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Aaron's Blog

 

©2014, Aaron Elson

 

   

Dale Albee

712th Tank Battalion

©2014, Aaron Elson

Page 3

    Aaron Elson: What exactly happened in Binscheid?

    Dale Albee: We had been sent out, and I was working with Mike. I may be wrong, but I think the 4th Armored was going down the main road, and we were going off to the side to clear villages like we normally do, to keep everything clear on the flank. And we came up to this little hill and stopped. Old Mike motioned to me to come forward, so I dismounted and went up, and we looked out here. Now, say like Mitscheid was over here, the town. The road came down around this way and came into the town. And in this field out here there’s a creek, right down below this little bluff. In this field out here there are Germans all over the place, with their holes dug and everything, just walking around. They didn’t even know we were there.

    So we figured, well, shoot, this is like most of the other towns, they’ve got them out to protect the town. We called back for infantry, and waited for about an hour and a half, and they sent the infantry up. They sent 15 green infantry. There was a sergeant named Handlebar Hank; I’ll never know his name and I wish I knew it. He had a big handlebar mustache and his name was Hank. So Mike said, "If I send jeeps, anything can knock them out. How about if you can lead out and go down the road, I’ll fire for support and then I’ll get the support down to you right away, and we’ll fan out and go on into the town."

    Okay, fine. So we got all set, and I took off in my tanks and went over the hill and we opened up on these guys here and the infantry was supposed to get around and get in position, with this ravine over here, so they could sweep around and then protect me as I came over the hill.

    We sailed over the hill and went around, and opened fire. I went down this little dip and just went up, and oh, just topped the rise, and I was planning on stopping just beyond that rise and opening up. Well, right there is where I set off a mine. And of course it knocked our tank out. So we dismounted and got behind the tank. There’s a damn machine gun right straight ahead of us firing on us but we all got behind the tank, and I hollered, "Send up my second tank!" Well, the second tank – that was Murphy in it and I don’t remember the others – came up right in my tracks. And they got up, oh, maybe twice as far as from here to the bush from me, and they rolled across and all of a sudden there’s the damnedest explosion.

    Later on we learned that what it was was the Italian box mine, and what it does, it’s a big box that goes across the road, and it’s got two cutters. And when you roll across that it cuts a wire and sets it off.

    Evidently, my tank wasn’t heavy enough to cut it completely, so when they rolled over they cut it. When that exploded, it blew the whole bottom of the tank in, and of course stopped the tank right away. So I ran over, and the hatch was blown loose, threw it up, and the little driver was Slick, I knew he was dead because he was just kind of slumped forward, and the whole back end of his head was gone, and his back was just shredded. And the assistant driver couldn’t stand up. So I grabbed him under the arms and pulled him up.

    Where you get the strength I don’t know, but I pulled the bow gunner out and his legs were broken I don’t know how many times below the knees, and that’s the reason he couldnt stand up to get out. And right here is Murphy, and I helped him over, and then I saw Holt was getting out. And then instead of jumping behind that tank, I turned around and ran back to my own tank, behind it.

    Handlebar Hank was laying in the road. That second explosion knocked the living daylights out of him and he just kind of jumped up and then fell. And this damn machine gun opened up, and you saw the tracers come by here like that that missed him. And then the second time the tracers came back and they walked right up over his shoulder.

    I ran back and got Handlebar Hank, and pulled him over into the ditch between me and my tank, and then we called for artillery support because I knew we couldn’t do a damn thing. And there’s two Germans right in here, and we knew they were right there, so, you know, the old, "Kommen Sie Hier Macht Schnell Mit der Hande Ho Oder Ich Schiessen!" We captured those two Germans. They came running over. Then we called for artillery.

    In the meantime, the Germans started throwing artillery in on us. So I called back and said, "Send us help," to get the wounded out. And the fences there were kind of like a pole fence, so we’d reach up and grab those poles, put two down like that and we took our coats off and our tanker’s jackets and run the sleeves through it, we made stretchers. And I called back and had Pat Shortall start backing up, him and his other tank. I think Holmes was the one behind him. And I had them back up, and open fire to pin anything down and then we carried everybody out of there that was wounded; we made the two PWs help us carry them. And that was the last time I saw Handlebar Hank. We radioed back to send a medic up, and they sent a medic jeep up, and old Handlebar Hank was laying on a litter on this medic jeep, and he had a cigarette, his hands were all bloody and there was blood all over, he was puffing on the cigarette, and he looked over at me and I said, "How are you, Handlebar?"

    He said, "I’ve got me a million dollar wound. I’m going back to the States."

    Aaron Elson: But he must have been hit pretty badly.

    Dale Albee: He was hit bad; see, we saw the puffs, when he was laying there you could see the German just started in and just worked up. And the first one missed him, came right down like that and missed him over here, but that second one just walked right over his shoulder. And then that explosion, Jesus, he was right beside the tank.

    Aaron Elson: But he survived?

    Dale Albee: I don’t know. See, I have no way of knowing because he was evacuated, and I got on Shortall’s tank and rode on the outside, and we moved back. And since I only had two tanks, they sent the captain’s tank up for the third, and then that’s the next day where the second platoon moved around with infantry and we went ahead and came in this way, went down the slope and took the town. That’s the time Ziebarth – an old German, bang, shot at him and Ziebarth emptied a whole clip, 250 rounds, into that foxhole and the little German stood up and smiled. Ziebarth says, "Oh, shit," and comes back. I think somewhere I read we said he was about 70 yards away, that’s a bunch of bull because that little guy wasnt any farther than from here to that bush and he just stood up, "Bang!" Zeke was just getting ready to crawl out of the darn tank, and he just reached over to his ack-ack gun and fired away, and he just figured that guy’s dead as hell, then all of a sudden, "Kamerad!"

    Thats when Zeke and I went up there and dropped a …No, it was Rotarota we did that.

    Aaron Elson: What was Rotarota?

    Dale Albee: That was up on the Rhine, when we had to go down this long column and go into Rotarota; that’s where we found that big cellar of what we called pink champagne. It was actually sparkling burgundy, but they had every kind of wine, gin, rum, everything, and, now that Alton Wagnon’s dead, why, it’s safe to say that we came out of there with two cases on the back deck of each tank, and all we could hold inside. See, he put out an order – when we were held up in Hof for awhile, right next to where we were trapped was a warehouse full of liquor, and when we got out of that we let the old man know. They sent a two and a half ton truck and loaded it up with liquor and we figured that whenever we came in we’d be able to have a big party. Well, the only time we ever got in and started to turn tracks and everything, we asked, how about some of that liquor that we let you get? They had drunk it all. We didn’t get one damn drop. And then the old man put out orders that all liquor would be sent to the rear, that you would not carry liquor in the tanks. And good old Boogedy, the old man came up one day – we were in a village and Mike and I were studying the map – and the old man asked how things are going. "Fine." And he says, "Can I use your radio?"

    "Sure, you bet."

    He stepped up on the tank and he looked down, and there’s Boogedy just taking a drink out of a bottle and looking right at him. And he goes up and reaches over to get my radio and looks down and right in the ready rack there’s a whole bunch of bottles of liquor; there was no champagne at that time but it was regular rum and regular liquor. He came back up to me and said, "I thought I put out an order about there’d be no more liquor in these vehicles."

    "Captain," I said. "This is true."

    "What’s all that liquor doing in there?"

    I said, "Captain, we just came through that town and that’s what we liberated. I had no chance to get it back. Now that you’re here, you can take it back."

    "What was Boogedy doing drinking it?"

    "I didn’t know," I said, "He must have opened one. I’ll get ahold of him, Captain. I’ll take care of that."

    I said, "Boogedy, you silly shit. You knew the old man was up here, why in the hell’d you take a drink?"

    "Well, dammit, I wanted one."

    That was Boogedy

    Aaron Elson: Now Slick, the driver who was killed, was that his last name or a nickname?

    Dale Albee: That was his name. Slick was a little driver. Jesus, the whole back of his head was gone. It blew the whole bottom of the tank in. The Italian box mine, I don’t know, it must have had enough TNT to blow a house up. The funny thing is – and this is in the 90th Division book – my tank was sitting here like this, so they came up, and there was room enough to get around for a while, so they just routed some traffic around it, and the back tank, they had pulled it off to the side. They came up with minesweepers and swept everything around. Then they came up and pulled my tank back. The 12th vehicle that went through there was a jeep with a reporter in it, and the driver hit a mine, and they say it blew him 300 feet. My tank had rolled up, like on the sprocket where it comes up, we had set off this mine, and if I had rolled six inches further, I would have set off another mine and it’d have probably blown the rest of the tank bottom in. But they’d gone around and missed that one mine, and that 12th vehicle was the one that set it off. They come through, everything’s fine, and there’s that one single teller mine. And that’s in the 90th Infantry book. That’s my tank. I tell you, I cried like a baby that day. I got up on Shortall’s tank. I was so damn disgusted, because what we didn’t know – we found out later – is we had run into a counterattack. They had massed people in there and were getting all set, and all they were waiting was for armor. And we had gone in thinking this was just a few people out in that field. We ran into a whole counterattack, and here we were just sitting up there and thinking if we had just had artillery and some men, we can clear this and then we’ll keep right on going. That’s the day that I dove into a pile of cowshit. You know how the Germans clean out their barns and they leave that stack? We had pulled on into the town the second day and were trying to get things oriented, and we heard this this tank, and I said, "That’s American."

    Old Boogedy says, "That’s German."

    "Thats a German? Nawww," I said. "Listen to the engine. And there’s no squeaking track."

    Boogedy says, "That’s German."

    About that time the sonofagun let loose, right over the top. Whoom! And the only thing around there was that pile of shit and I just dove for it. I went partway in. But I was behind a pile. And it was German. He laid a few rounds in, and then he took off.

    Aaron Elson: But he didn’t get the tank?

    Dale Albee: He didn’t get anything, except harass us, because I guess he just felt kind of futile, and he opened up on the town because he knew Americans were in there. He didn’t hit anything.

    But one other time, they opened up like that, and I dove, and I forget who the heck it was came under me, he beat me. I landed on top of him, and shrapnel wounded him in the hip. And he was under me. As soon as he hit, it hit, and then I hit on top of him.

----

    Aaron Elson: Shall we go over some of these pictures?

    Dale Albee: Yes. These are cavalry here, except for Heckler. Let’s see, I’m just trying to think if there’s anything more. Let me get my book.

    There’s Presidio Monterrey, and this is when they had the maneuvers in there. This is way back in the old cavalry.

    Aaron Elson: Who is this?

    Dale Albee: That’s Reiman. He didn’t go with us. He got discharged. This is Red Dawn.

    Aaron Elson: Red Dawn was a horse?

    Dale Albee: M-hm. Every one of them had a name.

    Aaron Elson: Did you have anything to do with the shows they put on, when Spanky McFarland visited the cavalry?

    Dale Albee: Oh, no. I’ve got an article in there that tells about us doing a tandem ride, riding one horse and driving another, then taking jumps. I was on that one. I was also on the training film when we went up to Darryl Zanuck’s ranch. We made a heck of a training film.

    Aaron Elson: Whats this plane here?

    Dale Albee: One of the guys in the cavalry owned this plane. Here’s Murphy. There’s Sergeant Roberts, he took over from Austerleaf. Austerleaf was a sergeant when we were in Presidio Monterrey.

    Aaron Elson: Who’s the little kid there?

    Dale Albee: That was my daughter, Dorrie. Doris. June 8, 1941. God, shes getting old. My kids are getting old. I dont know whats happening.

    Aaron Elson: You were married with children when you went overseas?

    Dale Albee: Yes. I had a daughter two years old that I hadn’t seen. She was born in the States while we were alerted to go overseas. I was like Freeberg and some of the others. Donna was born the 11th of November, 1943, and I didn’t see her for two years.

    Aaron Elson: Where were you when she was born?

    Dale Albee: Down in either in Camp Gordon or Fort Jackson.

    Aaron Elson: And she was in?

    Dale Albee: Oshkosh, Nebraska.

    Aaron Elson: I know that Freeberg’s wife lived off base. Your wife didn’t come down to live near the camp?

    Dale Albee: No. You see, my first wife, when the baby was born – Dorrie was born in El Centro and my mother came out and there’s a picture here somewhere of her, and so we lived in El Centro. Then when I went back to Fort Benning, she came back and we lived in Fort Benning. When we formed the 712th and started into our training, I had to send her back to Nebraska, and she was pregnant then. We were alerted for overseas and she was due in November, but we shipped out in December, and we were on alert, no leaves at all.

    Aaron Elson: When did you find out she had the baby?

    Dale Albee: When we were in England, I got a letter from Alice that we had a little girl.

    Aaron Elson: How did that make you feel?

    Dale Albee: Pretty damn proud. And pretty damn lonesome. I really had hoped that I could get a leave, just a couple or three days, to get back and see the baby, but there was just no way anybody was getting anything at that time. So, Donna, when I came back, it took me a week before she would even come near me. It wasn’t till we went down to buy a sweater, and Donna pointed at a little blue one and her mother said, "No, no, you don’t want that," and I said, "Wait a minute, if that’s the one she wants, she can have it." And then from that time on, she started kind of adjusting. The only thing is – and I shouldn’t say it on the tape – when I came back my wife was five months pregnant. I’d been gone two years. So that’s the reason she was my first wife. And I got custody of the kids.

    Aaron Elson: She had never said anything?

    Dale Albee: She wrote and told me she wanted a divorce, and I just said, "Let’s wait until I get back home and well talk about it." And when I came home the kids were alone in the house.

----

    Aaron Elson: Is this Heckler?

    Dale Albee: No, that’s Reiman. This is me with Tempo. This is riding across the field at chow time. This is my family, my father and mother, youngest brother, younger sister. This is my oldest brother, his wife. And then my next younger brother joined the Navy. Dee and Don both went through the war.

    Aaron Elson: And what happened to them?

    Dale Albee: They came out all right. They went in on destroyers, and then my younger brother ended up on an aircraft carrier. They both were in both theaters, but they came through without being wounded. This is my younger brother when he was in the CCC camp.

    Aaron Elson: He was in a CCC camp?

    Dale Albee: Yes.

    Aaron Elson: But you weren’t, were you?

    Dale Albee: No. I came out of high school and six days later I was in the Army. This is Camp Seeley. These were our tents; these are the stables, and this is an inspection. These are the horses, the stables. This is the chow hall. And this is your hero, right here, well up in the front of the line. Getting ready; you had a salt tablet to eat every time you went in the mess hall.

    Aaron Elson: That line explains why Dess Tibbitts and a few others went into the stable gang. Because a sergeant said you get to go eat before everybody else.

    Dale Albee: That’s right. They went in and had chow before anybody. This is Tempo, I had a piece of sugar in there, trying to get a picture, and I didn’t know that he was, he’s starting to paw the ground and it looks like he’s kicking me. He was quite a horse. …This is Fort Lewis maneuvers; we shipped our horses to Fort Lewis.

    Aaron Elson: Did you have the light tanks already in the Tennessee maneuvers?

    Dale Albee: Yes. We were light tanks from the time we hit Benning. We had the old M2A4, which had a shotgun starter, and the gearshift. Thats the one that I think Freeberg was talking about, that you leaned clear down like this to shift it, double-clutch it to get it in.

    Aaron Elson: What was a shotgun starter?

    Dale Albee: It had a 12-gauge shotgun; it didn’t have the pellets in it, but it was a shotgun. You put it in back in there and fired it, and it gave it the kick to start the engine. …That’s an oldtime picture because the only ones I recognize are Morin and Austerleaf. This is me with my beautiful face. We had a fire in our motor pool and thats how bad I was burned.

    Aaron Elson: How did that happen?

    Dale Albee: Oh, we came down there and a guy took a five-gallon gas can and had the fire ready to light, and he took the can and dumped it in, and there were embers in there, and it blew up. And he turned around and started running, and instead of running with the can backward, he ran with the flames hitting his hand and he dropped it and gas went all over. We like to never got out of that thing alive. And we were trapped there, because all of a sudden, you didn’t really know where you were, because there was smoke and flames all around you. Just by guessing, by god, we got out. But I had second- and third-degree burns all over my hands and my face. That’s the reason I don’t have any eyebrows now.

    Aaron Elson: That was at Benning?

    Dale Albee: Yes, Fort Benning. Our motor shed burned down.

    Aaron Elson: That’s your mother and father?

    Dale Albee: That’s my mother and that’s me.

    Aaron Elson: Oh, it says Mom and Dale, I thought it said Mom and Dad.

    Dale Albee: That’s me and thats my older brother. This is Camp Live Oaks, when we went up on maneuvers. That’s when we made that march. That’s when my oldest daughter was born and my mother came out. That was in June of 1941. I’d just reenlisted, had a baby. I had the world by the tail. Now, I suppose, you want to get into the interesting part. All right. Now this is Boogedy. And this is Joe Green, the Englishman.

    Aaron Elson: Tell me about Green.

    Dale Albee: Alrighty. We liberated 200 Englishmen and brought them back. Now Joe, he had been marched from Dieppe, where these British were captured, all the way to when we found them in Germany, and he said he didnt want to go back. He said he had a score to settle. So with noplace to put him, I said, "You’ll have to ride the back deck of the tank."

    Which he did for a while, and then one of the men was wounded, so we put him in his position and he rode there. Then later on he became a gunner, and he stayed with us and Joe just became one of us. Back at headquarters, nobody knew that I had an Englishman in my platoon, because we dressed him in American gear and everything, and it was so seldom that we spent time near the headquarters. Even when we went back and turned track, Joe was right in there and nobody ever paid any attention to him. And it was kind of surprising to them that all of a sudden I came up with a British prisoner up in Czechoslovakia. But I had to let Joe go then because really, I could have been court-martialed for not sending him back, and if the old man had found out, he’d have been more than willing to court-martial me. Anything to get rid of me. He had me on orders to go to Japan.

    Aaron Elson: No.

    Dale Albee: Oh, yeah. They wanted two medium tank officers and one light tank officer, and there was no doubt about who was going. I was on orders.

    Aaron Elson: You were talking about the Englishman.

    Dale Albee: Oh yeah, Joe Green. I had to turn him in. I just took him in a jeep and we went back in to the company and I told the captain that we had liberated an Englishman. He didnt ask any questions. And they sent him back to the battalion and right straight on through into England.

Joe and I wrote back and forth, and I’ve got a picture from him, when he got back to England, in his English uniform. And it was my fault, dang it; Joe wrote to me, and I was busy moving around and everything. I didn’t answer him, and I lost all contact. And I hate it, because I thought the world of him.

    Aaron Elson: Now these are?

    Dale Albee: These are pictures taken during the war. In one of these youll see me with a camera. We’d get a captured camera, and I’d just hang one, if I didn’t wear my binoculars or if things were light, I’d just take the camera, hold it here, and every once in a while snap pictures. I had a whole bunch of them, so when we went back to Amberg and they set up a photo shop. Then we were able to develop all these.

    Aaron Elson: You don’t have the negatives from those pictures, do you?

    Dale Albee: A lot of them I do. I’d have to sort through them. This is what took so much time. I didn’t find these till yesterday. They were on the back porch. I looked this whole house over thinking they were inside.

    This is some of the country, not much to that. This is the Rhine River. Here’s Mainz. At Mainz we pulled up on top of the hill and ran into a lot of fire. We were supposed to reconnoiter down into Mainz, and it was too heavy, even for the infantry the next day. I pulled off into a field and we waited for support. We were there for quite a while, and before we got word to move out they came up with a minesweeper and they put a nice little marker all the way around the corner, and me and my second tank were parked in the middle of a minefield. That’s where we cautiously backed up out of there. …These are some German prisoners coming back. Here’s a knocked-out town with no idea where in the world where it was. Mainz is where we crossed the Rhine. And Darmstadt; we took Darmstadt, you know. The 712th spearheaded into that.

    Aaron Elson: I didn’t know that.

    Dale Albee: Yes. The light tanks. All three platoons worked on that, and went in, and we met, I think it was the 4th Armored Division that came in from another direction. But in the history book, or one of the books, it tells about us going into Darmstadt. Heres Hiatt and Horn, this is a double exposure.

    Aaron Elson: Horn gave me a copy of this. What a great photo that is.

    Dale Albee: Yeah, he drove for Hiatt. And that’s standing looking at the Rhine River, and Rotarota was right back over here. …This is the Rhine right here. You know, your heart kind of pittipats on some of that stuff. …This is Czechoslovakia, and this is the family, when the war finally ended, we were in there; they told us to hold up on a hill. We had known the day before that, we thought the war was going to be over. And we had been kicked out of Besruby three times. We went around to circle and we came into this little Czechoslovakian town. And they said, "Hold where you are."

    Well, we weren’t about to hold up on top of a sloping hill like that, so we went on into town. And that night this family here wouldn’t have it – we were just going to sleep in our tanks like we were used to. No way. Into their house, and what little they had of food, we had to partake of their food and Jesus, they were wonderful people. And this is a thing that they put up in the town there, this guy with his little uniform. They hung one of the Germans just before we got into the town, and then they chased another one out into a field and beat him to death.

    We didn’t say anything. In fact, if they’d hollered for help we’d have helped them.

    Aaron Elson: This family?

    Dale Albee: Not this family. The townspeople. …This is Radwan, Ault, little J.J. Jordan. This is the little skinny sonofagun that came up there at Binscheid and helped us, all the wounded out. Ninety-five pounds if he was soaking wet. And J.J. died just a short while ago. Ault I dont remember a lot about. And this was a girl that Radwan found in there. A cute little wench that I think he wanted to bed. Might have. Thats the platoon there, my platoon. You probably recognized Shortall and Benda. Thats Borden, old Boogedy. …This is the M24. I had an M5A1, the light tank, with a 37. This is an M24 with a 75-millimeter I got the day after the war ended. I’d have given anything for that tank during the war.

    These are some German guns that were knocked out or captured. More captured equipment. And the Czechoslovakian people. This is a medium tank that hit a mine. This is a mortarburst here, you can just see the, it was snapped from there. These are some of the English PWs, this is after we got them back into our lines. They were a pretty happy bunch.

    Now, here are some goofy guys: This is Freeberg and Masser, with captured German uniforms, just having a ball. There’s old Freeberg; now if that isnt a top hat, GI pants and a German jacket. These are captured German film. I looted a camera and there was some film on it and so when we had a chance I had it developed. A German took these pictures.

    Aaron Elson: What is this thing here?

    Dale Albee: Thats an 88. Antiaircraft. Because it was a three-way, a flat-trajectory, antiaircraft, or artillery. …This is Paris. After the war was over we got a three-day pass. It took six days to get there and come home, and three days in Paris. …That’s more in Paris. … Now heres more of something, right here, we were going down this road, going into Hof, and there’s a German major that I’d killed with a .50-caliber laying out here. He ran out trying to blow that bridge. And so I snapped that picture because he’s laying out, I think that’s him right there. We didn’t know he was a major at the time; I just saw this German running out on the bridge and opened up. I didn’t have time to have the gunner traverse left. … This is in Hof. … And this is after they trapped us; we went by a damn hospital and the guys that went in and looked, here’s these guys laying in the beds and everything, so they came out and went on. Well, later on we found out they were the ones that opened up on us and had us trapped, because they were Germans and they just stayed in the hospital. There was a tank firing right down this road. My tank is on up ahead here. These are … this is after it was over and we were liberated. This tank is knocked out. Holmes’ tank had hit it in the sprocket.

    Aaron Elson: Holmes was in D Company?

    Dale Albee: He was in my fifth tank. He was the tank commander.

    Aaron Elson: Who’s the bald guy, Schifler?

    Dale Albee: No, that’s Doyle, I think. As small as he is, it has to be Sparky or Doyle. Schifler was tall and rangy.

    Aaron Elson: And bald.

    Dale Albee: And bald, yeah. He was bald clear back in the cavalry. Here’s Borden; this is back when we were changing track. Here’s Holt, and this is Holmes. This is Lieutenant Obrient. This is Joe Green, and U.Z. Roderick. See, there’s my 50-caliber that I had mounted on my tank. And then right here you can just see I had, I think it was ten boxes of ammunition right across the front. And then this ack-ack gun up here, I could store two cases of 110 each right there and leave the ack-ack gun up. This is with that white crap that we had to put on the tanks. See how white it is? Up in the Bulge there. This is dear old Alton Wagnon and that was his flame for while he was in Europe, after the war. That’s in Amberg. This is Sergeant Reynolds.

    Aaron Elson: The one who was wounded?

    Dale Albee: Yeah. At Periers. He became first sergeant. Instead of a battlefield commission, he went back to infantry O.C.S. …There’s two of the guys out of the battalion and I can’t remember their names. I think this is Laing, the motor officer, because I was set to come home. I had the most points in the battalion, and they called me back. There was a little rest camp, you could go out and swim and I went out and they called out and brought me back and said, "Pack up. You’re going home."

    And then they said, "Whoa! You’re not going home, because Captain Laing just received a Bronze Star for meritorious achievement for being an outstanding motor officer," and it put him two points ahead of me. So he got to go home first. Ohh, I could have bawled on that one, Jiminy Christmas. Because we had waited and waited, that was the first officer quota to come in to the battalion. The enlisted men had been going home on points.

    This is in Amberg. Lets see, there’s Tucci. There’s Chu Hooey. You can actually see his face. This is Tucci acting silly. This is Bill Thompson. This is Fleisch. Tucci again, or that is Fleisch, I forget who that is. Here it is, now. This is Roselle, who was in McNulty’s tank. And this is his wife and his baby. This is before we went overseas, and theres old Hilding holding the baby. Hilding had a child which he hadn’t seen yet, so he asked Roselle if he could hold the baby. Ohh, my gosh. And Roselle was the one that was burned to death.

    Aaron Elson: Has anybody been in touch, or found out what happened to his widow and child?

    Dale Albee: I don’t know. They tried real hard to trace them, and we found a Roselle, but it was the wrong one. …This is Freeberg and then old Horn. This is Jimmy Mills, and Godfrey. Theres the picture [of the eight soldiers with Mohawk haircuts].

    Aaron Elson: I’ve seen that.

    Dale Albee: Oh god, the old man, he'd have gladly killed Hiatt. He was furious, because Hiatt was the only officer in the picture.

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