'Mail call'
"The sergeant said, 'I don't know what to do with this.'"
Cliff Flora, who drew the above cartoon, was a regular at reunions of the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served. Cliff was a mechanic in C Company — while the battalion had a Service Company, each company had its own maintenance crew as well.
I used the audio of this interview with Cliff, which took place at the battalion’s 1996 Pittsburgh reunion, in my epic 17-CD oral history audiobook “The Middle of Hell,” about the battle for Hill 122 in Normandy in which Lieutenant Jim Flowers’ first platoon lost four tanks with nine crew members killed and several others wounded and/or captured. Flowers was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, but lost both of his legs on what he called that “bloody piece of French real estate.”
While Cliff didn’t take part in the battle itself, he trained with some of the participants and was able to add to my knowledge of the people involved in the battle. And if a movie is ever made about Hill 122, Flora described what would no doubt be a major scene in the movie, although some screenwriter is likely to pick his account up for some other war movie once AI gobbles up this Substack and spits it out. Mind you, I will confess to consulting whatever chatbot Bing employs in at least one spot while going through this interview, and being appreciative of the result.
Pittsburgh 1996, interview with Cliff Flora
Aaron Elson: Do you remember your serial number?
Cliff Flora: No. It’s slipped my mind. I know my social security number.
Aaron Elson: How old were you when you were...
Cliff Flora: When I first went in the Army? I was 24 when I was drafted, the Selective Service.
Aaron Elson: Where were you born?
Cliff Flora: Peru, Indiana.
Aaron Elson: So you know where Argos is. [At the very first reunion I attended, A Company truck driver Wayne Hissong told a story about Argos, Indiana.]
Cliff Flora: Oh yeah. It’s up the road a little way.
Aaron Elson: What did your father do?
Cliff Flora: He was a farmer.
Aaron Elson: Were you a farmer too?
Cliff Flora: I was a farmer’s son. I didn’t do much farming, though.
Aaron Elson: Did you go to high school?
Cliff Flora: Yeah, I went to high school.
Aaron Elson: What did you do after high school?
Cliff Flora: I tried to get a job anywhere I could for a while, and then eventually got a job with Inland Steel Company in East Chicago. Then shortly afterward I was drafted; that was the Selective Service in 1941. You were supposed to serve a year, and it stretched out; Pearl Harbor came at the end of ’41 and it was continued on.
Aaron Elson: So you went right into the horse cavalry?
Cliff Flora: Well, I went to Fort Benjamin Harrison, and was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, and they lined up the guys. They had two lines of guys, like a big gymnasium, and the officers there, one of them says, you, you go to the infantry; the next guy comes up, cavalry. You had no choice. So I was picked for cavalry. Then they sent me to Fort Riley, that’s a cavalry school, you’ve heard of that. Then they sent me to the 11th horse Cavalry in Camp Seeley, California. From there I went to Camp Lockett; Camp Seeley was on the desert.
Aaron Elson: Where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?
Cliff Flora: We were on the border at Camp Seeley, just a little ways from Calexico, California, and Mexicali’s down the road a little ways. We’re a little ways from Mexico. And that’s where, yeah, all the boys were out Saturday night. It was Saturday night for us. A lot of the boys were out shacking up, in taverns, whatever, and word came out, “All military personnel report to your base immediately.” Some of them of course were shacked up, they didn’t hear about it till the morning. Anyway, then we were sent to Camp Lockett, back in the mountains toward San Diego. Then we were used as the cadre with the 10th Armored Division at Fort Benning, Georgia. We moved in where Patton moved out; the Sand Hill area they called it at Fort Benning, where the 2nd Armored Division had been. Patton was the commanding officer I think at that time. It went to Africa, North Africa. We took over that area where they were at, and they brought in some units from an armored division up in New York, guys that were already in the armored units, to sort of blend in with the cavalry people to start the 10th Armored as the cadre.
Aaron Elson: Did you come down with the yellow jaundice? [The 11th Cavalry suffered an outbreak of what likely was hepatitis from tainted yellow fever shots.]
Cliff Flora: No, why?
Aaron Elson: Because a lot of people did, from Lockett.
Cliff Flora: I think one guy did get the, he died, I forget his name, but I don’t remember too much about him. The epidemic, I remember.
Aaron Elson: Did you ride, were you like a cavalry soldier?
Cliff Flora: Yeah, the horses. I was a private. You do all the work, and the officers and non-commissioned officers, they sit on the corral fence and watch you. It’s hell. They get the best horses, they get everything.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever fall off a horse?
Cliff Flora: No. A horse bit me once. I was tying him up; I brought him in, they have a corral, and I was tying him to this fence and then he turned around and opened his mouth and grabbed me right on the arm like that and I started screaming and hollering, so an old army man, a sergeant, said, “What’s wrong, he ain’t gonna hurt you.”
“What do you mean, look at it.”
So he let loose. Scared me. Opened his mouth like that. I never trusted a horse.
Aaron Elson: When did you first meet Laverne Patton? [Laverne Patton was one of the nine members of C Company’s first platoon who were killed in the battle for Hill 122.]
Cliff Flora: Let’s see, Patton, I can’t really say exactly, he was in Fort Benning. I don’t remember exactly where I met him.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember what he looked like?
Cliff Flora: He wasn’t very tall, thinning hair, kind of a meek little guy, a pretty nice guy. He was one of the guys that just doesn’t stand out, people like him. We used to go out and have a few beers, now and then, like I told you, he got a little drunk that one time and fell off the top bunk. He laughed, he thought it was funny, he was pretty drunk.
Aaron Elson: Did he have a girlfriend or a wife?
Cliff Flora: No, I’m not sure, I think his mother and father were dead, I believe he had a sister back in...
Aaron Elson: His mother and father were dead?
Cliff Flora: I believe. I don’t think he had much of a family. He might have had a sister. I think this guy March Banks [John W. Marchbanks], he was a very wealthy racehorse owner, and he owned a racetrack called Canforan [Tanforan]. I don’t know if you ever heard of it, in San Francisco. I think Laverne worked for him, so I don’t know whether he took him over as a, because he didn’t have any family or what, that was the guy he worked for, I know that. He wasn’t a jockey; I think he just trained horses and worked with the racehorses.
Aaron Elson: But his parents were dead?
Cliff Flora: I think so, I’m not sure.
Aaron Elson: And he had a sister?
Cliff Flora: I think he did. I couldn’t verify it.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember Eugene Tannler? [Tannler was another of the nine men killed in the battle for Hill 122.]
Cliff Flora: Well, I met Tannler. Tannler was in Company maintenance, C Company maintenance, and [Jake] Driskill was the motor sergeant. I was with [Dick] Greca and [Ed] Scott, and [Tom] Seitz; we were called tank mechanics. The term was kind of used loosely because a lot of times they’d change bogey wheels on the tanks and different things, you know, emergency maintenance that we could do. Anyway, Tannler was, I told you about, he was a good friend of mine, in England there, and he told me one day, he said, “I want to get out of here and get, I was trained to be a tank driver. I want to get in a tank.”
“Stay with us,” I said. “You’re better here.” But he went and told them about it and they made a tank driver out of him. [Tannler was the loader in Sergeant Judd Wiley’s tank]. He was a smart boy; he went to I think the University of Pennsylvania.
Aaron Elson: He wasn’t a driver, he was a loader.
Cliff Flora: I think he told me he was taught to be a tank driver, see, he wanted into tanks, something to that effect. But that’s right. Anyway, he was a smart boy, nice guy, come from a nice family. I told you that story, it don’t mean nothing, but shortly after he was killed, that incident, we were back there with the first sergeant and were sitting out in a field in Normandy and they said “Mail call.” The first sergeant come out with this box, you know, a big box, a kind of sad look on his face, and he said, “I don’t know what to do with this. This is for Tannler from his mother.” It was a box of cookies. He said, “You guys might as well have it.” It was kind of sad. Here I liked the guy, and it was kind of a shock. Here we are eating his cookies and thinking his poor mother doesn’t even know he’s dead and we do.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember what kind of cookies they were? [The devil may be in the details, but WTF was I thinking when I asked this question?]
Cliff Flora: No. Probably some kind of cookie that held together fairly well. You’ve got to ship them out. I don’t remember, I think the box looked kind of beat up; it had gone through all that system, the mail system. Probably, I think, a lot of them are broken up, but still you could eat them. That was the same day, I think, that, you heard the story about a guy named Putnam, that accidentally killed a boy?
Aaron Elson: That was the same day?
Cliff Flora: He was cleaning a gun. I think it was along about the same time. He was cleaning a grease gun on the top of the tank, and a boy from, I forget his name ...
Aaron Elson: Jarusz, Edwin Jarusz...
Cliff Flora: Chicago, right, in fact he had a jacket on that said “Chicago.” He was in the driver’s seat, I don’t know, he was doing something, they were kind of cleaning the tank. Putnam was sitting up like on the turret with this grease gun they call it, cleaning that. It wasn’t much of a gun anyway. It looked like a grease gun, somehow or another it went off and it hit him right in I think in the back of the head and killed him instantly, he was dead. That was kind of a shock, too. Anyway, the story was, I didn’t know Putnam very well, I guess he was a nice guy and all, it wasn’t his fault, later he was killed himself, see.
Aaron Elson: But he took it pretty hard, didn’the?
Cliff Flora: He did, yeah. I didn’t know him, but he was later killed; I don’t know whether you call that poetic justice, but, you know, it’s one of those things.
Aaron Elson: Were you there when...
Cliff Flora: I wasn’t there...yeah, I was in the area when it happened. I didn’t go ... I heard of it, it was kind of a shock too.
Aaron Elson: You worked with Driskill?
Cliff Flora: Yeah, he was our motor sergeant; he was our boss. He replaced [Earl] Swanson.
Aaron Elson: What happened with Swanson?
Cliff Flora: Driskill tells it in there. On the first day of combat, he was standing, Swanson, I hate to say it wasn’t a very [qualified]. He was formerly a blacksmith and chandler, he really wasn’t qualified to be a motor sergeant, you know, shoeing horses and things like that don’t have much to do with maintenance on a tank, does it? But anyway, I think he was a sergeant; they made him motor sergeant, and he was in this halftrack, you know the story, Driskill tells it, he was standing up. Driskill and I were right back of him in a tank recovery unit; we weren’t standing up, we kept our heads down, then all hell broke loose. The Germans counterattacked the first day. Swanson was ahead in a halftrack and he was standing up. It’s got armor on the side of it, like that, but this much about I think is exposed.
Aaron Elson: From the middle of his chest up?
Cliff Flora: Something like that. So this shell, I don’t know, shrapnel, I remember, Driskill, we found out Swanson had been hit, and he laid him on the side of the road, I don’t know, I think, I didn’t see him, but somebody said, “My god, he’s got a hole big enough to stick your fist in,” you know, in the side of him. But he recovered, and I never seen him or heard anything about him after that. That was that story. And then Driskill was made motor sergeant.
Aaron Elson: Driskill must have been...
Cliff Flora: Driskill was a nice guy. He was from down there in the Panhandle section of Texas, flatland around Amarillo. He come from a nice religious family, square shooters, a nice guy.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever have any conversations with him? He was your boss?
Cliff Flora: Oh yeah. He got along with everybody real good. He didn’t believe in drinking too much. One time our motor officer, that was [Jack] Sheppard, captured a bunch of schnapps, I think it was schnapps, like cognac, so he gave all the group, he gave Driskill a bottle for his guys, and Driskill brought it in and Driskill didn’t even drink it. He opened the damn bottle, he sniffed at it, tasted a little bit, and said “Just testing to see if it’s all right for the boys.” I didn’t care none about that anyway, that stuff, but over there a lot of guys, that’s good stuff, but he drank it. I guess I had a little drink of it too. I thought that was funny, somebody said, “Hey, Driskill, you don’t even drink.”
He said, “I’m just testing to see if it’s all right for the boys.”
Aaron Elson: Now you went up with him when they were looking around for dogtags and stuff?
Cliff Flora: Yeah I did, yeah.
Aaron Elson: What was that like?
Cliff Flora: It was at a crossroad, like.
Aaron Elson: This was before Hill 122? this was when Savio...
Cliff Flora: It would have been before Flowers, shortly, very shortly. There was an 88 that had been set up as an antitank gun, that was right close by, they got them dead to rights; there was no chance of missing.
Aaron Elson: And there were two tanks hit or three?
Cliff Flora: I believe there was two, I’m not sure. I just looked into one, and I remember, I knew Lockard [Fred Lockhart], I knew him better than Savio, but I knew both of them. He was slumped over. I couldn’t see nothing but just his back. There was a hole in the tank right where the driver was, and the other, like I said, where Savio was supposed to be was just like hair, bones and just pieces of [flesh].
Aaron Elson: Had the tank burned?
Cliff Flora: I think so, partially burned. They had an escape hatch, I think now they have about like flotation equipment in a 747, if you have to use it it probably wouldn’t do you much good anyway, would it? So, in case a tank got on fire and you had to escape there was a place to do it but I don’t think it was ever used.
Aaron Elson: They were used.
Cliff Flora: Well, probably. But, see, they’re waiting for you. If you hit a tank, those guys are waiting, just like we would, they’re waiting for you to get out, they got the small arms fire on you, the burp guns, or whatever, machine guns trained on you. If anybody comes out, you let ’em have it. You don’t have much of a chance. A little chance but not much.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember what you felt when you looked at that?
Cliff Flora: Very bad. Driskill, we didn’t say anything to each other; we kind of, you know, just like your own, some of your relatives passed away, what are you gonna say? It’s sad, you know, for a lot of different reasons, just like a guy, when you see a dead soldier, a dead American soldier, a lot of guys felt the same way; you feel sad about it, but on the other hand, you can always say, “I’m glad it wasn’t me.” That’s a strange way to look at it. When you see a dead German, you don’t feel that way so much. You feel, hey, this is what we’re here for. It’s tough luck, I’m really glad it’s you and not us. So I remember when we seen the first dead German along the way, Driskill and all the guys, [whispering] “Do you see that?” And this is kind of a little prelude to, we seen lots of them after that, including our own people in Normandy, they corded them up like wood and put them this way and that way, similar to a pile of wood. And that was a sad thing, you seen a guy, all American soldiers, they’re dead. They were putting them on the side of the road there to be picked up by the burial unit or whatever they call them, graves registration, all young guys. It’s sad, you feel real bad. But, you go on.
Aaron Elson: Where were you the night the battle broke out in the middle of the night, in Mairy, in France in September, when [Forrest] Dixon got into a tank with no engine?
Cliff Flora: I don’t think I was around. I don’t recall that incident. I don’t know what I was doing, but I don’t...
Aaron Elson: That was when Putnam was killed.
Cliff Flora: I don’t think I was around there.
Aaron Elson: Do you remember the Falaise Gap?
Cliff Flora: Yeah. I didn’t have much to do with it, but I did go up there and see the tanks on the hill there, the C Company tanks of the 712th. You know the story, you looked down in there, the guys had a ball, they were firing away just like a shooting gallery, no opposition, and they were bringing up Germans by the dozen. They had them laying on the hoods of jeeps, wounded. Buildings turned into temporary medical facilities, and I guess the doctors, everybody working like crazy trying to save as many of these guys as they could. It was just a slaughter. Well, you know the story, the horses were dead down there, the guys were being murdered or shot right and left.
Aaron Elson: Did you go down into that?
Cliff Flora: No. But I did see them bring these guys out, and they were in bad shape. They looked like, pale, blood all drained out of them, arms hanging down, German guys, bring them out of there by the dozens. We were in one little particular area, that was a big operation, it could have been that way in a lot of other places. There were British troops in on it, and a lot of other. And the story was in the end that they did let, some guys did find a way out; they should have trapped the whole bunch but some of them got out. I know that story. I think they blamed somebody, what’s his name, Montgomery or somebody, who did something, you know, it’s a hindsight thing.
Aaron Elson: Who else was in your crew?
Cliff Flora: Greca, Seitz, Ed Scott...
Aaron Elson: Was Scott a private?
Cliff Flora: Private. Always a private. He didn’t give a shit, he didn’t care about, free spirit. A story about him, maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, don’t print this, when he was in the States they had a roll call in the morning, it’s dark yet, and the guys are all lined up. The first sergeant comes out there, he’s got all the names, I guess to see if you’re still around. So he called, you know, my name, Flora. “Here.” He calls Scott. “Here.” But the sonofabitch had a, you lived in these tents, and he lifted the flap up and he hollered real loud, “Here!” and then he dropped the flap. Still in bed. He did that. Got away with it, I don’t know how many times, but I know he got away with it several times. Of course it’s dark, he said “Here,” I mean, he’s not going to go out to make sure he’s there. It’s a dangerous thing to do because if a first sergeant caught you doing that, you’d be put on KP for hell, maybe a month. But anyway. I could tell you a lot of other stories that have nothing to do with combat, there were just some interesting things.
Aaron Elson: Like what?
Cliff Flora: Well, we stayed in, company maintenance headquarters, company headquarters stayed back in Hagondange. That was a town, it’s in Alsace, and the other units were quite a ways up the road, well, not too far. It was in the battle for Metz, the city of Metz, quite a battle, they had trouble with it, first time it was captured in 800 years. Anyway, we stayed in a small hotel which was formerly a what you call a bordello, a whorehouse; the Germans used it, at that time it was for their benefit, and we stayed there I think a couple weeks. It was peaceful and quiet. There was a tailor, we got to know the guy, and I remember one, what they call the Free French, the FFE or something like that, had previously been there before us. There were several fairly nice looking girls. I got acquainted with one of them, Denise was her name. [One day] a tank come in, it was in an orchard, right, next to this hotel, and all the French people come out like, of course there were kids and people looking for food or a handout, that’s where I met her. Anyway, I went over there one time and she asked me if I, I didn’t speak very good French, hardly any. I didn’t know what the story was. And I went over, a real nice looking girl, she was in bed, she was pregnant. She was gonna have a baby. You could see, she was due [very soon]. French people are more out in the open than we are about those things. And this girl told me what happened. She said an FFI guy did it, see. She told it right out, and he’s gone. So anyway, the parents of this girl were kind of worried about, we were there, so they figured this is not gonna happen again. Which it could have happened.
Anyway, there was a guy in our outfit by the name of Risto Radovich, his mother brought him from Yugoslavia just before the big war broke out so he wouldn’t have to go in the army, or something like that. Brought him over there to San Francisco. So it turned out he was drafted in the army and they sent him over anyway; he didn’t like it very well. But he could speak Russian, Polish, and there was a camp, a slave labor camp, he’s the guy that got onto it. He went over there, it was full of girls, a lot of girls over there, some Polish girls, and Russian girls, mostly Polish and Russian girls. Some men, older men who were used by the Germans for slave labor. So he had a girlfriend, she was a Russian girlfriend, not bad looking, and so Greca and I, I think Greca was married, you don’t want to tell anyone about this, you guys come over, you know, I’ll get you a girlfriend.
So we went over to the camp with him, they had little rooms where they stayed, and these two girls, I think they were Polish girls, he introduced us.I don’t know what the hell he was talking, he says, “This is so and so.” They kind of smiled, so he left to go to his girlfriend. So we, they had two beds, Greca sat on one side of the bed with his girl and the one I was assigned to or whatever, Greca, he knew a little Polish, Greca’s from a Polish family, so he’s talking Russian ...
(End of side)
Cliff Flora: ...I don’t know, maybe shack up with him or something, so we had, I think we had a couple of cans of rations. We gave them some C rations, we took that and they heated it up and they put it in a big dish; they put it on a table, put spoons around there, and they started eating out of the dish. Greca looked at me, “Hell,” he says, “they’re eating out of the goddamn big dish, I don’t want none of it.” We thought that was kind of funny. Anyway, they had a radio there, it was mostly Russians there and they had Radio Moscow, and everybody left, to go in that one room to listen to Radio Moscow.
Aaron Elson: So did you wind up shacking up with them or not?
Cliff Flora: No, no, we never went back to that.
Aaron Elson: This was in Metz?
Cliff Flora: Outside of Metz. Hagendas [Hagendange], they call it, it’s in Alsace. Coal mines.
Aaron Elson: And that’s where Radovich found this...
Cliff Flora: Yeah, he got this Russian girlfriend. Anyway, I remember one Russian girl, I don’t know whether Radovich had a pistol or somebody, she saw a pistol and she went crazy. She was jumping up and down, she grabbed it, and she went outside, and they had a German helmet out on a post, and she was good, she fired that thing, she’d get a kick out of that. Anyway, later on, some of these girls came over to where we were living in this hotel. We had rooms, you know, were sleeping where these prostitutes used to stay, and I think three or four of them came over. One little girl I remember, she was a pretty little girl, I think a Russian girl, a little blonde girl, she had a ski suit on. She went and danced out to the middle of the room, I don’t know whether it was me or someone else, she jumped on a guy’s lap, maybe it was me, put her arm around me and acted like, hey, I want to do something. And the guys are looking at him, two or three other guys in the room, wondering what he’s gonna do, you know, kind of go along with it. And he kind of sat back and kind of went along with it and then she jumped up like this and spun around in the middle of the room just like “Hey, you don’t touch me!” You know, she’s telling you, you guys are not gonna get away with this, but I caught onto her game. She’s teasing the guy, you could see that she was saying you know, you’re not gonna pull any stuff with me. Cute little gal. Anyway, it was shortly after that they left. The only time I went down there was that one time. But Radovich went down there every chance, he stayed with them, what the hell, he could speak their language. It had nothing to do with combat.
Aaron Elson: What’s the closest you ever came to getting killed?
Cliff Flora: Well, I could have been killed easy the first day. The whole area, when we went into the attack, we went over there, we were green, never been in combat. It wasn’t even hardly daylight. It was just getting daylight, there was this full-scale attack. So what the Germans do, they say well we can do the same thing, they throw a counterattack, see, all hell is breaking loose, shells is coming in, they throw everything but the kitchen sink is what they said; you’ve got, it looked like balls of fire going by your tank, the tank, you know, there’s shrapnel like the one that got Swanson, or hit the side of the road, things are blowing up, you’re seeing parts of limbs of trees and dirt in the air, and you’re scared shitless you know, and you’re going along, I suppose that’d be about as close, so we got up there, finally night came, we lost several guys right there. I mean in the tanks, at the front is practically where we were at. So Greca and I, we was digging a foxhole, and Greca says, and I agreed with him, he said, “If this keeps up every day, we ain’t gonna last.” I said, “I don’t think so either.” You can’t go through too many days like that.
So the next day, for us it settled down a little bit, of course snipers were shooting guys from way out, and they liked to shoot for officers; that’s why officers never keep their insignia, you know, covered up, because you see anything like a major or what in the hell, or captain bars, they want to get them first. I think they might have got one or two of them. My rank was, I got a little break there, they wouldn’t waste a bullet on me. We had a guy by the name of [William] Schmidt was killed that day I remember, do you remember anything about that? He stood up, he was in a tank, I wasn’t there but I heard the story, I think it was a German in a tree that got him, I guess it was a terrible thing, he slumped down, I don’t know whether he was a tank driver or a tank commander, he slumped down in the tank and the other guys that were around there they could see him and the blood was streaming all over. It was a bad thing. He was killed instantly.
Aaron Elson: Did you know [Charles] Vietmeyer?
Cliff Flora: I’ve heard the name, but I didn’t know him personally.
Aaron Elson: Because he was in his crew, I believe, and he went nuts.
Cliff Flora: Yeah, that was a bad thing. I think that would be about the first or second day. That’s what I said, it was a pretty traumatic day for everybody.
Aaron Elson: Did you know Sawyer, Cardis Sawyer?
Cliff Flora: Yeah, from Texas. He was a character, quite a character. Nice guy, he was a baldheaded guy, a real funny guy. Cardis. We called him, what the hell was his nickname, nice guy. I remember one time one of the tanks was hit by a mine, we went up there, I think maybe, did he get killed?
Aaron Elson: No, but he went...
Cliff Flora: Oh yeah, that’s the day he lost his hearing and everything else. I remember he could say, “I can’t hear nothing.” I remember a cow, there was a cow out there, I don’t know whether the cow stepped on a mine, but I remember the cow looked like a rug, whatever it was, explosive, just took everything out from under the cow and there was nothing but the hide laying there like a rug. Anyway, the tank hit a mine, that’s right, and Cardis Sawyer, we never saw him after that. He must have lost all his hearing. That would be enough to take you out right there. It wasn’t fatal or anything.
Aaron Elson: Did you have to go retrieve that tank?
Cliff Flora: I think so, we was up there, I don’t know what happened after that. I remember when we dragged it out there or something. I don’t know whether anybody else got hurt or not, that’s the only one I remember. I think the others might have been, nobody got killed. Yeah, how’d you happen to know about that?
Aaron Elson: [Jim] Gifford told me about it.
Cliff Flora: Yeah, I was there shortly after it happened because that was an incident was combat was over a mine, you can always hit them, later at any time. I remember one incident, it didn’t have nothing to do with combat either, it was a German tiger tank and a German farmhouse. Driskill and I had orders to go up, hook onto it and tow it back for the infantry guys to use for target practice or something you know, in the back of the lines. Beautiful tank, you know, that’s one of their best, the tiger tank, with the big old long gun, the big old long 88s, that damn thing way out there. We were pretty smart. We didn’t get in it on account of booby traps. Anyway, I was standing around there, and I see this guy, a farmer, French guy, he had a young boy with him; he went back to a shed or something. There was an infantry guy at the side of the house hit some kind of a boobytrap or something, I don’t know whether it killed him or not. Somebody hollered “Medics!” He went over there, I guess somebody got him. But I think that farmer knew about that, because he walked back, he looked back just before that, this infantry guy was inside this house, I don’t know what he picked up, what it was, there must have been something there that attracted him because he picked something, you could hear a big blast right at the corner of that house. I never knew what happened. I don’t know whether. ... Anyway, we hooked onto the tank and nothing happened, but nobody got in the tank. It could have been boobytrapped, you get in there and start messing around, looking for souvenirs or whatever, or to see how things worked. It’s hard to remember all these things in detail.
End of tape