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Aaron Elson: What was your Bronze Star for?
Dale Albee: Up there in the Bulge, during that deal that I was telling you about, we got that column coming through. It was kind of a conglomeration of everything because we stopped that column that night, and then when we got ready to go into the attack, we had to come out of the woods and go into the open, then go into the woods. And when we got into the woods, three out of my four tanks threw tracks. And they were throwing artillery and t.o.t. [time on target] and we got out and put the tracks back together under fire and got them going, and got in and helped make the attack. I had to leave two of the tanks in there because as soon as we’d get them fixed and go a little farther, they’d throw the track again because it was a real mess in there; there were trees knocked down all over. But we kept enough tanks going so that we got in and helped the infantry go on up and take that crossroads. And so that’s – heroic achievement – I was put in for the Silver Star – I didn’t find out until later – for that action down at Binscheid, and Colonel Kedrovsky stopped it because he said tanks don’t go down the road.
Aaron Elson: What?
Dale Albee: That’s the reason he gave. Colonel Randolph would have probably upgraded it. Kedrovsky, no, you don’t go down the road. What the hell do you think the 4th Armored was doing while we were over there making that sweep? They were going straight down the road. And there was noplace else for me to go. That was the only logical thing to do. The next day we did go over. But had I gone over the day before I’d have lost probably three tanks because of all those panzerfausts. We knew that whole damn field was just honeycombed with Germans. The only logical way was to go down, and hell, the M8 wasn’t worth a shit, and the jeeps, if they went over, anything out there could knock them out. So the only logical thing was to have the infantry sweep, me pull up there with the tanks and open fire, and then keep firing and try to get them to surrender right in there. Then work on into the town. But he didn’t ask anything, he just said, "Tanks don’t go down the road." I didn’t know that until quite a while later. One of the guys in headquarters told me. He said, "Did you know you were put in for a Silver Star."
I said, "No, I didn’t know it." I’d heard a rumor, because the company clerk had told me it had gone in, but I thought it was a bunch of bull because I hadn’t heard anything. And he says, "Kedrovsky stopped it. And thats why."
Aaron Elson: Now, where are your ancestors from?
Dale Albee: I’m Scotch, Irish, French and Dutch.
Aaron Elson: You’re no relation to the playwright Edward Albee, are you?
Dale Albee: No, by gosh, I’m not. I’ve been asked that a lot, but there’s no way we could trace it. For a long while, most of the Albees came from Nebraska or Iowa.
Aaron Elson: And your father did what?
Dale Albee: He was a contractor and builder. He and my mother came out to Oregon during the war. My father was a foreman out at Vanport, where they were building all the Liberty ships. My mother was a welder, and she welded ships all during the war.
Aaron Elson: She was a Rosie the Riveter type?
Dale Albee: Yep. I still have her clamp. She was awful proud of that. Bless her heart, she did her part. You know, I have to tell you – when I came back from the war, people would ask you, "Well, how was it?"
And you’d start to say and then they’d tell you about the gas rationing and the shoe rationing, and finally you learned to just clam up and say, "Oh, it wasn’t bad."
Then one night my father sat me down and said, "You know, Son, we’ve always kept an open heart, and if you want to tell me about it, I’ll listen."
He said, "I’d really like to know what it was all about."
And I sat there for about four hours and told my father things I’d never told anybody. I really opened my heart and I think maybe that might have kept me from just going off my rocker. I was just so darned glad that my father had done that for me, and it shaped me up, so that I was able to do it for my daughter. My daughter went to Vietnam and spent a year over there. She was a nurse, in a MASH unit. She came back sick, and was still scared. The family couldn’t understand, what’s wrong with Donna? She’s so different.
And I had the chance to sit down with her and do the same thing my father did.
Aaron Elson: She’s your older daughter, or your younger?
Dale Albee: Younger. She lives in San Antonio. Bless her little heart. She went over; she spent a year up there in Chu Lai, in the hospital.
We talked, and she said, "You know, Dad, the only thing that bothers me – of all the people that came through that hospital, I don’t remember a name. I can see faces, but if I go to the Wall" – she said, "I’d like to go to the Wall" – "the only one that I know that would be there is Sharon Lane, and she came in after I was gone." She’s the nurse that came in as one of the replacements when Donna left, the one that got killed in that rocket attack there.
Then I had a son go to Saudi Arabia. My oldest son in the Navy just retired not too long ago. He was in Japan with his family, and they pulled him out because of his cryptography skills and put him over in Riyadh, and he spent several months there. A sailor in the middle of the desert. And they’re both in my VFW company.
Aaron Elson: Do they live in this area?
Dale Albee: No, Donna’s in San Antonio and Rusty just retired out at Norfolk. He was a chief petty officer in the Navy, and he stayed out there. My oldest son went two years in West Point and didn’t like it, so at the end of two years you can get out, and then he enlisted for three years, went to Germany and he finally decided he wasn’t for the service, so he got out. Now he’s in Portland.
Aaron Elson: It must have been unusual for you having custody and being a single father.
Dale Albee: The thing about it was, I told my wife, when I came back to Centralia, Washington, I was discharged and reenlisted right there at Fort Lewis, and she was at her mother’s in Centralia. She was five months pregnant with twins, and I told her, "You have your choice. I’m leaving for Nebraska. If you want to come with me, I’ll take care of you until the kids are born." The twins. And I said, "I won’t take them," but I said, "You have to give me custody of the two girls." My own two girls. But I said, "I will care for you until they’re born," because in the Army, she’d have the kids born and the medical expenses would be covered.
So she went back to Nebraska and then we went back out, my orders were revoked and I was sent back to Camp Roberts, and while we were there she had a miscarriage. As soon as that was over I applied for a divorce, and she didn’t contest.
Aaron Elson: She didn’t marry the would-have-been father?
Dale Albee: No, he left her, soon after he found out she was pregnant. That ended that.
Aaron Elson: You must have seen the movie "The Best Years of Our Lives."
Dale Albee: The title is familiar.
Aaron Elson: It was made probably in the late Forties.
Dale Albee: See, I may have been gone at that time, because I decided that I was gonna get out of the Army. I went down to San Diego and met my second wife. In fact, I had known her from her picture because she and my sister had worked in the Red Cross down at the destroyer base in San Diego. So when my sister sent pictures they would usually be of her and Marge, because they were buddies, and they worked together. And then, after the divorce, I said, "Oh, to hell with it, I’m gonna get out of the Army," and I went down to Fort McArthur, got discharged, and I went down to San Diego and stayed there. And I was gonna stay out of the Army. I got a job as a mechanic. Met Marge, and we couldn’t get married legally, so we went to Mexicali, or no, my golly, Calexico, and we got married down there. And then I decided to reenlist. I had a permanent tech sergeant rating, so I reenlisted. They gave me a corporal rating and said, "Now, with your MOS, here are orders to Fort Knox, Kentucky. As soon as you get back there and get assigned, then you can apply and get your permanent rating."
So fine. I enlisted as a corporal. Went to Fort Knox and they put me in a repple depple and put me on orders to Yokohama. I tell you, I just about lost my second wife real fast because here we’d just been married, here’s two kids, and she was all for me going back in the Army because I told her I’d have a tech sergeant rating, I’m going to Fort Knox, we’ll get quarters on post, that’s fine. And so everything was just going hunky dory. I left and hitched to the Coast. They shipped us, we stopped off at Hawaii, and all of a sudden they pulled everybody off the ship, and the only ones that could go on to Yokohama were the ones with the expert infantry badge. The rest of us they put in an engineer outfit. Well, since I had a tanker MOS and they don’t carry MOSs of a tanker in the engineers, I couldn’t get my rating. But I could go out yet for quarters. So I applied for quarters, and I was just about ready to come up for quarters, when our platoon was sent down to Bougainville. We loaded an LST and away we go. Thirty-two months I was gone. And here’s my wife over here, with the two girls.
Aaron Elson: Then you had the two sons with your second wife?
Dale Albee: Well, there’s kind of a gap because I came back, and I was gonna quit the Army even with all the time I put in, I was so darn mad then, and when I got off in Fort Lewis, I’d signed that five-year reserve, and didn’t mind it because I reenlisted. I think I had one month left on that reserve, and I got orders to report back, and I was on my way to Korea. I was to report for my physical and be on orders to Korea. So I reported in, and was all set to go, and all of a sudden I got orders cancelling those and I went to Adderberry into the 28th Infantry Division, which is a National Guard outfit. For six months I was the only reserve officer in a National Guard outfit.
Then we went to Germany instead of Korea. And while I was in Germany, I got to bring my family over. And while we were there, Rusty was born in Stuttgart. And then when I came back we went into Fort Knox, and Scotty was born in Fort Knox. Then I just went ahead and finished on out.
You know, damn near everybody except maybe some of the last ones in that was in the 712th and I don’t care whether it was from the cooks all the way through, every one of them saw some stuff or did some stuff that they’ll never live down. And you can put it behind you, but it’ll sneak up on you every once in a while. We started going to the high schools and talking to some of the students, because they don’t teach anything about the real World War II. So there were two schools and for about four years I’d go in and speak to them. One school, they had three classes and they broke them into two, so you’d speak to six different groups. And it was amazing the questions that they would ask and how interested they really were in some of this. And I came right out and told them that from the day you went in until the day you got home you lived with fear. You could smell it, you could taste it, you could see it. But you learned to control it. But I said, if you see anybody that says he wasn’t afraid, he’s either a liar, a damn fool or he wasn’t there. And they’d wait a minute, and then, you know, you could really talk to them.
I have to laugh; this one time I was talking and this one kid, he just kept looking at me, looking at me, and so I went on and was talking. I got up into the Bulge and was talking about that. All of a sudden his hand went up, and I said, "Yes?"
He said, "Did you have to change your shorts very often?"
And I didn’t even think. I said, "No." I said, "I was so tight that I could barely pass wind." And where it came from I’ll never know, but I tell you, I had that whole darn room, girls and all, just busting their gut laughing. It just popped out so fast.
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Aaron Elson: Tell me again what you were saying about the exercise where you had to ride at a gallop and roll a cigarette?
Dale Albee: Oh, yeah. So many of us, with what little we earned in the cavalry, the only time you really smoked hard-rolled cigarettes was in town. The rest of it was Bull Durham. And one of the things we did was, when the recruits got real good at their training, we would have them ride at a gallop and roll a cigarette out of Bull Durham. Well, some of them came in looking like matchsticks, and some of them maybe only had three or four grains, but we’d let them count as long as they had some tobacco in there and it looked like some semblance of a cigarette. Some of them just never did make it.
Another thing, after we knew that they had their balance, was to have them twist around in the saddle, or ride Indian style, where you drop over and twist one leg and come underneath and then ride and lean over the pommel. And you’d play Indian with one another, go riding by, and bang-bang, you’re dead, like that. And a lot of them, you could run up and hit the horse in the back end and jump on the back, if you didn’t have a goosey horse and have him move out from underneath you. Another thing, too, on that fast dismount coming in at a canter, I think the best record that we had on the machine gun platoon would be to come in in a column of twos, and come in at a gallop, and the whistle would blow. You’d come in to a column of fours, take off the machine gun and the ammunition, run over, set it down, put the gun on the tripod, and click the bolt as if you had ammunition, and they had the horses ride off. We were timed at a best time of 13 seconds. At a full gallop. We didn’t come in at a canter, we came in at a full gallop, and in 13 seconds we had the gun in action, and the horses gone. But you were all right, because you’ll notice, the cowboys, when they rope, they come out with one foot in the stirrup and their horse will usually take one or two steps. As soon as they lift that one foot, their horses stop. The cavalry horses, when we left our stirrups free, they would continue to gallop, but as soon as they felt us free our saddle, they would take two steps and then stop. Because I got flipped so darn fast it was pitiful on a remount. I didn’t know it but he was a quarterhorse, and evidently he had come in off the range and they’d green-broke and used him, because the minute I cleared my thing like that and dropped my hand on the pommel, he stopped, and I just did a flip. And then the other time, again it was old So High, the one I called Candy Ass, she was a beautiful little jumper, and she would just canter in, and up, and she was so easy to ride. I was out practicing this one day, and goofing off, because I took two jumps real easy, and I’m just riding along, and came into the third one. I thought fine, old Candy’s gonna come in there and make the jump. And she just stopped. And I went over her head so hard I pulled the bridle clear off her head. And she just looked over at me, like well, what the heck are you doing down there?
Aaron Elson: Tell me again about the training film that you made.
Dale Albee: Oh, they took a group of us and went up into Darryl Zanuck’s ranch. He had stables set up all along there, and we made a training film for the cavalry. What it was supposed to represent was a squad of new men coming in, and what they went through, and then till their graduation. So we stayed right there on his ranch. I don’t know whatever happened to the film, because we never did see the completed version. But we stayed up there about a month. And they had a leading man and a leading lady. I don’t know what the lady was supposed to do, but the hero was the officer that they powdered, primped, set him on his horse and then somebody else would do all the riding for him. But at that time, one nice thing – I still have a picture somewhere of Clark Gable, he loved horses, and he wasn’t too far from there, and he rode by three or four times. This one time we invited him in, and he came in, and we had pictures of him. My first wife – I had a real nice picture of Clark Gable on a real pretty horse – and she sold it to somebody for a nickel.
Aaron Elson: What was it you said earlier about when the horses went down into a valley and came up?
Dale Albee: Each night they would go in and develop the film and then they would preview it to see if it was all right to go into the film or whether they’d have to rerun it. And this one day, we had to go into a gully and then come back up on the other side. And it showed this squad had eight men going in and then coming out the other side. And it wasn’t until we got in that night, and they reviewed the film, that they noticed that eight men and eight horses went into this gully. Eight horses and seven men came out the other side. One guy was still down in the bottom. He had fallen off.
Aaron Elson: Did they go back and find him?
Dale Albee: Heck no, he walked in. You lose your horse, you walk. He was pretty unhappy, but he walked in. That was one thing, if you went off your horse you hung onto those reins with a death grip. If you broke every bone in your body, hold onto your horse, because that was your transportation.
You know, we had all kinds of things you could do. You could check your horse out on a weekend, and go out and do riding. In Monterrey we had it real good because there you could check the horses out, and you could take two of them and take a girl, and go down on the beach, and right in the bay, which was good for the horses because the salt water would help their feet.
In Monterrey, of course, you used to say Carmel by the Sea and Monterrey by the Smell, because they had the fish cannery down there right below us. And Carmel is the big beautiful golf course now, and all the high and rich are up there. Shoot, that was our jump course. We went up and practiced our jumping right on that.
Aaron Elson: Were there some maneuvers on an Indian reservation?
Dale Albee: No, it wasn’t an Indian, they had Giggling Reservation, see, Impossible Canyon and I forget what it was, there was three canyons out there, and you went through this big eucalyptus grove and went out into this, they called it the Giggling Reservation. That’s where Fort Ord was built. They cleared all that out and built Fort Ord in there. But in December of ’39 we went out and poured cement platforms so we could put up 12 pyramidal tents, so we could do some firing out there. It was awful good duty there, because you were garrison type, and everything you did was right in there and you came back into the stables, cleaned and everything, spit and polish, and then you went up to the barracks. Whereas once we moved down to Seeley, your tents, your mess hall, the heat, the salt pills. Of course we didn’t help it any, because the people down in El Centro really treated us nice. The first group of soldiers had been down there for years, so they just went completely out of their way to be real friendly to us. And it was real easy to go in there and drink all night, or go down into Calexico and eat tacos and drink Cerveza, and then come in and try to go to work saddling up at 4 o’clock in the morning.
Aaron Elson: What was tecate?
Dale Albee: Tecate, isnt that a dope, out of a root?
Aaron Elson: I dont know. One of the C Company fellows said when they were patrolling the Mexican border, they would trade rations to the Mexicans, because the Mexicans had their wives with them, and they would trade the food for tecate.
Dale Albee: Tequila is what he meant. They had something they called picote or something like that that, which is almost like a dope, and I don’t think anybody ever traded for that stuff. But tequila, now that, you bet. That’s logical. But you know, at that time, things were so darn cheap. We could get a dozen tacos for a quarter. And they were good tacos; they were round, rolled ones. Of course, we found out that some of the places that were making tacos down there were using cats. You didn’t see any cats in Mexico. But what the heck. I ate poi dog in Hawaii. Right along with poi pig. So what the heck, at a real Hawaiian luau, if you don’t ask what it is, taste it, and if you like it, eat it, and then find out.
After I got married, we would go down and buy meat down in Calexico. Mexicali and Calexico were just across the border, and on the amount of money we were getting at the time, oh, any penny you could save, and you could go down and get a bunch of meat and bring it back.
The only time I think we were really worried, three of us NCOs had gone out, and we were teaching the officers – we had some new officers – and we were teaching them to dismount with a pistol, and it was on a Friday afternoon, and we went ahead. We put the pistol in the glove compartment, went back to camp, cleaned up, and we went into Mexico that night. And we were getting ready to come back, and somebody for some reason opened the glove compartment, and there’s that .45. We’re in Mexico with a government .45. Good Lord, if they’d have caught us, , we’d have gone into the jail, and at that time if you went to jail in Mexico, you might not be heard from for a couple of months.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Dale Albee: Oh yeah. We had, I forget who it was, one of the guys out of one of the troops that got picked up down there for being drunk and raising some hell. He beat up on some guy down there, and he went to jail and it took them I think between two and three months to find out where he was and get him back out of there. They just threw him in jail and forgot him. But for the most part, there was never any trouble, we could go back and forth. It was just normal. Hey, let’s go to Mexico. Then in El Centro, we had the Adobe bar, and we always got what we called jawbone. Jawbone was a slang term for credit. Like the jawbone of a whale. We had credit, so we could drink there. But it was so easy and so much cheaper, you could drink so much more across the border. And shoot, at that time, at $21 for a private, you didnt have a lot to spend. I think a sergeant at that time only made about $54. But we were happy with it. Hell, we thought we had the world by the tail.
Aaron Elson: What did you do after the war?
Dale Albee: After I retired from the military, the first six years I sold insurance till I realized that I didn’t want to be a salesman. So I worked for Farmcraft Incorporated as a field representative, and I sold chemicals and fertilizers but at the same time I’d go out and check the fields, take soil tests. I was working right out with the farmer, and I just loved it. I didn’t have the money to be a farmer, so I did the second best thing. And then I retired from that. I wished I could have gone right into Farmcraft right off the bat, because it was a mistake to sell insurance for those six years. Since I retired, everything I’ve done has been volunteer. I just enjoy the dickens out of it.
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