Oral history interview with Robert Swanson, WPT Wisconsin World War II Stories

Please Note: Due to the set-up of this video recording, the voice of the interviewer is hard to hear. The transcript reflects the best attempt to represent what is said.

Transcribed Interview:

DERKS: So, let's go all the way back to when you got into the military. In fact, in was a little later--it was after Pearl Harbor, right--when you went in?

SWANSON: Yes. See, I was born in 1924, and so the first draft that came along was men ages twenty-one to thirty-five, and I was about sixteen at that time. Well, then it gradually came down to where, when I came to Stout as a student in the fall of 1942, I was still not yet eighteen, but I turned eighteen, and we went over to Eau Claire and enlisted in the Enlisted Reserve Corps. And, they had told that we'd probably stay in college, and then go to OCS [Officer 00:01:00Candidate School]. Well, that was shortened up, and at the end of our freshman year, then, we were taken on active duty. So, that was in June of 1943.

DERKS: You were a student at Stout?

SWANSON: Yes.

DERKS: The war must have been really front-and-center in your consciousness.

SWANSON: Yes. The Japanese, of course, had bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, and I was a senior in high school then. And, we actually enlisted one year after that in this Enlisted Reserve Corps--so yes, we were very conscious of it. The older men students at Stout had left by that time; they had either enlisted, or had been drafted. And so, there was this bunch of us who were freshmen, and all went over to Eau Claire to enlist in this thing, and fifty-seven of us were accepted at that time.

DERKS: Do you remember when you heard about Pearl Harbor?

SWANSON: Yes. I didn't know what or where it was. It was a Sunday, of course, and we often took a walk. I was an active Boy Scout and my dad would walk with me on hiking merit badge, and that day we were taking a walk, and came back--and they said Pearl Harbor had been bombed. And, we sort of said, "Well, yeah, that's nice [laughs]; what is it?" That's how much we knew about it.

DERKS: And what did you think then?

SWANSON: Well, then it was pretty obvious. In fact, my dad was on the Draft Board there when the age was twenty-one to thirty-five, and of course they got some very sad cases of thirty-five year old men that were being drafted, and they had families. Of course, nobody had any money then, and so it was pretty obvious that we were going to be taken into the Army, too. And I had planned to go to Superior State Teacher's College for a year or so, and then transfer to 00:03:00Stout, but my folks said, "Well, you ought to go there right away." I'm sure that they were thinking, "Well, I'd get away from home and I'd get started in this." And so, I came here--and we were all students here; we were very interested in that, because we knew some of the older students who were already in the service then.

DERKS: That was an interesting period, because when people think of World War II, they think of the battles--and probably think of Europe after D-Day. There wasn't much happening in that early part of the war, was there?

SWANSON: No. No, there wasn't. And we were--we were isolationists supreme. In fact, I can remember saying, "Let's not get in this thing. Let's let them fight." In fact, I was on the debate team when I was a senior in high school. The debate topic was "Resolved: that every able-bodied young, male citizen should have one year of full-time military training before reaching the age of 00:04:00twenty-one." And I was on the affirmative side. And I met the other day with the fellow who was on the negative side and I said, "Well, you know, I won!" because we both had got that military training.

DERKS: And how, yeah, when you went in; pick it up there.

SWANSON: Well, when I went in, we went to Camp Grant, Illinois, where they were inducting people from this part of the country, and then we were sent to Fort McClellan, Alabama, to take infantry basic training. That was a standard thirteen weeks of training, and it was excellent training. It was tough training. We were conditioned very well, but treated very well. And then they started this ASTP program. That was a program that soldiers would be sent to college and take a double program so that in a year and a half you would complete a Bachelor's Degree in engineering. So I was in a group that was sent 00:05:00to Fargo, North Dakota, and we had the first term of ASTP there, and finished it, and got a furlough, and came back--and, instead of starting the second term, they said, "Well, they're in need of infantry men, and you guys have had infantry training." And so, then we went to Camp Gruber, Oklahoma [an Army National Guard training facility used for Summer field training exercises] for the Rainbow Division. It had just been started up. [It had been] a famous World War One Division, Douglas McArthur was the chief of Staff of it, and they had reactivated it and we were put into that division there. And that was about in March of 1944.

DERKS: Is that where you were tapped for anti-tank?

SWANSON: Yes. I was put first in a heavy weapons company, and then in an anti-tank company. They kept shuffling people around as more men came in all of the time, but I ended up in anti-tank.

DERKS: Tell me about anti-tank, and that kind of training.

SWANSON: Well, the anti-tank gun was on two wheels with a long trail on it 00:06:00that-- It had to be towed by a truck; this [gun] was not something that you could wheel around. And, it had a barrel on it that was about ten feet long, and these big single shells that-- You would punch [the shell] in the end, and close up the trap there, and then fire them--and then it would kick back and throw out the old shell, and you'd put a new one in. So, we had a lot of experience in moving this gun around, [but] not very much at firing it, actually, because to fire that on a campground in an infantry place was not too safe. So, they had all kinds of devices that-- They put a .22 caliber rifle on the barrel of this, and then miniaturized everything so that you had a firing range that was only twenty feet long. And you could aim with this and fire this .22 bullet. We found, however, it was really easier to fire the gun with the big bullet in it 00:07:00than it was this little one because you moved it just a fraction of an inch and you were way off the target. So, the training of actually firing that was not very extensive.

DERKS: How many did it take to fire them?

SWANSON: Two men. One was the gunner, and the other was the loader. So, we organized, sort of, in two-man teams all the time.

DERKS: And when you're moving, would you also be driving the truck? I mean, was that part of it?

SWANSON: Each gun was associated with a squad, and a squad was ten men--one of whom was a truck driver--and this was a ton and a half, six-by-six truck. And so, he drove the truck, and then the rest of us were the ones that operated the gun, [and] set it up, and we took turns on that. We had to stand guard on that all night long, and so we worked in pairs and [were] changing the guards all the time.

DERKS: And then, was the whole division shipped out?

SWANSON: No, the division was not ready to go. And a division in those days had about fifteen thousand men in it. But 10,000 of those were in three regiments that were infantry men and anti-tankers, and so forth, and the rest were in artillery, and so forth. Well, they were not ready to go over, and so we were sent over--these three infantry regiments--as a task force. And, we were called Task Force Linden; the Assistant Division Commander was a fellow named Henning Linden, and so he went over as the head of our unit. And then Harry Collins, Major General Collins, was the general in charge of the whole Division. And the rest of them didn't come over until February--after we got over--and then it formed up as a total division. But we went over originally as a task force.

DERKS: How did you get over there?

SWANSON: We went by ship out of New York Harbor. There was a great big boat called the Edmond B. Alexander, and the story was that it had belonged to the Germans right after World War I, and somehow we captured her or whatever--and it was gigantic vessel. There were 6,000 people [troops] on this thing--and we didn't know; we thought we would go to England, because that's where most of the people were going, and then come across the Channel [into Europe]. Well, we steamed along there for upwards of two weeks, and took a right turn into-- and ended up in Marseilles, where-- We got off of the ship at that point.

DERKS: And when was that?

SWANSON: That was December, 9th, again--that December 9th keeps appearing with me--December 9th, 1944.

DERKS: So, where were you when you heard about D-Day--that the Invasion had happened? You were in camp?

SWANSON: Yes, we were at Camp Gruber, and I remember the Charge of Quarters came through the barracks yanking on all the chains that turned the lights on, and he said, "Out of bed! It's D-Day." And that's when it had started, and we were kind of happy that we were actually in the United States at this time; but, it was [also] pretty obvious that we were going to be speeding up getting ready to go over there, too.

DERKS: So you got to Marseilles--

SWANSON: And, we camped there for ten days, because we had to get all new guns and trucks. We didn't haul those over on this decrepit ship that we had, so it took about ten days. And, the first couple of days there was beautiful weather; this was in December, and of course, the south of France was nice. Then, it started to rain--it turned to sleet and to snow--and so when we left there, we left in a snow storm. And, we were driving in these trucks--the ten men were in 00:11:00the truck, with the gun behind--and someone came up with the brilliant idea that we shouldn't have the tarp over the truck in back because we couldn't see if we were being attacked by airplanes. And so, the order went out, "Take the tarp off." Now, it was snowing and sleeting and so we were sitting in the back of this open truck with our M-1 rifles pointed up in the air--and, needless to say, we did not bring down any German aircraft [laughs].

DERKS: They probably weren't looking for you in that weather!

SWANSON: Yes [laughing]!

DERKS: And where did you go?

SWANSON: Well, then we went to this Fort Crown Prince on the Maginot Line. We were at first told that we were going to go to the Battle of the Bulge, although I'm not sure it was called that at the time. But they had this-- Bastogne, it was--[and] the troops there were fighting off the Germans. And so, we started up in that direction, and we went a couple of days, and then they said, "We're 00:12:00detouring you; that battle seems to be under control." And so, we moved along the line, which proved to be the Germans next line of attack called Operation Nordwind [Operation Northwind]. And, there've been a number of books written about that, but it never got the publicity of the Battle of the Bulge--and actually, there were more Germans and Americans killed in Operation Nordwind than there were in the Battle of the Bulge. But, the Germans very cleverly pulled out of that bulge, and slid along the line there, where a number of us that were fairly new troops were stationed--and I don't know if they knew that or not, but they attacked through that area then, and so we were in this Operation Nordwind.

DERKS: When was your first invasion?

SWANSON: Well, that was right--oh, about the first part of January--something like that. We had had Christmas at this Fort Crown Prince, and then it took us several days to get up on the line. And, it was about the first or second of 00:13:00January that we had the first action in there.

DERKS: Do you remember that?

SWANSON: Yes--although again, I figure I was always a lucky person. They did not choose to slam at us in that point; we did not see any Germans coming towards us there, and the order was given to pull back somewhat, and form another line. And so, we pulled these guns back, and set up another line of defense after that--and actually didn't see much of the German Army at all--but some of the units of our Division did, and there were a lot of casualties along there.

DERKS: It really was luck of the draw, wasn't it?

SWANSON: It was; it was.

DERKS: And, I expect you heard a lot nearby.

SWANSON: Oh yes. Yeah, there was a lot of noise, and so forth. We often never knew which way the enemy was--which was, I don't know--maybe it was lucky, and 00:14:00maybe it wasn't. But, one place we had our gun set up, and a fellow that had been our Company Commander in the States came driving along in his Jeep, and he saw this gun. He said, "You've got that pointed the wrong way--the enemy's over there! Turn that thing around!"--which we did, then. So we were not heavily informed on a lot of things that we were doing.

DERKS: [Laughs nervously] That must disconcert you a little.

SWANSON: Yes--and that's, again, where luck was a big factor. There were lots of stories. One of the fellows in our company was out in a foxhole alone; his guard buddy had gotten ill and couldn't go out there. And, it was at night when you were out there, and of course that was always kind of creepy. And, he heard some rustling--and he saw a line of about seven men sort of coming along, and he thought, "This is a German patrol!" And he pulled his rifle up to shoot at them--and it jammed; and, as he was clearing it up, he heard these guys--and 00:15:00they were all talking English! And so, he quickly ducked down in his foxhole, and did not reveal himself, and he said he saved the lives of seven Americans there that day. He didn't know who they were, he never found out--and he didn't try to; but, there was a lot of that kind of thing. In staying on this gun, it took only two men to fire it, so the other eight men in the squad, then, were usually behind the lines somewhere living in houses. And we came out and took three-hour trips on that gun and in this town of Sweighausen, where we met our first real tough fighting, I had gone out on the gun with my guard buddy at five o'clock in the morning, and the Germans attacked this town at six o'clock, and our squad that was back in this house was ambushed in the house and one of them 00:16:00was killed there, and three or four of them were wounded. But at the end of the day, the American forces pushed them back, and all of these men got away. But, two of our men were killed that day--and they were two fellows that had just been married not long before we went in the service; and, one of them-- His wife was going to have a baby, and it was a sad thing that they were both killed at that point.

DERKS: So you were on the gun at that point.

SWANSON: I was out on the gun.

DERKS: And how far was that from--

SWANSON: Well, that was about three quarters of a mile away, and it was through some woods and over a hill, and they had told us when we went out there that they'd bring breakfast out there. What they used to do was-- They'd drive in the nighttime hours to pick up the meals in Marmite cans and they said, "Well, they weren't here when we had to go out there; we'll bring them out." Well, they didn't come, and they didn't come. And, finally, a little after noon, three 00:17:00fellows came running out to our gun, and one was our platoon leader, Lieutenant Fielding. And he said, "Where's your squad, Swanny?" And I said, "Well, back in Sweighausen, aren't they?" "No way," he said, "That place is all beat up." And one of the guys with him was a big tall guy, and he had his boots on the wrong feet. As he came running up, I noticed that his feet pointed outwards--we had these shoe packs--and I said, "Earl, you got your boots on the wrong feet!" And he didn't hear me at all, he was so excited. And the other guy said, "Well, there's a fire fight back there," and I said, "You mean the Germans are there?" and he reached into his pocket, and he pulled out a Luger, and he says, "Well, you don't get these playing tiddly winks." And he had shot a couple of Germans, and taken their weapon, and so then I said, "Well shouldn't we do something--go back there and get our guys out of there?" So this Lieutenant said, "Well, I'm 00:18:00going on to the Company Commander and try to form a task force to go back there." And, actually, they did that--and by the end of the day, the Germans were beaten back out of there, and quite a number of them surrendered. They were not wanting to fight, and those that were wounded ,we bundled up on a truck, and took them to an aid station, and that was really the end of that battle. It lasted just that one day. But it was a horrendous battle when it was going on.

DERKS: Now, was that behind you--again?

SWANSON: Yes. Yes. So, they were really attacking from behind us. But when we were out on this gun in the morning when the daylight came, I noticed a group of about fifteen fellows in the woods, a couple hundred yards away--and they looked like Americans, and they were watching us, kind of, and coming up--and finally one of them hollered, "Are you guys GIs?" and we said, "Yeah", and they came 00:19:00over, and they said, "Well you're wearing overcoats; we just about shot you. Word went out last night that the Germans were infiltrating the lines wearing American overcoats--and that anyone wearing an overcoat, you ought to shoot them." And here we, of course, put on every piece of clothing we owned when we went out there in the cold. Well, we immediately took off these overcoats, and we said, "Well, what are you guys doing?" They said, "Well, we're looking for some krauts," and they went on along the way, and we didn't see them again.

DERKS: It all just seemed so confused--

SWANSON: Well, when this Lieutenant came over then, he said, "Well, I'm going to see the Company Commander," and we had a gun that was near the next town of Angulon, and he said, "Take the firing case out of your gun, so it can't be fired, and you come over and take over that gun that's near Angulon." So, there were several of us over there at that point, and there was a big open field out in front of us--and the Germans were in the woods back there, and shooting 00:20:00mortar shells--but they were going way over us, in the field behind us. And, then we were--four or five of us-- laying around in a circle there, and I heard a mortar shell coming and they always said you wouldn't hear the one that gets you--but I don't know of anyone who ever proved that. And, that mortar shell came down, and it fell right in the midst of this circle of ours, and kicked up the snow and the ice and everything all over us, but not a single person was hit. And, they never fired another shell. Well, then one of our infantry units came along, and they said, "Well, we've got to assault that woods over there." And, here was a big wide open field, and assaulting the enemy who couldn't be seen, so they sent the Lead Scout out, and he got out in the middle of the field and somebody fired and he fell to the ground. So, they had a Red Cross guy with them--that's an American Soldier, an Aide Man--and he said, "Well, I'll go out 00:21:00and see what's the matter with him." I thought, "Boy, there is either the bravest guy in the world--or the most fool-hardy"--but he was wearing the symbol on his helmet of the Red Cross, and he had a flag, and he went out there and knelt down by this guy that was laying in the snow, and then he came back; and, we said, "Well, is the guy dead?" And he said, "No, he wasn't hit at all," but he said, "Leave me out here; if I stand up--why, I'm going to be dead." And, so then, later, there was a general assault from inside the woods, and eventually these Germans came out of the woods with their hands up, and they came over to our gun. And, I noticed as they came, that the couple fellows leading them looked like old men, and the people they were leading looked like kids. And, they had brand new uniforms that didn't fit them very well, and I said to this one kid--I knew a few words of German--"[speaks in German]", "How old are you?" And, he said "[German]"--that he was fourteen years old. And, he was acting like a kid that had got his hand caught in the cookie jar. He was kind of embarrassed 00:22:00here in the presence of these American soldiers, and so we bundled all of them up and took them to a stockade where they were-- So, perhaps they weren't very heavily armed in there, and the Germans were pretty desperate at that time, and were recruiting anybody to do anything.

DERKS: So, they probably weren't very well trained, either.

SWANSON: I doubt if they had been trained at all. [ unintelligible]

DERKS: Then what?

SWANSON: Well, then we left there, and pulled back to another place to re-organize--a place called Wingen-sur-Moder. The Germans had been through there some time before, and had been driven out. And then, near there were the Haardt Mountains, which were a whole ridge of mountains that were not vertical sorts of places, but just really high hills, and the Germans had built a lot of 00:23:00enclosures in there with their guns, and so forth. And so, we were to then attack these Haardt Mountains--not just our outfit, but a lot of people. But, we couldn't go in there with our guns, of course, because they couldn't' be hauled up these hills, and so we broke up into five-man squads, and with bazookas, and so we went to those Haardt Mountains then. It took us five days to get through, and there was a lot of action in there, and a number of both Germans and Americans killed, and we finally survived out the other side. We had, oh, three or four fellows from our Company that were wounded--nobody was actually killed in there--and then came out the other side. And, by that time, the war was starting to wind down rather rapidly.

DERKS: That's what I was wondering. Did you have a sense that it was coming to 00:24:00an end?

SWANSON: Yes we did--and of course, we were all concerned that we wouldn't be the last casualty of the war, or something like that. And so, we were in a series of small towns; we ended up then in Munich, and Hitler's birthday was, I think, April 25th, or something--and as we were approaching that date, the fear was that that might be the Last Hoorah. And, the fact that, of course, he-- In Munich was where he had formed up a lot of this stuff that started in the 1930s, and so we went into Munich, and a lot of units were in there, and there was a lot of stuff that had been blown up, and so forth. And so, we were in there, and a lot of Germans surrendered in that place--and a lot of people surrendered who weren't soldiers. They were wearing some kind of uniforms, and a bunch of them surrendered to us, and they were, I think, the fire department or something of 00:25:00that sort. And so then of course, Dachau was outside of Munich--and Dachau had not been well-known, of course, and had been kept secret--and, a number of fellas in our unit went to Dachau, and our Division received credit for opening up Dachau. I was never there, and I wasn't really too eager to go there and see that place, because it had all the ovens where they were, of course, cremating people. But the prisoners, there at Dachau, that were in the best of shape came into Munich, and they were walking around wearing these striped suits, and they were just as happy as could be. And they'd come up to you and they had pictures of their family that they had been carrying with them--some of them had been in these concentration camps for five years. And, of course, these were the ones 00:26:00that were in the best shape that we saw, the ones that were still in Dachau, of course, many of them were in the process of dying. And so they, these prisoners, were sweeping all over the place and celebrating, and of course, we gave them food and cautioned them that they'd be well off not to eat too much, because they had had five years of practical starvation. [I] didn't see any women in this group; this was all men, but there were women and children in that place, too. And so, that was really a revealing, horrible place that the, that the Germans had done in. Of course they had--I don't know how many concentration camps across the country--but Dachau was perhaps the most infamous of the lot.

DERKS: When did you become aware that they had these camps?

SWANSON: I think it was that somebody went out there, as we swept through there, 00:27:00and saw this place, and I don't know that-- We hadn't any information on concentration camps, as far as I know. We had a number of people, not so much from our unit, but who were captured by the Germans. One fellow who, in Schweighausen, was captured by the Germans, and he was wounded. And, they had a wounded German take him back to the rear area, and he was sent to a Polish concentration camp that had some Americans and some Poles in it. And, this fellow happened to be Polish-- Ziegmont Cristoff was his name--and he spoke polish, and he told us after the war [that] he was in this concentration camp for, oh, three or four months. And, they knew that something was happening, because the Germans were pretty well upset in there, and so forth, and so they 00:28:00said, "Well, let's escape from this place." And, they had some kind of a funny uniform that--they didn't know what nationality it was, but they were dressed in those. And so, they--the Germans--were not guarding things very heavily, and so they ran off into the woods. And, they got out there, and they said, "You know, here we are out in the woods, wearing some kind of an odd uniform. The American Army could come along here and see us--and blow us right out of our socks!" And so, they went back into the concentration camp, and stayed there for another three or four days when the American units came into being. And then, that fellow was sent home right away, and I didn't see him until the reunion we had in Milwaukee about ten years ago--and he told us this whole story. He again was an older person, about thirty-five years old, and how he had survived this thing and talked to these Poles that were-- They had a fence in the center, and he 00:29:00talked to them; they'd hang their blanket on the fence, and talk back and forth. And, these poles had some people that were sneaking food in to them. It didn't give you the image of a very well-guarded concentration camp that was out there. And, then they would share this food with these American soldiers as well.

DERKS: So, how far are we, at this point, from V-E [Victory in Europe] Day?

SWANSON: Well, that came up right about that time, because that was May 8th, and we celebrated then. And then, we were announced as being Occupation Forces in Austria. So we thought, "Well, this is a really good deal," because it was still thought that somebody--a lot of somebodies--were going to have to run up the beaches of Japan, and fight people that were not going to give up. The Germans would; near the end of the war, [they] were surrendering, but we had the feeling the Japanese would not. And so, by being named Occupation Forces in Austria, we 00:30:00thought "Well, this is going to be a better deal." So, we were sent to several places in Austria where we stayed a period of time pulling various kinds of duty. But then, of course, in August, we dropped the two A-Bombs--and the war was over. Then, we thought, "Well now--this is not a good deal; we're going to be here in Europe for the rest." Well, it turned out not to be the case. They had a point system that-- You got points for how many months you'd been in the service, and [for] any decorations you had; and so, they started to send men home in terms of how many points they had--so it didn't make any difference where you were. So, we were stationed in a number of different places in Austria, in large cities and small. And, we stayed in private homes, and the people would generally stay in the home with us--and of course, they got some food that way--and so, it was like putting up with a rowdy bunch of fellows, of 00:31:00course. And, we made black marks all over the floor with our rubber soles on our boots, and they'd come and scrub those floors every day, and these guys would come in--and still do that over again. But, we had guard positions that we took care of in Vienna. Vienna was a four-power city; it was divided into quarters, and the Russians had a quarter, we did, the French, and the English. And then, in the center, was a place called the Ring that actually was a ring--and that was an international zone, and they had a streetcar that went around this ring. It was about a mile in diameter, and that was the place that you could buy anything that ever was anyplace. We often said, if you let drop the fact in the ring that you'd like an elephant, you could plan on the next day somebody come 00:32:00leading an elephant in. That's when the black marketeers just reigned supreme. And, of course, the money then was-- The German money was worthless, and so cigarettes became what was valuable. And, we had a ration that we could get a carton of cigarettes every week--and a carton of cigarettes was equivalent of one to three hundred dollars in terms of buying cameras, and so forth. I had never been a smoker, and this encouraged me not to be one; I couldn't afford to be smoking these $100 cigarettes. But, we bought cameras, and stuff like that. The Russians were tough to deal with; they were, shall we say, "uncultured" types of guys. For instance, I remember one of them got a camera, and he clicked the thing, and he opened it up, and pulled out this thing-- He says, "Well, I 00:33:00don't see any pictures here." And so, we pulled Guard Posts with them at various places--at Linz, for instance. The Danube River divided the American and the Russian zone, and so our main duty there was-- There was a big bridge that had streetcars that went across it, and there were people that were living on one side, and working on the other. So, they'd come back and forth there, and we were supposed to stop all the streetcars, and look to see if they had a pass. Well, we didn't speak or read German, and so we didn't know when they'd show us a pass what in the heck it was. But if it was a pretty girl there--why, they'd often tell her that she had to stand and look at the river there for a while as punishment. So--all kinds of things like this, but we learned quite a bit about the Russian soldier there. When they had a high-ranking officer there, they were all very attentive. But, an officer that would have been like a Captain or even a Major in our army--they just treated that person like one of the boys. And 00:34:00they were kind of an unruly bunch, but they were much more careful at looking for contraband. A couple of great big trucks came along, and there were barrels in them and we'd ask what they were, and they said, "Well, they're empty barrels," and we pounded on a couple of them and they seemed to be empty. Well, the Russians stopped them and they took every barrel out of there, and in every one of those barrels was a person--alive--who was trying to sneak across the border. And, of course, they confiscated the truck, and the people--and took them off to goodness knows where. So, we had a lot of duties like that. We started some schools. Our Division had one called "Rainbow University." It was down in Southern Austria that taught all kinds of things. And then, I had a duty; I was called "The I & E" non-com, [for] Information and Education." After 00:35:00the war, we were getting all these publications and books, and I was supposed to call the division, or the company, together and have these discussions about Dumbarton Oaks [The Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C., at which the United Nations was negotiated and developed by international leaders.] and so forth, and some guys were interested in them. But then, I got an announcement that they had set up three college level schools--one in Biarritz, France that was going to be a business school, one in England that was a Liberal Arts School, and one in Wharton, England, that was a technical school. And they said, "You've been assigned two spots at the technical school; send two men over there. One [spot] is in architectural drafting, and the other is in heavy equipment--but, you have to send somebody who's had some experience in it." Well, we were stationed in a very nice place, and I started looking for people to go over there to England, and I couldn't find anybody that wanted to go. So, there was one fellow that had come to us as a replacement from England, where he 00:36:00had been a crane operator, and when we got him, his sleeves showed that some stripes had been removed from it. So, he had gotten in some kind of trouble, and got busted, and [got] sent over as a replacement. But, it turned out he had several girlfriends in England, and so he said, "Well, I want to go." Well, I had had architectural drafting in High School, and one year at Stout, and I had to get another person. I kept begging people to go--and finally, I turned my name in. And, we went by train out of Munich all the way over, and then went across [the English Channel] on a ship, and then went to Wharton, England--and registered there about the [same] time I'd have been registering at Stout, if I had been a civilian back there in the fall. And, they said, "Well, what program do you want to be in?" They didn't say that I had to be in archy [architectural] drafting, but I did; and, this heavy equipment man was assigned to go all over England looking for pieces of heavy equipment to bring into this school. And of 00:37:00course, he knew where all they were--and he took his time visiting his various girlfriends. And so, we had an eight-week course there that was excellent, and one day, our drafting group took a field trip to-- This was on an airbase that had gigantic Quonset huts in it [--huts] big enough to get five airplanes in. Well, the building construction place was building six houses inside of this place, and so we went over there, drafting. And, I saw this one guy instructing, and I went up to him and I said, "You're a Mr. H.M. Hansen, aren't you?" and he said, "Yes." He had been my teacher at Stout [State University in Menomonie, Wisconsin] as a freshman about three years before, and he recognized me. And he said, "What are you doing here?" And I said, "Well, I'm a student," and he said, "Two of my sons are over here teaching," and one of them is teaching drafting in the same building where I was. So, we were coming to the end of this eight weeks, and it was a very intensive course--except [that], on weekends, we had a 00:38:00free pass to go to any place in England or Wales by train. Now, the trains were all full, but we went a lot of places. And so, we got a lot of chance to get around. Well, as we came near the end of the eight weeks, the instructor said, "How would you like to be an assistant instructor here for the next term?" Well, I was planning to go back to Stout and take the rest of my training to be an industrial arts teacher, so I thought this was great, and I said, "Yes I would." Well, the day before the term was over, the Commanding General there put out an order: "Nobody will stay beyond this first term. We want to give this to as many people as possible." And of course, living in England at that time just beat all of these other places, and it was like going to college, [with] three hours of class in the morning, three in the afternoon, and the weekends free--and you could go anyplace there. So, he said, "Well, go back to your unit, and ask them 00:39:00to dispatch you back here." Well, it took about ten days to get back to Vienna where the Company was, and I finally decided I was getting close to when I was going to be discharged anyway, so I never did go back there. And finally, my numbers came up, and we were sent up to Bremerhaven to ship back--and, that's where the German submarine base had been, but it was also a place where there were-- And, there was a Victory Ship and a Liberty Ship there, and as soon as you got there, they put you aboard that ship--and, even if it was half-loaded, they'd take off. And, we had a choppy ride back, and we all got dysentery, and so forth, on the ship, but we landed back in the States, and then we were sent to Camp McCoy for a discharge, where I was discharged on April 5. And, [I] came 00:40:00back to Superior for the summer, and then enrolled at Stout [State University] again in the fall.

DERKS: You just picked up where you left off?

SWANSON: And, we got back; of course, most of the men there were GI's. A lot of them had been married, and had children. And, we didn't have much housing in Menomonie, so we got some barracks units. In fact, I was a journeyman carpenter by that time, and I worked on building these places. We had thirty double-units there for-- If you were married, and had at least one child, you could live there for $20 a month. And, it was just a block--or [rather], a mile from the campus--and there was great camaraderie, of course, with these people there. They had been in all of the Services everywhere. The GI Bill was, of course, just a fantastic thing. The maximum you could get was 48 months of schooling 00:41:00from it. And that meant forty-eight months of tuition and fees--plus, if you were single, $75 a month for housing, and so forth. And of course, in those days, seventy-five bucks a month was big money. I used up my GI Bill to the very end. I had a year of college before I went in, and then I had this year over at whar-, or this one term over there in Wharton, England, and I had some other credits. And so, my last check from my GI Bill--it took the forty-eight months--was to type my PhD thesis. And so, my education was paid totally down to the very end, and so I graduated from college with a zero debt. By this time I was married, and we had two kids, and had built a house that we still live in, 00:42:00and it was just an absolutely fabulous thing. And, the heads of the big universities were opposed to the GI Bill--many of them. The president of Harvard was not hot on it, because he said, "You're going to have all of these loafers coming back out of the Service, and they'll just hang out for four years in these colleges just fooling around." Well, they hadn't figured on what these guys were like, of course, because--especially those who were married, they were taking as many credits as they could take, because they wanted to get out and get a job right away. And many people that had been very poor students in high school and early college turned out to be exceptionally fine people, which-- Somehow, you wish there was a way that we could do that all the time, but this was just a group that really fell into it right. Now some, of course, did not come back.

DERKS: It really changed the country.

SWANSON: It did. It was fabulous.

DERKS: People would have never had the opportunity to go to school.

SWANSON: They never would have, no.

DERKS: You came back to--I mean, you were [originally] here at Stout, and you came back to Stout. Were you aware of the difference?

SWANSON: Well, I moved into the men's dorm when I came back. We only had one men's dorm, and if you put three people in a room, you could get one hundred people in the place--that kind of a thing. And, before the war, we had rules of hours, and so forth; now, that didn't pertain afterwards, but a lot of the students here were GI's, because they were still drafting young men at that time. So, some of these kids coming out of high school were going into the service then. So, an awful lot of us were-- And, we had some women who had been 00:44:00in the service, and that came to Stout too.

DERKS: They were motivated, weren't they?

SWANSON: They were motivated, and we had excellent instructors. Stout was always a hands-on place where, for instance, your shop courses-- To get two semester hours of credit, you went to class two hours a day, five days a week, for nine weeks--and you were actually in that shop learning and doing things, and the instructors were all there. And so, they were very good instructors, and very interested in students--and I think it's still that way.

DERKS: Back in Europe-- I had been curious-- We heard a story of somebody who was liberated from a POW camp, and you got the feeling that they were walking around--

SWANSON: Oh yes; they were.

DERKS: --everywhere at the end of the war. And, I was wondering how the occupation--how order was imposed back on.

SWANSON: Well, I don't know. Part of it was shipping a lot of the soldiers back home, because there were about three million American soldiers over there when the war was over--with nothing really to do. Well, that's not a very good situation, and there was a lot of drinking that went on, and a lot of just horsing around. But, these individuals, as you mentioned-- The people that were in concentration camps, of course, they were in bad shape physically. And, they were trying to get back to their homeland. Well, when they would get back there, they would usually find it wasn't there; the houses, and everything, had been burned down, and-- There must have been a lot of cases of people that--well, 00:46:00they were very happy to be released, but they were in bad shape health-wise, [and] they had no jobs or anything-- There were camps, though, where they were taken in, and fed, and so forth. In our army chow lines, for instance, we would be outside, usually, in the summertime, and you'd go through with your mess kit--and then, at the end of the thing, was a place [where] you could dump your garbage and all. Well, there were always people standing there that took the stuff out of the garbage. And, of course, a lot of us would just hand the stuff to the persons who were there, and some of those were displaced persons, too. I don't know how some of them ever found their homeland, and they had no parents, or anything else. We have a good friend, now, who was married to one of the fellows that was in this outfit with me, and he comes to these reunions. His 00:47:00wife was Polish, and I asked her one time, "Were you there when the Germans did the Blitzkrieg on Poland in 1939?" And she said, "Yes, I was a little two-year-old, and I was sitting out in the field on a Sunday, in the flowers, and my older sister [who] was about ten was there--and someone came rushing up and said, 'The Germans are coming!'" And she said, "My sister just took off." And she said, "I remember what my sister was wearing." She described the dress, and this little girl was two years old. And then somebody came back and pulled her back out of there. And I said, "Well, what was it like then with the Germans occupying?" And she said, "You know, there's one thing that soldiers like, and it's little kids--and they always treated us well. Whether it was a German, an American, a Russian--little kids were treated well." And she said, "I didn't 00:48:00really have a bad life." And, I had talked to her a number of times, and never gotten into this thing. She immigrated to this country, and married this fellow who was in our outfit and--well, she was married first, and had a couple of kids, and they've had no children. But, she remembered that as a two-year-old kid, and she said, "It wasn't really bad--but," she said, "I suppose it was bad for the adults--that they were not treated well, in many cases, by either army." Because, when we [American troops] would move into a place, we had no idea whether this person was a German sympathizer. The word was, "There's nobody here but us Nix-Nazis," was what everybody would say. Well, you couldn't find a Nazi around, and yet you knew that obviously some of them had to-- And, of course, we had a number of Jewish people in our army, and they were not very happy, 00:49:00needless to say, with the Germans, because they recalled all of those things [in the Nazi concentration camps] that had happened to them [the Jewish civilians].

DERKS: Yeah--I'm sure. The German civilians must have been on their best behavior.

SWANSON: Oh, sure.

DERKS: They understood the situation.

SWANSON: Yes, and we'd move into their houses--and, of course, a lot of stuff got busted up, and run off with, and so forth--and they must have been very, very upset by that, but felt fortunate that they didn't-- I went back twenty-five years later, when my son was over there, and visited the one house in Austria that I remembered we'd stayed in. The lady's name was Frau Dourfelt; [during the war], she had been a teacher of German over in England. She was a 00:50:00lady--probably seventy years old, and so she said, "You know, you guys [soldiers] should learn how to speak German--and write German." So, she held classes for us, and I kind of hung with it--and the rest of the guys [soldiers] got kind of sick of it--and then, we got moved out of there, and so nothing much happened. So, when I went back there twenty-five years later, I went to this little town, which was outside of Salzburg, and I said to my wife, "You know, that house where I stayed had a great big tree in the front yard; I wonder if that's still there." Well, it wasn't there--but I went over to the graveyard, and I looked for the name Dourfelt--and there were a lot of Dourfelts there. So, I knocked on the door, and a lady stuck her head out the window on the second floor, and she saw we were Americans, and asked us what we wanted, and I said, "Is Frau Dourfelt here?" She said, "No, she died several years ago, but her two 00:51:00daughter-in-laws live here." Her two sons had been in the German army, and when they came back after the war--and they had both since died--but, their wives lived in this house, and they had some kids. And so, I told this lady [who was] sticking her head out the upper storey--I said, "I'd like to talk to them." And she said, "Well, I'm the cleaning lady here, and if you come back tonight, I'm sure they're going to want to talk to you." So, we went back, and they brought out a piece of paper, and they said, "Did you sign this list when you stayed in this house? We've got these lists of all these GIs." Well, I hadn't signed any list; my name wasn't there, so I got talking to them. Well, the husband of one of them was still there, and he was working in the tax bureau. So, we were talking about all of these kinds of things--and their daughter, who was about eighteen or so, was there visiting from Vienna. So, we had this great time with 00:52:00them, and then we went on to Vienna the next day; and, we were walking down the street, looking for a place to eat, and here comes a person walking toward us--and who is it but this daughter who had been home on vacation, and we recognized [one another]; her name was Lily. And, there were two million people that lived in Vienna, and we knew one of them, and we met her on the street, and she took us to a place to eat [laughs]. So, I don't know; it almost sounds untrue--but, I swear it isn't.

DERKS: Who were the black marketeers in that circle that you talked about?

SWANSON: Well, I'm not sure. They were civilians, and they were tied up with soldiers and--though, we were, oh, just peddling cigarettes, and stuff like that. But, there were some people that were undercover there. I remember I was 00:53:00looking for a movie projector; we could get films, but we couldn't get [a projector]. And so, I sent out the word that I was looking for a projector, and some guy came to our house, and he said he could get this projector for so many cigarettes, and so forth--and actually delivered on it. And, I don't know who the person was. He was in civilian clothes, and I presume he was a German, but there was an awful lot of that going on. We were not supposed to take anything that was of worth to them, but things like--well, cameras and watches were easy things to get, and so that was more the kind of stuff that we were bargaining for. Little kids would follow GI's down the street who were smoking--and, of course, when they'd throw that cigarette butt away [snaps fingers]--they'd just clap that right up and they'd field-strip it, and take the tobacco. The Red 00:54:00Cross clubs had German civilians serving them, and they wore tuxedos and white shirts and all. And, I understand their pay was that they got all the cigarette butts that were left on the table; and, they would field-strip those, and re-roll them--and that was the big money-making item. We were always looking for things like-- We were in need of a swimming suit; now, where do you get a swimming suit? So, one of my close buddies was one of our truck drivers. The war was not over yet in the South Pacific, and so we were not supposed to be using any gasoline that was not absolutely essential. But, he said, "Well, I understand that they've got some film and some swimming suits over in this next town." Well, we found a lady who lived in one of these houses who was--had a 00:55:00broken leg or something, and needed to go see the doctor. And we said, "Well, we'll take you over to this next town to see the doctor." So, we got permission to take this truck, but we went on the back roads, and it had a ring mount on the top where you put a machine gun, and that was higher than the cab, and we were in this back road, and we came to a bridge--and, as we started there, I said to myself, "This bridge is too low for the height of this truck"--and it was. And, we rammed into that bridge--and, it bent this ring mount that was [mounted] on three big pipes--right into the back seat of this truck. Well, what were we going to do then--because we weren't supposed to have this truck out there doing this? So, we got out the wrenches, and unbolted it, and hid this ring mount in the ditch. And, we went on and took this lady there, and we got our swimming suit, and [we] got back. And, the man who was in charge of the motor pool is one that comes to all these reunions of ours; and here, about 00:56:00three or four years ago, we said--you know, his name was Patsy D. Moroni--we said, "Patsy, do you remember that truck that was missing a ring mount?" And, he said, "Well, no I don't." So, we told him this story, and he said, "Oh-- you were the guys that did that [laughs]!" Now, fifty years later, somebody found a bent ring mount, so there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on that was "adventuresome." We took a field trip up to see Hitler's Lair up in the mountains--and so, we did a lot of things like that. [We] had ball games, [and] we started some football leagues over there. There were a lot of guys who were football players--and a few coaches, and so forth. So, we tried to make it about like it would have been if we'd been at home in America, I guess.

DERKS: But what a change! I mean, you were over there, trained to fight, and 00:57:00really, it shifted entirely--and, you were a bunch of kids.

SWANSON: Yup. And we kept our rifles and they were all loaded. We had those for a long time, and I often wondered-- Well, one fellow was killed in a pistol accident when he had the pistol, and they were horsing around or something, and he was shot and killed by it--but, he wasn't in our squad, so I didn't know him very well. After I got out of the service, I got a letter from his folks. They said someone had given me--had given them--my name, and that I could tell them what had happened to their son. Well, I really didn't know all the details. I wasn't there when it happened, so I gave them the name of the First Sergeant, and I don't know if they ever called him. So, there were some things like that-- When I went to this school in England, we went by train to get to the coast--to get on the ship.

We got on the train in Munich, and we were taking that to go over to the coast. Over there, in big cities, these were coal-fired trains, but when you came to the edge of a tunnel, they had an electric engine that would come out and pull you through town. They were way ahead of us in many ways on keeping down smoke, and so forth. So, we were stopped on the edge of the town, and this was a train with--oh, ten, twelve cars on it, and so forth-- And so, one of-- Some fellas climbed up on the roofs, and this one fella-- And he saw a girl over on the bridge, and he waved at her and as he did, his shoulder touched the hot wire of the electric train. And, I was on the other side of the car; we had gotten out of the car, and he fell off there. A bunch of us ran around and he was not yet 00:59:00dead, but we put in a call for an ambulance, and he had been electrocuted. And, nobody knew his name. This was an assortment of us that were going to this school, and there were only two of us from the same company. And, he was--seemed to be--all alone, and he had never said anything [and] we'd been on the train a day or so. And I often wondered--you know--[if] his folks get a message saying that he'd been electrocuted on a train, just fooling around. So, there were some of those kinds of sort of sad things that took place, as well.

DERKS: Yeah, the war's over--

SWANSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah--

DERKS: --but, that doesn't keep accidents from happening.

SWANSON: --just fooling around all the time, you know. Yeah.

DERKS: I was thinking about that ME-109 incident that you showed us. Where was that? When did that happen?

SWANSON: Well, that was in Germany still. We were in southern Germany all the time, and I don't recall what town it was near. We were just out there--kind of in a long draw there, with all of our trucks and guns lined up from end to end, and-- The company clerk had a fire burning, and--this was before the war was over, of course--and somebody hollered, "Get that fire out," because that was one thing that you never did at night--was have a fire burning. Well, evidently, these two Me-109's (the Messerschmitt Bf- 109, often called the Me-109, was a German fighter aircraft designed by Willy Messerschmitt and Robert Lusser for use in the early months of World War II) were cruising around, and they saw that fire there--and they just took a run down this valley. And, the guy just miss-estimated how far off the ground he was. And, the one fellow in our squad that was hurt quite badly that day--he got shot through the chest; and, he was sent back to England, actually--to the hospital, and then to the States--and I 01:01:00only learned many years later that he had been finally discharged with a fifty percent disability. But, he left his pack sack on the truck, of course, when he was injured; and so, I was kind of hanging on to this as we'd move every place--thinking that he was going to come back from the aid station. Well, finally it got time for me to go home, and I still had his pack sack, so I went through it, and took out a few things that were personal items, like some pictures, and so forth, and I shipped them home with my stuff--and I thought, "Someday I'll find out where Steve Folardo is." Well, I suppose it was ten years ago that we were making a serious effort to locate all these fellas. There were several guys that were interested, and we got on the internet, and so forth--and, low and behold, I got on the internet, and here's Steven Folardo in Michigan. So, I called the number, and I said, "Are you the Steve Folardo that 01:02:00was in the 42nd division?" He said, "Yeah," and I told him my name, and he recognized me. And, I said, "I've got some of your stuff here! Do you want it?" And he said, "Well, what is it?" And, it was just some pictures which I mailed to him, and I hear from him at Christmas every time. He never comes to any of the reunions, but he had come as a replacement when our one man had been killed, and he had been in some kind of a job in England; I don't know what he did there. Well, I said, "What did you do in civilian life?" and he said, "Well, I went back to work at General Motors, and I was a pattern maker." And, I said, "Well, you were fifty percent disabled," and he said, "Yeah, but it didn't bother me too much in pattern making, and I got this pension, and I had a good life." And so, that was another follow-up of this kind of thing. I'm one who never--my mother, first of all, never threw anything away, and, when she died, I 01:03:00inherited all her stuff. Neither of my sisters--they had moved a lot, so they were wise; they didn't keep anything. So, I had everything that ever passed through our house, I guess. And as I said, I built my house in 1950, and still live in it, and I tell my daughter, "Now you're the one that's assigned to clean this place out when I'm gone;" but, she'll find some strange stuff in there.

DERKS: Filled up with fifty years of [unintelligible; SWANSON laughs]; I know how that works from thirty years. So, that was at night when the plane strafed?

SWANSON: Mm hmm [yes]. He--

DERKS: Then you got up when it got light, and you took those photos. You didn't tell me, on camera, what happened to the plane.

SWANSON: Well, the plane--the wing tip--hit the tarp on the truck that was right next to us. And, that was a short truck; it was the Communications Division. They just had some stuff there to send messages with, so it was only a 01:04:00four-wheel truck. And, they had their bed rolls in the back of that, and one of these fellas was going to sleep in there that night, and he was on his hands and knees in that place, spreading out his bed roll, when that plane came in. And, the wing tip ripped the tarp off of that truck, and he was on his hands and knees--couldn't have been but inches below that tarp--and he didn't know what had happened. All of a sudden, "somebody" had just grabbed this "sheet" off him, so to speak. And, he came out of there, and he said, "What happened?" And, I was going to sleep across the front seats of our truck, and right behind me were one hundred rounds of 57mm ammunition that, if one of these bullets had hit the firing pin, I wouldn't be here chatting with anybody now. And so, we didn't know what had happened; but, this one guy, this Steve Folardo-- Well, I dived off of 01:05:00this front seat of this truck when this happened, of course. Something--some kind of a shell--exploded in front of us; it didn't hit anyone, so I dived off of there and was crawling towards the woods when this Steve Folardo came by. He said, "I'm hit! I'm hit!" and so a couple of us grabbed him; and then--this was all over in a matter of seconds, you know--and then, along comes this fellow dragging this--[it] looked like a bag of bones. It was the pilot that was in a flight suit--and, I swear--every bone in his body was broken. And then, the other plane just circled around for a while, and-- And then, the next morning when we got up, of course, we started finding the parts of the airplane, some of which are in the picture, and so it was just smashed to smithereens. I suspect they were, they were getting short of pilots all the time, and I just suspect 01:06:00maybe this was a couple of guys that were not terribly well-trained.

DERKS: Plus, in the dark-- [unintelligible]

SWANSON: No; it may have been a little dusk, and maybe that fire burning--who knows? He was maybe trying to get rid of his ammunition before he went back. We never found out who the person was. I suppose he was carrying an ID or something, but nobody looked at that.

DERKS: How many times did you come under fire like that?

SWANSON: Well, probably half a dozen times in various places--mostly with shells dropping in on us, rather than direct fire.

DERKS: [unintelligible]. You said that, when you couldn't use the anti-tank gun, you were carrying a bazooka; had you been trained on the bazooka?

SWANSON: Yes, we had--but again, they didn't have us fire many rounds of the thing in the States. But, you learned how to aim it--and, of course, you had a little wire that you put around it. The way it detonated-- It had batteries in it, and when you pulled the trigger, it would just turned on those batteries that built a spark that fired that--that rocket, really, out of there. It [the shell] was about sixteen inches long, or something like that--a pretty powerful kind of thing. They were pretty accurate up to a hundred yards, or so. The Germans had a similar thing called a Panzerfaust, and they had them in different sizes. [The term "Panzerfaust" simply meant, "tank fist;" it was a single shot weapon--several sizes of which were used for various ranges.] And, we found one great big one that had a big charge in the front of it, and so we said, "Well, let's see if we can fire this thing." Well, we didn't know exactly how to do this, and it looked pretty ominous for somebody to put that on his shoulder and 01:08:00pull the trigger--whether he might go out with it. And so, we tied it to a fence somewhere, and we put a--we were busily doing this kind of stuff, you know, in our off moments. And, we put a long cord to the trigger, and we went back around a couple of trees, and pulled that trigger--and that Panzerfaust went out there, and blew the biggest doggone hole in a wall about fifty yards away; it was just a powerful weapon. And so, we didn't fool around anymore with Panzerfausts [laughs].

DERKS: What would the bazooka have done from the same distance?

SWANSON: It had a directed charge--so that, when it would detonate, it would blow forward--and it could penetrate some pretty heavy steel. And, of course, you could maneuver it, fire at the treads on the tank--that was one thing that 01:09:00was always trying to be done. I never had any experience in actually doing it, though; we just practiced that on a few things.

DERKS: So, you never did--

SWANSON: No.

DERKS: --have occasion to use it.

SWANSON: When we came into Nuremberg, we were-- The Germans had just been chased out of there, and we thought there were still some there, and so we put our guns up on the hill--that was the Danube, or the Rhine River. But, we had our gun up on the hill, and we had a field of fire all the way across it. And then, on the other side of the river, we could see some that looked like they might be Germans over there. So I said, "Well, I'm going to fire this 57 at 'em." And, we hadn't dug it in properly; the back spades-- You see, there was a great recoil when you pull that trigger, and it pushes the thing back. Well, there were 01:10:00spades at the end that would dig into the ground. If you hadn't dug them in a little bit, of course, it came back. So, I fired at this one over there--and that gun came back, and I was straddling the trail of it, and my right leg-- There was kind of a stake in the ground, and as that gun came back, it squeezed the calf of my leg between that stake and this trail. But then, it was on a little downhill, so it rolled off of there, and the guy that was calling the fire order, he gave me a fire order to--how to correct the order--and I was writhing on the ground. My first thought was I'd torn my leg off, and then secondly that I'd broken it. Well, neither proved to be true, but I had one whale of a bruise there on that leg. So they said, "Well, you better go back to the aid station." Well, if you went to the aid station, "you might never be seen again" was the kind of thing that you [thought about; it was]--hard telling where you would go, or what. So I said, "Well, it's not bleeding or anything;" 01:11:00and so, we found a pair of crutches in a house, and so I was hobbling around on these crutches for a while, and in about two weeks it was okay again--another place where I was lucky enough not to have ended up a casualty of just tomfoolery [both laugh].

DERKS: [Speaking to his camera crew] Now, do you have any questions [unintelligible]?

Crew: Yeah; did they ever find out what that uniform was?

DERKS: Oh--in the Polish concentration camps?

SWANSON: No.

Crew: It's not very relevant.

SWANSON: We just had a person on our Stout [University of Wisconsin-Stout] faculty die about three, four months ago. Dwight Agnew was his name. He was ninety years old, and I had not known that he was even in the service. He came 01:12:00as a history professor at Stout, and he became our first Dean of Liberal Studies; and, he lived in our neighborhood, and was a good friend. Well, when he died, I went to his wake at the funeral home, and his son and daughter-in-law were there, and they had laid out his uniform. And, I had not known that he was ever in the Army--and here it was, the old fashioned blouse, it wasn't the Ike jacket--and, on the sleeves, he was a Top Sergeant; that's three chevrons over, three rockers under, and a diamond. And, he was in an engineering outfit where he was the Top Sergeant. He was the most mild-mannered sort of individual--I couldn't imagine him as a Top Sergeant--and he was about my height, and probably twenty pounds lighter. So, I had to give a eulogy at his funeral the next day, and I gave the story that I had just seen his jacket for the first time, and 01:13:00learned that he was in the service. Because he was a little older than I, and I thought, "Well, maybe he had been exempt, or something," but he was in for about three years, like the rest of us. And, I said, I knew now--I always try to put a little humor in a eulogy--of how he was a very nice guy, but we had a few faculty members in Liberal Studies that were a little far out, and Dwight was not one to take any guff from them [laughs] and-- So, that kind of thing--he never talked about it, you see. And then, there were others of us who were always talking about it--and it was different attitudes that people came back with.

DERKS: We've heard that from a lot of people--that some people would never talk about it; they didn't even want to think about it. They wanted to get on with their lives. Do you think it's a psychological thing [unintelligible]?

SWANSON: Well, there were four of us fellows who started to Stout as freshman. We all tried to enlist in this Enlisted Reserve Corps, and two of them were rejected, and two of us were accepted. The two that were rejected--one was my roommate, and he had flat feet, and the other guy was pigeon-chested. So, those two fellas, though, got drafted, and the fellow who was pigeon-chested was from Toledo, Ohio; and, they were in need of a lot of draftees, and so he didn't get to finish the semester. We enrolled for second semester; he came back and in his mailbox was, "Report for duty." So, he got in the Air Force, and he talks about it--in the Navy Air Force. And then, the fellow who was my roommate, went to school all the time when he went in. And, there wasn't any electronics then, but 01:15:00he was in radio, and all this kind of stuff--about like he'd have been in civilian life. But the other fellow-- He and I went to Camp Grant together, and I thought-- My name was [began with] Sw, and his was T, so we were one [and] two in the list, and so we took a general classification test, and so forth--and he did very poorly in it. And, I couldn't understand that because he was a good student in school; and so, he got shipped out right away--out of Camp Grant, to an infantry training center. Well, I had gotten a better score--and well, I was kept there for a while--but then sent to another place, so I talked to him after the war. He had wanted to be in the Air Force. His brother was a year older, had left school and was in the Air Force, and this fellow was put in the preflight training. And then-- They evidentially had enough pilots, and so they cashiered 01:16:00all those guys out into the infantry--and he was in England for a while, and so forth. He wants to have nothing to do with the Army--or anything-- although in latter years he said a few things that he did along the way. So, I asked him one time, "Well, why was this?" Well, he got shoved into an outfit that came over from England, with a bunch of guys he didn't know. He had just got thrown into this thing as a replacement, and they got into some spots where there were some people killed, and all. And then, I think he fell for a girl over there that--this--disappeared [from] the scene when he came back, and he was just kind of feeling bad about it. Since that time, he's been [an] extremely successful 01:17:00individual--and, of course, he and his wife are both retired now, and so forth. So, another fellow that was at Stout [and] that was in the Rainbow Division-- We were-- We never saw each other there, because we were not in the same outfit, and I keep asking him if he wants to go, and he said, "Ah, that's nothing. I'd just as soon not have anything to do with it." On the other hand, I went to this high school reunion in Superior a month or so ago. One of the girls that was in my class comes in there with her husband, and said, "I think you know this guy." And, it turned out he was in the Rainbow Division, and he wants to come to all of these reunions now, and-- Why? I don't know, but we became instant buddies, you might say, at that time.

DERKS: Yeah--you really get-- You didn't serve directly with him; it's the people you were with that you get pretty close to [unintelligible].

SWANSON: I would say that, part of why I feel this way-- I've always lived in a stable environment. My folks met when they both became teachers in Superior in the new school, and were married. And, at that time, they did not allow married women to continue teaching, so my mother had to quit teaching. So, she was always home, and I [had] two sisters, and we lived in an apartment for a couple of years, but then moved into a house that we lived in all the rest of the time that we were together. We went to excellent schools in Superior [and] we lived just four blocks from the Patterson School, where my folks had met. They [the school] had two years of kindergarten, six years of grade school, and three years of junior high school. So, I was in that school for eleven years, walking back and forth. We had no hot lunch program; your hot lunch program was at home. 01:19:00And, at this reunion, one of the kids--kids? He's now seventy-eight years old! He said, "You know, your mother was the best cook there was." Well, I remembered that he came home with me for lunch a lot because his mother had died, and his dad was a barber, and so he'd come. My mother would say, "Well, bring Frankie home." And, Frankie stayed there, and became a captain in the fire department, and-- So, then I came to Stout and-- I say I came here--and never left, except for that. And the opportunities kept developing each time with the growth of the place, and I can't imagine us being anyplace else. And so-- And, I was in this Army unit, you see, for quite a long time. There were a lot of people that were replacements here and there, or went this way. But once we got overseas, I was in that same outfit all the time--and, it was a pretty uniform body of fellows. 01:20:00We got a few replacements, and then at the end, when people were going home, of course, then it was all different. But I've lived in an extremely stable environment, and I think that leads one, maybe, to be interested in those things. My sisters are not that way. They throw away everything that they don't need and they don't care about this, that, or the other thing. They have-- One's a musician, and the other's a writer, and they don't concern themselves with stuff like this.

DERKS: At the same time, though, it sounded like, when you were in Europe-- When you were in Europe, you were constantly settling in briefly--

SWANSON: Yeah; yeah, yeah.

DERKS: --and then being moved at night.

SWANSON: But, we were being moved as a unit, you see; it wasn't like I'd gotten a room somewhere, and then moved to another city, so we moved as-- And, I can't recall us ever having an argument among this bunch of guys--and, I try to think 01:21:00back on that--and that [arguing] never seemed to be true. We were not necessarily good friends; there were a couple of guys that, if it'd been in civilian life, I probably would not have been good friends with them. But there we were, all together, and I don't think anybody much cheated on anybody else, or failed to do their part, and so forth, so it was a good-- It was a good unit.

DERKS: You all had a role.

SWANSON: Yeah.

DERKS: You all depended on each other.

SWANSON: Yeah.

DERKS: And, there was a lot of fun stuff to do--

SWANSON: Yeah, yeah.

DERKS: --shoot off guns, and blow stuff up.

SWANSON: Yep [laughs]. I was concerned when I first went to this outfit. Of course, you were a private when you're in this, and then became a PFC [Private First Class]. And, as they were filling up the unit, I had been there a little while, so I was named Assistant Squad Leader; that warranted a Corporal's rank, 01:22:00but [they] never got around to awarding it. And then, as we got these new fellows coming in, some of them were quite a bit older. I thought, "Well now, they're going to resent this kid being the Assistant Squad Leader here," but they never seemed to. And then, the Squad Leader was wounded early in the game, and left; and so, I became the Squad Leader. And then, the Platoon Sergeant was injured, and I was Acting Platoon Sergeant for a while. And so, there was a lot of that switching around in there, but there didn't seem to ever be any jealousy among these individuals; it was just a very nice bunch. I talk to them now, one of them; I said, "Well, what college did you go to when you got out?" And he said, "I never liked school when I was a kid, and I was not going to go to college." And so, he started a manufacturing business--houses--and to this day, 01:23:00at age seventy-eight, he's still building homes, and he's very happy about it--and, he comes to every one of these meetings.

DERKS: How old were you when you got to Europe?

SWANSON: I--let's see-- I had turned nineteen in basic training-- I was twenty; I had turned twenty in October, and we went over there in November--yeah.

DERKS: And that was about the age of everybody in your unit?

SWANSON: Yeah, [an] awful lot of us were nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We got a couple [of] replacements later on that were only eighteen that had come right out of high school and [who had] gone to basic training, and were sent over. And, they did seem somehow a lot younger; of course, they hadn't been in the Army very long, either. But then, there were some older fellows; the Officers in the outfit were not particularly old, but I suppose the youngest of them was 01:24:00twenty-one at the time. We had a First Sergeant in our company that had been in the Rainbow [Division] in World War One. And, at the end of the war, he was going to be sent to West Point to become an officer. And, he broke his leg somehow, and never went--and became a hotel clerk or something. Well, when this Division was reactivated in 1944--[I mean] '43, he volunteered to be in this unit. He was forty-five to fifty years old, and he was taken in as a Private. Well, the Company Commander of our company was a kind of a showboat type of guy, and he found this fellow who was this famous Sergeant of World War One, and he got him as our Top Sergeant. So one day-- And, he wasn't a very good Top Sergeant, actually; he wasn't very well organized, but he had--he was wearing 01:25:00medals of the First World War. So, one day, the Company Commander was going to have him give us a pep talk, and so we went into the day room where the ping pong tables were, and all, and he had us sit down there, and he said, "Now Sergeant Wintroad, I want you to tell us what it's like being over there in France; we're going to be going over there." And so, he started to tell us, and his eyes filled up with tears, and he stripped off his jacket and threw it down on the table, and he says, "There; the guys that earned this are buried over there," and he walked out of the room just in tears--this big, tough guy. So ,he was feeling that, too. One time in the States, when I was on charge of quarters--that was supposed to wake the company up in the morning, but-- He [Sergeant Wintroad] gave me a list of what I was supposed to do, and there was nothing on there about what to do with the cooks, and you were supposed to go in 01:26:00and wake the cooks up about an hour before that. Well, that morning, we all fell out and went over to the mess hall, and there was no mess there. So, where were the cooks? Well, they were staggering out of bed up there finally. They had awakened on their own. "So, who was supposed to wake up the cooks?" Well, the Charge of Quarters was supposed to--that was me. Well, I said [to] this Sergeant Wintroad, I said, "Here's the list you gave me, and it [waking the cooks] wasn't on there. It didn't say that." And so, he said nothing more; he didn't hang me high, or anything like that, and we made it through the day with breakfast being a little bit late, but he was a guy that was of a previous era, and he must have been quite a hero in it, although I don't know. One of the other heroes in that World War One Division was--who was the poet [who wrote] "I think that I shall 01:27:00never see, a poem lovely as a tree--?" Kilmer! Joyce Kilmer. The camp that we shipped out of there [from] was Camp Kilmer, and I believe Joyce Kilmer was killed in World War One. And so, he was one of the idols of this division, he and Douglas MacArthur. So, we had had these two famous people from World War One in there. I always thought it was odd; I didn't think of a poet being an Army guy [laughs], or anything like that, but there's nothing about that-- And, he wrote poems that we learned in school--and, of course, they were easy poems to learn, and pretty easy to see what the point of them was, and so forth. So, we were at Camp Kilmer.

DERKS: What was the closest call you had? [Unintelligible]

[End of Interview]