ground working on guns and then they shipped me to california now there are several ways that a soldier can die they sent me to the first one in california out in the desert training what do you think is out in the desert scorpions rattlers and coral snakes one night and went to an outdoor theater e in the desert you don't know where the sound was coming from because it's so hollow but i finally made it made it home that's one way to die then we went to shipped over into england and landed liverpool state around commentry and through there and i don't know if you know this but you go dancing over there the they made a mistake on they took pictures of normandy where we had the land and they took the flag time they didn't take stereo you know i mean so they couldn't tell h hard those hedges were so when we got there they were monsters as high as a ceiling and the tank shoes couldn't go through so i was in a tank maintenance are fit and we had to go back to the beach and pick up these monstrous metal things that they had their attachment to the tank so act like a plow and plow through they were fairly good but not really great and of course when we did this the german planes as spy planes would be seen in the torch on so we hear a plane and we shut the torch off sometimes a plane coming over and we you know a little cricket stick click click click where they didn't last very long because in other words when you heard that you know there was an american around the head which was wrong because there was a german there what happened was when the germans cocked their gun click click makes the same exact noise as that so we threw that out a while nobody would listen to that for what they sent us the ship and let me tell you for about a week when southern southern england no places to live except on the ground and muck and everything i'm sure by the end of the week i'm all in it was still raining we must of stunk i mean real bad i swear that when we landed in germany i think the the troops ran away from the stink of the oh they sent us these ships to a place called piccadilly circus you ever hear piccadilly circus you must of been in london there's  famous play at piccadilly circus but our piccadilly circus was a place between england and france it was a staging area where all the thousands of ships had to go they had war ships they  had supply ships and everything and they just can all take off and go inland at the same time they had to go on a certain order and iron so that was the name of that area was called piccadilly circus staging area well when when i landed i had the water up them up to my up to my appeared to top of the head and then i tried to use my and when i got down on the bottom try to move forwards and then pop myself back up again and i did that three or four times and finally was able to get so the water was about here that was another way to die besides the rattlesnakes now everything three people were not on guard duty or have to have guards around your area and they were supposed to be relieved at two o'clock they weren't really the two o'clock so they waited till two thirty and they came in and look again and sure enough everybody sleeping everybody was sleeping or almost dead from carbon monoxide that's another way to die carbon monoxide when they came to me i could hardly open my eyes so he went away and came back in fifteen minutes he says i you wait now it's a little move your eyelids if that is if you are ok and i move my eyelid no it was coming too it took me about three hours i couldn't move my arms couldn't move my legs i was the closest to death i came on that there was another way so carbon monoxide and as another thing it saved my life we were run in some woods in a certain area and all of a sudden his buddy says come on let's get out of here i want to come on don't start to get out of here so you know you trust each other i'll tell you there's a camaraderie amongst the the soldiers when they get together that i wished that come roddy would exist in civilian life i mean we really bonded together so we went it wasn't five minutes that area where we were at was bombed and with artillery the person had that fellow had a dream from his wife is married and his wife says get out of there i don't know how that happened i still can't believe it but it happens it's all you know it happened so i was there and that's the dream had been another way my life unbelievable i took my family over there in twenty fifteen in normandy and there they got the place pretty well fixed up very nice museums and very friendly and so course they have him on the wrong side because it would grass all over but now because of tourism they made all our grass with you know tar and so on and they switched him from where he landed landed on the back side to the front side are the people come in with a parking lot they can see they can see where where the soldier is that some believable then of course went with patton a couple times and he is not a back room general i mean he goes right to the front right where the shooting that's it he had a couple tanks with friends of his friends that the machine guns were not working if they sent a couple of us up there are three different outfits and nobody was able to fix it the gun looked perfect so i went up there something told me before i go up there that i better take some of these before they had a spring in a metal spring so every time the seer would hit the guns and be fired it would kick back and then push another around in that spring after so many times it would kind of wear down and break so they put upon the idea of using these wafers so i took the gun apart can't find anything wrong with it so i said must be the wafers and i never did a job with the wafers never so i took four or five out put four or five new and put them in for me i went out here almost a pack and me he says fantastic he said i'm that four or five different outfits nobody's been ever doing just i'm go a later but of course it's a it's a hard thing i can understand where you have supplies coming in two soldiers or different outfits and you think the other one should have been the other one should not have been and he wanted it to as he was ready to go they wanted to slow him down it's going too fast and so on if they don't listen to him we would never have had the battle bastone which was very very bad i in the wintertime you know i almost froze my hands because we had to go right away he said we need somebody to go there and relieve so forth so that he says my outfit will go there and we'll get there within so many hours eisenhower find it hard to believe but we did we got there and that well let me tell you i never saw so many frozen stiff as if they're real real bad unbelievable but that was real bad but the germans were held down because they were running not  gasoline no gasoline so if you don't have gasoline you can't move they want to go to the the air the to the port cut us our supplies off it was another thing after we landed in normandy there because we had they had a big storm you know very big storm but later on in that month june nineteenth around that area one hundred twenty two they had a storm worse than that one and it was the biggest storm in forty years so sherbert which was our supply place the damage so after a while in the june and july we were  starting to run out of supplies and  we had times where we were in the middle of friends and we see german tanks and things up ahead and we can't fire because if we fire we would have enough ammunition to keep going then they'd get us so  that was it so they got it crossed on that so then they had to make a what they call the red ball express when you probably read about it you read about the red ball express where they had six by six trucks going in and get all this in a gasoline tank fire in a tank nothing is such thing as a frontline world war one there's a frontline where you get in the ditch and you fire the germans over there and you violet in world war two you're all over the place  way down in the bottom of germany if you ever go to germany you should go down there in bavaria because there's a town there it has all religious motifs on the buildings all kinds of things and they hold a passion play there every ten years they have a big huge stage they have the actual animals on the stage cattle and so for the really big it's amazing every ten years they do that they had some wood carvers out of a log they did called the last supper and that time they sold around three thousand dollars you're lucky to get them for fifty sixty seventy thousand dollars believable but the works of art they really are full cold miserable ready to go to hell it was wicked i mean it was muck all over trucks and tanks getting stuck no gasoline do move with you know it was wicked couldn't couldn't be any worse than be any did clear up and planes came over and they helped us a lot we were able of knock a lot of the german tanks out but they couldn't go on and they didn't have gasoline and they couldn't get it they had no way of getting supplies of gasoline to their tanks so they had  speak so we were lucky in that respect let's put it this way it helped me to no human beings better i saw all facets of life people who are getting bombed in england people who got killed in france and germany who lost their homes and are running away with whatever little cot they had to bring their belongings it was a crying shame i mean those people nothing left to go how's a smash would you do i mean it was a disgrace saul facets of light but by the same token also i met some families in germany because we were billeted in a different houses after the war and we used to go to see this family and by the way the grandfather there he had a gold plant this in the city of four time known as the gold city of europe and they sold trinkets and gold and all kinds of stuff and we used to go there every evening and they would tell us all the different and these people told us and then they would also go around trying to make families with girls get together with good looking  an boys to make the master race and it was pretty hard to refuse this this family was able refused because they were high up and off and they had enough money and so on it was wicked absolutely work and soul but still friends with them they come and see me and i go see them so there's good and bad in all nations some of them would hoodwinked they couldn't do anything about it they had to in fact some of the families their own  family members would squeal on the family so they had to shut up even with their children very very sad situation or had a great voyage home we were shipped from germany to a place near sherbert called the camp lucky strike can chesterfield i'm lucky strike and so on we got on the boat and they made a big splash in the papers big fleet coming home where we had the greatest storm on the way back and everybody was throwing up all in fact the aircraft carrier and reprised came across and the blow the bottle was split absolutely split and they had their engines running to get rid of the water and they just barely made it into port and