Good morning. This is Dr. James Lindley. It is
12 June 2009. We're at the National Museum
of the Pacific War operated by the Texas
Historical Commission and the Admiral Nimitz Foundation.
This morning we're interviewing Mr. John J.
O'Malley in Fredericksburg, Texas.
Good morning and thank you so much for doing this.
Would you please start by telling us your name,
your full name, where you were born
and a little bit about your early life and how
you came to be in the, and if you'll move
just a little closer to the microphone.
There we go. Yeah.
Well, my name is John Joseph O'Malley, Jr.
I was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, in
September 8, 1924, and grew
up in Redding, Massachusetts, which is a suburb
north of Boston.
Went to public schools there.
And I remember one very vivid experience I had in
public school when I was in the fourth grade, looking
out the window of my four-room school, which faced
on the town common of Reading, which was eight
miles from Lexington, and being told by my teacher,
my homeroom teacher that, at that very common,
on April 19, 1775, the Minutemen from Reading
congregated and marched the eight miles through
Woburn, Massachusetts to Lexington and I suppose
on to Concord, I didn't pursue that, but I
remember clearly looking out the window of
that school and imagining what that town common
looked like with those men gathering there
in 1775. So the other experience that I recall
from grade school was my teacher telling us
as we were singing, I think we sang every day the
hymn America, my country tis of thee, and
telling me about Samuel Smith,
who was the composer of America, who taught at
Andover, Phillips
Andover Academy, and drove back and forth to Boston
in his buggy and drove through Reading. Reading
was on a
direct, pretty much north of Boston on direct
route to Andover.
And as he passed through Reading, composed one
of his verses
of America. I love those
templed hills and so forth, because next door
to us was the
Old South Methodist Church, and that was the
templed hill that
he had in mind according to my teacher, so it's
always had a very special meaning for
me to hear that hymn.
So let's go to, well I went through school in
Redding, had some wonderful teachers, and
graduated in 1941 from Redding High School with
honors, I didn't realize it, I didn't
even look at my diploma. For years later I put
it in
the trunk and by George it said, with honors.
And I
was very surprised because I didn't think I was that
great a student, but evidently they saw
something in
myself that I didn't, that I missed.
Anyhow, in 1941 I went to work after high
school. I
appeared at age 16 from high school and went to work
for the Boston Herald Traveler. And in December
the 7th, 1941, as I was home on a Sunday afternoon,
and I don't know what we were doing, we had the
radio on, the radio was interrupted, the
broadcast was
interrupted, had to announce that an attack had been
made at Pearl Harbor, and as the broadcast went
on, it
became more and more certain that we were in a terrible,
terrible war with the Japanese.
So at that point, I think everybody, every
young man
that I knew thought, well, how are we going to
get into the service? What are we going
to do? So I went on to, I had already decided
to start college, and I was too young to go
into service, really. I couldn't have gone in
except with my parents' permission, even
in 1942, so up until my birthday. So I decided
to go to college. This was what was recommended
to me by some of the veterans of the First
World War who were very knowledgeable people,
people I respected at home. And they said,
John, get some good education, get as much
education as you can so when you go into the
service you'll be a more valuable person and
more mature. So I spent one year at Boston College
majoring in physics and found out in 1942 when I
matriculated there that I could get a three-year
deferment, that is to say a deferment until I
got my
degree, from the draft if I so chose. But I decided
my friends, schoolmates, were going into the service
and why should I take a deferment. I didn't
feel as if
it was quite right.
So in 1943, I presented myself at the draft board,
and they obligingly drafted me. I went into the
Army, entered at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, the
reception center, and was transported with a large
group in a troop train to what is now Fort Hood,
Texas. And on July 1st, 1943, we arrived at Fort
Hood, which now Florida was then Camp Wood. And it
was like walking from a refrigerator into a glass
furnace. I had never seen such heat in all my life.
There was complaint by the Vietnam soldiers who were
deplaned at Tansanut in summer, Tansanut,
Vietnam, and
said that they had never experienced such heat
in all
their lives as they got when they stepped off the
aircraft in Tansanut.
Anyhow, we were assigned-those of us who had
been in
College were recruited, shall we say, into the
Army Specialized Training Program, which
was to train officers in a number of different
specialty lines.
One of the specialty lines that the military
were concerned about was engines,
engines for internal combustion engines for tanks.
Our tanks had radial engines which required
high-octane fuel and were considered to be
a death trap.
The British soldiers particularly called our M4
tanks Ronsons because they lit up like
a lighter when they were hit.
I saw one of them hit when I was in the Siegfried
Line as we were holding a line for, in November of
1944, holding a line for an attack by my, one
battalion of my regiment, and it was really a very
sobering sight to see a column of black smoke
about a hundred feet in the air after it had been
hit with an 88.
Well anyhow, going back here, the Army had this
program that they were trying to develop
and slowly convert their radial engines to
diesels, which would have a much less dangerous
effect than the radial engines.
And so after basic training, which was at the
Tank Destroyer Replacement Training Center
at Fort Hood. I was sent to Lehigh University in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to study automotive
engineering with the idea of becoming eventually
commissioned as an ordinance officer. So I might
say that while I was at Fort Hood, the training was
very intense. My battalion lost five men. Five men
died in the first few weeks of training. So the
Army made an investigation. They sent inspectors
and one of them talked to me about the training. I
had survived it, but believe me, it was a rough
experience. So anyhow, they relieved all of the
officers in the battalion, and we were sent
into a
new training organization, and I was finally completed
my basic training in October of 1943, and went
on a
troop train again to Lehigh, University of the
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I don't know how many
soldiers were in this group, but we were in various
and sundry disciplines as the Army saw fit to create
Well, one of the problems the Army had was that they
gave in to just about every university
president around to have a unit at their particular
college or university, and things got out of control.
So anyhow, I had a very, very good experience
at Lehigh.
Asa Packard, who developed the Packard motor
car, was a graduate of Lehigh, and there was
a laboratory there that had been endowed by him.
They had a very fine automotive engineering section,
and I learned a great deal about internal combustion
engines, and I was all set to go forward with this
The Army pulled the rug out from under it.
The whole thing collapsed in March of 1940, on the
thought that we were needed immediately for
combat roles. Well, that was the reason given
by the Army, but I think that what happened was
the program, like so many other programs,
start out well-meaning and well-defined and for
some reason or another just expand and
develop all sorts of criticism. Anyhow, I was
on another troop train in March of
1944, headed for Camp Claiborne, Louisiana,
where I was to be a replacement in the
84th Infantry Division. So, the 84th was
sending officers at that time,
they weren't sending them, the officers were
volunteering out of the 84th to go to
101st Airborne Division for the landing in Europe.
And so they had a dearth of officers and they
had a
dearth of enlisted men.
And of course all the pilots, all the billets
that were worth talking about,
leadership billets, were gone.
And so we wound up going on advanced squad training,
company training, and all of that sort of thing.
And then we took over the area
that had been occupied by the 101st Airborne
Division at Camp Claiborne.
And the Army decided again to give us airborne training.
They were going to convert the division, 84th
Infantry Division, to an airborne
Division. We were all given examinations and given
training in gliders, in glider loading, gliders
securing, jeeps and so forth and gliders. And the
paratroopers were to come from the 13th Airborne
Division at Camp McCall, North Carolina. And
the men
who were not qualified for airborne training
were to be transferred out of
the division. Well that got about to that point
when the invasion of Europe had
occurred and they were examining the role of
the airborne there and although
the airborne troops, the 82nd, 101st
principally on our side, the 6th British
Airborne on the British side did a very fine
job, very, very fine officers and men and
so forth. But the division, the invasion, at
least for the 101st was a disaster. A friend
friend of mine who was in eye company of the 502nd
was killed on D-Day. And I went to school with him
right from the very first grade to the twelfth,
and it
hit me pretty hard. He was a great young man.
And to
digress just a little bit, about two years
after I
gotten out of the service in 1946, I was out,
but about
1947 I was at a gasoline station in Stoner, Massachusetts,
which is about ten miles north of Boston and
about three
miles from Reading where I had lived.
And in those days, of course, a person drove his
automobile up to the tanks, the gas tanks, and stood
there until the attendant came out and put the gas
in his tank.
So as I stood there waiting for the attendant to
come out, I looked up over the door, I saw the name
of the manager of the station, Roy J. Sherrod. And
the man came out of the station office, and it
looked just like Roy J. Sherrod. Of course, Roy J.
that I knew was Roy J. Sherry, Jr.
I thought, my gosh, this is Roy's father.
What do I say to him?
He went about without saying very much
and started to pour, put gas into the tank.
I debated, should I say anything to him?
Should I say I'm sorry?
Should I say, what should I say to him?
And so I thought back and forth
and forth. And finally, I said, Mr. Sherrod, I was
awfully sorry to be told that Roy didn't come home.
I don't know whether those were our exact words,
but that's what the thought was. Very sorry that
Roy didn't come home. I was an infantryman myself
Europe in the Second World War, and I knew Roy from
first grade to twelfth. And I think of him
often. And
he looked at me and he said, you know, when we got
that telegram from the War Department, he said, oh,
about the 10th of June, 1944, that Roy had been
killed in the invasion. He said it hit
his mother so hard that I had to give up my
very good office job in Boston and come out
here and take this job as a manager of the
gasoline station because I could not leave
her an entire day by herself. And it really, that
really bothered me, it just didn't go well with me.
So I thought of that, and I've always thought
of Roy.
And I was over there in 1994, and I had seen
some of the 101st veterans, and I was very
sorry that I hadn't made a serious inquiry to
find out what happened to Roy.
But I assume, since no mention was made of I
Company 502 in the division history, that
his plane was either shot down, his troop
carrier plane was either shot down or crashed
into a swamp area, or his stick of paratroopers
was carried too far out into the Atlantic
Ocean and dropped into the ocean. The
assumption I made was that he never fought in Normandy
in the Second World War.
So anyhow, going back again, we received some
airborne training. The airborne training was
in the glider site, which was non-volunteer. If
you are qualified, you go. It did not bother
me at all, because they hated the old routine
of doing these old squat exercises over and
over again. I wanted to do something different.
And so, I was not to get my wish there. The
Army just gave that idea up and they created,
they reorganized my division as an airborne
division at the beginning of 1946, at the end
of the war. However, before that time
they had decided that they were going to make a
large airborne invasion across the Rhine
in the final stages of the war, which would
have been March of 1945. They were going to
have six divisions there. The first airborne
division of the British Army was annihilated
It never fought again as a division.
The 6th Airborne was still operational on the
British side, there was the 17th Airborne,
the 11th, the 17th Airborne, the 82nd, the
101st, and my division, they were going to
dropped them all, either transport us over to
an airfield or airfields on the other side
of the Rhine, and finally make a grand push to
finish off the war.
However, that was all changed, we didn't go
through that either, because a bridge at
Ray Morgan across the line had been left
unguarded, that is to say it was to be
destroyed by a
German Army unit, which was charged with its
protection. And unfortunately for one reason
or another, the explosives didn't go off. Units
of the
9th Armored Division were able to cross the
Rhine and
cut the wires of the explosives, and they were able
to land troops, bring troops across the Rhine. And
that ended the need for this big operation the Army
had in mind.
In any event, the Remaragin Bridge, which has
sometimes considered some sort of a significant
taking of the American bridge, considered
some sort of a significant part of the Second
World War, actually was not, because it was
a railway bridge which provided a means of
crossing the Rhine for the German Army, the
First World War so that they could be moved
from the
Eastern Front to the Western Front. It never
was a
significant element of the Second World War and even
the First World War. Anyhow, to go back, we
went to
combat in November of 1944, and in the Siegfried
line at the Dutch-German frontier, and, well,
it was
an experience that was, well, how do you describe
it? It was a horrible warfare. The losses were
very, very high on our side because the line was
thoroughly defended with bunkers, concrete bunkers,
and they were all interconnected by a telephone
line, telephone lines which were buried about nine
feet deep. And with very few troops, the Germans
were able to intercept and control that part of
the Western Front.
In my interviews later with German civilians
and veterans, I learned that if the American
Army, the Allied side, had gone forward in
September 1944, when they had the German Army
pretty much in flight, had kept going just as
General Patton had suggested, and people
We thought very highly of General Patton.
He was a man who was his own worst enemy,
because he had a very foul mouth.
He was really more like a common soldier in the
way he talked, but he knew his business.
He was a great, great commander, and as far as
I was concerned, when we got the Stars
and Stripes newspaper, the question that was
always on my mind was, where is Patton today?
He personified the Third Army. And in any
event, his recommendation then to Eisenhower
was to keep pushing, don't give up, don't stop
when you got to the German frontier,
but just keep pushing. And Eisenhower's answer
was, well, the tanks have run out of gas.
He said, well, get the troops out of the tanks and
keep moving on the ground.
I thought the man was, you know, off the deep end
there, but this is exactly what should have happened
because in my interviews with those people in that
area, and they were extensive, they told me the
word I got was that from people who were there
and who
new situation on the ground, they could not
understand why the Army, the United States
Army, was not moving forward through the line,
through the Siegfried Line. The Siegfried
Line, called by the Germans the West Wall, was
built in 1938. And the Army was, the line
was in disuse from 1938 until 1944. By 1944,
the farmers in the area of the line, which
was mostly a rural area, were using it to store
farm implements and all of this sort
thing. There were locks on the bunker doors,
but the keys couldn't be found. There was
no protection around the bunkers, and so when
the American Army and the British, particularly
the American Army, got to the Siegfried Line,
they simply stopped. And the Germans scrambled
immediately to dig trenches around the line to
protect the bunkers, to clean out the bunkers,
to man them. And inside, of course, the
bunkers-I was in one, and I noticed that they
had on
a metal plate that ranges from that particular
bunker to a particular target, potential target
locations. So they had, these were in very
strategic locations and caused an enormous
number of casualties. Our tanks were not
anywhere close in technical effectiveness to
the German
tanks. The M4 tank that we had was lightly
armored. It started out with a 75mm cannon.
It was upgraded later to a 76mm. And then as
the war wore on in 1945, it was replaced
by the Pershing, which was an M48, which was a
very much better tank. Of course, this was
close to the end of the war. The Germans had
some very, very effective tank gunners, and
in Normandy they created enormous casualties
among the, well, the British 43rd Division,
which fought a side of us in the German-Dutch
area, lost God knows how many tanks.
On the other side of it, we had excellent fighter
A German general, a former German general, told
me, and we were out in this
area of a former battlefield, and he showed me
a bridge across the Roer River
where four of his tanks had been moving, and as
they moved down this road to this bridge,
the Rohr River was much smaller than the Rhine,
but nevertheless a substantial river in Germany,
the Rhineland. He said, out of nowhere, he
said, came these fighter bombers and he
said, swooped down, he said, the first fighter
bomber dropped a bomb on the
bridge, knocked it out. The next...
There was no way that they could move during
the daytime because of the excellent fighter
bomber support that we had received.
I can say without any question at all that I
don't think I would be here today if it
hadn't been for such effective fighter-bomber
support on our side. We had
excellent aviation and I regret very much that
when accounts are displayed
on a broadcast of the Second World War,
particularly the Normandy invasion, so
So little has been said and so little credit is
given to our airborne forces.
A friend of mine of many years was a pilot in
the Troop Carrier Command, and he was one
of the very best in the Troop Carrier Command,
and on D-Day his aircraft towed the glider
of General Don Pratt, who was the Assistant
Division Commander of the 101st Airborne Division
into Normandy. He was one of the first to take
off from England about 1:30 in the morning
on D-Day. He was an excellent pilot, and he
told me more than once that he never dropped
his gliders, and that was his specialty, in any
place but exactly where they should have
gone, which is not, of course, true of many of the
other flights. But in any event, he told General
Pratt's glider to Normandy, and it was dropped -
well, I say dropped. The pattern was, of
course, for
the troop carrier aircraft to fly over the drop
area at about 200 feet, and then signal back to the
pilot of the glider, cut the tow line, and the glider
would make a 180-degree turn, come down, and
land in
the landing area.
In General Pratt's situation, the wind shifted,
which is
something I believe that they had not considered
possible at all.
Instead of landing into the wind, he landed
downward with the glider, and the glider plowed into
a tree, and the pilot of the glider was a lieutenant
colonel named Murphy.
legs were smashed and Pratt was killed.
Apparently he had a jeep in there with
him which crushed him against the tree. So
Pratt was the first casualty of the
101st, probably the first casualty, one of the
first casualties of the entire operation.
And so this friend of mine, who was the pilot, also
participated later in the dropping of supplies to
Bastogne during the battle for Bastogne in December
of 1944.
And his aircraft, I know, flew over my
position, which
was not that far from Bastogne, maybe eight or nine
miles. And if they were at 100 feet altitude, that
would be a lot, because they had dropped
supplies on
the inner Bastogne area. And, of course, that
was no
easy mission with the Germans firing at them
and trying to get supplies to the 101st, some
of which wound up on the enemy side.
But I'll not recall one day when we were in the
Ardennes battle and went over to the offensive
in January 3, 1945 and attacked from the Manhay
area, which you can find on a map, toward
Ufalitz, which was about eight or nine miles
north of Bastogne, attacked toward that area
to close the bows, so to speak. The tack was through
very heavy snow in wooded areas and so forth.
And so
it was hard going. I froze my left hand and foot
because I went to sleep one night and left it
on my
left side, and his luck would have it, we were called
back to a rest area where we could warm up. A medic
came through and saw my leg, my foot, and my feet,
my both feet, and he said, my God, he said,
that left
foot of yours is very, very swollen. I said, don't
worry about it. I said, we've got snow packs, boots.
I said, I'm not going to wear my regular boots. I'm
going to just put on my sock, wear these, and they'll
be perfectly comfortable, but I don't want to
go back
to the rear and to a hospital for any kind of
treatment. He said, you are going back. I said, I'm
not going to allow you to stay here.
So I was ordered to go back with some other soldiers
I don't know how many were there, I wasn't
paying much attention. But I went back. One
of the reasons I hated to go back was that I'm
back there, I'm foreseeing a dyslexia
will happen, having a quality treat of this
particular problem. Here I'm having a warm
meal and all, here are my buddies in the
machine gun section, my machine gun section,
and they
one less man to look out for. So I didn't feel
good about it. And so after about
three days I persuaded them I wanted to go back
with my squad. And in the
meantime, the following day after I'd been
evacuated for
medical treatment. The company, my company,
made an attack in Belgium on a
village, and for some reason I'll never know
the answer to, the company commander
decided to go to bring the machine gun section
into a barn on the edge of a
village and what he planned to do there I don't
know, but the Baron had small
windows in it and what I understand, I had been
a machine gunner, I would
have gotten the order to fire a machine gun at
a haystack which is about a
maybe a hundred yards away, to set fire to it
with tracers because it was a
German tank, a hundred. Well, the gunner did
that and fired a burst and of course
the German tank knew exactly where the fire was
coming from, so they just
obviously turn their cannon on the barn and let
go of
the round.
So when the first round hit, the company commander's
leg was torn off, and he bled to death, and my assistant
gunner, who had been in the squad maybe a
fortnight at
the most, was hit in the stomach, and the
report I got
was he staggered outside and died in the snow there.
The third man was, I had known and still know
very well, was hit by a piece of shrapnel which
stuck in his sternum. And believe it or not, he
never bothered to get it treated. He never got a
purple heart and the piece of shrapnel stuck in
his sternum until he was setting off all
of these detectors at the airport wherever he traveled.
So he went to a doctor and told him he had a
piece of shrapnel in his chest and the doctor
dug it out, the surgeon dug it out and he
looked at it and he could not believe that
this man had been carrying this piece of shrapnel
and stress for 20 years.
And so that's how it wound up.
He got no Purple Heart, no citation, nothing.
And which brings me again to the point that a great
many people are out there wearing decorations that
maybe they weren't entitled to or claiming
service in
a particular organization to which they had
never belonged. And others were out there
who had acquired all kinds of, well, who were
entitled to all kinds of recognition for wounds
or valor or whatever and never did wind up with
anything like that.
Well, anyhow, the long and the short of it was,
we were on this, moving down this road
I slowly, when I got back, toward Huffleis, making
maybe a mile a day at the most through the snow.
And I looked up and there was an American
fighter bomber.
I think it was a P-47, which was moving in the
same direction we were, but I was amazed that it
was moving so slowly.
I thought, no wonder these guys are shot down.
I said, you know, there are sitting ducks up there.
But the pilot of that P-47 had rockets under
his wing, in his wings.
And as I watched, I saw a white puff of smoke
from a rocket which he had fired up ahead
of us.
And I paid no attention to it really until,
well, I guess it was the next day.
We finally got to the place, about 1,000 yards,
maybe 1,500
yards down the road, and I saw this German M4
tank, this
panther, huge, very, very well built piece of
equipment, with
an enormous hole in the side of its hull, and
it could have
only been made by this rocket, because we had
no-even our
tanks didn't have ammunition. The caliber of the
tank gun was not anywhere close to enough to
provide that large a hole. And the tank was burned
out. It was across the road. The four members of
the crew were all lying on the road, burned out and
killed. And I thought, my gosh, you know, it's just
It was just an experience that has always been
in my mind, and I've always thought what
great men these pilots were, and what little
credit they seem to have gotten.
It seems to me everything I read about has to
do with some, particularly the airborne
units, because it's very easy to write about
them, very small units, very, very fine and
soldiers, no question about it. But even at
Normandy, the support that the Army got
from the Navy, for example, as a Navy
destroyer, as you probably know, that in
I say I would suspect that someday somebody
will write a definitive story
of the Second World War, which will address the
question of attacking
Edom on our beach, whether that was a wise
decision or not. My feeling was that
the General Marshall was right, that the attack
on Harmony should have come much
earlier, 1942-43, because in that period of
time the Germans had a chance to
build these enormous bunkers, which were
essentially impregnable. And I'm sure
that the soldiers of the 29th Division, 116th
Infantry, 1st Battalion, who made
the one of the initial landings, and normally
outside of the 1st Division,
16th Infantry, were told, you're going to have
now a bombing of the
beach by our strategic bombers, B-17s, and
they're going to drop a carpet of bombs
the like of which the world has never seen.
You're going to have the naval
guns, the guns of our battleships out there in
the channel, and they're going
to be firing into this area. In fact, I was
told that the naval fire
control men that were in Normandy, I don't
think there were that many of them,
with whatever, called down naval gunfire on some
German armor, and it was 17 miles range, and they
knocked this armor out.
Very, very accurate, very fine support.
In fact, I was also read that a destroyer with
perhaps less than ten feet of good
water under itself and came up very close on
the beaches and knocked out
some of the munkers with direct fire. So the
point I'm making is that when you
read or you hear accounts of valor and I think
that for all intents and purposes
they're very well based. There's always some
story it seems that is not being
tall for one reason or another. Naval support
at Normandy is one that doesn't seem to get
too much attention, and the support of the
fighter-bombers in Europe to back up my division
and other divisions. My thought is that our
armor was very much deficient. It was very,
very far behind the Germans. The tank destroyer
armor or the tank destroyers were far more
advanced than the tanks in design on our side.
It came very, very late. Another deficiency
was we, in attacking the bunkers in the
Siegfried Line, we did not have a vehicle like
the Sturmgeschütz,
which was the storm gun that the Germans had to
attack the March line.
I was amazed if we had weapons like that, it
would have been reduced casualties enormously.
Anyhow, we got through the war and met the
Russians up on the Elbe River.
My knowledge of German was - I had a knowledge
of German, as I mentioned to you, and my platoon
leader at first thought that I should be his
interpreter, and the company commander took
me over as his interpreter and then the
battalion commander.
When that happened, I was in great shape,
because I
was the most feared man in my company, because
I had
the battalion commander's ear.
And I served him well.
He was a regular Army officer.
I served him very, very well.
I did my job.
And we were up in the El Rugo.
We had four villages in my battalion area,
which I was required to check every morning
with a jeep driver and make sure that no
incidents occurred during the night, which were breaches
of discipline by our soldiers or incursions by
the Russians.
Russians were across the Elbe River from us and
occasionally they'd come over to
our side. And I was, as a good Christian at
least, I thought I was a good
Christian. I was very cool to the Russians.
They had a bad reputation in
Germany. They were, some of the units were very
badly behaved. And I was, it was
uppermost of my mind to do what I could to keep mud
of our area and make sure the battalion commander
knew about any incursions.
One evening, well, my standard operating
procedure was to go to the
bergermeister of each of these villages and ask
him in the morning what
he had in the way of information for me.
One of them told me at Schnackerberg, which was
later an entry point into the East German
area across the Elbe, that some Russians had
come across the river during the night and
had threatened a farmer who was living there on
the river.
So I went with the jeep and my driver and
interviewed the farmer, and he told me that
some Russians had come there the night before
and had told him that they were coming the
following night, which was the night of the day
I was there, and they were going to kill
him if he didn't have a cow for them, they
wanted to take a cow back to the other side
of us to the river.
And so he was concerned.
But you know, there's one thing about, I found
out a little
bit about the Shermans, is they were concerned,
but they
didn't go to pieces.
He was concerned.
So I went back to the battalion commander and
told him what the situation was.
And we had in the battalion a unit, a weapons carrier.
We had about a dozen infantrymen, a fellow who
spoke Polish, nobody speaks Russian, I
spoke German, and we had a mix of troops, the
idea being to confront any sort of a situation
that required some force, display of force.
He told me that he wanted this group, this
group I'm talking about, to go to that farmer's
area and protect them that night.
So in doing that, we made a plan.
There would be myself, who spoke German, and
the Polish fellow, Polish soldier who spoke
the language, and we'd sit in the living room
with the farmer and wait and see if the Russians
showed up.
Meantime, the rest of the squad would be
outside and secreted in areas where they could quickly
come to our assistance if that was needed, the
weapons carrier would be
hidden someplace. So sure enough, after dark, a
couple of Russians showed up, came
inside, and because they spoke some Polish, the
Polish that this soldier
spoke was enough to get them to understand what
was going on, and they
were told that they were surrounded by American
troops, and they said that if
they didn't go across, he was told, they were
told, the two of them, that if they
didn't go across the river immediately and stay
over there, they would be shot
to death, and that bodies buried on the pigsty
in back. Well, the more I
I thought of it, the more I thought that should
have been thought through a little bit better
because we would have wound up in Leavenworth
having done something like that.
So anyhow, they realized that discretion was
the better part of the alarm and they took
off and they went across the river and never
had any more problems from them, never at all.
And the only other incident on the river that I
recall is one evening I went out there on
a levee, there wasn't much doing, it was rather
quiet. And I sat there and watched the
river go by and the Red Army Chorus came up on
the other side and gave me a concert
all by myself. But the one thing that really
bothered me a great deal was the
policy the Yonis Army followed of handing back
any soldiers who, any
military personnel and others who came across
the Elbe River to our side, they
were given no refuge but simply sent back to
the Russians and that was a,
I thought, a horrible thing to do. In fact, it
happened in one case and the, that I
know, I know personally, a medic, a physician
and his nurse, somebody else
came across and the word was they're gonna have
to go back across the river to the Russians.
The engineer officer, army engineer officer,
who ran the ferry across the upper river said
I'm not gonna take them back unless I get a
direct order. So he went back, he got the
direct order and took them back across the
river. That was a horrible thing. I have never
had much respect for Franklin Roosevelt for the
lackadaisical attitude he had
toward communists. His administration was shot
full of these people. One thing I
learned after the war and my readings was that
at Yalta there was a conference
as we all know, involving Churchill and Stalin
and Roosevelt, in which the
army of the zones of occupation was set up in
Germany, and regardless of where
the armies came to a final stop, these would be
the zones of control. Well, the
The Germans, as I found out, confirmed time and
time again, had hoped that they could
collapse their defense against the Americans
and the British, the French could be collapsed
and on the western front and they could move to
the eastern front, defend Berlin, defend
Eastern Germany. And whatever, however far we
had gotten into Germany, we would be
the occupiers. However, the Yalta Conference
ended all that hope, and the
zones of occupation which had been established
at Yalta, which were top
secret and not readable or not, how do you say,
not available to anybody under
the grade of Major General on our side, were
leaked. These results were
leaked to the Germans. I'm sure by somebody
like Burgess, McLean, Philby or
others who were in top-level positions in the
British service who were
communist agents. And once the Germans found
out that it made no difference how
how far they, how hard they fought, how much
leeway they gave to the Americans
and the Allies, that it was all going to end up
the way that Yalta had proposed it.
So they continued to fight on, and even when we
were on the Elbe River waiting for the
Russians, one of our soldiers was captured, and
the morning we went out towards Fox Hole,
there was a little blood around it.
I couldn't imagine the Germans still fighting
at the Elbe River, and I remember at night
looking up and seeing a dogfight between our
night fighters and a German night fighter.
And we could see the traces, I could see the
traces, red from our side, yellow from the
German side, and still fighting on.
Some of our bombers went into Austria, and on
the 25th of April, they bombed the city
of Vienna.
A friend of mine who was dorm here, a canon of
the Cathedral of St. Stephen, told me he
could never understand why the Allies bombed
and destroyed the city, the Cathedral of St.
Stephen and destroyed a good part of Vienna
when the war was only about two
weeks from the end. Well, the idea of our of
our leadership was to show that
Russians we were friends and so forth and so
on, which I thought was shameful,
absolutely shameful. The bombing of Dresden the
same way occurred on the
13th of February, 1945, and Dresden was
considered an open city, and there were
thousands of refugees there from the east, and
thousands were killed. And as
far as strategic bombing was concerned, I had
great feeling of sympathy for the
air crews. A young man I knew who went to
school with me, who was ahead of me in
school by about three years or so, was a bomber
pilot, and it was, his plane was
shot down over Germany, I don't know, 1943. His
parachute was seen to open, but his
body was never found, and I suspect that he was
murdered, because the feeling
against our bombers, strategic bombers, whether
they were terror bombers, and
some of them, I recall one story which involved
a man who was a Catholic
apparently, had a rosary, a crewman had a
rosary on his neck, and they were
planning to kill him, and I guess a Catholic,
German Catholic priest
intervened, as he would for anybody I'm sure,
and said, well, you can't do this,
you simply can't do it, and talked him out of
it. But I often thought later if I
had the money and some leads, I would have
liked to have gone back to the area
with this man who was shot down, at least
hopefully to find his body with the
help of the Germans there in the area. Many of
them, I'm sure knew, some of them
at least, knew something about the incident and
could at least solve the
problem. But the other side of the thing is,
and when we're waiting on the
the west side of the Rhine to cross the river.
Do you want to make a switch?
Not yet.
Go ahead.
At night there was a flight.
Continuation of Mr. O'Malley's conversation concerning
his experiences in World War II.
Okay, so I looked up at night, and I couldn't
see these aircraft, but I could
see the anti-aircraft shells that the Germans
were firing. The 88-
millimeter gun that the Germans used was
perhaps the most efficient gun to come
out of the Second World War. It could be used
against personnel. It fired anti-personnel
ammunition. It could be elevated to 90 degrees
above ground and depressed to three degrees
below level, minus three. And it could be used
against tanks and against aircraft. And
I'm sure that, although I can't prove it, that
when the B-17 bomber was being developed
and went into production, the 88-millimeter gun
that the Germans had developed was either
not taken into account or it was too late to
make any changes, because the B-17, as
I saw it, and I'm not an expert in it at all, was
pretty well protected against fighter aircraft, which
came up at the - which would have come up to their
altitude and try to destroy the aircraft, but not
against these shells from the 88s.
And I remember being near Hanover in Germany as the
the war came to an end, and seeing the number of
anti-aircraft guns in our area around the city,
it was
amazing, the number of them, and one of them had
apparently hit one of our tanks, and the front
of our
tank looked like a piece of Swiss cheese.
I don't know how many rounds had gone through
it, but
it was a very effective gun.
And I looked up and I could see the shells bursting.
And they were just so high up, about 30,000 feet.
They looked like twinkling stars.
And of course, the idea is to stand away from
the open because as those pieces of
shrapnel started falling, they could kill.
And they did kill one man in my division who was
standing out watching this display, or a display
similar to it, in the Rhineland, and a piece of
shrapnel came down through his collarbone area and
killed him.
So I was always careful to stand where my head was
up, and I saw that one of the shells had hit
one of
our B-17s, and I saw the fire getting bigger
and bigger
and bigger, and finally I couldn't see the
aircraft, but I
knew it had flipped over and started down. So I thought
there's one heck of a way to die.
So these men who I think had to accomplish 25
to come home, who I envied when I was at Camp
Claiborne in the maneuver area.
They were up there with their case of cold beer
in the aircraft.
I thought, geez, I mean, these guys have it so easy.
It didn't look so easy when I was on the ground
looking at them.
They had some terrible, terrible casualties.
two boys that went to school with me who lived very
close to me at home in Redding, both, three of
them had
been gunners or bombers, and all three of them were
And I don't know what the casualty rate was
among the bombers, bomber
crews, but it had to be very heavy, and it must
have been a very, very, very
hard thing for them to get up each day to do
it, to fly and drop their bombs.
And a friend of mine who was, who worked with
me after the war and when I was in the executive
office for about five years was a retired
lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.
And he was in a bomber crew, and the bomber was
shot down, and he was captured.
And of the ten members of the crew, only one
managed to escape.
He got a detection, and he found his way back
to England.
And he was the guy that failed to follow any of
the directions that they had given to escape capture.
So the war took some very funny twists. I'll go
back and end up, I ended up in the summer of
1945 near Heidelberg, my division, my battalion
was occupation area included, not Heidelberg,
which was the headquarters of the 7th Army, but
some villages to the west of Heidelberg.
And I was still my battalion commander's eyes and
ears, so to speak.
I was a PFC at the time.
And he called me in in July to his office, and
he said,
you don't have enough points, he said, to go home.
He said at that time the Army had been allocating
points to, depending on the principal, the
number of
months of service, the person who was in the
Army, and
those who were earliest in were earliest out.
And they
were given, say, maybe five points if they had
a Purple
Heart and additional. Well, I didn't have
enough points
to get out. He said, well, he said, the
division here is
going to stay as an Army, part of the Army, of
occupation. But he said, I don't think that
they'll allow you to stay here. You're
going to go to Japan. He says, here's what I'm
going to do. He said, I'm going to
recommend you for officer candidate school. He
said, I'm sure there'll be no
problem with that. And he said, you will be,
once you separate it from the
division, you will go back to the United States
and you will have 30 days furlough.
And he said, after that, you go to Fort Benning
and you'll have 90 days of Officer Kennedy's school.
He said, after that, you'll have 30 more days,
then you go to Japan.
He said, that's the best I can do for you.
Well I really appreciated that, because I never
did ask this man anything in the way
of favors.
did what I would want him to do if we were, if
our positions were reversed. He was, he
was helped to maintain a good battalion, and he
did. A friend of mine who was a colonel
and a military judge, he retired as one of the
judges on the Army Court of Appeals in
in Washington, and I had lunch with him every day
when I was in the Labor Department as an
Administrative Law Judge.
And we talked about the service, and one thing and
another, and the matter of discipline came up.
And I know in 1945, at the end of the war, discipline
came apart.
There was no discipline.
There was a god-awful mess.
So he asked me about the discipline of my battalion.
And I told him there was one incident in which
somebody broke a glass, which predicted an
announcement panel on the Rathaus town hall in
one of
the villages we were in.
He said, do you mean to tell me that that was it?
That was nothing?
Boy, you had no murders.
You had no assaults.
No, no, no. We didn't have anything. And he couldn't
believe it. Well, what I had done was pass the
word in
my squad and in my platoon to be spread around the
company and every other place in the battalion
that I
had no friends. I said, I have no friends. I said,
anybody does anything that's a violation of,
everybody does anything wrong, he's
going to be reported. No way around it. No two
ways around it. And I was also, so
that the word got around that, and I was, when
the battalion commander went
through the area in his Jeep, I was in the
backseat of his Jeep. He was looking at a
a nap or something, and they give him a salute,
and I salute back, let him know that I was,
you know, chief cook at least. They knew that I
had his ear, and regardless of grade or
rank or anything else, they had it conformed,
and it worked very well.
I was also in charge of the liquor supply. We
had a
small, what do you call it, an enlisted man's
club and
then the battalion had some kind of a small officer's
club. And I was, I got myself involved in providing
cognac for it. I found a farmer, I mean a vintner,
who had a good supply of grapes, and he made, he
could make casks of wine without any great problem.
So I made a deal with him where we'd get one, we'd
give him, let's see, how do we do it? For seven casks
of wine, we go to a distillery, which was run by
some Puerto Ricans.
That was the only place I had been in the Army
where I never heard any English.
It was all Spanish.
And I would give them seven casks of wine and
get back from them one cask of cognac.
And, of course, I delivered the cask of cognac
to the Spearhead
which is the club name. And I turned it over to them.
And I found out that it lasted one night. And I
thought, my God, this is not going to go on. So we
had a ration program to ensure that these guys
would not imbibe too heavily.
So in any event, somebody told me that there
was a pretty good supply of liquor in the
basement of somebody's home in our area.
So I went over to this place with my jeep
driver, and I went into the basement cellar,
and there it was, a huge supply of all kinds of
good liquor, cognac and everything else. else.
So the next thing I saw was a pair of shiny boots
come bouncing down the stairs, and on the top side
were a couple of chrome bars of a captain, and he
looked at me and he said, Soldier, what are you doing
in my liquor supply?
I said, Sorry, Captain, this is our liquor supply.
I said, I have been tasked by the battalion
commander to allocate the supply of alcohol to the
various places. So you'll get your share, don't worry
about it. And that took care of that problem.
But I
never had any problem with anybody there,
nobody. I
got all kinds of - made a deal with a photo company
to get a large packet of photo paper, which I managed
to give to a German who was running a photo
shop, and
he used what he needed to use, and he also made
pictures for the group. So they had a good deal.
And anyhow, the war ended, thankfully, in the Far
East with the explosions of the bombs, and I was
sent in the middle of September to the
transportation corps where they needed somebody who
spoke some German to Alsace, and I was there
for six months.
I made a deal with the Army that I would, if I could
get - I'd stay six months, because I couldn't leave
within that time, if they'd allow me 30 days to
go to
the British Isles to visit my relatives in
Ireland and England.
They said, that's okay, that's fine, we'll do it.
So I spent 30 days traveling on the surface to
England and Ireland from Alsace in eastern France.
And on the way over, I met some - on my troop
compartment - in my ASME compartment of the
train - met
some Scottish soldiers who were in the British Army,
had been called up in 1939. And in 1946, seven years
later, they were getting on. I thought, my
Gosh, what
an amazing thing.
And so they - the one thing I remember about them
was they had a bottle of Scotch whiskey, which was
very good. And they told me they were going to share
it with me. I said, no, I don't want to drink
anything. So they said, what kind of a man are you?
What kind of an Irishman are you? And all of this.
So I took a drink from them.
But then they were, we got to Newbury, I guess,
Newtown, Newtown, England, and they had a
canteen there for the British soldiers, tea and
sandwiches and all.
So I wasn't a British soldier.
So they dragged me over there, said, you are
now, so come on, help yourself.
So they were very fine, friendly people, and I
had nothing but good things to say for them.
My cousin, who was-I told a physician one time
that he could tell this story because
it was perfectly true.
She was living in Coventry, England, in
Warwickshire in 1940, when the city was bombed,
I believe
She was bombed in October and November of 1940.
She was heavily bombed, and there were some pretty
heavy casualties.
She lived in downtown Coventry in Lower Ford
Street, and she shared a
flat with another lady.
So she told me on the afternoon of the bombing
- one of the
bombings, I think there were more than one, of
Coventry, the air raid Siren sounded, and
she and her flatmate went running to their
designated air raid shelter in Coventry.
And they sat down on a bench inside the
shelter, and her friend looked at her handbag
and said,
I'd left my cigarettes in the apartment, in the
flat, and I'm not going to spend the entire
night here with these strangers and not have a
cigarette, so I'm going back.
So, well, my cousin said, if you go back, I go
back. I don't want to be staying here with
these strangers either.
Anyhow, they went running back to the apartment.
She retrieved her cigarettes and went running
back to the designated shelter.
They got to the designated shelter, the shelter
was filled to capacity, the door was closed,
and that was it.
So they had to run and run and run until they'd
find a place that had a couple of vacancies
where they could occupy, which they could
occupy for the night.
So they went in, they closed the place up, and
they could hear the bombs, they could hear the
fire department fighting the fires and all.
And the next morning, when it was all over,
they were released from the shelter and they
went back, not knowing whether they would see
that flat ever again.
And as luck would have it, a flat apparently
escaped damage, but they passed their designated
shelter, which was no more.
A bomb had hit it directly.
So the name of the game, or the bottom line is,
don't ever say that cigarettes will always
shorten your life, because sometimes they
lengthen a person's life.
So that's a true story, no question about it.
She lived in Coventry all her life after that.
She was born in Ireland, and she died about ten
years ago.
suffered some very, very serious damage. It's a
beautiful cathedral there, which was designed by
Sir Basil Spence and incorporates the old cathedral
with the remains of it with a brand new one, which
was a very, very beautiful structure.
So anyhow, when I got back from my furlough to
Ireland, my C.O. was a captain in his railway
transportation office where I had been given the
responsibility for moving freight, American military
freight through the place, told me that if I
were to
stay in the Army just one more year, they would make
me a Master Sergeant.
And he said, my commanding officer, the commanding
officer of the railway, it's a group, transportation
group, the colonel, and he said, you go to Strasbourg.
And he said, if you want to stay in the Army another
year, you've got it.
He said, that's what it will be.
Well, I decided that I had lost three years of
academic training, and it would be just my luck to
meet some very good-looking French girl, get married,
and regret that I had never taken advantage of
the G.I. Bill.
That was what made the great big difference.
If I had had no GI Bill to support me after I left
the service, I would have stayed in because I didn't
have enough money.
I couldn't have banked enough money from my pay in
the lower enlisted ranks to sustain me.
So I surely would have stayed in the Army,
would have
taken advantage of that offer that was made.
And I think I would have been pretty successful
at it,
because I rather liked the Army.
I had no complaints.
People complained about the food and this and
that and the other thing, but I never
complained about the food, except when I got
into basic training at Fort Hood when they
had a battalion mess and the eggs were cooked
with about one-third of them hard-boiled,
one-third of them softwood, and one-third of them
mostly raw.
And if you wound up with the mostly raw rakes,
you had it.
But for the most part, I would say that the
Army was
something like a computer or a data process,
very cold,
And sometimes you put something in and got garbage
Well, anyhow, to make a long story short, I
went back
and started my college all over again and got a degree
in B.C. in 1951, finally.
Also during the time I was in the service, I
picked up tuberculosis.
I was an interpreter, and in my interpreting activity
I had to visit places where troops could be billeted
and write out the places, scratch out the
places that
had communicable diseases and all.
It never occurred to me, no
very, very mission, that I could pick up one of these
So I did.
And I finally, they finally caught it two years
after the service.
It was moderately advanced at the time in one
lung, no cavitation.
And so I recovered naturally with the help of Streptomycin.
But that pushed my graduation back to about 1951.
I got that, my bachelor's degree, my master's
degree in one year.
And I then went on to Washington, where I found
myself on the Intelligence Research Specialist
Register and Foreign Affairs Officers Register.
So my division commander had been a-I had perfectly
recovered from my illness, no problem, never
had a
problem after that.
My division commander had been G-2, in Army G-2,
Chief of Intelligence.
So I decided to go into the Pentagon.
He had, by the time I got there, the fall of
1952, he had been transferred
and promoted to lieutenant general, and he was
third Army commander.
So I don't know how I wound up in the Army G-2
section, but I think I just made an announcement.
Here I am on this register, professional
register, and, you know, what does it have to offer?
Well, there was a colonel there on that staff
who knew I was from
General Bowling's division, the 84th. And he
told me, he said, you've got a job here, no
question about that. And he said, at the
moment, he said, I think Air Force
Intelligence has a need for some people. So he
said, I'm going to take you over to
Air Force Intelligence. And he said, you can
talk to them. So he put his arm on my
shoulder and he took me over to a fellow of German
birth, I guess, who seemed to be in charge of
something or other there.
And he told him that I was from General Bowling's
Division and I was interested in a position in intelligence.
So he bid me good luck, and I was left to the tender
mercies of this guy, whoever he was.
And he said, you speak German, right?
I said, yes, I do.
So he started speaking to me in German.
And there was another, there was an officer
that came in, I don't know what grade he was,
and he was listening to all this.
And he said to the officer, he said, he speaks
good German with an American accent.
Of course, I was over here at the, at the St.
Joseph's Hall, at the Mai Fest, met a fellow who
was here from Schlesien, Silesia.
I was talking
German with him.
And he said, asked me where I was
born up, brought up, and told him New England.
He said, New England?
You sound
like a Hungarian.
So anyhow, the long and the short of it
was, he said, would you like to go to Berlin?
Well, I don't know whether I'd like to go to
Berlin or not.
And in the meantime, as this happened, I got a
scholarship to law school.
I took a shot at this thing at Georgetown Law
School in D.C.
What the heck? Nothing against it, nothing came.
I never asked for anything.
I had been admitted to Harvard Law School,
and that was another thing that amazed me.
They had a four-page application for Harvard
Law School,
And I filled it out, and they got a transcript
of my
grades in college and in graduate school, and
that was it.
I thought I'd take a shot and never hit that.
Well, within three weeks they told me I'm
admitted to
George - to Harvard Law School.
And so then I tried to push my luck a little
harder by
asking them for a scholarship, which I didn't get.
I never really made an effort to get it, and I
thought what the hell, I'll go through Harvard
Law School and I knew some graduates, not many,
and I thought there's no guarantee to
success with that and besides working like a
dog for three years, where am I going to be?
At Georgetown they notified me that they
awarded me a three-year scholarship, not one year
but three years.
So I went back to Air Force Intelligence and I
told this officer that I had been awarded
a scholarship.
And he said, well, boy, that's something to
think about.
He said, you can always come back here if you
want to change your mind.
So then I went to the CIA and I talked to them
about one thing and another.
They gave me a couple of tests and of course
one of the things they do, it's kind of a
simple minded thing, they leave you in an
office, you step out of the office, they leave
a file cabinet open, half open, and it's, you
know, security material inside and all.
I guess the idea is they're going to watch you
from some place and see whether you get
up there and look in the file, in which event
they'll come back and smile and say,
sorry, you flunked the test, because we don't
like guys around who are snooping in files
where they're not entitled to look. So, anyhow,
they decided they were going to
hire me, and I said, well, I've got this
scholarship to law school, what
should I do about it? They said, you should
take that, because that'll never come
back again, and if you want to come back here
after you graduate, go ahead, we'd be
glad to have you, because you have a good knowledge
of Germany, which I thought was pretty good. I
thought that other people certainly knew a lot more
than I did. But at the same time, I worked at
everything, and I thought I could do a
creditable job no matter what they put me into. So
in any event, I went to law school, graduated, went
to the General Counsel's Office of the FCC, was
in the
litigation division, wound up working for an Army
General, a retired three-star General, the finest
man I've ever worked for, who had been Chief Signal
Officer of the Army. And he was Special Assistant
to the President for Telecommunications.
And so I wasn't in the White House, but I was
close enough. I know I mentioned a couple of
times to
people in the industry that they didn't have to worry
about me because I was only a spear carrier.
And they
started laughing.
So the point was that I was very much
interested in
him. He was a very fine, able, competent man. And
That pretty much, I became an administrative
law judge eventually, based on a competitive examination.
I owned up to seven years in the Coast Guard as
an administrative law judge.
Excellent experience, excellent people, and
that's the end of that chapter.