Bernard Carr

Rubenstein: If you can tell us a little bit about yourself, name, where you were born, coming to Portland. . . .
CARR: Well my name is Bernard Carr. I was born in 1923 in Berlin, Germany. We left Germany before Hitler came which was 1933. And we went to France, lived in Nice for three or four years and then moved to Paris. And in 1938 I came directly, through the Panama Canal to Portland, Oregon. Now one of the reasons why we left Europe was probably my parents thought that I should be exempt from conscription over there, either in a French army or in the German army. So I went to school here. And I started my college years. In 1942 I wound up at the Washington State College, Pullman, Washington. I took electrical engineering. Little did I know about electrical engineering, I didn’t even know what it was. But the reason was that I knew that sooner or later I would be conscripted into the Army. Now I was prepared for that. I was considered an enemy alien at that time; I was not a citizen. In order to get to Pullman, Washington I had to get a special dispensation from the Immigration Authority and I had to have a letter. That letter was composed by Roscoe Nelson, who was an old time, at that time, attorney and a trusted friend of the family. Like I said, we only came in 1938 and here it is 1942 and he wrote me that letter. 

When I got to Pullman, Washington I had to present myself to somebody in the post office who was taking care of passports and things like that because Pullman didn’t have an immigration thing. And I had to check in every week to let them know I was still there and so on and so forth. Those are things they should be doing now with some of the people who come to the States and some of these disasters we’re experiencing would not have happened probably. But anyhow, while I was at Washington State taking this engineering course somebody from the FAA (that’s the Federal Air Administration office) came to town and interviewed us. And I was selected to become (don’t ask me how) a senior electrical engineer to be transferred to a listening post in Alaska. I didn’t know what it was and that was all there was to it. Soon after the interview I received a telegram and I think that telegram is here, from the FAA exempting me from Army duties. They wanted to know when I could report to Seattle to be transferred to a listening post in Alaska due to the fact that I spoke several languages. So I took this telegram to my advisor, Professor Wiffen, and he told me that for devotion to my newly to be adopted land I should volunteer and I should serve my time in the Army and not take this position that would exempt me from Army service. And I followed his advice. Little did I know that a few years later—but I didn’t know it at the time. . . . So shortly thereafter I was drafted. I don’t recall the exact date but it was at the beginning of the war in 1942 sometime. I could look it up and give it to you if you wanted to. And I became a recruit like everybody else and I was moved to Camp [Lorlock] at Camp [Arka] at Camp Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas to take my basic training. And in basic training they didn’t have guns at that time because it was too new in the war, they had broomsticks and things like that that we used to simulate guns, and I took my basic training there. And after that basic training the whole outfit, the whole group of people shipped out and I got left behind. And that repeated itself three or four times. So I became an expert at being induced in the Army. And suddenly all of us were rounded up who had been left behind and were taken to some kind of headquarter within the Army and we were interrogated there. We were sworn to secrecy and no matter what happened it would not reflect on our Army record; we could refuse. And by the way I learned early in army life that you never volunteer for anything; I refused. And shortly after that I became attached to an outfit that was sent to Africa. And that’s where my Army service started, at Casablanca in Africa. We went overseas in a luxury liner which had been transformed into a troop ship. It was manned by the English Navy. We were all sleeping in hammocks – first time that any of us were put into a hammock. At that time I was 18 or 19 years old. And the same thing happened in Casablanca that happened to me here in the States. I got left behind. And again the reason was that I spoke French. And I speak other languages too. I was just a private, 18, 19 years old and the officers used my expertise in language to be a help to them. That consisted of getting food for them, French food, women, wine, song, and dance. 

Finally I was shipped out of Casablanca to Tunis and Bizerte in Africa. And then my real Army career, if you could call it that, started. I was shipped from there to Salerno. And from Salerno I became attached to a reconnaissance outfit. That was really quite interesting. I didn’t know what a reconnaissance outfit was. “Calvary Reconnaissance,” I envisioned horses. And we had horses but they were about five or six hundred miles behind the lines, thank God we never met up with them except in a victory parade in Munich. And they had to tie us on to the horses there so we wouldn’t fall off because we didn’t know anything about horses. But the horses were behind us five hundred miles. I imagine they had a staff of soldiers taking care of the horses for us. What a waste of money. 

Anyhow I started in Salerno. And in Salerno I went to Naples and from Naples I went to the front lines in Venefro, Italy. By that time it must have been November, December 1942. That’s where I met up with front line, really the front line duty. We came there; we were transported there in trucks to the front. And boy there was shooting and shells were zooming all over. And they were our own shells; they were the artillery shells we were lobbing to the enemy, Monte Casino, which was nearby. But I didn’t know that when we landed there. All I could hear was the fire and the flashes from these artillery guns. And there was a lot of activity out there. And I didn’t know how close to the front lines we were. I had no idea. But after that, I spent about a week in that area and I don’t recall what we did except every day we had to go out, maybe a mile ahead of the front line and just camp there, just watch. That’s basically what it was, make sure that no German soldiers came into our position. There wasn’t much of anything to do there. In that particular area they had foreign troops there. They had Tunisian troops; they had Moroccan troops, French troops. I think they had a brigade from Australia. All nationalities were there. And one day we were told that the Goums, the Moroccan soldiers would be moving through the lines to go ahead of us and we should let them go and that’s it. And sure enough during the night, unheard by anybody, suddenly we were surrounded by these Goums. And they would feel our boots to see what kind of boots we had. We were American. We couldn’t even see them. And they carried a knife in their mouths. And results usually were the number of ears that they would cut off from the enemy and they’d put them in their belt. When the enemy or the Germans knew that these Goums or Goumier were around, they fled. Because those people were unbelievable. Like I said, we were standing guard and suddenly we felt somebody patting us on our legs and those are the Goums, put a hand over our mouths so we wouldn’t make any noise and they just moved through. Well from there we went to Naples and from Naples they pulled us back to Salerno and they gave us amphibious training there. And that amphibious training was the forerunner for the invasion at Anzio. My outfit, the reconnaissance group that consisted of 16 people. And incidentally, out of those 16 people, four or five were Jewish. And that came about from camp Robinson, Arkansas where we were always held back and most of the people who were held back, we found out later, were Jewish. We were polyglots, spoke several languages and they didn’t know what to do with them. They went all through Africa like I did. And then they didn’t know what to do with them. It was decided at that time, while we were still in Africa, that the invasion was going to come by the northern part, from England onto French soil and not through what they called the soft underbelly of Europe, Greece and Italy and so forth. Churchill or Roosevelt decided that. So there was no need for us with those languages, French, Italian and Greek. They didn’t need us anymore and that’s when they assigned us to the reconnaissance. And we landed in southern France. We landed at Anzio. And we were at Anzio for I don’t know long. I could look it up in a book. I think they were there for about four or five months. We were the first vehicles to land at Anzio. And that was 16 of us, and the first platoon of the 45th Reconnaissance. After we landed it was unopposed; there was no fighting there. We landed. We went to Rome. Rome was about 25 miles away. We went to Rome and mingled in Rome with civilian population there. Rome was an open city; it had not been bombarded or anything. And we had our vehicles. We had four jeeps, maybe five jeeps, with three people in them. We had machine guns on top of them. But they didn’t know if we were Americans or Germans or what we were. We circulated freely amongst the traffic in Rome. The light was red we stopped, the light was green we went. Well it’s easy to find your way into a town but it’s very difficult to find your way out of a town. Usually there’s a centre de via or a city center. So it’s easy to get into town, which we did. And as we mingled with the traffic, it was horrendous traffic. Like the Arc De Triomphe in Paris, they had something similar to that in Rome, went around and around, couldn’t figure out how in the hell to get out of town. And finally we spotted an open place and we drove into that open place and that happened to have been. . . .

Rubenstein: Saint Peter’s Square?
CARR: Maybe it was Saint Peter’s Square. That was holy territory. Not even the Germans dared to go there but we did. And we found refuge there because we wanted to get out of town. And the Swiss guards came in all of their regalia, battle axes, honorary regalia. . . . we talked to them because we had people who spoke Italian. And we bribed them with a carton of cigarettes to show us how to go back to the ocean. We didn’t want to tell them anything. We just wanted the beach and the ocean. And whether they knew whether we Americans or Germans—they must have known. So one of the Vatican guards came with us and showed us how to get out of town and we gave him a carton of cigarettes. And we went back to Anzio. And we radioed all of this information back to headquarters. That’s the only contact we had; we had radios. Every jeep had a radio and we communicated with our headquarter and told them what happened. We told them we were in Rome, 25 miles away from the landing. The next day we went back to Rome and the same thing happened. We went into this town voluntarily, we headed for Saint Peters Square. The guards came again and said, “Gee, haven’t we seen you guys before?” So we gave them another package of rations, K rations and cigarettes and they showed us how to get out of there. The third time we had an officer who was a West Point officer. Somehow he had arranged an audience with the Pope. Never got there; we hit a mine. We had gone the same route twice before and the third time the jeep hit a mine and everybody in the jeep got killed, including the lieutenant. We never did go back to Rome. We pulled back. We were so shook up that that happened. We had gone over the same route twice before and nothing happened. So we went back to our area at Anzio. We were living in a foxhole there and every night we went on patrol and so on and so forth. We met the Germans and the Germans met us. Everybody went the same way when they went up the toll. They had irrigation canals and we walked into those irrigation canals because they were low and the fire went above it so we were safe from fires. But the Germans had the same idea as we did. So we met up with the Germans and the first few times was kind of ticklish. But after they knew who we were and we knew who they were, nothing happened. We would exchange cigarettes and they would throw black bread to us. And when they would throw the black bread to us and we would throw the cigarettes everybody would scurry back thinking it was a hand grenade or something like that. But we got acquainted with them. And we stayed at Anzio for about three months. We must have had casualties but I don’t—very few, very few casualties.

Rubenstein: This sounds almost like a very civilized kind of warfare.
CARR: That’s one thing about being a reconnaissance outfit. If we encountered or if we were faced with seasoned enemy soldiers, they knew who we were and we knew who they were. We would not shoot at each other because they didn’t want to give their position away and they didn’t want to let us know where they were. It became, in spite of what everybody says, it became. . . . I never fired a gun in earnest. I don’t know if I ever got shot at or not, I don’t remember. And I had 511 days of combat. I was awarded a bronze star and a silver star and two purple hearts and a good conduct medal. And I never got wounded seriously. Once I got wounded at Anzio changing a tire on my jeep, grenade went off couple hundred yards away and a piece of shrapnel fell on me. And the other time it was more or less a self-inflicted wound. And I can remember the medic asking me, “Do you want an aspirin or do you want a Purple Heart?” And I took the Purple Heart. So in all of this combat always the first one ashore and always in the lead with my lieutenant, I never got wounded, never got shot at and never had to shoot. So that’s remarkable. That’s Anzio. 

From Anzio we went to Southern France to the invasion in Southern France and that was on the French Riviera. The town was called Santa Rafael and Friesian. And there again we landed on a post, there was no fighting there and we were 25 miles inland and the Germans were in retreat then, there was no fighting. We had a heck of a time keeping up with the Germans to see where they were and to radio back to headquarters where they would bivouac, where they would stop for the night, things like that. So we never had much fighting. And then from there we went through Grenoble. We went through the Alsace Lorraine. We had fighting in the Alsace Lorraine but not the recon outfit. The recon outfit was much respected. They were spy troops actually. They were much respected by the enemy because they knew there were only 10 or 12 of us. They knew if they blew their cover we would notify headquarters and we would try to annihilate them. And they figured if they didn’t raise their heads up, just let us go, we wouldn’t know about it, whether we knew or not. And it was pretty peaceful. As a matter of fact, all of the towns that we came to would have white flags out to surrender. 

Oh, I’ve got to tell you another interesting one in Southern France. We did that by telephone, our advance. We found a working telephone and since I spoke French as well as German we got to communicate with some of the people ahead of us. I never knew what town it was that they connected me with because the maps that we had were woefully inadequate. They were like Michelin maps, were the best maps, like AAA maps. The army didn’t have any maps. And I would call and either speak to the mayor or the curé, the priest, of the town. And I would ask them if there were no Germans in the town to start ringing the church bells. And I asked them all to inquire from the neighboring towns, wherever they were, if they had no Germans there to start ringing the church bells. And then we knew that those towns were not occupied. We were really no heroes; we didn’t go to the towns that didn’t ring bells. We only went to the towns that rang their bells. Let’s not kid ourselves. As I said, we’re all Jewish soldiers. We weren’t all Jewish soldiers but out of the 12 there were two or three of us who were Jewish. That was unbeknown to me for quite a while. Anyhow we advanced. 

There was no problem in France, the problem started in Alsace Lorraine. There there was heavy fighting because the German Army quit retreating and that’s where the big battle was, the Battle of the Buldge was, that we were not involved in. But our job was not to fight. Our job in the reconnaissance was to be the eyes and ears of the troops behind us so that they would not have any unpleasant surprises. And so that was our job, not to fight. We didn’t have enough equipment to fight with. We only had the vehicles, the radios and a machine gun for self-defense. And incidentally, our greatest fear, certainly my greatest fear, was to be captured. Since I was born in Germany I had apprehensions of being captured and being Jewish. I had two sets of dog tags on me. Dog tags are the identification thing. One had an “H” on it for Hebrew, which I carried in my shoes. And the other one did not have any religious identification except the name, hometown and army serial number, whatever’s on those dog tags. We never got captured. We got ambushed two or three times and we got out of that. Never got captured. We captured a lot of German soldiers and we always retained one German soldier with us as insurance that if we should get captured then that German soldier that was with us would vouch for how good we were and how well we treated and fed him. That was kind of an insurance policy. We never needed it but we were always keeping a German soldier with us for about ten days. And after that we were glad to get rid of him. We captured a lot of troops and everything. But I started to say before, every time we came to a German town the white flags would be out. We still would be apprehensive whether they rang the bells or not. This was in towns that didn’t ring the bells. This was in Alsace Lorraine already. We were always on the lookout for a surprise and we had surprises. And at the end of the flagpoles was a swastika. As soon as we went through one of these towns we would look behind us, the swastikas would be out. So that’s how these people saved themselves. 

And sometimes we had difficulty going back to where we came from. We were always maybe four or five miles ahead of the American troops, the infantry, and that was our job. We seldom saw any of our soldiers and we were always on our own. Then we went through Alsace Lorraine, we went through the Black Forrest, another big battle was crossing the Rhine. But again it went smoothly with General Patton there. We had an interesting incident with General Patton. We were right at the crossing of the Rhine, must have been 1:00, 2:00 in the morning with a full moon and that’s what had been planned that the infantry would cross it and there would be light from the moon to see where they were going. And our job was to ferry across on rubber rafts and attach a line and then the combat engineers would come and they used that as a guide line to put bridges across there. Well, before that happened, and like I said, it was about 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, we heard some tanks in the woods. And boy we got scared because we were no match for tanks. So we immobilized that tank that we heard and it happened to be General George Patton’s tank. If you don’t think that would cause a lot of consternation . . . . Now I’ve got pictures, I think I left them here. There’s General Patton on there and us on there, before the crossing of the Rhine. Boy I never saw so many generals on the front lines as that day. But General Patton was, just as everybody heard, “Blood and Guts Patton.” He was leading his soldiers; he was a real soldier. He was ahead of his troops. He was ahead of us in the woods there looking at what the right crossing was going to be like for his men, tremendous. But we shot. We didn’t know what kind of a tank it was; it was dark. The moon was out but we couldn’t see. But anyhow, we crossed the Rhine and from the Rhine after that episode we got the hell out of there. Somebody took pictures, I don’t know who but I got them. We left and we went on. Our aim was then to head for Munich. Before we got to Munich we went to Dachau. We were the first soldiers in Dachau. We stayed there for about three or four hours, that’s all, because our aim was to get to Munich. 

Rubenstein:You said you were among the first soldiers in Dachau. 
CARR: We were only there for about three or four hours. And I’ve got some pictures of that. And it was pretty horrible. We didn’t really know. We had not been told by anybody that there was a concentration camp there. Maybe the Americans didn’t know about it. I have no idea. And we were the first. We didn’t even know it was a concentration camp. But we came to this edifice that was surrounded by a big gate and we busted down the gate because that kind of aggravated us; they had a gate that didn’t open. So we shot down the gate with a cannon and we went inside and once we were inside we saw hordes of people coming, running to us. We were more afraid of those people than they were afraid of us, I’ve got a hunch. They were all cadaverous looking. They spoke all kinds of languages, Polish, German, French, everything. I have no idea if they were Jews or not, no idea. But anyhow we pulled back because there were only 12 of us, 13 of us and we pulled back and we radioed back and we just stayed outside of the fence and we radioed back what we saw and in great detail and then we were told to go on to Munich because that was our goal. This was just an interlude, this Dachau. And Hersh Tanzer told me that he was part of a hospital group that took supplies to Dachau because we told them what we encountered and they told us back, I think, that they would take care of it and reinforcements would be coming. And I presume they did. What they consisted of, I don’t know. But I presume it was a field hospital, I have no idea what came back there but we were out of it. After three of four hours we were gone. 

Rubenstein: What day was that?
CARR: I would say about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and by 7:00 we were out of there, on our way to Munich. And because they wanted to get to Munich, the infantry wanted to get to Munich. They wanted to know what was lying ahead of them. So they knew then that Dachau was lying ahead of them. And I don’t think that my division even stopped at Dachau. They had other soldiers come to Dachau with a fighting outfit. So we went to Munich and I don’t know exactly what happened in Munich but the infantry caught up with us and they occupied Munich. Munich was pretty well destroyed by bombardments of ours. We were quartered. We had a picture there with the soldiers and a flagpole and that was the Minister of Labor, Dr. Ley. That was his house. We just moved into that house. It had a big parking area for our vehicles. It had a flagpole. It was a big house. And after Munich that was the end of the war for me. 

Now let me tell you some interesting episodes. You’re going to laugh at some of these. When we made the landing at Solerno, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these victory ships with ladders going down, soldiers climbing down these ladders? Well, I was on one of those ships, climbing down the ladders to go into the rubber raft to go to shore and somebody from up on deck hollered, “Carr, Carr, you ain’t supposed to be down there. You ain’t a citizen. Get your ass back up here.” So I started to climb up. It’s impossible to climb up, impossible because you’ve got so much gear for the landing. And as the guy saw me climbing up he said, “Carr, Carr, never mind. Your papers got here. You’s a citizen now. Get your ass into the boat and get ashore.” That was one thing. That was Solerno when we came to France to Southern France. I mentioned to you we did it by telephone. Well, there was no opposition. We just landed. There was no problem landing there. But these boats, I don’t know how I got into those landing boats. They come to the shore. They put the gates down and you drive off onto the sand. Well it just so happened that the first jeep that drove off found a hole right in front of the beach it was only this far away, found a hole. We spent hours getting that damned jeep out of there so we could go. And then we went ten miles ahead and we stopped and we just kept on going. We must have been ten miles ahead of our troops all the time. And just as I was telling Tom here, we always had an officer with us. And the officer and the driver and I, we were in the front jeep. We had about ten officers with us and they kind of rotated. One of them got killed at Anzio, and the others, I don’t know what happened to them. So we had ten or 12 officers. 

One of these officers I met up with in Lewiston, Idaho. I was a traveling salesman at that time, just graduated from University of Oregon, never went back to Washington to electrical engineering. I wasn’t interested in electrical engineering. The only reason I went there was so that hopefully I would get into the Signal Corps if I became drafted, which is behind the line. Henry Blauer was a CPA. I don’t know if you know Henry. I said, “What did you do during the war?” He said, “I climbed telephone poles.” Well that’s what I wanted to do. That’s why I went up there but no such luck. I got drafted and I went up as a replacement [inaudible]. Well I came to Lewiston in January and I fell victim to the mumps. At that time I must have been 23 or 24 years old. Never having been to Lewiston, Idaho before, I knew nothing about Lewiston, Idaho. But I had a list of customers. I called one of the customers. I asked him if he could tell me who the house doctor was. And the house doctor came. At that time they still made (this is 1948) house calls. Not 1948, 1940, 41, they still made house calls. [*transcriber note: According to his date of birth, If he was 23 or 24, this would have been 1947 or 1948 ] 

He said, “Kid, you’ve got the mumps.” And at your age you belong in an isolation hospital and the only one he could find was in Spokane. He said, “It will kill you getting there.” He said, “Just stay here; keep quiet about it. Stay in your room. I’ll come and see you every day or you can call me.” And after about a week in the hotel I ventured out in the street. It was winter time, maybe it was snowing, I don’t remember. I put my overcoat over my head and walked down the street and a pickup truck stopped and he said, “Carr?” And I looked up and it was one of my Lieutenants. I told him what happened. He said, “Well you’re not coming up to my house. I’ve got three little girls there.” (or two little girls there) “and you might still be contagious. But the next time you come back through Lewiston. . . .” And we kept in touch with each other. About a year and a half from now, his daughter called me and told me that her father is in a nursing home in Lewiston, Idaho. He got a divorce in the meantime and she just wanted to let me know. He gave his daughter my name and one thing or another and he said to call me. And I went to visit him every Tuesday for about a year in a nursing home here in Troutdale, Fairhaven I think was the name of it. And he told me stories that I never knew from the war years. He said, “You know, 176 people went through that 18 people of us or 16 people of us. They didn’t all get killed. So this lieutenant told me all kinds of stories. He passed away about a year ago now and I went to see him every Tuesday. I took a little bag of cookies and apples and he told me all stories that I didn’t even know about. And he said, “You know when you look back we were in a pretty safe spot.” Like I mentioned before, if we were fighting seasoned troops we were safe. They knew who we were. We were four jeeps. They knew that was a reconnaissance patrol. And if they would shoot at us we would run away, they knew that. The first shot, like a deer in the woods we would scat. And we would. We didn’t have anything to fight with. And they would give their position away. And once their position is given away we’d radio back to headquarters where it was and they’d be in danger from artillery fire or bombardment. So they would never fire at us. And that’s what happened at Anzio. And we knew their troops, spy troops. And we knew what they looked like and we knew the guys after a while. 

Rubenstein: Your lieutenant said that 176 men had rotated through your group of 18.
CARR: Yeah, I didn’t know that. God that’s a lot. And there are two of us left now. The lieutenant was only with us for maybe three or four months. Then we got another lieutenant. And at that time, about a year ago, the lieutenant was one of the survivors and myself and one in New York, a Jewish boy. And I haven’t heard from him in over a year and I called him once and we were going to keep in touch but never did. So I don’t know, I might call him again and see what happened. I hate to hear the answer because he would have replied to me. I wrote him a three page long letter and he called me. We had a lengthy discussion. And he was the only one. His name was Alex Klepner, a Jewish boy from the Bronx. So I might be the only survivor of that whole bunch. I don’t know.

Rubenstein: You mentioned that about two or three members of your reconnaissance group were Jewish but you didn’t know it at the time. How did you find out?
CARR: Well one’s name was Loeb so I imagined by the association of name. The other one was Klepner, That’s the one that’s still in New York. I can’t remember. The other ones were all Italian names. I had a funny outfit. I belonged to the 45th Infantry Division and they were Oklahoman Indians. I don’t know what tribe. I forgot. [They were] terrific soldiers, terrific soldiers. They couldn’t read or write but they could shoot and they could throw knives and they were terrific soldiers. And like the William Tell thing, if you put an apple, I wouldn’t mind. As a matter of fact I always said I couldn’t shoot a gun, Jewish boy, I couldn’t shoot a gun. I don’t think I ever shot a gun. I always had a sharp shooter behind me, one of these Oklahomans, one of these Indian boys. And once he told me to freeze and I knew and I froze and he shot right over my shoulder into a foxhole that had a German soldier in it. And I didn’t see him; he saw him. It wasn’t all play. It wasn’t all a tourist expedition. There was plenty of danger, plenty of danger. You had to use your head. And most of the people, except the Oklahomans, the Indians who were good fighters, they knew what they were doing and they had no animosities, to them this was wonderful. This was a wonderful experiment. They didn’t know what they were fighting for. We knew what we were fighting for, the Jewish boys. And there were a few Italian boys in there. They were glad to be back in Italy when they were in Italy. But we Jewish boys knew what the hell it was all about. Now Dachau, nobody knew what Dachau was. We knew a little about what Dachau was. And the pictures that I have—I appropriated, I stole. I appropriated a camera that was there. I didn’t take those pictures. But when I had them developed here in Portland this is what was inside. These pictures that I have here from Dachau. I don’t remember whether I actually saw mounds of bodies like those pictures depict. And what I saw were the gas chambers. All I can remember is hordes of people coming towards us. That’s all can remember, and getting the hell out of there. Like I said, we were plenty scared. So I told you about how I became a citizen on the high seas in the invasion, how the papers caught up to me. I told you the telephone exploits in southern France. I showed you the picture of Patton crossing the line and we immobilized his tank. Dachau you got the pictures of. And that’s about the end of my story.

Rubenstein: Let me ask you, you said you didn’t know of concentration camps, none of that information had gotten down to the troops?
CARR: I didn’t know anything about it.

Rubenstein: And you had no sense that any of the people. . . .
CARR: No, I went into the Army in 1942 I came out in ’45. I don’t know if the American public knew anything about concentration camps in ’42. I didn’t know anything about Auschwitz and Dachau and all of those. I don’t know if they knew anything about them but we certainly didn’t. I was 18 years old. I’m not very Jewishly oriented. I’m not. My grandparents were practitioners but neither my father nor my mother were; my mother a little bit. My maternal grandparents were Jewishly oriented. Buy my immediate family was not. And I was not either. I belonged to Temple Beth Israel. I was on the board for six years but I don’t think I was on the board. I think my wallet was on the board. And I just did not have a Jewish education. Now one of my boys is married to a Jewish girl, had a boy who became Bar Mitzvahed, a girl became Bat Mitzvahed. They’re very active in Olympia where they live in Jewish circles. I’m very pleased. My other boy married a non-Jewess but at holiday time the three children always go to temple. Whenever they come over on Friday for dinner they have to have a challah and they ask me if the candles are not on the table, “Where are the candles?” They do say their prayers in Hebrew and I’m mighty proud of it. I’m really proud of it. I make substantial contributions to both temples, the one in Olympia, where one of my boys and his family lives and the one here, Temple Beth Israel. But I am not. 

And that was one of the dangers that I had of being captured. That’s why my dog tags in my shoes, my boots were with the “H”, Hebrew. The ones around my neck were without the Hebrew. And that’s it. Now we had lots of contact with the population be it French or German as we advanced because we talked to them to find out, when did the Germans leave town. Every one of them, it seemed like, had an uncle or a cousin in either Philadelphia or in Pittsburgh, all of them. And by the same token, when they turned the white flag around, the swastika was on the other side of it. So I never knew and it didn’t matter to us; it didn’t matter to us. And many a time we spent in houses in the front lines where the Germans were upstairs and we were downstairs, unbeknownst to each other. And boy when we discovered it everybody scrambled. I had funny experiences, really funny experiences. I remember once on the front line (we were always on the front line), we were the only ones there. We had a radiotelephone wire. I just saw it in a book here. The next guy, there were 15, 16 of us, we were scattered for maybe 5 miles on the front line, had these telephones with us and they had these wires strung between them. So the next guy was maybe half a mile away. That’s a long way away being there all by yourself. I was leaning against a tree listening if I could hear any noises or anything. I said, “What’s a good Jewish boy like me doing all alone by your lonesome out here?” And I remember once in the front line I lit a cigarette with a match, because we always smoked because at night when we were walking we used the glow of the cigarette like a taillight. And as I lit that match somebody aimed, shot at us. So I never smoked cigarettes anymore. I started smoking a pipe. So we still had that light, that glow so we could see. I remember once we ran out of ammunition and somebody went back to get more ammunition and when he came he said, “Geez this stuff s heavy; help me carry it.” He said, “Put out your arms” so he can load it. I put out my arms and he loaded me up with ammunition and I started to move away. There was a tree in front of me; I never saw it. Can you imagine a thing like that happening? But I was lucky, 511 combat days. . . . 

First of all the telegram I received while going to Washington State exempting me from military service, that telegram is here. Then going into the military service, having four D-days, Solerno, Anzio, Southern France and the crossing of the Rhine. D-day meaning invasion day. Being the first soldier, first one always in front. And like the lieutenant told me it was a safe place to be, like I said, in a no-man’s-land. Oh the other funny one I’ve got to tell you: I came back on a foot patrol. We had been four or five days reconnoitering and it was time for us to come back. And they changed the password in the front lines all the time. While we were out gallivanting around we didn’t have the password and as we came back. We didn’t know where the front lines were, the infantry front lines. As we came back all of a sudden somebody hollered, “Halt” and we looked into a machine gun. And it was somebody from the American infantry. And they wanted the password, which we didn’t have. And I had only been in this country for about four years. It was baseball season. I knew nothing about baseball season. I still don’t know. They wanted to know what the score was or who was on first base. I knew nothing about it. And the Indians in back of me, they knew; they listened on the radio to the whole series. They vouched for us. But had that guy not vouched for us we wouldn’t have gotten back through the infantry lines. That was the one time I was most scared I think. 

I’ve got another episode. I came in 1938 to this country, to Portland. 1942 I got drafted, end of 1942 I found myself in Italy so my accent was still a pretty heavy accent after three years. I didn’t know a word of English when I came here. As a matter of fact I went to Franklin High School and I must have been the first foreign student at Franklin High School. And they were so entranced with me they learned me how to speak English fast and they impressed on me the matter of politeness. I should say in the morning “Good morning teacher.” And they drilled that into me, “Go to hell teacher, go to hell teacher.” So that morning when I came to school thinking I was saying “Good morning teacher” I said, “Go to hell teacher.” And I wound up in the principal’s office. I was sent home and after this all became clarified I became the darling of the school. [laughs] But the one I was going to tell you in the Army, we were in the front line and this was a long—I think it was the Rhine but I’m not sure. It was the Rhine because I seem to remember the Remagen Bridge where the Battle of the Bulge was about 50 miles away from there. And a train started coming down the tracks on the German side. And I grabbed a radio and all of our messages by radio went code. Well we overcame that actually, the code building, because we had these Indians. They were able to use their dialect to communicate. There was a name for it. They were code talkers I guess you’d call them. These Indians, in emergency they used their own language that was only understandable by their own kinfolk, Indians. Anyhow I grabbed a radio and in English in my heavily accented English, I told them a train and I didn’t say, train, I probably said, “twain” came “wunning” down the “twacks.” Meaning a train came running down the tracks. And there was a bridge further down, not the Remagen Bridge, another one they should bomb that so the train couldn’t get through. Well, nothing happened. But two or three days later I was forbidden to use the radio anymore because they thought it was a German that had captured the radio. Isn’t that funny? I was telling Tom, I only remember the funny things. 

I know one sad story, one I do remember. The oldest man in the outfit, Maxie Trap, was 31 years old. We were all 18, 19, 20. He had a family, was married, had kids at home. Whenever we had a patrol to go on we would tell Maxie, “You stay behind.” Somebody would volunteer to take his place. So he always stayed behind because he was a family man, little kids. And he stayed behind with a radioman and a medic. He stayed behind and we would go out on patrol. So one day we came back from patrol and the Germans found the frequency of the radios and they zeroed in, bombardment on that and everybody there. Maxie got killed; the medic got killed and the radio man got killed. Had he gone on patrol with me he wouldn’t have gotten killed. That was sad. Another sad one but I wasn’t involved in it, was in Munich. The armistice was going to be signed that afternoon; it was the end of the war. We had a mission to go somewhere to accept the surrender of some high Nazi officers. Boy were we scared. Last patrol, we all got through the war, this was the end of the war and we were afraid that something was going to happen to us. Well we never went on that patrol, somebody else went. I don’t know what happened. We goofed off I guess; we didn’t go. Somebody else did and somebody got wounded. I don’t know how they got wounded, They were evacuated on an airplane, hospital airplane and that airplane got shot down. Lieutenant Louden was his name; he went all through the war. He went on that mission that we were supposed to go on, got wounded somehow, got evacuated to London; the plane got shot down. That’s all I can tell you.

Rubenstein: You’ve received medals, the Silver Star and a Bronze Star, what were they for?
CARR: I got that piece of paper here–the Bronze Star was for heroic action in combat or something like that. We went to the town (forgot the name of the town) and we got ambushed. We got ambushed and we abandoned the vehicles because we got ambushed. And in the abandonment there was a code machine that was left in one of the vehicles that had to be retrieved. Well that vehicle where that code machine was in the village. We know which vehicle the code machine was in. It was not supposed to be in there but we recon people had one so we could communicate whatever we had to communicate to headquarters. And it’s a simple code machine. I never knew how to use it but the radioman did. So I went after that code machine. I went into that town. There were about four of us that were going to go in there to get that machine and I told all of them, because they were shooting at us, I told all of them, “You stay here and I’ll go in by myself.” And I did. I got the code machine and brought it back. Nothing happened to me. And that was it. I got a star for that. The Silver Star. I don’t really know how in the hell I got that. The kids got the Silver Star but they must have the documentation. They don’t know where it is either now. One is for meritorious and one is for heroic above the call of duty or something like that. But all of those I don’t know when I even got those medals. I think when I got discharged they came to me. I don’t know.

Rubenstein: And you’ve loaned the museum the Nazi General’s uniform. How did you come to have that?
CARR: Well I know where that came from. After we pushed out of Anzio we went to the Ono River in Cologne and the infantry was behind us. We were maybe two or three mile ahead of the infantry. The German army was in retreat already. And we came to some kind of a fortification outside of Rome and there was no action there because the Germans were retreating at that time. We just went into this fortification and it was hanging there so I picked it up. And the reason I was able to pick up all of that, we had a jeep. Oh, I’ve got to tell you another funny one, we had a jeep. I didn’t have to carry it on my back, I put in in the jeep. The flag, the same way: I came to a German town, went to the ratshaus, the town hall, and there was the flag so I took it. There was no fighting for it, It’s a beautiful flag. And I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not but it’s silver trimmed, so I took it. The helmet, I have no idea where that came from. No idea. But all that stuff I sent home and it got here. And my parents almost fainted when they saw the German helmet, when they saw the flag and the German uniform. That German uniform went to every performance of—from the German Club, the German immigrants, there are quite a few German immigrants here, most of them are Jewish. I don’t know which one had a German general in it but I think it went to several performances of that. [laughs] And then I have a revolver, that’s a crazy thing but I did it. That’s a German revolver; I carried it on my sidearm. Boy that was a crazy thing to do but I did. It was the best weapon I had. It was better than the American guns that they had and it was handy. Like I said, never shot it. And I had a carbine, there’s a picture of me with a carbine, that’s a light rifle. Never shot it. The machine gun, yes I did shoot. I shot it at Dachau as a matter of fact, over the heads of all these people who were running towards at us. We shot over their heads to slow them down because we wanted to get the hell out of there and we did get the hell out of there.

Rubenstein: When you found out later what the concentration camp was and what the Germans had done to Jews, what did you feel?
CARR: I don’t know what my immediate reactions were. I don’t know what I thought. I know that when we left Germany in 1933 I was ten years old. I remembered a parade in Berlin, I was in my dad’s office. Hindenburg had not gotten re-elected and the fuhrer, Hitler, was taking over. And they had all of this in this parade. They didn’t have the red, orange, black flag of the German government. They had the swastikas. My dad said, “This is it.” And I think within a few days we left Berlin. I know that. And I knew that the Jews were being persecuted, I knew that, ten years old. And I came to this country by that time, 1938 I was 15. I knew what was going on with the Jews in Germany. I didn’t know anything about concentration camps then. I knew they were arrested. They were shipped out somewhere but I didn’t know where. While I was in the Army I was not interested, neither were the Oklahomans. The Cherokees, the Indians, they were not interested. They didn’t know anything about Jews. They didn’t know anything about any of that. And the few of us who were Jewish kept it to ourselves because we didn’t want to tell each other that we’re Jews probably. We listened to the BBC because it was the only communication that we had. There was the newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, but we seldom got it. We didn’t know. We were only interested in taking care of ourselves and staying alive. And we knew there was danger in what we were doing but there but there also was a certainty that if we knew what we were doing and we did it right, we would be safe. We knew that. But in spite of that we got strafed from airplanes and they didn’t know us from Adam. And we got ambushed and so on and so forth. 

Talking about ambushed, I remember once, I must have been in the Black Forest somewhere. We occupied a house and what I didn’t know at the time but I painfully discovered it later on, our radios were a marker for the Germans to where we were. I didn’t realize that. They could pinpoint our location by the radio transition by the radio that we sent back. So once they did that and we got the hell out of that house and when we moved in these vehicles. Like I said there were maybe six vehicles at the most. We were scattered maybe a mile from the front vehicle to the back vehicle and the only contact we would have with each other (we wouldn’t see each other) would be by radio, still by radio. And we would check in, what was I called? I was Sunray One. We would call, “Sunray One ready, two ready, three” And when it came to Sunray Five or Four he said, “Wait a minute, Woody’s gotta wee wee.” [laughs] And there are shells all around us. Can you imagine such silly things? We still had a sense of humor. And nothing happened. We pulled out. But we were always by ourselves. We would never see the vehicle in front of us–never see the vehicle in back of us. We were just there, just three of us in a jeep. And I remember in Germany if we came to an intersection the signs would be turned around, the Germans would see to that. So we would have to check. And the Indians knew which is east, which is west, north and south. They could tell. I couldn’t. But in Southern France we came to an intersection. There were signs there so we asked the Indians if the signs were pointing the right way. And I don’t know what he said, I don’t remember so I said, “All right, let’s go.” And we drove on and I looked around and there was nobody behind me; they had all fallen asleep. We had just landed in Southern France and we worked for 24 hours a day probably. And they fell asleep while we were parked trying to figure out which way to go. You know, there was nothing for them to do but to wait. And they fell asleep, can you imagine? Pretty scary. [laughs]

Rubenstein: So what happened?
CARR: Well we just turned around and woke them up. We asked, “Should we shoot them?” [laughs] And we would relieve each other every once in a while from the front vehicle. They’d go to one of the other vehicles so he could get some sleep. And I got put in one of the back vehicles once and I couldn’t stand it when our convoy would stop I’d think, “What the hell’s going on? What happened?” I felt much safer up front. I knew why I was stopping then instead of being apprehensive, “Why did we stop?” I stayed with the lead vehicle all the time and it was pretty good. And you know the lead vehicle, usually on the front bumper (you’ve probably seen war pictures of that) it’s got a post on the front bumper. Well there’s a reason for that post, I don’t know if you know what it is. But the Germans or the enemy would string piano wires across the road. And this thing had a cutting blade on top of it and it would snap the piano wire. If that bar wasn’t there, somebody would get it and then the windshield was always down in front because that would cause reflection in daytime. So it was always down in front. 

I can tell you another funny one. In Scheffenburg, I think, it was on a river. We found a German warehouse that was filled with food, not only food but liquor too. Boy did we find liquor, ooh! Now all of these funny things come back. All soldiers (you’ve probably seen pictures) they carry a canteen of water. Well all of the canteens, we never carried them but we threw as much of the stuff that we didn’t need like extra machine guns, extra ammunition, we threw all of that away and we made room for all of the liquor and all of the food and everything else. And we had these light tanks with wheels on them, DMAs and those could be loaded up like a truck. We put cases of stuff on that truck. That was war.

Rubenstein: You mentioned that you and the other Jewish members of your group didn’t talk about being Jewish with each other because you were concerned for your safety. As you look back on your experience in the war how did it affect the rest of your life, do you see it having changed the arc of your life in any way? 
CARR: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I was mighty proud, still am to this day, of having been in the Army, having gone through all of that and I really feel that I earned my citizenship. I really did. And what this professor Whiffen at Washington State said, I should, for my newly to be adopted country, I should serve in the Army. . . . When I stop and think, I really earned my citizenship. As a matter of fact, my parents, I don’t know when they became citizens but while I was in the service they had to study. I never had to study. Automatically you become a citizen in the Army. But with me being shipped overseas the papers didn’t reach me. I never remember being sworn in or anything, just automatic. But my parents had to prepare for citizenship. And I had a grandmother, my maternal grandmother. She was, at that time, in her mid-60s, hardly spoke any English. And when the judge asked her, “What did you do for the war effort?” My grandma told him she flattened tin cans and she saved grease and she sent her grandson into the Army. And with that the judge said, “Congratulations, you’re a citizen.” Isn’t that nice?

[recording interrupted here]

….would call my parents to let them know there was a letter there from their son and he would drive over with that letter. And I suppose he did that, I presume he did that to all the parents who had children in the front lines or in the service. He would bring those letters over. What my parents must have gone through. Of course they didn’t know all of the details. The letters were censored by this lieutenant who wound up in a Gresham nursing home. He’s the one that would sensor the letters. Because I showed him one. I said, “You’re the son-of a-bitch that blacked out this.” Then he had to sign for it. But the mailman would bring those letter home. I’ve got boxes of these letters at home. The kids go through those all the time, even now. And they were really mundane letters. But they were signs of life–that’s what they were. I can imagine what the parents who had sons in the front line, what they went through. And I was amazed to see when they had that meeting at Neveh Shalom. The first meeting for this group, how many people were there. I didn’t know there were that many veterans there. How many were in the front lines, I don’t know. I found very few in the front lines. And statistics show that of all of the soldiers in the Army, less than ten percent were in the front lines. Now why that had to happen to me, I don’t know. Now that it’s all over I’m mighty proud of it. It’s 60 years ago. I have no regrets. I’m joyful. I’m here. I got wounded twice, always superficially. And I’ve seen many horrible things, many horrible things. Those you don’t elaborate on, you put them in. 

Now something interesting happened about Jewishness. I told you just in passing that once we were eating and then as we walked up a rivulet, we were walking in the middle of it because that was the safest place to be. There were five or six bodies there. And I got trench mouth. I got hospitalized for four or five days. And there a Jewish rabbi came by. And I think he gave me a mezuzah, I think that’s what it was. That’s the first time that I ever met anybody Jewish. How he knew that I was Jewish, I don’t know. But he knew it, or maybe I spoke up, I don’t know. That’s the only time I had anything to do with Judaism. And no holidays or anything like that. All I remember of holidays was Christmas and New Year we’d get special warning from headquarters to be on lookout, to be on the alert and to make sure that everybody is sober and that we’re ready with ammunition because that’s when the enemy’s going to attack, when we don’t expect it. And we were. But nothing was said about any Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. We would get packages every once in a while. And if there were cookies in there by the time we got them they were crumbs. But we were just as happy to get the crumbs and pass them around to everybody. I had to write letters for the Indians; they couldn’t read or write. I had to write some of their letters. And I had to read some of the letters they got from their kinfolk. I don’t know who wrote their letters. But they were wonderful, wonderful soldiers, just unimaginable. And some of those are still alive, one or two of them are still alive, Sargent York and Sargent Knight, those are the only two names 

There are very few of us left. Due to age and the lengths of time since this happened, 58, 60 years ago. We were all about the same age, 18, 20, 78, 88, we’re getting there. So that’s why I’m kind of glad. When you edit that you can make some rhyme or reason out of it. There’s some interesting things in there. They’re not really in the sequence in which they happened. When we took basic training they had bayonet practice. And, “What the hell? A Jewish boy at bayonet practice?” And during one of the episodes we came through the rear. We walked through an infantry regiment, had to go to the front line to reconnoiter what’s ahead of them. And the orders were issued, six bayonets. I don’t know if they ever did or not because we were ahead of them. And I heard orders, American orders being given, “No prisoners.” And that means you shoot; you don’t take prisoners. It’s pretty brutal. So it wasn’t all a tourist trip from Italy through France and the Black Forest and Alsace Lorraine into Germany, Black Forest, Dachau and Munich. And one of the pictures you showed me there, the flagpole and soldiers lined up. That was at the house of Dr. Ley we captured. And we were forced to get Goering who was going to surrender when we were in Munich. He was going to surrender and then somebody else took our place. And one of those lieutenants got wounded and shipped out and shot down. And the irony of that is, I heard later on that Goering, I think it was Goering, the fat one. I don’t know if it was Goering or Goebbels, I think it was Goering. The fat one didn’t want to surrender except to somebody of equal rank. So they parachuted two generals in there. That must have been nice of them.