If I only had a methodology
Revisiting some of my earlier work
I was a guest on the Steve Parker radio show recently on WTIC in Connecticut and I played a few audio clips from my interviews. The ones I chose were from my early days as an oral historian (when I would say what I did was “like oral history” until a friend said “It isnt like oral history, it is oral history.”)
If it is oral history, I thought, I have to have a methodology, which was a problem because I had no idea how to develop a methodology. But whether I planned to have one or not, what I was doing — asking questions as they popped into my head, remembering to push the record button on my Sony Walkman, forgetting more often than not to take pictures of the veteran I was speaking with, using full names instead of a Q and an A in the transcript, that’s a sort of a methodology, isn’t it? And over the years my methodology has evolved.
One of my earliest interviews was at the 1991 reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion, in the hotel lobby, with Ed Spahr. I overheard one of the veterans say that Spahr recently survived an abdominal aortic aneurism, which he said had a 90 percent fatality rate, and although I didn’t know anything about Spahr, I figured it would be a good idea to ask him a few questions about the war since I might never get another chance. So, Walkman in hand, I asked if he might talk to me about the war. This was 33 years ago, and the reunions were pretty lively back then, as evidenced by the background noise on the tape.
When I transcribed the interview, I did not do it in q-and-a form, but rather I extracted a series of vignettes as he told them to me. Following are the vignettes that came out of that 1991 interview. I used these in the first edition of “Tanks for the Memories: An Oral History of the 712th Tank Battalion in World War 2,” which is now in an expanded third edition.
Also, some of the audio, like this excerpt, did not make it into the transcript. These others did.
“This Will Get You Through"
Isny, France [Actually, it’s Isigny}, was our objective. It was a couple of kilometers in off the beach, where there was a highway that ran north and south, and there was a crossroads there. It was a little farm town. I don't know how big it was. I didn't have that much time to check it out.
We got in there and we were digging foxholes the third evening around a Catholic church, and the town was being shelled.
This church had two pillars in front of the entrance, and one of those pillars was hit and had fallen in against the door.
A nun came down the street, headed for the church. Me and another fellow, he was out of the 28th Infantry Division, we were digging a foxhole right beside the church foundation, and I saw this nun coming, and I thought, "I've got to get her covered." Well, I didn't know that she wanted to go in the church, so I started towards her, but I couldn't understand her. She was speaking French and I didn't know a word of French, but she insisted on going in the church, so I helped her remove some of the debris, and we finally got the door open.
She looked very young, in her twenties, I'd say. We finally began to understand each other. She spoke a few words of English. I told her it was dangerous inside the church, and I wanted her to get someplace safe, and she said, "I'll be all right."
She put this St. Christopher medal around my neck. She said, "This will get you through," and she went in the church, and I said to her, "Are you going to stay here?" And she shook her head yes. I didn't see her after that.
I had three tanks hit by shell fire and two by mines. I have to say that I was so lucky, that somebody led me.
“Take a Picture"
I was a gunner most of the time. I can't quote names of where we were, I don't recollect, but I hit a Tiger tank one day at least three times with an armor-piercing shell and never touched him. He just kept on coming. You could hear the shell going when it left the tank. It didn't penetrate. Then my loader accidentally threw a white phosphorous shell in, and I hit that tank right in the front end, and he stopped. Some of the crew came out. They thought they were hit and penetrated and they thought they were on fire.
We used to use the white phosphorous shell for markers. It burns and a puff of white smoke explodes. They were good for hunting range. We had the old type sights where you guessed the range, and we used to use what we called bracketing shots. Some gunners would use high explosive to get their bracket. The first shell, you could see it hitting, now, if it would hit, say, 200 yards short, the gunner would raise his elevation 400 yards, and if he shot over the target, then he would drop down 200 yards. That's bracketing. And if you didn't get him on the third shot, you'd better find a hole to get into because he was then going to be shooting at you.
These scars on my hand I got one time, they had antiaircraft guns, I think they were 20 millimeters, and they hit our tank, oh, I don't know how many times. They didn't penetrate — they weren't powerful enough — but on the inside of the tank a little round spot would get cherry red, and the paint would sometimes catch on fire.
They hit us with this antiaircraft fire. We got the piece of equipment that was firing at us. I think there were four guns mounted on it that they used for antiaircraft, but they turned it on our tank, and these little spots about four or five inches in diameter would turn cherry red and the paint would catch fire. That's what made these little white spots on my hand.
I was wounded on the inside of my left arm. Lieutenant Gifford, he was our tank commander. Our tank got knocked out, and luckily, we all got out of the tank. They hit us somewhere in the track, and busted the track, so that if we'd have kept going we'd have just gone around in a circle because it only had one track to pull it.
After we got hit, Lieutenant Gifford stuck his head out, and a machine gun bullet struck him around one eye. He had blood all over. Well, when he got out of the tank, I don't think he thought he was hurt as bad as he was, and he stepped behind the tank, away from the incoming; they were firing machine guns on us, trying to get the personnel that were in our tank, but we were behind the tank. Lieutenant Gifford tossed me his camera, and said: "Take a picture of me."
So I'm standing there with my hands up taking the picture; that's the only way I could have gotten hit in a spot like that, I had to have my arms up. It just felt like a bee sting. I felt the same thing in my face, but that was just a little piece of metal, something out of the machine gun projectile that hit me there. It was no bigger than a small match head that they picked out; it was probably the shell casing off of a 30-caliber bullet.
It was no big deal to me. I really didn't think I was hit until the medic asked to see my hand because when I dropped my arm the blood would drop off my fingers. He asked to see my hand and he wiped it off and said, "I can't see where the blood's coming from." And then, all at once, he said, "It's coming down your arm. Take off your shirt." And then there this was, I was bleeding like a stuck pig.
I haven't seen Lieutenant Gifford since. He was all right, but he never came back to the company after that.
[Lieutenant Jim Gifford showed up at the following year’s reunion, where he was reunited with Spahr and two other crew members of the tank that was knocked out on Jan. 10, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge.]
Even though we were under machine gun fire that time, I went out the top of the tank. That was what you had to do. You didn't know how bad the tank was hit. You didn't know what it was hit with. You didn't know whether it was going to catch fire or not. When they stopped you, you got out of that tank as quickly as possible. On several other occasions when they hit us with a slug and it penetrated the engine compartment and the gasoline, before we all got out, I saw flames flying out of the top of the turret, twenty, thirty feet in the air. We carried almost 200 gallons of high octane airplane gasoline, 102 octane I think it was, and it didn't take long to burn. It caught fire real quick. The gas tank was on the side, toward the rear of the tank, on each side of the engine.
Some guys came out through the flames, some came out before. Usually the tank commander, if he wasn't disabled, he was the first one out. The gunner usually was second, and his loader would be third. The assistant driver and the driver, they had their own hatches to come out. Now, they would have no problem getting out unless the gunner left the gun barrel over the top of one of their hatches. Then they couldn't open that hatch. They had to crawl across the transmission and get out the other side, which, if they took that long to get out, a lot of them didn't get out, because the ammunition burning, the gasoline burning, it didn't take long — seconds — until that tank was completely involved in flames, same as an airplane. It was so quick, and no one wasted time getting out.
The Frying Pan
We used to have an old frying pan hanging on the back of the tank. We never washed it in water. The exhaust fumes would blow on it.
We'd stop if we saw something. One time we caught a rabbit. The rabbits were large over there, and we had chicken and rabbit at the same time. Now, we were out in the field, so no one knew about us eating this wild stuff.
This pan would be so dirty, and we had a bucket hanging on the back of the tank as well; we used to brew coffee in it. That bucket was so black, you'd swear it was blacker than the coffee. Every time we'd get ready to eat, we'd make coffee in this, and we would say, "Well, if the meat is contaminated, if the chicken is contaminated and the rabbit is contaminated and the water around here is contaminated, these pans can't be contaminated because there's nothing on them but road dust and exhaust fumes," and we'd eat like kings.
We'd all joke and josh about things like that, and somebody would make some remark like, "Well, overeating with poisonous food is better than dying with a bullet," make some remark like that.
The Outpost
We kept one tank as an outpost. It was almost three-quarters of a mile outside of town, set up overlooking the Siegfried Line. We would take turns manning the tank in case the Germans would come back through there. We'd go back into town to eat, but always, night and day, there was a whole crew in the tank.
To get to the tank, we had to cross a zigzag trench that the Germans had built. Well, one day I was going up — we'd rotate people one at a time; we didn't rotate the whole crew, so there would be one fresh man there all of the time — I was going up through this open field, and I thought I heard something going past, close to me; it just sounded like somebody snapped their fingers. I couldn't figure out just what this was because you could see all around and I couldn't see anything.
The second or third time I heard this, it seemed like it was getting closer, something just snapping going past my head, and all at once I realized that somebody was shooting at me, because after I'd hear this snap, a second or two later I could hear a rifle crack. It wasn't loud. It was way off. I'd say he was a thousand or more yards away, but he was shooting at me.
When I realized this, I made a leap, rolled through the grass, I came to this trench, and I dropped down in it. I didn't know which way I fell, or landed, and I didn't know which direction to go in.
The trench leaned a little bit towards the tank on one end and away from it on the other. So I thought, "Well, I'll go down through these zigzags here a little ways one way, and then I'll look out, and if I can't see the tank I'll go in the other direction." I should have been within sight of the tank. I was maybe 300 yards away from it.
As I came around one of the zigs in the trench, I just happened to glance ahead of me and I saw a German soldier, sitting down, and he had a — we called them burp guns — he had a machine pistol laying across him. The first thing that came to my mind was, he had that gun aiming at me. I didn't take time to check it out, whether the gun was really pointed at me or not. I had a Thompson submachine gun with the stock cut off slung on my shoulder, and I had about a 15-round clip in it. We had 15- and 30-round clips, and I think I was carrying a 15-round clip because being in a tank it wasn't so bulky, and I just swung around and I pulled the trigger on it, and I could see the dust flying out of his uniform, and I just emptied that clip.
I stood still a little bit and didn't move. I thought he should fall over. He never moved. I put another clip in, and I eased up to him. I kicked his foot. He never moved. Nothing moved. I discovered that he had probably been dead for two or three days or longer; he was stiff as a board. I have to laugh at myself — I've only told one or two guys about this, me shooting the hell out of a dead soldier.
“I had to do it”
There was this one incident, near the end of the war. The Germans were getting hard up, and they had horse-drawn artillery, and there were three pieces of artillery coming down the road. They saw us, and stopped.
They turned an antitank gun around on us and they fired. They must have been poor gunners, because they fired three shots at us before I fired, and I could see in my sights that I hit this antitank gun. I hit it with H.E. — that's high explosive — and I could see a body flying up in the air. I saw a horse get hit at the same time, when the shell exploded on the front end of this German field piece. The horse was hit in the back end, I guess, because his front feet were trying to drag around. I believe there were four horses attached to this field piece, or maybe it was only two, I forget. But one horse was all right and the other horse was trying to get away, and dragging this other horse, and my next shot — I took to put those horses out of their misery. I didn't know whether the other horse had been hit, but it probably had some shrapnel in it. I had seen a horse before that was hit, and he was all blown up. He was laying in the field, he looked like he was going to burst, and I thought to myself, those horses, that horse that I had seen, and I had seen cattle that way, too, I thought, I'm not going to let that suffer. So the next shot, I sent a high explosive into those horses. That's hard. In fact, that's harder than enemy soldiers. But I had to do it.
I don't watch war movies. I've seen a little bit of them, but then if I watch them, I dream about what actually happened. I have nightmares, because you see the people in the movies, you see these shells coming in and hitting right in a group of people, they fly up in the air, then they jump up and run away. That doesn't happen. When that shell hits in a group of people, there might be one or two that get up and run away, but the whole group doesn't do that.
I have one son. He was born nine months before I went into the service. He has two children, a boy and a girl. They're grown up now. The grandson, this is his second year in college, and my granddaughter, she's out of college. She's 22 years old. My grandson is 19. My granddaughter got married last August.
When they were in school, fifth or sixth grade maybe, my grandchildren would say things occasionally about the war, and ask me things about it, and I would just say, "Somebody else will tell you about it." I'd also say, "You don't want to know anything about this, you'll read it in history. What you read in there will be good enough. That's the way I'd answer them."
I brought back a couple of German pistols. I guess my son was about eight or nine, and I came in the house one day from work, he had come home from school about a half-hour before I did, and he had one of his schoolboy friends with him, and he was showing him these pistols that I had brought home.
The one he had out at that time was a Walther; it was a German officer's. The officer's name was on the holster. It was a shoulder holster. The pistol was a 7.65 caliber, and I had ammunition for it, and he was showing his friend the weapon. I took it away from him and I explained to him how dangerous this thing was, and within a week I had gotten rid of all my German pistols. I gave one to a friend who had never been in the service, and the other to a fellow who had been in the service but he was in the Air Corps, and had never seen ground combat.
Ed Spahr died on January. 15 1997 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was born on June 23, 1917. He was awarded five Bronze Stars.