Oral
History Project 
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Robert Braun
How did you become involved in
the war? Did you enlist or were you drafted?
Both. Between my brother and I, one of us had to go from our family.
Because we were farmers, one of us got to stay and help with the farm. I
volunteered to go. How old were you and what year
did you enter the military?
I was 21 and it was 1942. [I served from] December 1942 to December
1945. Were you in the European or
Pacific Theater of the war?
European. Where were you
stationed?
I wasn’t really stationed; we were always on the move.
Can you share with us what an
average day was like?
That is a difficult question. We had training days and other days.
It’s hard to say what an average day was like because there wasn’t one. Were you in any battles during
the war?
Yes, they are all on this sheet. The Normandy, Northern France,
Rhineland, Central Europe, and [other] Ground Combat [battles]. I was a gunner
in the 8th Infantry Division and we were assigned to that. Did you lose a lot of weight over
there?
Basic training, I put on 30 pounds and I lost it all on the ten days I
was on the boat coming home. That’s what stress does to you. That’s how much
it meant to the physical person. Did you take a boat over to
Europe or were you flown?
I took a boat from New York but I had my basic training in four or five
different places. We started out in Camp Wallace, Texas. From there we went to
North Carolina. Then we went to Virginia and New Jersey.
We got to spend a week on Cape Cod. Then we went back to New Jersey and
to Fort Hamilton. So we had
training, all over. Where did you land in
Europe?
Liverpool, England. Where did you go after
that?
The administrators know where you’re going, but they don’t tell you
anything. They don’t say pack
your bags, we’re going here and going there.
You just go. You don’t
know if you’re in Africa or in Australia.
They never once told us how to shoot and kill somebody. Where did you see the most
battles?
When we landed in England at Liverpool, they had a camp in somebody’s
field. It was just a plain shed-- a
building with a plain slanted roof, four walls.
Each of these buildings might hold 200 people, or maybe only 75.
Anyway, from Liverpool we went to this field that had these barracks in
it and we spent a couple weeks there to get the climate.
We got there in March, and it felt like May there.
The weather was like a spring day. In
fact, the grass was green. We might
have been there a week or ten days, or something like that, and then they moved
us to separate locations along the English Channel.
It was different because we were always a gun crew.
We were assigned to a gun on a hill overlooking a bay off the English
Channel where the ships could get in. We
were given a gun there. You were in England at
first?
I think we landed there in March. From March until June we were there for the invasion.
We stayed behind because we were the anti-aircraft landing operation.
When they all got over there, we went over the channel into France. Did you sleep when you could
sleep? Did you have to take shifts at the gun?
We were assigned hours of duty at the gun.
Three on and six off around the clock. Then in June, you were moved
farther into France?
It’s hard to describe the whole operation.
It was seven or eight thousand men.
We were just a stick in the mud and you go along for the ride. Was it always by
train?
I guess we went by truck. I
can’t quite remember. After
Liverpool, we did get on a train and we went to this camp far away west.
When you were traveling, the train might
have gone five miles and then might sit for two hours.
It wasn’t just straight through. Even
when we got straightened out in France and we made a move, we didn’t go.
We went as a gun crew. We
had two trucks and two guns and that was the gun crew.
On occasion the whole works would meet together and get moving; after the
invasion in France it was captured.
We landed in Normandy. On
the peninsula, the land below Normandy was called Bretagne. Bretagne was where
they landed in WWI and the French and the Germans had built shore fortresses to
protect the English Channel. When
the other troops went into Germany, we stayed behind in our positions.
We took Bretagne and the Germans had replacements three stories down
deep. They had their big shore
guns. After it was captured they
killed a lot of the troops there. They
had good protection with concrete six feet thick.
After the Germans were all eliminated they let us go into this part of
this fortress to see it. From
Bretagne we went back to Normandy--central town called Rennes. It was kind of a dispatch center. From there we went to Luxembourg. About what time was
this?
September. This whole
process took a long time. Did you lose anybody in your gun
crew?
There were a few that got killed, but we were lucky.
What the Germans had done, they were arranged, these shore guns that were
set up there in that fortress to protect the English Channel.
Imagine how big they were, they were bigger than some of the battle
ships. When they reversed them and
were shooting back at us, and when the shells went through the sky, they sounded
like a freight train. They were
going 60 miles an hour. You
couldn’t see it, but you heard it. You
never know when they’d explode. We
were showered with the shrapnel at the end of the explosion. What did you do when you got to
Luxembourg?
They moved us on the borderline when we were in a place like Kellner.
Out in the country, you’ve seen old pictures of the people who lived in
the crossroads and went out in the field to their horses and animals and so on.
We were in the crossroads. We
were there two or three weeks. That’s
when we were introduced to what is called the buzz-bomb.
That thing went through the sky like a freight train too, but we could
see it. You guys would be in the same
field?
They gave us a house to move in, but in France they didn’t let us go
into a house. In Luxembourg we did.
These houses were the houses they had a thousand years ago.
Straw roofs, sod, cows in one room, and the next room was the kitchen.
That’s how they kept warm, with the animal heat.
In the location in Luxembourg that I’m telling you about, we were in
September or October. It was at a
position where they were getting ready for the Battle of the Bulge.
This was an area that they were well aware of.
They were Luxembourg and pro-German, which was all right.
One of them buzz bombs exploded quarter mile down the road and it left a
hole that you could drop a house in. In
the middle of the night when it explodes, it makes a big noise and everybody
wakes up. We did walk down to see
where that thing blew up. The hole.
And it wasn’t meant to be there, it happened with malfunctions.
From that part of Luxembourg and we were only about 35 miles from about
… and I remember that number real well …
from a real nice modern up-to-date new hotel called the Wiltz.
It was real nice and when we got to where we were we had to go right
through the middle of this beautiful place.
Here we end up in sticks. The
roads went in three different directions. At
one time there was some business; there was a building [here and] there and it
could have had some business there. One
had a business when we were there and it had a bar room.
We could go in there and buy whatever.
The young lady was the barmaid and she spoke enough English where we
could talk to her. And the closest
of our troops were seven miles away. Seven
miles from where we were. That’s how war was. After Luxembourg where did you
go?
Then we went out to what was called the Virgin Course heading towards
the direction of the northern front. The front was divided into three parts, the American,
British, and supposedly neutral France. The
British had the northern segment there on the coast on which was the location of
the German rocket center where they developed German bombs.
It was run by Warner von Brahms. In the meantime, there was the Battle of
the Bulge at Christmas time. We
were at that time assigned to the British commander. You worked with the British then,
or along side them?
The only thing that was British was the communications.
Telephones. We had
telephones. The telephones that
they had [were] a string and a wire. All these gun crews had to speak to headquarters.
The telephones were in a box about this wide about this high and about
that deep. They were tan and
leather and everybody had a telephone. It
could’ve had a strap. Everything
was done by telephone. After Christmas, how long were
you there working with the British then?
We didn’t see any. We
never even saw them. But that’s
the way it was supposed to be. I
was there to the end. We got within
30 or 35 miles of each other and that’s at the end. Three times in one day we’d dig a hole and they’d need
approval. We did them by hand.
They were big around but maybe 3 feet deep with a shovel. Imagine how
much fun that was? A good deal of
the holes we had to dig with a pick, because of the rock. Did you guys ever run out of
rations?
No; if we didn’t make a move during the day we’d get raw food.
A chunk of meat to cook, some kind of vegetable.
Other than that it was fish. We’d
have one guy assigned to do the cooking. That
was his whole job. That was a good
job. Headquarters would bring it
in. There weren’t semis.
Keep this in mind; the war was going three years already.
There were no cows. There were no horses.
There were no dogs. They had
killed everything. The most
terrible thing you could ever dream of were how Germans did all their killing.
It was all wrong, all wrong. There was nothing living left.
The only thing that I had seen once in Germany, all of Germany was a
deer, a wild deer. It was on the road, a little bigger than a shepherd dog.
People were starving to death. I
saw German people standing there that you wondered how they could hold their
clothes on. They were that starved
to death, hoping troops or somebody would throw them scraps.
And you pretended not to see them; it was a war. Was there a lot of physical and
emotional stress?
For who? For you.
No. Only when you had to dig the
hole, right?
That wasn’t stress. The
stress was between the troops and the officers.
They had to see that we did dig the hole.
That we didn’t sit down and we didn’t screw around.
The emotional stress wasn’t with the enemy, it was within the unit. The challenge was to have to dig three holes in a day and
then barely get set in it and have to move on to another one.
The officers had to make sure we did it.
They could be in a field a ways away and they’d have binoculars
watching us. Two officers would be
in charge of four gun crews. The
same officers. Did you lose many people in your
gun crew?
Not from enemy flare, although the unit supposedly lost them they never
told us. How many gunnery groups were in
that unit?
A battalion had 32 gun crews, about 8 gun crews, and 64 guns.
I’m not talking about rifles; I’m talking about the big guns.
Each of us had a rifle. But
I had two. The one they issued I
wrapped up real good and tight and threw it in the back of the truck. Then I picked one up from a dead soldier and that’s the one
I used. You never knew when
some officer would come along and inspect your gun.
So I showed them the one I had wrapped up. We had a big truck and there was plenty of room for it. As you went along, did you come
across other battles?
Right away when we landed is when I picked it off of the dead soldier.
From the activity of the crossing and getting into France that’s where
the worst was. Like I said, taking
that fortress in Bretagne there was a lot of activity, a lot of dead soldiers.
To start was the airborne company and they landed first. They landed,
hanging in trees all over. That’s just how things work out; you don’t know how to
explain it. To make a story out of
it, we lost one guy right away. He
was given to us as a replacement for some reason I don’t remember. On the boat going over, he was assigned to our gun crew.
This guy comes along and he’s the big shot, smart alecky.
He always challenged authority. We
were sent up in France and made an overnight stop for something.
I could see the place yet; it was a country farm road where some kind of
battle had been. There were a lot
of dead guys there. This mouthy guy
he takes a German rifle by the barrel and smashes it down and breaks the stock
so it couldn’t be used. And it
went off and got him right in the guts. It
didn’t kill him right away. They
got him back to England and he died there.
But he was plain careless, he wasn’t smart. And he was a replacement.
He wasn’t an original. In
fact, I wasn’t an original either; I had come along two months after it
started. After basic training you
got the unit you were assigned to. The
guys that took basic training were probably not in your unit. You weren’t with anybody from
basic training?
The guy across the street. I
was A battery and he was B battery, or C, that close.
The draft had left here in December 22.
It was the largest draft that ever went out of Wisconsin Rapids.
It was the last draft of 21 year olds, and the first draft of 18 year
olds. Were you ever injured in the
war?
No. Not as an offensive
injury. I was injured as a result
of the whole thing. I contracted
arthritis. I blame it on the
chemicals they put in the food they cooked.
The chemicals your system resisted and couldn’t function. Just like a person breaking out.
It’s an alien to your body and your body is going to suffer the
negative results. What were your feelings about the
war?
Terrible. There’s so much
to answer that what do you think about the war. It’s one of man’s failures to allow it to happen.
Then we could go a little further and we have to understand it’s an act
of God. It’s punishment cursing
us for not following his word. If you want to include that.
If you’re not a Christian it doesn’t count and if you’re a
Christian then you have to feel guilt for it. When you returned home did it seem as if America had changed
drastically?
That’s hard to describe.
You have to remember that at the same time you went from 20 years old to
25. You had a different outlook on what earth should be.
You were only half developed. You
had to start looking at it as a 25 year old and not a 20 year old.
So were the changes were a normal thing or was it because of the war, I
don’t know. That’s a hard one
to decide. Did you come home on leave at all
in between your service?
Twice. I think it was
twice. For how long?
It was maybe a week, maybe two. I know I was home at least once.
Once was from Washington. I
have to think it was twice that I was home. Did you get off the train in town
here still?
Yes. From Milwaukee.
I was discharged out of northern Illinois.
There was a camp there near Northwestern University.
I was in Illinois for two or three days. How often today do you think
about your war experiences?
They come up more today than they did in the past fifty years.
We lived without it for many, many years.
Now we see the same thing happening again and you have to reflect.
We’re all making the same mistakes all over again. If you were to go in the military today, with all
the new technology, do you feel you’d be interested?
Oh I don’t know; it would depend on things and on how much control we had. Do you have any particularly memorable moments you’d be willing to share with us? & |
