Keep a Sharp Eye Bob Rossi 712th Tank Battalion | World War II Oral History

Bob Rossi, of Jersey City, N.J., joined the 712th Tank Battalion as a replacement.

I went overseas at either the end of August or the beginning of September, 1944.

I went over on the Ile de France. It was a French liner but it had an English crew. No convoy. The sixth day out, now we’re eating boiled fish — let’s put it this way, they were giving us boiled fish and rotten oranges — we would stand for hours in the PX line, we subsisted really on chocolate bars, whatever kind of candy we could get.

The sixth day out, they had a submarine scare. We were about ten thousand replacements on this ship, all types, armor, infantry, artillery, antiaircraft outfits, and they had the antiaircraft guns mounted on the deck. Plus we had to fall out for an abandon ship drill every morning.

Prior to that, I think from six at night to six in the morning we were below deck, and it was awful. There was a stench. Guys smoking. Some guys spent the whole trip on their hands and knees throwing up into the toilet bowls. But we were pretty well jammed in there. So it was a break to get on deck.

So we went up this morning, and they had that drill, and they were dropping depth charges off the ship, just in case, and they were changing their course.

One day we saw a ship, there were hundreds of us on the deck, and we saw a ship that was painted black, with no flag, coming toward us on our port side. All of a sudden, it turned around and went the other way, and this English officer runs up to the gun crew, he says, "Gordon, did you see that ship?"

Gordon says, "No, sir."

"Well, keep a sharp eye."

I think everybody and his cousin saw the ship except the guy on the gun."

The sixth day was the submarine scare, the seventh day was when the unidentified ship was off our port side. Then the eighth day, the British corvettes came out to meet us, and they escorted us into the harbor at Gouroch, Scotland.

We had to jump from the ship onto a ferryboat, it took us to the pier, we got on trains, and we rode all night, with the shades pulled down, blacked out. We rode to Southampton, and we got on an English ship, not a big ship, it could have been a ferry. There were British-Indian sailors operating it. That was an adventure in itself. The next morning when we went down for breakfast, they had sausages, the guys picked them up, it was like the grease was just falling down from them, and a miniature loaf of bread. I only ate the bread, I didn’t eat the sausage.

And we were watching them cutting fish on the deck.

We landed on Omaha Beach. It’s been secured now. But the hedgerow we were in, we pitched pup tents, they’re still finding mines. I can remember, they found a mine in our area, and the soldier that defused the mine, he had his chaplain standing behind him. They were finding boobytraps and other things of that nature.

So we’re eating the C-rations, they tasted good compared to all that crap we had on the English ships.

One unit was meat and beans; noodles and meat. They didn’t have too many choices. The 10 in 1s had cheese and crackers. The other one was eggs and bacon. We didn’t have too much of a selection. Especially the C rations, they had three types, you could have them any way you liked, but it was breakfast, dinner and supper. They mixed them up.

Towards the end of the war we started getting different things. I heard a story the guys were getting hamburgers, we never saw them. In the cans. And I heard in the Pacific they were getting beer. We never got beer.

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