2RHPZ
03-08-2005, 02:06 PM
The Last Hurrah
Ed Boccafogli, 82nd Airborne Division
Ed Boccafogli of Clifton, N.J., is a veteran of D-Day, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge.
Clifton, N.J., Feb. 19, 1994
Ed Boccafogli: I was what you’d call a dropout today. It was back in the Thirties, the Depression years. There was no work, so I volunteered for the CCC camps. I don’t know if you ever heard of them.
Aaron Elson: Yes, the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Ed Boccafogli: I worked in Pennsylvania for the Dutch Elm division. Then I went out West and spent a year and a half out there. It was rough in those days. I went to California, hopping freights, with a dollar and twenty cents, a bag with peanut butter and a loaf of bread. That’s how we lived, two of us. And fighting with hoboes who tried to take our shoes. In those days, they’d kill you for a dollar.
Then the war broke out. I was inducted. In fact, I got called down at the draft board in Passaic, and I’d had an appendix operation. I went to the hospital, and they called up my sister and said, "Your brother is supposed to report today."
She said, "He can’t report."
They said, "What do you mean?"
"He’s in the hospital."
"Well, have him report Monday." Here I’d just had an operation. So I got a deferment for three weeks. Then I went down to Fort Dix, and from Fort Dix to Fort McClellan. And about a dozen of us were sent to New Orleans as military police.
We were stationed out under the Huey Long Bridge, at Camp Harahan, which was a big port of embarkation. The troops would come in by the truckload to depart on boats for the Pacific.
Also, we had a lot of bad elements there of rapists and murderers and whatnot. The Army was big in those days. We had a prison compound with a lot of men. There must have been three or four hundred at any one time. Most of them were being processed for shipment to Leavenworth. They were bad characters.
Aaron Elson: Had these people been in combat?
Ed Boccafogli: No. The war was just beginning. There were all kinds of elements. Guys who would get in a brawl in a city and end up killing or stabbing somebody. They were military personnel, so they went into the guardhouse and from there to Leavenworth.
I had it made. I could have stayed there the whole war, lived high on the hog. I had a jeep. Go patrolling at night, 11 o’clock, pick up the drunks, bring them back. Then I’d be on the gate many times. And what really discouraged me about that branch of the military, as the people would be coming back from leave, they’d be bringing liquor for the guys inside. As they’d come in the guys were half-bombed. They’ve got a pint sticking out here, a pint sticking out there. You had to confiscate it. Give them a slip, put it in a box, and after each shift you had to take the box and bring it over to the Officers Club. So the officers were living high on the hog on this liquor from the poor bastards that were gonna go over and die. I didn’t take too good to that.
There were a lot of muggings down there, what we call muggings today. What was happening, the guys would go to town, the ones who had money. They’d go out and have a good time, women, whatever. Then they’d get a taxi to come back. They wouldn’t come back with the regular trucks. The fellows had to meet at a place where the trucks would be and they’d all get in and come back to camp. But the fellows with money would hire a cab. They’d be bombed, and on the way back they’d pass out, and they’d be rolled. The cabdriver would pull over, go through their pockets, dump them in the ditch and go back.
So my partner and I would lay on the side of the road and wait. Down in the bayous, it’s thick, thick cypress trees, and there’s just a channel where the light comes through because of the road. And as dark as it was, you could always figure where the road was. So we’d lay on the side and wait. We’d see a taxi coming; it would go by. Okay. Then another one comes. All of a sudden the lights would go out. Oh, man, we’d turn on the ignition and take off. No lights. Follow the road. You could just about make out the road in that dark bayou. We’d go sixty miles an hour, get to where the taxi was stopped, we’d put the lights on and we’d catch the guy rolling the guy that was drunk. We took a club and busted all the windows in the taxicab, beat the hell out of the guy, took the drunk and put him in our jeep and took him back to camp. And nothing was ever said. Because they knew damn well if they complained, they were in trouble.
We did that twice. And then it stopped.
But then I became disillusioned, because the fellows there, they’d turn on you. Everybody was vying for the next position. So I put in for the paratroops.
Then I waited. Three weeks went by, and I knew they needed recruits, so I went in. The man’s name was Sergeant Flood. I said, "Nothing came through about my transfer?"
"No, not yet." He said, "Make out the papers again, maybe they went astray."
So I made them out, request for transfer. I waited another week. In the meantime, I’m nervous. A couple of guys were needling me because I wanted to get out. "What’s the matter, you don’t like this place?"
There was this one big fellow in the mess hall. He kept needling me, "When are you gettin’ out? When are you gettin’ out?" So that day I went back in, the third time, and the sergeant said, "I don’t know."
I said, "Look, I’ve been waiting four weeks now."
He said, "Make out the papers again."
So the clerk pulled the drawer out, and in all the papers I saw one paper on which I could make out my signature. I reached right down in the drawer and I pulled it out. They’d never processed it.
I was like a wild man. I stormed out of there. It was just lunchtime. I went inside the mess hall, and the guy gave me the needle. It was the worst time he could have done it. I whacked him, right in the mess hall. They had potatoes, cabbage and whatever, all over the floor. And we were wrestling there for fifteen minutes. It was a mess.
The next thing I know, they grab me and bring me in to the provost marshal. A colonel.
He said, "What’s your problem, son?"
I said, "Sir, if I don’t get out of here within the next week, I’m gonna be behind that compound."
Then I explained what happened.
He said, "Is that true? Sergeant Flood, come in here."
Sergeant Flood told him, "Well, we. ..." He gave him some excuse.
The colonel said, "I want those papers processed immediately." Then he said, "Why do you want to get out of here?"
I said, "It’s a nice place here, but I just can’t get along with most of the fellows. I’d rather be in a fighting unit. If we’re gonna be in a war let’s get over there and get it over with."
He said, "I commend you."
Papers come in, boom-boom-boom. Two days later, three of the guys that were giving me problems, they were noplace in sight. I was gonna bomb each one of them. I was really hot. In fact, I had one fight in the barracks, knocked a guy right through the window.
So I get my transfer and go up to Fort Benning. The next day I’m doing fifty pushups. I said, "What the hell am I doing here? I must be nuts." Running. Everything running. You couldn’t even stop to take a leak; you had to turn and take a leak running. You had to doubletime wherever you were. You couldn’t get caught walking. You went to the latrine, you had to doubletime, even when you were ready to let loose. It was rough. The training was unbelievable. I passed out twice. A lot of guys passed out. You see, they’d get you with the Indian war clubs in front of the big hangars. This was in July. Hot as anything down in Georgia. They’ve got the war clubs and you’re doing circles. Then you’re doing deep knee bends at the same time. And then in the front. And then overhead, you’ve got these … they’re like bowling pins. And the pain in your arms is unbelievable. Next thing I know, from the heat and everything, I’m on the ground and they’re slapping me. "That’s all right, you’re okay." They pulled me on the side, gave me a glass of water with some salt in it. "You’ll be okay." Another guy passed out; they go over there. They give you a kick in the rump. If they see you blink, they grab you and pull you on the side. "What’s your name? Report to the orderly room." Boom. Out. They don’t want anybody that’s faking. If you pass out, that means you went over your limit. But if you fake it, they don’t want you there. We had some fakers. I had one guy that I sent back with seven prisoners and those seven prisoners would have been dead except that I sent him back. He had tried to goof out on me during the Bulge. Monahan that guy’s name was. I had to chase him all the way back to a regimental aid station. There was nothing wrong with him. He was looking to get evacuated. I beat the hell out of him. I hit him fifty times on the head, knocked his helmet loose. I got him up to the front line, we went into the attack, lost quite a few men, took seven prisoners. I had one guy, I think his name was Wood. One of his sergeants, Sergeant Savage, shrapnel took his head right off. He was laying there and there were brains all over. Wood came over, he wanted to take the prisoners back. He’s got a Thompson [submachine gun], and he’s shaking like a leaf. I wrote a story for a book but they didn’t put it in, because it’s showing that the American, too, was a killer, not only the Germans. The Americans, some of them are vicious. Not in this case. It was a matter of he lost his brother, the equivalent.
So I grabbed Monahan. I said, "Monahan, take the prisoners back."
Meantime, the Germans are over there, and they’re shaking like a leaf because they could understand English and they could understand what it was all about. Go back 200 yards, he would have killed every one of them. So there’s seven Germans that are still living. They owe me their life.
But anyway, going back, now where the hell was I? Oh, so I got into Benning. In the training, we’d run around Lawson Field, which was quite a distance. It’s six or eight miles around. In the morning you got out and you had to doubletime all around the field before breakfast, then fall out. The first two weeks you’d think you were gonna die. You were walking dead. After two weeks you were an angel. You were floating through the air, because the body now started to acclimate to the rigors.
Then we’d go on forced marches, and there’s always some guys that are gonna drop out. But you evaluate, did he go his limit? And you’d get a big gorilla. You’d think he was like [Mike] Tyson, strong; or what’s his name, the actor, Rambo, would turn to a big bowl of jelly. But you’d get a little bit of a guy, he’d go to the end. Another big guy would collapse very easy. But is it his limit? You can run them until they collapse. So you evaluate the man according to what his limits are. That’s the reason for that punishment. The same thing in the Marines, to find out how much you’ve got in you.
Aaron Elson: At this point were you still a private or were you a sergeant?
Ed Boccafogli: I was a private. Right after I got wounded I became a corporal. Then when we jumped into Holland I became a sergeant. A squad sergeant. And then a platoon sergeant, but I never got my bottom rocker, because of one boy. I forget his name. I don’t remember names now. You get 75 and all of a sudden everything starts to…Kleinfeld! Kleinfeld, my platoon sergeant. As we moved up into the Bulge, the truck overturned. Quite a few guys got hurt; he was one of them. He was evacuated to the States, and he came back after the war. So they kept his rank open. In the meantime, I was the acting platoon sergeant through the worst part of the whole damn Bulge. From Christmas right straight through to the end.
Aaron Elson: What was it that drew you to the paratroops? What did you think about jumping out of a plane?
Ed Boccafogli: Oh, that was nothing. Once you got up there, the first time, you look out, you say, "Boy, I must be nuts."
They tell you, "Don’t look down." I looked down but then I looked up again.
Aaron Elson: Did they have a simulated tower?
Ed Boccafogli: We had training towers like they have out in Coney Island. You’re standing there, and it’s worse than actually in an airplane because you’re looking at the ground. You’re looking at all the guys sitting; they look like ants. And you’ve got the cable up there, you hook on, and now you’ve got to jump. So as you jump you fall down, "Zzzzooop," the slack is taken up. You go flying down into the sand pit, and it’s beautiful. Once you do it, you climb back up there and you jump again. Now you're getting a thrill out of it.
Then you had mock doors. You had to jump out and go into a roll, all the different things. And then you had to hang on harnesses and pull, to adjust the height. It would control your parachute. Not like today. They can stop in midair. They have equipment today, if we had that, we’d have won the war in half the time.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Ed Boccafogli: No, but see, parachuting is only a method of getting there. Once you’re on the ground, you’re an infantry soldier. You’re high class, well-trained, but you’re an infantry soldier. And the idea is to use what they call vertical envelopment. Send your troops in behind the Germans. If you’ve got to outflank them and try to get around, it’s hard. By throwing them in behind, you attack from the rear. The thing is, if you don’t succeed then you’re stuck. So that was the idea in Normandy. The 101st jumped at Carentin, and they dropped us at Ste. Mere Eglise, Chef du Pont and Beaulieu. The Merderet and Douve Rivers, the two principal rivers, were not big, but the area is something like the Meadowlands was fifty years ago. Imagine trying to get armor from here into New York if you don’t have the causeways. You can’t get across those swamps. So that was the idea of the Merderet and the Douve rivers, to get the bridges and the causeways, and the road net at Ste. Mere Eglise. Those were the critical points. Because once the Germans could get through to the coast, they could drive them back into the ocean. We had to prevent the Germans from getting to the coast. Then we had to hold so that our troops, when they reached us, would have the bridges and the causeway to get through the marsh area and then continue on, circle around and go up to the Brittany and the Cherbourg peninsulas.
Nobody ever realized how important that operation was. They say Eisenhower waited all that morning before the invasion to find out how the paratroops made out. He said if they failed it would have been another Dieppe. And when he heard that everything was going, he proceeded with the invasion. There was mass confusion, but the confusion also caused mass confusion for the Germans, because they couldn’t understand what the hell we were after.
I was lucky. I landed within, I’d say, maybe hundreds of yards of where I was supposed to. Others landed five miles away. Many of them were killed, because by the time they tried to work their way back they ran into German units. A group of four or five guys against let’s say a company, it’s only a matter of time. They’re taken prisoner or killed. And as we moved south later on, in this village we found rifles in the cemeteries with a helmet on top, meaning there was an American soldier there. Out in the fields, too, we’d find them.
Aaron Elson: Who buried them?
Ed Boccafogli: The French people. In that case. In the other cases, we had to bury them there. We ourselves didn’t have to do it, but the graves registration, if they couldn’t evacuate the bodies they covered them, and put the rifle and the helmet on. Later on other units would come and take the body out.
They had a lot of bodies. One guy was telling me, he was in a graves registration unit, he said it was the most horrible thing. They’d just take the bodies like pieces of, you know, down at the butcher shop. They’ve got the lambs and the cattle, they’d just throw them up on top of the thing, human beings, throw them up there, one on top of the other; any kind of soldier. Then at the collecting point they’d find the tag. It was very horrible.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about that first jump.
Ed Boccafogli: You mean the first jump in practice?
Aaron Elson: No, the jump into Normandy.
Ed Boccafogli: We prepared for the jump – I’d gone through demolition school, so when I jumped I had TNT and a C-3 pack of explosive. I had fulminate of mercury blasting caps strapped to my boot, and a land mine. Everybody had to carry a land mine. I had the front parachute, the back parachute. Musette bag. Rifle.
Aaron Elson: Why a front and a back parachute?
Ed Boccafogli: The front one is reserve, in case of malfunction. In combat, you very seldom pull it because if the back one doesn’t function you’re already on the ground. You’re only jumping at four or five hundred feet. But in a higher jump the reserve is helpful.
Another thing – we left on June 4th, because the invasion was supposed to be June 5th. Many people don’t know that. We left on the night of the 4th. We circled around for about a half-hour. We were the lead unit. Circled around, picked up other units from various aerodromes. And then the crew chief said it’s being canceled because of the storm. Christ. It’s like a man going into a ring. He’s gonna fight now for his life or death. You could hardly breathe. It was a complete letdown, because you’re keyed up. Your mind was thinking of every little thing, the sand tables [models], where the church was, where this is, where we’re supposed to assemble, where the river is, where the La Fiere Bridge is. All these are in your mind, and you’re trying to orient yourself to when you hit the ground. You want to know exactly where you’re gonna go, where your buddies are, and hope to hell you don’t all get killed.
And you’re green troops. By green I mean we hadn’t had combat before. Some of the 504 of the 82nd were in Sicily, so they’d had experience, especially the noncoms. But we were green.
Then we landed, and we went back to the tents. Some guys were inside the hangars and some guys in the tents.
That night there was a storm. I mean a storm, lightning and everything. They had the regular squad tents, with a pole – square ones. And the tent next to mine got hit by lightning and collapsed. Nobody was hurt, but everybody had to start moving canvas to get them out.
The next morning we had breakfast, and I’ll never forget – I was standing in the tent and there was this kid John Daum. We called him Johnny. Skinny kid, didn’t look any more than 16 years old, tow-headed. And he’s standing there like a statue, looking into space.
I went over. I said, "Hey, Johnny!" Being I was older and was more rugged, I used to take him under my wing. I said, "What’s the matter, Johnny? ’Ey?"
And he’s there like in a stupor.
"Hey," I said, "what the hell’s the matter with you?"
He says, "I’m gonna die tomorrow." Just like that.
"Ahh, come on," I said. "Chrissake. Some of us will, some of us won’t, but you ain’t gonna be one."
He was one of the first guys killed. I didn’t see him get killed, but one of the fellows said he ran up the incline, and he saw him drop. He got hit with a bullet.
These things are with you the rest of your life.
Anyway, then we had to strip all our bundles; the parachutes, the bundles with extra parts, machine gun, mortars, ammunition, rifle ammunition, plus bundles with medical supplies. Strip ’em. Repack ’em. This is all just to keep you going.
While they’re stripping them – these things are never written into the history – they have bundles with land mines. You need them. You get over there, you’ve got to block a certain area of road for protection.
Somehow, one of the land mines must have been activated. They figure the pin must have fallen out of one of them or somebody had activated it stupidly. It fell, and as it hit the ground, "Boom!" A whole damn bundle of land mines exploded. Six or seven people were killed and seven planes were damaged.
That was a disaster right off the bat, like a bad omen. The jump was canceled. Then this had to happen.
That night, we got back in the planes. Now your tension was twice as much, being you went through it the night before. Especially the first group, which was ours.
We took off at 9:30 or 10 o’clock on the night of the 5th, and we circled until 1 in the morning of the 6th. We had to pick up, I don’t know, a couple of thousand planes between the 101st and the 82nd. The 101st had a different route. They went north to south, and we went between the Jersey and Guernsey Islands and we came in from the west. Then we reached the Merderet and Douve rivers.
There were cloud banks and then the ack-ack coming up, shrapnel hitting the planes. You’d see these balls of fire. You can hardly sit in there because you had so much equipment. You’re looking out the little window, and you could see those damn balls of fire all around, like in Desert Storm. All that stuff going up, we were going through it.
My plane was hit after I got out. That I know because the guys were missing.
I fell out. I slipped on vomit. Some guys were throwing up, from nerves, and as we pivoted out my feet went out from under me, and I went out upside down. My hips caught the side door of the plane. The wind was like hell, holding me there, and guys in the meantime as they’re going out they’re hitting me in the head with their feet.
Finally I twisted and broke loose, thank God. Then as I’m coming down I hear crackling through the air. And what was it? Bullets were going through the parachute. I could hear crack-crack-crack-crack. And Jesus Christ, as I came down, I climbed up the risers [to collapse the parachute] and I came flying backwards, and went into a hedgerow. I was hung up on a tree about a foot off the ground.
I took my knife out, and I’m slashing all the rods, because now I figure the bullets are gonna be coming through the brush. I hit the ground behind the dirt bank, and I threw everything off. I threw the land mine away. The hell with this, I figured it wasn’t worth dying for. Plus we had a Mae West [life jacket] and a gas mask. The Mae West was in case we were shot down in the water. We had all this unnecessary equipment. I’d rather drown than carry that damn thing.
All this extra equipment, you’d get killed if you had to keep it. You couldn’t crawl through the brush. I threw this, I threw that, cut everything loose. I even cut myself [in the leg] getting out of the parachute.
I took off like a rabbit. I go and I’m getting to a hedgerow. I get over to a little gate, one field to another, and I hear somebody coming. So I lay down on the ground. I lay flat. They’re coming. I hear click-click [paratroopers had clickers to identify themselves].
I’m looking for my clicker, and I couldn’t find it. So I lay flat on the ground, and I’m looking up, and I could see this silhouette go by. It was one of our men. "Yo!" I said. Oh, man! I was glad to see one of my own men.
Then we grouped together. There were four of us. We got over to a road, went down the road, and then we ran into the Germans. The Germans were coming up the road. We shot like a sonofagun, fired all the bullets we could, and took off backwards, because our objective was to get to Hill 30. That was the main objective. And to try to group into bigger forces.
Then we heard some fighting off to the side, and you could tell the difference between the German and American weapons. The German machine gun is like a rip, like the Uzis today. Our light machine guns went donk-donk-donk-donk.
We finally hooked up with another small group. Then another one. By daylight we had quite a group.
At one point we got into a big firefight, and I jumped into a ditch. The Germans were on the higher ground, and they were firing down. There was a dirt road with ditches on either side. Bullets were hitting all around. I got into the ditch, and I’m laying flat on my back. The road bed is here, and the bullets are striking the bank. The bank on that side was a little higher. If it was lower, the bullets would have come right down.
Then they let up. In the meantime, the other guys were firing, but I was in a spot where I couldn’t even get up. If I would have got up, I’d have got hit.
Also you’re frightened. And you talk about frightened, you stop breathing actually. In Holland, too, in the town of Weiler, we got in one hell of a fight with the Germans, and there I actually stopped breathing. Stopped breathing. I ran I’d say 200 yards without taking a breath of air. My heart even stopped. This is what it’s like when you get into a fight. You see these pictures on television, it’s such a joke. There’s no such thing as these so-called hero-baloney. Everybody I knew of, they were frightened stiff when they were really into a fight.
But anyway, we finally got to Hill 30. Just before that we got very heavily shelled. They were using aerial shells that burst above the ground. I don’t know that much about artillery because I was never in the artillery. But that shrapnel’s coming down, and one guy got a big sliver like this [about four inches] into his rump, and I hit the ground. I lift my head after they stop shelling, and there’s smoke in front of me. I look, and there’s a hole. A piece of shrapnel had just come down into the ground. And the hot shrapnel, with the moisture, was making smoke come up. It missed me just by inches. The other guy got hit in the rump.
We finally got to Hill 30. We had a lot of casualties. Some minor. We left a few dead here and there. We got to Hill 30, and we set up.
Aaron Elson: About how many men were in your group?
Ed Boccafogli: On the hill, there were 180 to 200 men. Across the river, in Chef du Pont, Colonel Lindquist had assembled another 200. So between the two sides we had control of the causeway.
Now we had to hold it until the 4th [Infantry Division] finally reached us four days later, and then they could get across and continue their drive.
Then we went south, to Beuzeville. We took the bridges there.
Aaron Elson: In that three-day fight, what kind of equipment did you have?
Ed Boccafogli: We had mortars. And one light artillery piece. That was it. I went on three different patrols to try to get ammunition, because we ran out. When we jumped we all had four bandoliers of ammunition across our belt. And by the second day we ran out. That’s how much we used. I was down to one clip and six or seven rounds. Then finally we got some ammunition.
Aaron Elson: What was it like going on the patrols?
Ed Boccafogli: We went down through the swamp. We went all the way down to where the water was there [in an aerial photograph]. There were some farms in there. It looks very small but that’s a big area. We only took a section because we wanted to get the causeway.
There were ten or twelve of us. Warnecke, he was my platoon sergeant. Eventually he was made a battlefield commission, stayed in the military, and retired a full colonel. He sent a tape, too, to the Eisenhower Center, [in which] he says, "And can you imagine me, with the name Adolph Warnecke, and with a slight German accent. …" They couldn’t find better soldiers, though. Knapp, another one, Jannigan, all from B Company, became battlefield commissions. I had been put in in the Bulge, but the war ended, and then the whole thing stopped.
Getting back, so they attacked us, and during the early morning we tried to go down and get some ammo from the parachute bundles in the swamp. Some of the parachutes had different colors, and the colors represented what would be in that bundle. But half the parachutes were already sunk. We’d see part of it standing up. Mixed in, we’d see a red, white and blue one, or a white and red one. A lot of them landed in the swamp. Some of them had a body on them, too. The white ones.
We spread out along the edge and waded into the swamp. I got out maybe from here to across the road over there, grabbed a parachute, and the water was about [up to my chest]. I’m trying to keep my head low, and me and this other kid are pulling the parachute. And as we’re pulling, bullets start ricocheting off the water from the other side. The Germans spotted us. I go under water, the helmet and everything. I come up, get some air, pull.
We get to the bank, and as we’re pulling the parachute up, this kid Maloney standing right beside me, "Poom!" Right dead in the chest. We had to leave the body there.
We brought the bundle up, and what we were looking for was mortar rounds and rifle ammunition. I forget what was in there, but there was very little of what we needed. Then we had to go down and get another one. And then they sent other patrols. Finally, little by little, we retrieved about ten bundles.
Aaron Elson: Were these patrols at night or during the day?
Ed Boccafogli: Daytime. Then I went out on the second day. We had a patrol, and there were six of us, to see if we could round up some fellows. We were walking along a hedgerow, when all of a sudden a guy screamed.
And he’s down in the ditch, all covered with hay. It was a young lieutenant. He had been shot through the legs. He crawled into the ditch, and pulled all the weeds and stuff over him, and he lay there. He said all day the first day and part of the second day he watched Germans go by. He saw the silhouette of the helmets. Night patrols, day patrols.
All of a sudden he saw us and let out a scream. He was so happy.
Another time we went out, and we got into a hell of a firefight. There’s a lot of ditches there, a lot of sunken roads. We got into a firefight and one of our men was killed, one guy wounded, two or three Germans. They finally broke off, and we captured a flak gun, which they had been dragging.
We got it back [to the hill]. We had no ammunition for it, but at least we had a gun. They had one less to shoot at us.
To give you an idea of how many casualties we had, out of 2,010 in the regiment, on the 14th of July I think there were 900 left. Three hundred and some killed. I think six hundred or so wounded. And four or five hundred missing.
When we went to the reunion in 1976, there were only about 24 of us, but from my company there were only four of us. Everybody was crying. It’s unbelievable. Because when I got discharged from the Army, I had 90 days to reenlist. They picked out about 20 of us noncoms and brought us up to headquarters, gave us a big spiel that they were gonna form a new training unit, and that we would be raised in rank and we would be the cadre to introduce the new unit, which was the Green Berets at the time.
So we had ninety days. When I got back I met my wife, and then I said I had enough. I didn’t want no more war. But a couple of them stayed in. In fact, one guy, his name is De Vries, from Wallington, he stayed in. He went through Normandy, he went through everything; he went all the way through to Korea, to Vietnam. He was a command sergeant major; got every god darn decoration. I wrote to him, and he wasn’t home, because then he was still in the military, and never got an answer.
You know who was in my company? Bill Windham, the actor. He was one of my riflemen. He came to a couple of reunions. He plays the doctor in "Murder She Wrote."
Ed Boccafogli: I always say the fortunate part of the Depression was that it toughened that era of kids. They were brought up in adversity. They’d go to school with holes in their shoes, patched up clothes. They didn’t have the food like they have today. They eat too god darn much pizza. People lived on corn meal and potatoes during the Depression.
These are the kids that ended up being the tough soldiers that we had.
It’s very sad, now that I look back, at all the guys that died. Go back to Holland, I lost one kid there. I put him in for a decoration. If it wasn’t for him quite a few of us would have been killed. He set the barn on fire. The Germans had gotten into it, and we had nothing but a quarter of a mile of slightly inclined [land] going back with nothing but haystacks. There was no way of getting out of there, and he broke it up.
My wife and I were over in Europe, and we went to the cemetery to find his grave. We had to leave him there, in Weiler, when we pulled out. We felt him for a pulse, and he was dead.
We went to the graveyard, and I asked at the office, "A fellow named Ellerbush is supposed to be in the cemetery, a kid from Kansas." So he looks in the book. He says, "No name here. If he was killed, he isn’t here."
Then when we were ready to leave he came out and said, "Pardon me, sir, there are some late entries." So he went to another office and got the book. He said, "There he is." They had built a wall, and had the names of all those that were found. Some of them were found buried, and they didn’t know who they belonged to, because some of them were buried with the Germans and later on they found out it was an American, and there [his name] was on the wall. It made me feel better.
Aaron Elson: Let me go back to this [reading from the transcript of Boccafogli’s taping session for the Eisenhower Center]. "We had quite a confused mess. We had men from the 505 PIR and we had men from the 101st Airborne Division mixed in with us. So we dug in the positions there and tried to hold Hill 30. We had several attacks later in the day and there was quite a bit of shelling coming in on us. That night, they attacked us from two sides. The next day they attacked from three sides. Each time we’d throw them back. The artillery was bad, because it was coming in and we were getting casualties more from the artillery."
Ed Boccafogli: Our own artillery, coming in from the coast. They were shooting big stuff in, and the stuff would come overhead. A lot of it would land on top of us, and then go down into the valley there. That helped break up the attacks, but it also gave us quite a bit of agita. It’s terrible when that big stuff comes in from the coast.
Aaron Elson: I’ve been told they sounded like freight trains.
Ed Boccafogli: Oh yeah. Christ, in Holland, I’ll never forget. They must have had the Big Berthas because when they would come in, you’d hear ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ way high up in the stratosphere. And you’re in a hole, half sitting in water. And then all of a sudden "BOOOM!!" Then it settled down. It seemed like we were floating on the water. Damn hole. You’d be in there and you’d hear plop-plop-plop-plop-plop, big blobs of crap and mud, trees coming down. This stuff would blow in the air and come down at you like cow flops. And then the hole would partially cave in. There were dozens of holes like that, all through the area. And then at night, if you had to take a poop you had to crawl over into the edge of those holes. You couldn’t go down too far because they’d fill up with water. They were as big as this room, as this house.
Aaron Elson: [reading]. "It seemed that most of the heavy fighting was to the north of us at La Fiere Bridge. There was another unit there, and they were in some battle, because day and night you could see the flashes in the sky. It was like the Fourth of July.
"Eventually our troopers did take the bridge. Later on, I think it was the fourth day, one of the regiments of the 9th Division finally reached us, and that took a lot of pressure off us. We were organized to start to push south, and we headed down to another bridge crossing."
Ed Boccafogli: I can still see the town on the other side. And there, too, we got shelled from the coast. And a lot of them landed on us. I mean big stuff. You could hear them screeching through the atmosphere. They come in, and we’re over here waiting to cross, and they’re hitting the village on the other side. They blew that village to pieces.
We were more afraid of that than we were of the Germans. That’s why in Desert Storm when those poor Arabs got bombed over there, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes for nothing. They were ready to surrender. There’s nothing like a devastating bombardment. Your nerves get shattered. You can’t stop shaking. People don’t understand that. You see the movies and they get bombed. A guy says, "Yeah, all right, well, let’s see, we’ll open a can of Spam." Like it’s almost a joke.
Aaron Elson: What is it like when you hear the shells?
Ed Boccafogli: You’re shaking. In Holland we got hit so bad when we crossed the Nedercanal, the Neder Rhine. See, you’ve got two parts of the Rhine there. You’ve got the one up at Eindhoven and the one at Arnheim. Arnheim was where the British went and were wiped out.
We finally crossed over and we were going up to relieve them, and that’s it. We stopped at Lint – Lint or Alst. And then the Germans started shelling us. They even hit the bridge. And this stuff would come in, big, heavy stuff, and all Holland would just pick up and come down. And you’re shaking. You can’t stop shaking. You’re safe in that foxhole. That shell’s got to come in to kill you. Or come close enough to bury you alive. But your nerves get shattered, and you’re squatted down in there like this [bringing his knees up to his chest]. Because you’re in the water, if you go down further you drown. And the ground is above you. Usually you’d dig buddy holes, in other words two guys in a hole. And there was Moline, a big Swede who was with me. And he’s in there shaking; you can’t stop. Your knees hurt, and the tension is so high you want to stand up to relieve that tension, but you can’t because your head would be above, and the shrapnel would cut you right in half.
I said to Moline, "I can’t take much more." And he said, "Me neither." He says, "I’m gonna crack up."
I said, "I’m gonna crack up before you."
You go hours with shelling like that. We were in an orchard, a beautiful orchard, whatever they were apple, pear trees. And then when it finally lets up, you look out, and you could swear a giant lawnmower came over there and just cut it clean. There wasn’t one tree that wasn’t just cut to pieces. And all that time I don’t think we lost two or three men, because it had to get in the hole to actually kill you. The holes would cave in on you, and they’d just throw the dirt out. But even when it got bad, you’d dig down there and poop right in the hole, throw some mud on it. Miserable. Then your legs itch, because you’re in there for weeks, and you didn’t take a bath or nothing. There’s mud and everything and your skin starts to itch. Especially where your clothes are tight.
It’s hard to describe. I’ll tell you, boy, the mind just cracks.
Aaron Elson: Did you see anybody get combat fatigue?
Ed Boccafogli: Oh yeah. In Weiler we had one. I was on a patrol. I was always the lead scout. They used me and this Mexican kid as the lead scout, all the time.
We went down off the high ground, Bergendahl, which is high ground, a hundred feet higher than anything around. That’s a mountain in Holland. We went down through the gullies, and into Weiler.
We didn’t know at the time that that was German territory. So they decided to occupy Weiler, a small village on the Donhoevel Road, which comes from Bergendahl and goes all the way down to Groesbeck, which the 504th had taken. And then beyond Weiler was a big forest. And they were afraid that there was armor in there.
So me and Lieutenant Glein and the Mexican kid, we go down through the gullies, get into the town, walk around the town. There wasn’t a thing. When you don’t hear a cat, a dog, or see a civilian, you know that’s occupied. Because people, the first thing they do is take their pets and disappear. They go in the cellar, they go anyplace, hide, or leave the village.
We went in the village and said Jesus, nothing in there. Went all around. At the edge of the town it dropped off another 30 or 40 feet down into a swamp. From there you could see all the way to the bridge at Arnheim, about eight miles away.
We came all the way around the edge, and went in a couple of buildings, looked inside. In one building there was some German gear. And it’s strange, because they don’t leave and leave their gear. And then I’m thinking, back in Normandy, I was in a similar situation. I started getting butterflies. We figured there’s something wrong in this town.
Still, we went around, went all the way down, came all the way back. Then we headed back up to the hill, and reported the town was not occupied.
They radioed back, and I guess headquarters says, "Okay, move Company B down there and occupy it." So just before dark, we moved down to the first part of the town. It was a whole town, but there was a double apron barbed wire fence, and a trolley line and a road. So we figured that’s Weiler, and this must be another town.
Then we dug in and set up a roadblock, because the road coming from the one end was where the Germans were. I dug a hole. We set up weapons. And there was a pile of railroad ties. So we just pushed them up nice, and dug a hole, figured what a beautiful parapet. The bullets come and it’d stop them. I dig down. The ground was real soft, and all of a sudden I hit a glass jar. I said, "Sonofabitch, I’ve got to get cut," and I’m taking and throwing the jar out the side. I look, and I see money. So I clean around nice, and I pull this big jar out. It’s full of money. I took all the money, gelders, kroners, what the hell. I figured this money is worthless now, the country’s invaded. That’s how stupid I was. I took all that money, rolled it up in a big roll, stuck it in my pocket, and took all the coins and filled them in my steel helmet. Then I said, "What the hell am I gonna do with this?" So I called the guys over and gave them some money. I got rid of it. I had these two big wads of paper money.
Then orders come to pull out and move to the other end of the town. So I left the foxhole there.
When I went back [a few years ago] I wanted to go and see that farmhouse, but I figured the people would take me and throw me in jail for stealing that money.
We move to the other end of the town, and we set up where it dropped off. I’d taken a grenade – there was a sunken road going down to the lower part of the town, there was a big field over here and there was a road coming out of the forest. I had a 57 Bofur lined up with the road.
Aaron Elson: A 57 what?
Ed Boccafogli: Bofur. That’s like a 57-millimeter antitank gun, with machine gun ammo. Beyond that, I don’t know. All I know is you fire them, they do damage.
So I get out on this open spot to see the flank, because we couldn’t see down below. I told this one kid to dig in over there where he could see. I took a grenade, and I took some string out of one of the buildings, and I put the grenade with the pin anchored to the string. I figured anything coming up in the dark is gonna trip it, the grenade would go off, and it’s a warning. Also, nail the guy who’s coming up.
It got dark. Everything’s quiet. I figure, well, I’m on a corner and I had a grenade launcher. So I put my grenade launcher on, with the grenade on top. And I sat there nice and comfortable, looking at the road.
Comes dawn, it’s all like a mist, a heavy mist, just starting to clear to where you could see. All of a sudden, "whirrrrrr," there’s a motor coming. A truck comes out of the mist, coming right straight toward us. A German truck with troops.
Evidently they didn’t know we were there, and they thought it was still their troops occupying the town. There were Germans in there. They had gone into the church and hid when we moved in. This we figured out later.
In the meantime, everybody’s asleep. It’s a nice morning, the fog, everything quiet. I hear this motor coming. So I anchor my rifle, and fire the grenade. "Poom!" It falls short, by about 20 feet.
He put the brakes on, and he stopped. The guys woke up when they heard the explosion and opened up. They hit the cab of the truck. Germans were spilling out. Everybody opened up, machine guns, everything. We must have got at least half a dozen, a couple of them escaped. Blew the truck apart.
Then we start getting fire. They must have realized what happened when they heard all the shooting, and they started shelling us. And they were hitting everything in the town.
Then they started coming across the open ground, but there are a lot of culverts. You could see them come through the ditches and then they’d jump the culverts where the little farm roads were. We were picking them off left and right. And me, I’ve got the M-1, and I couldn’t fire. It jammed on me. When I fired that rifle grenade, the thing ruptured inside. I couldn’t open it up. I had cut my hand all open trying to get it unjammed.
I’m running around the town trying to get this damn thing open. In the meantime everybody’s opening up, and the Germans pull a full-scale attack. They come from all over.
I run over towards the church. I get over by the church, and there’s Evans – the kid Evans, he was a sergeant – and a lieutenant.
By then orders had come to pull back onto the other side of the road because we were outnumbered. I don’t think we had a hundred men there, and they pulled a full-scale attack.
I got over by the church, and as I’m by the church, two Germans came around a corner and were looking straight at me. Now they could have killed me. I’m up against the parapets on the side of the church. I’m jammed up against there and I’m shaking. I couldn’t breathe, that’s how scared I was. And I’m looking at them. And one of them’s looking at me, he could see part of me. And he’s saying something – now, whether he saw me or saw the other kid, Evans, I don’t know. Evans was behind a tree and the lieutenant was a little further over. I don’t think they could see them. And he’s saying something I couldn’t understand. He’s not saying "Hande-ho," but what he was saying I didn’t know. I was so scared. I put my gun down on the ground, my hand was bleeding all over from trying to pull that damn lever. And I stood up on top of the lever – this is all in a second I did this – Rrrrrrr, I jammed, and "Poom!" It ejected the shell. And I took the rifle up, I emptied the whole clip, and I nailed one of them. The other one, as he went around the corner, I saw him fall. There were three of them altogether. Two of them came out, but one went back.
Then I started running. Evans and the lieutenant started running. We were the last ones out of that part of the village. We go across an open field. There’s a fence, and the fence comes to the Donhoevel Road. At the Donhoevel Road there’s a trolley line, and a double apron barbed wire fence. That’s why we thought the barbed wire fence was a border. But it wasn’t. And the fence goes right up to a barn. We ran across, bullets flying in all directions. It’s a miracle we didn’t get hit. All three of us go in through the goddarn barn, and then we went over a stone wall on the other side of the road.
I went over the wall. Believe me, I didn’t breathe once, from after I shot until I got to there. And I think my heart even stopped. That’s how fast I was running, how scared I was. I got over that wall and "Aaaaahhhh, Aaaahhhh" [heaving sounds], finally I started breathing.
I stood there a minute, and there was Mackey. Mackey, my friend, he was over on the side. He came over to see how I was. Man, my heart was stopped.
And then I had this kid Ellerbush; that’s who I mentioned. The Germans got into the barn, and all along the line there, everything opened up. All our guns were opened up. It was one of the most brutal battles we had. And Ellerbush crawled out in the open. He had the bazooka, and he fired into the barn. The first one didn’t do anything.
He loaded up again, and fired. In the meantime he crawled way out in the open, and he got hit through the side.
The barn caught fire. And at the same time, the British reached us. They’re up on the high ground. These are British tanks. And they’re firing down into the town on us. They’re hitting the buildings, they’re hitting the stone walls. The walls are made out of stone and mortar. God darn bricks, stones and everything are coming down on top of us. So the Germans are shooting at us, the barn is on fire. The flames must have gone two hundred feet in the air. The Germans spilled out. As they’re spilling out the guys are shooting and knocking them down, and I’m yelling, "Don’t kill ’em! Don’t kill ’em! We want to get prisoners." Then we motioned them to come in, and so we took quite a few prisoners.
Aaron Elson: And the British were shooting at you?
Ed Boccafogli: The British are on the hill shooting at us. Our radio operator went crazy. We’re on different frequencies. He was at the other end, where the captain was. They say he tried to get them. He couldn’t get them, and he felt a responsibility. He started going across the open ground, to go up on the hill to try to tell them. "Boom!" They nailed him out in the field, killed him. Finally, after about an hour or so the British must have realized somehow that we were in the town and they were shooting at us. Then the tank firing let up. But the Germans and us were still firing back and forth.
This was late in the afternoon. Now we had to get out of that town. There was no way we could hold it. We were outnumbered like 20 to 1. There was only one solution. Get the hell up to the high ground.
So orders came to activate all the mortar ammunition, pull the pins and leave it all there. And I went over. Ellerbush got hit. He was stone cold, and we had to leave his body there. But if he didn’t hit that barn, the Germans would have crossed that road and got behind us.
As it started to get dark, we got the German prisoners to carry the wounded. The walking wounded walked, and other guys we’d put on doors, ladders, anything we could get. Oh, cowardice, that’s what I wanted to bring out. This one kid, Sergeant Vento, a good sergeant up until that point, left his whole squad. And they found him underneath the crawl space, because there are no cellars over there. He was down there shaking like a dog with the tail between his legs. He was broken down, and we transferred him out to supplies later on.
At the time I had nothing but contempt for him. But then later on I thought, how many men used every method not to be there. At least this guy went his full measure. He went through Normandy, all the way to there, and then all of a sudden something just went "Poom!" That’s it. Battle fatigue, whatever you call it. Later on I had compassion for him. But he left his squad, and most of them were either killed or taken prisoner.
Aaron Elson: Is this many years later?
Ed Boccafogli: No, it was while we were still in England. You start to think. And then we had the young punks come in. We’re in Germany as occupation troops, and the young punks had never even seen an enemy. "Hey, ya goddamn Kraut." An old man. This old man could be his grandfather. "Get out of here ya goddamn Kraut." They act nasty to people. We’d go to the mess hall. We had the three garbage cans where we’d put the edible, non-edible. You’d see an old lady there with gray hair, a little kid over there with a bucket waiting to get something. You’re not supposed to fraternize or give them nothing. What, are you kidding? All of us would say, "Hey, Hans. Come over here, Fritz." We’d call the woman over, give her whatever we saved – a potato or something. Then you think, it could be my mother. The suffering these people went through.
But anyway, that guy left his squad, and as dark got in, with phosphorous shells we started setting all the haystacks on fire. We went back with these ladders, and the Germans carried them, too. The prisoners carried the ladders with our wounded. We went in a long file, up the hill, till we finally got to the high ground.
Then for two days they attacked us with everything. They never dislodged us from the high ground. That was it, we stopped them dead. There were a lot of German casualties; they just couldn’t take the hill. Then we pulled out after the British finally reached us and stabilized everything. But of those tanks that were shooting at us, every one of them was knocked out by German 88s. As they came up on the knoll, they’d nail them like clay pigeons.
Aaron Elson: Which tanks were these?
Ed Boccafogli: The British tanks. I think they lost seven of them, they all got knocked out. Those 88s were accurate, like rifle fire.
Then we moved across the river there, the same thing. The British, they got so far, and then they refused to go any further. Poor bastards up there. The British bastards up in Arnheim. That’s it, they were lost. The ones that finally got back looked like they had gone through hell. Their eyes were coming out of their head. Out of 10,000 men that were dropped into Arnheim, they lost 8,200 men.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about when you were wounded.
Ed Boccafogli: After Baupte finally fell. Baupte was bad. They were shooting antitank shells. They were coming right through the trees. There’s nothing like an antitank shell, which is armor piercing. When it hits a tree it ricochets. That’s worse than shrapnel. That thing is slapping trees and ricocheting and it doesn’t explode unless it hits point blank. Boy, that was the weirdest sound.
Then we pulled out, and I was put ahead, Hernandez and myself, as head scouts. We were moving along this dirt road, and they said they spotted a large body of Germans from the air. Another company, a quarter of a mile away, was moving forward, trying to see if we could contact and flank them.
I’m going along this dirt road. All of a sudden the road drops off on the side of the hill and goes down, then levels off, and there’s farmhouses. And they opened fire on us. Well, my job was done. I drew fire. I hit the ground. And the next squad deploys immediately and opens fire. I can’t fire back. If I stand there, the second shot’s gonna get me for sure. So I hit the ground and let the squad take care of it.
Now two Polish soldiers come out with their hands up. "Me Polski! Me Polski!" That was bad, because up ahead was the main body of Germans, or enemy. The enemy had everything there. They had Poles, they even had Russians that were taken prisoner and were put up in the front as soldiers. Now they heard the shooting, so they knew that there’s a movement coming towards them.
We took the two prisoners. The old man, Millsaps, says, "Okay, move ahead." So I go ahead. We’re two hundred yards ahead of the main body, one on each side of the road. We’re going along, and we come to thicker brush, and then thicker woods. On the side it was low ground and fields up above. So as we’re coming in I hear a high-pitched screech. I stop, put my hand up, and move over to a wall. I look and see a farmhouse inside the walls, like a chalet, and another building. So I stop. The old man comes running up and says, "What’s up?"
I told him what I heard. I said, "It sounds either like a woman screaming or a high-pitched voice yelling."
He said, "You and Hernandez take off on the right flank." He called up Thomas and another kid and said, "Skirt those buildings and keep going." That scream was the angel on my shoulder. The old man must have thought I was starting to get jittery. So we go off about a hundred yards to the right flank of the column, as side riders. We’re going along, going along, maybe another six hundred yards. The two scouts ran right smack into the German positions, and instead of waiting, to let the main body come forward, one of the Germans opened up and killed both of them.
Then the company deployed, and the firing started.
We had some battles that were brutal, but this one was unbelievable. There must have been thirty or forty machine guns going at any one time. Bullets were cutting everything apart. Mortars were coming in.
We’re out on a flank, and I’m trying to work my way back in. I work over to a hedgerow. I get to this dirt bank, and I climb up, trying to see ahead, and I look out and I see something shine, and I open up. Next thing I know, "Poom!" The dirt flies up against me. I get down. Crawl away from there. Climb up on the bank again, and look, look, look. I’m next to a tree. I’m looking, looking, and see something out there like brush moving. I open up. Then, "Pow!" The bark and everything flies off the tree. I figure this guy can see me. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I go down the third time. I get up again. I get down in the brush. I fire two or three rounds. The next thing I know, "Pwwaaangg!" That was it. I got nailed beautiful. The bullet came from the right. The bullet went through the stock [of my gun], through my first aid packet, and tore my arm.
I’m laying on my back with my arm under me. I’d rolled off the bank and passed out. Then I start to come to, and I figure I’m dead. All I see is clouds, like a mist, and I figure I’m going to heaven. Then I started to feel pain, and in the tree above me I could see the leaves start to form. I said, "Holy Christ, I’m still here." Then I hear machine guns going. Everything comes back, and I think I must have been hit in the face. I’m numb from [the top of my head] down. I had one pain all through my body. I didn’t know where I was hit.
Finally I look and I see the blood squirting out. My arm is under me. And I thought, "Jesus, they blew my arm off." I rolled over, finally got my arm out, stuck my hand in and squeezed the blood into the hole.
Hernandez came over. In the meantime, I’m going into shock because of all this blood I’m losing. "Ahh," he says, "You’re okay." He takes my canteen and he gives me a drink, and I’d milked a cow just before, and I got some milk. The milk was sour. I spit it out. Just like Jesus Christ on the cross, they give him vinegar. So he gives me some of his water. Then he takes off and he gets hit in the shoulder.
Then I got a handkerchief and put a tourniquet as tight as I could get it around there. I worked my way over to where the kid from Peoria … what the hell is his name? I used to call it the whiskey capital of the world, Peoria, Illinois. I get over to him. He had the machine gun. The machine gun was firing so much that it was squealing. The bullets were squealing trying to get out. That’s how hot the barrel was.
And then I went crazy. I had a luger, and I started firing, going from hedgerow to hedgerow. The old man’s yelling at me to get the hell out of there, and I refuse. I went berserk. I started going after the Germans through the hedgerows. Finally they got me and they calmed me down and made me go back.
I got the Bronze Star, because when I went back I told Captain Taylor, he was back where the mortars were, I said, "You’ve got to come in closer. You’re firing way the hell beyond." So they brought the mortars in and started pounding them. And then eventually, after about twenty more minutes, the fighting broke off. The Germans pulled out and we pulled out. It was too big. We hit a tremendous force there. We lost a lot of men. I think that day alone, I was one of them, but we must have lost fifteen to twenty men right there.
Aaron Elson: Where did you get the luger that you were firing?
Ed Boccafogli: Someplace between there and Baupte. We’d gotten in a fight and there was a dead German officer. I took the luger off of him. The luger had blood on it, and I cleaned it off. I always thought that was a curse. I should have never taken that gun. I took it off a dead body. These things hit you later on, when you look back. When I got wounded and was being evacuated, I gave that luger to somebody. Then I found out he was killed.
Don’t touch the dead. We had one fellow, he had every kind of trinket you could imagine off dead bodies. He was a ghoul. He’d cut the finger off a dead body to get the ring off. He didn’t give a damn.
Aaron Elson: He survived?
Ed Boccafogli: Yeah. He came to a reunion. We used to call him the Ghoul. A dead German … he’d take the arm and cut off a watch.
Aaron Elson: I guess that happened a lot.
Ed Boccafogli: The Russians did that to the Germans, because the Russians were a lot of peasant people, and the Germans were more advanced. They all had watches. And the first thing they do is go for the watch, take it off the dead German. Rings and watches.
Aaron Elson: Towards the end of the war, were you with them when they entered any concentration camps?
Ed Boccafogli: No. We were stationed at Frankfurt, Germany, as honor guard, the 508th.. I pulled sergeant of the guard at SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces]. Two times. You had all the dignitaries there, and you were shaking in your boots because you had to march around and come in front, with the parade and everything, and salute. It was quite a show. I was even in Eisenhower’s office, and I was in the war room with the officer of the day. All plush rugs. Maps all over the wall, the Pacific and everything. I got in there because I was sergeant of the guard with the officer of the day. Otherwise I’d have never gotten in there.
My wife and I are going back in June [1994] to Normandy. That’ll be the last hurrah. I’m going to pay tribute, visit all the graves, the cemeteries, in Belgium. There are a few of us. I don’t know how many men from my company are going. Some of them can’t afford it, and some of them are too old now. A lot of them have died. We’ve lost 11 men since the last newsletter. They’re dying left and right now.
Ed Boccafogli, 82nd Airborne Division
Ed Boccafogli of Clifton, N.J., is a veteran of D-Day, Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge.
Clifton, N.J., Feb. 19, 1994
Ed Boccafogli: I was what you’d call a dropout today. It was back in the Thirties, the Depression years. There was no work, so I volunteered for the CCC camps. I don’t know if you ever heard of them.
Aaron Elson: Yes, the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Ed Boccafogli: I worked in Pennsylvania for the Dutch Elm division. Then I went out West and spent a year and a half out there. It was rough in those days. I went to California, hopping freights, with a dollar and twenty cents, a bag with peanut butter and a loaf of bread. That’s how we lived, two of us. And fighting with hoboes who tried to take our shoes. In those days, they’d kill you for a dollar.
Then the war broke out. I was inducted. In fact, I got called down at the draft board in Passaic, and I’d had an appendix operation. I went to the hospital, and they called up my sister and said, "Your brother is supposed to report today."
She said, "He can’t report."
They said, "What do you mean?"
"He’s in the hospital."
"Well, have him report Monday." Here I’d just had an operation. So I got a deferment for three weeks. Then I went down to Fort Dix, and from Fort Dix to Fort McClellan. And about a dozen of us were sent to New Orleans as military police.
We were stationed out under the Huey Long Bridge, at Camp Harahan, which was a big port of embarkation. The troops would come in by the truckload to depart on boats for the Pacific.
Also, we had a lot of bad elements there of rapists and murderers and whatnot. The Army was big in those days. We had a prison compound with a lot of men. There must have been three or four hundred at any one time. Most of them were being processed for shipment to Leavenworth. They were bad characters.
Aaron Elson: Had these people been in combat?
Ed Boccafogli: No. The war was just beginning. There were all kinds of elements. Guys who would get in a brawl in a city and end up killing or stabbing somebody. They were military personnel, so they went into the guardhouse and from there to Leavenworth.
I had it made. I could have stayed there the whole war, lived high on the hog. I had a jeep. Go patrolling at night, 11 o’clock, pick up the drunks, bring them back. Then I’d be on the gate many times. And what really discouraged me about that branch of the military, as the people would be coming back from leave, they’d be bringing liquor for the guys inside. As they’d come in the guys were half-bombed. They’ve got a pint sticking out here, a pint sticking out there. You had to confiscate it. Give them a slip, put it in a box, and after each shift you had to take the box and bring it over to the Officers Club. So the officers were living high on the hog on this liquor from the poor bastards that were gonna go over and die. I didn’t take too good to that.
There were a lot of muggings down there, what we call muggings today. What was happening, the guys would go to town, the ones who had money. They’d go out and have a good time, women, whatever. Then they’d get a taxi to come back. They wouldn’t come back with the regular trucks. The fellows had to meet at a place where the trucks would be and they’d all get in and come back to camp. But the fellows with money would hire a cab. They’d be bombed, and on the way back they’d pass out, and they’d be rolled. The cabdriver would pull over, go through their pockets, dump them in the ditch and go back.
So my partner and I would lay on the side of the road and wait. Down in the bayous, it’s thick, thick cypress trees, and there’s just a channel where the light comes through because of the road. And as dark as it was, you could always figure where the road was. So we’d lay on the side and wait. We’d see a taxi coming; it would go by. Okay. Then another one comes. All of a sudden the lights would go out. Oh, man, we’d turn on the ignition and take off. No lights. Follow the road. You could just about make out the road in that dark bayou. We’d go sixty miles an hour, get to where the taxi was stopped, we’d put the lights on and we’d catch the guy rolling the guy that was drunk. We took a club and busted all the windows in the taxicab, beat the hell out of the guy, took the drunk and put him in our jeep and took him back to camp. And nothing was ever said. Because they knew damn well if they complained, they were in trouble.
We did that twice. And then it stopped.
But then I became disillusioned, because the fellows there, they’d turn on you. Everybody was vying for the next position. So I put in for the paratroops.
Then I waited. Three weeks went by, and I knew they needed recruits, so I went in. The man’s name was Sergeant Flood. I said, "Nothing came through about my transfer?"
"No, not yet." He said, "Make out the papers again, maybe they went astray."
So I made them out, request for transfer. I waited another week. In the meantime, I’m nervous. A couple of guys were needling me because I wanted to get out. "What’s the matter, you don’t like this place?"
There was this one big fellow in the mess hall. He kept needling me, "When are you gettin’ out? When are you gettin’ out?" So that day I went back in, the third time, and the sergeant said, "I don’t know."
I said, "Look, I’ve been waiting four weeks now."
He said, "Make out the papers again."
So the clerk pulled the drawer out, and in all the papers I saw one paper on which I could make out my signature. I reached right down in the drawer and I pulled it out. They’d never processed it.
I was like a wild man. I stormed out of there. It was just lunchtime. I went inside the mess hall, and the guy gave me the needle. It was the worst time he could have done it. I whacked him, right in the mess hall. They had potatoes, cabbage and whatever, all over the floor. And we were wrestling there for fifteen minutes. It was a mess.
The next thing I know, they grab me and bring me in to the provost marshal. A colonel.
He said, "What’s your problem, son?"
I said, "Sir, if I don’t get out of here within the next week, I’m gonna be behind that compound."
Then I explained what happened.
He said, "Is that true? Sergeant Flood, come in here."
Sergeant Flood told him, "Well, we. ..." He gave him some excuse.
The colonel said, "I want those papers processed immediately." Then he said, "Why do you want to get out of here?"
I said, "It’s a nice place here, but I just can’t get along with most of the fellows. I’d rather be in a fighting unit. If we’re gonna be in a war let’s get over there and get it over with."
He said, "I commend you."
Papers come in, boom-boom-boom. Two days later, three of the guys that were giving me problems, they were noplace in sight. I was gonna bomb each one of them. I was really hot. In fact, I had one fight in the barracks, knocked a guy right through the window.
So I get my transfer and go up to Fort Benning. The next day I’m doing fifty pushups. I said, "What the hell am I doing here? I must be nuts." Running. Everything running. You couldn’t even stop to take a leak; you had to turn and take a leak running. You had to doubletime wherever you were. You couldn’t get caught walking. You went to the latrine, you had to doubletime, even when you were ready to let loose. It was rough. The training was unbelievable. I passed out twice. A lot of guys passed out. You see, they’d get you with the Indian war clubs in front of the big hangars. This was in July. Hot as anything down in Georgia. They’ve got the war clubs and you’re doing circles. Then you’re doing deep knee bends at the same time. And then in the front. And then overhead, you’ve got these … they’re like bowling pins. And the pain in your arms is unbelievable. Next thing I know, from the heat and everything, I’m on the ground and they’re slapping me. "That’s all right, you’re okay." They pulled me on the side, gave me a glass of water with some salt in it. "You’ll be okay." Another guy passed out; they go over there. They give you a kick in the rump. If they see you blink, they grab you and pull you on the side. "What’s your name? Report to the orderly room." Boom. Out. They don’t want anybody that’s faking. If you pass out, that means you went over your limit. But if you fake it, they don’t want you there. We had some fakers. I had one guy that I sent back with seven prisoners and those seven prisoners would have been dead except that I sent him back. He had tried to goof out on me during the Bulge. Monahan that guy’s name was. I had to chase him all the way back to a regimental aid station. There was nothing wrong with him. He was looking to get evacuated. I beat the hell out of him. I hit him fifty times on the head, knocked his helmet loose. I got him up to the front line, we went into the attack, lost quite a few men, took seven prisoners. I had one guy, I think his name was Wood. One of his sergeants, Sergeant Savage, shrapnel took his head right off. He was laying there and there were brains all over. Wood came over, he wanted to take the prisoners back. He’s got a Thompson [submachine gun], and he’s shaking like a leaf. I wrote a story for a book but they didn’t put it in, because it’s showing that the American, too, was a killer, not only the Germans. The Americans, some of them are vicious. Not in this case. It was a matter of he lost his brother, the equivalent.
So I grabbed Monahan. I said, "Monahan, take the prisoners back."
Meantime, the Germans are over there, and they’re shaking like a leaf because they could understand English and they could understand what it was all about. Go back 200 yards, he would have killed every one of them. So there’s seven Germans that are still living. They owe me their life.
But anyway, going back, now where the hell was I? Oh, so I got into Benning. In the training, we’d run around Lawson Field, which was quite a distance. It’s six or eight miles around. In the morning you got out and you had to doubletime all around the field before breakfast, then fall out. The first two weeks you’d think you were gonna die. You were walking dead. After two weeks you were an angel. You were floating through the air, because the body now started to acclimate to the rigors.
Then we’d go on forced marches, and there’s always some guys that are gonna drop out. But you evaluate, did he go his limit? And you’d get a big gorilla. You’d think he was like [Mike] Tyson, strong; or what’s his name, the actor, Rambo, would turn to a big bowl of jelly. But you’d get a little bit of a guy, he’d go to the end. Another big guy would collapse very easy. But is it his limit? You can run them until they collapse. So you evaluate the man according to what his limits are. That’s the reason for that punishment. The same thing in the Marines, to find out how much you’ve got in you.
Aaron Elson: At this point were you still a private or were you a sergeant?
Ed Boccafogli: I was a private. Right after I got wounded I became a corporal. Then when we jumped into Holland I became a sergeant. A squad sergeant. And then a platoon sergeant, but I never got my bottom rocker, because of one boy. I forget his name. I don’t remember names now. You get 75 and all of a sudden everything starts to…Kleinfeld! Kleinfeld, my platoon sergeant. As we moved up into the Bulge, the truck overturned. Quite a few guys got hurt; he was one of them. He was evacuated to the States, and he came back after the war. So they kept his rank open. In the meantime, I was the acting platoon sergeant through the worst part of the whole damn Bulge. From Christmas right straight through to the end.
Aaron Elson: What was it that drew you to the paratroops? What did you think about jumping out of a plane?
Ed Boccafogli: Oh, that was nothing. Once you got up there, the first time, you look out, you say, "Boy, I must be nuts."
They tell you, "Don’t look down." I looked down but then I looked up again.
Aaron Elson: Did they have a simulated tower?
Ed Boccafogli: We had training towers like they have out in Coney Island. You’re standing there, and it’s worse than actually in an airplane because you’re looking at the ground. You’re looking at all the guys sitting; they look like ants. And you’ve got the cable up there, you hook on, and now you’ve got to jump. So as you jump you fall down, "Zzzzooop," the slack is taken up. You go flying down into the sand pit, and it’s beautiful. Once you do it, you climb back up there and you jump again. Now you're getting a thrill out of it.
Then you had mock doors. You had to jump out and go into a roll, all the different things. And then you had to hang on harnesses and pull, to adjust the height. It would control your parachute. Not like today. They can stop in midair. They have equipment today, if we had that, we’d have won the war in half the time.
Aaron Elson: Really?
Ed Boccafogli: No, but see, parachuting is only a method of getting there. Once you’re on the ground, you’re an infantry soldier. You’re high class, well-trained, but you’re an infantry soldier. And the idea is to use what they call vertical envelopment. Send your troops in behind the Germans. If you’ve got to outflank them and try to get around, it’s hard. By throwing them in behind, you attack from the rear. The thing is, if you don’t succeed then you’re stuck. So that was the idea in Normandy. The 101st jumped at Carentin, and they dropped us at Ste. Mere Eglise, Chef du Pont and Beaulieu. The Merderet and Douve Rivers, the two principal rivers, were not big, but the area is something like the Meadowlands was fifty years ago. Imagine trying to get armor from here into New York if you don’t have the causeways. You can’t get across those swamps. So that was the idea of the Merderet and the Douve rivers, to get the bridges and the causeways, and the road net at Ste. Mere Eglise. Those were the critical points. Because once the Germans could get through to the coast, they could drive them back into the ocean. We had to prevent the Germans from getting to the coast. Then we had to hold so that our troops, when they reached us, would have the bridges and the causeway to get through the marsh area and then continue on, circle around and go up to the Brittany and the Cherbourg peninsulas.
Nobody ever realized how important that operation was. They say Eisenhower waited all that morning before the invasion to find out how the paratroops made out. He said if they failed it would have been another Dieppe. And when he heard that everything was going, he proceeded with the invasion. There was mass confusion, but the confusion also caused mass confusion for the Germans, because they couldn’t understand what the hell we were after.
I was lucky. I landed within, I’d say, maybe hundreds of yards of where I was supposed to. Others landed five miles away. Many of them were killed, because by the time they tried to work their way back they ran into German units. A group of four or five guys against let’s say a company, it’s only a matter of time. They’re taken prisoner or killed. And as we moved south later on, in this village we found rifles in the cemeteries with a helmet on top, meaning there was an American soldier there. Out in the fields, too, we’d find them.
Aaron Elson: Who buried them?
Ed Boccafogli: The French people. In that case. In the other cases, we had to bury them there. We ourselves didn’t have to do it, but the graves registration, if they couldn’t evacuate the bodies they covered them, and put the rifle and the helmet on. Later on other units would come and take the body out.
They had a lot of bodies. One guy was telling me, he was in a graves registration unit, he said it was the most horrible thing. They’d just take the bodies like pieces of, you know, down at the butcher shop. They’ve got the lambs and the cattle, they’d just throw them up on top of the thing, human beings, throw them up there, one on top of the other; any kind of soldier. Then at the collecting point they’d find the tag. It was very horrible.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about that first jump.
Ed Boccafogli: You mean the first jump in practice?
Aaron Elson: No, the jump into Normandy.
Ed Boccafogli: We prepared for the jump – I’d gone through demolition school, so when I jumped I had TNT and a C-3 pack of explosive. I had fulminate of mercury blasting caps strapped to my boot, and a land mine. Everybody had to carry a land mine. I had the front parachute, the back parachute. Musette bag. Rifle.
Aaron Elson: Why a front and a back parachute?
Ed Boccafogli: The front one is reserve, in case of malfunction. In combat, you very seldom pull it because if the back one doesn’t function you’re already on the ground. You’re only jumping at four or five hundred feet. But in a higher jump the reserve is helpful.
Another thing – we left on June 4th, because the invasion was supposed to be June 5th. Many people don’t know that. We left on the night of the 4th. We circled around for about a half-hour. We were the lead unit. Circled around, picked up other units from various aerodromes. And then the crew chief said it’s being canceled because of the storm. Christ. It’s like a man going into a ring. He’s gonna fight now for his life or death. You could hardly breathe. It was a complete letdown, because you’re keyed up. Your mind was thinking of every little thing, the sand tables [models], where the church was, where this is, where we’re supposed to assemble, where the river is, where the La Fiere Bridge is. All these are in your mind, and you’re trying to orient yourself to when you hit the ground. You want to know exactly where you’re gonna go, where your buddies are, and hope to hell you don’t all get killed.
And you’re green troops. By green I mean we hadn’t had combat before. Some of the 504 of the 82nd were in Sicily, so they’d had experience, especially the noncoms. But we were green.
Then we landed, and we went back to the tents. Some guys were inside the hangars and some guys in the tents.
That night there was a storm. I mean a storm, lightning and everything. They had the regular squad tents, with a pole – square ones. And the tent next to mine got hit by lightning and collapsed. Nobody was hurt, but everybody had to start moving canvas to get them out.
The next morning we had breakfast, and I’ll never forget – I was standing in the tent and there was this kid John Daum. We called him Johnny. Skinny kid, didn’t look any more than 16 years old, tow-headed. And he’s standing there like a statue, looking into space.
I went over. I said, "Hey, Johnny!" Being I was older and was more rugged, I used to take him under my wing. I said, "What’s the matter, Johnny? ’Ey?"
And he’s there like in a stupor.
"Hey," I said, "what the hell’s the matter with you?"
He says, "I’m gonna die tomorrow." Just like that.
"Ahh, come on," I said. "Chrissake. Some of us will, some of us won’t, but you ain’t gonna be one."
He was one of the first guys killed. I didn’t see him get killed, but one of the fellows said he ran up the incline, and he saw him drop. He got hit with a bullet.
These things are with you the rest of your life.
Anyway, then we had to strip all our bundles; the parachutes, the bundles with extra parts, machine gun, mortars, ammunition, rifle ammunition, plus bundles with medical supplies. Strip ’em. Repack ’em. This is all just to keep you going.
While they’re stripping them – these things are never written into the history – they have bundles with land mines. You need them. You get over there, you’ve got to block a certain area of road for protection.
Somehow, one of the land mines must have been activated. They figure the pin must have fallen out of one of them or somebody had activated it stupidly. It fell, and as it hit the ground, "Boom!" A whole damn bundle of land mines exploded. Six or seven people were killed and seven planes were damaged.
That was a disaster right off the bat, like a bad omen. The jump was canceled. Then this had to happen.
That night, we got back in the planes. Now your tension was twice as much, being you went through it the night before. Especially the first group, which was ours.
We took off at 9:30 or 10 o’clock on the night of the 5th, and we circled until 1 in the morning of the 6th. We had to pick up, I don’t know, a couple of thousand planes between the 101st and the 82nd. The 101st had a different route. They went north to south, and we went between the Jersey and Guernsey Islands and we came in from the west. Then we reached the Merderet and Douve rivers.
There were cloud banks and then the ack-ack coming up, shrapnel hitting the planes. You’d see these balls of fire. You can hardly sit in there because you had so much equipment. You’re looking out the little window, and you could see those damn balls of fire all around, like in Desert Storm. All that stuff going up, we were going through it.
My plane was hit after I got out. That I know because the guys were missing.
I fell out. I slipped on vomit. Some guys were throwing up, from nerves, and as we pivoted out my feet went out from under me, and I went out upside down. My hips caught the side door of the plane. The wind was like hell, holding me there, and guys in the meantime as they’re going out they’re hitting me in the head with their feet.
Finally I twisted and broke loose, thank God. Then as I’m coming down I hear crackling through the air. And what was it? Bullets were going through the parachute. I could hear crack-crack-crack-crack. And Jesus Christ, as I came down, I climbed up the risers [to collapse the parachute] and I came flying backwards, and went into a hedgerow. I was hung up on a tree about a foot off the ground.
I took my knife out, and I’m slashing all the rods, because now I figure the bullets are gonna be coming through the brush. I hit the ground behind the dirt bank, and I threw everything off. I threw the land mine away. The hell with this, I figured it wasn’t worth dying for. Plus we had a Mae West [life jacket] and a gas mask. The Mae West was in case we were shot down in the water. We had all this unnecessary equipment. I’d rather drown than carry that damn thing.
All this extra equipment, you’d get killed if you had to keep it. You couldn’t crawl through the brush. I threw this, I threw that, cut everything loose. I even cut myself [in the leg] getting out of the parachute.
I took off like a rabbit. I go and I’m getting to a hedgerow. I get over to a little gate, one field to another, and I hear somebody coming. So I lay down on the ground. I lay flat. They’re coming. I hear click-click [paratroopers had clickers to identify themselves].
I’m looking for my clicker, and I couldn’t find it. So I lay flat on the ground, and I’m looking up, and I could see this silhouette go by. It was one of our men. "Yo!" I said. Oh, man! I was glad to see one of my own men.
Then we grouped together. There were four of us. We got over to a road, went down the road, and then we ran into the Germans. The Germans were coming up the road. We shot like a sonofagun, fired all the bullets we could, and took off backwards, because our objective was to get to Hill 30. That was the main objective. And to try to group into bigger forces.
Then we heard some fighting off to the side, and you could tell the difference between the German and American weapons. The German machine gun is like a rip, like the Uzis today. Our light machine guns went donk-donk-donk-donk.
We finally hooked up with another small group. Then another one. By daylight we had quite a group.
At one point we got into a big firefight, and I jumped into a ditch. The Germans were on the higher ground, and they were firing down. There was a dirt road with ditches on either side. Bullets were hitting all around. I got into the ditch, and I’m laying flat on my back. The road bed is here, and the bullets are striking the bank. The bank on that side was a little higher. If it was lower, the bullets would have come right down.
Then they let up. In the meantime, the other guys were firing, but I was in a spot where I couldn’t even get up. If I would have got up, I’d have got hit.
Also you’re frightened. And you talk about frightened, you stop breathing actually. In Holland, too, in the town of Weiler, we got in one hell of a fight with the Germans, and there I actually stopped breathing. Stopped breathing. I ran I’d say 200 yards without taking a breath of air. My heart even stopped. This is what it’s like when you get into a fight. You see these pictures on television, it’s such a joke. There’s no such thing as these so-called hero-baloney. Everybody I knew of, they were frightened stiff when they were really into a fight.
But anyway, we finally got to Hill 30. Just before that we got very heavily shelled. They were using aerial shells that burst above the ground. I don’t know that much about artillery because I was never in the artillery. But that shrapnel’s coming down, and one guy got a big sliver like this [about four inches] into his rump, and I hit the ground. I lift my head after they stop shelling, and there’s smoke in front of me. I look, and there’s a hole. A piece of shrapnel had just come down into the ground. And the hot shrapnel, with the moisture, was making smoke come up. It missed me just by inches. The other guy got hit in the rump.
We finally got to Hill 30. We had a lot of casualties. Some minor. We left a few dead here and there. We got to Hill 30, and we set up.
Aaron Elson: About how many men were in your group?
Ed Boccafogli: On the hill, there were 180 to 200 men. Across the river, in Chef du Pont, Colonel Lindquist had assembled another 200. So between the two sides we had control of the causeway.
Now we had to hold it until the 4th [Infantry Division] finally reached us four days later, and then they could get across and continue their drive.
Then we went south, to Beuzeville. We took the bridges there.
Aaron Elson: In that three-day fight, what kind of equipment did you have?
Ed Boccafogli: We had mortars. And one light artillery piece. That was it. I went on three different patrols to try to get ammunition, because we ran out. When we jumped we all had four bandoliers of ammunition across our belt. And by the second day we ran out. That’s how much we used. I was down to one clip and six or seven rounds. Then finally we got some ammunition.
Aaron Elson: What was it like going on the patrols?
Ed Boccafogli: We went down through the swamp. We went all the way down to where the water was there [in an aerial photograph]. There were some farms in there. It looks very small but that’s a big area. We only took a section because we wanted to get the causeway.
There were ten or twelve of us. Warnecke, he was my platoon sergeant. Eventually he was made a battlefield commission, stayed in the military, and retired a full colonel. He sent a tape, too, to the Eisenhower Center, [in which] he says, "And can you imagine me, with the name Adolph Warnecke, and with a slight German accent. …" They couldn’t find better soldiers, though. Knapp, another one, Jannigan, all from B Company, became battlefield commissions. I had been put in in the Bulge, but the war ended, and then the whole thing stopped.
Getting back, so they attacked us, and during the early morning we tried to go down and get some ammo from the parachute bundles in the swamp. Some of the parachutes had different colors, and the colors represented what would be in that bundle. But half the parachutes were already sunk. We’d see part of it standing up. Mixed in, we’d see a red, white and blue one, or a white and red one. A lot of them landed in the swamp. Some of them had a body on them, too. The white ones.
We spread out along the edge and waded into the swamp. I got out maybe from here to across the road over there, grabbed a parachute, and the water was about [up to my chest]. I’m trying to keep my head low, and me and this other kid are pulling the parachute. And as we’re pulling, bullets start ricocheting off the water from the other side. The Germans spotted us. I go under water, the helmet and everything. I come up, get some air, pull.
We get to the bank, and as we’re pulling the parachute up, this kid Maloney standing right beside me, "Poom!" Right dead in the chest. We had to leave the body there.
We brought the bundle up, and what we were looking for was mortar rounds and rifle ammunition. I forget what was in there, but there was very little of what we needed. Then we had to go down and get another one. And then they sent other patrols. Finally, little by little, we retrieved about ten bundles.
Aaron Elson: Were these patrols at night or during the day?
Ed Boccafogli: Daytime. Then I went out on the second day. We had a patrol, and there were six of us, to see if we could round up some fellows. We were walking along a hedgerow, when all of a sudden a guy screamed.
And he’s down in the ditch, all covered with hay. It was a young lieutenant. He had been shot through the legs. He crawled into the ditch, and pulled all the weeds and stuff over him, and he lay there. He said all day the first day and part of the second day he watched Germans go by. He saw the silhouette of the helmets. Night patrols, day patrols.
All of a sudden he saw us and let out a scream. He was so happy.
Another time we went out, and we got into a hell of a firefight. There’s a lot of ditches there, a lot of sunken roads. We got into a firefight and one of our men was killed, one guy wounded, two or three Germans. They finally broke off, and we captured a flak gun, which they had been dragging.
We got it back [to the hill]. We had no ammunition for it, but at least we had a gun. They had one less to shoot at us.
To give you an idea of how many casualties we had, out of 2,010 in the regiment, on the 14th of July I think there were 900 left. Three hundred and some killed. I think six hundred or so wounded. And four or five hundred missing.
When we went to the reunion in 1976, there were only about 24 of us, but from my company there were only four of us. Everybody was crying. It’s unbelievable. Because when I got discharged from the Army, I had 90 days to reenlist. They picked out about 20 of us noncoms and brought us up to headquarters, gave us a big spiel that they were gonna form a new training unit, and that we would be raised in rank and we would be the cadre to introduce the new unit, which was the Green Berets at the time.
So we had ninety days. When I got back I met my wife, and then I said I had enough. I didn’t want no more war. But a couple of them stayed in. In fact, one guy, his name is De Vries, from Wallington, he stayed in. He went through Normandy, he went through everything; he went all the way through to Korea, to Vietnam. He was a command sergeant major; got every god darn decoration. I wrote to him, and he wasn’t home, because then he was still in the military, and never got an answer.
You know who was in my company? Bill Windham, the actor. He was one of my riflemen. He came to a couple of reunions. He plays the doctor in "Murder She Wrote."
Ed Boccafogli: I always say the fortunate part of the Depression was that it toughened that era of kids. They were brought up in adversity. They’d go to school with holes in their shoes, patched up clothes. They didn’t have the food like they have today. They eat too god darn much pizza. People lived on corn meal and potatoes during the Depression.
These are the kids that ended up being the tough soldiers that we had.
It’s very sad, now that I look back, at all the guys that died. Go back to Holland, I lost one kid there. I put him in for a decoration. If it wasn’t for him quite a few of us would have been killed. He set the barn on fire. The Germans had gotten into it, and we had nothing but a quarter of a mile of slightly inclined [land] going back with nothing but haystacks. There was no way of getting out of there, and he broke it up.
My wife and I were over in Europe, and we went to the cemetery to find his grave. We had to leave him there, in Weiler, when we pulled out. We felt him for a pulse, and he was dead.
We went to the graveyard, and I asked at the office, "A fellow named Ellerbush is supposed to be in the cemetery, a kid from Kansas." So he looks in the book. He says, "No name here. If he was killed, he isn’t here."
Then when we were ready to leave he came out and said, "Pardon me, sir, there are some late entries." So he went to another office and got the book. He said, "There he is." They had built a wall, and had the names of all those that were found. Some of them were found buried, and they didn’t know who they belonged to, because some of them were buried with the Germans and later on they found out it was an American, and there [his name] was on the wall. It made me feel better.
Aaron Elson: Let me go back to this [reading from the transcript of Boccafogli’s taping session for the Eisenhower Center]. "We had quite a confused mess. We had men from the 505 PIR and we had men from the 101st Airborne Division mixed in with us. So we dug in the positions there and tried to hold Hill 30. We had several attacks later in the day and there was quite a bit of shelling coming in on us. That night, they attacked us from two sides. The next day they attacked from three sides. Each time we’d throw them back. The artillery was bad, because it was coming in and we were getting casualties more from the artillery."
Ed Boccafogli: Our own artillery, coming in from the coast. They were shooting big stuff in, and the stuff would come overhead. A lot of it would land on top of us, and then go down into the valley there. That helped break up the attacks, but it also gave us quite a bit of agita. It’s terrible when that big stuff comes in from the coast.
Aaron Elson: I’ve been told they sounded like freight trains.
Ed Boccafogli: Oh yeah. Christ, in Holland, I’ll never forget. They must have had the Big Berthas because when they would come in, you’d hear ‘brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ way high up in the stratosphere. And you’re in a hole, half sitting in water. And then all of a sudden "BOOOM!!" Then it settled down. It seemed like we were floating on the water. Damn hole. You’d be in there and you’d hear plop-plop-plop-plop-plop, big blobs of crap and mud, trees coming down. This stuff would blow in the air and come down at you like cow flops. And then the hole would partially cave in. There were dozens of holes like that, all through the area. And then at night, if you had to take a poop you had to crawl over into the edge of those holes. You couldn’t go down too far because they’d fill up with water. They were as big as this room, as this house.
Aaron Elson: [reading]. "It seemed that most of the heavy fighting was to the north of us at La Fiere Bridge. There was another unit there, and they were in some battle, because day and night you could see the flashes in the sky. It was like the Fourth of July.
"Eventually our troopers did take the bridge. Later on, I think it was the fourth day, one of the regiments of the 9th Division finally reached us, and that took a lot of pressure off us. We were organized to start to push south, and we headed down to another bridge crossing."
Ed Boccafogli: I can still see the town on the other side. And there, too, we got shelled from the coast. And a lot of them landed on us. I mean big stuff. You could hear them screeching through the atmosphere. They come in, and we’re over here waiting to cross, and they’re hitting the village on the other side. They blew that village to pieces.
We were more afraid of that than we were of the Germans. That’s why in Desert Storm when those poor Arabs got bombed over there, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes for nothing. They were ready to surrender. There’s nothing like a devastating bombardment. Your nerves get shattered. You can’t stop shaking. People don’t understand that. You see the movies and they get bombed. A guy says, "Yeah, all right, well, let’s see, we’ll open a can of Spam." Like it’s almost a joke.
Aaron Elson: What is it like when you hear the shells?
Ed Boccafogli: You’re shaking. In Holland we got hit so bad when we crossed the Nedercanal, the Neder Rhine. See, you’ve got two parts of the Rhine there. You’ve got the one up at Eindhoven and the one at Arnheim. Arnheim was where the British went and were wiped out.
We finally crossed over and we were going up to relieve them, and that’s it. We stopped at Lint – Lint or Alst. And then the Germans started shelling us. They even hit the bridge. And this stuff would come in, big, heavy stuff, and all Holland would just pick up and come down. And you’re shaking. You can’t stop shaking. You’re safe in that foxhole. That shell’s got to come in to kill you. Or come close enough to bury you alive. But your nerves get shattered, and you’re squatted down in there like this [bringing his knees up to his chest]. Because you’re in the water, if you go down further you drown. And the ground is above you. Usually you’d dig buddy holes, in other words two guys in a hole. And there was Moline, a big Swede who was with me. And he’s in there shaking; you can’t stop. Your knees hurt, and the tension is so high you want to stand up to relieve that tension, but you can’t because your head would be above, and the shrapnel would cut you right in half.
I said to Moline, "I can’t take much more." And he said, "Me neither." He says, "I’m gonna crack up."
I said, "I’m gonna crack up before you."
You go hours with shelling like that. We were in an orchard, a beautiful orchard, whatever they were apple, pear trees. And then when it finally lets up, you look out, and you could swear a giant lawnmower came over there and just cut it clean. There wasn’t one tree that wasn’t just cut to pieces. And all that time I don’t think we lost two or three men, because it had to get in the hole to actually kill you. The holes would cave in on you, and they’d just throw the dirt out. But even when it got bad, you’d dig down there and poop right in the hole, throw some mud on it. Miserable. Then your legs itch, because you’re in there for weeks, and you didn’t take a bath or nothing. There’s mud and everything and your skin starts to itch. Especially where your clothes are tight.
It’s hard to describe. I’ll tell you, boy, the mind just cracks.
Aaron Elson: Did you see anybody get combat fatigue?
Ed Boccafogli: Oh yeah. In Weiler we had one. I was on a patrol. I was always the lead scout. They used me and this Mexican kid as the lead scout, all the time.
We went down off the high ground, Bergendahl, which is high ground, a hundred feet higher than anything around. That’s a mountain in Holland. We went down through the gullies, and into Weiler.
We didn’t know at the time that that was German territory. So they decided to occupy Weiler, a small village on the Donhoevel Road, which comes from Bergendahl and goes all the way down to Groesbeck, which the 504th had taken. And then beyond Weiler was a big forest. And they were afraid that there was armor in there.
So me and Lieutenant Glein and the Mexican kid, we go down through the gullies, get into the town, walk around the town. There wasn’t a thing. When you don’t hear a cat, a dog, or see a civilian, you know that’s occupied. Because people, the first thing they do is take their pets and disappear. They go in the cellar, they go anyplace, hide, or leave the village.
We went in the village and said Jesus, nothing in there. Went all around. At the edge of the town it dropped off another 30 or 40 feet down into a swamp. From there you could see all the way to the bridge at Arnheim, about eight miles away.
We came all the way around the edge, and went in a couple of buildings, looked inside. In one building there was some German gear. And it’s strange, because they don’t leave and leave their gear. And then I’m thinking, back in Normandy, I was in a similar situation. I started getting butterflies. We figured there’s something wrong in this town.
Still, we went around, went all the way down, came all the way back. Then we headed back up to the hill, and reported the town was not occupied.
They radioed back, and I guess headquarters says, "Okay, move Company B down there and occupy it." So just before dark, we moved down to the first part of the town. It was a whole town, but there was a double apron barbed wire fence, and a trolley line and a road. So we figured that’s Weiler, and this must be another town.
Then we dug in and set up a roadblock, because the road coming from the one end was where the Germans were. I dug a hole. We set up weapons. And there was a pile of railroad ties. So we just pushed them up nice, and dug a hole, figured what a beautiful parapet. The bullets come and it’d stop them. I dig down. The ground was real soft, and all of a sudden I hit a glass jar. I said, "Sonofabitch, I’ve got to get cut," and I’m taking and throwing the jar out the side. I look, and I see money. So I clean around nice, and I pull this big jar out. It’s full of money. I took all the money, gelders, kroners, what the hell. I figured this money is worthless now, the country’s invaded. That’s how stupid I was. I took all that money, rolled it up in a big roll, stuck it in my pocket, and took all the coins and filled them in my steel helmet. Then I said, "What the hell am I gonna do with this?" So I called the guys over and gave them some money. I got rid of it. I had these two big wads of paper money.
Then orders come to pull out and move to the other end of the town. So I left the foxhole there.
When I went back [a few years ago] I wanted to go and see that farmhouse, but I figured the people would take me and throw me in jail for stealing that money.
We move to the other end of the town, and we set up where it dropped off. I’d taken a grenade – there was a sunken road going down to the lower part of the town, there was a big field over here and there was a road coming out of the forest. I had a 57 Bofur lined up with the road.
Aaron Elson: A 57 what?
Ed Boccafogli: Bofur. That’s like a 57-millimeter antitank gun, with machine gun ammo. Beyond that, I don’t know. All I know is you fire them, they do damage.
So I get out on this open spot to see the flank, because we couldn’t see down below. I told this one kid to dig in over there where he could see. I took a grenade, and I took some string out of one of the buildings, and I put the grenade with the pin anchored to the string. I figured anything coming up in the dark is gonna trip it, the grenade would go off, and it’s a warning. Also, nail the guy who’s coming up.
It got dark. Everything’s quiet. I figure, well, I’m on a corner and I had a grenade launcher. So I put my grenade launcher on, with the grenade on top. And I sat there nice and comfortable, looking at the road.
Comes dawn, it’s all like a mist, a heavy mist, just starting to clear to where you could see. All of a sudden, "whirrrrrr," there’s a motor coming. A truck comes out of the mist, coming right straight toward us. A German truck with troops.
Evidently they didn’t know we were there, and they thought it was still their troops occupying the town. There were Germans in there. They had gone into the church and hid when we moved in. This we figured out later.
In the meantime, everybody’s asleep. It’s a nice morning, the fog, everything quiet. I hear this motor coming. So I anchor my rifle, and fire the grenade. "Poom!" It falls short, by about 20 feet.
He put the brakes on, and he stopped. The guys woke up when they heard the explosion and opened up. They hit the cab of the truck. Germans were spilling out. Everybody opened up, machine guns, everything. We must have got at least half a dozen, a couple of them escaped. Blew the truck apart.
Then we start getting fire. They must have realized what happened when they heard all the shooting, and they started shelling us. And they were hitting everything in the town.
Then they started coming across the open ground, but there are a lot of culverts. You could see them come through the ditches and then they’d jump the culverts where the little farm roads were. We were picking them off left and right. And me, I’ve got the M-1, and I couldn’t fire. It jammed on me. When I fired that rifle grenade, the thing ruptured inside. I couldn’t open it up. I had cut my hand all open trying to get it unjammed.
I’m running around the town trying to get this damn thing open. In the meantime everybody’s opening up, and the Germans pull a full-scale attack. They come from all over.
I run over towards the church. I get over by the church, and there’s Evans – the kid Evans, he was a sergeant – and a lieutenant.
By then orders had come to pull back onto the other side of the road because we were outnumbered. I don’t think we had a hundred men there, and they pulled a full-scale attack.
I got over by the church, and as I’m by the church, two Germans came around a corner and were looking straight at me. Now they could have killed me. I’m up against the parapets on the side of the church. I’m jammed up against there and I’m shaking. I couldn’t breathe, that’s how scared I was. And I’m looking at them. And one of them’s looking at me, he could see part of me. And he’s saying something – now, whether he saw me or saw the other kid, Evans, I don’t know. Evans was behind a tree and the lieutenant was a little further over. I don’t think they could see them. And he’s saying something I couldn’t understand. He’s not saying "Hande-ho," but what he was saying I didn’t know. I was so scared. I put my gun down on the ground, my hand was bleeding all over from trying to pull that damn lever. And I stood up on top of the lever – this is all in a second I did this – Rrrrrrr, I jammed, and "Poom!" It ejected the shell. And I took the rifle up, I emptied the whole clip, and I nailed one of them. The other one, as he went around the corner, I saw him fall. There were three of them altogether. Two of them came out, but one went back.
Then I started running. Evans and the lieutenant started running. We were the last ones out of that part of the village. We go across an open field. There’s a fence, and the fence comes to the Donhoevel Road. At the Donhoevel Road there’s a trolley line, and a double apron barbed wire fence. That’s why we thought the barbed wire fence was a border. But it wasn’t. And the fence goes right up to a barn. We ran across, bullets flying in all directions. It’s a miracle we didn’t get hit. All three of us go in through the goddarn barn, and then we went over a stone wall on the other side of the road.
I went over the wall. Believe me, I didn’t breathe once, from after I shot until I got to there. And I think my heart even stopped. That’s how fast I was running, how scared I was. I got over that wall and "Aaaaahhhh, Aaaahhhh" [heaving sounds], finally I started breathing.
I stood there a minute, and there was Mackey. Mackey, my friend, he was over on the side. He came over to see how I was. Man, my heart was stopped.
And then I had this kid Ellerbush; that’s who I mentioned. The Germans got into the barn, and all along the line there, everything opened up. All our guns were opened up. It was one of the most brutal battles we had. And Ellerbush crawled out in the open. He had the bazooka, and he fired into the barn. The first one didn’t do anything.
He loaded up again, and fired. In the meantime he crawled way out in the open, and he got hit through the side.
The barn caught fire. And at the same time, the British reached us. They’re up on the high ground. These are British tanks. And they’re firing down into the town on us. They’re hitting the buildings, they’re hitting the stone walls. The walls are made out of stone and mortar. God darn bricks, stones and everything are coming down on top of us. So the Germans are shooting at us, the barn is on fire. The flames must have gone two hundred feet in the air. The Germans spilled out. As they’re spilling out the guys are shooting and knocking them down, and I’m yelling, "Don’t kill ’em! Don’t kill ’em! We want to get prisoners." Then we motioned them to come in, and so we took quite a few prisoners.
Aaron Elson: And the British were shooting at you?
Ed Boccafogli: The British are on the hill shooting at us. Our radio operator went crazy. We’re on different frequencies. He was at the other end, where the captain was. They say he tried to get them. He couldn’t get them, and he felt a responsibility. He started going across the open ground, to go up on the hill to try to tell them. "Boom!" They nailed him out in the field, killed him. Finally, after about an hour or so the British must have realized somehow that we were in the town and they were shooting at us. Then the tank firing let up. But the Germans and us were still firing back and forth.
This was late in the afternoon. Now we had to get out of that town. There was no way we could hold it. We were outnumbered like 20 to 1. There was only one solution. Get the hell up to the high ground.
So orders came to activate all the mortar ammunition, pull the pins and leave it all there. And I went over. Ellerbush got hit. He was stone cold, and we had to leave his body there. But if he didn’t hit that barn, the Germans would have crossed that road and got behind us.
As it started to get dark, we got the German prisoners to carry the wounded. The walking wounded walked, and other guys we’d put on doors, ladders, anything we could get. Oh, cowardice, that’s what I wanted to bring out. This one kid, Sergeant Vento, a good sergeant up until that point, left his whole squad. And they found him underneath the crawl space, because there are no cellars over there. He was down there shaking like a dog with the tail between his legs. He was broken down, and we transferred him out to supplies later on.
At the time I had nothing but contempt for him. But then later on I thought, how many men used every method not to be there. At least this guy went his full measure. He went through Normandy, all the way to there, and then all of a sudden something just went "Poom!" That’s it. Battle fatigue, whatever you call it. Later on I had compassion for him. But he left his squad, and most of them were either killed or taken prisoner.
Aaron Elson: Is this many years later?
Ed Boccafogli: No, it was while we were still in England. You start to think. And then we had the young punks come in. We’re in Germany as occupation troops, and the young punks had never even seen an enemy. "Hey, ya goddamn Kraut." An old man. This old man could be his grandfather. "Get out of here ya goddamn Kraut." They act nasty to people. We’d go to the mess hall. We had the three garbage cans where we’d put the edible, non-edible. You’d see an old lady there with gray hair, a little kid over there with a bucket waiting to get something. You’re not supposed to fraternize or give them nothing. What, are you kidding? All of us would say, "Hey, Hans. Come over here, Fritz." We’d call the woman over, give her whatever we saved – a potato or something. Then you think, it could be my mother. The suffering these people went through.
But anyway, that guy left his squad, and as dark got in, with phosphorous shells we started setting all the haystacks on fire. We went back with these ladders, and the Germans carried them, too. The prisoners carried the ladders with our wounded. We went in a long file, up the hill, till we finally got to the high ground.
Then for two days they attacked us with everything. They never dislodged us from the high ground. That was it, we stopped them dead. There were a lot of German casualties; they just couldn’t take the hill. Then we pulled out after the British finally reached us and stabilized everything. But of those tanks that were shooting at us, every one of them was knocked out by German 88s. As they came up on the knoll, they’d nail them like clay pigeons.
Aaron Elson: Which tanks were these?
Ed Boccafogli: The British tanks. I think they lost seven of them, they all got knocked out. Those 88s were accurate, like rifle fire.
Then we moved across the river there, the same thing. The British, they got so far, and then they refused to go any further. Poor bastards up there. The British bastards up in Arnheim. That’s it, they were lost. The ones that finally got back looked like they had gone through hell. Their eyes were coming out of their head. Out of 10,000 men that were dropped into Arnheim, they lost 8,200 men.
Aaron Elson: Tell me about when you were wounded.
Ed Boccafogli: After Baupte finally fell. Baupte was bad. They were shooting antitank shells. They were coming right through the trees. There’s nothing like an antitank shell, which is armor piercing. When it hits a tree it ricochets. That’s worse than shrapnel. That thing is slapping trees and ricocheting and it doesn’t explode unless it hits point blank. Boy, that was the weirdest sound.
Then we pulled out, and I was put ahead, Hernandez and myself, as head scouts. We were moving along this dirt road, and they said they spotted a large body of Germans from the air. Another company, a quarter of a mile away, was moving forward, trying to see if we could contact and flank them.
I’m going along this dirt road. All of a sudden the road drops off on the side of the hill and goes down, then levels off, and there’s farmhouses. And they opened fire on us. Well, my job was done. I drew fire. I hit the ground. And the next squad deploys immediately and opens fire. I can’t fire back. If I stand there, the second shot’s gonna get me for sure. So I hit the ground and let the squad take care of it.
Now two Polish soldiers come out with their hands up. "Me Polski! Me Polski!" That was bad, because up ahead was the main body of Germans, or enemy. The enemy had everything there. They had Poles, they even had Russians that were taken prisoner and were put up in the front as soldiers. Now they heard the shooting, so they knew that there’s a movement coming towards them.
We took the two prisoners. The old man, Millsaps, says, "Okay, move ahead." So I go ahead. We’re two hundred yards ahead of the main body, one on each side of the road. We’re going along, and we come to thicker brush, and then thicker woods. On the side it was low ground and fields up above. So as we’re coming in I hear a high-pitched screech. I stop, put my hand up, and move over to a wall. I look and see a farmhouse inside the walls, like a chalet, and another building. So I stop. The old man comes running up and says, "What’s up?"
I told him what I heard. I said, "It sounds either like a woman screaming or a high-pitched voice yelling."
He said, "You and Hernandez take off on the right flank." He called up Thomas and another kid and said, "Skirt those buildings and keep going." That scream was the angel on my shoulder. The old man must have thought I was starting to get jittery. So we go off about a hundred yards to the right flank of the column, as side riders. We’re going along, going along, maybe another six hundred yards. The two scouts ran right smack into the German positions, and instead of waiting, to let the main body come forward, one of the Germans opened up and killed both of them.
Then the company deployed, and the firing started.
We had some battles that were brutal, but this one was unbelievable. There must have been thirty or forty machine guns going at any one time. Bullets were cutting everything apart. Mortars were coming in.
We’re out on a flank, and I’m trying to work my way back in. I work over to a hedgerow. I get to this dirt bank, and I climb up, trying to see ahead, and I look out and I see something shine, and I open up. Next thing I know, "Poom!" The dirt flies up against me. I get down. Crawl away from there. Climb up on the bank again, and look, look, look. I’m next to a tree. I’m looking, looking, and see something out there like brush moving. I open up. Then, "Pow!" The bark and everything flies off the tree. I figure this guy can see me. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I go down the third time. I get up again. I get down in the brush. I fire two or three rounds. The next thing I know, "Pwwaaangg!" That was it. I got nailed beautiful. The bullet came from the right. The bullet went through the stock [of my gun], through my first aid packet, and tore my arm.
I’m laying on my back with my arm under me. I’d rolled off the bank and passed out. Then I start to come to, and I figure I’m dead. All I see is clouds, like a mist, and I figure I’m going to heaven. Then I started to feel pain, and in the tree above me I could see the leaves start to form. I said, "Holy Christ, I’m still here." Then I hear machine guns going. Everything comes back, and I think I must have been hit in the face. I’m numb from [the top of my head] down. I had one pain all through my body. I didn’t know where I was hit.
Finally I look and I see the blood squirting out. My arm is under me. And I thought, "Jesus, they blew my arm off." I rolled over, finally got my arm out, stuck my hand in and squeezed the blood into the hole.
Hernandez came over. In the meantime, I’m going into shock because of all this blood I’m losing. "Ahh," he says, "You’re okay." He takes my canteen and he gives me a drink, and I’d milked a cow just before, and I got some milk. The milk was sour. I spit it out. Just like Jesus Christ on the cross, they give him vinegar. So he gives me some of his water. Then he takes off and he gets hit in the shoulder.
Then I got a handkerchief and put a tourniquet as tight as I could get it around there. I worked my way over to where the kid from Peoria … what the hell is his name? I used to call it the whiskey capital of the world, Peoria, Illinois. I get over to him. He had the machine gun. The machine gun was firing so much that it was squealing. The bullets were squealing trying to get out. That’s how hot the barrel was.
And then I went crazy. I had a luger, and I started firing, going from hedgerow to hedgerow. The old man’s yelling at me to get the hell out of there, and I refuse. I went berserk. I started going after the Germans through the hedgerows. Finally they got me and they calmed me down and made me go back.
I got the Bronze Star, because when I went back I told Captain Taylor, he was back where the mortars were, I said, "You’ve got to come in closer. You’re firing way the hell beyond." So they brought the mortars in and started pounding them. And then eventually, after about twenty more minutes, the fighting broke off. The Germans pulled out and we pulled out. It was too big. We hit a tremendous force there. We lost a lot of men. I think that day alone, I was one of them, but we must have lost fifteen to twenty men right there.
Aaron Elson: Where did you get the luger that you were firing?
Ed Boccafogli: Someplace between there and Baupte. We’d gotten in a fight and there was a dead German officer. I took the luger off of him. The luger had blood on it, and I cleaned it off. I always thought that was a curse. I should have never taken that gun. I took it off a dead body. These things hit you later on, when you look back. When I got wounded and was being evacuated, I gave that luger to somebody. Then I found out he was killed.
Don’t touch the dead. We had one fellow, he had every kind of trinket you could imagine off dead bodies. He was a ghoul. He’d cut the finger off a dead body to get the ring off. He didn’t give a damn.
Aaron Elson: He survived?
Ed Boccafogli: Yeah. He came to a reunion. We used to call him the Ghoul. A dead German … he’d take the arm and cut off a watch.
Aaron Elson: I guess that happened a lot.
Ed Boccafogli: The Russians did that to the Germans, because the Russians were a lot of peasant people, and the Germans were more advanced. They all had watches. And the first thing they do is go for the watch, take it off the dead German. Rings and watches.
Aaron Elson: Towards the end of the war, were you with them when they entered any concentration camps?
Ed Boccafogli: No. We were stationed at Frankfurt, Germany, as honor guard, the 508th.. I pulled sergeant of the guard at SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces]. Two times. You had all the dignitaries there, and you were shaking in your boots because you had to march around and come in front, with the parade and everything, and salute. It was quite a show. I was even in Eisenhower’s office, and I was in the war room with the officer of the day. All plush rugs. Maps all over the wall, the Pacific and everything. I got in there because I was sergeant of the guard with the officer of the day. Otherwise I’d have never gotten in there.
My wife and I are going back in June [1994] to Normandy. That’ll be the last hurrah. I’m going to pay tribute, visit all the graves, the cemeteries, in Belgium. There are a few of us. I don’t know how many men from my company are going. Some of them can’t afford it, and some of them are too old now. A lot of them have died. We’ve lost 11 men since the last newsletter. They’re dying left and right now.