Tanks for the Memories
The book that, for me, started it all
Now halfway through my 74th year, I’d like to reflect a bit before embarking on my next two major projects. I mentioned in my last newsletter that I would say a few words about my four main books, Tanks for the Memories, Up Above the Clouds to Die, The D-Day Dozen and Prisoners of War.
I self-published Tanks for the Memories in 1994, and released expanded editions circa 2002 and 2022. But with each expansion, I inadvertently left out or overlooked certain passages, mainly because I was trying to do too many things at once.
Today I pulled out one of my remaining copies of the original. It had a map of the battalion’s route in the first couple of pages, like a lot of military books have. In the second edition I added a timeline of significant battalion events, and left it out in the third edition. But I started reading the preface to the first edition and wondered if I’ve actually come as far as a historian as I think I have. So I’d like to reprint that here. But first I included a quote that didn’t appear in later editions. This was the quote:
“There’s a lot of things a man can laugh about now, that wouldn’t have been a bit funny back when it happened. A lot of people say veterans never talk to them. Most of them don’t. The reason they don’t talk is they couldn’t get the picture over to somebody that wasn’t there. They talk to each other. They know what I’m talking about, and I know what they’re saying. Somebody that wasn’t there, he would think that you’re making that story up.” —Otha Martin, tank commander, C Company, 712th Tank Battalion.
There was a second part to the quote which I didn’t use in that first edition. Otha had been talking about Jim Gifford, a lieutenant in the battalion who always wanted to be where the action was. One time, Otha said, Gifford caught a German’s head that was blown off before it hit the ground.
Hell, even I didn’t believe that but maybe that’s why you had to be there. (There’s a scene in the movie of Catch 22 where a head goes flying through the air.) I had interviewed Gifford the year before, which is probably why I didn’t ask him about that. Or maybe I asked him later and he denied it, either way, that was a long time ago.
Following is the preface to the first edition of Tanks for the Memories. Honest to God, I don’t know why I felt a need to rewrite this in future editions.
When I was a child, Iloved hearing my father’s stories about World War II. He managed to make the act of being wounded sound funny. “I had never been in a battle,” he used to say, “so I stuck my head up to see what was going on.” Among other things, he said, a bullet went through his helmet,but some tissue paper wadded inside kept his skull from being penetrated.
My father,Maurice Elson, trained with the infantry, went to Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Ga., and was assigned to the 712th Tank Battalion in Normandy as a replacement.
I only heard him talk once about the second time he was wounded. It was in December and there was snow on the ground, it was at night and in a place called Dillingen. He said he was hit by a German machine gun bullet that entered his chest an inch from his heart, and that the bullet was extracted from his arm. The doctors even gave him the bullet.
Several years after he died of a heart attack in 1980, I came across a newsletter addressed to my father. It was put out by the 712th Tank Battalion, and it chronicled the ordinary, but rarely mundane, lives of the battalion’s members. It mentioned the grandchildren, the retirements, the visits, the surgeries, and it reminded its readers that nobody was growing any younger.
I wrote to the newsletter’s editor, Ray Griffin, in Aurora, Neb., and asked if he would put in a notice asking anyone who remembered my father to contact me. Griffin passed my letter on to Sam MacFarland, who was in A Company, to which my father had been assigned. MacFarland wrote and said he didn’t remember my father, but that I would be welcome to attend the next reunion, where I might find some people who did.
That reunion was in Niagara Falls in 1987. I met three people — Jule Braatz, Charlie Vinson and Ellsworth Howard — who remembered my dad, and the stories I only vaguely remembered suddenly came to life. It was an exhilarating feeling.
The beattalion members welcomed me as if I were part of a large, extended family, and I have been to several reunions since.
The 712th Tank Battalion landed in Normandy on June 28, 1944, and was on the front lines for 11 months. It was in the forefront of the Breakout from Normandy, helped encircle and trap the German 7th Army at the Falaise Gap, probed deep into enemy territory during General Patton’s vaunted dash across Fronce, and rushed up from the south to join in the Battle of the Bulge. It helped break the Siegfried Line, and at times was so far forward that identifying panels were placed on the tanks so Allied planes wouldn’t bomb them. The battalion guarded the treasures of the Merkers Salt Mine and helped liberate the Flossenburg concentration camp.
Jim Gifford joined the battalion as a replacement in Normandy and was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Today Gifford is a lawyer in Yonkers, N.Y., where he also runs a used-car lot. He works seven days a week, and still has a country-lawyer charm that came from growing up in Gloversville, N.Y.
In a philosophical moment, Gifford says that during the war he experienced a kind of calm he did not feel before and has not felt since, because he didn’t expect to survive. Therefore, all the pressure of worrying about school, about a career, about making a living, was lifted from his shoulders.
Forrest Dixon also says he didn’t expect Jim Gifford to survive. “If the tank pulled up in front of a building,” Dixon says, chuckling, “Lieutenant Gifford would get out and go around in back of the building to see if any Germans were hiding there with a bazooka.”
Tony D’arpino lives in the Boston suburb of Milton, and Ruby Goldstein in the Boston suburb of Hull. After the war, Goldstein opened a dry-cleaning establishment and D’Arpino was one of his customers. It wasn’t until they met at a reunion that D’Arpino, who was in C Company, and Goldstein, of A Company, realized they had belonged to the same outfit. Goldstein, a tank commander, was wounded at the Falaise Gap. D’Arpino, a tank driver, was one of only six of C Company’s original members to make it from Normandy to Czechoslovakia without being wounded, unless you count the fact that his eardrums were perforated when his tank went over a mine, and he has suffered from ringing in his ears ever since.
As I was interviewing Bob Hagerty in a hallway outside a meeting room at the Harrisburg, Pa., Sheraton during the 1992 reunion, one of the tankers’ wives passed by. She leaned toward the microphone of the walkman-size tape recorder and said, a little giddily, “Every year they fight the war all over again, and every year it comes out the same.”
In a way, she was right. Every year, though, it has fewer participants. Most of the battalion members are in their seventies. Some wear hearing aids, and a portion of each reunion is spent catching up on medical histories. Several are in remission from cancer.
For a few days each year, though, they are young again, clattering in M4A3 tanks across rivers on pontoon bridges, barreling full tilt along ice-slicked roads, and bringing back to life, for a few flickering moments, the memories of those who are buried in the cemeteries of France and Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany, or whose ashes remain in the fields and orchards where they burned inside their tanks.
During the course of my research for this book, I visited the battalion’s monument outside the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Ky. It was a sobering moment. I had interviewed so many tankers, and heard so many anecdotes, that I thought I knew a great deal about the history of the 712th. But when I started going through the names of 97 battalion members killed in action, I recognized barely half of them.
This is by no means a comprehensive history of the battalion. It virtually ignores the stories of B Company and D Company, largely because most of the people I spoke to were in A Company or C Company. Rather, it is a collection of anecdotes, of images and memories and vignettes as related by a few dozen of the 1,235 men, including replacements, who passed through the ranks of the 712th.
Next: Up Above the Clouds to Die