Smokey Stuever's War Part 3: The Death of Shorty
Marion "Shorty" Kubeczko was killed on July 7, 1944, during the battle for Hill 122
Ed “Smokey” Stuever was a maintenance sergeant in the 712th Tank Battalion, with which my father served in World War 2. Parts 1 and 2 of my 2005 interview with Smokey are in my most recent Substacks, and there likely will be a fourth, as he had a lot to do with keeping those Sherman and Stuart tanks rolling through 11 months of combat, beginning with three vehicles that stalled in the water just shy of Utah Beach (this was three weeks after D-Day). Marion “Shorty” Kubeczko, Smokey’s driver all throughout training, was killed on the battalion’s fourth day in combat.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about Spanky MacFarland.
Smokey Stuever: Oh, yes. One time, Spanky MacFarland was there for five days, and they put him in my tent because there was a couple of guys on leave. One of them went to New York, somebody died in the family and so he’d be gone for a week, so they assigned his bunk to him, you know, and I was his chaperone for five days, to see that he ate and slept, but didn’t have to account for what he did. He’d go roamin’ and do anything, go spend time with the Colonel Herr and his wife, go all over, you know. But he always, when it come to chow time he had to be by me and we’d sit together and all that, I had to make sure he got food. Yeah. And he was a little chubby guy, I’d say he must have been 12 years old, around there.
Aaron Elson: In the veterinary detachment, what kind of problems would you deal with, or what would happen to the horses that they would need medical attention.
Smokey Stuever: There was lots of problems. They would have teeth problems, the male horses had problems with stones accumulating in their girth, which is up in there, and we had to soap ‘em up and reach up in there and remove the stones, and they loved that. There was wood ticks to worry about, they’d get in their ears and different areas. They’d get in fights amongst themselves and they’d get torn flesh. Most of the trouble was with their feet, their hoofs. They got, the brush out there, when it broke off, it was pretty strong stubby stuff and it would puncture their hoofs, and the inside of their hoofs, I forget what we call it, the soft part of it, and, this particular horse that I talked about had a piece of that greasewood stuck up in there and I was ready to pull it out. We did get it out.
There was an occasion where the dentist, he was a great big fella, Dr. Shank, what a name for a dentist, and he was entertaining a couple of lady friends and he wanted to show ‘em how to ride a horse over a hurdle and there was a hurdle about three foot high that was called a chicken coop, it was built like this, so when he approached it, the hurdle, getting ready to jump over it, he pulled the reins tight and he tightened up in the saddle and the horse thought he meant to stop, so the horse tried to stop and it rolled through that chicken coop head first, it’s a wonder it didn’t kill it there. So the horse was able to walk, but it was bleeding, and the major says “You’d better take it out and destroy it.”
So Lieutenant Crow says, “How about letting me have it for two days. It’d make a wonderful class instruction, and I think I could fix it up.”
So the next day we got it all ready and we put it alongside a great big round table and put it, strapped it on there and put it to sleep and he opened up a large cavity between its ears on the back of its head and there was three broken vertebraes, they were really out of place, and he wired them all together with our help and stitched it up and in two days it was pretty good. And so, the major says, “Well, we’ll put it on the disabled list.” You know, light duty, “but it’ll have to be exercised,” and that’s where I came in, to exercise the horse daily. I rode it instead of walking it. It was such a beautiful riding horse. And so it was only assigned to someone small, light. It was a beautiful horse, oh yeah. And that’s where I got a buddy, his name was Lillerland, from southern Illinois, where that university is down there, Carbondale.
Aaron Elson: What happened to him, your buddy?
Smokey Stuever: He stayed with the 10th Armored Division.
Aaron Elson: This dentist who had the problem injuring the horse, was he a horse dentist or a people dentist?
Smokey Stuever: People dentist. And he pulled a wrong tooth on me.
Aaron Elson: Oh, he was the one who pulled the wrong tooth?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah. And we stood in, what do you call it, a parade, you know ...
Aaron Elson: Inspection.
Smokey Stuever: Inspection. And General Marshall inspected us. And when they were walking in front of me ... “What’s the matter with you, soldier?” Oh, you know, I’m making funny faces. And over on the side I let it all fly out, a big mouthful of blood, oh, man, I made a mess. I says, “The dentist pulled my tooth this morning.”
“You shouldn’t be out here. Go into your barracks.” Go to your tent, or whatever. So I was dismissed. But I didn’t get no time off. Only that day, that afternoon. And finally I got some ice pack. General Marshall came to us one time later, at Camp Lockett. We stood in the rain, I mean mounted, waiting and waiting. Then they finally, they called that he can’t make it. It was around Pearl Harbor time, right after Pearl Harbor.
Aaron Elson: Where were you on Pearl Harbor day?
Smokey Stuever: Oh. On Pearl Harbor day was on a Sunday. I had eaten lunch early because someone has to be at the veterinarian hospital all the time, so me and another fellow, I don’t remember now if it was Thompson, I think it was Wallace ... It was about 11:30, 12 o’clock on Sunday that December the 7th and boy, the sirens were blowing and everything, “Pearl Harbor’s been bombed. The Japs are on their way!” Ohhh, there’s guys got up on the roof of the barracks with machine guns. Well, the damn Japs, they did get to the California coast on some of these little subs they had. And I had to go out and go on a border patrol guarding electric power lines, you know, transmission stations. We were there day and night, and we slept in a cave, you know, a dugout. And I come down with a bad cold so I got relieved of that duty and was sent to the, not to the hospital, but for treatment, bad cold, that’s all.
Aaron Elson: The yellow jaundice, do you recall that?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, oh that was at the new camp, Camp Lockett, around Pearl Harbor time. I think it was just before Pearl, no it was after, right after, and Wallace, Bernie Wallace had a bad case of it. Bernie Wallace also had cancer removed at that time, and you know, cancer wasn’t very well known at that time, and he had it on his lip and they cut him from ear to ear and they rolled that skin up over that area and removed that flesh and you could hardly see it, the scar, such a tremendous job they did, at some hospital in San Diego. Yeah, probably a Navy.
Aaron Elson: When did you and Shorty become buddies?
Smokey Stuever: There, at Camp Lockett, no, we became buddies before that. He was Catholic, so was I. There was a bunch of us Catholics, we would go to church together, they’d have church call like 11 o’clock on a Sunday and we went to a Mass at Campo, nine miles away, and then we weren’t allowed to fool around after church, we had to get on that truck, if we didn’t you walked back, or some guys would go over to the store and fool around, they’d try to make with some of the ladies attending the church. I don’t think anybody, but I, I lucked out with this young lad and his parents. They met me outside the church and they said, “Would you like to come to our house and have lunch, or dinner, with us, or do you want to go back to camp?”
I said, “I’ve got nothing at camp. I’d love that.”
“Okay, good.”
And then the son took me around the Mexican border, showed me the holes in the fences where people are sneaking through.
Aaron Elson: What was Shorty like in the cavalry?
Smokey Stuever: He was a quiet fellow, because his parents divorced.
Aaron Elson: They were Catholic?
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, they were Catholic. Yeah, he was Catholic. That’s how I guess we got buddied up was because we bumped into in the church, we were kind of forced upon each other. So when we went to San Diego we went there together, and hitchhiked there and back, we’d go stay at the YMCA. We drank beer. He liked to take in the sights of San Diego. But then I had a, I wasn’t married to my wife then but her sister was a maid at Coronado Beach off of San Diego. There was an island, you know, in that big bay there, and she was a maid for some officer. And her boyfriend worked up near San Francisco, he was a carpenter, he was building, he got a government job, and so a couple of times they got together and he had a car, he’d pick her up and then they’d come out and pick me up and we went down to Tijuana and we played the races at the horse track, stuff like that. But Shorty and I, I’ve got pictures of Shorty and I thumbing our way back to camp. There was one time we were gonna go to San Diego and the first sergeant didn’t live too far from there and he says, “Well, I’ll take you as far as Pine Valley.” He give us a ride to Pine Valley and we got lucky, there was a priest out there of our church that we were attending, Davis was his name, and he was going to just the outskirts of San Diego where we could take a streetcar or a street bus, so we got lucky that time. But it was tough to get a ride. When you got on a truck, a bunch going to San Diego, one time we got on a truck, he had no brakes, and on those mountain roads going downhill it was scary. So the guy up ahead knew he was in trouble, so they had some kind of signals and he’d wave him on, and he’d try to stop him. So he did. It jarred the hell out of us, but he slowed him down, and then finally he was going up a hill and there was a spot he could pull off on. So the other truck took the rest of us and he got stranded, I don’t know what the hell happened to him after that. That was a scary ride. But them guys would always like to give us real hair-raising rides. Oh, boy, we’d be yelling at them, “We’re gonna kill you when we got to camp...”
Smokey Stuever: I remember Shorty’s attitude when we were going overseas and were talking about getting killed and all that, because we watched a movie about the Sullivan brothers, and Shorty let out an exclamation, he says, “Awww, I don’t get care if I get back or not.”
“What?” I didn’t like to hear that. So, I wonder.
Aaron Elson: And Shorty’s name was Marion Kubeczko.
Smokey Stuever: Yeah, Marion Kubeczko.
Aaron Elson: And where was he from?
Smokey Stuever: The south side of Chicago near Midway Airport. Now after the war, first his mother went over there and saw the grave and saw him and then made arrangements to bring his body back, and when they did they got ahold of me and said we’d like to have some of the boys there. You got some members? So I got quite a few, I think there was 27 of us, and Forrest Dixon was one of them. And the church where he was buried was right across from Midway Airport and here was this great big hangar and they had the windows open and watching our movements.
The following audio is from an earlier interview with Smokey, and while I haven’t got transcriptions, I did use an excerpt in my book Tanks for the Memories, so the text and the audio will not match up; I’d suggest listening but not reading, or reading but not listening, or doing both separately.
[and this is the excerpt from Tanks for the Memories, which is now in an expanded third edition:]
Shorty (Marion Kubeczko) was my buddy in the cavalry down on the Mexican border. We’d go to town together with some other fellows. A lot of times we hitchhiked. We were 50 miles east of San Diego on the Mexican border, in a very remote area. There was no bus transportation available. If the trucks weren’t going into San Diego, you had to find a ride there and back, and you had to make sure you got back on time, because we were under the scrutiny of some old-time sergeants that served in the Philippine campaign and the Cuban campaign. They were very rigid.
Shorty and I stayed together through the cavalry. Also Kenny Wallace from Southern Illinois. There were some other fellows that we buddied with, but the three of us from Illinois, we always managed to stay together, and we were in the same tank crew, Wallace, Kubeczko and me. We were joined by Eugene Sand of Nebraska and Patsy Barchetta and Ed Chieleski. That was my recovery crew.
Shorty was an eager driver. When we were leaving England, our [tank recovery unit] brought up the tail end of the column, and we had to repair a flat tire on a truck. It only took us five minutes, but it made us drop way back and we had to try and catch up. Well, the truck could catch up, but we didn’t. We kind of dropped back, but we were going at top speed. The MPs leading us made a sudden right turn in the middle of this town, and Shorty made this turn at high speed but he couldn’t stay on the street. He went through a cemetery. We went right over the graves.
On Hill 122, we were sent to retrieve a tank that was knocked out, and as we were going up the hill we encountered a heavy mortar barrage. I heard this one coming right at me, and I ducked, because my chest was about ten inches from where it exploded. It hit the front end of my turret, and Shorty didn’t have his cover down. He had it wide open, and he was down under, using the periscope. And the shell went through him.
Shorty was laying on the accelerator, going up the hill in low gear. And the tank retriever was headed right for a big pile of gas cans. I steered it out of the way, trying to shut that darn thing off. I shut the master switch off and that damn thing kept running. By that time, a paratrooper grabbed me by the feet and pulled me off of that tank and said, “He’s gone! Let him go.” He shoved me down in a foxhole and I said, “Get off of me. I need some air.” As soon as he let me go, I ran up there and got on that darn tank, and all around the turret was burning. I pulled the fire extinguisher and put the fire out inside, and then it dawned on me: Ground the magnetos. And so I grounded the magnetos, and it killed the engine. The engine was going at top speed in low gear, and we were going to the top of the hill.
Then I helped them take Shorty out of there, and gave them his belongings. And this colonel that was in charge of that operation, he was from the airborne group [the 82nd Airborne Division], he said, “Let’s get this damn tank off of this road. Who can drive a tank around here?” They had me down on the side of the road, trying to give me a morphine shot, and I wouldn’t take it. So I said, “That’s my tank, and I’ll get that damn thing out of here.” And I made a U-turn, with sparks flying in every direction.
That night, the Germans were laying some mortar fire on us, and Tony Skolarus gets up out of his foxhole and he goes out in the middle of the field, and he says, “Come on, you Germans, kill me! You got Shorty.” I grabbed him and shoved him down in a hole. And he says, “What can we do? What can we do?”
And I said, “Start praying. That’s what your mother’s doing.”
We had a guy in the other tank retriever, which was on the other side of this open field, his name was Whitehead. He was an atheist. He was always in arguments with Kenny Wallace about religion. Back in California they would argue and I would get in trouble because they’re arguing after hours, those two were always arguing about religion. Kenny Wallace would always get into these religious discussions, wherever he went. I admired him. He was quite an evangelist. I could never shut him up.
When Whitehead woke up that next morning, he said, “I want everybody to hear me. I prayed last night.”
To be continued