Steven Karras Read online

  Chapter 4

  ERIC HAMBERG

  LUDWIGSHAFEN, GERMANY

  84th Chemical Mortar Battalion Italian Campaign

  Eric Hamberg was born in the town of Mannheim, across from its twin city, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, where he attended school. Immigrating to England not long after Kristallnacht without his parents, who remained trapped in Germany, Hamberg arrived in the United States in 1940; for two years he worked as a cook before being drafted into the army in 1942.

  I had a very happy childhood; we had money, we had a nice home, my father owned a big store, which I was supposed to take over when I became an adult, which never happened, and an apartment house on top of it which had about sixteen apartments. We also had another apartment which was five stories high in which we lived on the second floor. I had nothing to worry about. I never really suffered. Even though I was the only Jewish boy in high school, I was never called a dirty Jew. But then things started changing.

  By the time I graduated in 1937, every one of my schoolmates belonged to the Hitler Youth. By 1938, things were very hard for me, because my father had already lost his store, our houses were taken away from us, and my sister went to New York. The night of the Kristallnacht I was very sick, but I remember going to the balcony and looking down, and across the street was a Jewish store. They destroyed the store, they broke the windows, and they threw everything out in the streets. The brown-shirted SA men went up to our neighbor’s apartment on the second floor and took that nice family’s bedding, threw it all out into the street, and set it all on fire. I saw people laughing and dancing and being so happy that the Jews were getting something that they didn’t expect.

  I also saw people who cried, and not only Jewish people, but most of the people were very happy. As sick as I was, I just couldn’t understand that. The next day, the SS men in black uniforms came to pick me up. I was running a very high fever. They were decent to my mother, but said, “We have to pick up your son.”

  She said, “He’s sick, you can’t take him out. He’s running a temperature and has God knows what.”

  They said, “Sorry, get him dressed.” She pleaded with them to call our doctor, who fortunately at that time was a Gentile doctor. So, they called him up and he said, “You want to take him out, why don’t you shoot him right away? He’ll never make it to wherever you’re taking him because he’s got pneumonia.” So they left me and that was one of the things that saved my life. It also showed us that it was high time to get out. My father had a friend in England. They used to correspond on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and send Jewish New Year cards. In one of his last letters, my father wrote, “Please, if you can, find out if my son can get out of Germany.” In the meantime, I had gone to a Jewish hotel for two years as a cook apprentice. I figured knowing a profession would get me out much easier. However, the wife wrote back and she says, “Unfortunately, your friend died.”

  So, I wrote to twelve different British hotels to give me a job as a cook and get me out of Germany. I sent each one my report card from school and a letter of recognition my boss had written. Six hotels offered to help me and I got out in June 1939, three months before the war started. I was in England for a whole year, and then eventually immigrated to America.

  It was a strange thing, getting out of Germany. My father rode with me on the train until we got to Holland. I didn’t know if I should laugh or if I should cry. I was happy that I was getting out of there, and I was sorry to leave my parents behind, but to me, as a young fellow, it was almost like an adventure.

  I got to the United States in 1940, and five days after coming, I got a job as a cook in a nightclub. Two years later I was drafted into the U.S. Army.

  I was sent to Camp Rucker, Alabama, and was trained as an operator of a heavy mortar weapon—4.2-inch chemical mortar they called them.

  I was very happy. I was hoping and praying that I would be sent to the European theatre and not the other one. We were sent overseas in September 1942 and landed in Oran, Africa. There, they put us on a hill outside of Oran called Canastel, which was nothing but a big rock. We put our tents up, and after a few weeks they took a report of how many people were in the outfit called Enemy Aliens. They would not let us fight until we became U.S. citizens. After a while, my outfit was transferred to Tunisia, to be part of the invasion of Sicily.

  When we got to Sicily, they took twenty-six of us who spoke very poor English and attached us to an outfit that was already fighting there. For some reason, the outfit we had initially been assigned to had been held back in Africa. I never knew why. So, when we got there they made us mule bearers, taking the mules up the hill with supplies and bringing them down. At first it was uneventful, and then the Germans started attacking. Someone shouted over to us, “Hey you! Yeah you, going up the hill, you’re going to be litter bearers. Get your asses up there.” They didn’t give us a Red Cross armband and they took our guns away. We went up the hill, and sure enough we were right in the fight.

  I remember hiding behind a tree when the Germans kept shelling us. This might sound ridiculous, but I swear to God, in that tree was a little hole that I crawled into as much as I could, and I fell sound asleep during the battle. When it slowed down, I woke up and there were wounded soldiers all around and one of our men had already gotten hit. We took one fellow, four of us litter bearers, and carried him about four hundred yards until we realized he was dead. We saw a captain, who asked, “Who are you guys?”

  We responded, “Well, we’re Enemy Aliens, sir. We’re over here to fight the war against the Germans, but they haven’t made us citizens yet.”

  He said, “You’re not citizens up here? Get the hell out of here!” So we carried that man down. It took us a day and half because it was on a rocky hillside and to carry a man that weighs about 190 pounds was pretty rough. We got to the bottom and they put us back with the mules. When the campaign in Sicily was over, they sent us back to Africa.

  On the way back to Africa, our Liberty ship got torpedoed and it limped the rest of the way. Then they sent us back to the same hill we came from in Canastel, Oran. Finally an officer said, “Today fellas, you’re going to become citizens.”

  They took us to a big tent that they erected. While we were sitting on benches on the outside, one by one they called us in to talk to a U.S. department official. Then I was called in and he asked me some very basic things like, name, town of birth, age. At the very end, he said, “Now comes the most important question I have to ask in order for you to become a citizen, and think very carefully about this: Do you mind fighting against the country of your birth?”

  When I heard that, I laughed. I told him, “You’re a little late.”

  He laughed too and said, “Yeah, I heard what you guys have been through in Sicily.”

  So I became a citizen right then and there and was sent to join my outfit in Anzio. I got there on an LST (landing ship, tank). We jumped off into the water and marched to the first village called Campo Di Morto—the Camp of Death. My unit was the 84th Chemical Mortar Battalion; our insignia was a yellow and blue field with a dragon with a death head and on the bottom it said Cabe Fumo. We were assigned to a mortar platoon; each platoon had four heavy mortars. It took four men to actually fire a mortar. One man attaches the explosives in the back of the mortar shell, one puts the instrument on the top of the barrel, and according to the place that we were shooting at, one guy would find the target coordinates, adjust the weapon accordingly—up down, side to side—and then one guy would take a shell and throw it down the barrel.

  We were attached to whatever infantry outfit that was fighting in the area. When one infantry unit was pulled out, we stayed and supported the next one. In Anzio, we supported the 3rd Division, which also happened to be the division that Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, belonged to. We supported the 45th, as well as one of the great outfits, the 82nd Airborne. We also worked with the 442nd, the Nisei combat team, comprising many tremendous Japanese American
soldiers; most of them were short in stature but extraordinarily brave. This unit was not that long in Italy, nowhere as long as we were, but they wound up with more decorations, more Purple Hearts, and more people killed than any other unit because they just felt that they as Japanese needed to prove they were Americans. I had a lot in common with them.

  The first mortar shell I ever fired, when I came to Anzio, was a white phosphorus shell that landed in a ditch with five German soldiers in it. When some troops came back from the field, they said, “Hey, you fired the shell down there? Nice shooting buddy, you got five of ’em.” I felt a little queasy in a way, but then I figured that I am fighting a war and I am here because I wanted to be. Also, I felt that this was my job, and this was my way of coming back at the Germans for what they did to me. I didn’t know at that time if my parents were alive or not, because they were trapped still in Germany and living in a hell under the Nazis.

  But I was a Jewish boy fighting against an enemy that I knew, an enemy that was responsible for arresting, deporting, and killing my people. Refugee soldiers who were drafted or volunteered fought against the Nazis with fervor, because they were our hated enemy and were responsible for us losing friends and relatives in concentration camps, through terror and beatings long before the ovens came. I still had vivid memories of Kristallnacht a few years earlier in 1938 and the pleasure most Germans got out of burning synagogues and businesses, dragging Jews through the streets. Fighting the Germans went very deep for me; I wasn’t going to give an inch.

  Anzio was like sitting in a shooting gallery. The high ground was totally controlled by the Germans who could shoot down at us anytime from the mountains where they were dug in, and they did fire at us constantly. All we could do was hide behind houses and in our foxholes.

  Just before the breakout, I was wounded. I had been digging a foxhole and was bent forward hacking away, when a shell landed just short of the hole and I was buried alive. Since my buddies were there, they got me out right away. When they pulled me out, they sent me to a hospital where I stayed for the rest of the week before I came back. Collectively, my outfit was in Anzio for 160 some days. We had no chance to take a bath. If you were lucky, you filled your helmet with water, and washed yourself off a little bit, but you couldn’t take a bath. I’m sure we smelled to high heaven, but we didn’t realize it anymore because we got used to it. It was a life that only a young person could take. We didn’t care if we spoke nice or not nice. When you’re in the army, the word with an “f” was every third word.

  When we left Anzio, we knew that all roads lead to Rome, so we didn’t mind the dust, even though breathing was difficult. We also didn’t mind the snail’s pace we had to travel—nothing mattered. We were going to Rome after so many months of waiting, fighting, and hoping. We were dirty and tired, but we were a happy group of men.

  On that truck bound for Rome I saw a German colonel coming down the hill. I stopped the truck, and captured and interrogated him. It felt beautiful to me—a little sergeant interrogating a big-shot colonel with maps on him and plenty of information that I passed on. He seemed very happy to give himself up. For him, the war was over and I certainly was glad that he was out of it.

  One story that is not so pleasant for me to tell occurred when we were attached to an outfit comprising some real fuck-ups. One night two Germans came out of nowhere with their hands up and surrendered to me. I was on guard duty at the time and couldn’t leave my post. So the GIs from this unit said, “Hey, you got two ‘Heinies’ there? Don’t worry, we’ll take them back for you.” So, they took them back under guard, but five minutes later I heard two shots and saw the same GIs walking back toward me with smiles on their faces. “Sorry, they tried to escape and we had to kill ’em.” That really bothered me.

  At any rate, on the way to Rome we received the roses, the kisses, the cheers, and other greetings of the Italians on the history-making day of June 5. That’s when we marched into Rome. We stayed a whole month. I never saw the Coliseum and I never saw St. Peter’s, but I had a good time. It was the thirty days that our battalion had dreamt of—sidewalks, electric lights, spas, rest camps, girls, company parties.

  After that, we continued going up the Italian countryside, every so often stopping for battles. There were always small and fierce battles. Italy has a lot of small towns—Cisterna, Atina, Wolmonterone—and a lot of them are in the mountains. We had to climb the mountains and drag the mortar behind us, so, it wasn’t an easy thing to fight a battle in a mountainous terrain. During the winter of 1944–1945, we were in the middle of Italy when we were called over to the West Coast. There had been a breakthrough by the Germans, and this seemed to be one of their last pushes where they broke through.

  During one of those battles, we occupied a cave that was being shelled very badly. At one point, we left the cave to set up our mortars to fire on the Germans, who were advancing quickly toward us, and one of our sergeants got wounded very badly. He had a big piece of shrapnel in his lung, which collapsed, so I ran out with my medic and carried him to a ditch nearby under fire. We got him into a ditch and we waited; as a matter of fact, I laid myself on the top of the guy that was wounded because it was a shallow ditch. When the shelling was over, we bandaged him, picked him up, and took him back to the cave, which we evacuated later on.

  We went all the way up to the Arno River and then we went to Volterra, where we got a week off. It was a beautiful little town and it was completely intact. Every roof had a Red Cross painted on it, so we didn’t bomb it. It was like a spa; it was like a place that people went for the mineral waters and all that sort of things. Then we went to Florence.

  ON THE MORNING OF MAY 2, 1945, I was a staff sergeant and platoon sergeant, and it was my job to divide up the rations and keep track of everything. I was in a house doing the things for the rations when an order came in for a firing mission for my mortar. Since I was working, my buddy, Joseph Weiler from Brooklyn, who was a mortar sergeant, said, “Eric, you stay here, I’ll take care of the gun.” We did that a quite often. He went down, I heard him fire about two shells and then I heard an explosion. I knew that second that it was my gun that exploded, and I ran down to the three guys that were manning the gun. My best buddy Joe was killed instantly by a piece of shrapnel that went between his eye and his ear and into his brain. One of the guys was slightly wounded, and the other guy was all right.

  I just held Joe in my arms and I couldn’t say anything, but he took my place and that’s the way we were. Throughout the whole war, Joe and I shared the same foxhole, we shared the same tent, we did all the bad things and all the good things together. This was around two o’clock on May 2. All of a sudden, the bells started to ring, from all the churches around us, from across the lake, next to us. I asked, “What’s goin’ on?” The war had been officially over at twelve o’clock and nobody told us. Joe was killed at two o’clock in the afternoon. If we had known, it wouldn’t have happened. We absolutely did not need a fire mission, but whatever it was, he was gone.

  I was staying at the outfit, because of what they called eighty-five critical points. Critical points combined the amount of time you were in service, how many battles you were in (for each battle you got a certain star), and how many decorations you had. These were all tabulated, and if you had eighty-five or more, you didn’t have to go to the Japan side to fight another war. I was taken out at ninety-eight points at that time. So we sat around in Italy, took it easy, and waited until finally in October they put us on a boat home.

  In the meantime, I wanted to go look for my parents in Germany because we were already near there. I went to the captain and told him my story, and he said, “I’ll give you my jeep. Take it, but I can’t give you a pass.” At that time, the law was that if you were outside of Germany after the war was finished, you were not allowed on the inside. He said, “I know how you feel. I know what’s going on, but we don’t know where your parents are. If you knew where they are, maybe you can find them, but if you
get picked up in Germany without a pass, they will say you stole the jeep and I can’t say I gave it to you because it’s against the law, military law anyway.”

  He continued: “Look, you’re a staff sergeant now, a decorated soldier. Why don’t you wait? You’ll see them later.” So, I stayed in Italy and I came home in November 1945. I had a long journey across the ocean and came back with a beautiful suntan. My sister had gotten married and had a little boy, and I found out that she had been contacted by our parents. Our father had been in a concentration camp, he was in Theresianstadt. My mother had been sheltered by a Christian family who knew us very well, and since she was blonde, she could pass as German very easily. I started getting things rolling to get my parents to America. They came on June 24, 1946. I remember the day, because I got married exactly five years later to the day on June 24, 1951.

  I remember my father when he came out of the concentration camp; he weighed sixty-eight pounds. When he came to America, he was very undernourished but between his wife, his children, and our love, he finally came back to life. Once he had been a very rich man, but then had been reduced to nothing. In the States, he worked for a while in a factory; I got him and my mother an apartment and I took care of him. My father wouldn’t talk about the concentration camp except to say that when he was there, “I kept myself alive. I worked in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.” That was funny in a way, because whenever he caught me in the kitchen at home in Germany, I would get a slap. He would say, “Boys don’t belong in a kitchen.” In Theresianstadt he told me that he would stuff the potato peelings in his pocket and another fellow would stuff onion peelings in his pocket; in the evenings, they would go back to the barracks and make a potato onion soup.

  I said to him one night, “You know papa, your son, that little German refugee boy, became a staff sergeant in the war. I was so proud of being an American soldier and I was up for a battlefield commission, which means that would’ve made me an officer right in the fields.” I had already been a forward observer and I’d say my battlefield commission came through eight days after the war had officially ended. One thing that they didn’t need, though, was another young second lieutenant.