which might have been July or something like that, the weather turned like this. [pouring rain]. And Betty and the folks were gonna take me over to Boone County Airport, which by then was a small operation compared to what it is today. And I dug up an Army raincoat I had but didn't use very often, and I was gonna use that, I'm wearing this thing over there, saying goodbyes and all of that, it was kind of tearful. Then I get on the plane and put my stuff up, and only later when somebody asked me did I realize that my raincoat has faded onto my shirt, and I've got green stripings coming down my shirt. It must have looked kind of goofy, but I didn't have a place where I could get my bag down and find something more suitable, so I traveled all the way to the west coast with green stripes on my shirt.

Aaron Elson: What kind of work did your father do?

Bob Hagerty: He was what you call a bookkeeper.

Aaron Elson: Was it called a bookkeeper?

Bob Hagerty: He didn't think it was appropriate to say he was an accountant, because an accountant to him did more than a bookkeeper does, by way of advice to management, and on the top of the heap he thought were CPAs, which were somehow blessed. But I think my mother liked to think he was an accountant.

Aaron Elson: When we first started talking today, you were talking about Captain Merrill, at Fort Benning was it, or Lockett?

Bob Hagerty: It was Fort Jackson. See, at Fort Benning, when we were sent there from Lockett, we weren’t necessarily going to keep all the same officers in the same positions, so we had a man named Earnest DeSoto that was the company commander at the time I was there. Then he later became a major and moved into battalion headquarters, and I’m not sure if there was an interim captain or not, but shortly after he moved, the entire battalion, after I think it was the Tennessee maneuvers, we hadn’t been sent back to Benning, we were sent to Camp Gordon, Georgia, which is right outside Augusta, and a real neat camp, considering what we were coming from. And then after a short time at Gordon we were told to get ready to go overseas, and we were split away from the division at Gordon and made a separate tank battalion. And then with that new identity we were sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina to do a lot of things. What we were doing was by way of preparation for commitment. And we went all through these exercises at Jackson under Merrill, and then we shipped out of there, went to England. And you could see from Merrill’s story, I think he was injured in July, we were only committed in late June, he probably lasted two or three weeks.

Aaron Elson: You said he had a little room in camp where he had the picture of him. What newspaper or magazine was it?

Bob Hagerty: It was called the Infantry Journal.

Aaron Elson: The Infantry Journal, he was on the cover?

Bob Hagerty: Yes. You know, that goes to thousands and thousands of officers, it’s probably the bible of the guys who are infantry officers, and there you have your mug on that. But I think he likes that aspect of soldiering, that look, you know, that says Watch out, baby.

One time Colonel Bryan said to me, “Has your outfit taken care of you?” And I knew what he meant. And they hadn’t, at that time.

Aaron Elson: What does that mean?

Bob Hagerty: Did they get you a decoration? I said, “I think they will.” And then within a short time I came down sick. I just couldn’t function. So Porky Pellettiere was one of the tank commanders in my platoon, and they put him in charge for a while. I think I was sick all for maybe a week, and I came back, and I took over, and the infantry fellows said, “Hey, that Porky is really good. He's really good.” And a short time later, Porky was awarded a Silver Star, the infantry put him up. And that was all right, because what he did probably merited that, but it brought back to my mind Bryan’s question, Has your outfit taken care of you?

Aaron Elson: How did he get, his nickname was Porky?

Bob Hagerty: He was chubby. It was funny, in the outfit, you’ve probably heard before, we had so many guys whose names began with P, and the first sergeant, Robert Seaney, and Seaney was an old hard hittin’ cavalry man, and here all of a sudden he’s transferred to a tank headquarters, you might say, and everything is armor, and you're not even allowed to keep your campaign hat, all of that goes into history, and poor old Seaney, it was an awfully difficult transition for him. Plus he had a new commander in this Merrill, and I think Merrill really put the spurs to Seaney. And I can recall in the early days at Fort Benning, early in the morning they had you fall out, and the whole company would form in one yard between the two barracks, and each clerk would go through the lineup, and he’d come to the P’s and there’d always be chuckles in the ranks, because he had, I’ve forgot all the names like Pellettiere and Pietryka...

Aaron Elson: Pilz?

Bob Hagerty: Pascione, he had Pilz, and Peterson, and on and on. And sometimes they had more difficulty pronouncing the names and these guys in the ranks would be smirking.

Aaron Elson: Peterson's the guy who lost a leg?

Bob Hagerty: He still has a tough time maneuvering that, doesn’t he? He doesn’t do as well as Jim Flowers does on two [prostheses]?

Aaron Elson: Do you have any lingering effects from your fingers?

Bob Hagerty: I was surprised, because I hadn’t seen them, you know, I was bandaged up at the aid station, and then I went to this field hospital, and I guess within a matter of hours, they put me in surgery. I didn't know the man who operated, never did ...

Side 5 (Tape 3 side 1

Bob Hagerty: My brother was in Europe at the time. I don't know how he knew this chaplain, but he must have communicated with him and said can you give me any news of my brother, who’s been injured? So this note is 1944, it’s almost 50 years, my brother’s had this all this time, and recently, I guess in about the last year, he turns up with this note and he said I thought maybe you'd like to have it, as it relates to me. This is what the chaplain wrote:

Aaron Elson (reading): “Dear Sergeant Hagerty. Your brother Bob landed here for a very short stay with an injured right hand. He is well in every way and he expects his hand will be healed in a short time. He asked me to send this note to you and to say further that he would write to you when he arrives and gets settled at a general hospital. Aside from his hand, he is in good shape after his session in combat. Sincerely, Andrew J. White, Catholic chaplain.”

Bob Hagerty: Isn't that something? My brother carried that all these years.

Aaron Elson: I wanted to ask you, I don't know if it was your platoon, in the interview I did with Krysko, I haven't worked it into the book yet, but he described in the winter, I guess it must have been after the Bulge [it was during the Bulge], he said his tank skidded off the side of the road, and he and his crew went into some town for a couple of days, until a lieutenant from the 712th found them there, they had their tank camouflaged, because they lost the rest of the battalion. I don't know if that rings a bell, it might have been a different platoon.

Bob Hagerty: It probably could have happened when they were moving from say like Dillingen up into the Bulge.

Aaron Elson: Let me see if I can find it here ... oh, Donlingen, Luxembourg, at the beginning of January ’45 on the way up to participate in the Battle of the Bulge. “As we drove north through Luxembourg a blizzard made driving difficult and hazardous; it was impossible for the driver to see the road. A slip off the road to one side would ... needless to say my tank slipped into the ditch.” His crew had to wait till the convoy passed. “It took two hours to get to the top of the hill and the 712th had disappeared. About a mile to the front the sky was ablaze with flames. I found a house ...” He wrote this. I went to interview him and he handed me about 25 pages he had written, and as he was reading it out loud all these memories would come back but I didn't have the tape recorder on, so I said let’s do it again with the tape going, which I hope to do in a couple of weeks [I never did]. This was Donlingen, Luxembourg. “It was the third day when we were found, this time by one of A Company's lieutenants, who bitched about my hiding our tank behind a building.” I don't know if that rings a bell. Maybe it was Morse.

Bob Hagerty: It might have been me. I was the only third platoon lieutenant, wasn’t I? Although I wasn't a lieutenant at that time, in January. I didn't get commissioned until February.

Aaron Elson: Who would the lieutenant have been at that time?

Bob Hagerty: It could have been Ed Forrest. Forrest was a tiny little man, Aaron, I'd say he had a poor posture, you know, where his shoulders were hunched forward and his back was thrust out, and it gave his chest a caved-in experience, and he wore thick glasses, and he had a small, kind of angular face. I think he worked in a bank in some suburb of Boston.

Aaron Elson: In Stockbridge, or West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Bob Hagerty: You know, when he came to us, when the captain, somewhere in the States, when the company commander decided he was the third platoon leader, I remember the guys thinking, “He's a platoon leader?” He looked so frail and fragile. He worked out all right. Then, you know, as so often happens, you have a guy that goes through a lot of combat, and you've got a company commander who recognizes that, wants to give him a break, and what does he do? He brings him back to headquarters and makes him the exec officer so he’d be out from the pressure, and he gets killed back there. It just seems unreal. I’ll bet you if you interviewed the company commander he’d say that's exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to give him a break.

Aaron Elson: He had what, two or three Purple Hearts?

Bob Hagerty: It’s possible.

Aaron Elson: You had described, the last time we talked, going out on a reconnaissance with Forrest.

Bob Hagerty: I remember telling you that. We could have both been dead pigeons and the damn war had hardly started. Boy, that was so lucky, I mean lucky the vehicle was empty, because we walked right up on it before we knew it was there. I think that’s probably what got George Tarr killed. Uncertainty about where he was going to go tomorrow, so he's gonna reconnoiter, and he reconnoitered while stuff is falling in. You can’t do that.

We had a pretty good platoon, though, when you think about it, with Ruby Goldstein, Charlie Bahrke, Charlie Fowler, in the States, you know, he didn't have any problems in the States.

Aaron Elson: Were you, you weren’t there when Fowler did whatever it was he had done, were you?

Bob Hagerty: I may have been, but most of that occurred after I was injured. Because he just didn’t want to go out there, whatever was the reason he didn’t want to go. Of course if you asked anybody do you want to go up he would say I’d rather not. It’s funny, isn't it, some things happen and they make you look good temporarily, but the fact of the matter is you’re scared as all the rest are. It’s just that maybe you do what you should do under that duress, and then somebody says “Hey, he should be decorated.”

Aaron Elson: What was the most scared, I guess apart from that reconnaissance, what was the most scared you recall being?

Bob Hagerty: I think maybe you and I talked about it, where we were at Oberwampach, the night after this gun battle where Davis got the tank out; see, we were still there at Oberwampach, which is just a crossroad, some farm buildings, whatnot, and I guess a few little homes. But we needed to outpost that area, which was ours, and I went up on the side road that Davis had come down on. I went on the side road and pulled off to the right behind like a little culvert where a farmer had cut a path through to move the wagons and horses, and we had pretty good defillade, do you know what that means?

Aaron Elson: No.

Bob Hagerty: The silhouette of our tank was kind of masked by the earth mass over there, so we had what they called defillade. Just enough that we could swing the gun; it was free. We could see up ahead, but there were some buildings on fire. Sometimes things like that are set on fire by the infantry, maybe to create a kind of a super searchlight, and then the Germans aren’t going to come through and expose themselves while they're highlighted like that. But anyway, we’re in this defillade position and they said the fires are up the road. The road was kind of like a rise, and an infantry guy came running toward us. He said there’s a halftrack coming. And we thought, “Halftrack, boy oh boy, where is she?” And Big Andy was my driver, and he eased the tank back up to the road, and a fellow named Ted Duskin was my gunner, and he was a good gunner, you didn’t have to describe everything to Ted, he could think for himself. But he squeezed the gun out and laid it up the road. And through this smoky haze that the fire’s making here comes this German, but it ain’t no halftrack. It’s one of the big tanks. And I just remember thinking, “God this is gonna hurt.” He saw us I'm sure as soon as we saw him, and Ted shot right away, as soon as that bulk came through the fog, and he must have hit the turret. There was a big shower of sparks, probably as the shell bounced off. They were heavily armored in the front and they were only really vulnerable in the rear. So about a second after we fired, he fired, and a big lick of flames came out of the big gun, you know, the muzzle, and it hit our tank; it seemed to hit it down low in the carriage, made a hell of a sound, and suddenly, I think Ted might have gotten off another shot, and with that the German began to move backward into the smoke. How lucky can you be? And we quickly took a look at our tank, and one of the bogey wheels appeared to be almost severed. He hit us down low, fortunately for us. And with the track still being intact, Andy could ease her back, and this German didn't come after us. But talk about being scared, before he made that first shot, I, it’s hard, because they had the firepower, they could penetrate us, we couldn’t penetrate them until we got a larger gun. Then we could approach equality, but at that time we couldn’t penetrate them, at least not from the front.

After we backed out, and found a little curve in the road there’s a little rock wall there, there was enough room for us to get in there, but ahead of us, against the same rock wall was a tank destroyer. They had light armor, but they had a bigger gun than we did. They could knock out a German tank whereas we couldn't. So as quick as we got behind the destroyer I ran up and told the destroyer, the tank commander, what was probably going to be coming down the hill. And I said you can get a good shot at him; he doesn't know you’re here. And the first thing you know, you could hear little click-clicks, that's about all the noise their tanks made was click-click, real quiet. We would make a lot more noise, we’d give ourselves away. But he’s coming down here, and he had a dismounted soldier leading it. This guy, man, imagine having that as your job. I mean, this guy’s dead the first time he's seen, isn’t he? But he’s gonna take the fire and spare the tank. So this foot soldier comes down here, and as the tank creeps up behind him, the guy on the tank destroyer fires too soon. It went right across the front, missed it. And with that, the German threw it in reverse and went back up the hill. And of course the tank destroyer didn't go after him because he couldn’t afford to take a hit. He would lose. But I think Andy and I were genuinely scared, when we saw that halftrack turn into a big German tank, God. I wouldn't want any repeat of that.

Aaron Elson: What were those first few days in Normandy like?

Bob Hagerty: You know, you jumped at every noise. And somebody, some damn fool, was shooting at shadows I guess, and he must have been in an adjacent hedgerow, and he was firing in our direction. You could hear that stuff ... psheeeew ... because the Germans weren't back there on top of us, right next door. It was some scared guy shooting at something, he wasn't using his head, because he had friendly troops in the next field. But you know, you began to see things where there weren’t things, and noises, you don’t know what they are, and you hear just an explosion and so you think about, it’s a scary experience, just to be introduced that way. And nobody there, at least nobody you’re talking to, would say it’s only this, it’s only that. And that might have helped put down your fears.

[some of transcript removed because I used it in an earlier substack. Conversation picks up when I asked if Bob was in Amberg at the end of the war in Europe]

Bob Hagerty: … Aaron, but you really should, you think of how neat that was, to be in a comfortable apartment, we slept three to a room, except the captain had his own private suite.

Aaron Elson: This was in Amberg?

Bob Hagerty: This was in Amberg. And we had adequate rooms, and a real nice parlor, you could get together in the evening and play cards or shoot the breeze or whatever, and then all our meals were taken in the officers' mess, which offered you some menu choices. It had a nice bar, a horseshoe bar in an adjacent room, and music while we ate, boy, downright nice, comfortable living. And then you're with these great people, people that you really enjoy being with. And they had movies at the downtown theater, and they had space reserved for officers. If you wanted a little diversion you could go to a movie, otherwise you seemed to find more pleasure just in being together, having the company of each other. And to think at the end of that particular sojourn is home, the war's over, you’re going back to all the people you love.

One fellow, he hadn’t been a particular buddy of mine because he was a little older, you know how when you’re 20, guys who are 23 don’t hang around with you, they’re with their own group. This particular guy, he had a younger brother who played on our ball team and he kind of hung around, so we knew the older brother, his name was Lou. We knew him somehow after a while. But anyway it worked out that with the vagaries of the draft, Lou went into the service kind of early, and winds up of all things with the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. If there was a preeminent infantry division in World War 2, it had to be the Big Red One. They were just a terrific outfit, and this fellow Lou winds up in the Big Red One, and over a period of time he’d been in all kinds of engagements, and my father told me in a letter that Lou had been back, I guess as one of these wounded veterans, he’d been back and according to Dad's understanding he’d been wounded seven times. So here’s the war over, and it's only a question of when you’re gonna get home, and Dad wrote to me and told me Lou had stopped in several times, that he’d been discharged already, and he said, “Bob, he’s still wearing his uniform.” That’s a big thing, a lot of guys did that for a while, but anyway, when I got back home, I asked Dad to call Lou, and I think it was the first or second day I was back home Lou came up, and he always was kind of a flaky guy, different, but likable. Anyway, he came right out, he had to see Rob, so we could talk about battlefield experiences. But Lou was still wearing his overseas cap and he had a Purple Heart on his chest, four stars, four clusters, and then the clusters that wouldn't fit he put ’em on his cap. I thought only Lou could do that. How many guys have been wounded seven times in combat? And I think it wasn’t any time he resumed his old habits; he was drinking too much and getting into fights with people. He didn't die real young, he might have lived twenty years after the war was over. He could have prolonged his life if you’d take away the beer and stuff.

This is comedian Red Buttons. He portrayed paratrooper John Steele in “The Longest Day.” These are Green Buttons: They give you the opportunity to converse with Aaron Elson, or to comment on the Substack, share this interview on Facebook or with other Substackers by restacking, or, if you haven’t already, subscribe to my World War 2 Oral History Substack.