Bob Holster

Oral History Project

Bob Holster

Where and when did you enlist? I didn’t enlist. I was drafted some time prior to September and on September 3^rd, there was a whole contingent of us from Marathon County sent to Milwaukee Medical Center. W e were given a physical. Prior to the time we went down, the guys who passed their physicals were in the army and they went from there. A lot of guys had already sold their cars and quit their jobs, and when they failed the physical, they were able to go home and try to pick up the pieces. What they did was institute a thirty-day furlough. You were actually in the service, but you were sent home for thirty days to get your affairs in order and then report back to Ft. Sheridan, Illinois for deployment to wherever you were supposed to go. We reported to Ft. Sheridan on the 3^rd of October and most of us were sent to Camp Funston, which was part of Ft. Riley in Kansas. It was a temporary camp that was built for World War II. We were put in the 9^th Armored Division and after aptitude tests and interviews and everything they decided where we were going.

SHAEF was at the top and that was Eisenhower. There were four armies in Europe. We were in the 1^st Army. There were corps, and I don’t know how many, but we were in the 5^th Corps at the time of the Bulge battle. I believe we were in three different corps. A division, as far as our division was concerned, is between 20 and 25 thousand men, and we were in the 9^th Armored Division. An armored division is split up into three combat commands. They are actually equal components of the division in that there was three of everything. Our CCA had the 3^rd Field Artillery Battalion, the 60^th Infantry Battalion, and the 19^th Tank Battalion. We were an armored division, so we had a lot of thanks. Company A, 9^th Armored Engineer Battalion was my unit in the 9^th Armored Division. Then we had a medical detachment, a signal detachment, and miscellaneous other things. When we were overseas, we had a tank destroyer battalion attached to us. Each combat command almost operated as its own little army. Our main function, if we were operating as an armored division, was a fast striking force and you spearhead, you drive in without regard for what is on your side and you drive a wedge in and if you meet resistance, you stop and take care of it. If it is too great, you stop and hold and foot soldiers, infantry, come in and clean out the town and then you would go again. You would pass right through them. In the engineer battalion, there were three line companies. Each combat command had a line company and then we had a headquarters company that serviced the battalion as a whole. In our A company, there was a headquarters platoon, which had maintenance for the vehicles and equipment, engineering equipment, kitchen section which fed us and kept us in food, supply which kept us in shoes and jackets and mittens and whatever we needed and communications. I was assigned to the communications section. I was a radio operator. That was my original assignment. I was in that unit until the 9^th of March 1945, and then I changed positions. My position was a Radio Operator, and we used Morse code. We had a set that had quite a range and it was all transmitted in Morse code. We had a key that snapped onto our leg and that was the way we worked. Everything was sent in code. It was encoded into five letter groups, and we had and encoding machine. Every day we were given an indication of how best to set that machine up. Any message of clear text was fed in to the machine and you pull the handle down and letter-by-letter it converted the clear text into five letter groups and it came out like a postage stamp with glue on the back and you stuck it on the message board and then you transmitted. That is what the receiving station got and they decoded the message into clear text and that is the way messages were transmitted. We also had FM sets. They were short range. Our CW sets, which we transmitted code on, would send a signal that would travel and bounce off the ionosphere and down and it was long range. The FM set, at least the sets we had, were strait line and if you were behind a hill or something it didn’t get through. It was relatively short range. That is how I fit into the 9^th Armored Division.

Did you want to go into the army? I don’t know. There were enlistments, but as far as the group I went in with, nobody was gung ho about going in. We knew that was what we had to do. Strangely, everybody was thinking that they had some problem that would keep them out, and about halfway through the physical, that whole attitude changed and everybody wanted so badly to pass the physical. It is something I can’t explain, but I know it happened.

Where in Europe were you? We were in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, Rhineland, which was in the vicinity of the Rhine River, and Eastern Europe. We had three battle stars that we wore on our campaign ribbon.

How many years were you in the military? I served from my time of induction to discharge just over three years. I was overseas for one year.

During the time overseas, did you see combat? Oh yes, when I was overseas I was in combat. We arrived in Luxembourg, which was the line then, and quiet at the time. We were put in to hold the line, but there was very little activity until December 16^th, 1944, and that is when the roof fell in.

What was an average day like? During the war? It is hard to say and hard to remember. It was not like being in camp. In camp, there is training. Bugles called reveille in the morning, and the people walked through the barracks to see if everybody was awake. Everybody lined up on the company street, and everybody had to be accounted for. Squad leaders reported to their squads and platoon leaders reported their platoons to the company commander. Then you went back in the barracks and pretty soon there was chow call and you went and ate. After that, you went out on various training, whether it was rifle, machine gun, anti-tank gun, or engineer equipment. We were combat engineers, and our functions included demolitions, explosives, blowing things up, removing enemy explosives, laying minefields, and mapping them. One of our duties was removing enemy mines, and it took a lot of training. You didn’t want them to blow up in your face. Most of them were booby-trapped. A mine would have a paddle placed in the ground and then the mine was set on top of that, and the mine was flush with the ground. When a heavy object ran over that mine, it would detonate. If somebody tried to pick the mine up and take it out, the little charge underneath would detonate, and of course, the mine would blow up in your face. There were all sorts of devices to make removal difficult. There were anti-personnel mines with small antenna or little wires that set off the charge. The mine would bounce in the air and then explode and the shrapnel would injure people.

What was the hardest part of being in the war? I was a radio operator, and I was on a communications crew. Our responsibility was the radios. We were not pushed into the forward elements, but we were held back a little way from the front because they were not interested in exposing our equipment to destruction. The line platoons were responsible for clearing mines and roadblocks. The infantry was responsible for flushing people out of buildings and driving them out of foxholes and the shooting part of the war. We stayed behind the infantry except in the Bulge we were used like infantry. We went on patrol and made drives and cleaned out towns and so on. We functioned as infantry because they were so short on personnel. In the communications center, we didn’t get into that, but we were subject to artillery fire, and that is unnerving when the shells are dropping around you. We had pulled into a wooded area, and the first thing we did was get out and dig some holes. I had a buddy who was a radio operator and we dug a hole and threw some brush on top, because in a wooded, some of the shells hit trees. Then you would be showered with shrapnel. Instead of hitting the ground and exploding, the shell would hit the tree and explode in the air and the shrapnel came down. If you were in a hole, you were vulnerable unless you had something covering it. We served shifts on the radio, and during the nigh, our half-track had to be buttoned up, because our radio had lights and sound. This way, there could be no light showing. If a message came in, you tried to minimize the noise. During our first shelling, there was no question to what it was. It was a German 88. I came out from the half-track and dove on the ground. I then had to come back to the half-track to get back on the radio because there was a message coming in. The Germans had another rocket launcher called the Neblewefer. We called them “screaming memmies”. It was a rocket launcher. They loaded those tubes with rockets and they had a wire connection to the back, and they fired them electronically. That propellant charge, like an artillery shell, would send the rocket toward the target. One time I was riding in a jeep, with all of our belongings in back, and we pulled our belongings out every night and a big piece of shrapnel fell out. We don’t know how it got there. When the Nebelwefer exploded, there wasn’t a lot of shrapnel, but there was a tremendous explosion. You felt like your brain was going to be pushed out of your head. In Europe, they had a lot of tiled roofs, and the concussion was so bad that it cracked the tiles and they would slide off the roof and fall on the ground. One night I was on the radio and we were in a town near a castle and our lines were thin. We were sitting on the front line and when the Germans started their attack, we took the brunt of the attack. The artillery began to fire at the targets and the shells were crossing our half-track and I didn’t know what was going on.

Do you remember any important messages you received? No. It was pretty routine stuff as far as we were concerned. I was not on the radio shift the first day, but it was pretty eventful. We had to code the casualty lists to be sent back to headquarters. It was hard to hear names of people you had been associated with for two years. We lost 40% of our company. Our infantry battalion, the companies and the tanks were the front line and there was a river between the Germans and the Americans. When the battle started, they bottled up some of our men and tanks in the attack. They were to assemble at a road junction, but by morning, mortar shells were dropping and the attack never got organized.

Do you know anything about the concentration camps? Yes, we liberated Buchenwald. The first one that we liberated was a Polish POW camp at Lindberg. You never forget the smell and the bodies piled up. Our boys saw it and we didn’t stay very long. The infantry division behind us stayed longer.

Is there any story that you would like to share with us? I said before my main assignment was a radio operator. The whole European theater was short of officers and we were supposed to have an executive officer that was supposed to travel with our combat command. The headquarters was in a half-track and the commanding colonel and other officers traveled in that half-track and when darkness approached they very seldom drove in the dark. Then each unit would post their own security. In other words, an armored unit spearheading the advance goes down to a designated road, and if they do not meet any opposition, they keep on driving. There are all kinds of things that can happen. The enemy will put up roadblocks, and they will defend some spots that are defensible. An armored outfit will try and clean it out. Tanks will be in the lead and infantry boys ride on the tanks. We had a couple of squads riding on the tanks right with them. If they ran into something that needed attention, our boys were right there. Our outfit got the only intact bridge over the Rhine River. The infantry went over knowing that the bridge was wired with explosives. Nobody knew why it hadn’t been blown up, but we had two engineers that shot the cables in half. They managed to take the bridge and get a bridgehead started on the other side. An amphibious crossing across the Rhine would have been costly in the terms of lives. The enemy was on the other side sitting on the bank shooting at you. Anyway, we got cross the bridge. I was assigned to combat command headquarters at this time, and our combat command was the last unit fighting in Europe. We were stopped on the 7^th of May 1945 and my jeep was directly behind the command half-track, and they called me up and I was ordered to run from the point of the column and tell them to stop fighting, the war was over. We would drive down roads that weren’t secure and we had been over the roads several times, but we had to provide security and services to platoons that defended us and provided security.

What kind of reception did you get when you came home? Well, we actually came back early. We came back in August of 1945. A group of us out of our company and battalion were transferred to the 4^th Infantry Division and sent back to the states. We were put in the 4^th Infantry with a 30-day furlough and told to report to the west coast. Our orders would be coming and we were slated to participate in the invasion of Japan. Thank God for the atomic bomb. I am convinced that I would not be here if it wasn’t for that bomb.