Stanley Oscar Wuolle
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Army
WUOLLE, Stanley Oscar
Stanley Oscar Wuolle was born in 1927 in Duluth, Minnesota, the son of Oscar and Fiina Wuolle.
He served in the U.S. Army from October 1942 until November 11, 1945.
He was assigned to the 91st Infantry Division, Reconnaissance, and spent most of his time in Italy. His rank was Corporal.
CPL Wuolle went on to serve in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War.
Source: Veterans' Memorial Hall Veteran History Form
(Disclaimer: To the best of our knowledge, the information provided in this oral history interview is accurate. We do not make any representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information.)
Oral Interview with Stanley Oscar Wuolle Conducted by Dan Hartman, Veterans’ Memorial Hall Program, St. Louis County Historical Society Recording Date: Unknown, but within 2010 – 2011 Recording Place: Unknown Transcriber: Susan Schwanekamp, St. Louis County Historical Society Transcription process funded by a grant from the Lloyd K. Johnson Foundation
DH: Today we begin an oral interview and my name is Daniel Hartman and I am the Program Director for the Veterans’ Memorial Hall, which is part of the St. Louis County Historical Society and today we are doing an interview with – do you want to say your full name, including your middle name?
SW: Stanley Oscar Wuolle.
DH: And how do you spell the last name?
SW: W-U-O-L-L-E.
DH: OK. And what year were your born?
SW: November 26, 1922.
DH: OK. And who were your parents?
SW: My mother’s name was Josephine and her maiden name was, in Finnish “Tovitsen” and in English, “Davidson”.
DH: And how about your father?
SW: His name was Oscar Wuolle. Oscar Karl Wuolle.
DH: OK. And I’m guessing that your mother was Finnish.
SW: My mother and dad were both Finnish.
DH: Oh, okay. And how long had they been in the United States, then?
SW: They came over about 1910.
DH: So you’re 100% Finn, then.
SW: That’s right.
DH: And where did you grow up at?
SW: In Duluth.
DH: Where in Duluth?
SW: Mainly at 2nd West between 4th and 5th St.
DH: OK. So you were in the Hillside. How was it growing up in the Hillside?
SW: (Sound indicating maybe not the greatest.) Well, I was pretty well acquainted with the character of town there. The streets and alleys and everything else.
DH: What did you do for fun as a kid, growing up in the 30s?
SW: We used Washington playground for ice skating, mainly, and the hills around there for “flags” (??), street baseball and touch football.
DH: You played that in the street?
SW: Yeah. Umhm.
DH: So I’m going to kind of skip ahead to your war experience. At what point did you decide that you wanted to join the military?
SW: When they sent me a draft notice.
DH: And how old were you?
SW: I was 19.
DH: And so, in about 1941, ‘42?
SW: ’42.
DH: And did you know it was coming?
SW: Oh yeah. I knew it was coming.
DH: OK. And did you think about volunteering before the draft came and got you or did you just…..
SW: Oh, I volunteered before they came and got me. (??Compare against a few lines above.)
DH: And what branch did you volunteer for?
SW: The Cavalry.
DH: And why did you pick the Cavalry?
SW: I knew they had something to do with map making and printing, so I thought I would try and get into that.
DH: And did you have any luck?
SW: No.
DH: And so why did you want to go into map making in the military?
SW: Well, I was a printer before I went into service, so I thought that would come along with it.
DH: I guess so tell me where did you go and volunteer at? Where did you sign up for the military at…Duluth….?
SW: St. Louis County Courthouse.
DH: And how did that go for you? Did it go as planned, or…?
SW: Oh, it went all right. Nothing special. They just signed me up and they said they’d call me later.
DH: And how long did it take them before they called you?
SW: Well, I think I signed up in about August, and I got a call in October.
DH: Was it kind of weird waiting around for that to happen, or….?
SW: Yeah. I had a good time before I left.
DH: So, what were you doing to have a good time?
SW: My buddies were still here. A few of them had started to leave. We did what we normally do.
DH: So when you got the call in October, where did they ask you to go?
SW: Fort Snelling.
DH: So did you go down there by train, or did you go down there by car, or…?
SW: We went down by bus.
DH: Was that the Greyhound here in Duluth?
SW: Yeah.
DH: And was the bus filled with other guys like yourself going down to Ft. Snelling, or…?
SW: Yeah. Guys from St. Louis County.
DH: So what happened when you got to Ft. Snelling?
SW: We took our pledge and were issued uniforms and we had a day or so of waiting. They gave us liberty, a pass to go downtown. Then we reported back. And the next day we mustered up and were told which fort we were going to.
DH: Then where were you going?
SW: Ft. Riley, Kansas. Cavalry camp.
DH: Now, before this, had you traveled around the country much before this?
SW: I went with my folks to the San Francisco World’s Fair in 1940. That was about it.
DH: That was probably a pretty amazing journey too.
SW: Yeah, it was.
DH: So, tell me, what did you think of Kansas, Ft. Riley?
SW: As for terrain, I didn’t care for it very much. The camp itself was nice and clean and the buildings were pretty good. It was cold there, and of course, we were there in the winter months. One thing unusual there in our training was that some of us were walking back to our barracks and we went to the service club and Gene Tierney, the actress, was there. And she invited us to her table to have a…..there was just a few of us…she invited us to her table to have a, as I recall it was either a Coke or a malt…something like that. Gene Tierney was a famous actress at the time.
DH: I bet that was kind of exciting.
SW: Yeah, it was. She was there because her husband was in officer training. He was the famous designer. (Oleg Cassini)
DH: Did you guys take any photos with her, get an autograph or…..?
SW: No.
DH: DOK. So what type of training did you do at Ft. Riley?
SW: Well they had assigned me to radio school, because of the tests that I took. I would rather have gone to mechanics school, but they said “No, you’re better qualified for radio.” So they sent me to school to learn Morse Code.
DH: Were you okay with that?
SW: Oh, yeah. I did fine.
DH: Do you still remember Morse Code today, then?
SW: Some of it, yeah.
DH: Pretty impressive. So how long were you at Ft. Riley before they sent you to the Morse Code school?
SW: October to January. I went to my regular unit, division, in January.
DH: And what was that regular unit and division?
SW: 91st Infantry Division.
DH: And did you remain with them the rest of the time?
SW: Yes.
DH: So where did they sent you after Ft. Riley for Morse Code school?
SW: Well, we had a lot more training at Camp Wright (or “Bride”?), Oregon. With the 91st Infantry, we did maneuvers with other divisions and more training, more firing, more practical training for reconnaissance. And that was about it. We did nearly 18 months of that.
DH: So what did you think of all the training? Was it pretty hard work?
SW: We thought it was too long.
DH: The days were too long, or just the whole thing?
SW: The whole thing was too long. We thought we were ready to go over already, but apparently they didn’t.
DH: So you would have preferred to have just been sent over and not train for so long?
SW: Yeah.
DH: So who were some of the guys, do you remember any of the names of the guys that you hung out with in the 91st. Any of your friends over there?
SW: Oh yeah. Several of our Sarges, Bob Olson, from Minnesota. He was from Hopkins. And Paul Fillbert, from California. Another Sergeant was Tray Hatt, from Louisiana. Oh, and the driver of our car, vehicle, was Heath from Minneapolis. Bill Heath. Our radio operator was Corbin, from Iowa. So we had quite a few from Minnesota. Quite a few – we had some from the Iron Range, and there was quite a few people from Minnesota in our division.
DH: So tell me a little bit about these guys. Bob Olson. What type of guy was he? Was he…?
SW: Well, he was a typical big Swedish guy. Good head. While we were in camp, he had a high enough IQ that they decided to send him to Stanford University, along with several others. I think about six from our troop were sent to Stanford University for training, and apparently for officer training, too.
DH: Did you see them again when they came back, or…?
SW: They decided they didn’t need any more men, so they sent them back to our unit. And we served with them the rest of the time.
DH: And how about Paul? Can you describe Paul a little bit?
SW: Paul was French speaking, from New Orleans. Long time Army. Was in the old horse cavalry. He went through the Louisiana maneuvers in 1940 in the horse cavalry. So we had several old horse cavalry men in our troop.
DH: I bet he was kind of a unique guy, too. Brought a little bit of experience and….
SW: What was that?
DH: I bet he was a unique guy. Kind of different from the rest of the group.
SW: I’d doubt that I was unique in any way.
DH: No, Paul was.
SW: Yes. He was unique in his own right. He was smart and he was a good, a very good sergeant. You couldn’t ask for better.
DH: And how about Heath, from Minneapolis. How was Heath?
SW: He was our driver. He was one of the older guys. And he got hurt. And he had to leave our outfit because his back was so bad after the ….he got hurt, that they put him in an Air Corps office unit.
DH: And the last guy I’m going to ask about is the Corbin from Iowa. How was, was he a pretty good guy, too, it sounds like…?
We didn’t think so at first, but as we got to know him, he changed our minds.
DH: Was anyone in your group kind of the funny guy in the group?
SW: Yeah. We had one like that. His name – what was it? His name was Pratt. And he was Wisconsin. He was a farmer from Wisconsin.
DH: So it definitely sounds like you had a Midwest crew.
SW: Yeah. We had quite a few from the Midwest.
DH: So after you got done with the training here, where did you go from Oregon, when they moved you out?
SW: Being that we trained in Oregon, we thought we would go to the Pacific. But they fooled us again. They sent us to the East Coast. Camp Patrick Henry. In preparation for overseas duty.
DH: And where was that out East?
SW: Yeah. Camp Patrick Henry. Near Newport News.
DH: And what did you guys do there? What type of training did you do?
SW: Well, at Patrick Henry we didn’t really train. We were getting our overseas shoes, our shots and shoes and equipment and they gave us passes for to go to town, on a couple days. And that was about it, I think. Just getting ready to get sent over.
DH: And at this point, what role did they assign you?
SW: I beg pardon?
DH: What role did they assign you? Did you become a radio operator then, or….?
SW: No. By this time I had decided I didn’t care for the radio part of it. I had been trained as a gunner, too. And my scores in gunnery (?) were high, so I become a gunner in the light armored car.
DH: OK. And so when did you find out that you were going to be going overseas, I guess?
SW: When?
DH: Yeah. What year?
SW: I believe it was March of ’43. And it took us 21 days to cross over because of the threat of U boats.
DH: Do you remember the name of the ship you went over on?
SW: No. All I know is that it was a little Liberty ship.
DH: So how did you handle the voyage? Did you get sick at all?
SW: No problem.
DH: You were one of the lucky ones, then.
SW: Umhm.
DH: So where did you arrive? Did you go to England or…?
SW: Went to Oran, North Africa. That was our landing site.
DH: Did you have any problems with any U boats on the way over, or …? Landing at all, either?
SW: No. No problems with U boats that I know of. There may have been at the outside rim of the convoy. There was an awful lot of ships in that convoy. You couldn’t see them out passed the horizon, you know.
DH: Would you say that there was like over 50 ships, or more?
SW: Oh yeah. There had to be more than that.
DH: How many guys did you have on your small Liberty ship, do you think?
SW: I think it was about 400 – 500. Something like that.
DH: What did you guys do to entertain yourselves on the ship? Play cards at all, or….?
SW: Yeah. Played cards mostly. Slept and just walked around the decks.
DH: What card games were you guys playing?
SW: Well, it was mostly poker. There was some cribbage, I guess. There was some penny ante poker.
DH: So describe North Africa to me, when you first arrived. Was it what you thought it would be, or was it different? What did you think of it?
SW: Didn’t really have much time to think about it. I don’t they told us where our landing would be. When we got there, we knew were in Oran. They said “This is Oran, North Africa.” We went in there and they shipped us straight out. We set up a camp and….I’m trying to think of the name of the town. I think it was close to a place called Mustagana (??), North Africa. The actual place was Krowkumba, (??) close to, the main city would have been Mustagana.
OK. And I’m not sure…you’re still with the 91st Division, correct?
SW: Umhm.
DH: And tell me what did you guys do after you set up camp? Where did they send you?
SW: More training. Desert marches.
DH: What did you think of the desert?
It’s hard to walk in. And we were close to a place called City Belabess (??). That was the headquarters for the French Foreign Legion in North Africa.
DH: What did you think of the French?
SW: I didn’t have much contact with them at all. I would see some of their people and some of their Senegalese guards. But that was about it.
DH: What did you end up doing in North Africa?
SW: Well, physical training and getting ready to go into combat. Then we were also training for southern France invasion, with the landings and how to get our vehicles ashore and stuff like that.
DH: So was that your first combat role, in the invasion of southern France?
SW: Our combat role would have been invasion of southern France, but they changed that. I guess they wanted an experience – the vision, as a result, they pulled the 3rd Infantry out of Italy and we took their place in the line.
DH: So you went to Italy?
SW: Yeah.
DH: Do you know where in Italy you went? Where in Italy did you go to?
SW: I was landed near Naples. We were billeted in a college there, and then part of the division was sent back to Angio. The 362nd, I believe, went to Angio, and landed at _______ by Angio. We were held back in Naples and we did a tour of Pompeii while we were there. And then they moved us up. At the breakthrough at Angio we were on our way to Rome. The day after Rome fell. We didn’t do any fighting in Rome, but we moved from Rome to a place called Servevalentia (?). Parts of our unit were going back there. Parts of them were held later, because the division actually went into combat, I believe, on the 4th of July. But we were in combat before the division went in. We were attached to the 34th Infantry. So we worked in tune with the 34th Infantry and then in July we moved back with our division on July 4th and we remained with our division from then on.
DH: So you were attached to the Red Bull, then.
Yeah.
DH: Did you run into anyone you knew in the Red Bull?
Did I do what?
DH: Did you run into anyone overseas that you knew from Duluth, or…?
Oh, yeah. I sure did.
DH: Do you remember any of the names of the guys you ran into?
SW: Oh, Phil McLaughlin, Trovetsky _____??__, and some of the names escape me. I can’t really remember. Ed Laushan.
DH: You ran into a lot of guys from Duluth.
SW: Yeah, yeah.
DH: Was it kind of fun to run into them, or…?
SW: ________Stratophore, his brother was with the Duluth News Tribune
DH: And so - yeah! You were de-attached (detached?) and brought back into the 91st, then. So you were with the 34th for about a month, it sounds like?
SW: Yeah, about a month, I guess.
DH: And what did you think of going through Rome…..what did you think of Italy, now?
SW: Well, just traveling through it up to that point. We hadn’t got into combat until right after Rome. Apparently, we didn’t get much publicity the day Rome fell. Maybe it was on the 5th of June. The 6th of June was D Day, so Rome just became a side issue.
DH: So I guess tell me….you went into combat pretty soon after this, so did the war feel different to you, once that started, or…?
SW: The first few days on the line we were assigned some patrol duty. This mounted patrol, where you use cars. We were on this shore. The 34th was on a hill town called Rosignano. And that was close to the shore and the Savoy was on the shore. And that’s where we were. On the flank of the 34th. And we were patrolling that area. Tray led the first patrols and I was the scout on the second patrol the following day. And a Lieutenant who was leading the patrol. It was only a four man patrol, was all. He assigned two of us to an outpost, a farm building, and he took off to another building off to the left. And we were supposed to go to him when we received the signal. We never received the signal. I had to send the other member of the patrol – his name was Sirocco (?) – back to our troop headquarters to get some more men to handle the observation point. And they didn’t send anything up but Sirocco came back up. And the enemy spotted him coming into the farm building. So we heard mortars go off and evacuated the farm building. We were bracketed, we knew we were bracketed in, so we evacuated the farm building. And we made our way back to troop headquarters. When we got back, the officer asked us what had happened and where was the lieutenant. And I told him what the situation was at the…He told us to come to him when he gave the signal. He was supposed to be up against the wall and signal us so that we could see it. And he never did signal. So, after we were back at the observation post we started back to the troop. ______asked if we had heard anything and I said we had heard the machine guns go and some kids hollering “Tedesco”. He said “Do you think it was _____?” I said I didn’t know. Well, we beat our patrol back, and the lieutenant that was supposed to be leading the patrol came driving up in a Jeep that he had, reading his mail. He had already been back for hours. And didn’t report that he left us out there. So we were out there alone. So we made our way back. Nothing was said to the lieutenant.
DH: Whatever happened to the farmhouse?
SW: Pardon?
DH: Did they blow up the farmhouse, or did they mortar it, or…?
SW: Yeah, the farmhouse was hit.
DH: So it was a good decision to get out of there.
SW: Yeah.
DH: And nothing ever happened to the lieutenant, though?
SW: (A sound indicating a negative response.)
DH: And so I guess we’ll keep moving you down this journey. So where did you guys move, where did you go in Italy after that?
SW: From there we ____back to the east, where our division was being deployed and we rejoined our division there. And then we operated…..the country over there was suitable for our vehicles. And we started operating as a regular reconnaissance troop, _______mounted in our vehicles.
DH: Were you happy to be able to do that?
SW: Well, I don’t know how happy you would be. You know, you’re in combat. You’re doing the job that you’re supposed to do. And we did our job. Patrolling. Sometimes getting into a small fire fight, but nothing very big. We had several incidences of getting out too far in front and at night, I’m not sure just what time this was, but sometimes at night we’d be up way too far. And one night we were out so far that we met a German column traveling on the same road. They were going to their front line and we were going to their ______, crossing each other on the same road, on one side of each other. No firing. Nobody fired a shot.
DH: So you just….
SW: They went (he must have made a descriptive gesture, here) like that. A sergeant by the name of Fillbrook had to stop some guy from swamping (??). He would level his rifle at him and took his rifle off him, made him put his rifle down. The German unit was horse drawn. (??) There was maybe 10, 15, horse drawn vehicles.
DH: But no one fired at anyone.
No one fired a shot. Right alongside of them.
DH: That had to be one of those odd moments.
SW: It was scary.
DH: How close did you get before you realized it was the Germans?
SW: Well, let’s see, we were third car back. The lieutenant’s car was up front. And only officer’s car _____, elite car from the staff sergeant’s car and the buck sergeant’s car. We had three armored car at the time. We later got a fourth one. But at that time it was only three. Plus five Jeeps. Three men to each Jeep. Four men to each armored car.
DH: So, when you passed them, did you turn around and head back, or…?
SW: No, no. We kept going.
DH: So, I guess, tell me some more stories like that. (??) Had to be a pretty scary experience. What were some of the other things you were about the same time?
SW: Well, at night we stopped. We set up to have something to eat breakfast, but the officer told me to stay in my car and maintain radio contact. I was the gunner and I also operated the voice radio. The 506 radio. The main radio was a 193 that operated under Morse Code. The regular radio operator operated that one. But my radio was back in a turret and his was up in front. So, he had me stay on the radio, operate both, because I was qualified for the Morse Code, too. And all of a sudden, artillery come in, ____a little bit off to the side of us. All the rest of the guys were already in the building and I was out there by myself maintaining radio contact. And when that treeburst (??) hit, I knew I was in a bad spot. I figured well, I’m going to leave here and I’m going to run over to the other car and open up the frequency in the other car. It was only about 50 feet away, something like that. I jumped out, got maybe 20 feet away when our car was hit. You couldn’t see it. It was dry dust in what was parked. It was covered with a cloud of dust so you couldn’t see it. I was on the ground. I don’t know if I had jumped to the ground, or I got blown to the ground. Anyhow, I was down. And the treeburst, there was enough of a treeburst there, that it went right into the car. The guys in the building came out and saw I was laying out on the ground, but I just felt myself, I knew I was okay. I didn’t feel any schrapnel or anything. I got up and I just think that maybe three shells came in, that’s all. When we went back to the car, the front wheel was gone. The schrapnel had gotten right through the rim and bent the rim of the big wheel and the car was all shot. There was a hole from the fender _______My seat – shrapnel had cut my seat up.
DH: Very good thing you got out of that car.
SW: Yeah, it would have gone through ________. And I’d been out of the car maybe five, ten seconds before and I got just far enough away from the car. The car was hit and there were a lot of holes in the car. And we were in enemy territory. So we had instructions to prepare the car for demolition. The sergeant and I prepared the car with hand grenades and phosphorus grenades for demolition. _______the flare. And then we had to wait to see if…we sent a Jeep back with two men, to see if they could bring a wheel with a tire on it. And I don’t know how they got through, but they got through. And they came back with a wheel. And the radio operator and the driver were putting the wheel on when another shell hit back there. Well, they had this heavy wheel with a tire on it, trying to lift it up, and at that time he jerked, the driver jerked so hard that it closed back up.
DH: So that’s when…
SW: That’s when…I told you previously about Heath getting hurt, and from that time on, he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t climb in the car. We finally had to let him go, and he went to the Air Corps. We got the car back. I had to take all the hand grenades, the demolition grenades out of the car. We had prepared it for demolition. We put a 37mm round in the car _______We put a phosphorus grenade on the engine and a couple grenades on the radios. So then it could be completely wrecked, you know, so they couldn’t use anything. And of course we had to undo that when we resumed our reconnaissance.
DH: So what did you guys do next after that?
SW: What was that?
DH: What was the next thing you did on the reconnaissance side? Did you keep going into enemy territory?
SW: I don’t remember, if we turned back then, or not. But we generally resumed our reconnaissance and reported back. Sometimes they would order us back or give us a break. And after we had been in for a month and a half or better, they decided to give us a break. They brought us back to a town. I think it was Mustanaga – no, that was another town. ___tania, I think it was. They gave us a break there, and that’s where I met Braxton. At a bar. And he was wearing glasses. I recognized him. He was in a class with me – in a printing class at Central High School when we were still in school. And he didn’t recognize me. He was with dark glasses and I said “Braxton?” And then he looked good and I told him who it was _______. I asked him why he was wearing dark glasses. And he was in artillery, with the 34th, I believe.
DH: Was he with the 125th, locally?
SW: Yeah. He had gotten a muzzle flash and his eyes were….he was just recuperating with his eyes from the muzzle flash (?).
DH: Sounds like you hung out with him for a while.
SW: No, I didn’t. No. I just said “hello” and that was about it. We weren’t particular friends. I just knew him, that’s all. And so when our car was hit, they sent our car crew down to the ordinance company, one of the other cars had run into a mine and it broke the driver’s legs. Hit with a front wheel. His legs were broken so after he got back from the hospital he was assigned to us and we tried to get him to drive and he wouldn’t drive anymore, so we couldn’t use him. So we ended up with another driver.
DH: And what was his name?
SW: Jacksaw. And he drove for us for a while.
DH: So what was a typical reconnaissance mission? What would you do?
SW: They would assign us to an area, to cover, and see what we could find, and radio back if we were…Basically, it was to find the enemy and call back when we met resistance. But sometimes we wouldn’t find ‘em. We’d drive through, past ‘em and we didn’t even know it. When we were back alongside the resistance.
DH: But it was your job, pretty much, to find the enemy, though. It was a pretty dangerous role.
SW: Yeah.
DH: Sounds like you finally got to know the east Italy pretty ___ too.
SW: The what?
DH: Sounds like you probably got to see a lot of Italy that way, too.
SW: Yeah. We drove around quite a bit. And going back to that ordinance company, we got there about noon. And took our mess kits and got into the ordinance company chow line. And when we got back to the car, there was a soldier climbing over the top of it, looking at the car. And he was looking at all the holes in it, you know. And when I looked up, I recognized Phil McLaughlin, from Duluth.
DH: What were you doing?
SW: Well, he worked at the ordinance company. And he had apparently been in some other unit and had gotten hurt or transferred or something into the ordinance company, because I think he left with one of the offices (?) from Duluth. I’m not sure of that, but I thought that he did. Anyhow, we talked about it, and he said “Do you ride in this doodle bug?,” you know. But he says something about the holes in it and being lucky. And I said “Jesus! It’s nice seeing you again, Phil.” And he said “Well, you know, something else happened just recently. I had to take a truck and go down to the fort and pick up some stuff from a ship down there that had unloaded some stuff. “ And he says “You know, my brother was on the ship. Bob McLaughlin.” And he was a sailor on a regular freighter. They used to call them armed guards. They had sailors on civilian ships. Because they had to put a light cannon on them for protection, and he was one of them – members of the armed guard. So he had met his brother, about a week before I had met him overseas. And he didn’t know he was coming. He had just happened to see his brother. It was kind of unusual. I meet him and he had met his brother about the week before.
DH: Yeah. It’s pretty unusual. Pretty lucky.
SW: Yeah.
DH: So how long were you with the ordinance company?
SW: Oh, just long enough to have some armor plate put underneath the driver and radio operator. For protection from land mines.
DH: And they sent you right back out again?
SW: Yeah. We went back to our unit again.
DH: And is this still 1943?
SW: This is in 1944.
DH: And how was the weather in Italy? Was it pretty cold there, too, or…?
SW: Well, mostly we had pretty nice weather in Italy, up until we got up to Florence. From Florence on, we didn’t, we couldn’t use our cars much, because we started up into the mountains.
DH: Too much snow and water…?
SW: Not…it’s the North Appenines and they weren’t basically snowy, but we were coming into winter and of course up in the mountains we did get snow. It was kind of a half-rain, half-snow, cloud bank. Miserable weather.
DH: So how was the food throughout this?
SW: Well, when we were in the lowlands where we could use our cars, we typically had C rations and we would try to stop….we had a little stove. Each armored car had a little stove. And when we stopped, the Jeeps would come up around us and we’d pull the stove out and we usually had________. It was pretty good, with cooking them. We would open the cans up, and sometimes we’d go into a place where we could get a chicken and then we’d cook the chicken. On one occasion, we were brought back, pulled off the line for a little while, just for the day. And we went back to a little village – it was mainly deserted. The lieutenant picked out a house. This was a new lieutenant, now. The other one had been kicked out.
DH: So he did get kicked out, eventually, for something else?
SW: He got kicked out – the captain kicked him out of the outfit, because of a court martial.
DH: Do you remember that lieutenant’s name?
SW: Yeah, I know the guy’s name. I can’t get his name out of my head.
DH: What was his name?
SW: I don’t know if he’s still alive. His name was Beecher. B-E-E-C-H-E-R.
DH: So you think he might have been court martialed, then?
SW: No, he wasn’t court martialed. He had a friend that was a colonel.
DH: So he at least got kicked out of your unit?
SW: I beg your pardon?
DH: He did get kicked out of your unit, though?
SW: This was on a different thing. This was in the summer of ’44. Early summer of ’44. We had gone to where we couldn’t stop. We had to stop before we could go any further. There was damage to 6 x 6’s on the load. They’d been hit and there were several of them. And it was in an area where there was trees and it had a long field. We were going through this long field and these trucks – infantry trucks – had tried to go through and they got hit. And the trees – and several buildings were in there amongst the trees – and the colonel was there. ______was stopped, because they couldn’t cross that open area. Lieutenant went up to the colonel and says “We’ll send in the cars. ___bring the cars in, _____.” So he picked the third car, which was our car. We unloaded our bedrolls off the car. We knew it was going to be bad staff. We turned the guns - I turned the guns around to fire off of the back end of the car. We backed in. The Infantry sent in 11 infantry men in with us, in case somebody tried to come in close with what they call a Panzer fist, a German Panzer fist. It’s like a bazooka. We got out there, in that open field, and all hell broke loose. We were quite a ways out into the field. And we had looked over a German tank before that and we saw that it only had three rounds in the ready rack in the turret. But they could fire pretty fast, and then they’d have to go down in the bin and get some more ammo. Our driver realized that, you know. You had to move the car fast, then slam on the brakes. A round would have hit pretty close to where we would have been. We got orders on the radio to pull back. Well, we couldn’t pull back. I could have told the lieutenant on that, because I had the voice radio. I told the lieutenant that we can’t leave the Infantry. He says “Move back.” But we stayed until the Infantry was able to get back, too. Well, in the meantime, a shell hit where our lieutenant was laying in a ditch, watching what was going on. And the confession went down the ditch.(??) He got up and he ran and he got into the car. His own armored car and by that time I was picking up our bed rolls and putting them back on the car. I called him and I says “Where are you going?” And he says “Meet me wherever we had breakfast in the morning.” And so we started back, but the captain heard all this going on, on the radio. And he met the armored car. He drove up in his Jeep and he met the armored car. That was about the time our car caught up with ‘em. And I jumped out and was running toward him and he, the captain saw me coming, running, and he ordered me back to my car. So I went back to my car – reluctantly, but I did. And I heard the captain say “Lieutenant, get off of that car. You’re relieved right now.” And he said “Sergeant Trayhan, it’s your platoon.” And that’s what the captain said about the court martial.
DH: So I bet you were pretty happy to have that lieutenant gone, though?
SW: Yeah. Because we got a good one after that. We got a good one.
DH: OK. So we’ll go back to the good guy, now. I wanted to hear a little bit more about that guy, so. So you’re in Florence, the last time we were talking.
SW: I beg pardon?
DH: You were up in Florence. What were you doing up there? Were you still working on reconnaissance?
SW: Well, we got to Florence. Of course, Florence is on the Arno River. There’s a famous bridge across the Arno River. The 5th Army had special orders not to touch that bridge. Because Ponta Delveccio (??), they called it. It was a bridge with buildings on it. Houses on it. It goes across the Arno River. And from the Arno River, north, it goes right up a hill, long hill and then continues into mountains, and more mountains.
DH: And did you guys ever go into the mountains?
SW: Yeah. We didn’t see much combat at all, up there. The division engineers would have to fix up places in the roadways where the Germans had mined them and dynamited them and where the roads fell away and they had to fill them in so they could cross, you know. And the engineers sometimes would get sniper fire and receive sniper fire. Then they’d call for recon to come up that was us, with our armored car. And we parked there, and if they caught fire and if someone could see it, we’d fire back, you know.
DH: Yeah.
SW: They – usually that stopped it. So that we could keep looking. That was about our only missions up there. Besides, then, we were starting to dismount our patrols (?).
DH: OK. So where did you guys go, how long did it take you to go through the mountains?
SW: 52 days.
DH: 52 days. I imagine it was some pretty tough stuff to go through, though.
SW: We lost, the division lost a lot of men. A lot of men. The 362nd Infantry Division was especially hard hit. I think they said that one company – K Company 362 – were down to 20 men.
DH: And was it just because of the weather?
SW: They started with 200.
DH: Was it because of the weather, or Germans shooting from all sides?
SW: We lost a lot of men from combat. We were sent out, sometimes, to relieve infantry on observation posts, when they wanted to pull some of their men back into the warm area and let ‘em warm up and we would relieve (them) in that observation post. Stuff like that. And we would run patrols. One of our patrols – I wasn’t on this one, but one of our patrols…we sent out a patrol, a main patrol going out, and at least have a flanker, one on each flank, so if we got fired on they could try and neutralize them. But this was wintertime – cold. And the patrol got fired on, and one of the flankers got up close to the machine gun nest (?) that was firing on our patrol, and he was armed with a sub-Thompson. And he pulled the bolt back on his sub-Thompson, and he was going to shoot one and try to take one prisoner. And the bolt just moved forward slow, you know, it didn’t fire.
DH: OK.
SW: And he was close enough so that the Germans heard him and they came at him. And he threw his machine gun and hit one in the face. Well, this is what I hear. I’m not sure of it. But he fought with the other one, hand to hand. And the German grabbed his hand and bit his hand. Especially his finger. Well, the German was knocked down. I think he killed one and one got away, finally. He got a Purple Heart for getting bit on the finger. But he stopped the firing. His name was Horace Brigham. And it was written up in the Stars and Stripes for having been bit on the finger – a Purple Heart for getting bit on the finger. And that’s in our division history. I can show it to you if you want.
DH: So when you guys finally got through the mountains – 52 days – where did you go from there? What was your role and were you continuing just to drive north?
SW: We were in front of a place called Livuk Manro (??), which was where _______lost a lot of men there. And Mount Adoan (??), which ______was supposed to go through there and the Germans counterattacked on Christmas Eve. So, that kind of stopped us. As I understand it, our troop was supposed to _____________this assault, because the infantry was pretty short on men, because all of the replacements that we would do were going into the Battle of the Bulge(?), which was going on about that time. So they were using whatever they could get, and we were one of the…supposed to go in. But because of the current attack, they called it off. We went later on. We broke out in the end of March and April. We broke out of the mountains into the Po Valley. And then we were back in our cars.
DH: Was that a good thing at this point?
SW: I beg pardon?
DH: Was it good for you to be back in your cars?
SW: Yeah. We liked to be back in our cars. Infantry has got an awful rough job. We didn’t fight as infantry. We just operated……..we did patrols and sometimes operated outposts. That’s all.
DH: So what happened in the Po Valley? Was there some more fighting there, I imagine?
SW: Well, it was fast. The idea was to get….in the Po Valley….from the mountains we could see part of Bologna, the city of Bologna. And when we broke out, we passed through the city of Bologna and moved on past there. And didn’t meet much resistance, but every once in a while we’d get a little fire fight. And we got into one little one. Infantry had gotten out in front of them and trucks had gotten out in front. And we met one coming back. He had gotten lost, the truck, _______and when we met him, the Germans met him at the same time and started firing at the truck. We got into it with a German unit that was moving back. Ended up in a fire fight there. And they had a sniper up in the church steeple that was starting to kind of pick us off, because our turrets were open. We weren’t in a tank that has a closed turret. We had an open turret on our car.
DH: So you could just shoot right in.
SW: Yeah.
DH: So did you guys make it through that, okay, it sounds like?
SW: I got the sniper. I fired a 37 shell into the steeple. And that was the end of that. But the driver of the 6 x 6 – he managed to get out of the armored car between him and where the firing was coming from. And he was able to move his truck out of there, and he got through okay.
DH: Wow. And so how far north did you guys continue to go? I mean, this was getting pretty late in the war, too.
SW: Well, this is close to the end of the war now. And we were supposed to be heading toward the Brenner Pass. They closed the Brenner Pass off so that Germans couldn’t get back into Germany. Well, the whole darn 5th Army was running for the Brenner Pass, you know. We got stopped. I believe they said the war was over for us in Germany, or in Italy. And that was before the war in Europe, or in France and Germany was over. They surrendered in Italy before they did in Germany and France. A couple of days ahead of time.
DH: So for you, the war was over, before it was over in the rest of the ….
SW: Yeah. Yeah. But we stopped and we thought it was over and we were parked there. But we were pretty darn happy that we had made it. And there was a village off to the side there, and we were going to celebrate in the village and the captain says nobody would go. There was enough of, not a rebellion, but he knew that we wanted to get into town to celebrate. Finally he let us go, but he says nobody goes in with a Jeep, or any vehicles. We walk in, if we want to go, we walk out. Well, ________, I guess. We went in there and got into a tavern. The owner wasn’t there. We were drinking wine and finally the owner came in, screaming his head off, the owner, drinking his wine. And we told him we were going to pay for everything. He opened up the basement, he had more in the basement, and beer, too. We celebrated there. Some of us celebrated too much.
DH: Were you one of those?
SW: Yeah, I was one of those.
DH: How was the wine over there? How was the beer?
SW: Lousy beer, lousy wine. We had a jug on the side of the car for it often. And when___straw, bottles with straw (??).
DH: nd it wasn’t very good.
SW: No, it wasn’t very good, but we kept it.
DH: So, I’ve got a couple of stories I’m supposed to ask you about. Can you tell me about the manger story?
SW: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was quite a deal. We had been up and pulled back for the night in a little town. There was a building there, with, I think it was two stories, maybe even three. But two stories. And the officer, the lieutenant, the good lieutenant – we called him Spike. His name was Spike Ohler. Some of the guys had already taken their bed rolls off the vehicles and gone up to the second story and laid them out to sleep up there. I hadn’t gotten up there yet. I was on the main floor with the officer. And another officer came in. And he told Spike, he says “I’m going to take the_________.” And Spike says “Well, we’re already in and some of the men have already got their bed rolls out.” He says “We’re still going to take it in.” He was a captain. Well, he outranked us. And Spike gave him an argument, but he says “That’s an order. You’ll have to move people out.” Well, we moved our people out. One of the reasons, he says “I need the manger that’s attached to the ceiling. Grave (?) registration ______and we need the building for bodies.” And so we crossed the street and there was an 8 foot wall, a 7 or 8 foot wall around a Catholic, I don’t know what…it wouldn’t be a convent. That would be for women, but its equivalent. And there was chicken coops on the inside wall and they had a few chickens in there. Oh, the guys got a hold of some of the chickens and the Italians were in town, and we threw some of the chickens over the wall to the Italian side. And some of our people got chickens and we set up a banquet table in there. There was ____banquet people in the place. And our cook was a guy named Ma Olinger. And he was pretty good at it. And he fixed up chickens so we had a banquet. And I got the duty that night, for guard. Kind of covered the ____ there. I walked back and forth there. I heard a big shell coming in. I knew it by the sound, because it sounded like it might have been a garbage can going end over end (makes sounds imitating this), like that. It hit the grave registration unit. And that building collapsed on men from the 11th (?). Just ____guys from the grave registration unit, the building from the grave registration unit came right down on the top wall. It was awful. But the manger saved us! Can you imagine that?
DH: You had a lot of close encounters…lucky.
SW: Yeah. Well, there again I got knocked over, with a concussion, but I was okay again.
DH: Wow. Then another story I want to ask about, too, is, I guess you were injured at some point with a guillotine wire.
SW: Yeah. We were moving on a road and we had been in a little – it wasn’t actually a fire fight – a partisan, Italian partisan had come back and told us, stopped us on the road, waved us to a stop and he says there was a house up front with German SS troops in it. And he rode the back of one of the cars. He got on board and he directed us to the building. And we said “Well, you stay in the car and cover us.” All the guys in the Jeep, most of the guys in the Jeep, some of the guys in the armored cars, left our cars. I was left alone in mine. The radio operator and driver and car commander had left. And my job was to cover, with the gun. And they got up close and they pointed to the windows, which one they wanted me to shoot at. The range was close, I couldn’t miss, you know. I put a 37mm in and shoot in the window, and it would explode its side (or inside), you know. And I kept shooting, pointing at the windows – I didn’t even see a German. I kept shooting. And finally, one officer, apparently, a German SS officer had jumped off the back end of the window – the back window – and was running across the field and was trying to get away. And _______on the machine gun, cut him down. I went back after the thing was over – I went back. ______”Nice shooting, man – (but it sounds like “mon”). He was a replacement and was one of the youngest guys we had. He says “That’s what I come over here for.” You know, he was just as calm as could be. But I don’t know. I’d never seen the people that were shot inside. Our radio operator went in and said there was quite a few of them dead, and I was the one that was shooting. So apparently it was my gun that was…the other guns were silent. They didn’t shoot. Because they had left their vehicles ________to go in there to see if they could get ‘em. It would have been nice to bring ‘em in all captured, but…… Then we left there, and as we were driving, I noticed the muzzle of my machine gun. See, the way the turret is structured, there’s a 37 mm gun and alongside of it is a machine gun. And usually I can fire the machine gun, watch while it strikes, then step on that trigger for the 37. Well, I was sitting in the seat and I could see the muzzle on the machine gun working itself loose. And I called for the radio operator, who was buttoned down. He had the steel, you know, the cartridge, down. So he helped me out. He says “Captain, (??) muzzle____should tighten that muzzle.” And he was doing that and I had cleared the machine gun. I pulled the bolt back, pulled the belts out, and pulled the bolt back several times. Well, the car commander, Olson, he had come back, because he had been up to the house with the rest of them. He had come back. He climbed in the turret, and he said “Stan, did you clear the gun?” I said “Yeah, I cleared it.” So he saw there was no belt in it. He pulled the bolt back and forth. That should have cleared it. But then he stepped on the trigger. Well, ______was tightening the muzzle right at the time. He had this…fits right over the end of the belt (?), like that. There’s a slot. You just stick the slot in and twist it. The gun went off when he had the muzzle off, went through his hand, tore the heck out of his hand here, and of course we had a Jeep medic send him back. And then we had to get a newcomer. ________operator, a new radio operator. And they sent a radio operator. We were driving down the road, coming back, and the first two cars got, I don’t know, I didn’t see anything. All of a sudden I leaned forward in the turret, like this, there’s a back area on the turret and it’s open back here, like that. I leaned forward and got hit in the face. And it throws me back and I hit my head on the turret and I got in the turret, bleeding like crazy. My mouth was cut, you know.
DH: A wire?
SW: The wire came up and hit me like this. It shoved my lip back and it _________here.
DH: And you went like this? (Apparently, a lot of physical demonstration was going on in this section.)
SW: And Olson was leaning back in the turret, I was leaning forward, so it hit me first. And he ______let it go, but it took his helmet.
DH: Wow.
SW: Of course the Jeeps picked up his helmet. But he wasn’t hurt. And they didn’t send me back. They just gave me cotton - stuffed my mouth full of cotton. My lip was way out here. I couldn’t…I could drink, but I couldn’t chew. I stayed with my unit, and finally my lip came down to normal size. But I carried scar tissue on my lip, up until 1988. In 1988, the scar tissue started to fester and my face blew up a bit and I went to the VA and they lanced it. A couple months later, it blew up again, they lanced it again. A while later, it blew up again, but this time it really blew up and my whole side of my face was blown up, enough so it closed my right eye. This time the VA said they had to do something more. They didn’t know how to approach it and they called the main hospital in Minneapolis and they got instructions. They cut it open and they pulled the pieces of the wire out.
DH: There was still wire?
SW: The wire was, see, they had used a corded wire, not a regular thin wire. It’s a corded wire. The cording broke up, and stuck in my lip. I thought it was just scar tissue. But the cording was still in there. They pulled some cording out. I told them, before they took it, what it was. They said “Well, it’s scar tissue.” But when they opened it up, they knew I wasn’t lying. So they took pieces of the wire out, the cording out. I got home and still I could feel a sharp piece, pieces – I squeezed it, I got some more. I handed it to Hazel. Right after it healed, so that I don’t have a lump. It used to hang down, like that, you know. I don’t have that lump there anymore. I had that lump from ’44, ’45 until ’88.
DH: Wow. First I want to say thank you for telling me your story. You have an incredible story, an incredible journey, it sounds like. So, thank you for telling me your story. You had some great close encounters.
(Recording shuts off here.)
