In 1941, at the age of 16, I was working in the shipyards. I worked there for two years and received my draft notice. I was offered a deferment, but I wanted to go and see the world. ... I was loaded on the USS Santa Rosa, which I had helped rebuild while working in the shipyards.
It took 17 days of being strafed and torpedoed before landing on the Normandy beach. I was standing with my shoulder touching another soldier when a rifle grenade went off about 18 inches from my head. It blew the soldier’s feet off and killed our lieutenant, who was about 50 feet behind us. I never got a scratch except that I am totally deaf in one ear and can’t hear much out of the other.
I went through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Czechoslovakia. While in Belgium, I slept in a ditch with it 30 (degrees) below zero; the next morning, my overcoat was stuck to the ground, and I could not get it loose. I left it there. The people in Belgium were real friendly and brought us cake and cookies and treated us like we were heroes. ... During the Battle of the Bulge, our company took 1,400 prisoners.
Approximately 40 of us marched them to a train station, and they were taken to Chartres, France. On the march, the prisoners were ... eight abreast. We were going over a narrow bridge when a big, tall prisoner told me that he could take my machine gun away from me any time he wanted to. I said, “I know it,” and he laughed.
While in Cologne during the Battle of the Bulge, my buddy and I saw a door with a letter stapled on it saying that no soldier was to enter that door. It was signed by Gen. Eisenhower and Hermann Goering. That got our curiosity aroused until we broke in.
There was a winding stairway that went about 100 feet down underground. All of the stuff that was in the museum of Cologne was stored there. There was a large safe open, and it was filled with German marks. ...
I spent three weeks in Stalag 17 at Nuremberg. Another soldier and I escaped in a stolen ambulance and rejoined Patton’s 3rd army. I was 20 miles from Pilsen, Czechoslovakia when I got 14 bullet holes in my stomach. A doctor saw it happen and ran up and rammed a cigarette in my mouth. I always thought that he had just lit it and didn’t want it to go to waste. I just recently found out it was to slow the internal bleeding. ... I went from 175 to less 100 pounds. ... I was young and did not have sense enough to have ever been scared.
Written by Leonard Crumbliss, 77, shortly before his death in 2002; submitted by his son, Larry Crumbliss on the oklahomawwii.org Web site
