Oral history interview with Milo G. Flaten

[Interview Begins]

DERKS: Probably the most comfortable thing would be to start at the beginning.

FLATEN: Okay.

DERKS: Like, when-- I don't know where you were or who you were when the war--

FLATEN: The-- Uh, when the war started, I was out in the country. I was a sophomore in high school and my folks were looking to buy a house. We lived in Minneapolis, and they were looking to buy a house out near Hudson. And we stopped to get some groceries Sunday afternoon on Pearl Harbor Day, my dad went in to buy some beans or bread or something, and he came out and held the newspaper up in front of the window. The car was parked at the curb, and it said WAR across the top of it, and I couldn't figure out why there would be a war about a place called Pearl Harbor, which I'd never heard of, in the Hawaiian Islands, which I'd never heard of either. And I found out that we owned the Hawaiian Islands. And then I went, as I said I was a sophomore at West High 00:01:00School in Minneapolis, and they got us out of class in the morning to hear the president speak about the day that will go down in infamy. And I was glad because usually they had assemblies after school at the end of the day, but this one we got to cut classes for it. And then, my mother and father moved to Milwaukee. My father tried to get a job in the Army, and they said he was too old. He was a World War I veteran. So, he was a Roosevelt, he was actually a buddy of Hubert Humphrey's. He was on the city council in Minneapolis when Hubert was mayor, and he got him a job as War Foods Administrator for the state of Wisconsin. And I went to Shorewood High School. I transferred my senior year in high school. And my birthday is the 7th of May, I was eighteen and the law 00:02:00said when you're eighteen you're supposed to report for -- they notified you ahead of time, that a month or two before your birthday you had to go to the draft board and tell them you were going to be eighteen on such and such a day. And then on that day they would send you a letter to go down to -- downtown to the Buffalo Street Induction Station, which was about four blocks south of Wisconsin Ave in an old warehouse, and report for your physical. Well, I said, I'm going to graduate on June 6, 1943 and my birthday is on May 7, won't you let me finish high school? He says, oh sure, that happens a lot and they gave me a high school deferment for month. And so, I had a deferment from the draft for 00:03:00one month. And then I got my notice to report for physical, but because I'd had one deferment, they usually let you have two weeks to clean up your affairs. They wouldn't let me do that. So, I got on a train and reported to Camp Grant, Illinois. I have no idea, that's right near Rockford some place, because we used to go to a roller rink in Rockford for recreation. Then they sent me to Camp Blanding, Florida, which is an IRTC, which stands for Infantry Replacement Training Center. Took seventeen weeks of basic training, and I had a lot of other things happen to me, which aren't worthy of reporting, like I was supposed to go to a college training program, and because I had a test in high school 00:04:00that gave me, I had a certain SAT or something like that, and I was qualified to be in the College Training Program. And they assigned me to John W. Stetson University, which is in Deland, Florida, right near Camp Blanding, and I got there, and they closed the program down. So, they took me back to Camp Blanding and told me I should be what they call a Dog Robber, which is an officer's orderly. You clean up the officer's quarters when they go out during the day, duty training, you clean up their, polish their shoes and make their bed and stuff like that. And I said nothing doing-- I'm not going to be a dog robber, that's what they call them in the Army. So, he said okay and they put me in, I found out it was the best job in the Army. The officers were as tired as the trainees, they had to work as hard as, they were just exhausted at the end of 00:05:00the day. They could hardly, sometimes they wouldn't even pull the blankets down, they'd fall asleep right on their bed and there was no whiskey bottles, no nothing, all I did was make their bed.

DERKS: Why's it called dog robber?

FLATEN: Beats the hell out of me. There's a lot of things in the Army that are expressions that I hear and most of them are so filthy I can't repeat them. Anyway, they made me a permanent KP in the officer's mess, teach me what a good job the dog robber was when I refused to be one. And the permanent KP meant that I had to be on kitchen police, that's if you know, maybe you don't know what KP is. That's assist the cooks by scrubbing pots and pans and mashing potatoes, peeling potatoes, that kind of stuff. And because I was permanent, I was-- I got 00:06:00to be a friend of the mess sergeant who was a guy from Fontana, California, and he called himself the Duke of California, of Fontana. And so, when officers would come in the mess hall, you're supposed to holler Tens-Hut, well, when the mess sergeant came in the mess hall, we had to holler, "make way for the duke." And the duke had me-- he had me collect two dollars from every KP. They took-- the enlisted men took turns, eight at a time being on KP and I'd have the roster and took two bucks from each one of them and they would, and then I had to go into town, dressed up in khakis, into Jacksonville, and bet on the dog in the dog races and then the mess sergeant took a two dollar-- or two percent skim 00:07:00from every pot, so he could buy pot and had it shipped in the mail. And finally, they shipped me to England. Later I found out that they had a policy. They wouldn't ship anybody overseas unless he was nineteen, and I was still eighteen, so on my nineteenth birthday they sent me to Camp Kilmer, New York, and I went on a weekend pass and the cab driver told me lots of secrets. He told me that I was going on the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth, I can't remember which, and they'd already told me I was going on the Mount Vernon. And I figured this cab driver, he had a lot of secrets, he said that Joe DiMaggio had a bad heel, and it was really syphilis of the heel, and that he got it from Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean those were the kind of internal secrets you learn from cab drivers. And 00:08:00when Tuesday came around, sure enough, we got on the Queen Mary, just like the cab driver said, and we went overseas and we landed in Glenrock, in the Firth of Clyde, I think, in Scotland, and took a rickety rack train down to Cornwall. And they put me in the 29th Division, which was shipped overseas to England to become-- their job was to invade France. That was what they were training for. They never saw a whit of combat in Africa or anything. Their job was to land in France. And they had a replacement company, I can't remember, might have even been a replacement battalion, even though they didn't have any casualties. But that's because the training was so severe and tough that they were losing 00:09:00casualties, plus the fact that I presume as D-Day got closer and closer that the guys realized that they were about to be in combat. But whatever it was--

DERKS: What was the training?

FLATEN: What?

DERKS: What was the training?

FLATEN: What was the what?

DERKS: The training.

FLATEN: Oh, we had various things. It got boring as hell because we had it in training, it was called-- we'd have the platoon and the attack. The attack on a fortified position. The platoon at a river crossing. The company in a holding position. Various-- everyday we'd have that type of thing. And we had good training, but it got to be boring. But much of it, attack on a fortified position, came in handy on the beach, and in Germany when we were going through the Siegfried Line. I learned how to handle explosives and I learned how to 00:10:00handle explosives as I previously mentioned about knocking out a tank, but the-- anyway, we got on a-- we were in a marshaling area in-- near a town where the Queen Mary berths, and I never remember that. It's on the English Channel by the Isle of Wight. I can remember all that, but I can't remember the name of the city, big city, couple million people. And then they put us in a marshaling-- oh, they took me out of the replacement battalion and put us into the 116th Infantry Regiment, and in E Company. And I better tell you about how an infantry division is lined up. It's roughly-- everything in the Army is roughly in threes. They call it the triangle division. It's-- they have three regiments to 00:11:00a division and usually three divisions to a corps, and three corps to an army. And then you go down the line. In a regiment, there are three battalions, and in each battalion, there are three companies. There are actually four. A lot of people who are watching this will say a lot of baloney, there was four companies. There are three rifle companies. They call them maneuver elements. And then there is the heavy weapons company that has 81 [millimeter] mortars, that's a bigger tube, they stand about this high, whereas in the rifle company you had 60 mortars, which are little short things, 60 millimeters. Don't ask me how many inches a millimeter is. It's that big. And then in each, there are three companies to a battalion, plus the fourth one, which is a weapons company. 00:12:00They had 81 mortars, bigger mortars, and heavy, heavy machine guns, which are-- the barrel is cooled by water. They have a big water jacket on them. They're both Lewis guns invented in World War I by a guy named Lewis, apparently, and water-cooled meant you could fire a longer burst and the barrel would stay cool because the water would cool it. I'll tell you about a water-cooled barrel after we get into Normandy. And then each rifle company, there are three rifle companies, had three platoons. Everything's in threes, remember. Actually, it had four of them, three rifle platoons, and then each platoon had three rifle squads and that's where the threes end. And each squad was nine men. First scout, second scout, an assistant Browning Automatic Rifle-- a Browning 00:13:00Automatic Rifle is-- sounds like, characteristically enough, was an automatic rifle. It fired twenty rounds, and it fired rapid fire [makes noise]. And um, then the fourth guy was the BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] man, everything in the Army is initials so if I refer to something by initials, ask me to explain what it is. Then the assistant BAR man and the rest were riflemen. And when we were in the marshaling area, we had lieutenants who were mostly ROTC graduates from University of Mississippi, Texas A and M, Texas Christian, and so forth and those guys weren't exactly Rhodes Scholars, and a lot of them were football 00:14:00players and other kinds of jocks. They were good guys, good officers, but they-- when they assigned us maps of Normandy, they were in French. They were French maps because they were topographic maps that had, um-- altitude increments on them so you'd know where a hill was. I don't know if you'd ever seen one. They're not like highway maps. And-- but they were all in French and me and my big mouth mentioned to the company commander that I had taken French in high school and I could help out the Texas A and M officers on reading the map, and immediately they gave me a map and made me the scout, and told me, "Just think, Flaten," Captain Stewart his name was, he was from New Mexico. And he said, "Just think, Flaten, you'll be leading eight million men all the way across Europe and into the heart of Berlin." And I thought-- we had a big laugh about 00:15:00that, and I didn't know it was really true. I did. I led eight million men across Europe, up to the Elbe River, which is where we were supposed to stop and met the Russians on the other side of the river. But that was a long time, it was about a year later, and I was wounded many times, I think eight times, and I think I got three or four Purple Hearts. I saw-- I found two Purple Hearts today when I was looking for pictures. I found out no matter if you are lightly wounded, you'd go to the aide station, they'd send a wire home to your parents saying this is to notify you, your son, Milo G. Flaten, has been lightly wounded and has returned to action. You'd go down to the aide station with a blister on your heel and my folks are going nuts, about every other day they'd be getting a telegram and they told me that, so I told them from now on, the aide man, each 00:16:00company had a medic called the aide man, which I suppose was short for first aide, and he would bandage you up, and so. Anyway, back to D-Day--

DERKS: So, did he stop sending the messages?

FLATEN: What?

DERKS: You told him to stop sending the messages?

FLATEN: Well, I told-- the battalion aide station was where you went if you're wounded, but the aide man was from each platoon, there was one aide man. And he would take you back or get another aide man to carry you in a stretcher if you were wounded, or he'd help you back, put you on a piggy-back back to the battalion aide station, where we had a wonderful man named Dr. Creese, C-R-E-S-S, C-R-E-E-S-E. I think he was from Louisiana. God, what a wonderful man. He was killed. But that's ahead of time. You want to know about D-Day. We 00:17:00got on a troop-- we did some training in-- on a beach called United States Army Amphibious Training Center at Slapton Sands, England, and had a sandy beach similar to Normandy. And they told us, I'm sure when we were training there, they told us that's why we were training there, because it's similar to a beach in Normandy. But they didn't tell us when, and we were told not to reveal that. I guess then we were -- not allowed to go to town, or else they figured we were all, none of us wanted to tell secrets because we were all on the invasion force, but whatever it was -- We trained at Slapton Sands and we didn't have any LCVPs -- that stands for Landing Craft Vehicle dash Personnel, which will hold a 00:18:00jeep and, and/or thirty men, and thirty men is about the size, that's the riflemen in a platoon. Each platoon holds twenty-seven, each squad is nine men and there are three squads, that's twenty-seven, see I can do arithmetic. That's the extent of my arithmetic by the way, and, uh, and uh, and there was the platoon sergeant and officer and an assistant platoon sergeant. So that would make the thirty-man boat team, and they trimmed them down, each platoon was normally forty men with a bunch of other stuff, support squad, but they just put the riflemen in there. They didn't even put a medic in there, just the riflemen, the platoon leader, who was a second lieutenant usually, and a University of 00:19:00Mississippi graduate, there was in ours. He was a nice guy too, his name was Wells, he got killed. Everybody I know got killed or wounded. And that's why we never have conventions and what do you call it-- Reunions because there was nobody to reunion with, whereas if you're even in an Air Force unit there's still somebody that was left from the good old days, but we had no one. Everyone was killed or wounded. And we-- put us in these boat teams and we were on the, well, first I'll tell you about in England.

When we were in England, they put us in Cornwall on three towns, one was called Newquay and the British call a dock a quay, I don't know why, and it's like they 00:20:00call a line a queue, well, they call a dock a quay. Q-U-A-Y is the way it's pronounced. And there was a town called Tourquay, and Newquay and you can imagine what the GIs made out of Newquay. Let's go to town and get some-- let's go to Newquay and get some-- And then Tavisstock going down the Cornwall peninsula, Tavisstock, Newquay, Tourquay and I can't remember all those little towns. Slapton Sands was in there. The nearest big town was Bristol and then at the very end was town called characteristically, characteristically enough, Land's End, and that was the closest town to the Germans. That was the closest town to France, across the Channel. And the British evacuated their homes and let us stay in their homes, and the GIs were all-- many of whom were teenagers like me, and most teenagers are pretty bad people, and they break things and 00:21:00swear and cuss and stuff, and we became very-- we didn't want to wreck stuff. We'd say don't, don't you know, don't spill on the floor, on the carpet, we'd try to keep things, and the British people would come home on the weekends and get stuff out of the icebox or whatever, and they would be very nice to us, and they'd thank us for staying at their house. And that kind of stuff and I had to mention that because uh. Then they took us into the marshaling area, a town that starts with L and it ain't Lancaster, and-- they, uh-- oh, it was boring. We 00:22:00were there and we were surrounded by a chain link fence with barb wire on it and MPs on the outside so we couldn't go to town and give away the fact that we were about to invade France. And, but they had given us maps and all that stuff. So, we knew everything they knew. And we knew it intimately, we knew where each draw up on the hill was and where. We had about half a mile, three quarters of a mile of white sand, hard packed sand on the beach. Then we got in the boat, and I think on the troop ship carrier the USS Thomas Jefferson [APA-30], and went across down past the Firth of Clyde, out into the English Channel and then we -- and it was real windy and it was wavy and they stopped and we went back and on 00:23:00the, I don't think we got into the English Channel, but we were on this damn troop ship and it was packed with at least a whole regiment, that's 3,000 men, everything's in threes remember. Three squads and three battalions with 3,000 men, 1,000 men in each battalion. And on the fifth we got out into the Channel, and it was really windy and raining and they brought us back to that town that I can't remember, in where the Isle of Wight is. And then on the sixth they said we're going to go. We thought we had gone on the Thomas Jefferson, packed, practiced loading, practiced unloading and practiced getting into LCVPs. Well, the LVCP is a Higgins boat named after a guy named Higgins from-- who had a boat 00:24:00company, flat-bottomed boat. It had a hinge door on the front and while we didn't practice amphibious landings in the English Channel, they had a wall that was supposed to represent a ship, the side of a ship, and they had a thing called a Jacobs ladder, which is heavy rope squares, and you had to climb down the Jacobs Ladder into the LCVP which is hanging from a davit, which is a thing hanging out with ropes.

When they, on D-Day, they were supposed to lower, no as a matter of fact, all the way across the channel, the LCVPs, the Higgins boats, were hanging on the side of the ship, so it wouldn't take much of an imagination to know what those ships were with those landing craft on them. I don't know how many they had on 00:25:00them, three or four on each side of the ship. And we trained by going over this, up on top of this wall, wooden wall was supposed to represent the side of the ship. We never did do it on the side of an actual ship. Climbed down the Jacob's ladder, remember when you climb down that your hands are on up and down things otherwise you get your fingers stepped on by the guy above you. And then you got into the boat and then they would lower the boat to the ground below and that was supposed to represent the English Channel. And they gave us training on, at a high school or something, some kind of a school that had a, probably a college, had a pool and the unit I was in was all hillbillies from Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania. I was in the 29th Division, which was, the patch was 00:26:00blue and gray representing soldiers in World War I who were the sons of Civil War veterans, and the gray were the sons of the South, because Maryland and Virginia was right on the Mason-Dixon Line. Some of the guys were ancestors of Union soldiers and that was the blue, so the patch was blue and gray, we were composed of ancestors from both the Civil War in the Union Army and the Confederate Army. And uh, oh I forgot where I was. Oh, yeah, we got into-- after we got into those landing craft, we-- we got out into the Channel and all of a 00:27:00sudden, we could see it was getting-- we were supposed to land at 6:00 AM. I've read books since then, 6:30, but it was 6:00. It was still dark out, but days are very short in Normandy. Doesn't get dark until about 11:30 at night because it's so far north, north of Madison. And when they turned off the engines, for three days we've been hearing the engines of that damn troop ship, all of a sudden, the engines stopped. And-- and it's wavy and they told us to come on, we were going over, we're going to get in the Higgins boats. And like everything else, when the Army is-- I was a private, not a PFC, I was a private. And I had 00:28:00just-- I was nineteen years old and one month. By the way, the day I graduated from high school was June 6, 1943, and the day we hit the beach in Normandy was June 6, 1944. Exactly one year to the day afterwards. And then we climbed into the LCVP. I think they sometimes were called LSVP, but it doesn't make any difference. [Break in recording] One thing I had neglected to tell you about the -- we were in some kind of a pool, a swimming pool, I think at a high school or something when we were over in Cornwall. I think it was near Bristol, and we learned how to work our life preservers, our Mae west's, in case a bad thing 00:29:00happened, the ship was torpedoed or something. And these guys would try to swim with their clothes on so they could see how they could swim, and I could see that none of the guys I think could swim. No one in my platoon, which consisted of hillbillies from Virginia, rural Virginia, and Maryland-- that's the 29th Division was the Maryland National Guard. The unit I was in was the 116th Infantry, but for some reason in the Civil War it was the Dandy 5th of Maryland and they still played at parades, they still played the Dandy 5th of Maryland which is our regimental song. And on D-Day when we got over, we got into the, down the Jacobs Ladders, and as I said it was quiet as heck because all of a 00:30:00sudden the engines shut down on the ship. And the engine shut down on the other ships and there were ships as far as you could see. And we climbed down the Jacob's Ladder, got into the Higgins boat, and then instead of lowering things like they did on the side of the wall in Tavistock, they just let her rip and we all landed with a splash into the water. Some of the guys fell down. It was real rough and we had to circle around because we had to wait till all the LSVPs got into the water and then we were going in in a V formation with our company first, the 2nd Battalion was the lead battalion. And the-- what?

DERKS: Be careful not to hit your mic.

FLATEN: I'm sorry. We were in a-- so, we had to wait till all of the LSVPs got into the water before we formed our V with E Company in the lead, and the first platoon and the first squad and the first scout was me. So, I was the first guy to land in Normandy as far as I know. I presume, and I've read that there are others who landed airborne and stuff, but I didn't see anybody else but me when I landed. I could see S Company in the next part of the V, but I was-- my Higgins boat was the first one to go. It was manned by coast guardsmen, not sailors. Why to this day I'll never know. I had read about coast guardsmen 00:32:00making landings in the various island hopping invasions in the Pacific, and I presumed we had trained, seasoned coast guardsmen who were experienced in making landings, and I asked the chief petty officer, who was ready to lower the ramp alongside me, if he was a seasoned coast guardsman from the South Pacific and he said, no. The last job he had was manning a light house in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan.

DERKS: So, there you are, hurtling towards the beach.

FLATEN: And then, ready to hit the beach and it's rough as hell, and the other guys are seasick. For some reason I don't get seasick. I was-- I had been in the 00:33:00Army a long time, in the Army Reserve, when I-- to get ahead of the story, I joined the Army Reserve after I got out of the Army, and was in an Airborne Infantry unit, and jumped out of airplanes and never got airsick. Never got sick on, never got car sick as far as I know. I'm just one of those kind of guys that never got sick. But they, the guys, many of the men in the LSVP were sick. By the way, this was a discriminate-- racially discriminatory incident that was far worse than anything perpetrated on Blacks. I didn't have to ride in the back of the bus or drink at a separate drinking fountain or go to separate school. But the only people involved in the invasion of Normandy were white male. No Blacks, 00:34:00no women, no Hispanics. All white males, and all of the 9,000 casualties that day were white males. I would have been happy to sit in the back of the bus or drink at a special drinking fountain or go to a special school than to escape the sheer terror that was inflicted on us white males. I had to get that off my chest, that there are two sides to discrimination, and we were segregated. The-- I don't know why, because I understand in Vietnam that most of the-- two-thirds of the fighting was done by Blacks, but anyway. As we got into-- we were supposed to, we were trained to go to the, uh. On the final approach, which is 00:35:00an infantry term, to the LD, which is called the line of departure, and then another place where they drop yellow flares in the water and that was the line of, that may have been the line of departure. And the engineers placed yellow flares in the water, they were ahead of us, and then they got the hell out of there. And as we crossed the line of departure, all the guns in the world opened up including an ancient battleship we had behind us called the Alaska, I think, which was a World War I retread, and we had a destroyer, which we called the Shaw, USS Shaw [DD-373], which was supposed to give us overhead fire, direct 00:36:00artillery fire until we got our artillery landed. And I don't think they had a gyroscope on the Shaw because it was in the waves, and it was going back and forth. And the first round would land in Paris, or someplace way inland and the next would land on the beach. But we, we were, and they kept playing music on a public address system, and they had two records: Glenn Miller's "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and "String of Pearls" or something like that. I couldn't figure out why they had those records playing popular music and we were all going literally to our deaths, but we didn't know that.

But finally, I could feel hits, I could feel the landing craft hit something, 00:37:00and I presumed it was one of those telephone poles the Germans had placed on the beach, because when they lowered the ramp and they formally said infantry prepare to debark. The ramp is down. And with that, they lowered the ramp and I ran down the ramp and went into water way over my head, I never-- couldn't touch bottom. And I could swim like a fish, because I was a boy scout and had taken swimming merit badge, and life-saving merit badge, and I was on the swimming team at Shorewood High School. I could swim like a fish. So, I immediately dumped everything except my clothing. My pack, my helmet, anything that would weight you down. That's what you're supposed to do, they train you in swimming and lifesaving. Couldn't get my shoes off because I had leggings covering the laces and I couldn't untie them. So, I swam, and my rifle had a wooden stock and 00:38:00a wooden upper hand guard, so it kind of floated. And besides that, a rifleman would rather lose his arm than his rifle. By this time, they had ingrained that into us. And I swam ashore, and outside of one other guy who also was-- lived on the water, he lived in New York on Long Island, and he could swim. Big tough Jew, about six [feet] four [inches] and he was a BAR man, he was the strongest man I ever saw. And he swam ashore with his, he knew, he swam ashore with his pack and his BAR and four magazines of ammunition. I can see why the Jews took 00:39:00Golan Heights with such ease if they all had tough guys like Hersh, Bob Hersh. And I landed, I swam and finally got so where I could stand. The shore was packed sand, and it must have been 300 yards to what they called the shingle. The tide was coming in at I think 7:00, and the shingle was a pile of egg-shaped rocks, little pebbles about the size of an egg that had washed up and that was the high-water mark, and that offered some shelter from flat trajectory weapons. Flat trajectory means machine, rifles and small arms, and they called, they never rise above the height of a man for 500 yards. Uh-- I was under a hedgehog, 00:40:00the Germans had made, in addition to these telephone poles, which had sharpened ends that were supposed to score the bottom of landing craft, they had, up beach a little ways they had welded railroad tracks together into Xs, an extra thing to hold them up. And that was supposed to also punch holes in the bottom of LSVPs. And hid behind one of those because there were a lot of -- small arms. And of course, I had-- I had-- had my head shaved for something to do in the marshaling area and my head was white, I felt like I was a bull's-eye. And tracer bullets were flying around. Germans had red tracers just like we did. And 00:41:00I hid under that, I didn't have a rifle, I didn't have anything. Just me and my leggings and my shoes and my ODs.

By the way, we were, that stands for the color, olive drab. It's a wool, very good quality shirt and pants. And that's what the infantrymen wore. They didn't wear dungarees like we trained in, or like sailors or air force people wear, we wore heavy wool uniforms, and they were impregnated with stuff that was supposed to keep gas, lewisite gas from coming through it. But they were heavy and uh -- and they were wet, but I wasn't worried about my temperature, I was worried about getting killed, and by then, other boats kept coming in. And most of the boats had 1st Division people on them, and the set-up on the invasion of 00:42:00Normandy was that two regiments were supposed to land. The seasoned unit was the 16th regiment of the 1st Division, and the trained who had, the other outfit who had done nothing but training for two or three years, was the unit I was in. The 116th regiment of the 29th Division. Two units landed in Normandy. The 16th regiment, infantry regiment, and the 116th infantry regiment. And I've read later on that they took 9,000 casualties on Omaha beach that day, so other units came in after us. And -- by then there were landing craft coming in, most of 00:43:00which were like that one in that picture there, they landed on the beach, and they landed right at shoreline, and maybe got your feet wet on a couple of waves, but -- and those guys were getting killed and wounded. And so, I went over and got a rifle and a helmet, except that I had to wait about two hours before the guys who were killed hadn't been hit in the head. I was darned if I was going to wear a helmet off a guy who had been hit in the head. And then we got up to the shingle and we saw a little wall, which was by then the water was encroaching, coming, the tide was coming in. And the high-water mark was that shingle. Why they call it a shingle, I have no idea, but it's, I looked it up in the dictionary one time and a shingle is indeed a pile of stones, a high-water mark.

And we went to a little wall where they told us there would be a wall there in 00:44:00training. It was a cobblestone wall masonry. It was about four foot, three or four feet high, and on the wall, it was kind of a retaining wall for a cobblestone road -- cement, paved road, paved with cobblestone. And we got there and across the road was a Bangalore tor-- a, uh,-- accordion of wire, barbed wire, wrapped in circles, have you seen pictures of those. That was designed to keep infantry from crossing the road into the trenches across the road. And the idea was that we, we were told the engineers, and of course we never saw an engineer, would take a Bangalore torpedo, which is a long tube, metal tube full 00:45:00of explosives, I presume TNT, and it had a string on the end which was a fuse. Well, this Hersh, who was a miracle man, went out and found a Bangalore torpedo someplace, but we didn't know how to pull, how to work the fuse and he pulled the string and it had an eight second fuse. All fuses in the Army are eight seconds, by the way. And there was a lieutenant from the 1st Division, and he was crying and sobbing and telling how awful it was and he was scared, and he wanted his mother, and Hersh decided he'd go. And we're getting an accumulation of soldiers. And because in basic training I was the tall guy in my squad, I was given the job as the number one guy and the number one guy in basic training is a squad leader. And most of the time after that I was a squad leader, even though I was a private. And I just naturally did the things I'd took in 00:46:00training. I redistributed the ammunition, made sure everybody had a rifle, and here we had people from the 2nd Rangers, we had people from our unit, well me and Hersh, and the rest of the guys were from the 1st Division, because we had landed in the 1st Division landing strip, EZ Red landing sector. And I said, okay, now, you guys see if you can find any ammunition. Made everybody distribute and they were passing it back and forth. And then the Shaw, which was the destroyer giving us overhead artillery, started shooting machine gun fire or some kind of ack-ack fire at us. And we had a little sailor and he had dungarees on, and he had one of those big outside helmets that the Navy wears, so they can have earphones underneath them, and he had a little thing that would, and of 00:47:00course that didn't work. And so, he got out of his bag, and he got wig-wag flags, like you have in the boy scouts, and he started semaphoring to the ship, "Don't shoot at us, we're Americans." We're the good guys. And then pretty soon that little shutter box came back, and he read the message, and I said, "What'd they say?" And he said, "Give yourself up to the nearest American troops." And so that was, and then they started shooting white P-- WP, white phosphorous, which is, it'll burn anything as long as it gets oxygen. Anything, metal. Same as thermite grenades, they're made of white phosphorous. And they started bouncing, we had marsh grass where we were, on the other side of the road.

Well, first, I have to tell you about Hersh. Hersh went over, got a Bangalore 00:48:00torpedo and calmly walked across the road and there's machine guns. You could see, when a bullet would hit the ground the cobblestone would spark, there would be a spark, you could see a spark. And it was, it was daylight, but it was still early morning. Put the Bangalore inside the hole in the concertina wire, and the lieutenant had showed him how to pull the thing, and I don't know whether he pulled it or not, he was in the way, and I saw a tracer hit him right smack in the head and killed him. And then he fell on the Bangalore torpedo, and we couldn't tell whether it was hang-fire or whether he had actually pulled the, the fuse, the string that had the button on the end of it. And this lieutenant who had been crying, all of a sudden, he got up enough nerve, 'cause I didn't know how to work the fuse, and he knew he was the only one who knew how to work 00:49:00the fuse. And he pulled Hirsh's body off it, he pulled the fuse on the Bangalore torpedo and then ran back on the other side of the wall. Boom, the Bangalore went up and blew Hersh all to hell and blew the barbed wire into pieces and we ran across the road into trenches. And they had trenches in V, zig zag trenches, and it was a German trench because on, in -- the first thing I saw was a half-eaten sandwich wrapped up in a Deutsche Zeitung, the daily newspaper of Berlin. Or maybe, I don't know, it was a German newspaper in German. They had told us that we were going to be faced with a regiment of Germans composed mainly of Russian deserters, but we knew they were Krauts, we called them all 00:50:00Krauts. And we knew, and they had these zig zag trenches so they could get an angle on anyway you were and fields of fire, and every once in a while there would be-- a squad or a unit headquarters, which was lined with bricks and cobblestone. That was underground, and that was where the headquarters was of whatever unit was. And they slept underground in those, they weren't concrete emplacements, they were cobblestones which is cement. And they were designed to be temporary. They didn't have water or anything. But they sure had a lot of Krauts in them. But the - the Shaw hit, we were in marsh grass, cattails, and the Shaw threw a WP, a white phosphorous round into the cattails. Caught it on 00:51:00fire even though it was raining out and even though it was wet, and the marsh grass and the cattails were soaking wet, they were on fire. And of course, they didn't go into flames because of it was raining, but it was heavy white smoke. And the heavy white smoke enabled us to go up the hill. That's why I'm here today because I, our little unit composed of guys from a polyglot of soldiers from three different units, maybe four, went up in that smoke. The smoke was so heavy we put on our gas masks. We all could retrieve a gas mask of a body on the shore, and the only time in my army career outside of training that I ever used a gas mask.

We got up on top of the hill, and I was telling the guys because I was 00:52:00instinctively the squad leader still in Camp Blanding. It wasn't because I had any bravery instincts or anything, it was just that I, my training was as a squad leader, the tallest guy in the squad. And pretty soon the captain, an old guy, must have been twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, Captain Johnson, he was from Green Bay, Wisconsin. He was a 1st Division officer and he said, "Flaten, you take your men and go down here." And I said, "My men? I'm a private, I don't have any men. I'm a man." And he thought because I was directing the people that I was a non-commissioned officer. By the way, the non-commissioned officers wore, on the back of their helmet, wore a horizontal white stripe and the officers had a vertical white stripe painted on the helmet 00:53:00so you were able to distinguish non-comms from officers. And this Captain Johnson had me take my platoon, which was by then maybe thirty or forty men, and we advanced a couple of hedgerows. By the way, the other thing that I'm going to tell you that's shocking is that they should have court-martialed General Bradley and General Eisenhower and all of those people because they never told us about the hedgerows. They told us they would be hedges but they didn't tell us about hedgerows, and that was literally thousands of men died because they didn't tell us about hedgerows. We had to invent our own training on how to get over those hedgerows. A hedgerow is an earthen burn about, oh, anywhere from six feet wide to two feet wide, and they were like fences. They had-- they all had 00:54:00trees on them and tall bushes, all of them bramble bushes with spikes on them, so that the cattle couldn't get over them. Normandy is dairy country just like western Dane County, looks exactly like it. And the-- and the cattle once in a while, they use-- the hedgerows were fences, and each one of them had a gate at the end and you had to go through this heavy thicket of bramble bushes and stickers would stick you. But we used to go through the gate and of course the Germans on the other side of the hedgerow would zero in on the gate. They knew at first, we were going through the gates, so we took all our casualties at the gates, so as a scout I had to go first through the middle of the bramble bush. 00:55:00And we went in about four hedgerows and there was on the top of a hill, the hill by the way was so steep that we had to put our rifles on our backs, our sling, sling them over our backs, you can envision we put a sling across our belly and the rifle was strapped to our back, so we could use our hands, because we had to have both hands. That's how steep the hill was, climbing up to the top. And there was a weird looking tree, bushes, off to one side. And when I first got to the top, well it was kind of a French species of some kind of bush that I never saw. Then we got about hedge, one or two hedgerows in, which is about 100 yards, fifty yards was about the average distance of a French field, maybe seventy-five yards. I envision each of those farm fields about the size of a football field. 00:56:00Fifty yards square and a 100 yards long. But that's a long time ago so, I may be faulty.

And -- then all of a sudden there was a bunch of shooting over by this weird looking bush. And the bush was a German shore emplacement, a big 240-millimeter gun that was, and that was a camouflage net that this weird bush that I'd seen. And somebody from another unit had encountered some Germans in that gun emplacement, and then they, then they had left, so he said we better get that, Captain Johnson said, "We better go back there. Flaten, grab some men," as though I were a man-grabber, "And we'll go back there and see if we can knock that gun out." Because that gun, we figured, would be bombing replacements and 00:57:00battleships and such that were out on the ocean, overlooking. So, we got to the gun emplacement was like a foundation of a new house, you've seen those. It had cement wall, and the guns in the middle with, bolted down with bolts, nuts as big as your fists. And it was a permanent gun. I can't, the muzzle was big. I figured it was about the equivalent of our 240, 240 millimeters. For those who don't know millimeters, join me, I don't know what a millimeter is either, but I would say it's about ten inches across, maybe eight inches in diameter. [Break in recording] Anyway, we got to this gun emplacement, and it was there all by itself, and we climbed the stairs down into this -- concrete emplacement, and it 00:58:00had a steel door on it. And we're not sure what we're going to do but we want to knock this gun out. And by this time, I had a thermite grenade, which is, it's -- it'll burn through anything. It's like a maybe it's phosphorous, I'm not sure, but it burns anything it touches to metal makes it burn red and then white. That's how hot it gets. And you don't want to be within five or ten yards of the damn thing, or you'll burn up. I saw a guy burn up. And, he had one hooked on his belt and a bullet went through it. And so, we-- just then, the door opened and there's some Krauts with a, a, a stick, a yard stick or 00:59:00something with a white handkerchief tied on it. They wanted to give up. Six or eight of them. It was the gun crew. And we had this sailor who I told you about was trying to communicate with semaphore with the, with the Shaw who giving us over head fire, which was not too accurate. And the -- he was always asking me questions, why are you doing this? He was a pain in the neck, but he was a nice little guy, and I didn't want to be mean to him, so when we got these Krauts, we didn't know what to do. We got some tent ropes from some guys came up the hill with their packs intact, and we tied their hands together with tent ropes and gave the sailor a rifle and said take these Krauts down the hill to the prisoner collecting point. They told us there'd be a prisoner collecting point. Well, the 01:00:00regimental headquarters was still out in the ocean, there was no prisoner collecting point. We got rid of the Krauts, and we got rid of the sailor. I don't know what he did with those, probably turned them over to some more sailors and said look what I got. But whatever it was we got rid of them. Then

DERKS: What time is it by then?

FLATEN: By now it's maybe, I don't know, I've been asked this question, maybe noon, eleven o'clock. We did a lot of firing. I used up, and I'm firing a rifle a lot. What we do is we lay down in a field of fire when there's Germans are on another hedgerow, and you could tell they were they had these burp guns [makes noise]. Their-- our heavy weapons, our machine guns would go [makes noise]. Theirs would go so fast there was no interval between rounds, it sounded like tearing a sheet, ZIP, that's why they call them zip guns. Burp guns, they'd fire in burps.

And we could tell when they were there. Then what we'd do is we'd go across a 01:01:00hedgerow, everybody would fire their rifle, we would fire eight at a time, except the machine guns, and they would, we'd presume that would make the Germans all duck and then we'd go over the hedgerow. And most of the time they didn't duck, they'd run away too. But we got to the-- back to that gun, there were some ammunition boxes and the muzzle of the gun, I didn't know how to work it. It had electrical or mechanical stuff inside that house to show them how to aim it and stuff. And so, but I wanted to get the gun out of there and I wanted to get it out of there in a hurry because they were shooting at us. The Krauts were shooting at us. And so, we got these two ammunition boxes, and I climbed up on these two boxes and I wanted to reach up with a hand with a thermite grenade and drop it down the barrel and we figured that would knock out the rifling on 01:02:00the inside of the barrel if it got to the receiver. The muzzle of the gun was pointing almost straight up in the air, that it would roll down into the receiver and eight seconds gone by it would melt the receiver. And the boxes were tippy, and I had to get on my tip toes, and I had to pull the fuse on the-- and if I dropped the fuse, I had eight seconds to get the hell out of there. I wasn't sure whether I could or not, but I wanted to make sure that gun was knocked out. So, I finally get up on my tip toes and jumped, as I jumped it knocked the two boxes down, but I was able to ram the-- WP, the thermite grenade down the rifling. I could hear it go down. And then pretty soon that the receiver started to glow. I could see smoke coming out of the, so I knew it was getting oxygen. And then it got white, and it just sort of melted right there 01:03:00while I was looking at it. We knew we knocked that gun down, out. And the captain was so impressed with me that later, he was back to his unit of, he was company commander of A company of the -- 16th regiment. And he knew, he wrote down my name and my unit and so forth and he wrote me up and I got a medal out of that, for knocking out that gun, Silver Star. And of course, I did things a lot worse than that that day. And then we went back and finally, I think, after two days went by where I had my unit of forty or fifty guys, half of them were 01:04:00wounded, and -- they said you can, the headquarters units have come ashore, and you can, all the men who were in the 29th Division run down, go down the sunken road, which is a road between hedgerows. These hedgerows had, as I said, earthen walls with trees and bushes growing on them. Then sometimes between them they had a road that was depressed, sunk into the earth maybe six feet. And that was the way they went, how the farmers got around between fields. And they were great to hide out from artillery if you could get one.

And we met, just happened that it was an officer from my battalion Lieutenant Ninneman, he was kind of a jerk, and he took us, he was to guide us back to our unit and we were two or three miles away from where we were supposed to be. And 01:05:00we finally came back to our unit, and I think of my company, we landed with 201 men, there were fourteen left, when I got back to the company. And the rest were killed or wounded, and they were cooks and truck drivers and stuff. They weren't riflemen. And there were machine gunners and mortar men, there were a few of them. But they'd given us replacements. They gave us, and we had such casualties in Normandy that we went-- we'd send for replacements at least once a week of fifty men. We had fifty men killed or wounded, sometimes three times a week. Sometimes we'd lose 150 men, all white men, a week. And it was terrifying. I was 01:06:00never so scared in my life. I was terrified to the point that I was never anything but terrified. And I smoked cigarettes so badly that later when the PX rations, cigars would come, by then I was a platoon sergeant. When you're promoted not because of your valor or bravery or leadership qualities, you were promoted because you were the guy that was left. And I became a squad leader, which was a sergeant with three stripes, no that's assistant squad leader, and then a squad leader, which is a staff sergeant, three stripes and a rocker underneath it. And then platoon sergeant, I was in charge of the forty men. And we got replacements so often, we'd send, and the hedgerows were so mystifying they were surrounded in a field, surrounded, if you can imagine, with a six-foot earthen wall with trees growing on it, and you couldn't see the next unit, 01:07:00they'd tell you F Company's in the next field, but you never knew whether it was or not. You could hear firing going on over there. So, we'd send, they said-- they'd call up on the radio or the telephone, radios didn't work much. "Go back and get replacements, Flaten." Sergeant Flaten by then. I sent a runner back that would show-- that was good at showing these replacement troops, green as hell, just come from Camp Blanding probably. And up to where our unit was because they'd get lost otherwise. Well then, the guys I sent back weren't worth a darn, plus the fact that they were all young guys like me, and I wanted old guys. They had guys in their twenties, they were more reliable. They were from the Ack-Ack, they were retrained, Air Force retrainees. Army aircraft artillery retrainees, and some retrainees from other types of unit, but mostly they were 01:08:00Air Force who had gone to six weeks infantry training, they ostensibly knew how to fire a rifle by then and ack-ack,I don't know why they picked up so many ack-ack, that's what we called anti-aircraft artillery, ack-ack. It was just like a slave mart, I'd go practically feel their muscles and look at their teeth because I wanted, you know, grown adults and I had my choice, just like slaves, only they were worse than slaves because they knew they were going to get killed, where slaves all they had to do was pick cotton. And they would all line up out there and I'd ask them questions about how much rifle training they had and so forth because I wanted to get some old guys in my unit. And then I'd lead them up to my unit which was three or four hedgerows up. Hardly get to know 01:09:00their names, they were killed, wounded the next day or within a week. I hardly got to know any of them. And I don't know how I survived myself, I was wounded several times myself, I told you that. But the--

DERKS: How did you survive? Do you think you developed--

FLATEN: I think I was so terrified, and I kept, I got real good training. I think I was so scared, I kept thinking ahead of what would happen, I kept my head, everybody walked around with a hedgerow stoop, because you wanted to keep your head below the hedgerow. We got into a town called Martinville, just outside of Saint-Lo. The idea was we were supposed to fight through the hedgerow country and hill country. If you can envision the hills around Cross Plains out there, that's the way, there's a lot of dairy country. A lot of Holstein cows 01:10:00and apple trees. That song It's Apple Blossom Time in Normandy is from apples, and -- which came in handy because a couple times we got surrounded and we ran out of water and we'd eat the apples to quench our thirst. The only thing is when you step on an apple it'd make the same pop as a Bouncing Betty landmine, which would bounce out of the air and come up about that high and fire bbs all over the place.

And but -- speaking of that, oh I was going to tell you about Martinville. It was oh, it was, we became animals by then. We were under constant artillery, and the Germans had good artillery. They had a gun called a .170 and an .88, and they were just marvelous artillery. The only thing they didn't have, they didn't 01:11:00have a proximity fuse and by this time radar had been invented, and they put radar in the nose of our artillery shells and when they'd get, they could set the fuse, and they'd get ten feet off the ground, the artillery shell would explode. And so, there was-- into the hole, so the Germans couldn't get, there's no place to hide. And if you could, the German artillery would hit the bushes and the trees on the hedgerows and explode, sending shrapnel down into the holes where we were, but after the trees were all shot off, and they were all shot off in that area just outside of St. Lo, we were in, everyday we'd dig deeper into the, into the side of the hedgerow and then down. And our faces were covered with dust, you couldn't see anything except our eyeballs and our teeth. And we 01:12:00were just literally like animals. And every once in a while, somebody would get killed or wounded and then-- we'd-- I hoped we'd get killed or wounded sooner or later because we were just dying. We had no fresh food, no water. And there's a town out here called Martinville, just north of Cross Plains, just exactly like it. And it had a church in it just like that place did, in this town of Martinville. And I went out there one day out of curiosity, probably looking for a bar or something, and I asked a nun at recess, there's a Catholic school out there, how the town got its name. And she said there's a retired priest living in the house next to the church, and I knocked on the door and he came to the 01:13:00door. And I said how did this town get its name, and he said, he was an old guy about my age now. And he said, he said that he had heard a French priest from France had named the town, and I wonder if that is the same town. I go out there every once in a while just to look at it and remember how terrified, scared I was out there. But one day, it seemed like forever we were getting shelled. Probably, maybe a week or something like that. It was, you know sixty years ago was a long time. And they -- oh, I one time, I have to criticize the officers and the trainees. They gave us good training, but they didn't tell us about the hedgerows. And they couldn't say they were surprised by the existence of hedgerows because they'd been there thousands of years. The Romans had built the 01:14:00hedgerows, the original hedgerows. So, it wasn't something, these and grown trees, sometimes trees that big on top of the hedgerows. So, you knew that they had been there hundreds of years, and they flew over those taking aerial photographs every day for hundreds of days. So, they knew about the hedgerows, and we had to invent our own tactics and we, because we weren't trained to go over those hedgerows and took training that we had to learn ourselves, I blame everybody from Eisenhower on down for that. And I've read training manuals where they've been very critical of the high-ranking officers for not insisting on having training in hedgerows in England. But now I've got that off my chest.

The, uh-- they lined us up and said we were going, our systems division 01:15:00commander picked a squad and it happened to be my squad to go with him and a uh-- a tank, one tank, into this village of St-Lo. St. S-T. L-O. And it was a big junction of highways, and it was in a critical area where apparently the Germans and the, and the Americans wanted to take the town. And we went in there one night and the town was, the tank rolled in there, and my squad. And the assistant division commander, General Cota. General Cota was-- the part on the movie called The Longest Day, or D-Day, or one of those things, his part was taken by Robert Mitchum, General Cota: C-O-T-A. He was a good guy too. And-- he 01:16:00was a one star, assistant division commander, what we called the ADC, the assistant division commander. And we went into St-Lo, and it was, the tank stayed back at the edge of town, and the town was intact. All the churches were there, all of the houses were there and the glass windows and so forth. And we stayed there I think overnight, and I think we went back the next day. I read somewhere, by somebody who had written a story of Normandy, that we went in there, because it was about a general, they wrote us up, when us regular soldiers went on patrol, they never wrote us up, but he was in there for three or four days. But I recall it was only two or three days, but I saw the town intact. The next time I went through there, the town was just a pile of rubble. 01:17:00There wasn't anything. There wasn't even a whole brick. It was just a mass of rubble. And the uh, uh -- we took St-Lo. Another unit had taken it, they put us in reserve that day. When we were in reserve, we were only two hedgerows, maybe a hundred yards back from the front line, and we always -- by the way, we never had shelter. Our unit didn't take any shelter, so when we, when you slept at night, there, we always had a buddy system. We had two guys together. We had, all we had for cover was a raincoat, which we kept on the back of our rifle belt. Each guy had a raincoat. Get in the bottom of a fox hole, one guy would put his raincoat on the bottom, and the other guy would, the other soldier would 01:18:00have, let you use his raincoat for a blanket. Two raincoats, never a wool blanket. Never anything except two blankets, I mean two raincoats. And some of them were that plastic stuff that, but uh, one guy would look over the hedgerow and be on guard. But sometimes we'd, every other hole would be two guys. We'd have four-hour guards. Then two of us would get in the raincoat and sleep like spoons, snuggled up just like I used to with my wife, in the raincoat, we kept each other warm that way. But it was cold all the time. But after a while you didn't catch cold, and it was, it'd get down to forty at night in Normandy. It's far north. And you could tell a replacement because he had a runny nose. He was 01:19:00a new guy. He would be bragging about how long he'd been with a unit at St-Lo or someplace, but that's nothing but BS because he's got, he's got a cold. We knew the replacements hadn't become resistant to catching cold. And I never caught a cold all the time I was in Europe, and I was lying in snow. Lying in foxholes where the water froze around my head it was so cold. Never caught a cold. But I did have some sinus problems.

But then we went from St-Lo, it was we uh, we -- we had to go walk from, attack from hedgerow to hedgerow. And the way we would do it, we'd fire our rifles over the top of a hedgerow. We used to have a tactic where we'd sneak over, and then the Germans would catch us halfway across, and fire at us. But we found the best 01:20:00tactic, and they should have taught us this in England, and I blame those officers for not telling us about hedgerows, was everybody's fire like crazy and holler and yell. And then we'd go like cowboys and Indians and the Germans would get so scared of us, I guess that we'd get there, and they'd be gone. A lot of times, unless we ran into an SS unit. And those were terrible. SS units were guys who would hear us, and they'd come at us. We'd get halfway across the field and there they'd come with their burp guns and rifles with, with, with bayonets on them. They were tough. And they were big guys. When we had training films about the enemy it was always Japanese, there was always training films about the enemy was Japanese. These guys were as big as we were, and you'd see them coming with -- guns a-blazing. There was a, we had hand to hand combat, we had 01:21:00bayonet fights. And nobody, you never read about those because there were never any newspaper men that were brave enough, and I wouldn't blame them. If I were a newspaper man, I'll be damned it I'd go up there where that fighting was going on. And we went hedgerow to hedgerow to hedgerow, walking. We got outside at Martinville, and they pulled us back and got us new uniforms and gave us showers. This was after, this was about -- middle of July and we landed on D-Day, the sixth of June. We had replacements coming in and they finally pulled our regiment back.

DERKS: So, that's like, six weeks?

FLATEN: [Nods] And some of those times we were surrounded. One time we were surrounded on top of a hill at Mortagne, and how I remember these names, and 01:22:00right on Mortagne was a town called Perche-sous-Vire, and sous I think means the Vire River, V-I-R-E. The first town we took in, on D-Day or on the next day was Vireville. And I presume that had some connection with that Vire River. The first big town we took was Isigny, I-S-I-G-N-Y. We came to that square; the town was a little village and it had a square like it was a county seat. In the center of the square was a statue or a fountain and there was an old guy, a guy probably my age now, with a top hat and a bouquet of roses in a tuxedo, not a tuxedo. But he had a top hat like Abe Lincoln wore, and he was the mayor, I 01:23:00guess. And I couldn't, and there was a Kraut 88, a tiger, dug in across the square. What they'd do was they'd go into the basement; they'd cut away a house and then they'd go into the basement with only that 88 sticking out above the ground. And he was on the other side of that square. I wanted to tell the Frenchman, I couldn't -- get the heck out of there. Pretty soon, the tank wasn't visible, it wasn't firing anymore, but you never could tell with those Krauts, and all of a sudden Charles De Gaulle came. General De Gaulle, a great big guy, about six [foot] five [inches] with one of those flat hats, and the mayor gave him the roses and he gave a speech in French on this fountain, and newsreel men were, you know like these guys are doing now, taking Pathe News or Paramount 01:24:00News or something. And then they said, "Okay, Flaten, get your guys, get going, don't stand there, you're not in the movies now." And so, we went across and I think we got into a big firefight right outside of town.

But the time we went back into reserves at Martinville, we'd been fighting for so long, we hadn't had fresh food. We'd been eating K-rations for so long. K-rations consisted of a little can of cheese from Green Bay, Wisconsin, it said on the cover, and a little cracker like a rye crisp, and a D-bar which was chocolate bar. Sometimes they were Hershey bars. And a little can of beans or soup. Mostly it was a can of beans with some kind of crap in it, and hash. And we all carried a spoon. Every infantryman carried a spoon so we could eat our 01:25:00D-bar, our K-rations. Some of the guys had so few vegetables, their hair was turning gray. You know, a nineteen year old kid with gray hair from not having enough vitamins. I didn't know your hair would turn gray. Did you? I never knew that, but maybe they were scared gray, I don't know, but they-- Anyway, we got back, and they gave us a shower in a big semi, and it was in the back of the semi, was a shower. They had about eight or ten shower heads, and I don't know, I think you were allowed thirty seconds. What they would do is, eight guys would go in at a time, and they'd say okay, and they'd tell us what we're going to do. We're going to blow a whistle and the showers are going to come on and you're going to have thirty seconds. Get thoroughly wet, and then they'd blow a whistle, and then get the soap and soap up. And then we'll blow another whistle 01:26:00and thirty seconds to get all the soap off of you. So, we went in there and took a shower. A minute each. Thirty seconds hot water. You can do it in thirty seconds. I remember that. And -- then they had a show, they had a USO show, and a singer called Dinah Shore was going to stand on the back of a truck. And they pulled the truck up, and this is mind you, 200 yards from the Germans. There's a lot of earthen walls with trees between us, but there were still shells coming in. And she, and they had a piano on the back of the six-by-six truck. And she stood on the tailgate with a microphone, and she said, and it started to rain. And we're sitting on our helmets because we don't have chairs. We didn't even have, we had nothing. And this is okay with us because we're in the rain anyway. 01:27:00And she said I'll stay here as long as you guys will. Well, where could we go? You know we're in the rain anyway. We were animals. And we turned our helmets over, upside down, and sat on our helmet. Every infantryman sat, squatted on the ground like that. That's how you could tell an infantryman. And the makeup was running on her face and the guy inside the truck with kind of a cover was playing the piano, he was dry, but she was singing, she sang for two hours. I admire her for that. She's a nice lady and she was a-- she was a good singer. God, she couldn't have been much more than we were, older than we were. How old was she when she died, I wonder? She was just probably six or eight years older than we were, if that.

DERKS: If that. I mean, she was not old in the '50s.

FLATEN: That's right. She was married to Burt Reynolds. I saw her one time and told her about that. She remembered that day. [Break in recording] Oh, Dinah Shore, Dinah Shore, yeah. We, well that's all I have to say about her. She was awful nice to risk her life literally to sing to us. And then the next day maybe, they gave us hot meals. They brought up food that was cooked, and potatoes and meat and all that stuff. And then they took St-Lo. Once they took St-Lo then the Krauts would start moving back by miles. We'd get in trucks to chase them and then they'd take a stand someplace, and the trucks, before they'd get to where the Germans were, the trucks would stop, all black drivers, and let 01:29:00us out before it got too dangerous, and then they would turn around and go back and we would go on foot the rest of the way, the white males. And pretty soon walked down the street and then you know, these-- highways and all of a sudden, thunder and lightning would come, and it would be machine guns and rifle fire and artillery fire and grenades and so forth. And so, you were always scared. You never knew when you were safe. It was hot. Summer was very pleasant weather. Beautiful country, Normandy is.

And-- but we would go in shuttles. We would march five miles, ten miles, and then we'd ride five or ten miles. And we had just our OD, our wool shirts, our 01:30:00wool pants and we'd stick our box of K-rations inside of our shirt. And then we had a field jacket. They were light tan, the army had tan jackets before the green ones came out. And then they had a zipper and then you could button outside the zipper, but we left all the buttons open so we'd have buttonholes to stick our grenades, the handle of the grenade would go. Each guy had three or four grenades on the front so he could grab that off and fire it. And then we had a rifle belt that had, one, two, three. Three clips with eight rounds in it on each side. You could, a canvas flap, you'd lift that up and each rifle, M-1, grand rifle, fired eight rounds. It would fire a separate bullet every time you'd pull the trigger. We'd and-- we didn't have automatic weapons, except in 01:31:00the fourth squad we had a machine gun and that was mounted on a tripod, not a bipod, but each squad had BAR, which is an automatic weapon. And then we had so many casualties. The BAR man often got killed first. We had officers, officers were killed by the ton. They were, they were like everything else, the big shots had to go to meetings. And they'd say, we'd be in a place, and they'd say, all the platoon leaders assemble at the CP, at the command post. That's where the captain was if you-- we happened to have a captain for a company commander. Most of them were killed off. And going to meetings they were up out of the holes and exposed to fire and they'd get wounded. We-- we had-- many times we had all our 01:32:00officers killed. I can remember going to, when they'd have battalion meetings of all company commanders, I was the company commander, and I was a sergeant. And those guys were-- the flower of mankind because in the rifle platoons you have jerks like me and guys who were bank robbers and everything else. But those officers were all college grads, they were all nice guys. And they died like flies. We'd get new officers sometimes three times a week. There'd be four officers, one for each platoon. And it was a real waste of manpower, I guess, I don't know. But it was really something. Most of them were ROTC graduates, and they were just ex-football players and so forth. I really-- whereas the riflemen 01:33:00were, had included all kinds of riff-raff like me that didn't amount to-- to much, often. But those officers were really fine human beings. But we got into Brest, and then we were moving along the countryside in shuttle buses, and us white males would be walking along the road, and they decided to divert the 19th Corps. Our corps was the 29th Division, the 30th Division and the 2nd Armored Division. They usually-- the three divisions in a corps were usually two infantry divisions and an armored unit. The 2nd Armored was our armored unit. We got to know people in the 2nd Armored just like we got to know our own people. 01:34:00And the same with, the artillery would attach artillery to fire overhead fire. Of course, we never knew then that they be a couple miles back. But we would get attack orders and they'd tell us that we were going to get 313th, 128th Artillery or something. And we were a unit all the way through.

They took our corps, 29th, 30th and 2nd Armored, and mixed with another corps, I think the 20th corps, which was the 29th, 30th and 1st Armored, and diverted us up to Brest, B-R-E-S-T, in the Brittany peninsula, because they intended to capture that and use it as a supply port to supply weapons and material to 01:35:00supply the Allied Army for the rest of the war. Well as it turned out, there were submarine pens up there, and the Germans blew them all apart. And there was nothing left of that town, they couldn't use it. But I got wounded and captured up there. I was captured for, as we were coming into Recouvrance, the regimental commander, not the company commander, but the regimental commander, Colonel Pernell, who was a lawyer from Baltimore. By the way he, after the war he was such a prominent Baltimore lawyer that he nominated Dwight Eisenhower for president at the Republican Convention, years later or however long it was. Each 01:36:00state gives the nominating speeches you know, well, he gave the speech for Maryland. Anyway, he said we're in a little town called Recouvrance, which was a suburb of Brest, and he said, "Flaten, take two guys and go into town and see if there's any Krauts there," because there's a river and the-- and the only thing we knew there was Krauts in the-- sailors in the seaport. And we thought they were all gone. We weren't sure. Well, we got into Recouvrance, which is a pretty good-sized site. I imagine Brest was 100,000, 200,000 people. It was a big seaport. One of the major seaports in all of Europe. And -- we got, there's a boulevard and there's, our P-47s, which is what we had our close air support, 01:37:00from these P-47s that carried a 500-pound bomb on each wing. And they fired-- they'd give us strafe and bomb, and they came in twos. And they would give us close air support. And dropped a big bomb, there was a big bomb crater which is about as big as this room. And the machine gun was shooting down that boulevard and it was one of our machine guns. It was, I even got so I could tell the difference between a heavy machine gun and a light machine gun. But they uh, and they both had the same cyclic rate of fire. But the bomb hole we were in, we had, instead of taking two experienced riflemen with me, I took one guy who was a cook who was a drunk from Milwaukee named Schaffer. And he was looking for 01:38:00booze and not watching. Ordinarily you just, it's standard operating procedure as soon as you go into a hole, each guy looks and covers a flank or a direction. He was looking for wine. And a Kraut came in the hole with a zip gun, burp gun, and said, "Hands up," in English. And took us and I put my hands up and dropped my rifle.

And they took us into a subway. They had between the river, the Brittany peninsula at right where the harbor is, had a big bluff that, and in between the bluff there's a river on one side or bay on one side, a bay on the other side. Under the hill, they had dug a tunnel with railroad tracks on it, and they had -- they would take cargo from one ship in Recouvrance harbor to load onto a ship 01:39:00that was going into the Mediterranean. And they had donkeys pulling these flat cars back and forth. And that's where the Krauts took us that night. And they had sauerkraut for supper. And it was just like going into -- And they'd get us up in the daytime and make us fill, with a pick and shovel, this is about twenty-two of us prisoners, and made us fill bomb craters and make the roads passable for their tanks. And there was all twenty-two of us, they might have had six or seven Germans for guards. Happened to be five Germans, say there were six guards. They're five Germans and a work detail and all of a sudden, these two P-47s, they were big planes. They were as big as a DC-3. And we knew, we 01:40:00Americans, and another guy named Ritter, who could speak German by the way, he's from Pittsburgh, um -- knew that they'd fly in twos. One would come down and strafe and bomb, the other one would ride shotgun above him to make sure he wasn't attacked from above. And then they'd switch places. The one that was riding shotgun when down. So, when they saw this work detail in the road, this plane came zooming down [makes noise] and we dove in the ditch on the left side, and with the German guard, Ritter and I and a German guard. And the second plane was then coming down and all the Krauts knew was here comes another plane. We knew this one wouldn't be firing until the second pass. So, Ritter takes and hits the Kraut over the head with a shovel and kills him. And then we had to get the heck out of there, we escaped. And we stayed in the, in a park, you know the 01:41:00park had grass, but it was all overgrown because nobody had moved the lawn for a long time. We hid in a bush, and there was, and there was artillery coming in and the Germans weren't going to look for two escaped prisoners. I don't know if they looked or not, they didn't find us. And we knew when we came into the town, I knew because I knew the position of the church steeple. I knew a lot about French churches.

And-- I said, how are we, we're going to have to wait until and we'll try and work our way back. And we knew it was relatively safe because we sent patrols out and patrols were always coming and going. But each day they had a password. They'd have a password and a counter sign. And one day it would be calvados and the countersign would be cocktail, or Wells Fargo or Paramount News or something like that. They were distinctly American words. And the, and we got out of this 01:42:00town, I knew where the church was and I knew F Company's on one side of the road, E Company's on the other side of the road and we're surrounded by these trees, so we didn't always know what unit and they kept moving us around. We always said they'd wait until we'd finish digging our fox hole and then they'd move us. But we came back, and I said if this is where our unit was if they haven't moved them. And we got across the field, and they had the outpost with a machine gun. And you have to cock-load a machine gun, twice. Cock it twice [makes noise]. And-- he said, "Halt, who goes there?" Just like you say in the movies. "What's the password?" And pulled the bolt back once. And he said, "Okay, one more time." He knew there was two guys in the field. "What's the password?" And the second time I knew in a minute we were going to get fired on. 01:43:00I said, "I don't know what the password is today, but I know what it was three days ago." And the guy says, "Oh shit, it's Flaten." He recognized my voice. It was my platoon. And then the company commander wanted to know how many Krauts there were, and I told him I was a captive. He bailed me out, he said, "Just like you to get captured." By the way, I see these guys with these license plates that say POW on them, they're proud of the fact that they were captured, I was ashamed of it. I was so ashamed; I never did tell my father I was captured. My father was a veteran of World War I, and I was so ashamed of the fact that I was captured. I escaped-- I was glad I could escape so I wouldn't have to, and these guys now have these conventions with POWs come to, they were 01:44:00captured! Christ, I wouldn't go to one of those places like -- but that's something else. Anyway, then, I could see the 8th and the 2nd Division from the other -- We had light resistance. And one-- I came and I captured, we were on the great wall of Brest, and we had a hell of a fire fight in the town before we got there. We ran into a bunch of SS paratroopers. They had brought them down from, by submarine they brought them from Casino, in Italy, through the Straits of Gibraltar and landed them in Brest to protect the submarine pens.

And so, we really hit a hornet's nest when we hit the, I think the 2nd SS Paratroop Division. Not only were they SS men, they were paratroops. And boy 01:45:00were they tough, oh man, they were. We had a heck of a firefight to take the town. I was wounded again. And -- I had gone out-- The way we would attack, the tactic we would, we'd devise after learning how, the first scout would go over the first hedgerow, and go to the second, to the hedgerow, and then he'd look, if you could part the bushes to see if there was any Krauts on the other side. The second scout would be on the second hedgerow waiting where he could see you, and you'd say it's okay. And then he'd wave the main body who was on the third hedgerow. And the theory was that you'd get up there, the theory of a scout is he'd be down in open country, the way it was in Germany and Belgium and Holland, 01:46:00250 yards out, and when you're fired on, he'd turn around and raise his rifle over his head, which meant enemy in sight. The manual said you're supposed to move, the first scout is to move boldly and aggressively, make yourself a target. And then, after you said enemy in sight, you got down and started firing at the enemy, and the second scout would make his way by firing maneuver up to you, then the third guy would come up by firing maneuver, you run five or ten yards, fall down, start firing, cover the next guy, you'd work in teams. It was called firing maneuver until you got to a line called the line of skirmishers and then the whole platoon would move by skirmishers. That's the way we were taught to do it and that's the way we did it by and large when we got into open country, but when we were in hedgerows we'd just go, one guy would signal the 01:47:00second scout. Well, I was out there, and I got about halfway across the field and a guy named Nelson from Worthington, Minnesota, another white man, came across the second scout without waiting for me to signal and the Germans were on the next hedgerow unbeknownst to me and started shooting at him. And they hit him. And he was screaming, how he had been wounded and I'm in the middle of the field all by myself, and the platoon had moved up to the second hedgerow, but they weren't coming up on me. They probably thought I was killed. I'm laying there, and H Company, which was our mortar platoon, our mortar company, it's called the weapons company, firing, had been catching hell because they hadn't been giving any overhead fire with the .81 mortars, so they were firing .81 01:48:00mortars and some of them were landing on one, they were firing them on the Germans on that hedgerow ahead of me. But some of the short rounds were coming kind of close, and I saw the spoil of a fox hole that some Kraut had dug so I said, I dug, I went into that and then I'm at the base of this hedgerow, and the Germans were on the other side, I could hear them talking. I could hear them rattling their mess gear and they didn't know I was there. Captain Stewart used to chew me out for not knowing how many Germans there were out there and giving him a lot of intelligence.

And I said, well I'm never going to get back from this thing alive, so I'll look over the hedgerow and maybe by some chance I'll get back. And my helmet, my helmet and the helmet camouflage net caught on the bushes, and I shook my head free, and there was a Kraut standing there looking at me, two inches away from 01:49:00my face. And so, I ducked, I immediately ducked back under the hole, and the Kraut told all the other Germans that there was an American there and they started throwing potato mashers over the hedgerow. And the Czechs, thank God, had been sabotaging their munitions so that sometimes they'd get a hand grenade would go off in their hands as soon as they, they wouldn't have a waiting time for the fuse. So, the Germans were quite cherry, they were quite skeptical about, and they'd throw them real quick, so they weren't like going up and then back down into the hole. They weren't throwing them that gingerly. And somehow or another, and H company was shooting -- mortar rounds and I think by that time 01:50:00things had stayed in a static position, and they were firing artillery and machine guns at this hedgerow that I'm in a foxhole beneath. And something, either one of those grenades or an .81 mortar, something hit my rifle. My rifle was leaning up against the side of the foxhole, and all of a sudden, a kaboom! And I'm out of the foxhole. And I'm laying in the parapet, which is the dirt spoil around the foxhole, and I went to reach my rifle and it was all, it had been hit by whatever explosion it was. And I'm bleeding from every aperture in my body. My ears, my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my rectum, anything. I was bleeding. And I said, well, I've been trying to get up nerve all afternoon to get back, so I'm going now if I can make it. I wasn't sure, I felt -- I knew I'd either wet my pants, I don't think I did, but it was blood, you know, going 01:51:00down. And I got back, and I didn't have enough strength to go over the center of the hedgerow, so I went through the gate and a guy saw me coming and opened the gate. And there was Captain Stewart and he said, "now," he said, "where have you been all day?" And I said, and he said -- before I get a chance to answer he said, "You better get back to the aide station, you don't look so good." 'Cause I was blood all over. And he thought I'd been wounded. All I did was get a little piece of shrapnel on that particular day.

DERKS: So, was it the concussion?

FLATEN: It was the concussion that had, yeah. Ruptured my eardrums, which is why I wear hearing aids. Actually, I had my, this ear was ruptured twice, and that's why I hear better on this ear. And, but they grow back together, you know. But 01:52:00they don't, they keep you deaf. That was that, that day it ruptured both my eardrums. Later on, my right eardrum had been ruptured when a MP had gone to the bathroom. We had knocked out a tank, and the tank was in the middle of the road, and our, and the Germans had left. Then we had to go around the tank, our tanks hit -- when they knocked out a panther tank and they had teller mines, which are great huge mines, surrounding the tank so that any tank, any vehicle that had to go around it in the ditch, would go over a mine. Well, somebody had taken and piled all the teller mines off on one side of the tank and they had an MP telling, directing traffic. Telling our tanks and our trucks to go around the left side of the tank.

Then he went to go to the bathroom, and the next truck came along, didn't 01:53:00realize and went around to the right and set off all those mines that were, there were about ten or twelve mines. All of them went off at once, and I'm on the hedgerow on the other side, and the explosion was so loud, that it blew, blew out my, ruptured my eardrum the second time. I had, the first time, well. The time I had the grenade thrown in my hole, or whatever it was, I went back to the aide station and that marvelous man, Captain Creese, patched me up and -- did whatever's necessary, and I went on a stretcher on two sides of a jeep back to the collecting company and they decided I hadn't been wounded, but I -- had my lungs collapsed, and they kept me there for thirteen days, and they pumped up my lungs. It was the 113th Evac Hospital but it was under canvas. It was a big 01:54:00tent, like a circus tent. And we were laying on stretchers that far off the ground, and the doctor came by and finally he said, "Well it looks like you can go back to your unit. Come outside the tent," the doctor said. And so I went outside the tent, and he said, "See that hedgerow down there?" 'Cause the place was all hedgerows. "Run down there, climb up on top, and then come back." So, I ran down there, climbed up there, and he had a coffee can, and he said, "Now, spit." And I didn't spit blood. He said, "Okay, you can go back to your unit." And it was right after I got back that we ran into that second SS paratroop unit. But, after we took Brest, and captured General Ramcke, who was a real high ranking general, who is trying to establish the Nazi party in Germany today, although he must be dead by now because he was a high-ranking guy then. We took 01:55:00us by train, in the forty and eight, forty men or eight-- forty men or eight cattle-- cattle cars, they put a platoon in each car, and we drove across France up into Holland or Belgium. There was just the opposite of the terrain in the hedgerow country. In the hedgerow country you never knew where you were, 'cause you were surrounded by trees and bushes and you couldn't see over them. You never knew who was on either side of you. Here you could see nothing, you could see practically to the Rhine River. It was flat as a pancake. Flatter than anything I've ever seen before or since. That must have been Holland maybe, I don't know.

We'd see a clump of trees, you'd know that was a town, cause that's-- By the way, I got to be an expert on French churches, because they were kind of alike. 01:56:00They had a vestry, and they had a steeple. Everyone is convinced that the Germans were using the steeple as an OP, an observation post. And they were shooting machine gun fire at us from the OP in the church steeple. So, when I'd go to a town, I'd be the first guy, the first thing I was instructed to do was go in the church and fire up the end of that, up that steeple. And I'd go in, and the vestry for, where the priest would change into their accoutrements of a Catholic church, and sometimes they'd be having church, and all of a sudden, I'd burst in the door and before I'd say, hi, yes or no, I'd fire eight rounds up that steeple, because all of us were convinced. I don't think there ever was a Kraut up in the steeple, but we were convinced of that. And then I'd be kind of 01:57:00embarrassed, especially if they were having church service. And -- I'd take off my helmet, and say something to the Frenchmen, tell them I'm an American. Every once in a while, they could speak English, but most of them couldn't. They didn't know, thought I was another German, see. When we were in a town called St. Renanne, the whole town, the entire town, they were firing, had a tank battle through the town. The .88 gun was a gun that had such a high cyclic rate, I mean such a high rate of fire, speed, muzzle speed, that the round would go over you before you would hear the sound. It would go [makes noise]. That would, you could hear the sound of the projectile, the shell, going over. And-- [break in recording] After I got, after Ritter and I escaped-- the Germans, I got 01:58:00wounded, in a subsequent battle, by the 2nd SS paratroopers, and was sent to a hospital in England. I was only hospitalized three times. The other eight times I was wounded I wasn't hospitalized, except the time I went to the 113th Evac, I guess you could call that a hospital. But -- coming home, I came home through the replacement channels. The returning wounded by, came through the same packets, they called them, as the brand-new trainees from the United States, replacements. We got to a replacement depot, which were called repot-depots by the soldiers, outside of France about five miles south of Paris. Maybe 01:59:00twenty-five miles, I don't know. Called Etampes. They questioned me and routinely asked the guys who had been, who were returning wounded, if they had ever been captured and I said yeah. But I escaped, and I was ashamed of it. And-- so they sent me to Paris where I had to be interrogated by G-2, that's intelligence, high level intelligence like John Foster Dulles or somebody like that. And that was SHAEF -- Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, S-H-A-E-F. That was General Eisenhower's headquarters and there was a G-2 who wanted to interrogate me about my time as a prisoner of war. Apparently, he 02:00:00thought I would learn all kinds of military secrets. I just told him about that burrow, that donkey that hauled the flat car, and how the Germans had given me sauerkraut. And anyway, I was living, and they assigned me, they found out how many times I had been wounded, and they didn't have my records, but they somehow found out that I had been wounded eight times, at least for the record. And they said Eisenhower had a, somebody had a policy that if you're wounded more than twice, they wouldn't send you back, two times or more they wouldn't send you back to the front line.

So, they assigned me to the MPs in Paris. Well, I was nineteen and in the-- MP 02:01:00stands for Military Police. They were the policemen who were policing the city of Paris. And we were living at a place called the Le Petit Palais, which means the small palace, if my French is right. And-- it was anything but small, it was a huge building. It was an old department store, and that's where they had the peace talks negotiating one of those wars, the Korean War, and they were arguing about the shape of the tables and all that. That was in the Petit Palais. We were, the MPs were on the fourth floor and on the fifth floor, no, on one of the floors, the floor above us, the Glenn Miller Band was staying. And I got to know those guys because I was a platoon sergeant. I was nineteen and, in the MPs, you have to be in the MPs for thirty years before you get to be corporal, and because we had such casualties, I got to be a sergeant in a month and a platoon 02:02:00sergeant in two months. So, they put me in the MPs because I had, because I had been wounded so many times. They had to find a unit for me and none of those old guys were thirty and forty years old and stuff. They, and I could speak in French too. I would go out with a truck and we'd put a traffic cop on the Champs Elysees, and one at the Arc de Triomphe and one at Place de Concorde. And they'd be there for four hours directing traffic, and mostly vehicles, military vehicles. I didn't' t have anything to do. So, then I started going out with these guys, Ray McKinley, a drummer, a famous band leader who took Glenn Miller's place. Miller was dead or missing by then. By the way I took a course from Mike Lekrone, and he said that what happened to Glenn Miller, it was called big bands, and he said what happened, he was on an island in the Pacific shacked 02:03:00up with Amelia Earhart. Lekrone's a good guy. Anyway, you don't run into too many guys that are good guys. He, we-- They kept me in the MPs, and at night those guys would play, the Miller band had to play two shows, one afternoon show and one at eight o'clock or nine o'clock at night. And then they were done for the day.

And I got to know all the musicians, and we'd go to the hot club of France which was Django Reinhardt's place of business. He's a famous guitar player. In fact, he was my landlord later on. And we would play, we'd drink a lot, and there was 02:04:00Jerry Gray, Ray McKinley, Red Nickels, and Trigger Albert, and couple other guys would go along. And we'd take turns playing, well we played Lady Be Good until four o'clock one morning. Started at 9:00 or whenever they got through. And-- Trigger Albert, the bass player, I had played in a high school dance band, and I was a bass player. I was probably a pretty good one. We had a jazz band, and we went to play at dances every Friday night. Everybody else had a date and I had to go play in the basement of St. Roberts or someplace while they had a high school dance. And so, they, when Trigger Albert had married an English girl, he was the bass player, I don't know what his name was, I think it was Clarence. And he, his wife was pregnant, and she was going to have a baby and he got 02:05:00fourteen days compassionate leave, and they started looking around trying to find a base player. And McKinley, who was running the Glenn Miller Band, said Hey we got a guy in the MPs downstairs who goes out with us every night, and he's a better bass player than Albert. I swear. And so, they shuffled papers around, somehow, they wanted, those MPs want to get me out of there, you know, they didn't like this kid telling them what to do. And so, I, the MP battalion was more than happy to get rid of me, so I played with the Glenn Miller Band for fourteen days, until Trigger Albert came back. That was kind of fun, and I still see, whenever they, I still see Ray McKinley if he's still playing on circuit. Peanuts Hucko, he was playing at the Union or something the other day. He's a 02:06:00clarinet player. Some of those guys are still playing. And they have these secondhand Glenn Miller Band that comes around, the estate of Glenn Miller. There's still a couple guys from that military band that were my age then. And that guy, the piano player is the chairman of the music department of Yale University. What the heck is his name? Maybe he's retired by now. I guess everybody's retired, that's my age. But that was kind of fun, and then finally I got really, I'd see the guys. They started giving them leaves into Paris. Three-day weekend pass, and I'd see a couple guys with helmets on with camouflage nets, and my conscience started bothering me because I was, here I was drunk every night and getting laid and all that stuff, and in Paris living 02:07:00it up. And so, I, and they were trying to get people to go, trying to get volunteers, they had quit sending replacement volunteers or replacements from the States because they figured the war was just about over. That was before the Battle of the Bulge. They were asking for volunteers who would volunteer to go in the infantry. They had signs up at every mess hall. Won't you volunteer? So, I told them, I could sense the resentment after I played in that band especially. Then I was going to come back and tell them where to direct traffic and how to direct traffic, and I didn't know either one.

So, I volunteered to go back. And my unit was in-- at Kerkrade, Holland, in regimental reserve. I don't think there was anybody, I think there was a couple 02:08:00guys that had come back from the hospital, otherwise they were all new faces. And they-- I was then the platoon sergeant, and we went up across the Maginot Line and got into Aachen which was the first, we took, the first big city and Aachen is a big city, 500,000 or probably a million now. And A-A-C-H-E-N. Us and the 1st Division. We fought -- they had buildings, there's no front lawns in Europe, and all the houses are in apartments. And you'd go through, uh, and the blast to go through the walls apartment to apartment we used our entrenching tools. It was too much trouble, too much work too. But a bazooka would blow a hole in it. The only thing is the back blast of a bazooka, you can't have it in 02:09:00a room, so what you'd do is you'd go to the window and stick your ass on the window sill and have the back end of the bazooka out the window and then you'd fire so the back blast would go out on the street out the window, and you'd fire a hole. And then you could go through the hole into the next room. And when we had Paramount News was by then following us, our unit, our unit and the 1st Division, because Aachen was the first big town we took in Germany. And they showed a picture and you'd shot down the street, and here would be five or six guys with their rear ends sticking out the window with a bazooka on their shoulder. It was an established tactic. We had to teach ourselves a lot of established tactics, especially in hedgerow country. And they could have told us about that, I don't blame them for not telling us how to get through apartment walls. They'd give us each two quarter-pound cakes of TNT each day, each guy 02:10:00would get one with a firing pinhole in it, and we'd use them for digging a foxhole. We were going high tech, we didn't have to use our shovels anymore because we had enough ammunition up there. We could blast a hole in the ground and that would give us a good start, especially in rocky terrain, so we could dig a foxhole with that. And when we got to Aachen we used our quarter-pound block of TNT to blast a hole in the wall to the next apartment and then we, but we only had two each, so we had to finally use the bazookas. And they had a better brand of a bazooka by the time we got up there, too. And our anti-tank weapons were .90s. We used to use .57, well, I have to-- you guys don't understand. These are millimeters again. A .57 is a gun about-- it has an 02:11:00aperture on the end of the muzzle. It's an anti-tank weapon. It's a high- velocity weapon, but it's only a small thing and it didn't have enough poop to penetrate the German armor, so they started bringing in, and we copied their .88 with a gun called the 90. And it had as much zip as the .88. Put them on the end of tanks and they called them tank destroyers.

And we had, tank destroyers would come with us, the infantry, the infantry'd go first and if they'd spot a tank. I was telling your before how we used to knock, we were on a tank-hunting team in France. We'd go back to France. Every little village they called a chateau, I think named after the owner of the biggest 02:12:00farmhouse in the village. They'd have four or five houses in a little narrow street, and the Germans had these Tiger Royals and Panther Tanks. And they had all, they named their tanks after animals obviously. And they had a big, long .88. It was just like our tanks do today, great big, long muzzle. Those high velocity weapons have long, but the projectile goes so fast they have to have a long tube in order to make it accurate. And to get it on its way. And we knew that those .88s couldn't, the streets were so narrow the tank couldn't turn its muzzle once it got going down the street. And then we'd put something in the middle of the street, a davenport or something like that or pile a bunch of crap or take an old jeep or something, and the tank would stop, and the soldiers 02:13:00would get out of the, out of the tank to clear the way, and while they were doing that, we were in the basement of the house, and we could reach out and each German tank had twenty bogie wheels, little, the track runs on those wheels. And we couldn't knock the tank out with our conventional artillery, or our bazookas or our anti-tank weapons, so we'd take our quarter pound of TNT and, with its firing pinhole in it, and then take some shape charge composition C, that's the thing that they're blowing up buildings and banks with to this day, it's plastic. We'd shape it on that bogie wheel, put a firing cord in there and a firing pin, and then boom. Make a blast that would knock the bogie wheel off the tank. And the tread would only, only one tread would work. And the 02:14:00Germans couldn't turn the gun around to shoot at us because the streets were so narrow, they couldn't get, then we'd run like hell. We knocked out ten tanks that way in France. But the, getting back into Holland --

DERKS: We have ten minutes of tape left. That's all we have.

FLATEN: Well okay. I'll tell you we got up the Elbe River, a river that I read in the paper is flood stage now in Germany today. And I didn't know it went into the Dresden, but it's a big river. It's about as big as the Mississippi is up here at Hudson. And they said, and by this time we have no replacements. I know all the officers were drunk someplace. The war was over except for running into the Russians. We were told not to go into Berlin, stop at the Elbe River, and I had the first, we had a guy in our unit by the name of Judson English. Big white male, with reddish hair from New Orleans. And he'd have pot shipped to him in 02:15:00the mail. And he called himself Blue English. And Blue English was the first American that defected to the Russians. He went over, they told us of course you can't go across the river, the river is really high water and flood stage and you had to have a pretty good-sized boat to get across the river. Of course, he went and stole a boat and went across the river and got drunk over there. And the company commander said where's English. I said I don't know; last I saw him he was over there with the Russians. I thought I told you guys not to go over there. Well of course I said I didn't, English went. So, he said, okay go get him. So, I had to go across the river in a boat and I got him, and brought him back, testified at his court marshal. Blue English, he called himself the mayor of Canal Street, and about a year ago I was down in New Orleans riding on Canal Street, and I said to the cab driver, "Do you know the Mayor of Canal Street?" 02:16:00And the cab driver says, "You mean Old Blue?" So apparently, he got back there. But we were at Torgau when we met the Russians, and they were the saddest looking soldiers I ever saw in my life. And they kept saying that the great -- in the Cold War they were afraid of the Russians, and I said if they're anything like those guys, half of them had German uniforms on, half of them didn't even have rifles, they were just, I don't imagine we were exactly centerpieces ourselves, but after living in holes for the better part of a year, but they were really awful looking troops.

But we had, we went over the river, and we saw on a dike, on the other side of the river on a town called Torgau, we saw these guys and even though some of them had German overcoats on, we recognized them as Russians because they had funny looking hats. So, we went down there and made sign language and they 02:17:00brought out a bottle of vodka and we had, spent an afternoon. And then one day, it was about, you know everything goes slow in the army. One day they build a bridge, they didn't want us to have a bridge because they didn't want the Krauts, we couldn't feed them, see. The Krauts were surrendering by the thousands, and we wanted the Russians to have them. And that's what they said, because we could see them. They tried to swim, and they'd drown, we'd say those German soldiers are drowning. Well, we don't want them. Let the Russians have them. Then all of a sudden they put a pontoon bridge across there, and a German unit, it was a buzz bomb unit, it was a rocket unit, and Werner Von Braun, only I didn't know that, I read this in a book later, came across that pontoon bridge, and all the officers in the unit had lugers and I had a barracks' bag, 02:18:00and they'd stop and take their luger from them, put it in a barracks' bag. Pretty soon I had two barracks' bags full of German lugers. And on the way home from Germany, we left on Christmas Eve 1944. I learned how to play poker and I lost 2,000 dollars in back pay, and we broke a rudder and had to go back to Plymouth and get on another troop ship, and I was broke because I had learned the hard way how to play poker. And we found out that the merchant marine would buy these lugers from us, and they'd give us 500 bucks a piece for them. So, I had enough to stake my-- I came back and I think I had 10,000 dollars. They gave us greenbacks you know to come home with. And my father made me put it in the bank. My father was a great influence on me. When we were in that woe-be-gone animalistic area of France, the Germans would send public address announcements 02:19:00that we should surrender. And they would give us good food and we'd go back to a prison camp and the war would be over. And I would have done it gladly, except I didn't know what I would tell my father. Can you imagine going home and telling your old man I surrendered? That's why I never would admit to him, never would ever admit to him that I was a prisoner, even though it was only three days, and I had escaped and killed a German, the guy with me killed a German getting out.

DERKS: So, you got home.

FLATEN: I got home, I got home, and I got to Fort Sheridan this time. And I called up my mother and father and told them to come from Milwaukee and they came in their 1935 Buick and picked me up and took me home. And I went to the university. The school had already started at, I had a scholarship to play baseball because Diney Mansfield had seen me play high school baseball in 02:20:00Minneapolis. And, or he, somebody told him, he gave me, he told me I lived in the stadium dorms, you know the stadium has, the University of Wisconsin has dormitory rooms on the east side, where coach's offices were, those were dorms. They gave me free room there and instead of board, food, they got me a job at Bud Jordan's Grill on State Street, with all the jocks, And -- we lived, we lived in the stadium dorms. And they made us go out for all sports. They weren't just going to get a baseball, I was a right-handed pitcher, and I played baseball for Wisconsin, but they made us go out for football too, because by God they were giving us a free room at the stadium dorms, and they got us a job, meal job. We had our -- So I, I -- was on the football team, that's where I met 02:21:00Ambrose, and he was a freshman, he was a freshman. He was about, what, an eighteen or nineteen-year-old freshman. Hadn't been in the Army yet. And I'd been in the army for three years and had gone to one semester at Milwaukee State Teachers College because Wisconsin was, University of Wisconsin was on three semesters then. They had school all year round. No vacations, three semesters, and one of the semesters was already going when I got out of the army, so I went to Milwaukee State Teachers College. And, with all the other veterans. And we'd go down, down near the Downer Theatre, down Downer Avenue from Milwaukee State Teachers College, and because we were veterans, we had whiskey and toast for breakfast. We'd have four roses and toast, and of course I wasn't used to 02:22:00drinking and I'd get sick. But it was kind of an exciting experience to say that I had, at eleven o'clock my classes were over and I'd had four roses and toast. I took a course called speech and I didn't take the final exam, all my credits transferred up here except the incomplete turned into an F, and I had -- so I had to see a guy by the name of Sam McCready. He was the professor in charge of keeping athletes eligible. I had to see Sam, Sam the eligibility man, to see about picking up some credits. And I had taken German, I could speak German, because we were in, after the war ended in August, or in May, we were in the army of occupation, so I learned how to speak German like a Kraut. But I learned 02:23:00Plat Deutsche, which is street German.

So, when I took a four-credit easy A, supposedly, I learned they spoke Haut Deutsche. Not only that but Miss von Bodagen, the teaching assistant, was a good-looking tomato that I used to take to the log cabin bar, we had a 4:35 class. And she said, "Herr Flaten you'll have to drop this course because you're not learning the right kind of German." So, I had to pick up four credits, and the course had almost gone six weeks and I took Gems and Precious Stones, Quartets of Beethoven-- Economic Botany, Economic Botany was two credits so that made my four, oh, and Freshman Forum. And I could listen to Freshman Forum on the radio because it was broadcast on WHA, and one morning I turned on the radio, rolled over in bed, and I said isn't this grand I can go to class by just 02:24:00turning on the radio, and they said Freshman Forum, which is normally heard at this time, will not be heard today because of the final exam. So, I had to run all the way up to 272 Bascom, and the teacher said, "No, it's too late to take, the final exam was over with." So, he told me to write a lengthy paper on one of the lectures. So, I took-- TIME magazine had a-- a lecture was on Abraham Lincoln and his life or something. TIME magazine had a review of a book by Van Buren on Abraham Lincoln, and I copied it word-for-word. And he called me up the next semester and he wants to see me after class. And I went and he was holding the TIME magazine in his hand. He was kind of an effeminate guy anyway. He said, 02:25:00"Do you recognize this?" And I said yes. I said, "If you think I'm going to lie to you and tell you I didn't copy that lengthy paper out of a book review of TIME," and he said, "As long as you don't lie to me, I'll pass you anyway." So, he gave me a C, which enabled me to go to law school. Yeah, I went, everybody went to the GI Bill. Seventy-five bucks and then--no, fifty bucks, but I joined the ROTC, and they gave me thirty-five bucks. Veterans, there were only eight guys in my class, they didn't like the Army very much. So, they were really 02:26:00desperate for veterans to join the ROTC. But that wasn't worth talking about. And I don't remember much about Korea because I was wounded. I was only there two weeks.

DERKS: I'm having trouble going from fighting through the hedgerows and being in stark terror day after day to having to deal with your university forum class. They just don't seem to--

FLATEN: That was when I came home from the Army, you said.

DERKS: I know, just from one to the other.

FLATEN: Well then, I joined the ROTC and got a commission. And then I wanted to get the thirty-five bucks so I-- they told me to join the Army Reserve. And the Army Reserve had a lot of 84th Airborne Division, 334th Airborne Infantry, and so they had a lot of law school faculty for officers in the unit. DeWitt and 02:27:00Carlin-- most everybody was a veteran, faculty and students. And we'd go down there and sign a payroll and have a couple cans of beer and go home. Then they started making us wear uniforms and they had built an armory out on South Park Street and rifles and machine guns, and the next thing I know I'm over on Pork Chop Hill, but I was only there for two weeks and I only gave one combat command. They sent us on a patrol and the Chinese were drunk and they were clanging symbols and bugles and stuff, I gave my one and only combat command as an officer, I said, "Haul ass!" And we hauled ass, and then I got wounded and I can't remember anything else. I got hit in the head. So, I can't tell you anything about Korea.

DERKS: Really, it's just gone.

FLATEN: Well, I can tell you we went across that creek. The creek belonged to us 02:28:00in the daytime, and they were in bunkers, Pork Chop Hill was dug in, they'd been there for a couple years. In the daytime we owned the creek, in the nighttime the Chinks owned the creek, and the Chinese, and we would -- but they would send patrols on the other side of the creek and the Chinamen would get all drunked up and blow bugles and they'd get courage from--