"There's no such thing as a good war. World War 2 was a 'must' war. We had to win"

Meet Arnold Brown, rifle company commander, 90th Infantry Division

I first met Arnold Brown at a reunion of the 90th Infantry Division when he walked past and I noticed he was carrying a binder that said “Oberwampach” on the cover. I knew that my father’s tank battalion, the 712th, which was attached to the 90th Division, had fought off nine counterattacks (the number kind of fluctuates between seven and nine in accounts I’ve read or recorded over the years) in Oberwampach, Luxembourg, over a two-day period during the Battle of the Bulge, but I had not heard any accounts of the battle from the infantry’s perspective. In 1997 I visited him at his apartment in a senior living complex in Owensboro, Kentucky. If Arnold bears a bit of a resemblance to Colonel Sanders, he was from Kentucky and he was a colonel when he retired from the service, this despite having only an eighth-grade education. I think he was even in a group called the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.

This is the first part of that September 8, 1997 interview. The audio will not always match the transcript, as the audio was edited into separate tracks when I was producing audio books on CD. This section before the first audio clip was not included on the audio CD.

Arnold Brown, 90th Infantry Division, Owensboro, Ky., Sept. 8, 1997

Aaron Elson: (looking at cover of Brown’s scrapbook, which has unit patches) Now which divisions are these?

Arnold Brown: Well, of course you know the Big Red One. And you know the First Cavalry Division. And you know the 90th Infantry Division. And this is the Fifth Division. I first went in as a recruit, I got my training in the Fifth Division, and I served in the 103rd, 104th, training a new division, and I forgot which one it is. And this one up here (missing) had an ax on it. One of them was the 69th, now, I remember that.

Aaron Elson: Okay, show me these patches once again.

Arnold Brown: Okay. Let me do it in the order that I served in. Fifth Infantry Division. 69th. Then the 90th Infantry Division, First Cavalry Division, and the Big Red One.

Aaron Elson: First, a couple of preliminary questions. Your name is Arnold Brown?

Arnold Brown: Arnold L. Brown.

Aaron Elson: What’s the L for?

Arnold Brown: Lee.

Aaron Elson: Not after Robert E?

Arnold Brown: I don’t know of another, if any of my ancestors had the name Lee, so it’s a possibility it could have been. I hope the Arnold wasn’t after Benedict Arnold.

Aaron Elson: Where did you grow up?

Arnold Brown: I was born and raised in Ohio County, Kentucky, just about 30 miles from here. On a farm. Of course I was a teenager back during the Depression years. I got tired of eating corn bread and molasses three times a day so I decided to go into the Army. I left home with 50 cents in my pocket, an eighth-grade education. I went out to the little place of Cronos, they called it Equality I believe was the name of the area there, and went out in the bushes and waited till the first freight train come through, and when it slowed down I jumped inside one of these boxcars. It was dark inside, and there was a professional hobo in there. He said, “Where you goin’, sonny?” Like to scared me to death. But he turned out to be a very nice hobo, because he told me when and where to get off the train when I arrived in Louisville so that the security forces wouldn’t pick me up; otherwise I probably would never have made it into the Army. So this is my beginning of my military career.

In those days, well, we were an all-volunteer force, and of course they got a lot of their men, individuals like me, and other young men who would get into some type of minor trouble with the authorities, the police, a judge would call them before him and they’d give him a choice of paying his fine and spending 15 to 30 days in jail or going into the military. So a lot of them would take the military. And in those days, the basic training in the military was to weed ’em, in other words either make a man and a soldier out of them or out they would go. And later on, I ended up being a recruiting instructor in the same outfit. And this was quite a problem, because as a corporal in those days I had more authority than the majors had later on as far as disciplinary actions were concerned. If we had a problem recruit, we could take him down and put him in the guardhouse and leave him there overnight, no charge or no nothing, he didn’t know how long he was going to be there and this would scare the heck out of him, when he came back, why, he’d turn out to be a good soldier. Can you imagine trying to do that today in this type of Army? No.

And while I was drilling recruits, I had trouble with another soldier. I did everything I could to discipline him, and the policy then was, one of the things they would allow us to do was for the recruit to hold a rifle over his head and run down to the parade ground, around the flagpole and back, and believe me, if you do this for a little while, you’re really tired out. And I had him to do that a few times and it didn’t help, so I reported him to the lieutenant who was in charge of the recruit training. And he says, “Take him behind the garbage rack.”

In those days, if you had a problem with the individual, why, they had an area behind the garbage rack there where you could go back there and you could fight it out, as long as you used your fists, and when it’s over you’re supposed to get up and shake hands. The lieutenant told me to take him behind the garbage rack.

I said, “Did you look at this one? He’s over 6 feet tall and he’s from the mountains” up there in Virginia. I said, “Would you take a look at this one, Lieutenant?” These are some of the comical things. You want to get to my story.

Aaron Elson: Now wait a minute, you being a little guy, did any of these recruits ever wallop you?

Arnold Brown: No, sir, I never had any of them invite me behind the garbage rack. But that was a different army.

Aaron Elson: Now what year did you go in?

Arnold Brown: That was in 1936. I enlisted on March 18th, 1936. And it took me a year and 11 months to make Pfc. But it wasn’t too long after that until I made corporal. But the only reason I got promoted to corporal, a World War I sergeant committed suicide, and this left a vacancy for sergeant, so when they promoted one of the senior corporals to sergeant, it left a vacancy for a corporal, and they got all the senior Pfcs and they chose me then for the corporal’s rating.

Aaron Elson: Do you know why he committed suicide?

Arnold Brown: I never did hear. He was old, you know, pretty old at that time. So, I proceeded then and basically got I think to buck sergeant, served as platoon sergeant, and I was getting ready to leave the service after my first career, and I’d already met my future wife. I was stationed at Rockford, Illinois, and I was going to be separated in March of the following year, and I already had my job lined up where I could, as soon I got out of the service, step right into this occupation...

Aaron Elson: Doing what?

Arnold Brown: As a machinist. And I knew that, in the military at that time a sergeant made $72 a month, on my pay I certainly couldn’t afford a wife, so I’m planning on getting out. I was in a position where I could take a trade school, you see, and I qualified and even had a job with a company lined up, so I didn’t want to wait, you know how it is, you’re young and full of energy, etcetera, so we decided to get married, and got married on Thanksgiving Day, it was November the 20th, 1941. Well, you know what happened December the 7th, so I couldn’t get out. Well, now I’m stuck. So I applied for OCS ...

Aaron Elson: How had you met your wife?

Arnold Brown: Well, I met her at one of those community dances, you know, USO activity.

Aaron Elson: By this time you were, in 1936 when you went in, you were how old, 18?

Arnold Brown: Eighteen.

Aaron Elson: So you’re 23 now, right? Okay, so Pearl Harbor was attacked. What do you remember about that day, you know, hearing that?

Arnold Brown: Yes, I remember that. As I mentioned, I was stationed in Camp Grant, Illinois, and I happened to be Sergeant of the Guard when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and I know the Officer of the Day, a lieutenant, came down and wanted me to put extra guards around the warehouse, you see, this was a recruit reception center where the recruits would come in and train and get equipped and then they’d ship them out to some unit assignment. So apparently he thought there might be some sabotage going on so it was just a precautionary action, but nothing ever occurred around there in this respect.

Aaron Elson: And what was the feeling of the people? Were they angry?

Arnold Brown: Oh, yes. Everyone was real mad at the Japanese, and of course after that the volunteers were coming in, you know, the volunteers were just about as plentiful as the draftees were. Well, it unified the country. In other words, this was a war that we had to win. As one person made the statement, I think compared with the later wars that World War II was a good war. He said, “There’s no such thing as a good war.” He said, “World War II was a must war. We had to win.” And I don’t think even those who were in combat there was never any doubt in our minds but what we were going to pursue it until we won the war.

Aaron Elson: Now when you put in for OCS, if Pearl Harbor was not attacked, when would you have gotten out of the Army?

Arnold Brown: Well, I would have gotten out the following year on March the 18th, I would have completed my three years of service.

Aaron Elson: Was there a feeling, because the war was on in Europe already, were people following it closely, or was that overseas and nobody talked about it?

Arnold Brown: Well, I believe a majority of the people were worried about it. You know, they were worried about it but they weren’t emotional and upset about it like they were after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Aaron Elson: What made you put in for OCS?

Arnold Brown: I’ll have to tell it like it is.

Aaron Elson: Tell it like it is!

Arnold Brown: They started calling in reserve officers, National Guard officers; now, I don’t want to put any reflection on the individuals, they were educated, they were smart, but they did not have, they knew very little about the military. And this one lieutenant, he was reading in the manual there, trying to learn something, he said, “I understand why we have officers and non-commissioned offers, but who are these bar men?” Browning automatic rifles. I thought, “Good gosh, these people are gonna be leading me in combat?” And here I already had three years of training. So I applied for OCS. Of course, you had to make 110 on the Army General Classification test in those days to qualify, and they also required a high school education. Well, they had a board of officers there to make these selections to OCS, so they observed me in my handling of my platoon, etcetera, so they gave a waiver for me to go OCS in spite of it. And I did go to OCS and I might add that I graduated in the upper 10, because they always interviewed the upper 10, it was OC 82, in 1942, that I graduated from OCS.

Aaron Elson: And where did you go to OCS?

Arnold Brown: At Fort Benning, Georgia, infantry center, Fort Benning, Georgia.

Aaron Elson: That’s where my father went, at about the same time. Maurice Elson.

Arnold Brown: Remembering names is one of my pitfalls.

Aaron Elson: So you went to Fort Benning infantry OCS...

Arnold Brown: And then they assigned me to a new infantry division that was being formed. And in this division they just sent out a cadre, they have an officer as the company commander and then they have some of the key noncommissioned officers. So the rest of it then is filled up by replacements, including new officers from OCS. So they sent five of us shavetails into this company. So the company commander gave us a form to fill out, giving our experiences and our preference of assignment. So I put down rifle platoon leader. I’d been a platoon sergeant and I knew the platoon A to Z, so I knew I could handle this job in spite of my limited education. And all the officers put down company executive officer. Well, who do you think they chose for company exec? Me. And I should have known, because that’s the Army system, if you want something, tell them that’s what you don’t want. So after being in that position for three months, they promoted me to first lieutenant. So it wasn’t long after that until they were forming another new division, so now we have to send a cadre to this new division.

Aaron Elson: That division, the first division, which division was that?

Arnold Brown: The 69th. Then they were gonna form another division and we had to send a cadre. So the company commander called me in, he said one of us would have to go as a C.O. in the new division. So he said, “Since this is my first company, why, I’d like to stay here.” Of course I had no choice. So I was cadred out to help form another division. After holding that position for six months they promoted me to captain. So when I first went in, it took me a year and 11 months to make Pfc, now I go from second lieutenant to captain in 11 months. I said “I must have been a dumb private and a smart officer.” Of course, this is the way experience paid off, in other words I was in the right place at the right time, and I was doing a satisfactory job is what it boils down to. So I ended up, in other words I was helping train a new division to get formed and organized, so it could ship out.

Aaron Elson: Which division was this?

Arnold Brown: Don’t quote me on this, it was the 103rd or 104th Division, I don’t know. But what I was doing at the time I got my orders to ship out as a replacement officer, I was conducting, and I was doing it for division, in other words I was working for the assistant division commander, and we were running rifle platoons through a live firing field problem and rating them on their qualification for combat, now this is what I was doing when I got orders on the 16th of June to ship out as a replacement officer because of the high rate of casualties they were having in Normandy.

Aaron Elson: In these live fire exercises, was anybody wounded or killed?

Arnold Brown: There was no one injured, there was no one killed and no one injured by gunshot wounds; anyhow, you know, you get scratches and so forth, it’s rough training.

Aaron Elson: So the 16th of June 1944 you were training recruits, and you got orders to ship out as a replacement officer. Where had you been, at which camp were you doing this?

Arnold Brown: I was serving at, there’s a camp here, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, at Fort McClellan, well, I served at all of the camps in the South. I’m sorry, in a few months I’ll be 80 years old and my mind, my senior citizen mind plays tricks on me occasionally.

Aaron Elson: Oh, that’s quite all right. Don’t worry about that.

Arnold Brown: I should have gotten all my notes together and had these written out.

Aaron Elson: That’s quite all right. It’s an interesting process. Some things you don’t remember, but the things you do remember are what’s important. So don’t worry about anything that’s not there.

Arnold Brown: I’ll tell a story, now when these platoons were going through these live firing problems, I had to rate them, whether they were qualified for combat or not. If not, they had to go back and take some more training. And I was able to rate all the platoons except one. And this platoon did everything wrong as far as issuing their orders and taking advantage of the camouflage, everything they did was wrong except one thing. They hit every target. So I went to the assistant division commander, a general, and asked him to help me make this decision. And he wasn’t much help, he’s still going to leave it up to me. And this is what I said: I said, “Well, the cover of your own rifle fire is the best cover you can have, and when you’re killing enemy they’re not killing you. So how can I rate them unsatisfactory?”

He said, “Good.”

So we rated them qualified.

Aaron Elson: Absolutely right, I think.

Arnold Brown: Okay, so I’m on my way as a replacement, and they put us on a troop ship to ship out to England, and we were in a convoy, and there were so many ships in this convoy that you could look in any direction almost going over the horizon, and the freighters and tankers and all had the outer perimeter; in other words, if submarines made an attack on us they were supposed to take it rather than let them get to the troop ships. Well, we were out two days, and the ship that we were on was an old German ship that had been scuttled by the Germans in Africa or someplace, and we had salvaged it, and we were on this troop ship. And our convoy was taking a zigzag course, of course, and they were making one of those turns to the left, and the steering mechanism of the ship went out. We couldn’t turn. And there was one of those tankers crossing in front of us and they put this ship in reverse it’s like it’s jumping up and down to put it in reverse to stop from hitting this tanker that’s filled with high-octane gas.

I’d hope maybe they’d just turn around and take us back to repair the ship, because the convoy just went off and left us, but we were already at the point of no return. So they left us there and they left one, oh, what do they call them ships?

Aaron Elson: A destroyer?

Arnold Brown: A destroyer. They left one destroyer there and he was circling us all the time while we were getting our repairs done, and occasionally he’d take off and drop a few depth charges, I don’t know whether there was an enemy sub there, the radar picked up something, it might have been a school of fish, I don’t know, anyhow it did drop a few, and nothing happened. So they got it repaired before daylight the next morning, and then we took off to catch the convoy. Of course, you know this transport ship could travel a lot faster, so we caught up with them without any other incident.

Aaron Elson: Do you know the name of the ship or how big a ship it was?

Arnold Brown: There were 5,000 troops on it. But we were crowded down there in the hold, it’s very uncomfortable.

Aaron Elson: Did you go directly to Normandy, or did you go to England?

Arnold Brown: Oh no, we went through England. But I was only there a few days, because they were needing replacements bad; you’re familiar with the casualty rate that they were having there in Normandy. So they shipped me right on through and right up to the front lines, and you know, it was so confused and everything I don’t even remember the exact date, but it was around the last of June and they assigned me to the 90th Infantry Division. They assigned me as company commander of Company G in the 358th Infantry Regiment. And this company had lost all their officers and 50 percent of their enlisted men during a prior engagement. My mission at that time was to organize these replacements into this demoralized company and make an attack three days later. That was the most trying time I’ve ever had in my entire life. I thought, if I live through this, that I’d have to have some help from the Supreme Being. If there is a guardian angel, why, no one ever needed one any worse than I did with my responsibilities in this situation and the men that I was responsible for and I believe he came to my rescue.

I had a few skirmishes after that but no major operations until the battle of the Island of Seves.

Aaron Elson: When you came in they were on Hill 122 still, yes?

Arnold Brown: Yeah, but I wasn’t on Hill 122. This was just a little after that; I heard them talking about it. That must have been where this unit lost all their personnel in combat.

Aaron Elson: What were they saying, what type of things? Were they depressed?

Arnold Brown: They were depressed, demoralized. And I can understand that, you know, well, I don’t know, I can’t express myself but it was certainly a demoralizing and a sad state of affairs at that time.

Aaron Elson: Were you scared?

Arnold Brown: Why, I reckon I was scared. I always say that anyone said they were not scared, they were either lying or crazy. Either way I didn’t want them in my outfit.

Aaron Elson: So even back then, there were people who said, “I’m not scared?” Who had that attitude?

Arnold Brown: No, I just made that, that was my own comment.

Aaron Elson: Tell me about your very first skirmish. You were a captain. You had a company. Was it fully restocked, or was it depleted in personnel?

Arnold Brown: Well, it wasn’t completely filled up, you know, in those days the TOE called for a hundred and ninety something, but that was 12-man squads, and they had already eliminated the 12-man squad down to, so, I’d say about 150 men after I got the replacements, round figures. And, well, after the reorganization when we were moving up to the front, we were under long range artillery fire. An artillery shell exploded nearby and a piece of shrapnel from this artillery shell struck a little boy in the head. He couldn’t have been, well, somewhere between 18 and 21 years of age, and I can hear him today, his cry out and the way his voice trailed off as he dropped dead. He said, “Mooommm.” It gave me the chills. So that was my first casualty. I witnessed my first casualty. He was one of the 405,399 to be killed in World War II, he became a statistic. He was a statistic to everyone except his mother and his other loved ones. And I often wondered, how is the selection made, see, he hadn’t seen an enemy. He hadn’t fired any weapon. And he was one of my first casualties.

Arnold Brown: At this particular time, the attack kept being delayed. We’d move here and yonder to different places. Half the time I didn’t know where I was, but according to my map, I knew where I was on that map. I had to know where I was at all times, within 50 yards, which I did.

I want to go into my first real major battle, and that was the battle of the Island of Seves. The regiment made two attacks on that island and were repulsed with heavy casualties. The regimental chaplain put up a white flag and started walking across toward the enemy lines. A German officer put up a white flag and they met out in no man’s land. They organized a truce. So they decided to pick up their casualties, get medical treatment for them. Come back and took the white flags down and we started making more casualties.

Aaron Elson: Were you involved in picking up the troops? Did you go out and help bring people back?

Arnold Brown: No. The medical corpsmen and so forth, they organized troops to go out and get them. They actually made contact with some of the Germans while they were doing this. And I learned my first big lesson. After making the first attack and getting ready for the second attack, one sergeant, I couldn’t get him out of his foxhole to join us for this attack. He was squatted down in this foxhole below ground level, and he was frozen with fear. He was strictly, you know, out. He just wasn’t gonna do it. So after this next attack, which was also a failure, why, I went back to check on him. There he was, crouched down in that foxhole in the same position I’d last seen him. The only difference was, he had a hole in his steel helmet. He was dead. For him to get killed like that it took a treeburst artillery shell, a piece of shrapnel had to go straight down into that foxhole and hit him. So the lesson I learned was, if it’s your time you cannot hide. So I decided that I may get it, but I’m gonna be doing my job when I do. If he had joined us in the attack, who knows? Of course, with the condition he was in he wouldn’t have been any help anyhow. Some people just could not take, the public doesn’t realize all the types of killing there is, and the ruthlessness of it and so forth. And there are just some men that couldn’t take it mentally, they just didn’t have something while other men that could take it, who knows why they could take it?

Aaron Elson: Do you know anything about this particular sergeant? Was he a replacement?

Arnold Brown: I don’t even know his name. See, I hadn’t even had a chance to learn their names, because when you’re in operation, your platoons are scattered out here and yonder, I only know just the people right around me that I have to deal with, the platoon sergeant, the platoon leaders.

Aaron Elson: Tell me about the three attacks that you made on Seves Island.

Arnold Brown: Okay. After all this, we’re gonna make another attack, just one rifle company, and they chose me to make this attack. I was beginning to think, I wondered, you know, if the tactics are correct here. Because here’s a strongpoint three miles long; I was always taught that you attack the weak points, not attack the strongpoints. If you surround them, why, they’d fall without any casualties. And I thought first that that was wrong. Because here now they’re going to order one rifle company to take an objective that the regiment had failed and one battalion surrendered half of their men on that island, now they’re going to send me over there? Now this is the thoughts that are going through my mind, see. But they promised me a smokescreen and an artillery preparation so that they could blind the enemy and make him keep his head down while we crossed this open field and that river we had to wade to get to this strongpoint.

I kept waiting for the smoke and the artillery and I never see it. The battalion commander ordered me to go anyhow. I questioned him on that. And these are his words, he said, “If we don’t get some men on that island,” he said, “I’ll be relieved, the regimental commander will be relieved, you’ll be relieved.”

I said, “Well, Colonel, I think my responsibility goes a little deeper than that.” I said, “I’m responsible for 150 men.”

I don’t remember saying this but in my mind I knew that was what I felt.

He ordered us to go anyhow, so what am I gonna do? Take a chance of being court-martialed for disobeying an order to go on a hazardous duty? I couldn’t do that. I remembered the old infantry credo, it ended up, I said, “Follow me!” I thought it would be sure death, but I had no choice.

So I got out about 50 yards, and the Germans opened up on us with machine guns, even some tank firing. So I looked back, and there are three men following me. So I hit the ground, now what the heck are me and three men gonna do? So I lay in a prone position, and one machine gun was cutting grass over my legs and I believe if he had searched up any higher he’d have cut the cheeks of my butt off, but he searched back and got one of the men that were following me.

And someone was firing at me with a burp gun, what we called a burp gun, it’s like our Thompson machine guns, it wasn’t high-powered and it was firing at its maximum range. So they’re on line with me but they’re falling about three feet short. The bullets were bouncing, I could see them. I was holding my carbine, and I felt something roll across my hand, and I caught three of those bullets. Now who’s going to believe that you caught three bullets in combat? But I explained that they’d lost their strength, they were just bouncing. And after a while they stopped shooting, they thought we were dead, and they could see that we were no threat to taking that island, so they stopped shooting. So I told these two men to run back for cover. So they dashed back for cover. I should have got up and went with them, I can see the picture now but I lay there and when they hit cover, I got up, and these Germans probably jumped on their guns, they were ready for me, and I had three machine guns firing at me, so help me, like you see in a movie. They ripped up the dirt on the right side, the left side, the bullets I could hear like hornets all around me. And I didn’t zigzag, I just took off as fast as I could dash, it was fifty yards, and I didn’t get a scratch. So I figure the guardian angel was working for me.

So, they had an investigation of that, they had me make out a report on the battalion commander’s action, and you know, he got relieved of his command and so did the regimental commander.

Aaron Elson: And who was that commander?

Arnold Brown: I believe that was [Christian] Clark. And Colonel Nichols, who was my battalion commander, he said, that was before he took over as battalion commander, he said he was in Colonel Clark’s office that time, and he was sitting there tapping his foot. In other words, and he’s responsible for not getting the smoke and artillery.

Aaron Elson: Did they ever find out why the smoke ...

Arnold Brown: I have no idea. Now pardon my General Patton language, but they were so damn screwed up that none of them knew what the hell they were doing. That’s the way I expressed it in the report.

Aaron Elson: How did your company respond? Did they respect you, or were they upset that you hadn’t defied the order?

Arnold Brown: When I issued the attack order and they refused to go, actually my sympathy was with them. They were correct. No question about it. Because, suppose I order you to walk out in front of automobiles. Are you gonna do it?

Aaron Elson: No.

Arnold Brown: To cross the highway with high speed automobiles, the principle is the same. You don’t have to obey an illegal order, and I wondered what my chances would have been if I had disobeyed that order. I’ll tell you this: If I’d had a reputation – see, I didn’t know anybody, they didn’t know me. I had to prove myself.

(to be continued)