LSTs (landing ship tanks) were launched sideways into the Ohio River. From there they were floated down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. Senator John Heinz History Center.
War paraphernalia did not turn out to be the souvenirs he brought home. The reality of dead soldiers and the humanity of the enemy were the “souvenirs” Fred took home and would never be able to get rid of. He has two other memories of Normandy. “To this day I do not like sardines,” Seifert states. “I saw a can of sardines [at Juno] and I saw these soldiers. They were just floating, bobbing up and down. I said to my friend George [of one soldier], ‘Hey let’s pull him out of the water!’ And look, he had a little hole here. Well, the sergeant major said, ‘Roll him over.’ Well, the whole back of his head was missing. But he had a can of sardines and pictures coming out of his knapsack. The pictures I put back in his knapsack as we propped him up on shore. But I thought, ‘He won’t eat these sardines, I’ll take them back with me.’ You know what, when I went to bite into those sardines, I threw up.” As his eyes fill with tears, he continues, “…And today I don’t eat sardines…[because] I thought of that.”
Fred relates the story of his first encounter with a German POW. “You know you think it’s a superman,” Fred says. “When you see them, some of them, hell, they’re not much different than we are. You don’t realize…The first one I saw, he had a crucifix. And I said, ‘Can’t be…it can’t be!’ And it was a crucifix, not just a cross. So you’re sort of shaken by it. We are fighting human beings no different than we are.” After taking a pause to hold back tears and years of emotion, Fred sums up, “Yea, that was an experience…seeing the crucifix.”
After the invasion of Normandy, the Overman headed back to London. When on the English Channel, Fred saw his first V-1 buzz bomb, on June 12, 1944. “I remember the first one,” Fred says. “We fired at it and, God, we misjudged the speed. We thought it was going slow; it sounded like it was lumbering along, but actually it was going three hundred [miles per hour]. And we were missing it, way astern…[But] we didn’t know what they were. No idea what they were. Everybody was dumbfounded to find out they were V-1s, which we found out a couple of days later.”
Once in London, the ship picked up more troops to take back to Normandy, “which was dangerous because we were crossing that bad spot [in the English Channel]. I couldn’t figure out why they were doing that there. But they couldn’t have all their troops coming from one place so they had to divide us up.” Fortunately, the Overman arrived at Normandy safely for the second time. Allied troops were dropped off, and the ship returned to the United States.
After a thirty-day leave, Fred was assigned to the SS Henry S. Lane. On September 4, 1944, Fred left New York in a convoy, taking troops to England and then up the Schelde River to Antwerp, Belgium, while the Battle of the Bulge was being fought. He remembers being told, “If you tie up [at] the dock, have somebody ready to leave…you might have to leave in a hurry.” This perplexed the sailors at first. Fred describes, “Even the captain couldn’t figure out why we would have to leave in a hurry. Then the signal went out and the radio operator found out that the Germans had broken through.” As the Germans headed toward Antwerp in an attempt to divide Allied troops, they sent V-2 rockets into the city. “There was no defense against them,” recalls Fred. “They were the real rockets. You could see them and then all of a sudden there was a boom. Those things would come in and, man, they hit!” The V-2 rockets caused mass devastation, which Fred witnessed firsthand. He describes a particularly painful memory. “There was a theatre called the Rex Theatre in Antwerp. One of the V-2 rockets hit the theatre and there were some casualties. And the gunnery officer said to me, ‘You wanna take some men up and see if any of our boys got it?’ Cause they were sure [that they did].” The attack killed over six hundred Americans. As he retells the story, the horror of the memory is apparent in Fred’s flushed face and broken speech, but he continues: “It was a carnage there. It was a sight that you probably didn’t want to see again. Cause there’s bodies just torn apart. And now, well you did realize that war was hell, but now you’re getting it more and more that it is.” While he still knew the enemy was the enemy, the once inexperienced sailor was no longer excited and gung-ho. The reality of war had set in. Fred was more than ready to return to the United States when his duty on ship was completed on June 1, 1945.
The war was financed not only through heavier taxation but also through the sale of war bonds to the public through patriotic messages. They were promoted through a series of “drives,” eight in all, as the need for funding continued. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.
Fred then attended ammunition handling school at Camp Peary, Virginia, from October to November 28, 1945. He was sent to a naval ammunition depot in Red Bank, New Jersey. With the war over in Europe, Fred defused bombs in the United States. Here he served until his enlistment ran out on February 20, 1946, his twenty-first birthday. He was honorably discharged with the rank of coxswain.
For Fred, life seemed to grow more difficult once he returned to “normal life.” He describes how he lacked a desire to do much and was prone to episodes of anxiety and vomiting. Despite this, Fred finished high school at Taylor Allderdice and then went to Duquesne University on the GI Bill. Still, he had difficulty adjusting to life at home and continued getting panic attacks. Even though he made appointments, he never really wanted to go to a doctor and thus never kept them. Eventually the 52-20 club (twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks’ readjustment pay) helped him refocus. He also feels that “Duquesne took very good care of veterans.” It was there, in a psychology course, he finally realized what was “wrong” with him when he read about post-traumatic stress disorder.
With time, Fred was able to heal his war “wounds.” He devoted his life to the education, growth and development of children. He eventually got married and had nine children, raising them in the Pittsburgh area. He also obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education from Duquesne University and worked as a teacher and principal in the Penn Hills School District. Since retiring, Fred has spent much time as a volunteer at local hospitals and nursing homes. Fred says that one of the greatest rewards of his service in World War II was that, combined with his Catholic upbringing, he formed a strong moral code. His war experience gave him an understanding of humanity that Fred has continued to employ throughout his life.
Part III
Husband and Wife Stories
OCEANS APART
James Arthur Krebs and Helen McGrogan Krebs,
As told to Helen E. Krebs
Many soldiers went off to war engaged to loved ones who promised to wait for them, but not too many such engagement stories involved both parties deploying to different theaters of the war. James Arthur Krebs, known as “Art” in the family, served with the U.S. Army Engineering Corps as an officer directing the building of landing strips in the South Pacific, while his fiancée, Helen McGrogan, was a surgical nurse on hospital ships, making sixteen crossings of the Atlantic. They corresponded for three and a half years of wartime service before they were both married in uniform after Germany’s surrender.
Art Krebs was the oldest child of German-speaking immigrants who settled in the Southside of Pittsburgh near the turn of the century. Art spoke nothing but German until the time he entered the first grade. His father was an accomplished tailor who set up his own shop in the newly developing neighborhood of Beechview, not realizing that it was never to attract the clientele for custom-made clothing. Still, he was able to establish a reputation that drew customers from all over the Pittsburgh area. Although the family had Americanized, they saw their trade slowed during World War I and purchased a huge American flag to hang from the building, lest customers be suspicious of their German origins. Disaster struck the family when Art’s father and his six-year-old sister died in the influenza epidemic at the war’s end. Art, age fourteen, grew up fast, as he took on the responsibili
ty for his mother, sister and two younger brothers. Although his education was interrupted by the necessity of full-time work, he graduated in 1931 at the beginning of the Depression from Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in civil engineering. Art was the only one of his class to have a job awaiting him, and that was as a clerk in a hardware store. When World War II started, he had his recently lapsed ROTC commission reactivated so that he could serve in the army engineering corps. Art always suspected that FDR deliberately helped facilitate the attack on Pearl Harbor to involve the United States in the war.
Helen McGrogan was the oldest of five children. Her father was a foreman in the mines in West Newton, twenty-one miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Despite her father’s death from black lung disease when she was fourteen, the family managed to find the resources to enroll her in a nursing program at Pittsburgh Hospital after her graduation from high school at seventeen. She was working as a nurse at Magee Women’s Hospital in Oakland when she met Art while tending to his mother before her death from cancer. Frustrated with staffing shortages, she resigned and enlisted in the U.S. Army Nursing Corps in June 1941. This classified her as “regular army,” in service prior to the United States’ entry into the war. She was writing Christmas cards when she learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The desperate need for nurses led to accelerated training programs. The cadet nurses of the May 1944 graduation class at Homestead Hospital have already received their uniforms. William J. Gaughan Collection, University of Pittsburgh.
The Krebs family had kept in touch with Miss McGrogan after their mother’s death, so when Art was sent to Indiantown Gap, he knew that Helen was already stationed there. He renewed their acquaintance, and a romance blossomed. Helen invited Art to take her to a dance at the officers’ club, and he at first refused and then hurried home on leave to get some dancing lessons from his sister before taking Helen up on the invitation. She had her picture taken in uniform while she was there. Art saw it on display in the photographer’s window, promptly bought it and carried it with him all through the war. When her deployment seemed imminent, he stripped his bank account to buy her an engagement ring, knowing that no jeweler would consider giving credit to a soldier off to war. When she accepted, he tried to convince her to marry him, but she, seeing the risks ahead for both of them, asked him to wait until they met again in the same port. He saw her off on the train and thought again about all the young men she would be meeting in the future. Art was granted a leave to take the train to Fort Dix hoping to convince Helen to marry him at once. He found that she had already been deployed to the Port of New York. He arrived there, only to see her ship disembark. In trying to trace her movements, Art attracted the attention of army intelligence, which wanted to know why he was asking so many questions.
Helen served on three different hospital ships stationed in the North Atlantic in the next three and a half years, the longest of these services on the USAHS Chateau Thierry, refitted from World War I. As a surgical nurse, she participated in the North African campaign, the Italian invasion and the invasion of southern France.
Although there were times when they operated for thirty-six hours straight following a battle, there were also opportunities to see parts of the world she had only heard about. She enjoyed her leave in England and even made her way to Edinburgh, Scotland, but missed out on seeing London because of the bombings. She couldn’t wait to get ashore and explore Naples and was exasperated with her fellow nurses who stayed on the ship, playing cards in their stateroom. She pulled back the curtains on them, demanding that they look out on the famous Bay of Naples, reminding them that they would probably never be there again. They reluctantly looked and returned to their cards. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius at this time was a great concern to the Allies, who feared that the glow in the sky would make their invasion ships visible to the enemy. Instead, Vesuvius served as a beacon to the Allies navigating the waters to the beachhead.
Helen scoured the bazaars of Morocco looking for items to send back to her family at home. She developed a never-fail system for doing what she wanted on shore. She and a nurse friend would ask their commander to assign them a corpsman to accompany them on leave. The officer would object, “Surely two attractive women like you will have no difficulty finding soldiers to escort you,” to which she would reply, “Yes, but then we would have to do what they want, and we want to shop.” As Helen browsed the shops, the men assigned to escort duty often purchased duplicates of her selections for their own wives, mothers and sisters. She received grateful letters from relatives who noticed the change in quality of the souvenirs from the “junk” their men usually sent home.
The shipboard community was like a village. Many of the hospital ships even had their own newspapers. There was a proliferation of different “clubs” of like-minded individuals with similar hobbies. There was always a group interested in theater who formed a chorus or performed skits. One night, several days sailing out of New York, the crew was invited to a choral presentation of a new musical entitled Oklahoma! The audience was thrilled and uplifted by the story and music. Officers, who had not planned to attend, were drawn in by the music and stood in awe. They were informed that Rodgers and Hammerstein were opening this show on Broadway that very night, and they had seen to it that the ship had received an advance copy so they could enjoy the show along with the New York audience. That musical remained Helen’s favorite.
Art had assumed that he would be assigned to the European Theater as well. When he received his commission, as an officer he was responsible for his own uniforms, unlike the GIs who had government-issued uniforms. All the major stores had military uniform departments during the war. Art purchased his dress uniforms from Kaufmann’s Department Store in Pittsburgh, and his wool shirts and heavy, long, wool coat survived the war in pristine condition. He ended up with an assignment in the Pacific Theater. Art served with the 198th Engineer Aviation Company and the 362nd Engineers, building airfields for army air corps bombers and fighters in islands throughout the South Pacific, including New Caledonia and Tinian.
Art shuddered at the thought of thousand-year-old coral beds that they dug up, deposited on land and crushed to make the landing strips. The lumber shipped across from the mainland was expensive, long-lasting redwood destined for temporary wartime use. He saw shiploads of jeeps and other equipment dumped into the ocean at the end of the war because it was too expensive to transport them back once they had been deemed unnecessary. He reflected that war is all about waste.
World War II exacted an enormous toll on America’s resources, including its iron ore deposits. The worker at Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation’s Elizabeth furnace in 1942 is cutting steel beams. Senator John Heinz History Center.
War has long periods of inactivity punctuated by bursts of exhausting effort. During the long periods on the hospital ship, Helen learned to knit and crochet, a very difficult accomplishment for her because, as a lefty, she could never learn how from her mother. Handcrafts and needlework were extremely popular onboard ship. The surgeons could not afford to let their fingers get stiff and were constantly working on projects so they would be ready when the time came for surgery. One of the doctors returned home with a complete set of needlepoint chair covers for his wife. Anyone stationed on a hospital ship was sure to leave with extensive dental work and all the elective surgery they needed. The doctors and staff had to stay on top of their game. But when casualties arrived, there was little rest. In that time when they were desperately needed, Helen was grateful for the newly developed sulfa drugs that saved so many from dying of infection. By war’s end, they also had the miracle of penicillin.
There were moments of strife as personalities clashed. Helen knew an “egotistical, atheistic doctor who relished in teasing the nurses and reducing them to tears.” She had a tendency to snap back with a sarcastic remark and then to run to her superior to tell her side of the story first rather than be accused of insubordination. Her command
er always found her justified and extracted apologies from her antagonist. Helen claimed that those professed atheists, who frequently belittled the devout, would be sitting beside the Catholic nurses saying the Rosary when the bombs started falling.
Despite her poor circumstances growing up and her lack of self-confidence in high school, Helen took to command easily. She set up her routines and held her assigned corpsmen to them. Occasionally, someone would interfere with her routine and she would strongly object. One Sunday, she headed out of her unit for Mass and happened to find her corpsmen washing down the walls. She was appalled that they should be working unnecessarily on a Sunday and confronted them about it, only to be told that another officer, seeing them idle, had given them the assignment. Helen immediately hunted up the other officer and, in no uncertain terms, asked why he had interfered with her routine. “Have you ever worked men for twenty-four hours straight, given them coffee and thrown them back in for another twelve hours? Well, I have. These are trained medical corpsmen, not laborers. We have our routine and walls are washed each week according to schedule. Don’t you dare interfere with my command again!” When she asked her men why they had started the job in the front room instead of in the back as per routine, they confessed that they were afraid that she might not have seen them until the job was done. If she had to pass them on her way, they knew that she would come to their rescue.
Pittsburgh Remembers World War II Page 9
