©2014, Aaron Elson
Aaron Elson: Did your squad have to take any other pillboxes?
Mike McKinney: After the beach?
Aaron Elson: Yes.
Mike McKinney: Yeah. Once we went through the Dragon’s teeth in the Siegfried Line. We were the first ones across that Siegfried Line. September, I’m guessing, the 24th. We saw these big globs of concrete. They looked just like teeth. Dragon’s teeth. Flat on the top. You could hide behind them. But they had a pillbox after the teeth. We had to take that pillbox. It was a little thing. We got up there at night time, and were in a little firefight. A couple of guys got wounded. One guy laid out there all night, we couldn’t get him in; he moaned all night, crying for Mama. He died sometime during the night; we couldn’t get him back. But the next day, the pillbox was empty. I made it my headquarters for a couple of days, we stayed there for a while.
Aaron Elson: At any point did you get pulled back off the line, or was the First Division always fighting, from Normandy until you got to the Huertgen Forest?
Mike McKinney: Yeah. We were across France, the Falais Gap, they closed that, maybe a day or two, but we took off again on the back of the tanks, Patton’s tanks. We got all the way up to Metz, around Metz. The first break I remember, no, no break, right to the Huertgen Forest, right until Thanksgiving Day. That’s when I got the third hit. I didn’t tell you, I got hit on D-Day. Across my knee, took out a lot of flesh. It was bleeding like a pig. Ryan was a medic, I told him to wrap it up, bandage it. I took a bandage out of my pack and packed it in that and put some sulfa powder on it.
Aaron Elson: At what point on D-Day were you hit?
Mike McKinney: I think it was going up the hill to the pillbox. There was some fire still coming from alongside the pillbox. Of course you’re running and falling and stuff like that, so I don’t know when it happened, but it was about that time, sometime in the morning of D-Day.
Aaron Elson: So you fought with your knee wrapped up like that for three days?
Mike McKinney: Yeah. Well, more. We took the heavy bandage off and just put a lighter bandage on a day or two later.
Aaron Elson: Did it eventually get treated at an aid station?
Mike McKinney: We had a medic attached to the platoon, and he always had whatever the battalion aid station had, so he just kept dressing it.
Aaron Elson: Now the Huertgen Forest, Thanksgiving Day. How long had you been in the Huertgen Forest?
Mike McKinney: We had time to build a trench. It was pretty quiet; started to snow. There were some downed trees. We had a chance to dig a big slit trench and put a couple of logs over the top and cover it with dirt. They brought us up sleeping bags, arctic sleeping bags. They were luxurious. You get in that thing. So we were pretty stagnant for a couple of days. That was the first break I remember all the way across. There were no breaks before that.
I guess we were a couple of weeks in the Huertgen Forest. They had to build corduroy roads, it was muddy. There was snow. There was rain. I can remember being in the rain for five days in a foxhole. It rained continuously. Puddles of water in the foxhole. Mud. Soaking wet after five days of rain. One of the lieutenants in the company collapsed and went into shellshock, and he said, "I can’t go any further," and started crying. So a week, ten days I guess in the Huertgen Forest.
We had to take a town called Heissen. The Second Battalion had tried to take it and they couldn’t take it, so they called us up, the Third Battalion. And of course L Company. And of course L Company said, "First platoon and the third platoon." Sergeant Rulong had the third platoon. So it was me and him. "Follow me, men."
At the edge of the woods there was a hill going up; there was a little village up there with a bunch of houses. We started running, Rulong’s platoon on one side of the road and mine on the other.
I guess we took them by surprise, because he and I and a bunch of his guys and a bunch of my guys got into town. We made it to the middle of the town. There was a little fighting. We went through a couple of houses. Shot a few Germans. Captured a few. Sent them back down.
Night came. We stayed in the town. I had a command post with a phone in the basement of a house in the middle of town. He was across the road someplace else, Sergeant Rulong. And late at night we hear this tank coming down the road. We’re no match for tanks. He’s coming up toward where we are, so I take off from that house and move back toward the edge of town. Get into the basement. We left the phone there. We had another phone we hooked up to the wire. I’m talking back to the company CP, and all of a sudden I hear some guy talking German. There was this German on the phone up there in the house, and he started talking German. I didn’t answer him because I didn’t want him to think there was anybody in the town. So we were in the basement, and one of my sergeants comes running down the road, and a guy outside the house who was on guard duty didn’t know, he thought it was a German so he shot him three times. He shot him in the leg three times. We got him down in the basement, trying to keep him quiet. A tank comes down the road. We could hear the thing swiveling around; it’s got a certain sound when it swivels the turret. I got my hand over the sergeant’s mouth, trying to keep him quiet. The tank takes off. We stayed there that night, and the next morning we took off. The rest of the town we took running past a big hole in the ground. I see about four or five Germans sitting there, so we didn’t even stop, we told one of the guys to get out, and they were taken prisoner. And that was the end of the Huertgen Forest; the next day I think it was that I got hit.
Aaron Elson: Did people suffer trenchfoot in the Huertgen Forest? Did you get many cases of that?
Mike McKinney: I didn’t notice anybody, none of my guys, because I made my guys change their socks, clean their feet, make sure they had foot powder, made sure they dried their feet when they could, and just change their socks whenever they could, rinse out the old ones. Leave a little coffee in your canteen and wash your socks out in the coffee.
Aaron Elson: Wash your socks in the coffee?
Mike McKinney: Sure. It’s hot water. The socks were brown anyhow, so it didn’t make any difference. Just as long as they had good feet, you knew there wouldn’t be any trouble. The infantryman had to take care of his feet. If you got a blister on your feet it was almost like a court-martial offense.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Mike McKinney: Oh, sure. You’d catch hell. You were supposed to take care of your feet. It was drilled into you from the time you got into the infantry. At least it was where I was.
Aaron Elson: But in the Battle of the Bulge and in the Huertgen Forest that was a big problem.
Mike McKinney: It had just started when I was in the Huertgen Forest. It was November. There was rain. Like I said, five days of rain at one time. Then it started to snow. The day I got hit, Thanksgiving Day, was just foggy. But after that I understand it got real bad. A lot of snow and stuff, and when the freezing started.
Aaron Elson: How did you get hit?
Mike McKinney: This was an airburst in the trees. I guess maybe a shell came in and hit the trees and exploded, or maybe it was timed to go off in the air. I got hit laying down. A piece of shrapnel up in my left leg, right along the inside of my crotch. I walked down the hill with it. There was no other way to get down there. You walked down to the aid station. I just walked into the aid station, it was right there. So I had a guy take a look at it. I said, "I don’t know whether it needs just a bandage or something." He put a bandage on it. Then he took a look at it, and he said, "It’s still in there. A big piece. You’ve got to go back." So I went back to battalion aid and they shipped me back to Liege, Belgium, where they operated. Put me under. I came out on the operating table singing "McNamara’s Band." And I’d stop singing and say, "I’m hunnnnngry." And I’d sing a little more and I’d say, "I’m hunnnnngry." That’s what they told me. And I’d sing a little more of "McNamara’s Band."
Aaron Elson: How does McNamara’s Band go?
Mike McKinney: "My name is McNamara, I’m the leader of the band/Although we’re few in number we’re the finest in the land/ We play at wakes and weddings and at every big fancy ball/ And when we play to funerals we play the best of all. Oh, the drums were banging the cymbals clanging..." And I would say, "I’m hunnnngry." That was in Liege, Belgium. Then they operated, took the thing out and shipped me back to Paris.
Aaron Elson: Getting from the aid station to the bigger aid station, did they send you in a jeep?
Mike McKinney: In a jeep. Sitting in a jeep with about four other guys who were walking wounded. They could move around; they didn’t need an ambulance.
Aaron Elson: When you were in Liege…
Mike McKinney: The V-2 bombs were going over.
Aaron Elson: I was just going to ask about those.
Mike McKinney: That’s where I first heard them. One of them hit the hospital I was in. I guess it didn’t make it to the coast. But it hit the hospital.
Aaron Elson: While you were there?
Mike McKinney: While I was there. I guess it malfunctioned or something. But they didn’t fly very high off the ground. Maybe a hundred yards up.
Aaron Elson: That must have scared the heck out of you.
Mike McKinney: Oh yeah. We thought the hospital was being bombed. We didn’t know about V-2s then. We found out about them.
Aaron Elson: What happened when the hospital was hit?
Mike McKinney: I don’t know where it hit. It hit someplace, we could hear it. But whatever, they took care of the patients, or the dead or whatever. I was interested in myself. I wasn’t so concerned about anyone else getting hit. I was there to be taken care of.
Aaron Elson: Then did they send you back to England?
Mike McKinney: No, they sent me back to Paris. They didn’t sew me up in Paris. They wanted to leave it open, so they just kept putting Vaseline pads on it for a few days. Then they sent me back to England. And how did I get back to England? I don’t remember. I remember I went by ambulance from Liege to Paris. I remember seeing the lights of Paris. By this time there were some lights on in Paris, believe it or not. Dull, dim, but there were lights. And I’m looking out the back of the window of the ambulance, looking at Paris. How did I get from Paris to England? I don’t know. It must have been by boat.
By then they had come up with the point system, for sending people home. I had so many points I was a VIP. I had points for time in the service, time overseas, for medals, for wounds. I think 85 points was the minimum; I had 185 or something.
Aaron Elson: What did you do on the beach to get the Silver Star?
Mike McKinney: I’ll get you the official citation. You can read it. I don’t want to brag. I just ran around the beach; they said it was deserving of a medal.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Citation for Silver Star. Vincent M. McKinney, 1200 ------"
Mike McKinney: And my rifle number was HB61.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Technical sergeant, then staff sergeant, Company L, 16th Infantry. For gallantry in action in the vicinity of Colleville sur Mer, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944. Voluntarily traversing large areas of beach under intense artillery and small arms fire, Sergeant McKinney, unmindful of personal safety, effected reorganization of his section. Sergeant McKinney’s courageous and aggressive leadership enabled his unit to face the enemy at full fighting strength and greatly bolstered the invasion effort in his sector. Residence at enlistment, Brooklyn, New York."
Mike McKinney: Doesn’t that sound great?
Aaron Elson: Yes it does. Now can I read the Bronze Star?
Mike McKinney: Sure.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Vincent McKinney, technical sergeant (then sergeant), Company L, 16th Infantry. For heroic achievement in connection with military operations against the enemy in the vicinity of Arcole, Algeria, 9 November 1942. When his squad was impeded by intense machine gun fire, Sergeant McKinney skillfully deployed his men and with utter disregard for personal safety fearlessly advanced and with accurately thrown hand grenades destroyed the hostile strongpoint and then led a successful attack against the foe. Sergeant McKinney’s heroic actions and initiative exemplify the indomitable fighting spirit of the American soldier."
Mike McKinney: Doesn’t it sound great? "Unmindful of his personal safety." In other words, they’re staying "Stupid he."
This you might be interested in; you can read that at your leisure [an article about Company L on D-Day]. That was in the Stars & Stripes; that was the official publication of the Army overseas.
Aaron Elson: Oh, soon after the invasion, June 29, 1944.
Mike McKinney: Yeah. I think that was written, dated the 15th. That’s about the whole company coming ashore on D-Day. It tells you about one of our sections that got sunk, the guys were all drowned. Fourth section, Sergeant Zahotchky, an old Army soldier. A prewar soldier, I knew him from when I first went in, he was a sergeant then. Good friend. He shouldn’t have been over there. He was too old to be over there. They should have let him go, leave him stateside.
Aaron Elson: But he wanted to go?
Mike McKinney: I don’t know if he wanted to go or not, but maybe he was on the borderline, so they sent him over.
Aaron Elson: It must hurt an awful lot, losing people like Townsend and Zahotchky.
Mike McKinney: Oh, and lots of others. Artie White got shot in the back; he didn’t get killed but paralyzed from the waist down, he was sent back. He was a guy I traveled all over with. Lots of other guys, too. Good drinking buddies. Nice guys. Do anything for you, lend you money, give you a pack of cigarettes if you ran out. True friends. It’s war, so. A bullet had their name on it, so.
Aaron Elson: Did you have any adventures with them in England or Florida?
Mike McKinney: Oh, sure. Adventures?
Aaron Elson: Fights.
Mike McKinney: Not with them, with other guys, with the 36th, yeah. Hillbillies from down South, country farm boys, they swing a fist fast. Yeah, sure. A lot of good times.
Aaron Elson: Did these fellows talk about their families or their girlfriends? Were any of them married?
Mike McKinney: Oh, sure. You knew the guys. You knew guys were married. "Oh, a letter from your sweetie," you know, something was sent to them. I don’t think anybody had any kids. Guys were married but they didn’t have children; they wouldn’t have sent them, I don’t think. The Army wouldn’t have drafted them.
Aaron Elson: Some of the tankers had kids, but they were drafted in 1941, before Pearl Harbor.
Mike McKinney: They sent replacements up to me; I remember getting a guy in Germany, this guy was 35 years old, was married, had three kids and he had club toes. They put him in the infantry. His toes were like this [very curled], and they sent him up there. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel, I guess, towards the end. He got killed in a couple of days.
Aaron Elson: Did you become hardened?
Mike McKinney: Yes, I did. I can remember, my troops were up on a hill, it seems we were always on a hill. I took one guy from the left, a little guy, I remember, a little Italian guy, only about four and a half feet tall. I took him from the left side and I said, "Go down to the end there and dig in down there by those guys." There were a couple of shots back and forth. A little while later I went down there, and he had been killed. I felt bad I had sent him down there. If I had left him alone maybe he would still be alive. But he’s there, I’m in the foxhole. He’s alongside the foxhole. I remember I started eating a can of beans. I had no place to lay it; I laid it on his chest. I thought about that after the war. I’m eating beans on his chest, there’s a dead body there. You become hardened, it’s just … you’re half-human, I think. You’re a lot animal. The way you’re living. You’re laying in mud and dirt, and you’re filthy. You straighten up a little bit when you go back to reserve for a while, a rest area, or if there’s a break in the action, you go back to civilization. When I think of how I acted during the war a lot of times, yeah, you’re not all human.
Aaron Elson: When you would go to a rest area, would you dread going back to the front?
Mike McKinney: No. I was thankful for the interim, where you could shower, change clothes, wash yourself. Shave. Go to sleep without hearing shells or gunfire.
Aaron Elson: Now I know you were strict about your socks. Did you ever come down with lice?
Mike McKinney: I came down with the crabs. On an English ship, coming across, coming through Africa. Right after the shooting in Africa. We had to go for a short-arm inspection. I felt itchy, but I figured it was just ants or something. And the officer, the doctor, spots me, and he hands me a razor. Dry razor. "Step over there and shave." Not go back to the barracks and shave. "Step over there, drop your pants and shave." With a dry razor, shave off all that hair. Yes, I had crabs. Body lice, no.
Aaron Elson: What was the longest you went without being able to shower?
Mike McKinney: I guess that was going across France into Germany. We didn’t shower, we didn’t bother shaving. Couldn’t shave. We ran out of everything. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have food. We had to stop when we got near Metz. Patton ran away from all the supplies; he wanted to get as far as he could. So we were with him. That’s the longest time. You didn’t have a chance at night even to stop and … because you had to put outposts out and you had to be on the alert during the night for counterattacks and stuff like that. It really wasn’t until you got back to a rest area that you could really shower. And even then there wasn’t much of a shower. You’d get maybe a helmet full of water, and use that for everything. Shower. Wash your clothes. Wash your hair. Whatever. Water was a big problem over there. They had to bring it up, wherever they could get it; they put tablets and stuff in it to maybe purify it some.
Aaron Elson: Was there a lot of diarrhea?
Mike McKinney: Oh sure. I had diarrhea while I was walking.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Mike McKinney: Sure. We were marching, not marching but walking and going into the attack.
Aaron Elson: Going into an attack?
Mike McKinney: Sure.
Aaron Elson: God, what a time.
Mike McKinney: Like I’m saying, you turn into an animal. When you'd get a chance, you’d try to shuck everything and get a change of underwear and a pair of pants. Meantime you just stink everybody out. Nobody said anything because they realized they were doing the same thing.
Aaron Elson: Did you have any encounters with generals who came to the front? You weren’t with Patton, were you?
Mike McKinney: Going across France we were, yeah. Because he was with the First Army corps. Like I said, we rode on the back of his tanks. He joined us in Africa, even. We ended up having to shave every day and wear ties when he showed up. Prior to that we didn’t have to shave every day. You shaved when you wanted to more or less. No ties. Patton: Spic and span.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever hear him give one of his famous speeches?
Mike McKinney: No. He never came close to me.
Aaron Elson: Did any other generals come up to the front?
Mike McKinney: Generals? Bullets are flying, generals don’t do that; they go back. No, they have to be in the back where all the planning is going on, put on a light, looking at maps and stuff.
Aaron Elson: What was the highest ranking officer that you had contact with?
Mike McKinney: My battalion commander, I guess. Colonel Batshit.
Aaron Elson: Colonel what?
Mike McKinney: Batshit. That was his favorite expression. We called him Colonel Batshit. I only saw him a few times, too. I took a town in Sicily called Enna. I found out it’s supposed to be a resort. It didn’t look like much of a resort. But I took a combat patrol into Enna, with a light machine gun and a reinforced squad, and I had everything lined up. I was in the bank. I took over the town. I had all the policemen disarmed. There were no Germans there. We had a little fight on the way in, there were some Germans, but it was just a delaying action; they took off. I was trying to figure a way to crack the vault in the bank, and trying to get the bank president to come down. All of a sudden Colonel Batshit drives up. That was the end of that. But I didn’t see anybody, he showed up that dang week. I didn’t want to see him; I was trying to get in that vault. I didn’t know what was in there, gold or silver maybe.
Aaron Elson: I understand there was another time when you did get into a bank.
Mike McKinney: Oh, no, that was in an SS trooper’s house, in Aachen. We were going house to house there, and we holed up in this one house and had a chance to look around. I opened up a drawer and there was all this money. I just shoved it in my pack. I thought it was worth something, I figured I’d have a little nest egg. It was useless.
A couple of young girls were walking down the street, and we were in this SS trooper’s house, so we hollered out to them, "Get off the street!" And we dragged them in the house there. They were young girls. So they’re looking around. And there was a big closet, with a bunch of fur coats. I said, "Take your pick." They grabbed a bunch of them. Then they took off.
Aaron Elson: What happened to the SS trooper?
Mike McKinney: I don’t know. He was up at the front someplace, I guess. Maybe he lived there and he was at the Russian front.
We had some street fighting in Aachen, but we left and went to the Huertgen Forest before it really got bad. I understand it was bad in Aachen, there was a lot of house to house, blowing holes between the walls and staying off the streets.
Aaron Elson: So the Germans would have been in Aachen when you were there?
Mike McKinney: Oh, they were there.
Aaron Elson: But the heavy fighting had not started to take place?
Mike McKinney: No, we were just on the edge of town, the first few streets I guess. Then they put us down to the Huertgen Forest. Before we left Aachen, though, we were on the road and they used to bring hot meals to us. We were static for a while. And the jeep from the company kitchen used to bring up a hot meal. Hot coffee. Stew or something, and maybe some bread. We used to look forward to it every night. But they started getting fire from machine guns as they were bringing it up, so they stopped bringing it to us. They told us, "We’re not gonna bring it to you because then we get fired on, and we don’t want to get hit." So I spent the next day up on the top of this roof with a pair of binoculars trying to spot the machine gun or whatever it was, and I see a little activity around a house, right at the corner of a house. So I called the CP and I said, "I think I spotted where that machine gun is." So he got on the line with the artillery and they threw a smoke shell out, and I made the adjustments on the smoke shell to where they were. Then they fired for effect. They had the battalion fire two rounds. That’s a lot of ammunition. So we got rid of the machine gun nest and we got our hot meals again. That was in Aachen, too.
Aaron Elson: You said at some point – I had asked you about finding the religious symbol in the pillbox – and you said at some point later on that you began to feel that maybe the Germans would have somebody looking after them...
Mike McKinney: I was hoping that they maybe have a little faith and trust in a higher power. You know that the buckles that they had, "Gott mit uns," God with us, on their belt buckles, so I figured they had – at least the old guy did, if not the new Nazis. Yeah, I kind of hoped that they had somebody they prayed to who was taking care of them.
Aaron Elson: Was that out of compassion?
Mike McKinney: Just an odd moment of reflection, I guess, I don’t know. I never had any compassion for the Germans. I knew they didn’t start the war, Hitler started the war, and they were caught in it. But they had to shoot us and we had to shoot them. I wasn’t against them individually, I didn’t even know them. But they were trying to kill me so I had to kill them before they got a chance to kill me.
Aaron Elson: In Normandy, the prisoners, I’ve heard that they were all different nationalities. The ones that you captured…
Mike McKinney: Yeah, they were different nationalities. Some were even Russian. They were Russian, they were Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Polish. A lot of them were used for laborers, they just happened to be caught up in the snare. The prisoners we took on the beach, I remember seeing a sailor there even. There was a guy in a Navy suit. And what he was doing there I don’t know. Yeah, they were different nationalities. But some of them were just as laborers. They were in uniform, but the uniform of a laborer. Of course when we found them, nobody had any rifles. They ditched them.
Aaron Elson: Did you have any encounters with the Hitler youth?
Mike McKinney: No. They weren’t up at the front. Where I was, with all the fighting going on, kids weren’t up there shooting. Big guys were.
Aaron Elson: So you didn’t go back. You came home on points after you were wounded the third time?
Mike McKinney: I was coming through the replacement center. After I got out of the hospital, they sewed me up and I was on recuperation, I was getting back in shape. I went to a replacement center, and then we were just getting the muscles tuned up again, and finally we got all finished with that, and were gonna get reassigned. So we’re walking through a line, and you give the guy up at the desk, some soldier, your name, your rank, your company, whatever.
"How many times were you wounded?"
When I said, "Three," everybody stopped. All eyes popped up.
The soldier turned around, he says, "Lieutenant! Lieutenant! Come out here!" He says, "This sergeant’s been wounded three times."
The lieutenant takes me in the office, and he reads this thing from Eisenhower. And it says, "Anybody wounded three or more times will be reassigned to a rear-echelon job. But he has the option, if he wants to rejoin his old company, he’ll have to sign this waiver."
I said, "I’m not signing anything."
They sent me back. So I stayed in England. But I could have signed a waiver and gone back and joined my own outfit if I wanted to. Right in time for the Battle of the Bulge. That was the end of my fighting. I figured three times, that’s enough. Three on a match.
Aaron Elson: Where was the First in the Bulge?
Mike McKinney: I couldn’t tell you. If I know the First, they were in the thick of it.
Aaron Elson: There was still quite a bit of war left.
Mike McKinney: Oh yeah. They ended up in Czechoslovakia. So they took the southern half of Germany.
Aaron Elson: And you came home then?
Mike McKinney: No. I was assigned to a military police escort guard company. I think it was the 425th MPEG. I was in charge of a contingent around a hospital for German prisoners of war. With another sergeant; he and I worked 24 on and 24 off, so we were in town every other night. We had a ball.
Aaron Elson: What were the prisoners of war like?
Mike McKinney: They were severely wounded. They were in beds. Amputations. Our job was just to make sure they didn’t escape, not that they wanted to.
Aaron Elson: Did you talk with any of them?
Mike McKinney: Not really. I talked with the NCOs. We used to take a head count every night. And I would talk with their corresponding rank, no officers involved. It was just all NCOs.
Aaron Elson: You being a sergeant and he being a sergeant, did you feel like equals at any point?
Mike McKinney: No, he was a sergeant in the German army, I was a sergeant in the American army. Once in a while the healed prisoners, we’d put them on trains and take them to a stockade.
Aaron Elson: All this time, your wife was your fiancée?
Mike McKinney: Yes. We didn’t get married till three months after I came home.
Aaron Elson: So you had been writing back and forth for what, four years?
Mike McKinney: Three years and two months, August 2, 1942 to August 6, 1945. We landed on my birthday in LaGuardia Field when I came back home. The same day they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Celebration. Flew home. Stopped in Newfoundland for a steak and ice cream dinner. Real VIP treatment. Landed in LaGuardia field.
Aaron Elson: And you got home on your birthday. How old were you?
Mike McKinney: It was ’45; I was born in ’19, so I was 26. I went in a child, a minor, my mother had to sign for me to go in the Army. I came out a man.
Aaron Elson: You were under 18 when you went in?
Mike McKinney: I was under 21. I think a minor was 21 in those days.
Aaron Elson: Oh, because you enlisted, not because you were drafted.
Mike McKinney: I enlisted. I needed my mother’s permission to go in. She had to sign for me.
Aaron Elson: Just quickly, you had nine brothers and sisters. Did any of your siblings go into the service?
Mike McKinney: Yeah. Four of us went in. Frank was in the transportation corps, he was out in Oregon. Jack was in the Navy on a destroyer. Jim was a radar operator in the ETO. The other two boys were too young to go in.
Aaron Elson: So your mother had four stars in the window?
Mike McKinney: Yes. And they all came back safe. I was the only one who even got wounded. All soft jobs. Radar outfit. On a destroyer.
Aaron Elson: A destroyer couldn’t have been an easy job.
Mike McKinney: Well, except for beans on a Wednesday for breakfast. That’s what the Navy served every Wednesday morning for breakfast, beans. It was traditional for some reason. Frank was an officer in the transportation corps. He was into shipping and handling. In Brooklyn he worked for the Eagle Pencil Company. So he went in and got a soft job as an officer. I was the only guy that did the fighting.
Aaron Elson: What do they say, for every soldier on the front…
Mike McKinney: Ten behind him. Support troops.
Aaron Elson: I’m not even going to ask about your career as a cop, because that would be another three hours.
Mike McKinney: Is that how long we were talking?
Aaron Elson: No. Two hours.
Mike McKinney: I had a career in the Police Department. It was fun while it lasted. I had a good time. Twenty-four years. I worked in East Harlem. Every night was New Year’s Eve.
Aaron Elson: Was that a big Italian neighborhood back then?
Mike McKinney: Italian, yeah. It ran from the East River to Third Avenue. First Avenue, Second, Third Avenue. Spanish between Third and Park, and black from Park to Fifth. Then Harlem was Fifth to west.
Aaron Elson: Which precinct were you in?
Mike McKinney: Two-five. The 25th. It was on 126th Street and Lexington. They moved the stationhouse down to 119th Street after I got out, and Lexington Avenue. That’s where they are now. I just read a book all about the 25. My badge number was 15573. This is my badge. I made a belt buckle out of it.
I left in 1971. I was discharged on disability at that time. January 1, 1971. 12:01 a.m.
Aaron Elson: And what was the disability?
Mike McKinney: Heart condition. Not bad, I got three-fourths pay.
Aaron Elson: What led you to become a cop?
Mike McKinney: I had no trade. I had no decent job when I was in the Army, so when I came out I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I figured civil service would be my best chance, and I just took all the civil service tests I could. The first one to call me was the Police Department. I also passed the Fire Department, but I figured if you get shot or stabbed in the Police Department you recover, but if you get in a burning fire, you breathe all those hot gases in, your lungs are shot. So I stayed with the Police Department.
Aaron Elson: And what rank did you wind up with in the Police Department?
Mike McKinney: A patrolman. They called me disabled in ’64, so I got a job in an office, and we got busy with the scooter program in New York City. You see those little scooters that they have? I helped institute that program, did all the nitty gritty on that, all the manufacturers, the Italians and Germans.
Aaron Elson: Gee, so you must remember Lexington Avenue when it was a two-way street.
Mike McKinney: Lexington? Yeah. Oh sure.
Aaron Elson: And even Third Avenue.
Mike McKinney: Third Avenue was two-way. Even First Avenue I remember two way. Second Avenue, it wasn’t till later that they made it one-way. Madison, Fifth.
Aaron Elson: It must have been a very, very different city in those days.
Mike McKinney: Oh, it was. A very different city in many ways. They didn’t shoot cops in those days. They didn’t talk back to cops in those days. Today they just walk up beside a car and pull the trigger.
Now, when I look back on it, it was a life. Between the CCC, the Army and the Police Department.
Aaron Elson: You haven’t told me any CCC stories.
Mike McKinney: Not really anything to tell. We were in Idaho building the road from Idaho to Sun Valley, along the south fork of the Salmon River.
Aaron Elson: That must be beautiful territory.
Mike McKinney: Oh, gorgeous. I was in a specialized squad. We used to just go around, clear off trails in the mountains, clear the snakes off it. Fix them, repair them. Other crews worked with the jackhammers and the dynamite. We built an airfield and a corral for the pack horses in case of forest fires; they could land planes and store the pack horses. Cut down trees, blow out stumps. It was interesting. While I was out there, some guy stole some stamps from a guy’s footlocker. And we were fifty miles from Boise. They got him, and they made him walk from camp to Boise. The road ended right at the camp, so they told him to take his trunk and take off. They wouldn’t even give him a ride to Boise. He just started right there.
The CCCs were nice. Good healthy, outdoors.
Aaron Elson: That was right out of the Depression, wasn’t it?
Mike McKinney: Right in the Depression. That was in ’38, ’39. I missed the World’s Fair that year, too. Thirty-nine, ’40. They had the World’s Fair in New York, and I was in Idaho. But I caught the one in ’64, ’65. Of course then I was stationed inside the World’s Fair. We had a liaison office with the World’s Fair, coordinated things between the World’s Fair and the city police. They had their own security, but we had to coordinate a lot of things. Very interesting. Set up trips for VIPs coming in from all over the world.
Aaron Elson: I remember taking the subway out there, they had just finished building it.
Mike McKinney: The el, the Roosevelt line. That’s all changed now. It’s all narcotics over there. From Shea Stadium all the way down to Queens Boulevard. I can’t think of any more war stories to tell you. Maybe I’ll think of something tonight or tomorrow.
Aaron Elson: When did you start growing this mustache?
Mike McKinney: A couple of years ago my wife saw a guy on television, I think it was a pilot, and she says, "You’d look good in one of those. Why don’t you grow one?" So I started to grow one. Now she wants me to take it off.
I’ve got that Time-Warner thing, GI Diary, World War II, Lloyd Bridges narrating, I got my half-hour on television, they did a story about me in Africa. He [Tom] got me a professor from Florida State University, did he tell you about it? I talked to her for an hour and a half on the telephone. I was the grand marshal in the parade out here, Rio Rancho, rode in a Mercedes-Benz in the back, waving at people.
Rio Rancho has veterans going to the schools, talking to them about that era. Not only the Army, but the Depression, what life was like, school. Because they find out the kids don’t know anything about it; my son in California is a teacher and he said there’s only five pages in one of the books on World War II and the Depression. They don’t know about it. So what we’re doing here is trying to teach the kids about it, so they learn something about what went on in that era.
"Saving Private Ryan" made Normandy the story of the year.
Aaron Elson: Yes, but for so many people who were at D-Day, there still was so much more to come. Now you had said that Normandy wasn’t your longest day, so to speak. Did you tell me what the most harrowing thing was?
Mike McKinney: I said that Normandy was not the most harrowing day? It was one of the most. But my longest day? We were put into position before daylight, we were on the desert, we were walking someplace. And the captain tells me and Artie White to take a patrol out and see what’s out there. So we get started and flares go off, and we’re silhouetted in the flares, and machine guns opened up, and naturally we hit the deck. Daylight comes, and we find out we’re only 50 yards away from the Germans. The captain brought us too close to their lines. Some mistake he made, I don’t know. Most of the company was in back of us, so they got away all right, but we were in front of this hill. When daylight came the Germans saw us only 50 yards away. I had a couple of blades of grass to hide behind, and we had a couple of other guys. We made a circle. If we had to shoot, we were gonna shoot our way out of it, but we weren’t gonna jump up and run back because we’d have been killed. So we laid there for about 13 hours, out in the hot sun, just laid there and laid there. When it got dark, we got up and made it back to the company. And they greeted us like we were back from the dead. But the company got the daylights kicked out of them that day because they were in a real bad spot and they had enfillade fire, which is right across the front, not direct. I almost got court-martialed. I wrote a letter home shortly after that, and I was sounding off, stupid captain, you know. And whoever read it gave it to him, some other lieutenant in some other company used to censor our mail, but he brought it over and gave it to this captain, and he called me down and said, "I could court-martial you for this."
"You go ahead."
"Take it back and rewrite the letter."
So I rewrote it. But he wanted to court-martial me. It turned out later, Tom’s cousin Steve graduated West Point. This guy, this company commander’s now a brigadier general, Ellwood Smith. Steve said he had been to something with General Ellwood Smith. So I told Steve who this guy was. That was my commanding officer in Africa, and he was a jackass. It’s a small world. But that was a long day, too. Normandy was a long day. I don’t want to say it was easy, but it was less than I expected. It was a tough day. But everything went so well, like a well-oiled machine; my section was so well-trained, not that it was my doing but they were well-trained. It was the men themselves who got up, rose up on their feet and walked up that hill or ran up it, with those bangalore torpedoes, with the flamethrower, the guy standing up there … I think that was what surprised me was how easy it was. I expected a lot worse. I guess it was as bad as other people might have thought it was but it was not as bad as I thought it would be.
Aaron Elson: I think elsewhere on the beach it must have been carnage.
Mike McKinney: It could have been. There’s no way to know unless you talk to the guys that were on there. I saw the movie "The Longest Day," but whether that’s accurate or not I couldn’t tell you. I know the scene in "Saving Private Ryan," going ashore, is accurate. When the guys are getting out of the boat, going past those obstacles in the water. All that stuff was accurate. They must have talked to some guy in my company because that one scene with the guy’s belly open, I saw that. I saw it. I’m walking down the road and one of the guys is laying there with his belly open and his intestines hanging out. I saw that; when I saw that in the movie … I don’t know who their advisers were, some captain or somebody. But I saw a guy at the 50th anniversary of the landing when Clinton went over there, and there was one captain who got up and introduced Clinton or made a speech or something, claiming to be the first man on the beach. Now, if he’s in the Second Battalion, no way he could be the first man on the beach. Or the first officer or anything else because the Third Battalion was all before him, with all the officers. And he’s up there talking about how he had to walk over bodies in the water. If he was the first one on the beach he didn’t have to walk over any bodies, there was nobody in front of him. I wondered if anybody else thought about that. He’s claiming that he was the first man on the beach, him climbing over bodies, or walking over bodies, or saw dead bodies. How could he be the first? Anyhow, I wanted to be over there with Clinton and it didn’t come to pass. Tom tried to get me over there. My son wrote to Ron Kellums, he’s a representative in California. He tried to get him to get me on a plane over there and sit beside Clinton.
Spielberg won a Golden Globe, and he’s thanking the 116th Regiment, or the 29th Division, and the Second Division. He should have said First. He was flustered, I guess, he said the Second Division. But even he forgot that the First Division was the leader of the invasion on Omaha Beach.
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