Ethan


 * This is the interview of Mr. Frank Stevenson who was born on June 6, 1923. **
 * He served as a Private First Class during WWII with the 45th Infantry Division in the United States Army. **
 * My name is Ethan Krall and I will be interviewing Mr. Stevenson along with Abby Musser who will be assisting me with this interview. **
 * This interview is being recorded at ELCO HS on November 15th for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. **

1.) Where were you born? 2.) What was your life like before entering the service? (Great Depression, life at home) 3.) What were you doing before you entered the military? 4.) Did you have any family members who served at this time too?
 * __ Biographical Details __**

5.) How did you enter the military, and when? 6.) What was your basic training like? 7.) What did you do after your completion of basic training? 8.) When did you ship out, and where did you end up? 9.) While in North Africa did your division meet any strong German opposition or was the fighting coming to close at this time?
 * __ Early Days of Service __**

10.) Where did you go after the North African Campaign came to an end? 11.) What was it like at Anzio during the opening hour of the invasion? 12.) How long was it until there was a lull in the fighting? 13.) After the first few days at Anzio was your division able to push inland? 14.) Describe the German counter attack that hit your division. 15.) After Anzio where else did you and the 45th fight in Italy? 16.) After Italy, your division went on to invade Southern France. What was this invasion like, and was it any different from the Anzio landing? 17.) Describe combating the Germans in this new environment. 18.) How far north did the invasion force push into France? 19.) How long do you think it was that you were on the line before you got moved back to the rear? 20.) How did you keep in touch with friends and family back home? 21.) What was the fighting like that winter, were you at the Battle of the Bulge? 22.) How was it then after that winter, when you pushed into Germany?
 * __ Time in the E.T.O. __**

23.) What was it like for you on V-E Day? 24.) How did you adjust to life back at home? 25.) Are there any morals or life lessons you took away from the war that you still live by today?
 * __ Post-War __**


 * TRANSCRIPT**


 * Ethan Krall Stevenson 1 **
 * Transcript **
 * __ Ethan Krall __** : This is the interview of Mr. Frank Stevenson who was born on June 6th, 1923. He served as a Private First class during WWII with the 45th Infantry Division in the United States Army. My name is Ethan Krall and I will be interviewing Mr. Stevenson along with Abby Musser who will be assisting me with this interview. This interview is being recorded at ELCO High School on November 15th, 2012 for the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.
 * __ Krall __** : Where were you born?
 * __ Mr. Frank Stevenson __** : I was born in Philadelphia, PA.
 * __ Abby Musser __** : What was your life like before entering the service?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Well, I graduated from Wilson High School. I was at Penn State in my third year, and they came to us and said that if we would sign up for the enlisted reserve, they would allow us to graduate since we were so close to graduating, because they found that most of the Army’s officers were college graduates. We would either go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) or ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program), which was a thing they said they botched things after the past year of the war (1942) so they’d train engineers, linguists, and so forth through that program. Right away the first thing they said was that they would allow me to graduate. I got a letter saying that I should report to Fort Meade, Maryland on May 26th. No graduation. Then we took Basic Training, and we said “what about ASTP or OCS?” They said you are going to Fort Meade, Maryland for assignment overseas. So we went overseas on a ship called the //Empress of Scotland//.

It was the //Empress of Japan// before the war, but there’s no wonder why that was changed. We had our Thanksgiving on the way over, and we landed at Casablanca. We landed on the 29th, and I went in on a cannon company ammunition truck, which was no problem. We got to the beachhead in about three miles, and couple planes overhead were diving, and one of our guys says in this strange accent “them are Spitfires”. They weren’t Spitfires, they were Messerschmitts. They dropped a couple of bombs, and they landed about fifty feet from me fortunately, but there were two kids who were killed, so they didn’t have much time for combat. It was a stalemate then until May the 23rd when we pushed off, and when we pushed off I was fortunately not with B Company because there’s more of a story: B Company started with two hundred men, and they ended up with one hundred after they pushed off.
 * Stevenson 2 **
 * __ Krall __** : What was your basic training like?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Basic Training was in Macon, outside of Camp Wheeler, Georgia, and it was so hot that summer that we all got heat rash, and we made a joke out of how Sherman said “War is Hell” and we said that the sent us to Camp Wheeler, Georgia to get used to hell.
 * __ Musser __** : While you were in North Africa did your division meet any strong German opposition, or was the fighting coming to a close at this time?
 * __ Stevenson __** : By the time we got to Africa, the actual war in Africa was over. Shorty thereafter they landed at Sicily and that’s where my division got its first combat. We went from Casablanca to Oran on 40&8’s. They were meant supposed to hold forty men or eight horses. It held fifty men, and there were no lavatory facilities at all, so when the train stopped you had to take care of what you could. You had no idea when it was going to start, and more than once guys had to run like crazy to catch up to the train. But it was a very, uh, interesting experience, and we finally arrived at Oran. We got there the day before Christmas, and that night we heard a crash. A B-25 crashed into what was called Lion Mountain, but a few days later we shipped over to Naples.
 * __ Krall __** : What was it like at the Anzio landings, which your division took part in during the opening hour of the invasion?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Actually the 3rd Division landed on the 22nd of June, and they had no opposition whatsoever. They actually had patrols close to Rome.
 * Stevenson 3 **
 * __ Musser __** : Describe the German counter-attack that hit your division.
 * __ Stevenson __** : Okay, what happened there was like I said. There was no resistance for a little while, but Hitler gave the order to “wipe that abscess from the face of the earth” (referring to the Allied beachhead). And they brought down divisions and units from Yugoslavia and all over. They hit our two battalions with eighteen battalions (roughly from one to two thousand Americans up against eighteen thousand Germans). It didn’t seem quite fair but there’s more to it. What happened was that there were two (U.S.) destroyers off coast and they were firing their five inch guns day and night just like a roof over our heads. And that was only part of the story, because the next day there was a place in Italy called Foggia, which was the main airfield for the Italian Campaign, and a thousand planes came over the next morning; regular fighters, dive bombers, and so forth. And not like Iwo Jima and so many other places where people could dig in the cliffs, maybe they dug a foxhole at most but that didn’t do much good against bombs. So all these thousand planes strafed and dropped their bombs to the point where the Germans asked for a truce, which they were granted, for a couple of hours to take away their wounded and their dead.
 * Stevenson 4 **
 * __ Musser __** : After Anzio, where else did you and the 45th fight in Italy?
 * __ Stevenson __** : I’m going to start and I’ll come back to that in a minute. What happened to my buddy Stolte and I, he was from Philadelphia and Penn State, and we were called down to the headquarters tent. We had no idea what they wanted to do. So they told us that the line companies had a lot of fighting to do, trying to take hills everyday, and they were to tired to do any patrolling at night. So they had a couple of experienced fellas, one fella who had a Silver Star, and they wanted about half of them to be rookies, and if we wanted to join this outfit our job would be say if A Company wanted a patrol we’d have to give them a patrol whenever they wanted. So they said do you want to join? Well I had heard two things prior to that. One was never volunteer. The second was the worst thing you could be was infantry in a line company. That was where the casualties were the heaviest. That morning I was with C Company, so I decided to say okay I’ll go on with the patrolling outfit, and my buddy Stolte said “what was that?” and I said “you’ll find out”. So we ended up with this patrolling outfit, and the first thing we learned when we were patrolling was if a flare went up, they said don’t move; stand there and act like a tree. And George said the knew damn well there was no tree there all day long, so if you were standing up you were going to be shot at. So whenever these flares went up, we hit the ground in a hurry.


 * Stevenson 5 **
 * __ Krall __** : After Anzio, where else did you and the 45th fight in Italy?
 * __ Stevenson __** : After Anzio we took Rome on June the 4th, and D-Day up in Normandy was June the 6th. But we went for invasion training, and we thought we were going to land in the Balkans because Churchill said he wanted to hit the soft under-belly, but we did not hit there. On August 15th we landed in Southern France, near Saint-Tropez on the Riviera. I always kidded my wife that I ran across the Riviera and hated to stop to watch those topless swimmers but I couldn’t help myself. But they weren’t there the day we went in. So they had everything set up, we got in there with no difficulty whatsoever, but it was August, and it kept getting hotter and hotter, and we got about twenty miles inland, and our guys captured six German soldiers. Since I spoke German I would be the one to take them to the rear. So the rear was still four miles or five miles back, so on the way back they asked if they could stop and have a drink. So we sat in a little ravine, they sat on one side I sat on the other side. So I threw them a can of water and they drank that, and the one fella said to me you know we were told if we were captured we should never get captured because we’d be tortured from the day we got captured. They said the guys who captured us were decent. They didn’t do any harm to us. You aren’t doing any harm to us. They told us a bunch of lies, but I’m so pleased with this. I have this little medal that I won in a bicycle race in Berlin, not the Olympics just a bicycle race, and he gave me that medal which I have hanging up in my room and I have prized as any other medal in there.
 * __ Krall: __** How different was the Invasion of Southern France compared to the Anzio Landings?


 * Stevenson 6 **
 * __ Stevenson __** : As I said at Anzio there wasn’t much resistance right away but at France there really wasn’t much resistance and we were fortunate. We had to go over the Alps and they hadn’t even held up on the Alps. They didn’t do anything for a while, and we started going so fast that we ran out of ammunition and supplies, that we got to a town in Central France, and we stopped there and by that time I was in what was called an O.P. Group where we observed for artillery, and we’d always go for the highest spot. So we found this church and we went up in the steeple observing and the Germans knew we always went for the highest spot. So they started landing artillery, and we were fine because the walls there were about twenty inches thick and the shells just bounced off. But not all the shells bounced off there. The whole town was thrilled about being liberated, and they were out in the central square. Several of these rounds landed in the middle of the central square, and it killed 42 of them and wounded a lot of others. They put the wounded and killed in the church, lined them up and down the aisles, and then when a relative came by and they’d see their own relative they’d put up a scream. It was a shame. Here they were celebrating and happy, and a lot of their people ended up dead.
 * __ Musser __** : How long do you think it was that you were on the line before you got moved back to the rear?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Generally speaking we were on the line for eight days and off line for four days. Now I say off line, the eight days we were up one time and they couldn’t move you very far back at Anzio. So we were right in front of four self-propelled 105’s (105mm Howitzer on a Sherman tank chassis).

Even during the night when we were trying to sleep, papapa-poom, these things would fire, and you never got a constant sleep, but that’s alright because each one of us was a guard for two hours a night, so we managed to suffer through.
 * Stevenson 7 **
 * __ Krall __** : How far north did the invasion force push you into France?
 * __ Stevenson __** : We pushed up into what was called the Vosges Mountains. I had never heard of them, but they are somewhat in Western France. By this time it was November, and it was starting to get very cold, and when we pushed into the Vosges Mts., the normal shell when it explodes the shrapnel goes up and out, and if you’re in a foxhole two feet away you won’t get. But if you’re amongst trees, when the shell hits the trees its what we called a treeburst, and now the shrapnel just goes down and out and if you don’t have a cover on your hole, and we didn’t have time to put cover on our holes, a lot of kids got a lot of shrapnel in their backs and their legs and so forth, plus they had a lot of guys getting frozen feet, and actually when their feet are frozen too badly they had to take their foot off. When we went up into the Vosges, there were a thousand of us, and when we came back there were ninety-five of us left.
 * __ Krall __** : How did that happen?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Well as I mentioned it was getting cold, and a lot of guys got trenchfoot. And the treebursts, they were the things that caused most of the other casualties, and German machine gun fire so uh, actually fewer guys were killed by bullets than they were by shrapnel. Shrapnel was the big thing that killed most of the people.


 * Stevenson 8 **
 * __ Musser __** : You talked about the foxholes. How deep were they and how many men did they hold?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Okay, I often kid these days they told us to have a foxhole for two. I wish I’d be in the army these days because they have an integrated army. If I had had a nice young blonde like this in a foxhole beside me I’d be like the dog who chases a car and if he catches it, what would I do with it? Don’t get bad thoughts. Now the foxhole was as deep as enough for a man. Now incidentally one time during the German counter-attack (Anzio), we were in corps reserve that morning, I dug a foxhole. My buddy liked it because I didn’t mind digging. We went into division reserve, a different place. I dug another foxhole. Then we went into regimental reserve, I dug another foxhole. It got to be two o’clock in the morning, and I had dug so many foxholes that I said the hell with the next one. All of a sudden that was when the big counter-attack started. Bullets were flying everywhere, and if had stood up that’d be the end. So I laid on the ground, took my helmet liner out of my helmet, took the helmet itself and pulled up as much dirt as I could in front of me. While I’m laying there I see a German tank coming down the road. Ten minutes later fortunately I see an American tank going down the road, and the American tank knocked out that German tank. But as a matter of fact, it was the only time ever that I cried. I laid there and cried, and I remembered my buddies at home, who were back home, and the one guy was complaining because he worked a textile, and he worked overtime and seven days a week. He’s making a bundle of money. I’m making sixty dollars a month, and he’s complaining. So watch what you complain about.

**Stevenson 9**
 * __ Krall __** : While you were in combat, what were you more afraid of lets say, the incoming artillery rounds or small arms fire?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Well really I didn’t like the small arms fire, but most of it was by shrapnel. And the Germans had a thing called the ‘Screaming Meme”. It was a six-barreled mortar, and when it went up, it had screaming sounds, and our guys used to claim it would say “did you ever kill a Jerry?” because if you did it was going to land right on your head. Well fortunately they didn’t always land right on our heads, but it was enough to scare the bajesus out of you. Then the Germans had another bomb. They called the Butterfly Bomb. It was a thing kind of like a torpedo about eight feet long, and when they dropped it the sides would spin out and hand grenades would fall all over the place, and this was when the troops were changing from on-line to off-line, they were standing up straight. When those things landed amongst you, a thousand hand grenades, it caused a lot of havoc. Fortunately we were close to them but not enough to take too many casualties.
 * __ Krall __** : Can you explain how you said earlier about how the helmet chinstrap in training you were taught to keep it on and how that changed once you got into combat?
 * __ Stevenson __** : As I mentioned in Basic Training they said put that chinstrap on and use it. That’s what they put it on there for. The day we got to the combat outfits they said don’t you dare put that up around your neck! If you do the concussion will break your neck. And fortunately for me one day a German mortar came in when we were going back from a patrol, and it landed about three feet from me. No shrapnel, but the concussion sent my helmet four or five feet off my head, and if I would’ve had my chinstrap on I would’ve had a broken neck.
 * Stevenson 10 **
 * __ Krall __** : Around what time do you think your division crossed into Germany?
 * __ Stevenson __** : I’m just trying to think now, we were in the Vosges in October, I guess it was just around Christmas time because I remember one of our fellas had been in the war last Christmas. He cried; he said he thought by this Christmas the war would be all done. But it wasn’t too bad going into Germany, but the first combat we had was a town called Aschaffenburg, and the word was that Patton had cleared it. Well that wasn’t quite the deal, what had happened was Patton’s son-in-law had been captured in Africa, and he wanted to release him. So he took a group of tanks and trucks and so forth, and they went into this prison camp, knocked open the gate, and they got his son-in-law and a few others out but they didn’t bring enough trucks to carry all of them, so many of them were recaptured, as one of our lieutenants from our C Company he had been captured earlier and now here he was captured again. But fortunately the Germans were not like the Japanese; they still treated him in a prison camp until the war was over. But there was a word there in Aschaffenburg that it anybody refused to fight they would be hung, so they kind of fought to the death, but it took us a week to take this little town of Aschaffenburg, and we went from there to Bamberg, that’s where we were when Roosevelt died. The next place we helped take was Nuremburg, and on the way to Munich we came to this town called Dachau, and it turned out to be a concentration camp. When I got in, I meet a fella who was from Austria, and he said he was not a political prisoner, he was just there for some other things, so he was like a trustee he could see a lot of things.

So he took me to the ovens and showed me the ovens, and there were two rooms full of dead bodies waiting to go in there and he took me around the back where they had a firing squad, the Germans were always neat, they had a little macadam runway there so they could wash the blood down every night and take care of that. When we got there, there were guards there, and our Colonel Sparks was our battalion commander, and when we got there the troops got all the German guards, lined them up along the canal, gave their weapons to the inmates, and let them mow ‘em down. Well that caused a problem because the 42nd Division had come in the back and there was a lady reporter with them, and she reported this to Powers of B (Company), and Colonel Sparks was court-martialed and told to report to Patton for the trial. When he got to Patton, this fella Sparks, not everyone liked their officers, but Sparks was one of those when he led an attack, he wasn’t sitting back saying go get ‘em boys, he sat on a tank with a shotgun. He never actually fired the shotgun he used as like a prop, but he was right with the front kids, and the kids admired him more than any other officer around. So when the word got back to Patton, he looked at his record and said, “What the hell are you doing here? Go back and rejoin your outfit.” So he did. And later on he became a Supreme Court Justice in the state of Colorado. Now when we got to Dachau they were dying at a rate of over two hundred a day mainly from starvation. They weren’t being killed. They just weren’t fed at all. The Germans had a shortage of food and they didn’t take care of the inmates there. Another problem was when they were liberated, they started going down to Munich and other towns, not hurting anybody but they were ransacking all the wine cellars, stealing all the food, and they were just almost went crazy. We had the job to go and round them up and they were going to take them back to Dachau and they screamed they didn’t want to go back. We said we can’t help it, but it’s the only place you’re going to get good food, you’re going to get better clothing, and they’re going to treat you like people. So they did finally get in our trucks so we took them back. Then when it was all over in Munich, when the war was over, they were having truckloads of guy that were prisoners going back to Russia. They said we don’t want to go back to Russia we surrendered, we’ll be dead the day we get there. We said well our orders are. So they took their machine guns and said get in the trucks and go, if you can jump off some way in between that’s up to you. But we did pity those guys because we knew they’d be dead meat if they got back to Russia.
 * Stevenson 11 **
 * __ Krall __** : So what was the reaction of the inmates once you liberated the camp?
 * __ Stevenson __** : When we got there, there were forty box cars and for some stupid reason the Germans were moving these dead people from one place to another. And among all of them was one guy that had about a couple more hours of life, he fell out of the boxcar onto the ground, and that was another thing that enraged our troops.
 * Stevenson 12 **
 * __ Musser __** : What was it like for you on V-E Day?
 * __ Stevenson __** : We were in Munich the day the war was over V-E Day. We had stayed in a house, we had taken a house away from some Germans, and we did not have to use the black out curtains. We had to use black out all the time on the trucks and everything else had certain lights they could use. Everything else, you just didn’t need to use any black out curtains and what a relief that seemed to be.


 * Stevenson 13 **
 * __ Kral __** l: Once you got back home to the States after your deployment, how did you adjust to life back home?
 * __ Stevenson __** : Well, at the war’s end, the 45th was going to go over through the States for thirty days and head over to the islands and fight against the Japs. And they came to us and said anybody who had two hundred days of combat or more, we feel are over the hill. They didn’t have to tell us that. They said you aren’t going to go over to fight against the Japs; you’re going to stay here for Army of Occupation. So I got to a town called Ingolstadt, Germany, which was right along the Danube. One day I decided to swim across the Danube; it wasn’t blue. It was muddy. But by the time I was across I was a mile down stream, and now I had to walk a mile back up stream to get to my clothing, but anything that was not involved with the war was really great.
 * __ Krall __** : While you were on occupation duty in Germany, what all did you have to do as a guard, or with controlling territory?
 * __ Stevenson __** : For occupation, they knew I had been a Phys. Ed. major. So my job was to round up a place for a baseball field and round up equipment so the fellas could play, I was not one of the players. But we got enough teams that two teams could play against each other. That’s all we couldn’t find too many guys from other places, but that was my main job to take care of the baseball for the fellas. Now when I did get home I was at Ft. Meade, Maryland. I was there three times; I was inducted there, I went overseas from there, and discharged there on October 3rd. When I got home my sister was going to start Penn State on November 1st; they had different terms then.

And here at home I was going to go in what they called a 52-20 club, which meant any G.I. could get unemployment for fifty-two weeks and get twenty dollars a week. But rather than do that I enrolled in Penn State to finish my Penn State career, and I did finish in May, and what I did there was no chance for student teaching there, so another fella and I had the same problem. They sent us to West Chester, Pennsylvania, and our student teaching for Phys. Ed. was looking over playground kids. But it sufficed, and it resulted that I got a letter one day that Myerstown was looking for a teacher, and I went up to Myerstown, had the interview, and got the job.
 * Stevenson 14 **
 * __ Musser __** : How did you get back to the States?
 * __ Stevenson __** : As I said, I was stationed in France for a while, and there’s an interesting story there. We took a train down to Marsais to disembark. On the way down some of our guys got a hold of a carton of cigarettes, and they took matches close enough to loosen the cellophane around it. They got the cellophane off successfully; they took out the carton of cigarettes, stuck them in their pockets, and filled it with stuffed newspaper. It looked exactly like a carton of cigarettes. So they started to bargain with some guy. He had a big jug of wine, or a couple of guys they had a big jug of wine when we stopped, and they kept arguing until the train was ready to pull out. When it did pull out, they made the switch. And they were laughing about how great that was. They got this wine for nothing, and they started drinking this stuff. It was water with red dye in it. So it was poetic justice.


 * Stevenson 15 **
 * __ Krall __** : Did you ever get a chance to go back over to Europe, after your time in the service?
 * __ Stevenson __** : The first time I went back the advertising was that they were going to take you to Anzio. This fella who organized it was from further north. I got back, and what they did was they took us to beach where the 3rd Division had landed, and that was it. They just said there’s nothing else above the Mussolini Canal, which we remembered, nothing, and I was very very disappointed, so later on my wife happened to notice there was going to be another one. The Anzio vets were going to run to go to Anzio. So we went to that one, and incidentally Anzio was a very very pretty summer resort; nice beaches and everything else. But we didn’t use that; while we were there we had various trips. One was to the cemetery at Nettuno, and there are 17,000 G.I.’s buried there. I get so annoyed with these bus tours. They’ll go from Rome down to Naples; they’re about three miles away from this wonderful cemetery, and not one bus tour ever stops and says “Hey this is where 17,000 (American G.I.’s) are. There are several of my buddies there. The one fella, Lieutenant Macintyre, during the war Stolte I were asked to go on a patrol and take C Company lieutenant on the patrol with us. When we were done we were sitting by a big shell hole, we got talking, and it turned out that Macintyre was from Penn State also. So there was a notice in various papers and I still have a copy of it ‘//Penn State Reunion On Anzio Beach Head’.//


 * Stevenson 16 **
 * __ Krall __** : Is there anything else you would like to add about your time in the service?
 * __ Stevenson __** : I think I’ve told most of it. We get together for reunions each year, and the first one was in Cleveland, Tennessee because my lieutenant was there, and we had one in Lancaster in 1991, and we had 50 rooms. We had one in 2001 and we took 25 rooms. The last one we had was in Branson, Missouri because one of our fellas lived in that area, and it was down to 14 fellas. So that was the end of the reunions, but they were excellent get-togethers.
 * __ Krall __** : Thank you for your service for this country it was a pleasure interviewing you.


 * NARRATIVE**

Pfc. Frank Stevenson 45th Infantry Division U.S. Army Frank Stevenson was born on June 6th, 1923. He grew up in the Wilson area, and after graduating from Wilson High School he attended Penn State University. In his junior year of college Mr. Stevenson volunteered for the ASTP program offered by the U.S. Army. The plan was that he would complete his education at Penn State and then begin the ASTP program. But in May of 1943 he was told to report to Fort Meade, Maryland for basic training, then assignment overseas. After completing basic training Mr. Stevenson, now part of the 45th Infantry Division headed for North Africa, and eventually landed at Casablanca then road in a train of 40&8’s to Oran. The fighting was over in North Africa when Mr. Stevenson was there, but his first action was still to come. On January 29th 1944 the 45th Division landed at Anzio. [interview clip] The Italian troops hardly put up a fight, but a few days into the invasion the Germans counter attacked. Where Mr. Stevenson was with the 45th, it was 2 American battalions against 18 German battalions. The strong fighting spirit of the 45th, along with the help of air cover from Allied planes and artillery support from offshore destroyers and Self-Propelled howitzers, beat back the German counter attack. For his actions at Anzio, Mr. Stevenson was awarded the Bronze Star. After Anzio the 45th kept pushing through Italy until Rome fell on June 4th, 1944. The 45th then began training for an amphibious assault on Southern France, which was codenamed Operation Dragoon.

The G.I.’s hit the beaches in August, once again to find little resistance at first. This time the division pushed far inland, encountering a few German squads here and there. [interview clip] The division moved so far ahead that it often had to slow down and wait for supplies. During their advance the 45th had to cross through some of the French Alps, which luckily the Germans did not defend. After moving into central France, Mr. Stevenson and the 45th began to encounter stiffer German resistance, especially in the fall. In late October into early November the 45th moved into the Vosges Mountain, where a stalemate set in between the German’s and the G.I.’s. Fighting in the Vosges slow and gruesome, and most casualties were due to German mortar and artillery fire from their Flak 88’s and “Screaming Memes” mortars. [interview clip] The G.I.’s road out countless barrages in foxholes, which were good for everything except taking a direct hit from an artillery round or a tree burst. The G.I.’s were weary, and disappointed that the war would not be over by Christmas. Around this time winter had settled in and the G.I.’s now had to cope with the bitter cold and snow. It was said that the winter of 1944-45 was one of the worst Europe had ever had. Around Christmas time Mr. Stevenson and the 45th crossed over into Germany, where the first fighting they got into was at the town of Aschaffenburg.

[interview clip]

From there they pushed on into Bamberg, and then they went on to secure Nuremburg. On their way to Munich, the 45th discovered what this war was really about. They came upon the Dachau concentration camp, and captured the camp with little resistance from the SS guards. Once the G.I.’s got in the camp, they realized what they were really fighting for.

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In all, over 30 Waffen SS and regular German soldiers were executed, and countless more were shot and beaten by enraged inmates, some of which were wielding pistols given to them by U.S. troops. From Dachau Mr. Stevenson’s division pushed on to Munich. That’s where he was on when the division received word on May 8th, 1945 that it was V-E Day. After the war’s end, Mr. Stevenson stayed in Germany with the 45th as part of the Army of Occupation. When he arrived back in the States, Mr. Stevenson was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army on October 3rd, 1945 at Ft. Meade, Maryland. After the war, Mr. Stevenson went back to Penn State to finish his college career. He also went back to visit Anzio twice, where they have a cemetery at Nettuno for the G.I.’s who lost their lives at Anzio. Mr. Stevenson has endured some of the toughest campaigns with the 45th Division, fighting in Italy, France, and Germany. We are lucky to have him around today, as part of what America calls the Greatest Generation.