Angelo Crapanzano, LST 507, Exercise Tiger survivor
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Aaron Elson: [reading from citation for the Bronze Star) "The President of the United States takes pleasure in presenting the Bronze Star medal to Angelo Charles Crapanzano, Motor Machinist’s Mate first class, U.S. Naval Reserve, for service set forth in the following citations.
"For heroic service while attached to the LST 507 when that ship was torpedoed by an enemy submarine [sic] in the English Channel" — Submarine?
Angelo Crapanzano: Ah, see, you’re the first guy that ever noticed that. This was part of a coverup.
Aaron Elson: "...In the English Channel on April 28, 1944. Clinging to a partially burned life raft in the icy water after his ship had gone down, Crapanzano valiantly supported a badly wounded and unconscious shipmate with his free arm, sustaining the man until rescued four and a half hours later. His unselfish action on behalf of another saved the life of a comrade, and his loyalty and courage reflect the highest credit upon Crapanzano and the United States Naval service. For the President, James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy." He was a bigshot, Forrestal.
Angelo Crapanzano: Yeah, you know what? I don’t think you know this, you know he jumped out of the Boston Naval Hospital window and committed suicide four years after the war? That same hospital I was in in 1944. So he must have had some kind of a problem.
...Now I’m looking down the schedule, and I didn’t usually stay up till 10 and the 20/20 show came on at 10, so I looked all the way down, and it says "20/20 show," and it says, "The mystery surrounding the killing of 750 GIs in a D-Day rehearsal," or something like that. And when I saw it, I couldn’t believe it. Forty years now, Holy Christ, don’t tell me that this is about Tiger, I don’t believe it, but maybe it is. So I right away jumped on the phone because my son in law at that time, my daughter lived in Iselin, he had a Beta, in 1982 there was no VCR, there was just Beta, and he had just gotten it maybe six months before. So I got ahold of my daughter and I said, "Tell Russell to tape the whole 20/20 show, it’s on from 10 to 11." I said I just saw this thing in the paper, and it looks like the thing I was involved in. It’s hard to believe.
So then I got ready to watch it at 10 o’clock. So I sit in the chair, put it on, and sonofabitch, they show you the ass end of the third ship, the third ship that got hit, they blew the back end of it, that’s the 289. When I saw that, I said, "Oh my God, it is." How the hell’d this happen? Who’s doing this now? I watched the whole thing, I was like amazed. I was dumbfounded.
Aaron Elson: Up to this point, 40 years, had you talked about it with anyone?
Angelo Crapanzano: No.
Aaron Elson: When you were depressed, did you tell the psychiatrist anything about it?
Angelo Crapanzano: No, I never went into any details. I told him I had lost a ship. I told him I was decorated. But I didn’t — you know why, I don’t know if you realize this, too — when this thing happened, in the beginning, when we were in the hospital, when they took us off the ship to a hospital after this thing happened, we were all more or less told that we should never talk about this to anybody. Even the guys in the Army, like I met this guy who lives in Forked River, he was on the lead ship, the 515, and he said that as soon as this thing started popping, the whole thing, they had all the soldiers go down below decks. They didn’t want them to see anything or understand what the hell’s going on. And the next morning, their commanding officer told them, "Nothing happened last night, remember. Nothing happened." It’s all documented. So anyhow, I watched the show, and what happened, I’ll tell you quick because I can go on and on and on, my brother who lives down in Shipbottom, Long Beach Island, that particular night, my nephew happened to be twisting the dial, he came across it and he said, "Isn’t this what happened to Uncle Angelo?" And my brother says, "Holy Christ! What the hell is this?" So he watched the whole show. Now he’s a commercial artist, he works in Manhattan. Can you believe this, he commutes 200 miles a day. He’s been doing this for 14 years.
Anyhow, the next morning when he goes to Manhattan, he calls the studio and talked to the producer, a woman, her name was Nola Saffro, and he says to her, "I watched your show last night on Tiger, and my brother’s a survivor of that."
So she flipped. She says, "Well, where is he? Where does he live?" He says right across the river. She says, "Please, give me his phone number." And the next night, at 5 o’clock, I was eating supper and the phone rings, and it was her. She spoke to me for an hour. She wanted to know everything that happened, the way I’m telling you.
And at the end of the conversation, she said to me, "I have the names and addresses of a lot of your shipmates. They’re scattered all over the country, there’s one guy in England, who stayed in England and married an English girl." She gave me, she said, "I have the name and address of John Doyle," who was the skipper who came back to save us, he lives in Missoula, Montana. I said, "Please give me it." And then she had the name and address of Dr. Green. Dr. Green was one of the doctors, he was a captain, in tthe Army field hospital where we were brought that following morning. I didn’t know him then. I didn’t even know he was there. Are you familiar with what happened when the head doctor in this hospital got all the doctors together before we got there, and he got them all together and he said, "Look, you’re gonna get a load of casualties this morning. You don’t take any names. You don’t ask any questions. You don’t keep any records. Just treat them as they are. Anybody that gets caught talking about this will be court-martialed." He’s telling this to guys like captains and all. And they wondered, and then when we came in and they treated all these guys, what happened is this. When the war ended, he lives in Chicago, he’s a pathologist. Ralph Green. I met him and his wife Sylvia, in New York. So after the war he goes home, back to his practice, and he was telling me, every once in a while he used to think about the thing and used to say, where the hell did all these guys come from, and why did they threaten us with a court martial?" Because nobody knew. So what happens, in 1974, the government passes the Freedom of Information Act. As soon as he saw that, that was it. Now this guy had money. He went down to Washington, went into the archives, he wanted to see the box on Tiger. But there still were certain things that were classified that he couldn’t see, but they gave it to him. When he opened that up, he told me when he started reading it, he couldn’t believe it. And he says, How the hell did they keep this thing so quiet, a disaster like this? You know what I found out yesterday at the memorial in New Bedford? This guy, by putting figures together, this and this, I knew the figure was low. He said there was over a thousand guys killed. See, they come up with this figure seven hundred and something, that’s bullshit.
So he sees this stuff and he gets crazy. He decides that he’s gonna investigate the whole thing through. So he spent months traveling all over the country, finding guys, locating survivors, and what he does is when he gets enough good information together, he goes to the 20/20 show. So they looked at it, they loved it. On the 20/20 show they interviewed John Doyle, the captain. Dr. Green. Manny Rubin is the fellow who stayed in England, married the English girl. He just died recently. I knew him like this. Manny Rubin. A couple of English people. But, you know what they did? This is fantastic. I couldn’t believe it. They went to Germany, they wanted to try to9 locate the E-boat captain who sunk our ships. They put an ad in a German paper saying Would the E-boat captains who remember in 1944 tyhis attack, would they please come forward because we’re trying to make a documentary. They did. All three of them. The skipper who sunk my ship and the other two guys. His name is Gunther Rabe, pictures of him and everything. I saw letters that he wrote to Dr. Eckstam explaining the whole thing, their side of the story. So they got these guys, too.
The point I’m getting at is that, when she gave me all these names and addresses of these guys, I figured the first letter that I want to write is to Dr. Green. I was so thankful that he went to this trouble to do this. So I write him a letter, and I explain who I was, what ship I was on. What happened. A brief synopsis. And he sends me back a letter a week later, he says, "Please, do me a favor. Put down on paper everything you remember from the time you left Brixham until the time you ended up in the hospital. Everything." I put together a six-page letter. Oh, he said the reason he wanted to do all this was that he’s thinking about writing a book. He was going to call his book "Tiger Burning." Which was an appropriate title, too. So I did. Six-page letter, and I sent it to him.
Then I wrote a letter to Captain Doyle and I thanked him, because if he wouldn’t have come back I wouldn’t be here today.
Aaron Elson: Where does McCann come in?
Angelo Crapanzano: Joe McCann was a coxswain on the 515, the lead ship where the commander was on and Doyle’s ship. Now every LST, no, some LSTs carried on davits two of these small personnel boats, LCVPs. My ship carried four of them, some had two. And he was a coxswain of one of them. Now this guy was an expert seaman, coxswain. The reason being, he lived in Washington State, he used to go out on fishing trawlers, and he knew how to handle the tiller and all that stuff. And here’s the thing that’s gonna amaze you, maybe you were aware of it. He went into the Navy at age 13. He had somebody fake his parents’ name. And when he pulled me out of the water that day he was 15 years old. Now, I wrote to Dr. Green, John Doyle, I wrote to my gunner officer who lived in Texas, Tom Clarke, he was here to visit me a few years ago. I wrote a letter to Manny Rubin in England. I wrote a letter to a lot of guys, all the names she gave me. But primarily Dr. Green and Doyle.
The thing I’m getting at is this. In the letter to Green, I explained what I told you, that I couldn’t feel my legs, and I was worried about gangrene, and that they were going to have to amputate my legs. Now this letter, Green takes this letter, he made copies of it and he sends it out to a few guys. And you know who gets one of the letters is McCann, he lives in Washington State. So I write all the letters, this is 1984, ‘85, I’m getting ahead of myself. Now the connections is this. We’re talking about, now it’s four and a half hours in the water, and I’d just about had it. I figured I wasn’t gonna make it. And all of a sudden, I’m looking in the distance, right, it’s still dark. I see this light, going up and down, and it seems to be getting bigger. So when I see this, I immediately assume that help is coming. And when I did that, I passed out. I figured, I saw help’s coming, I couldn’t hang on no more, I just passed out.
Now, listen to this, this is weird. He, when I find out — oh, wait a minute — when I wrote the letter to John Doyle, the captain of the 515 who lived in Montana, he wasn’t feeling well so he couldn’t answer it, so he calls up this guy Floyd Hicks, who lives in California, who was on his ship, and told Hicks to call me up from California and to tell me that he got my letter, and this and that, and that he was glad to hear from me, and that he wasn’t feeling well, and this and that. So one Sunday night I get a phone call, and I didn’t know this guy from Adam, Hicks, in California. I said, What the hell’s going on? So he said, "I was on the 515 with Doyle," and an engine room guy, too. And he said Doyle asked me to call you up because he isn’t feeling well. In the meantime, he says to me, "I have the phone number of a guy named Joe McCann who lives in Washington State."
Aaron Elson: So you had not been in contact with McCann yet?
Angelo Crapanzano: No. I didn’t know who he was. But Hicks told me that McCann was one of the guys who lowered his boat and went around looking for survivors. So — oh, I didn’t call him, I wrote him a letter, Joe McCann, I’ve got the copy. I wrote Joe McCann a letter and I told him about Hicks and Doyle and this and that, and I told him who I was, and — oh, I said to him, "I know that there were two boats lowered and went around looking for survivors," so I said, "The odds are two to one that you are the one who picked me up." I said this in the letter. About three, four days later on a Sunday night again, the phone rings, it’s him. It’s Joe McCann. I didn’t know him from Adam. And he says to me, this is weird, I told him on the phone, I said, "You know, Joe, I wrote to tell you that being that you was one of the coxswains that picked up bodies, uy, guys, the odds are two to one you picked me up." He said, "I did pick you up."
I said, "How did you know it was me?"
He said, "The reason I knew it was you is that you were unconscious, but you were mumbling about your legs." He had read the letter that I wrote to Dr. Green about my legs, and you know that — oh, wait till you hear this, I couldn’t get over this. I came so close to not making it. He told me that when the captain told him that they were gonna lower the boats and go around looking for bodies it was still dark, he immediately ran into his locker and he got a Navy lantern, they were about this big, and they’ve got a big light on them like that. So he took the lantern and up in the bow with the thing, he hooked it onto the bow because he said he didn’t want to go through the water and kill somebody that was alive. So he was like just drifting slow and looking. And this is the light I saw — and, he said, the first run that I made in the area of your raft, we thought you were dead, and we passed you right up. Can you imagine? Because I went unconscious, and he thought we were dead. Well, McGarigal was unconscious for a couple of hours. But when I went out, they thought we were dead, they went right past. Then he said, on the way back, he passed us again, and the guy in the boat with him said, "You know, I think I saw one of them guys moving." And sonofabitch, I mean, how close can you come not to, after all I went through. I mean, I cried. When I hung up I cried [choking up again].
Aaron Elson: Tell me, what point did, your wife was telling me that the LST that turned around didn’t want to come back, that somebody risked a court martial.
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh, God. What happened, after the third ship got hit. Here’s another thing. We were lined up eight LSTs, one behind the other, with 500 yards between each one. The front one to our ship, we were way the hell back, now they knew these were maneuvers, when we got hit they saw flares, first they saw flares, with the E-boats there’s all flares to light up, but they still didn’t think, they thought this is part of the maneuvers. But then when the guy saw the second one go and the third one, that’s when the commander said, "This is not maneuvers." So he told all the LSTs to get the hell out of there, go back to England. So they took off, right. Five LSTs took off, to go back. And an LST only goes, top speed, loaded, five knots. They had these Mercedes engines in them, very powerful engines. So all right, they take off, and they’re heading back to England. So they’re under way for quite a while. In the meantime, this Captain Doyle, he must have been thinking about something, he says to the commander, "I’m gonna turn this ship around, I’m going back [choking up]," he says, "There’s gonna be a lot of guys in that water alive yet."
The commander said, "If you turn this ship around and go back I’ll have you court-martialed." now this guy’s a commander, and Doyle was a lieutenant JG. Doyle said to him, "This is my ship and I’m going back." And then, he wasn’t concerned about the Navy crew, but he had all these Army guys. He made an announcement over the PA system, he said, "I’m going back. Would you rather stay or go back and fight?" So they all yelled, "Let’s go back and fight!" So then, now he starts back, what, like I said, five knots. So by the time, but see, this guy, the reason the commander said I’ll have you court-martialed, this is normal procedure in the service, you can’t jeopardize a ship loaded with guys to go back and pick up guys, you know what I mean? But Doyle knew that when he got back to that area, it would be dawn, and once it gets dawn, E-boats don’t hang around, they like it at night, sneaky, hit and run. And he was right. So like I said, when they came back, they lowered the two boats, McCann was in one of them, and he’s the guy that pulled me out of the water.
Aaron Elson: What can you remember about that moment?
Angelo Crapanzano: I was out.
Aaron Elson: The book said a lot of guys at the last minute like almost happened to you, that almost like a moment of euphoria, they’re going to be rescued, they passed out, and they got lost. A lot of them. I don’t know how many. When did you come to?
Angelo Crapanzano: I came to on the 515 in a bunk. And the guy who was working on me, the first thing I asked him was, "How’s my legs?"
"Oh," he says, "you’ll be all right. We’re gonna take you, we’re going back to a hospital this morning." They still had to travel up to Dorset. So when we got to the hospital, like I told you, Green supposedly was there and all these guys, and they were threatened, don’t ever talk about this thing. Well, see, it’s five weeks before Normandy, and they don’t want the Germans to know how much damage, you know, they were short of LSTs already, because they sent most of them tot eh Pacific. Now we lose three more, plus, lidsten to this, we lose all these crack Army troops that were in all the campaigns. North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio. And that’s no good.
Aaron Elson: So these troops had been veterans of landings?
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh yeah. I saw a couple of soldiers on my ship, and I seen them they were laying down, they were shivering. I said to the guy, "What’s the matter with them?" They’ve got malaria. They’ve got malaria — in the morning — oh, I didn’t tell you this part of the story, wait a minute, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Where was I?
Aaron Elson: You were just coming to.
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh yeah, right. And I said to the guy, how’s my legs, all right, we’re going to the hospital. This is the funny part of the, the comical part of the story. When I woke up, right, I was awake for a little while, my executive officer was one of the few officers that survived, James Murdoch, and he was a professional baseball pitcher for one of these Southern teams. Lefthanded. He was really good. And he used to walk around the deck a lot of the time with a glove and a ball, bouncing it, and he was a rebel. He was from Virginia, one of the southern, you know how they talk. Nice guy. I’ve got a picture of him. And he smoked cigars. But good cigars. He used to buy them in a box. So I wake up, and after a while I see him, he’s standing there in his underwear, and you know what he said? I’ll never get over it, I couldn’t believe what he said. "Sonofabitch," he said. "I had six good boxes of cigars on that ship."
And I said, "You sonofabitch, you’re worried about your cigars, all these guys got killed." Yeah, I never got over it, I couldn’t believe it.
Aaron Elson: You’ve just nearly lost both your legs, you’ve been in the water for four and a half hours, how did they get you back in shape to send you out on D-Day?
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh, you know about that.
Aaron Elson: It said in the book, it said forty trips, but you made 23?
Angelo Crapanzano: It says forty? I don’t know where the hell they got that. That’s another thing that’s in my memorabilia. It was in the vicinity of 23 or 24 or 27, I’m not sure. I’ll tell you what happenedl I went to the hospital. They checked me out and treated me, and said, "You’ll be all right." They didn’t say anything permanently, no permanent damage, and don’t be concerned about it. So from there, here’s what they did. They took the survivors and split them up in small groups. And they put us in, they called them rest camps, but I called them isolation camps. Because we weren’t even allowed passes or to talk to anybody.
Aaron Elson: The book said that one thing that kept a lot of guys going was the thought of getting survivors’ leaves.
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh yeah, I’m coming to this. This is the payoff [chuckling]. Oh man, I couldn’t believe what I heard. Sonofabitch. So we go to this rest camp, and naturally we all know that the rule in the Navy is this: If you lose your ship, you have to go back to the States for 30 days survivor leave because you have to get all your gear back again,. We lost everything. Because when I got there, they gave me Army fatigues, a towel, toothbrush, a piece of shap. That’s it. And we all knew that, that you have to get survivors’ leave. I says, "They’ve got to send us back to the States." So after we’re there about two, three weeks, this same guy, Murdoch, he was the executive officer, by the way, my captain was alive when they pulled him out of the water, and when they brought him up to the officers’ quarters he hada heart attack and died. So naturally, then Murdoch, he took over.
Aaron Elson: The captain’s name was...
Angelo Crapanzano: Schwartz. I think he was from New York. He had been on a destroyer in the Pacific, on two destroyers and lost both ships. This guy saw a lot of action. He was a real old salt. And he liked his drink and he liked his women.
When we were still in the States, the captain and my gunnery officer went out one night on a liberty, and they came back to the ship, we were tied up by a pier, they were both pie-eyed, and they both of them walked right off the end of the pier. Yes, this is true. So then, Clark’s telling me that when we were in England, see, none of us knew this, one night he was the gangway watch officer, they told him to go in to England, there was a place there, to pick up two English Waves, and to bring them back. And he said, Holy Christ, you wouldn’t believe what was going on.
I figured Schwartz, to look at him, he looked like one of these conservative guys that it wouldn’t happen, but you can’t tell by looks really.
Aaron Elson: He survived all that time but then he had a heart attack and died?
Angelo Crapanzano: Yes.
Aaron Elson: Did any of the guys actually get gangrene?
Angelo Crapanzano: No, not that I know of. I don’t think really, well I’m not sure, but I don’t think it really could happen in 43 degrees. I thought, because I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, I was thinking about it, but actually I think it would have to be like the North Atlantic water, which is like down in the thirties, then you’ve got something to worry about.
Aaron Elson: You were in the middle of telling me how instead of getting your survivor’s leave. How did they break it to you that you were going to be part of D-Day?
Angelo Crapanzano: After we’re there about three weeks, he comes out one morning, lines us all up and he’s got the papers, I said to the guy next to me, "This is it. We’re all going back to the States." So he starts reading them off, he says, "You guys are all petty officers, and all experienced, all went to Navy schools, and you’re all going to be reassigned to LSTs to make the invasion of Normandy." I could feel my blood like getting cold. They gotta be kidding. I says, What the hell are they trying to do, kill us? Chrissakes, it’s only three weeks ago we were out there, and now we’re gonna go back? I couldn’t believe it.
You know how they work. I need six motor machinist’s mates. They don’t even know your name. They just give you the serial number, that’s it.
Aaron Elson: I guess they must have been short of crews for the LSTs.
Angelo Crapanzano: Not necessarily, because the LST we were going on had a full complement of men. The problem is this, though. When I did go aboard the 294, these guys all knew what happened. These LSTs, they knew what happened to us. I guess word got around, even though nobody was supposed to be talking about it. But the thing is this, when I went aboard, I went to the engineering officer, and he was a hell of a nice guy, he was from Chicago, and I could see right away that the guy was decent. He said to me right off the bat, You want to get down in the engine room? So I said, all right, let’s go. So I went down in the engine room with him, but when I got down there, oh my God, he took one look at me, he said, all right, let’s go up topside. I couldn’t, I said, No, I can’t, I can’t stay down here.
You know what I learned Sunday? I was the only guy who got out of the main engine room alive. I just learned that now. Not many guys get out of engine rooms.
Aaron Elson: Now, the officer who told you to go up to your bunk...
Angelo Crapanzano: That’s my engineering officer, Smith.
Aaron Elson: Was he killed?
Angelo Crapanzano: Yes. My buddy was killed, we were very close. He was a radioman, his name was Joe Grecco and he was from West New York, and a radioman, and he was chronic seasick, I couldn’t see why they didn’t take him off the ship. He used to stand his radio watch with a bucket next to him. Sick as a dog. They never took him off. He should have never been on that ship. I’ll tell you something else, when we went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, they made up the convoy. There was about 40 or 50 ships, and it took us about 11 days to go from Nova Scotia to Ireland, and rough. And LSTs have no keel, they’re flat-bottomed, every little wave you’re doing this. And I say that 30 percent of the crew was sick. I mean they got green looking in the face, they couldn’t eat or nothing. And when we got near Ireland, and somebody spotted land, they yelled. All these guys came up, they looked like rats coming out of holes, they were sick.
You know what’s bad about it, a lot of people don’t realize this, when you go below decks, like in the quarters and stuff, the ventilation ain’t that good. A lot of guys throwing up, and the odor and the smell, you get sick. Even if you’re not prone to it.
Where am I, I forgot?
Aaron Elson: You’re recovering and you just found out. You were in the engine room...I wanted to ask you, and this is a tough question, but I’ve talked to a lot of infantry guys who dealt with combat fatigue, and it’s probably the same type of symptom that you experienced going into that engine room, I want to ask you what it felt like going down into that engine room.
Angelo Crapanzano: I don’t know. It’s a funny feeling that, I guess it’s like claustrophobia. I didn’t have it before, though. See, I used to go down in the engine room and read, and even lay down and take a little nap, while the engines were running. Nothing bothered me. And kid around. Fool around. Horsing around. But then it was different. I went down and like, it was terrible, it was a terrible feeling, it’s hard to explain, it was like the whole thing’s gonna come down on top of me. And I knew that it’s a terrible place to be when something like that happens, that I was very lucky that I got out of there. He said to me, "Let’s go topside." So I went in his office...
Aaron Elson: Did the other sailors ask you about it, did they press you for details?
Angelo Crapanzano: Yes, but I only told them what I knew. At that time what did I know, I didn’t know anything, really. All I know is my ship sunk, a lot of guys got killed, and I saw the 531 get hit. I saw the 289 get hit. Other than that, I don’t know. The Germans didn’t even know accurately, you know why? The next morning, where was it, in the hospital, somebody had ahold of a newspaper, and there was an English newspaper, the front page, a report, the Germans reported they sank a couple of oil tankers. Oil tankers. They seen all the flames. Yeah, but see, it don’t make sense, I’ll tell you why, is that, see, this is maybe, I don’t know if that’s in the book or what, when the E-boats approached us, it’s quite a distance away, see, they see like silhouettes, so the E-boat captain who sunk my ship, they fired two torpedoes at my ship, and then they watch, and they know how long it, nothing happens. Right away. The first two torpedoes they fired went under us. We didn’t even know it. One of them scraped the bottom. The first two. I never heard it. See, this is in the book. I never knew that they heard that noise, but some of the Army guys I think that were on the tank deck thought it sounded like that we were making a landing or we were hitting a beach, they heard noise. That’s what it wasl. They were depth torpedoes set for ships with keels. Then he knew right away, he said all right, the next two, surface torpedoes, right on top of the water. They fired two more, and one missed us, but that’s not the one that I saw. That was two other ones. We got hit with one, one missed us. Then this other thing, I don’t know where that came from, it could have come from a different E-boat, because the only thing it did it went in and out. Because a lot of the LSTs reported hearing theseloud engines, and then the complete panic took place, and the one ship was firing on the other ship, and there were about 25 guys got killed that way, one guy got his testicles shot off. Yeah. Manny Rubin got hit, remember, he said he had a helmet on but he still got, it creased it.
The engineering officer says to me, "Wait in my office. I want to speak to the exec." So he did. He came back. He said, "Look, don’t worry about it." Because he knew I could type. He said, "You’re gonna take care of all the records for the engine room and work with me in the office, and your general quarters station’s gonna be on a gun, topside." So I said, oh boy, what a break! What a break! When we went into the invasion, right, we were there the first morning, first LSTs going in to Utah Beach, and we were going into the beach, and we were on the beach when, this was not a German plane, I think it was an English plane that got hit, there’s this plane flying over, it got hit or something, I look up and I see this plane’s coming down, I said Holy Christ! He’s gonna come right down on top of us. And he didn’t miss us by much. And as soon as he hit the water, I’ll never forget, the water got all green around it, but this is what they have, this special dye so when they dunk in the ocean, they can spot them to pick them up. The water got all colored.
That was a scary thing. Then...
Aaron Elson: What happened to the pilot?
Angelo Crapanzano: I don’t even know. I mean, there was so much going on. Because we were all on our guns, and you couldn’t really like take notes. Here’s the thing, too. Oh, this is funny. See, with LSTs, when you go up on the beach, especially in France, the tide drops 17 feet, so when you go in in high water, as you’re going in, you drop the rear winch, all the way out, with a long cable and it’s on the back end, and that lays there. When you go in you discharge your load, if you get in real good. Sometimes you don’t get all the way in. And then, it takes awhile to unload, like a lot of tanks and equipment. And then, by that time, the tide starts running out, and then you catch it all the way in to the low tide, you wouldn’t believe this, I have pictures, the tide goes so far out, the whole ship is dry. You could walk all around your LST, you could look at the propellers, the screws, everything. That’s a 17-foot drop. Now you have to wait until the tide starts to come back in. So this first day, the way it worked out, we got stuck on the beach, then it got dark. Now it’s dark. So all these LSTs are sitting on the beach. And this is D-Day, there’s a lot of stuff going on. Everybody’s trigger-happy. We’re all at general quarters. Every guy’s at his gun. All the LSTs. So one of the LSTs way up on the other end, all of a sudden you see all the tracer bullets going up, they’re all firing. So everybody starts. And we’re firing the guns. All of a sudden we see this big flash, and a guy says, "We got him! We got a plane!" Right. Captain gets on the PA system, he says to us, "You know, you guys just shot down your own barrage balloon." I didn’t think that could happen, because all these guns are supposed to be fixed that you can’t point it to the wheelhouse where the captain is. Also there are certain positions that it won’t go.
(Break in tape)
Angelo Crapanzano: ...pulled him out of the water, well, he was an officer, so he went to officers quarters. Tom Clark. Nice guy. They took care of him and they wrapped him up with a blanket, and then he got warm. He said he went up topside. It was daytime now. Then he said as far as you could see in the water was bodies floating, all around. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies, and the thing that you never forget is that, all the bodies that were there in the water, like 90 percent of them, they all had like this white frothy thing around their nose and mouth, and he said that that indicated that they drowned. When you drown, there was an explanation for it, but he said they all had that, he said he’d never forget it. It made such an impression.
Aaron Elson: Now the Mae West, wasn’t that the thing with the carbon dioxide?
Angelo Crapanzano: No, see the Mae West is the Navy jacket, that’s a great jacket. There’s like a little light on there. You could stay buoyant for about, they said three, four days with that. The soldiers, most of them had a thing around their waist instead of below their shoulders. Like they said, they learned a lot from Tiger about like before the invasion to make sure that it didn’t happen again. I’m surprised that the soldiers somewhere along the line weren’t instructed.
... Most of the people in England know about this thing, they’re familiar with it, because it happened in their back yard.
Here’s a picture of all of us survivors in Pittsburgh in 1989. These are all survivors of the 507. Ken Small just died. He lived in Hicksville. We got to know him and his wife pretty good.
This is the inscription on the American monument at Slapton Sands: "Dedicated by the United States of America in honor of the 749 men of the 4th Infantry Division, the 279th Combat Engineers and the 70th Tank Battalion, United States Army, who along with crew members of the eight landing ships, U.S. Navy, perished off the coast of Slapton Sands, Torcorss, while participating in Operation Tiger, April 26-28, 1944. A training exercise in amphibious landings, Operation Tiger was a prelude to the invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944. This joint rehearsal by British and American forces resulted in a military tragedy in which the support convoy was attacked during the early morning hours by German schnellboats. The surprise attack resulted in the loss of several fully loaded and manned landing craft. May these men rest in the knowledge that the lessons in this tragedy added significantly to the ability of the Allies to carry out the successful invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. May these soldiers and sailors be remembered for their supreme sacrifice for the Allied cause in World War II. Donated by Fort Carson Foundation, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA."
Aaron Elson: What was your impression on D-Day at H-Hour when that artillery barrage came from all the ships?
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh yeah, are you kidding? I always tell this story, we were about a half a mile or a mile from the battleship Nevada. So the Battleship Nevada is anchored broadside, with the 16-inch guns. And I’m watching them, everybody was. And you see the big flame, and then about four seconds later the whole ship goes, the vibration for a mile. They told me they fired a two thousand pound missile eighteen miles. Can you imagine? It’s like a Volkswagen or something. Eighteen miles, that’s like from here to Paterson. Unbelievable. I was so impressed. You see movies and documentaries of it, it doesn’t do anything. I said Holy Christ, how about the guys on the battleship? They must have all had earplugs and stuff. Look at that disaster that happened on the Iowa. You know, somebody told me, this is true, there’s nothing more devastating than Naval power. I’m not talking about aircraft, big, two, three thousand pound bombs. I’m talking about ground stuff. There’s nothing more destructive. We were firing at pillboxes, constantly, and the battleships, and still, yet, when they went in on the invasion, them frigging pillboxes were still there.
Well, you know, they had a lot of time to prepare, years and years.
Aaron Elson: Did you get a Purple Heart?
Angelo Crapanzano: I wasn’t wounded, physically. Mentally. They don’t give it to you for that.
Aaron Elson: Did you ever talk about it with doctors?
Angelo Crapanzano: The only one I spoke about it with is my psychiatrist.
Aaron Elson: This was before 1984 or after?
Angelo Crapanzano: Before I had mentioned it to him, and he didn’t seem to think that that was the problem then.
Aaron Elson: Now this 20/20 thing comes out, did you then tell the psychiatrist more?
Angelo Crapanzano: Yeah. And then, let’s get this straight, I’m thinking about what year. Vietnam is where they gave it a name, and found out that this actually happened. I’ll tell you something else, my psychiatrist got into treating all the policemen, a lot of them in Bergen County who have this post traumatic stress disorder from their experiences on the job. A lot of them.
He didn’t pump me much. He just said, What was it all about? I told him. I broke down and told him what happened, that was it.
You know what I realized, too, Sunday, up in New Bedford, that these TV, Inside Edition, they’re all trained, I figured out myself, they know how to ask you certain questions, they wanted to make me weep. And Joe said the same thing. They know exactly the questions to ask you, and you fill up. And if you don’t, they ask you another, and sooner or later they’re gonna get you. They want to see this on the camera.
Aaron Elson: What was the fellow like, your buddy, Joe Grecco?
Angelo Crapanzano: I didn’t know about him till we went into the same crew, and he was from West New York. We hit it off right away good, and we always went out together. In December 1943 we went to Chicago, the whole crew went to Chicago to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station for antiaircraft training, where the plane pulls the sleeves, and whenit was Christmas eve, he and I went walking through the town of Chicago because we were never there, and we said it looks like New York. And then we went to midnight Mass together [choking up].
Aaron Elson: Was he from a big family?
Angelo Crapanzano: He had one brother. Where’s that article I have about him?
Ida Crapanzano (Angelo's wife): Christmas eves were always sad for him. Even with the little kids, we would get their toys together, but it’s always very sad for him. I’ll tell you, the 20/20 show did a lot for him, because they started to talk about it, and he started to get a lot of correspondence, and he would sit up and write letters.
Angelo Crapanzano: This article, what’s bad about this is that my mother and father knew that we were on the same ship, and this article was put in the local paper I guess about a week after our ship was sunk, so when they saw that, then they really started to worry.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Killed in action, Joseph Grecco. Former Dispatch carrier. West New York athlete was radio man..."
Angelo Crapanzano: He was a terrific basketball and baseball player.
Aaron Elson: Now it says Buried Overseas. Was he...
Angelo Crapanzano: No, that was done because they couldn’t do anything else with the bodies, it was too near D-Day, there was a lot of confusion, so they temporarily put them over there. But I went to see, his body came back, I went to see, in a funeral parlor over here, he came home about three years after I was married, I guess 1947 or 48. I met his mother and father and brother....
Aaron Elson: (reading) "A telegram from the Navy Department received last Friday by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Grecco, 5400 Madison Street, West New York, notified them that their son, Radioman third class Joseph G. Grecco, was killed in action. The telegram read, "The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son, Joseph Gabriel Grecco, radioman third class, USNR, was killed in action in the performance of his duty and the service of his country..."
Angelo Crapanzano: They gave her some details, right...
Aaron Elson: "...The department extends to you its sincerest sympathy in your great loss. His remains were interred in Allied territory outside continental limits of the United States pending cessation of hostilities. If further details are received, you will be informed. To prevent possible aid to our enemies, please do not divulge the name of ship or station.’ It was signed by Vice Admiral Randall Jacobs, chief of Naval personnel. Once Dispatch carrier. Grecco, a former Hudson Dispatch carrier boy, was inducted into the Navy on March 18, 1943, after having graduated from Memorial High School in February. He received boot training at Newport, R.I., and was then sent to Boston, Mass., for training as radio man. After 22 weeks at school, he was graduated and attained his present rank. He was home on leave and upon returning he was assigned as radioman aboard an Lst. In March Grecco was sent to England. Born in West New York, he was graduated from School 3, and while in high school played with the Memorial championship basketball team of 1942. He was also on the Build Better Boys team of West New York and Malzones of the ...Besides his parents, he is survived by a brother Patsy, 14. His father is a veteran of World War I."
Angelo Crapanzano: Nice looking boy. He reminded me of, I told him, too, John Garfield. He was a cocky type, too. He knew he was good looking.
Aaron Elson: Your wife tells me that Christmas Eve is always a tough time.
Angelo Crapanzano: It’s sad. It’s crazy, I mean, to me it was a sad holiday all the time. It was always like that.
Ninety percent of the LSTs were built in the middle of the country. We went aboard our ship New Year’s Day of ‘44. Brand new. You could smell the paint. But it wasn’t fully equipped. A nucleus crew got on, and they had two pilots that had to take it down the Mississippi, a couple of days, you go through all the locks. When you get down to New Orleans they put on the guns, the wheelhouse, the mast. They start putting in ammunition, supplies, all that stuff. And then we went for, two General Motors engineers come on and we went on a shakedown cruise. And then we made practice landings in Panama City, Florida. And then went back to New Orleans for something else, oh, we took on some more guys, that’s where McGarigal got on, and other guys too got on, small-boat guys and stuff. Then around Florida. This is January. I was standing watch in my trunks, that’s all., and guys were sitting on the tubs tanning themselves, I used to get sunburnt. And as you come up the coast, it’s getting colder and colder. The next stop we laid overnight in New York, they camouflaged the ship there. I got home just for the night. Then Boston fish pier. Then Halifax, Nova Scotia, and that’s where the convoys were being formed.
And what happened to us, too, this ship had a, it was like ill-fated, because a lot of crazy things happened. When we were in Halifax, we’re tied up to a pier that had just the pier and a long railing, metal, and they had all the bow ropes and stern ropes tied to the railing, and when it came time to leave, they never unhooked the ropes, pulled the whole goddamn fence off the pier. That was No. 1. No. 2, we were in a convoy of 50 ships, and we had the coffin corner. Of all the ships, this is the last row, and you’re over here. The worst. That’s how they pick off ships, from the back. So none of us were crazy about that. After we were under way for a couple days, something breaks on the rudder, they can’t steer it now. You have to drop out. They notify, and we drop out. So we drop out, and we were in the North Atlantic alone. A nice piece of action that is. But we were young, and we didn’t worry about things like that.
The favorite expression on my ship was this: We never had to worry about torpedoes because we’ve got a flat bottom. Russell did it in script. What happens is this. I don’t remember this, but they said it did happen, and it might have happened, it could have happened while I was sleeping, because the watches go on continuously. But they said that the rudder broke, something broke on the rudder, they couldn’t steer the ship. So they go down into where the screws are, and they go back where the mechanism is, and you know what they fixed it with? A paper clip. I don’t know what the hell it was, but that’s what they did.
Then, what also happened before we went overseas, oh, this happened down in New Orleans or near Norfolk or someplace, they’re maneuvering the LST to go into a certain area, and they’re backing the LST in, and they run over a buoy and they strip the one screw, and that was it, we had to go in for repairs on that. Screws are what you call propellers. Like the stairs they call ladders. The bathroom they call the head.
The first thing we did when we got to Milford Haven, Ireland, every LST that made that trip had full capacity, all the tanks except the ones they’re using to fill their own engijne, were all filled with hundred octane gasoline. That’s how they got all the, every LST that went over was carrying gasoline like for the airplanes and stuff. And when we got there they pumped it all out. You put in seawater to take its place. So then, oh also, most LSTs that went over, and we had it too, carried an LCT on the deck, and this thing was rigged on weights and stuff, and listen to this, and you had to discharge this LCT because they needed it for the invasion, the smaller, you go up into this bay, and then they pump the ballast out of the one side like this, and the whole ship tilts, boom, they cut the thing and this thing launches right into the water. They get rid of that. Most LSTs carried an LCT over. They were small, I don’t know if they were capable of crossing the channel. I guess they were.
Oh, you know, you were talking about before seeing ships hitting mines. I did. I saw the 496 hit a mine, because we were going in the same time, this is around the third week in June, and they were on this side of us. And I knew that there was a couple of guys that I knew on that ship. They hit a mine. In fact, the captain got killed on that deal and that’s where Dolmansky’s father got hurt. And Manny Rubin was on there and he told a story about the captain.
Aaron Elson: What was the catharsis in this whole thing? When you finally started to talk about it, how did that affect your outlook on life?
Angelo Crapanzano: Oh, I think it did a lot for me, because the last time I was in the hospital was 1982, and I haven’t been in since. So that’s 14 years. Oh, it made a big difference, I know it did.
Aaron Elson: Does it make you feel like all of it was not in vain? Or did you ever feel like it was? Just shut the whole thing out?
Angelo Crapanzano: You mean, like, did I think it was necessary that it happened? See, I sort of have a believ that things happen usually the way they’re supposed to happen. You think you have control but you don’t really have control. Because there’s so many things that lead to the fact, another one of the facts is this: We weren’t supposed to be in that convoy. You know what happened? The 508 was supposed to have been in, and two days before she hit something, I don’t know, a minesweeper or something, and instead of her being there, we went in her place. We were meant to be there, right?
Aaron Elson: You said you have two daughters. Do they take an interest in this?
Angelo Crapanzano: Not really.
Ida Crapanzano: Now they do. Before they never knew about it. You never spoke to them about it. You never told them stories.
Aaron Elson: How about grandchildren?
Angelo Crapanzano: Well, now the situation with the grandchildren is that, with my oldest daughter, who got married in 1969, I have a grandson who’s 22, he’s at St. John’s University, and I have a granddaughter who’s 19. Now my granddaughter who’s 19 seems to be more interested than anybody, although my grandson did bring it up in high school or college.
Ida Crapanzano: I think it was in college he wrote a, he had to do something, in college or the last year of high school, I’m not sure.
Angelo Crapanzano: My other daughter, Nancy, got married pretty late, like 34, whatever, and her children are too young.
Ida Crapanzano: One is going to be eight, one is five, and one is three.
Angelo Crapanzano: You want to hear something weird again about this thing? In Union City where I was born, on the block where I was born, my father had a barbershop. Next door there were people who had a fish store, and then there was a dry goods store, a Jewish couple, Danny Pirkle and the girl’s name was Romilda Metrany, and she had a brother. And when I went overseas, right around the time that this happened, she dreamt, she saw all these Navy uniforms floating in the water, and she went over — she didn’t tell my mother, she said to my mother, "Have you heard from Angelo lately?" I guess she said no. Then she didn’t tell her. She probably told her later, when they knew...
Aaron Elson: Who was this again?
Angelo Crapanzano: A neighbor, a young girl. I played with all these kids, see, when we were small, playing on the block. And the other funny part is, this has nothing to do with the war, when my mother took me to school, to kindergarten, I cried so much and carried on the teacher said, "Take him home. Bring him back the next semester." Now I played all the time with this Jewish kid, Danny Pirkle. So the next September, he went to school, I went with him. The first Jewish holiday he stayed home, I stayed home. (Chuckling) I had another Jewish, I grew up with a couple of Jewish boy friends. Irving Metzger, I grew up with him. He went into the Air Corps. He was a small guy, right. He was thing built, he went into the Air Corps, he became a pilot, I’ve got him in a book, too, an article, he was a B-17 or a B-something pilot, first mission over Germany his plane gets hit. They were up 40,000 feet. When he gets hit, all their equipment flies off, gloves, right. He tells the guys to all bail out, and he stays with the plane and he brings it down. When his gloves got blown off, they cut all his fingers off. They had to amputate all his fingers. He had no fingers. And when I saw him (choking up)...
Aaron Elson: It was that cold up there?
Angelo Crapanzano: Forty below. Unbelievable. I went to his wedding....
Ida Crapanzano: And they all made fun of him because he had to wear the yarmulke.
Angelo Crapanzano: The wedding was up in the Bronx.
Ida Crapanzano: After the war.
Angelo Crapanzano: And then, they lived in Union City for a while, then they moved out and I lost track of the guy, and that was the end of it. I mean, everybody got their lumps.
Aaron Elson: Let me see this here...
Angelo Crapanzano: This article was put in the Hudson Dispatch by McGarigal’s mother after he was home on leave.
Aaron Elson: (reading) "Storekeeper 2/c McGarigal home/ Life saved by Union City boy. Storekeeper second class John T. McGarigal, 20, U.S. Navy, son of Mrs. Louise McGarigal of 619 Palisade Avenue, Cliffside Park, and the late John G. McGarigal, a former patrolman of Cliffside Park, is home on a 30-day furlough after combat duty in England during which he was severely wounded. In telling" — this was in the Hudson Dispatch in November 1944 — "in telling of his experience following the torpedoing of his ship in the English Channel on April 28 last, young McGarigal attributed the saving of his life to a fellow seaman, MMM 1/c Angelo Crapanzano of Union City. For four and a half hours after their ship was hit early in the morning of April 28, Crapanzano clung to a small liferaft with one hand and with the other hand held onto John, who was unconscious from loss of blood from a deep wound in his head. When the torpedo struck the ship, the concussion was so great that McGarigal was hurled from one side of the watchtower to the other. As the ship was going down, he and several of his buddies managed to get onto a burned raft, where they clung until a rescue ship arrived five hours later. All around them men were dying. Taken to an Army hospital in England, McGarigal was given blood plasma, and after being hospitalized for three weeks, he was returned to active duty. He arrived home on his rest furlough Nov. 1. He has been awarded the Purple Heart. McGarigal has been in the service 19 months. He received his boot training at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Ill., from where he was sent to storekeeper school at Toledo, Ohio, and from there to the amphibious base at Solomons, Md., for assignment to his ship. He was born in Englewood and lived most of his life in Cliffside Park. He graduated from Cliffside Park High in 1942."
Aaron Elson: I notice that this was the Naval Reserve. How did you come to be in the reserve? Did you enlist, or were you drafted?
Angelo Crapanzano: I was what they call a selected volunteer. I went to Newark — when I took my physical the guy says to me, You can have whatever you want, Marines, Army or Navy. So my father was in the Navy, and he was on a sub tender, and he always said to me (choking up), he said, "If you have to go in the service, go in the Navy, because you have a clean place to sleep and good food." But he never told me about the torpedoes. (Laughing)
Aaron Elson: Was he in World War I?
Angelo Crapanzano: Yeah. My father was in World War I, and his brother, my uncle, was in the Army in World War I and he was in France in the big battles, he was gassed a little, too. He was in this outfit, in fact, he was one of the orderlies for Frank Knox, who was a colonel or whatever in the Army, and Knox eventually ran for president or vice president with Roosevelt, in the Thirties. In fact, my uncle and father, one time he was in Journal Square campaigning, and my father and my uncle went, they got to him, and he remembered my uncle, yeah. Where’s that thing I got of his that was made in France? This is a picture of me in New Orleans.
Where were we? In the water or out of the water? My legs are getting cold... I’ll tell you something, in my memorabilia book, I have about eight or ten pictures of that category. I have a picture of Ernie and me, where Ernie gets up on my shoulders and holds onto the palm tree.
My mother wrote this. This is my mother’s handwriting. Because I lost everything I had on the ship.
Aaron Elson: What sort of things did you lose?
Ida Crapanzano: My letters.
Angelo Crapanzano: I had about eight dollars in English money, and I had two mandolins. My father gave me one, and I picked up another one. I have two now. Oh no, I sold one. I played by ear, pretty good. In fact, I used to play, see, my uncle played mandolin and my father played guitar, and I used to love to hear that. And I used to watch my uncle, and I picked it right up. No lessons or nothing. I liked it. We had a lot of fun on the ship, don’t get me wrong. Before this thing happened, it was like one big happy family.
I’ll tell you, a lot of horsing around goes on on a ship. Plus there’s a lot of card playing, dice playing, guys playing cribbage. All kinds of stuff. And no matter where you go on any ship, you always end up with some rebel who plays the guitar and keeps playing You are my Sunshine over and over, to drive you bananas.
Aaron Elson: What was the food like?
Angelo Crapanzano: Excellent. I mean, I thought it was excellent. I had a very good appetite. Meatloaf. I loved this dish they made, baked salmon, and then they put a crust of dough over it. A lot of, they give you a lot of fruit salads. But you know the thing that people don’t realize is this, too. When you go up in the chow line with your tray, on our ship the chow line was up there and you had to go up a ladder on this side, you start here, you walk across, you go down this ladder, but when it was rough, and then you walk and the guy goes ping, and you got your fruit salad, and then when it’s rough, you go down the ladder with your tray and you hope you don’t kill yourself, I’ll tell you something, you’re not gonna believe this, but I used to sit next to a lot of guys who I knew they were sick and they wouldn’t eat, and I’d eat my chow and I’d eat some of theirs. And there was a lot of guys got very squeamish up in their stomach, they’d go in line and then when they sat down, they’d walk away.
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Contents
Chapter 7, The Human Aiming Stake