Ernest Graves
Normandy landing areas, and all the other depot areas--gone not once but
repeatedly--I had seen all types of units--good ones and bad ones. I had a very good
notion of what a good unit ought to do, and this unit wasn't doing it.
Q:
It must have been a kind of demoralizing experience in some ways. I mean, to have to
deal with that at that level.
A:
You asked whether I was concerned? I certainly was because I didn't want to be part
of an outfit that was not doing well. And I felt I was. Most of the men were good
people. But we didn't have the officer leadership. I will say this. I don't remember each
of the members of my platoon individually, but I remember my platoon sergeant was
very good. I remember my three squad leaders were very good.
If I told them, "This is what we have to do," they could do it. But it was hard to try to
have one platoon out of a whole battalion perform at a high level when the others
weren't.
To condemn all the officers would be unfair. There were some excellent platoon
leaders, particularly Danny Geise, the former NCO. He was outstanding. He had been
a master sergeant in Alaska, and he realized he was never going to get out of there
unless he volunteered to go to officer candidate school. So he did. He was good. But
he didn't, at least initially, try to have the order and discipline that I was trying to have.
Q:
When did you get to Germany?
A:
We got to Germany in the middle of April. The war was essentially over. We went into
the Bad Kreuznach area and into the Saarland--Saarbrucken and Saarlautern. They
scattered the battalion in that area. It was occupation duty, but we were also working
to patch roads and that type of engineer work. We were there for about two months.
We arrived in April and left in the middle of June for Marseilles to redeploy to the
Pacific.
Q:
Ah! So you really weren't in Europe very long.
A:
We weren't in Europe very long. I had no real combat experience.
Q:
You didn't get what your father said you ought to have.
A:
That's true, although I learned a lot. Those experiences did me in good stead later, but
I wasn't with a unit that was doing a lot of challenging things or accomplishing a lot.
Q:
Did you redeploy to the Pacific as a battalion?
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