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November 11, 2014

Many of my oral history interviews are with people who served in World War II.  Their stories are always educational, moving and inspiring.  The following is from my interview with Mark Levy, who passed away in February of this year. For those who knew Mark, it would be no surprise to learn of his leadership abilities, adaptability and compassion while he was in the military. 


On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I rode my bike to the local bagel place. They had a son who was maybe 20 years old.  I didn’t see him, so I said, “Where’s Al?”  His mother said, “Haven’t you heard?”   I said, “Heard what?”  She said, “He is in a National Guard Unit and he’s already been called up.”  I said, “What for?”  And she said, “For the war!”  And I said, “What war?”  She said,  “The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor today.”

I got the bagels, got on my bike, went home and told my parents, and we listened to the radio the whole day.  That’s when we found out where and what Pearl Harbor was.

I graduated from L.A. High on the last day of June in 1943, and I was going to start UCLA the next day.  It was affordable, I had the grades and everyone I knew went there.

I was only at UCLA for one semester.

I tried to enlist in the Coast Guard, but they had more people than they needed.  (I also found out afterwards, that those were the people who drove the landing crafts in the invasions, so it’s just as well that they didn’t take me!) 

Eventually I was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, though I didn’t know why.  I learned that there were two things at Fort Knox:  the Armored Training Center, where they trained tank soldiers, and the Army Finance School.  I thought, Well, my name’s Levy.  They probably figured that I was a smart Jewish kid and they’re going to send me to finance school.

At the railroad station there were five or six other guys. They were all going to Fort Knox.  They were talking about carburetors and brakes and all kinds of auto mechanic stuff.  I figured, okay, these guys are going to tanks and I’m going to finance.

It turned out that I wasn’t going to finance school.  I was going to the Armored Center.  They put me in a training unit.  When they found out that I had an ROTC semester in high school (which only meant that I knew how to do “Right face” and “Left face” and “About face”) they said, “Okay, you’re going to be an acting corporal.”  So, suddenly, I was acting corporal, at 18 years old.

Basic training at Fort Knox meant learning about tanks, halftracks–which today are called armored personnel carriers–and every kind of truck in the world.  I could drive anything and everything. 

One day, I was told,  “There’s only one thing the army needs.  The army needs infantry second lieutenants.”  (This was because the casualty rate among infantry second lieutenants is the highest in the military.)  They said, “So you’re going to Fort Benning, Georgia, to infantry school.”

Was I scared?  You bet. 

The infantry officers training course was the hardest, toughest training course in the army, except for the paratroops.  And the only thing that was different was that, in a parachute division, you jumped out of a plane.  In the infantry, we didn’t do that.  I thought, What am I doing here?  I was a 134 pound weakling.  I mean, I was really a schleppy kid.  I had a uniform on and I had acting corporal stripes on my sleeve, but I was a nerd! 

How I got through that course and became a combat officer in the United States Army, I will never know. 

 I finished the course in February of 1945, and it was time to go overseas.  I got my commission with one hand, and I got my orders for Europe with the other hand.

Every day that you could spend in the States was a day that maybe your life was safe. 

It turned out that I was responsible for 200 men going over.  The ship was a disaster.  The first bunk was down on the floor, and the top bunk was up by the ceiling, with bunks in between.  The first few days out, the plumbing failed.  I won’t describe to you what that was like.

There was an amazing sight going overseas–one of the impressions from World War II that I will never forget.  When I went up on deck, as far as I could see, there were ships.  They were sending huge convoys to protect them from what they called the German Wolf Packs, the submarines.  There was every kind of ship in the world.  Troop ships like ours carrying men, ships carrying supplies, naval ships, destroyers, and a couple of cruisers.  The destroyers were darting around among the other ships, looking for submarines.  Every once in a while, they dropped a depth charge. Whether there was a submarine or not, I don’t know.  It was an unforgettable experience.

We finally landed in La Havre, France.

When they asked me where I’d gotten my basic training, I said “Fort Knox Armored School.”  “Okay, perfect. We are looking for some replacements for armored units.”

So I became a tank officer.

Those in charge knew I was on my way to the “real war.”  They said, “While you’re here, we have some duties in the town, and you can help us.”  So, what was one of my first duties in the American Army?  I had to keep the lines of soldiers orderly at a brothel, to keep them from fighting, and to make sure that they were given condoms by some enlisted men who were handing them out. 

I joined the Fourth Armored Division in northern Germany.  I was assigned to B Company, 37th Tank Battalion.  I was not only the commander of my tank, but I was the platoon leader of four other tanks.  I communicated with those other tanks with a radio.

I was just 19, but I guess I knew what I was doing as much as anybody did.  I may have been a nerd, but I was smart.  My first day, I said to the sergeant who had been commanding my platoon for a while, “You keep doing what you’re doing.  I’ll watch you, and when I’m ready, I’ll tell you.”  That was maybe one of the smartest things I ever did.

Since the war, I have claustrophobia.  American tanks in World War II were cracker boxes.  There are SUVs on the road today that are bigger than the tank I was in!

There were five men in a tank.  Since I was the tank commander, I was up in the highest point of the tank.  Down in front of me to my left was a man called a Loader, and a man to the other side called a Gunner.  In between the two of them, and along side me, was the gun, which was 76 millimeters. It was huge.  Every time it fired, it came back and rocked the tank. 

Down below me, in a sort of basket, were the Driver and the Assistant Driver.  I was looking through a periscope.  If I wanted the driver to go to the left, I’d kick him in the left shoulder, and if I wanted him to go to the right, I’d kick him in the right shoulder.  We did have an intercom, but they didn’t always work.  Besides, we couldn’t hear because the machine noise was absolutely deafening.  I’m hearing impaired today from the noise.

It’s a miracle that anybody comes out of months and months of tank warfare with their sanity.

We slept on the ground, or we slept in the tank, or we slept on the tank.  It depended on where we were and how dangerous it was.

We didn’t bathe.  It wasn’t like being in the Navy or like being in the Air Force, where you go back to a base or a ship and take a shower and change your clothes.  We didn’t have a change of clothes.

Whenever it was possible, the guys on foot would jump up on the tank and ride with us.  If we were moving from one place to another where there was no shooting, we would always have 10, 12, 15 guys on the back deck of the tank getting off their feet.  They would also keep warm because of the heat of the motor.

We didn’t have any winter clothing and, in February and March, it was cold. The army had arctic clothing, but we didn’t.  We had just four pair of socks and two pair of boots.  My feet got frostbitten because my socks got wet and I didn’t change them soon enough.  It was painful, but not like those in the Bulge, where they were deep in snow, which we never were.

Our interaction with the enemy was not like being in the infantry where you walk up to somebody and point a gun at them and pull the trigger.  Half the time we were shooting at other tanks.  You didn’t feel so bad about shooting another tank because it’s impersonal.  I was blessed not to have to serve in the infantry, because that was really fighting man to man.

The German high command knew that the war was over after the Battle of the Bulge, but they fought on, because Hitler made them fight.  The officers left if they could get away, or they stashed away money.  If they could lose their identity, they took advantage of it. The poor guys on the line were still standing out there with a rifle, trying to stop the Americans, and we were unstoppable.

In April of 1945, one part of our division liberated a work camp that was attached to Buchenwald.  That was really the first camp that got all the attention, when Patton and Eisenhower and Bradley came.  Then they called in the Press.  It was the first time the Press had been able to see what had happened in the camps.

When Buchenwald was liberated, we heard that the Burgermeister of the town (similar to a head of the government) was ordered to bring all the people from the town to see what happened.  Of course, they said they didn’t know anything about it.  Then they made the people in the town bury the bodies.  The Burgermeister and his wife and children went home and committed suicide.  This was the story that spread through the division. I’m not sure that we really understood what was happening in the camps yet.

The Germans were all around us.  Most of them wanted to get away from the Russians; that’s all they cared about.  The SS were doing terrible things in the concentration camps, but the Wehrmacht, which was the people’s army, were not the SS.  They were the regular army and by that time, they were old men and boys.  We saw 16 year olds shooting at us.

Hitler built this wonderful network of highways all over Germany called the Autobahn.  This was supposed to be Hitler’s secret weapon, to be able to move troops easily from the Russian front to the American front, and then back to the Russian.  Well, he didn’t apparently think about the fact that these highways were available also to us.  Sometimes, the Germans would blow a bridge so we couldn’t get across but, just as fast as the Germans blew up bridges, we had combat engineering units that could very quickly put up temporary structures. The American Army was amazing when it came to that sort of thing. 

Our tanks were terrible, though.  The Germans had much better tanks than we did, and they had better guns than we did.  But we had more.  If they lost a tank, they lost a tank.  If we lost a tank, we had four more that some factory in Detroit had produced.   We really out-produced the Germans.  That’s what helped us win the war.

How was I feeling? Most of the time I was scared to death.  Everybody was afraid. But we were all in the same boat.  And, as time went on, you got more comfortable with the people you were with. Also, our training was very good; we knew what we were doing. If we didn’t have the best equipment, we had know-how.  Everybody supported everybody else; we were a team.  We were five guys and a tank.  In my case, 25 guys and five tanks.  We got to knew each other and care about each other.

Our next orders involved taking the city of Prague. 

We moved very quickly, going in from the west.  The Germans were surrendering in huge numbers, but they didn’t want to surrender to the Russians, who were coming in from the East.  The Germans assumed that the Russians would kill them or put them in prison forever.  If they were going to surrender, they wanted to surrender to us. 

Therefore, we had huge numbers of prisoners. We didn’t know what to do with them so we bundled them.  We would take 200 German prisoners and say to one G.I. with a rifle, “You’re in charge of these Germans. Move them out.”  They’d took them west, to where there were prisoner of war camps.

The war ended May 7th or 8th, depending on which country you were in.  Different countries celebrate V.E. Day on different days.

Suddenly we were told, “You’re not going to take Prague; the Russians are going to take Prague.”  General Patton was having a fit, because he wanted to take Prague.  He didn’t want the Russians to take it, and he was right.  However, we learned later that Eisenhower told Patton that if he countermanded the order that he should not take Prague, Patton would be court-martialed.

Europe had been dark for many months because of the bombings.  The day the war ended, that night, lights went on.  We were out in the woods and there was a little town nearby called Strakonice, and even in this small Czechoslovakian town, the lights went on.  So we knew the war was over.

On the 11th of May, the Second Ukrainian Army arrived.  There was singing and dancing and Schnapps and Vodka and drunkenness. They were really crazy people. But they were entitled; they had been through so much at the hands of the Germans.

We danced with the Russians and soon our command said, “Okay, we’re going back to Germany.  Now the work begins.” 

We took over a German military barracks in Deggendorf.  We settled in for what was to be an occupation.

It turned out that the battalion intelligence officer had been wounded, and they wanted me to take his place.  So, I went to counterintelligence school in Oberammergau, Germany, which was deep in Bavaria. It was adjacent to Berchtesgaden, which was Hitler’s mountaintop retreat. The school’s official designation was ETIS-USFET – Counter Intelligence.

One of the worst Nazis was Julius Streicher.  He was the gauleiter (Nazi party leader) of Nuremberg and one of the most hateful anti-Semites.  His brother, Max Streicher, lived in Deggendorf and had huge contracts from the German government to build highways.  This counter-intelligence detachment that I joined was charged with gathering evidence linking Max Streicher to the Nazis, so that they could charge him with war crimes. 

When they completed their dossier, the team said, “We’re going to Nuremberg, would you like to come with us to the War Crimes Trials?  We can get you in to the visitors' gallery.”

Like the convoy I mentioned in the North Atlantic, those trials were a sight I will never, ever forget.  In front of me were Goering and von Ribbentrop and Streicher, and Donitz—the worst of the Nazis.  I was looking right at them and hoping that they were all going to die.  Most of them were hung.  Goering cheated us and took his own life and Hess was imprisoned. It was an unforgettable experience.

In May of 1946, they converted our 37th tank battalion into a Constabulary squadron, which meant they took away our tanks and gave us light, fast vehicles.

We were being trained to look for war criminals. We would pick a town, enter in the middle of the night, and block every road in and out.  When the people woke up in the morning, they had no place to go.  Then we would go house to house questioning people, checking their arms to see if they had SS tattoos on them, and looking for shortwave radios and weapons that they weren’t supposed to have.

We covered most of Germany – the size of Pennsylvania with 16 million Germans and a half a million refugees.  We learned what we called “interrogation Deutsch,” enough German so that we could ask the questions we needed to ask. 

Of course, the people that we were investigating didn’t like us, and nobody ever admitted to being a Nazi.  We had blowup photographs of these big Nazi rallies and there were a million people in one photograph.  We’d show the photo and say to them, “Nobody’s a Nazi, but who are all these people?” 

The army was trying to weed out the innocent people, because a lot of the poor schlubs who were in the Wehrmacht had been drafted against their will.  They didn’t know from Nazis or Jews.  They were handed a rifle and told, “Go fight.  We’re trying to get rid of them.” 

But there were plenty of the bad guys still around. We’d turn them over to some higher authority, where they would be further interrogated, and then someone would decide whether this was a major war criminal, a minor war criminal, and whether they should they go to Nuremberg.  There were many tribunals, not just the one in Nuremberg, and less important people were tried in lesser tribunals.

In July, we finally finished and it was time to go home.

I was on a Navy ship for the return trip. I had been on the ship one day when I heard, “Lieutenant Levy, please report to the commanding officer immediately.”  I thought, what have I done?  I reported in. 

The Army puts everything on your record.  Everything.  If you sneeze, it’s on your record.  So, the commanding officer said, “I see that you were in command of 200 soldiers going over, so you had some experience with shipboard administration.  We want you to be one of the Officers of the Guard.” 

I said, “What do I have to do?”  He said, “Well, mainly you have to keep the enlisted men away from the nurses and the WACs and the Red Cross girls. Also, there’s an advantage to your doing this job; you get to eat with the Naval officers.”  Well, that sounded good.  So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” 

I had to wear a jacket and tie to meals, and there were white table cloths, fresh milk, and steaks–food that I hadn’t seen in eight months. 

When I look back now at myself after I finished high school, I can’t get it through my head that I did what I did, and that I did as well as I did.  I think I was a good soldier, and I think I was a damn good officer.  I don’t know how or why.  I don’t know where all those smarts came from.  I don’t know where the leadership ability came from.  But it was there.

I don’t know how I got through the training.  I really don’t.  Physically and emotionally and in every way, it was so hard.  And it was meant to be.

There aren’t many of us left.  A thousand Veterans from World War II are dying every week.  I’m pretty much in the youngest cohort of World War II veterans. 

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