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©2014, Aaron Elson
Bob Rossi: So, do you need any more stories?
Aaron Elson: One more, there was one where you said you had to shoot your way through a town?
Bob Rossi: Oh yes. This was when we were sent to the wrong part of town, and we were the Number 1 tank. I think I was in Lombardi’s tank at the time. And we got through the town, and as we were firing, on the left and the right firing through the Germans, the Number 2 tank was. This was when Buck Hardee got wounded, and Valdivia, the bazooka round, Lockhart was the tank commander.
Ed Spahr: He got killed, right?
Bob Rossi: Valdivia, when the bazooka came in, it came in up at an angle, and hit Valdivia in the leg, but the resulting fragments hit Buck Hardee in the neck, the back, all over his body. He was wounded severely. Seymour was the driver. He got a lot of shrapnel in his back. Who was the assistant driver? I don’t recall. But Lockhart was the tank commander. And in his excitement, instead of running to the left around the tank, closest to the building, he ran around the right, and they cut him in half with machine-gun fire.
Ed Spahr: Firing right out of the basement window. That’s where the bazooka came from, too.
Bob Rossi: The infantry platoon was holed up up the street, we could see their platoon leader, he was laying dead in the street.
Tony D’Arpino: Is that the same place that Klapkowski pushed Lombardi aside?
Bob Rossi: Yeah. When we got to the end of the town, we turned the tank around and Klapkowski jumped off out of our tank and jumped on the back of another tank, and they went back, and he was on the back deck firing a .50-caliber machine gun up there. For that he got the cluster for the Silver Star. We weren’t too happy with him, because he left us without a gunner. But that’s the way it happened at that time.
Ed Spahr: I was in Kurtis’s tank that time. I seen it coming out of the basement window. I was his gunner. Was it Kurtis? Wasn’t he the tank commander? I wanted to fire in there. He said, "No, no, you’d better not, there’s probably civilians in there." But I knew right where that ...
Jim Gifford: That house where Lockhart was killed, yeah, he ran towards the house.
Ed Spahr: I saw this blast, you know how the flash from the bazooka, and I knew right where it came from, and then when he [Lockhart] came around the tank, they machine gunned him.
Jim Gifford: There was a big pile of manure there, and there was a cow or a horse, like our houses have a garage on the end of the house, this was a barn on that house, and they were in that barn.
Tony D’Arpino: I remember what you mentioned today. Lombardi pulled me aside, and he says to me, "What do you think of that goddamn deal with Klapkowski today?"
I said, "One of two things, either he’s a fucking hero, or he’s ready to go home. One or the other."
Bob Rossi: It wasn’t too long after that he did go home. Because he became battle fatigued.
Ed Spahr: I remember when the medics came up there for him. The first thing they did, they give him two of those...
Bob Rossi: Blue 88s they called them.
Ed Spahr: And hell, he got worse. That was supposed to put him right to sleep. But he got worse. They strait-jacketed him then.
Aaron Elson: What was the best meal you had?
Bob Rossi: I would say Thanksgiving. Christmas.
Jim Gifford: I don’t think we ever had a good meal.
Bob Rossi: We had turkey for Thanksgiving. In the rain, though. We were going through the chow line with the rain beating down on us. I was just a kid. But I just felt, I didn’t want to eat out of a mess kit. So this house we were staying in had this presentation dish of General Von Hindenburg, and that’s how I had my Thanksgiving dinner, eating off of General Von Hindenburg’s face.
And then we had Christmas in Kirschnaumen.
Jim Gifford: There we had a hot meal. Kirschnaumen.
Bob Rossi: We had Christmas in the snow. And I remember, it was like a haywagon, a flatbed haywagon, standing up, but we still had Christmas dinner.
Jim Gifford: That was a holding area, just before we jumped off for the Bulge.
Bob Rossi: You didn’t expect it then. Even Colonel Kadrovsky mentioned it at the presentation out at Fort Knox in ‘88, he said, "My troops had to have..."
Jim Gifford: In Kirschnaumen on Christmas day, it was a small village alongside the road. The houses were close together. And the road split, and there was a church in the middle of the road. So we all went to Mass that morning. And the church was full. The townspeople were there, and we were all in there. And then about, I think it was around 10 o’clock, around that time, we all came out of the church and went back toward the houses where our tanks were tied up.
And the next thing a plane, an American fighter plane comes down about maybe 100 feet off the damn roadway shooting the shit out of everything, and he knocked that church apart. And everybody had just left. Then, Jesus, he came back down again, doing the same thing, and he came down again doing the same thing. So we moved some tanks up, there was a ridge on the right, there was a long field and there were woods at the top of it, so we backed some tanks up there along the woods, about three or four of them, I forget who all the tanks were, I think Griffin was in one of them. Anyway, we waited for that sonofabitch.
About 2 o’clock in the afternoon he came down again, right, about 100 feet, and we could look right into the plane, and I remember I was on the .50 shooting at it, and the bullets went right straight into the fuselage, right along the side of the plane, didn’t hit the pilot. It was a low ceiling at the time. And the plane smoked and started to turn over and headed right up out of sight into the clouds, and the next thing we see a parachute coming down out of the goddamn ceiling. And the guys jumped in the jeep, they went to pick him up, and I’ll be damned, it was an American major who thought that we were Germans because he couldn’t see the Saar River up ahead, and he had crossed another river and he thought that he had crossed the Saar, so he was shooting the hell out of us. He was lucky he wasn’t hurt. Friendly fire killed a lot of guys. Today they call it friendly fire. Back then I guess we called it accidents.
Bob Rossi: I can remember when you mentioned about the church, the priest saying Mass with the fingers cut off the gloves. He was saying Mass with the gloves, it was so cold.
* * *
Jim Gifford: The Falaise Gap. We had broken out, Task Force Weaver again, which was a group of tanks from the battalion, went through the German lines and went back down behind their supply line to raise hell. And then we made a big circle and we came back, it was about 50 miles, and we worked our way back towards the Falaise Gap. What was it, Von Klauswitz’s 15th Army? [Von Kluge’s 7th Army] We came up on a hill. ... Just prior to that, there was a German ammunition dump. When we went through that, they were protecting it, and they shot up some of us, and Henderson got killed.
Then when we came out of there, we came up on a highway, there’s this big valley, this was the Falaise Gap, and we pulled our tanks up alongside and some of the tanks went down to the bottom of the hill, and they made a little circle. So we settled down for the night, and as soon as it was daylight, I was up above in one of the halftracks, and I walked down to go to the tanks that were down there, and on the way down I looked down in the valley and I thought I saw flashes. I went back to the halftrack and I got a set of binoculars. When I adjusted the binoculars down in the valley, which was about three miles of flat tabletop, and over there were big cliffs, like the Palisades, and here the flashes were hundreds of German soldiers with their bayonets on their rifles in the early morning sun, it was flashing on them. And they were dispersed among hundreds of tanks moving up the valley toward us. Jesus, I saw that, I ran back, got on the radio, and I started hollering on the radio to everybody what was coming. And it wasn’t too long before the fighter planes, they used to run in fours, those Thunderbirds, Thunderbolts.
They kept flying over us and they saw it, and they went down in the valley and you could see them dropping their bombs among this stuff. Well, by the time those guys had gotten maybe a half a mile or a mile under their belt, we had ‘em zeroed in and everybody was shooting.
Tony D’Arpino: Like a shooting gallery.
Jim Gifford: You could close your eyes and you couldn’t miss anything. Horse-drawn vehicles. Tanks. Hundreds of, I’d never seen anything like it. And we were at the narrow end of it. We had A Company and B Company were dropped in, a tank destroyer battalion had dropped in to close the gap, and we, luckily for C Company, we were on the side. So we’re shooting down at ‘em but A and B were catching hell because they kept coming at ‘em, and they went right straight through A and B Company, and then they started to turn around, and they started to run into each other, and that was the end of them. Then it was just a carnage. It was nothing but a tabletop of vehicles and horses and men, Christ, the planes were bombing the shit out of them, the artillery had dropped their blades way back up the road and were just firing into them. It was a carnage. I don’t know how many of those guys died.
Tony D’Arpino: I can still see it today in my mind, a picture of a German on a motorcycle with a sidecar, right, and everybody and his brother was shooting at him, and he’s raising up the dust, and he’s going like a bastard and he’s not getting hit, I’m going "Come on! Come on!" Three tank crews are there together, saying "Come on, get away, get away."
Ed Spahr: I was firing the coaxial machine gun at him, and it just looked like ketchup running out of the barrel, it was the barrel melting, it was just dropping.
Tony D’Arpino: We were taking turns firing the 75. I remember, I got in the gunner’s seat, and I said I want to see if I can find something to hit, right? And I looked, and there was a clump of trees. I put a couple in there, and all of a sudden there’s a fire. It must have been gas drums or whatever.
Jim Gifford: And then right across on the top of the palisades was a British outfit, Canadiens they were, and for about a half an hour we were bombing away at them, shooting at them, until we got an order that’s Canadians, don’t shoot over there, so we stopped. But about 50,000 of Von Kluge’s army broke through, I forget what army it was, broke through, about 50,000 of them. But the other almost 200,000 of them ended up in the pocket and they started surrendering. And we dropped leaflets telling them to stop your firing at 2 o’clock and for them to surrender. They were coming up out of there by the thousands. I mean, they were going by us like a riot, tons and tons of them going by us, some wounded, beat up, on stretchers.
Ed Spahr: Sergeant Schmitt, the mess sergeant, remember, that’s where he got hit, up there, he was gonna bring us a hot meal up.
Tony D’Arpino: It wasn’t Schmitt, the mess sergeant, it was Speier.
Bob Rossi: When I joined the 712th, I joined Lieutenant Lombardi’s tank, this was after the Falaise Gap, and he showed me a German epaulet from an artillery outfit that he had got, it was the 712th.
Jim Gifford: We just told the prisoners to go on back up the road, and there was a big chateau back there, with maybe 50, 60 acres of square hedgerow type fields, and we just dumped them all in there. They had their guns. They dropped a lot of their guns, but we let the officers keep their sidearms.
Bob Rossi: I would say that was the biggest carnage of World War II.
Jim Gifford: The prisoners all went up and they filled those fields. And then we got orders to move out to another location, I guess to probably block the escape route.
Tony D’Arpino: I remember firing down there, and there was a German ambulance, with a cross on it, and it got hit, and it tipped over, two cows fell out of the goddamn back end of it.
Jim Gifford: We had guys go down into that valley afterwards, and for three days they were shooting wounded horses. Three days, they were just going around shooting horses. Those poor animals were standing ... I remember one horse had a shell in his shoulder, and it was sticking out of his shoulder, and his one leg was off, and he’s standing there on his three legs and he’s eating the grass, I’ll never forget that poor horse.
Tony D’Arpino: I can still see the pictures of the empty shells that we fired. Piles of them. It was like a shooting gallery.
Bob Rossi: I can remember you were the driver and what’s his name, LaMar was the assistant driver, and we were sleeping in a hayloft, and the cow below us was wounded, and it couldn’t even moo, everybody wanted to shoot the cow, put it out of its misery, and I remember my crash helmet fell down into the barn, I didn’t dare go down during the night, I was afraid I was going to be kicked to death by the wounded cow.
Jim Gifford: You want to hear a funny story? I was somewhere up in the Saarland and it was raining and I was sleeping in a barn, and I was in my sleeping bag. I had it zipped up to my neck, and in the stalls there were horses and bulls and cows, and I’m the hallway, and there’s two doors behind me that went out into the yard. And just about daylight, I didn’t know it, but a couple farmers brought a cow up there, and there was a bull in the box stall, and Jesus, all of a sudden I woke up, the goddamn barn was shaking like it was going to fall apart, and I look, and here’s this sonofabitch of a bull, he looked like he weighed about ten thousand pounds and he filled the whole hall and I’m laying there in a sleeping bag zipped to my neck, and there was nothing I could do, my eyeballs were popping out of my head, and he went by me like a freight train, and out that door and he hit that cow, I’ll never forget it, the cow boomped up and she let out a big "Mooof," and at the same time that farmer reached down and directed the cow, the goddamn thing must’ve been three feet long, and it disappeared into that cow. God, I unzipped that thing. He was so interested in that cow, he didn’t care about me. He went by me, I’ll never forget that. I aged ten years.
Aaron Elson: What were the hedgerows like?
Jim Gifford: Oh, they were deadly. Very deadly. They used to have snipers. The hedgerows were about four or five feet thick.
Ed Spahr: Thirty or forty yards apart.
Jim Gifford: They surrounded the field. They were started in the ninth century, that’s how old they were. They were built up like three or four feet of dirt, and then the brambles. With a hedge, heavy, thick hedges, and this surrounded the fields. Where we had fences, they had hedgerows, they put their cows and horses in there, and they were safe. But in those hedgerows, being wide, you could crawl in there, and a lot of snipers, we were losing guys left and right that went out to go to the bathroom and they would never come back.
Tony D’Arpino: The undercarriage [of the tank] became exposed when you tried to climb them, too.
Jim Gifford: We used to, when you’d go through that area, your machine guns would hit just above the dirt part and just rake those hedgerows to knock off these snipers. They were hiding in there all over the goddamn place. They were sniping guys left and right.
Tony D’Arpino: They finally put blades on one of the tanks, and they plowed through them.
Jim Gifford: As a matter of fact, one of our tanks disappeared one night, and early in the morning I went looking for it. And I went down through the fields past these hedgerows, and I just had a tommy gun, I must have been about a mile into their territory, because it was a fluid area, they were here and we were there, it was all over the place, and I don’t know what the hell I was doing, but I was looking for the tank. After about a mile down the road I went in, crossed, and as I’m walking alongside this hedgerow, I come up the, like the hedgerow would be here like this and then there’d be the gate. So I’ve got the tommy gun like this and I’m going kind of slow, naturally, you know, watching, as I come to the gate I turn, and the hedgerow’s about four or five feet wide, and as I turn to go into into that field, it was a big, high wheatfield, which was maybe almost six feet tall that wheat, and as I turn, Jesus, I bump right into a German soldier and he’s got a tommy gun. And the both of us just stood there, and I’m on his side of the hedgerow now, and behind him there’s about fifteen or twenty guys all loaded for bear, they’ve got bandoliers of machine gun ammunition hanging around their necks, they’ve got big machine guns they’re carrying, a whole goddamn line of them, about twenty of them. I stood there, I froze. I knew if I raised my gun I was going to get a thousand bullets in me. I didn’t know what the hell to do. For a second I just stood there. And the guy looks at me. We’re only two feet from each other. We bumped practically into each other.
The last guy in their line turned and starts running into the wheatfield. Jesus, they all turned, I guess they figured I had about a hundred guys behind me, but they didn’t know I was alone. And they run down through there, I never raised that goddamn gun. I just held it. And the other guy backs away from me, and he starts turning, and they went down through the wheatfield and went way the hell over in that corner of it and they disappeared. So I walk down the wheatfield and I come around the other side, and I’m looking to see what the hell’s going on, where they’re going, and down over there I see all the machine gun equipment, everything laying all over the place, and over there there’s a woods, and a deep ravine with a little stream, and then there’s a field over there, a small field, and there’s our tank that I was looking for. It was bogged down, and the crew was out in front of it, and all these guys are standing there. They must have thought we were all around them. And they surrendered to that crew. I don’t know whose tank that was. Maybe you guys know?
Bob Rossi: Were you our tank commander the time we got bogged down, and the Germans were on the other side of the river, and they were shooting the mortars at us?
Jim Gifford: Oh yeah, that was at the Saar River.
Bob Rossi: Yeah. And Klapkowski was outside the tank, with the high explosive.
Jim Gifford: You know what happened? The tank went off the road, and the ground was like the crust on a pie, it was maybe three feet thick, but that Saar River valley was muddy underneath the main ground. So you could walk across it, cows could go over it, but a heavy 45-ton tank going across it, all of a sudden, the ground gave away. Oh yeah, it was our tank, yeah, because we had another tank come down, and I remember digging down into that mud and holding my breath and reaching down to put the pintle in to pull it out.
Bob Rossi: Klapkowski was outside the tank when they started shooting the mortars at us.
Jim Gifford: That was Dillingen. That was the Saar River.
Ed Spahr: When we moved out of there they brought the smokescreen in to give us cover to get out. That’s where we had the outposts, remember the tank up at the, what do you call them, the T’s sticking out of the ground.
Jim Gifford: As a matter of fact, there was a little village, Hennigan got killed right there, Henderson rather, right outside that town. We pulled into that little village and the tanks were dispersed, and his tank hit a mine, and he and his brother were in it, his brother’s here today. So when they come up out of the tank, the brother who’s here today jumped off the left side and his brother jumped down the right side onto the road, it was a dirt road, and he landed right on a goddamn mine.
Tony D’Arpino: You mean Henehan.
Jim Gifford: I hadn’t had a bath in I don’t know how the hell long.
Bob Rossi: Join the club!
Jim Gifford: So I was in this house and there was a nice bath, and it was right on the edge of the garden, the back yard, it had a nice big window there, and you could look right out, down the field, and into the Saar River. We were in a little bit of a holding position there at the time. So I started filling cans and everything with water, and heated it up, and filled up the bathtub. I had a nice hot bath waiting for me. So I piled into the bathtub, and I’d just started to sink down when all of a sudden I hear an explosion. I looked down, at the end of the field they had dropped one. So I said, "Uh-oh, where’s the next one coming?"
The next one came up closer to the house. Sonofabitch. So I figured the third one, I slid down into the water and I waited for that third one, and "Bwooom!" Right in the goddamn garden, it blew the window out, all this shit came down into the tub with me, the sash, the whole goddamn thing, I’ll never forget it, it was a total wreck stuffed into that goddamn bathtub. And the next one went over the house and landed up in the woods and that was all, just those four.
Tony D’Arpino: I can remember, you get a little soft over there after a while, but anyway I can remember, you know, how cold it gets, and you got them goddamn knit caps on, and you’d just touch your hair, ohh, jeez, it hurt like hell. And you’d say, "Well, I guess I’ll comb my hair..." I think I had, I don’t know, no more than two showers all the time I was over there.
Bob Rossi: I got one shower from the government. We were in a holding position, in the Dragon’s Teeth.
Jim Gifford: Oh yeah, Thionville.
Bob Rossi: And I can remember, we went on the 6-by-6s to go and get these showers. And when we walked into the line they gave us clean long johns and clean socks, and as we disrobed we threw our soiled underwear and socks in another pile.
Tony D’Arpino: Is that where they didn’t tell us how long we were gonna be there?
Jim Gifford: Yeah, that was, we were out of gas.
Tony D’Arpino: I remember I soaped up, and I soaped up, and soaped up, and all of a sudden they shut the goddamn water off.
Bob Rossi: We took our showers, got dressed, and we went back to where our platoon was, and when we went back, they said, "Boy, are you guys lucky." The truck we were on, the 6-by-6, oh, the wheels went over, it pushed down the mud, that a box mine was there, it pushed up, and they never would have known it, the detectors would never have found it because it wasn’t metal, it was a wooden box, we just missed it by inches. The box just oozed up out of the mud.
Jim Gifford: Well, you know, there were a lot of mines there. I went back to Thionville to get some orders and things, bring them back to headquarters, and there was a lieutenant who had just come up, he was replacing somebody near Maizieres, and they said, "Give him a ride back," because I was going right up there. So he got in, and he had his duffel bag, and he had his long green raincoat. When we got up to where he was going, which was right close to Maizieres, there was a woods there and there was a house, and his outfit was up there, an artillery outfit up on the ridges there, you could see them. It was raining, so I pulled up by the house, and I said, "Your outfit’s right up there." Jesus, the guy, there was a house there and it had a porch on it, so instead of going around, going up to his outfit, he has his duffel bag on his shoulder, he walks up to that house, steps up on the porch, and it blew him right out into the road, killed him instantly. I never forgot, that guy wasn’t up there one minute, he got himself killed. God damn boobytraps, they were all over the place. We lost a lot of guys that way.
Aaron Elson: What were the Dragon’s Teeth?
Jim Gifford: They were antitank obstacles, cement, you couldn’t go through them. They were about four feet above the ground.
Ed Spahr: You’d belly your tank.
Jim Gifford: You had the Maginot here, on the French side, and up several miles you had the Siegfried.
Bob Rossi: It was the Siegfried Line, but the Americans had nicknamed it the Dragon’s Teeth.
Ed Spahr: I can remember going up there, relieving one another in that outpost tank we had up there.
Bob Rossi: You mentioned the Maginot Line. I remember what you [Gifford] did. We were practicing with the infantry, we were ready to move into the Bulge, and they were getting these guys from the rear echelon, cooks, bakers, whatnot, clerks, they gave them a rifle and said, "Here, you’re an infantryman." So we were in a holding position in the Maginot line, and this one day we’re going to practice with these new infantrymen, Jim says we’re going to try hitting this door of the Maginot Line.
He bore-sighted our gun. Do you remember that? I remember you bore-sighted it, not through the regular telescope, he bore-sighted to get a direct fix on this door, this armored door. The armor-piercing shell hit the door and bounced off, you’ve never seen more guys running. Then a bazooka man came up, this was like simulating a battle, and the bazooka man, he lines up to hit it, and the guy was standing behind him, burned his pants right off.
Jim Gifford: One of those doors was blown off, and I went into the Maginot Line, it was all underground, there were whole subterranean tunnels under there. And Jesus, it was quiet, and rain was dripping all over the place, and wayyyy down there I saw a light, so I’m walking slowly down, and I’ve got a tommy gun, which was stupid, I don’t know why I did this, but I did, and I’m going towards that light, and each time I would pass a cavern which was back in there, I couldn’t see now, it was dark, and I was going by these entrances, you know, and it got deeper and deeper, and as I got up toward the light, there was a Volkswagen sitting there, and it was loaded with suitcases, and there was a light up above. So as I got to the edge, and it was in an open area there, and the tunnels went off in about three directions. So I stopped and says, "God damn, you’re crazy." I mean, you go over and touch that thing, the minute you walk out there somebody’s going to shoot you, if somebody’s around, or it’s boobytrapped." So I guess I’m here today because I said the hell with that, and I slowly made my way back, and I had to go by all those goddamn entrances, and I’ll tell you I sweated that out, I was down there, oh, I’ll bet you a quarter of a mile down there. And it’s there today that stuff, all subterranean, just like a subway system. Deadly.
Ed Spahr: And all pointing in the wrong direction.
Jim Gifford: Yeah, they abandoned it. That was the Maginot. We were able to go through it, and then, of course, when we went back, they came back into it and turned those guns around, and when we finally did get our gas and started going through we caught hell. The Maginot. And the Siegfried was even worse. Fort Koenigsmacher, that was the one. That was the main fort.
Ed Spahr: They say about this Gulf War, they say the Air Force did everything. The Air Force did a lot, but I don’t yet think that the Air Force ever hurt any of those soldiers that came out and surrendered, because they were Kurdish people, they weren’t Iraqis. They just decided we’re giving up. They just quit. Because I know how we went in there with flamethrowers, I watched that one infantry boy that one day, they sent him up there with a flamethrower and they let him get within, just about ready to fire his flamethrower against one of them doors up there, to get in the bunker, and they cut him down. Let him get so close. They knew how far our flamethrowers would go. You remember, whose tank had the flamethrower on it?
Bob Rossi: It was Warren. No, his tank formerly had a flamethrower on it.
Jim Gifford: You know where Lockhart, that village where he went into the town to turn around, just coming up to that town, up across the hill in back of it was one of those entrances to the Maginot, and there was a whole company of German soldiers lined up out there, a whole company of them, and I don’t know who I was with at the time, but we started firing on them, and I could see now the shells didn’t hit them directly, because they were quite a ways up that mountain, but it landed, and when they realized Jesus, we’re shooting at ‘em, they turned and the whole company started running like a sonofabitch into that door, and they slammed that big door shut, they were down there.
And then that was the village where Lockhart got killed. That was their outpost.
Jim Gifford: I forget the name of the town, but we had settled down for the night, we got off the road, and it was dark, and we heard these trucks coming, and Jesus, here come these trucks loaded with German soldiers sitting there with their guns. There was a little bit of moonlight, and you could see them in the back, and they’re going right straight through us, we’re on both sides of the highway but we’re back in a ways, they couldn’t see us in the woods.
They went down into the town, they must have realized what they did, because they turned around, and as they came back, you could hear the trucks shifting gears down in there, so we all got out and got ready for them, and jeez, when they went by us, man, it was a slaughter.
I remember this one truck burning, those guys on fire, jumping off, running right toward us, they didn’t know where the hell we were. And we were throwing hand grenades at ‘em in the ditches. And when it got daylight, we’re all on edge, and there was one guy who was a master sergeant in the German air force but he was on the ground, he had stripes with wings on them, so he had lain in a ditch over there and we were throwing grenades over, and there were four or five of them there.
When it got daylight we went up close to see what happened, where he went or is he still there, and they were still laying there, and I picked a guy up and he had a luger, I stuck the luger in my pocket, that was loot, which we all wanted. And his jacket came apart, I’ll never forget it, this big wallet came out, and I opened it up, and it was loaded with these white bills. They were like, eight hundred dollars would be a white bill, two hundred dollars. And you know, I looked at it, and I started to feel guilty. I put it back, he’s dead, and his parents would get it, or his brother. I was naive. You know how long that lasted? Well, anyway, I put it back in there. And a little later in the day, I said, I don’t know, that seems to be stupid. He’s going through graves registration and everything else before, I went back and it was gone. I don’t know who got it.
Bob Rossi: There’s something you reminded me of. Johnson was the driver. I was the loader. I forget who was the tank commander.
We had pulled into this town, pitch black at night, and I know when I got off that tank that night there was nothing on the side of that tank. And we slept in this barn overnight. Now I came on guard duty about five o’clock in the morning, and when I came out Johnson, the driver, was already out there, and he had a German prisoner sitting on the ground, like an old big butter tub, and he says he’s clean, I checked him out. Sure he checked him, he had a gold pocket watch that the German soldier carried in a chamois case. And there were four or five dead Germans around the tank, every one of them was shot in the head, their pockets were inside out, every one of them, that morning.
Jim Gifford: You didn’t hear the shooting?
Bob Rossi: Somebody shot them during the night. So I’m up on the tank there, in the turret, and it was raining, it was drizzling, you remember those brown German rain capes, I used to put them over the hatch so the water wouldn’t get in the turret. And I’m looking around, and an infantry man brought another German soldier. I put him on the ground next to the other guy. I think he says, "Can I get a coat out of the wagons?" And he put a coat over his shoulders. And I’m looking all around, I’m looking all around, all of a sudden I see these two guys walking across the hill. Now, the .45 I have is Jim Gifford’s, I’ve been saving for him when he gets back, I see these two guys, "Boooom!" I shoot the .45, I hit a live wire, and the flames shot all over. The guys, whatever they were carrying they dropped, and I motioned to them to come forward. It was two DPs [displaced persons], they were carrying milk to the next village.
The woman that they were working for, they were never supposed to leave the village, but she was selling milk, and I didn’t know who they were, I nearly killed these guys. But this’ll show you the things that happened.
Jim Gifford: Nobody knew where anybody was.
Bob Rossi: Oh, this German soldier, he was sleeping in the hayloft above us all night, until it became light, that’s when Johnson got the watch. He was ready to give himself up.
Jim Gifford: He was probably happy to get captured, most of them were. I remember once when we were in Task Force Weaver, I don’t know what village that was, we’re coming down the highway, and stop the tank, here’s a German colonel with maybe 200 men lined up over here in a field by this house, and he’s going like this, and we stopped, and he wanted to surrender. I called back on the radio and said, "What do you want us to do?" These guys, there’s about 200 of them, they want to surrender to us. They said, "Just tell them to keep walking down the road, and you all keep going." So they were confused. We drove on by them, and we kept going like that to them, go back down that way.
This was all before Paris, and they were all over the place. They didn’t know whether we were behind them. They see a whole column of American tanks, they said, "What the hell is this? We must have lost the war." And they were coming out to surrender. We had no facilities to take them.
They called that the breakout in Normandy. We were stuck in Normandy, it was sort of a stabilized situation, it was bad news, because they’re over there, and we’re in a small area, and they’re firing at us all night and all day.
First of all, before we broke out, the Air Force softened them up. Remember that? You saw B-17s, as far as you could see in every direction, and they kept droning over. Remember that? And they were hitting St. Lo and Perier and Caen.
Tony D’Arpino: Matter of fact, it was daylight and you’d think it was almost nighttime, that’s how many planes there were.
Ed Spahr: The vapor shut the sun off. That’s the day General McNair got killed.
Jim Gifford: They were softening it up. As soon as that was over, that’s when we got orders to move out.
Ed Spahr: Actually, the town that we jumped off from was Avranches. I remember the night before, we were all under the tank, they shelled the hell out of us before we jumped off.
Jim Gifford: And then as one column of tanks would progress, another column would come in behind us, and we just kept this up until we had about a three-mile line of vehicles, all armor and all tanks, and that was called Task Force Weaver.
Ed Spahr: That was the drive to Paris.
Jim Gifford: That’s what we thought. And we got up there quite a ways, and then we made the U-turn to come back down, we didn’t know it but we were a pincer movement. Then we were heading toward the Falaise Gap to close that gap.
Bob Rossi: One last story. For me, I met my brother, who was in the 4th Armored Division, I met him on the autobahn on Holy Saturday, 1945. We had to get off the autobahn so the 4th Armored could go through us, and that’s when I met my brother for the first time. And then I met my brother the night the war ended in Czechoslovakia. The 4th Armored and 90th were working together.
Tony D’Arpino: You know where I was the night the war ended? In Czechoslovakia having a new engine put in the tank, and we had to stand in a lineup because a broad got raped that night. You know, we knew the war was over, and we all were pounding on doors trying to find something to drink. She couldn’t identify anybody, but I know that we were there about a week, and I think it was the next morning, they told us one of the cooks packed real quick at night, and they transferred him.
Jim Gifford: It was in Amberg we had Hermann Goering’s touring sedan. It was in one of the barracks there. Amberg was a barracks for German cavalry officers, and we took it over when the war ended, it was our headquarters. So we cleaned the whole barracks up. There were some nice horses, you know, the Lipizzaners. We took care of the horses. Some of the guys were ex-cavalrymen. But in one barn, they had it covered with hay, it was Hermann Goering’s black touring sedan, and we brought that out, and we drove around with it, used it for about two weeks, and then one day Cadman and a couple of other guys came down from Regensburg, from General Patton’s headquarters, he said, "We want that, General Patton wants it for himself." So we had to give it to him, and god damn, I was up to Regensburg, we used to have to go up there and get our orders every Saturday. I went up to Regensburg and Jesus, there it was, all painted with a brush, olive drab, all that beautiful upholstery inside was all messed up.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever meet Patton?
Ed Spahr: He was up there at the Moselle River, walked right past our tank. He stood there, with mortars coming in, do you remember that day?
Jim Gifford: One time we were crossing the Moselle River at night, and I had on the back of the tank a little German trailer, a little artillery trailer, a small thing, but it was a big box, it had a German machine gun, and some other stuff. And when we brought the tank up to cross, Patton was standing there with a couple of his aides watching us go by, and damn, this trailer was too narrow, so it wouldn’t go into the tracks. If it was going to be dragged across, it was going to be a problem. So I pushed it off into the river and I let it sink, because we weren’t supposed to have that shit. I got back to the tank, and I lost all that loot.
Bob Rossi: It came back to my mind how fortunate we are. In 1988, when we had the presentation of our monument at Fort Knox, we were fortunate that D’Arpino, Spahr, myself and Sessions, the four men of that particular crew that got knocked out in the Siegfried Line, we were able to get together, and here we are in 1992, Jim, myself, Spahr and Tony, we’re able to sit down here and talk with you. It’s amazing that we were able to survive the war and to be able to be here and talk with you about this.
Tony D’Arpino: That first tank we lost, when we hit mines...
Bob Rossi: Your first tank...
Tony D’Arpino: I don’t know many cartons of good cigarettes I lost. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I used to get my rations every week. We were all looking forward to getting to Paris someday, with all them cigarettes.
Bob Rossi: We used to give our rations of cigars to Klapkowski. He didn’t smoke cigarettes. He smoked cigars.
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Interviews