World War II Memories of
Wayne Bayles, U.S. Army, Ret.
CO of Co. "L" 359th
Part 4 of 5
I was in the 3rd Army for the whole time that I was over in Europe during the war. Of course, General George Patton was the CG. I saw him several times, always near the front, but I guess one time I saw him after the war in a parade at Amburg. He was standing on the reviewing platform, but the closest that I ever came to him was when I was a patient in the 1st General Hospital in Paris. It had been real crowded, they had had a lot of casualties, so myself and two other Lieutenants were bedded down in the hallway. Of course, the hallway was nicer than most of the hospitals anyway, but, they had three of us stashed up in the hallway because the officer’s ward was full. Patton’s son—in—law, a Lieutenant Colonel, was in the room right around the corner from where we were and two or three times he came up to visit him while I was there in the hospital. But I remember this one day, it was time for our beds to be made up and we were just standing around there and this little French nurse’s aid was making up our beds, flitting around and you know how they fold the corner under. Here comes General Patton down the hallway, staunched and in a hurry to see his son-in-law, and just about the time he started to pass my bed she swung her little behind out in front of him and he ran into her and knocked her down on the floor. (laughs) He was a gentleman, he stopped, took a step back, smiled and said “sorry”. She got up and he proceeded around the corner to see his son—in-law.
The first part of April 1945 the war was almost over but I learned one thing, as long as there is one man out there shooting at you with a rifle or with artillery then the war is not over as far as your concerned. We were in this little town of Oberhauf, Germany and we had been given the next town as an objective, it was about three miles. It was the first time I had ever been sent out with a company size. The Battalion Commander had three little towns to take so he gave each one of us a town and told us to take it. We started out, no problem, except we had a tank or two with us and the Germans in retreating had cut down trees across the road so we had to stop once, in a while to clean out the trees. The problem with that, it made it slow, because they usually put a mine someplace in that tree and you had to be really careful, so that slowed us down. Just before dark we were still quite a ways from the town we were supposed to take and I got hit. We thought it was a rifle at first but later on it turned out to be a piece of shrapnel. I was hit in the right forearm and it knocked me down. I remember though the aid man came running over to take care of me and I had chewed him out so many times because I had caught him drinking alot. I was worried that some day we would need him and he would be too drunk to do anybody any good, so I chastised him quite a bit. But I hadn’t been on the ground half a minute till he was there. I had a brand new tankers jacket that I was really proud of because they were hard to get and he took a pair of scissors and cut the sleeve right off of that thing. During WWII we used a lot of sulfa drugs, each first aid pack had eight big tablets about the size of your thumb and if you got hit you were supposed to take all eight of those and drink a quart of water. He saw that I did that and then they managed to get me on a jeep. We crawled back a little ways, the jeep picked me up and took me into this little town of Oberhauf, where we had our first aid station. I never will forget because it was on the second floor. There was a very small, narrow staircase going up to the second floor. Now why they wanted to put an aid station up there, I’ll never know but anyway that is where it was. I got up and they looked at my wound again and they still thought it was a rifle slug that was in my arm but they couldn’t be sure. They had no x—rays there but just to be on the safe side they made me take eight more of those sulfa tablets and drink another quart of water. Man I’m telling you I was really full. When they finally got an ambulance to evacuate me back to the clearing company a couple of guys were helping me down the steps and I urped all over everybody and everything. Pills and water and everything else came flying out of me going down those stairs and got all over those guys but they didn’t seem to mind. I don’t remember too much about this clearing company but we got back there and the place was full, I mean there were guys in all kinds of shape laying all around all over the place. You could hear some of them crying and some of them were hollering, they were hurting so bad. Some of us were just laying there, I was scared because I thought for sure the artillery was going to blast in on us, I just had a fear of that for some reason. But everything worked out all right, but I can remember only one thing. A doctor was up walking around looking at all the guys and doing what he could, deciding which ones should go first and so forth. He stopped at me and there was an aid man with him and he told him “I’m worried about this guy going into shock.” So he made him lift my feet and lower head and he said “kind of watch him real close.” That’s all I remember until the next day we were on an ambulance going back to the field evacuation hospital, the 106 Evacuation Hospital, I remember that number. There were four of us in this ambulance that I was in, one on each side and one tied in a litter above you. We had been going quite a ways and I could hear this guy up above me moaning, he was unconscious but you could tell he was moaning in pain. Then I heard a rattle like I’d never heard before and I said that man, I believe, is dying. So I banged on the cab, the driver finally stopped, got out, came around, and said “what’s the matter?” I said “you better take a look at this fella above me because I think he has a real serious problem.” He said “Lieutenant I’m just a driver, I don’t know the first thing about first aid, I can’t do anything. I’ll just drive a little faster and see if I can hurry up and get there.” Sure enough, when they unloaded us of f the ambulance, they took the fella above me out first and he was dead. I had heard him die.
That place I had spoke about unloading the ambulance was the 106 Evacuation Hospital. They ran me in there, made some x-rays of my arms and found it wasn’t a bullet, it was a piece of shrapnel. But it had embedded itself in the muscles in my forearm and they said “well, we don’t think we better try to take it out here.” So they just trimmed off the old dead flesh around the entrance wound, sewed it up, put my arm in a sling, and evacuated me to the 1st General Hospital in Paris. While I was there the main thing they did was to give me physical therapy every day on my arm. I had to squeeze a rubber ball, put it in water, rubbed it in oil, and everything else. They were too busy there even to operate, they had quite a few casualties. One day they came in and called out us three Lieutenants. One of these fellas had been shot through the neck, the bullet went in one side of his neck and went out the other. The other had had a jeep accident, it turned over and broke his collarbone. So we were just in their way, most of the time, and since we weren’t too bad they would give us passes during the day and let us go off. We would come in 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 o’clock at night, get a good nights sleep, go do our p.t. that we had to do the next day, and they would give us another pass. That went on for a few days and then they came in and said “well, we have to evacuate you to the United Kingdom.” None of us wanted to go to England, we would be leaving any chance at all of getting back to our outfit. We didn’t want to go to England and we complained, so they said “o.k., we’ll see what we can do about it.” The next day, here came three litters with two guys on each litter. The three of us looked at somebody and said “boy there must be somebody here that is real sick.” Then they called off our names and we said “what is this?” They said “you’re being evacuated to a field hospital in Cherbourg, France and it is a litter patient only train that is leaving and you are going to be on a litter.” Well, we could walk, we had been going to Paris every day but because of the fact that the train was supposed to be restricted to litter patients they made us get on those litters. They hauled us out and put us on the train, we had to ride all the way to Cherbourg laying on that litter. I was in the hospital there in Cherbourg, had been there a couple days when they ran me into the operating room. It was in the summer time, it was hot. It was a tent hospital, no air conditioning. I never will forget this young doctor, a Captain, was operating on my arm with just a local anesthetic and he was having trouble finding that piece of shrapnel because it would move around every time my arm would twitch a little bit. He was sweating and had a Sergeant that would wipe his head off every once in a while to keep it from dripping down in me. He had my arm opened up with the expanders and he was down in there feeling around. His boss, a Major, came along and said “what’s the matter?” He said “well, I’m tearing this boy’s arm all to pieces trying to find that piece of shrapnel, I can’t get it.” This Major was the chief of surgery and said “just mark his ZI”. What that meant was that I could go home, they would put me on a ship and ship me back home. That sounded pretty good except I really wanted to go back to my outfit. The doctor said “won’t we try one more thing.” He sent the Sergeant over to the dental clinic. The dentist had a little portable X—ray that they used. He stuck several needles in my arm, cross ways and made then cross each other, and then made a picture of it to see where the shrapnel was in relationship to where those needles crossed. He then just reached down in there and pulled it out. He sewed it back up and a few days later I was headed back for my outfit by train. They put me in charge of the troop train from Cherbourg to Paris. Then we were further to go from Paris on up to Nuremberg, Germany by cattle car. They crammed so much of us in those boxcars that you would have thought we were Jewish prisoners. But that was aliright, we were headed home. It took us three days, we would go awhile and have to stop, but anyway we got there.
Of about 200 men that were leaving that hospital to go to Nuremberg, I lost one in Paris. We got ready to check out and there was only one man that didn’t show up. I never did know what happened to him. It was really sad because driving along on the railroads you would look out and just see fields of people sitting by the railroad. Part of them were Jewish people that had been freed from the refugee camps, some of them were Russian soldiers that had been captured and freed, and alot of them were of course Germans trying to get back home. It was a mess, war is really bad. You can just see all these things, I’m sure its hard to imagine but it was bad.
We got to Nuremberg o.k. and from there we went by truck. I think we went first from Nuremberg to Weiden, then since my outfit was in Graffenwahr they sent me there and I rejoined and they gave me my company back that I had when I got wounded. So it was back home again.
I’ve tried to remember his name but it never comes back to me, but while I was a patient in that field hospital in Cherbourg I was recovering o.k., no problems, but there was a young soldier, an enlisted man, that had been admitted and was being treated for shell shock. I know it is real, that phenomena is real, he was really almost out of it at times. For some reason he took up with me and he’d come in my ward and sit on the bunk and talk to me for a while and he’d get up and wander off. Every day, two or three times a day, he would come in and just want to talk. But I remember he had a problem sleeping that was one of his symptoms. The Army had a sedative, we called it Blue 88, I don’t really know what it was but if you take one, you are out. He had been on those for a while and the doctor finally said he had as many as he could take. He told the nurse not to give him anymore. I remember one night he came in and he was really upset. He was demanding that he have a pill, he couldn’t go to sleep and he thought the nurse should give him a pill regardless of what the doctor said. This nurse that was on duty told him she would go get him one. What she did was she took a capsule, they were in a blue plastic capsule, and she was accountable for those things and every time they would change a shift or nurse they would inventory those pills and have the doctor’s orders there for one to be disbursed, but she took one and emptied the powder out and filled it full of powdered sugar. The guy took it and bang he was out just as fast as he would have been if she had given him the real one. It was pitiful though because they were blowing up a lot of pillboxes around some of those fortresses around the harbor there at Cherbourg and each time they would dynamite one of those things this guy would come and jump onto my bed.
I had a “hardship” tour in Turkey (without my family). It was 1959/1960. I was stationed in the town of Kaisery, which is in the central—eastern part of Turkey. It was very lonely out there, kind of out by itself, almost desert. I was out there on a two man team, myself and one enlisted man, an E—4 that spent most of his time on TDY. So (laughs) I was actually about the only American in that town. But I made friends pretty good with them, I couldn’t speak their language but we managed to get along. A couple of incidents that I remember about the depot because Turkish discipline in the army is somewhat different from what it is in our Army. They believe in corporal punishment. Several times I have seen the depot commander have a soldier stand at attention in front of him and he would just slap him over and over. They also believe every Officer should have an orderly. I told them that I didn’t want an orderly. They said “oh yeah, you must insist on having an orderly. They shine your shoes and make your bed.” Well I didn’t want anybody to do that, I wanted to do it myself. Anyway they assigned me this young boy from Istanbul who wanted to speak English and he thought if he worked for me it would be the best way for him to practice his English on me. He was always trying that. We were. doing all right but I came home one day, I got sick at work, and here this rascal was sitting up at my table eating my cookies, drinking my milk, which was hard to get, his feet up on the back of the chair, listening to my new hi-fi records that I had bought and I had told him specifically not to do that. He did it so it kind of ticked me off and I didn’t really want an orderly in the first place. So I told my driver “take him back to the depot, I don’t need an orderly anymore.” The next day I was out there and the detachment commander, a Major, came up to me and wanted to know what did this man do. I said “nothing, he didn’t really do anything. I just don’t need an orderly.” He said “oh yes, your interpreter told me about it and he needs to be punished.” I said “oh no, don’t punish him. He didn’t do anything that he needs to be punished.” They next day I saw my interpreter and I said “what happened to Oscar?” He said he got “six and six”. I said “what do you mean six and six?” He said he was slapped six times and he had to spend six days in the latrine. Now, that is cruel and unusual punishment. To even have to use one of their latrines is bad. I couldn’t go, I would wait until I could go home before I would go to the bathroom because those Turkish latrines were so bad, especially in the summer time and this was.
The Turkish army furnished me this little apartment for this Spec 4 and myself to use while we were there. Two bedrooms, a little sitting room and sort of a kitchen. We used a Coleman camp stove to cook on. We did have a small refrigerator that the U. S. Army had gotten for me somewhere, I don’t know where. They also gave us a kerosene space heater, which was a mistake. Anyway, the water heater in the bathroom, we had a shower but no tub, was made out of copper. You could take a small wooden crate, stomp it into pieces, and throw the pieces in there and the water would get really hot. It didn’t hardly take any time at all, but wood was hard to come by and sometimes we didn’t have the wood when we wanted to make a tub of hot water. I came up with this thing that I had seen our guys had made to heat water to wash mess kits in by using gasoline, it was kind of a blow torch type thing. So I built one out at the shop, brought it in, and put it in that thing. The water wouldn’t get hot, would not get hot! I kept turning it up and one day (laughs) all the joints in that water heater melted, it had been soldered together, and that tank was leaking all over everywhere. And you know the water was still not hot! I still haven’t been able to find anyone that could explain it to me. But that space heater we had worked fine at first and then it got so it wouldn’t stay lit. I couldn’t figure that out so I opened the door, looked in the stove, and it was full of soot. We thought, well we need to clean the stove out. The stove didn’t have too much in it so I thought we had better clean the chimney out, it is probably full. Hamilton went up on top and took a brick with a string tied to it. He was dropping it down through the chimney. I was standing down on the ground telling him what to do. He was juggling it up and down and I went back inside and I have never seen such a mess in my life. This oily soot was knee deep, all over all of our rooms. (laughs) It took us a week to gather all that stuff up. We never did really get it all up because you would try to clean it with a wet rag and that just smeared it. So it was a mess!
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