Murray Levine of New Hempstead, N.Y. was captured by the Germans at Anzio. He passed away in 1999
©2000, 2009 Aaron Elson
I’ll be 76 on May 31. I was 19 when I got drafted.
After I was inducted, they sent me to Fort Dix. I was there for a week or so. They put us on a train with all the other guys, and I got sent to Camp Croft, South Carolina. That’s where I took my basic training. Sixteen weeks.
When I finished my basic training, they took me out, because I had taken an IQ test, and I had a pretty high mark. They took four or five of us out of this training company. The Army had a program, the ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program. They were going to send us to Auburn University to do some studies or training. So we laid around for three or four weeks. Then suddenly our orders changed, and we were told to report to the company that was in training in Croft. The Army was holding back on this ASTP, because they needed replacements in Europe. So I took another three or four weeks of basic training, and I went overseas. I had a delay en route, they sent me home, and from there I had to report to Newport News, Virginia. That’s where I was shipped out. The General Anderson Naval transport was there, and I went to Africa. They shipped us to the port of Oran. We landed, and then we got off the boat, and walked across the pier to a British boat, which was actually an Indian boat. And we were going to Italy.
I got seasick on the trip to Italy because the stench, the food that they were cooking, we couldn’t take it. The ship was loaded with our rations, but that they didn’t give us. They were making some kind of shit, I don’t know what the hell it was, a big pot, and the guy was sweating in it. And we got seasick because we didn’t eat, and we smelled the stuff.
After about a week in Italy, I was assigned to report to the 45th Division. I was placed in G Company of the 157th Regiment.
G Company had fallen back and was in a rest area, which was about a mile and a half from the front lines, and the Germans were firing artillery.
I was a B.A.R. man. Browning Automatic Rifle. Two-man team. And we were in this area, and we were talking to the lieutenant; he came and introduced us. Most of the guys in the company were replacements. You don’t last long in the infantry.
I jokingly went over to the lieutenant and said, "You know, my eyes aren’t too good."
He said, "Don’t worry about it. We’ll put you up front, and you’ll see everything." I thought that was funny as hell. We all laughed. "We’ll put you up front," he says.
"Oh, good, I was worried."
A few of the guys were talking to the lieutenant, and one said, "What’s the situation in the area? "
He said, "We’ve got them surrounded." He was full of shit. It was the other way around. The Germans were in the hills and we were on the beaches, so how can we have them surrounded? So we were laughing. I said, "Gee, that’s a funny way of surrounding."
We rested that day, and about 8 or 9 o’clock we get a call, and we have to replace a British outfit on the front lines.
So we got our stuff together, and it was 2 or 3 in the morning when we started to move up. The lieutenant said, "Don’t make any noise, because the Germans will shell the roads."
As it is they were shelling, and would you believe, they start shelling the roads anyway. I was so punchy I actually walked into a tree. Banged the tree with my helmet, what a noise it made! I was half-asleep. The guys said, "How the heck could you walk into a tree?"
It took us a couple of hours, but we got to the front lines. The British outfit was pretty well decimated. Their bodies were lying all over the place. Germans. British. Americans, laying all over.
We got into the foxhole there, and it was muddy. We had mud up way beyond our ankles, and we set up our gun.
The Germans fired artillery for two days, to soften us up. On February the 23rd they lifted the artillery. I look out of my foxhole and I see them coming. Attacking. I opened up on them. Everybody, the heavy equipment, everybody who was alive was firing at them. And the B.A.R. is like a machine gun; it does a lot of damage. So what they did was they apparently surrounded my foxhole, and one of them tossed a concussion grenade that landed near it and exploded. It knocked us cold practically, and also caught me [underneath the left shoulder]. I had a wound in the shoulder. Plus a concussion. And I was just shaking my head. Then all of a sudden I heard a machine gun spraying, and my sidekick was killed and I caught a couple [of machine gun bullets] in the back. They must have gone through him into me.
The wound in the shoulder was shrapnel, and that tears. I was bleeding [in the shoulder] and I was spitting blood. From the concussion. I was a bloody mess.
Then I looked up and I saw the Germans were on top of me. And I said to one of them, "Ich bin verwounded." And this is a crack outfit, the Hermann Goering Panzergrenadiers. Their faces were all like frostbitten. They were pinkish and bluish, you know, when you’re frostbitten, you get that certain look. They had probably been on the Russian front.
One of them looks at me. He says [to his officer], "Amerikaner ser schlech verwounded."
So [the officer] says, "Macht nichts! Macht nichts!" In other words, "It doesn’t matter. Let’s finish him off. We’re not taking any prisoners."
I hear him cocking his machine pistol ready to finish me off. That’s when the thoughts were in my mind, "Goodbye Charlie." At that moment another shell exploded right among us, and just blew them away. Killed them all. Another GI was there with his hands up, out of my platoon. He was killed also. And part of my hand was blown off. If I wasn’t in the foxhole, I would have been killed.
When I finally got my senses back I looked around and I saw everybody’s dead. I crawled out of the foxhole. I needed a helmet, and I took a helmet off this guy, put it on my head, and I was roaming in no man’s land. I was in the German lines.
There were a lot of caves in the area, and there were a lot of machine gun nests. So apparently in one of the caves [there was one machine gun nest that had been knocked out], and I said, "Kamerad." I put up my hands. A German runs out, pulls me in, and I’m looking around, and I look out and I see there are two GIs coming up with grenades. And our grenades are fragmentation grenades, if they explode in a cave, they make mincemeat out of everybody. So I started to be a pain in the ass. I started to bug the German lieutenant that I’m dying, I’m bleeding, I need help, this and that. He pushed me aside. He spoke English. He said he’s busy. And I kept after him. And then he says finally, "Get him out of here." So one of the Germans took me and we went in the back somewhere where we could get out of the cave, and we were walking along, and I heard, "Varrooom! Varrooom!" The GIs knocked out the cave. Incidentally, while I was in there, it was very dark, and there were some GIs who originally were machine gunners. They were in bad shape. They were crying, in agony, they were badly wounded. But fortunately I got out of there, and they got blown away.
We got to a knoll on a hill. We’re walking along, there was a big supposed first aid station, a German first aid station made out of stone, a house. And we finally got there, after a couple hours. Oh, he also took a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped my hand up.
So I went to this supposed first aid station, and they had a lot of German wounded and Italian wounded. First I notice that they’d cut the floor out, and I see that they use it also as an observation post for artillery. And they were talking, phoning. I said, If we get wind of it, our destroyers and cruisers off the coast get will use it as a target. Don’t you think they did? Fortunately the stones were [about a foot thick], so the shells would bounce off. In fact, there were two German paratroopers making a run for the house. A shell exploded and blew their legs off. One German comes over to me with a gun, he was gonna shoot me in the head, he was so burned up. Another one said, "Hey, schmuck, what are you doing? Look at his condition. He’s a [human] even though he’s an enemy soldier." So he put his gun back.
The following morning an ambulance pulls up to take all the wounded out, the German wounded. And they’re leaving me there with another GI. He wasn’t wounded. So I said, "I need help."
The ambulance driver says, "There’s no room."
I said, "I’ll sit up front with you."
In fact, the other guy said, "We’ll both sit up front with you."
"Nein." He says, "You got cigarettes?"
I said, "I don’t know."
So he frisked me. Fortunately I had cigarettes. I never smoked, but from the 10-in-1 ration I used to get them. He said, "You’ve got Chesterfields. Don’t you have any Lucky Strike?"
"I’m sorry. Just Chesterfield." It shows you the tobacco, how important it was.
He took me, and the other guy. We sat up front. We squeezed in somehow.
There was another German medic, he stayed on the running board. And we were riding along in the ambulance and he’s going through a tank area. Don’t you think we get attacked by American planes? The driver stops and parks his ambulance near a tank. The GIs are going for the tanks, they’re shooting up the place. They accidentally hit the ambulance too.
Before that, the German medic who was standing on the running board jumped off, and he got hit by an anti-personnel bomb. I saw him take off and he never came down. He just disappeared.
Then, after the attack, the driver was looking around. He saw the ambulance had been hit. He looked in the back. Some of them were killed. But fortunately me and the other guy were all right.
So the driver took us to Florence, Italy. He took me to a hospital. I don’t know what happened to the other guy. And I was there in that hospital for three or four days. They gave me very little medical attention. In fact, they wrapped my hand up with paper bandages. Can you imagine? And they put me on a hospital train, and during the night they dropped me off at a prisoner of war camp, which was Stalag 17.
An interview with Murray Levine
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