Pittsburgh Remembers World War II

by Dr. Joseph Rishel

  “Back the attack” was a common theme in several of the war bond drives. Dramatic battlefield scenes helped connect those on the homefront with the nation’s military effort. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Book recalls fighting German forces in the liberation of several small French villages, as well as Le Havre in France, Bastogne in Belgium and Hamburg in Germany. Because he was one of the few who had a driver’s license, he was able to drive a truck for some of this distance. Trucks were not always available, however, and he estimates that he traveled about half the distance on foot. In December 1944, the Allies encountered a lot of resistance from the Germans around the town of Bastogne. The Germans had broken through the Allied lines, surrounded the city and demanded its surrender. U.S. General McAuliffe gave his famous reply to the German ultimatum: “Nuts!” McAuliffe was noted for his lack of profanity. Book and his buddies endured the siege, consisting mostly of artillery shells. No waves of German soldiers appeared. At last they were saved when Patton’s Third Army broke through and liberated the city two days after Christmas. It was only after the siege was broken that Book and his buddies realized how precarious their position had been. The fighting around Bastogne was part of a campaign known to history as the Battle of the Bulge. The winter he endured, 1944–45, was an extremely cold one. Book suffered frostbite on his toes, but he says that his condition was only minor compared to other men in his platoon who suffered severe frostbite and other serious injuries.

  Book’s biggest battle against the German resistance took place in the city of Cologne. He recalls that the city was leveled and that he had dug in to fire his machine gun. The worst of the fighting had occurred the day before he arrived, leaving dead bodies of German soldiers in the houses and a multitude of dead animals, primarily cows and horses, lying in the streets.

  There were many times Book and the other soldiers would go for days without food because the supply tents were blown up. However, the men were provided with K-rations that included bouillon cubes, which mixed easily in hot water and became broth. And there were always chocolate bars to provide quick energy. There were no regular supply deliveries and no hot meals. Trucks would drop supplies along the road to be distributed as the soldiers passed. They slept on the ground. There were intervals when he couldn’t even remember when he last had a shower.

  Recruits from Pittsburgh are shown how to fire a forty-millimeter gun at ground targets. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  While in one unknown town, Book recalls talking to another soldier when his sergeant told him to pick up a sack that was lying on the opposite side of the street. Book did not hear the sergeant’s order, so another soldier said that he would go get the sack. As the soldier went over to pick up the sack, he stepped on a land mine hidden under a paving stone, killing him instantly. Book remembers just how lucky he was that day and how saddened he was that it came at the price of another soldier’s life.

  Another encounter with the Germans occurred while he was walking through the roads in France. Along these roads grew what is known as a hedgerow, an eight- to ten-foot-high barrier of bushy shrubs that lined the rural roads. While walking through the countryside, he and about ten other soldiers heard a noise. When they looked through the hedgerow, they saw about fifty to sixty German soldiers all marching in the opposite direction directly on the other side of the same hedgerow. Book says that they “were a noisy bunch” and that he and his comrades continued walking silently, knowing that they would not be heard over the noise being made by the Germans.

  Toward the end of the war, Book kept guard at the infamous German concentration camp Auschwitz after its liberation. At Auschwitz, he saw dead bodies lying all around the grounds. Bodies were stacked up four by four like railroad ties. In one of these piles, Book saw a foot move and reported it to his captain. The person was pulled from the pile and was provided medical attention. Book does not know whether the person survived. He saw this person and several others barely existing, weighing about eighty undernourished pounds of “nothing but skin and bones.” He saved photos of three corpses. The horrible mutilation of thousands of innocent victims was an unforgettable atrocity.

  Throughout Book’s military career, he was only able to get a glance at General Eisenhower from afar but was able to see General Marshall and General Patton close up. He says that Patton was a real character, a showpiece, and that everything about his appearance, down to his pearl-handled holster guns, was highly polished.

  Book says that the war was necessary. “We needed to put the Germans in their place and to straighten out the world.” He recalls that, in all the places he had been, his fellow comrades were always optimistic and their morale was high.

  To raise morale on the homefront, trophies of war, including this captured German tank, minus its track, were shipped back to Pittsburgh, where they were placed on display. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.

  Book was awarded four battle stars and four bronze stars. He is also in the process of filling out papers for a Purple Heart, since he was injured from a shell that landed ten yards from a jeep in which he was a passenger. Again, he was lucky to have suffered only superficial wounds to his eye. He finished his military career as a soldier with the Eighth Division and was honorably discharged at the end of the war.

  Raymond Book went on to be elected a Pennsylvania state representative (1982–90), serving four terms. In 1985, he succeeded in getting his most notable bill passed in the Pennsylvania House. It made it possible for organ donors to be identified on driver’s licenses. His bill also allowed the hospitals to ask the deceased person’s family if they could use vital organs to help sustain life for others. Book, who had witnessed so many deaths during the war, is most proud of a bill intended to save lives.

  WHERE THE HELL IS PEARL HARBOR?

  Bill Gruber,

  As told to Sandy Doyle

  Bill Gruber grew up in Oakland, the oldest of four boys. At Central Catholic High School, he was on both the swim team and the football team. Bill remembers that before World War II, residents of Oakland took the bus or streetcar to work, as few people had cars. There was so little traffic that they would rope off the streets for winter sled riders, putting burnt coal and ashes at the bottom of the hills so the sleds could stop in case a car did come along.

  Bill recalls that many people in his neighborhood were isolationists before the war. On December 7, 1941, he was helping his father wallpaper the dining room when a neighbor came to tell them about the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Bill’s dad said, “Where the hell is Pearl Harbor?” The American people learned a lot more about Pearl Harbor the following day when President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war. Suddenly in his neighborhood, isolationist talk vanished as the country mobilized for war. Bill had high school to finish. He had always “loafed with older guys,” and after graduating from high school in 1942, he couldn’t wait to turn eighteen and join his friends who were already serving in the military. Bill’s dad was not thrilled about his son being in the service and told him that the war would be over soon. If he didn’t have to go, why not wait until he was drafted by the army?

  Because Bill had been on the swim team, he loved the thought of water and ships and wanted to enlist in the navy. Reluctantly, his parents signed the form so that he could join at seventeen. His uncles from World War I told him what to expect: “Average fellows were treated like kings when they were in uniform!”

  Even though Bill thought that the United States was losing the war at the time, he was confident that the Allies would win the war eventually. England, France and Japan had bigger navies, but the U.S. Navy was building ships right here on the Ohio River and would catch up fast.

  Bill feels that the military historically wanted young men because older men would actually think about the danger involved in what they were being ordered to do. According to Bill Gruber, “They don’t want old guys who could think.” The night he left Pittsburgh fo
r basic training was his first time leaving the city. Security was tight because “loose lips sink ships.” None of the men knew their destinations. A line of about two hundred marines and sailors who had enlisted and one hundred older army draftees was marched across the Smithfield Street Bridge in the dark to the P&LE station. The bridge closed down to one lane of traffic. Navy MPs and army SPs with side arms and leggings tried to keep away the civilians who had come to see the men off. Lots of civilians, including Bill’s mother, his aunts and two or three girlfriends, were there. Bill’s dad yelled, “Don’t volunteer for anything and do what they tell you!”

  The March 25, 1942 issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette showed U.S. Marines giving new recruits the “send-off they deserve,” accompanied by American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps, as they marched down Wood Street to the train station. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

  The men were put on an antique steam train called back into service to convey troops to their secret basic training destinations. For security and safety reasons, all recruits were told to sit on the floor. When the packed train pulled out at midnight with full military honors, Bill whacked the seat above him with his hand and dust flew up from the long unused seat. It hadn’t even been cleaned! Two hours later, the train stopped in the pitch black of the countryside. Pulling between two other trains for security, they transferred the army draftees to one train and the marines to another. The sixty navy recruits stayed on their original train. By 7:00 a.m., they were at Samson Naval Training Station, outside Ithaca, New York. Disembarking, Bill thought, “I’m in New York! This is New York dirt!” He observed units marching and thought, “I hope they don’t think that I’m going to do that!”

  Boot camp lasted fourteen weeks. Bill explains the derivation of the term “boot camp.” It actually refers to the leggings worn by soldiers in previous wars. If you were a “boot” you had to wear leggings that snapped up the side of your leg over your boots. The officers could tell the “newbies” from the more seasoned recruits by their “boots” or leggings. One of the things that newbies had to do was navigate a one-mile obstacle course. Mud was made around the course with hoses. Bill was in good shape from playing football and easily completed the course. Even though rifles were not used in the navy, the recruits were taught to break down rifles and clean them. Bill had never fired a gun, but he proved to be a good shot, clustering them close to the bull’s eye on the target range.

  Bill had a seven-day leave before he was to report to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for his overseas deployment. His father, who was the head accountant at Pittsburgh Steel Company, now Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, took him to his office in the Grant Building to “show him off.” Bill met about fifty employees. Pride had overcome his father’s initial reluctance concerning his son’s enlistment. There were three other Pittsburghers from his unit on leave here at the same time. Bill’s mother realized that he could stay a day longer with them if he flew back to New York instead of taking the train with his fellow sailors. Bill decided to play a joke on his friends. He told them that he was going to go AWOL and would not return to the navy to go overseas. They were aghast, saying, “You’re making a mistake! You’re liable to get shot!” After his flight to New York, Bill took a cab from the airport to the barracks and got there before his friends. When they arrived at 1:00 a.m., they found him sleeping in his bunk.

  Bill was sent to Providence, Rhode Island, for gunnery training. There the trainees lived in sheet metal Quonset huts. For two days they used a movie simulator. The object of the simulation was to shoot as fast as possible when an aircraft came on screen from any angle. On the first day, Bill shot down three planes. On the second day, the sky was darkened and clouds added, but he still shot down three planes. He “took to it.”

  Eight of the gunners were sent to Dam Neck, Virginia, about five miles from Virginia Beach. They had five days to get from Providence to Dam Neck carrying sealed orders in an envelope. Dam Neck was a small base run by a lieutenant wearing sandals with his shirttail out. With only about a dozen ships’ companies permanently stationed there, to Bill it seemed like a resort. The men stationed there woke up to a recording of Glen Miller’s band instead of reveille. They would go into Virginia Beach at night. Bill was there for six or eight weeks, training with huge guns embedded in concrete, pointing out to sea. Gunning was loud, but in those days they didn’t have earplugs. When fired, the sound bouncing back could be felt throughout Bill’s entire body. The commercial fishermen knew to stay away.

  His sealed orders said that he was assigned to the USS Phelps, a small destroyer hunting German U-boats. Small destroyers were popularly called “tin cans” and held about 150 men. Bill had requested to be on an aircraft carrier and was transferred off the Phelps. Six weeks later, the Phelps was sunk and more than 100 sailors died.

  Bill was sent to the brand-new aircraft carrier the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was constructed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Christened the USS Coral Sea on April 29, 1945, the ship was renamed for the fallen president the following month. Bill has a card that says “original crew.” He is still amazed that with all of the security that went with moving troops to various locations, the German or Japanese spies never found them but the “bobby soxers” always did. The girls clustered around the train windows with gifts of cigarettes, candy and their addresses. Bill wrote to some of them. The Roosevelt held five thousand sailors and marines. As big as three football fields, it had fifty-four guns in the main battery. Gruber’s mount was a ten-millimeter (five-inch) machine gun. The guns were numbered evenly on the starboard side and odd on the port side. Bill’s gun was #3 on the port side. It had a range of twenty-two miles. Eight-inch and sixteen-inch guns could go even farther. Each gun had a crew of four men above and four men below the gun deck who delivered shells and powder. All eight learned to do each job required in loading. Shells were lined up around the bulkhead. They were put into a hoist, and then a powder keg was added to the shell. When loading the shells from below, if one did not close the hatch with the palm of the hand, with fingers out of the way, it was easy to lose a hand. Bill recalls seeing a shell come up with a dismembered hand on the top.

  Mesta Machine Company produced a wide variety of guns for the war. In this photograph, which required two joined exposures to make a continuous picture, men pose atop one of the largest guns. Senator John Heinz History Center.

  When in his anti-aircraft “open tub” gun mount, the gunner was strapped in a standing position so he could lean back and fire overhead. His feet were strapped into cleats while the turret spun in a circle. The big mounts had a manual control to change direction, but there was no time to do that in the heat of battle. In battle they used a “fire control man” to swing the turret in the direction of the firing. While engaging the enemy, it was possible for the fire control men to be crushed to death between turning gun mounts where there was not enough clearance, even though there were striped pennant warnings posted on the bulkhead in the space between the guns.

  The worst things that Bill saw on the Roosevelt were not battle related. One day, Bill and an acquaintance decided to go up to the deck to watch planes make their “tail hook” landings. The tail hooks were four-inch-diameter cables stretched horizontally across the deck of the ship. These cables caught the tail of the plane when it was landing on the deck so it did not fall off the end of the landing strip and into the water. The two men stood in a pit below the landing deck while observing. Bill kept his cigarettes rolled up in his tee shirt sleeve, and when his pack fell out, he bent down to pick it up. Just as he did, one of the cables snapped and whipped around, beheading the sailor standing next to him. Bill’s first instinct was to run up and grab the head by the hair and bring it back to replace it on the body. He remembers blood pumping from two streams in his neck. Bill believes that he saw life in the man’s eyes for about ten or twelve seconds after the decapitation. A few days later, Bill had a dream where he was in a long tunnel, like Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tunnels. There w
as a head rolling ahead of him in the tunnel. Bill thought, “That head is beating me! It’s outdistancing me! I’m losing to it!” Once in a while he thinks about that kid and his parents getting the letter from the navy. Bill has memories of another grisly accident aboard the Roosevelt. Once, when general quarters was sounded summoning the men to their battle stations, a sailor on the flight deck was so excited to be running for his gun turret that he forgot to duck near a plane. He ran right into the turning propeller. Bill couldn’t stop to help because he was running to his own gun, but he shouted for a medic. Nothing could be done for him. The memories of these tragic losses continue to haunt Bill.

  Bill had a great deal of respect for his commanding officer, Lieutenant Rau, who had graduated from Annapolis. The lieutenant and his young bride (a runner-up for Miss New Jersey) had been featured in a Lux Soap advertisement showing Lieutenant Rau in uniform. One day while in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to resupply, a one-hundred-pound bomb was found to be defective on delivery. Lieutenant Rau asked Bill and some other men to take it out in the open on the flight deck. Lieutenant Rau and Bill Gruber were going to defuse it. The men on the flight deck were moved to starboard. Lieutenant Rau had one pair of pliers, and Bill straddled the bomb with another pair of pliers. In the tense moments of defusing the bomb, a soldier named Holderad was singing a popular song: “Put your little foot, put your little foot, put your little foot right down…” Despite the distraction, they disabled the radio fuse successfully. While in port, the sailors were to be given liberty, which would be especially good for Holderad, who would be able to see his family in nearby Brooklyn. Lieutenant Rau took Holderad’s liberty away for his thoughtlessness during such a suspenseful time.