Ray Bartolo

Greenville, Pa

US Army – World War II

One way to measure military service is by counting the number of years a person actually serves. Another way is to consider how long that service continues to profoundly affect one’s life.

For Ray Bartolo, the first way adds up to three years. The second way stretches out to the rest of his life.

Ray enlisted in the army in the beginning of 1943, not long after graduating from Grove City High School. After basic training in Camp Swift near Austin, Texas, he went on maneuvers in Louisiana, then trained in Ft. Leonard Wood.

Finally, amphibious training on Clemente Island near San Diego led everyone in his unit, the 365^th Field Artillery Battalion of the 97^th Infantry Division, to expect to be sent to the South Pacific – even more so when their equipment was sent to Ft. Lewis, Washington.

But things don’t always go as expected in the military. The Battle of the Bulge broke out in Europe, so the 97^th Infantry was sent to Europe.

Ray was a wireman in the communications section of the artillery battalion.

“The wire section lays telephone wire between the front lines and the headquarters back to the gun emplacements,” Ray said. “Our battalion had 105mm and 155mm howitzers, usually about a mile or two behind the front lines. So the guys manning the guns didn’t know what they were shooting at. A forward observer would see where the shells landed, and tell them over the phone lines whether to raise the guns or lower them, or go to the right or to the left, depending on the targets they wanted to hit.”

While Ray survived the battle, his brother Eddie didn’t.

“He was two years younger than I was,” Ray said. “I went by the cemetery where he was buried, but I didn’t know until late in 1946, after the war, that he was buried in that cemetery. It was near Acton, Belgium.”

After the Battle of the Bulge, Ray’s battalion was sent to southern Germany, where there was still a pocket of resistance near the Czechoslovakian border. That was where Ray encountered a situation which he would never forget.

“Coming back on a wire mission we came upon this huge facility,” Ray said. “We didn’t know what it was. American troops from the 90^th Division were trying to break into it. The gates were charged with high voltage electricity, and we had to wait until it was turned off before we could actually break the gates in.”

It turned out to be Flossenburg Concentration Camp. What they found inside was one of the worst nightmares in human history.

“There were a whole bunch of people in there who looked like walking zombies,” Ray said. “There was a Polish doctor there. He was a Jew, and he could speak a little English, and he took us through the camp, and he showed us thecrematory. He took us into one of the barracks that the prisoners were still in. They didn’t even know that we had liberated the camp.”

What the liberators learned was even more disturbing. The camp had about 7,000 beds – actually, wooden shelves – but there had been 14,000 prisoners there. Half of the prisoners worked for 12 hours a day in an aircraft factory and a quarry while the other half were in the beds. Then they switched.

“The Germans had taken the main contingent of prisoners out and put them on death march to another camp, leaving the ones who couldn’t go, mostly women and older men, and locked the camp up and took off,” Ray said.

Of course, the Americans were totally unprepared for such an experience.

“We were 20 years old and had never even heard the term concentration camp,” Ray said.

The liberation of Flossenburg on April 23, 1945 wasn’t the end of the war for the 97^th Division. As they liberated more towns, there were lots of celebrations, but those didn’t always go the way they should have.

“We had liberated Pilsen in Czechoslovakia, sort of right on the border,” Ray said. “We were in Patton’s Third Army. Just as we were ready to parade into town, a jeep comes down with a guy waving his arm. We saw him talking with our commanding officer. The next thing we knew, we saw this battalion of tanks come rumbling in and park alongside of us. This battalion had just come over from the states, had never been in battle before, and Patton thought this would be an opportunity for him to show off, because Patton was sort of a glory hunter anyway. So we stood there like a bunch of dummies while they went into the camp, and shooting guns and so on, which they had no reason to do because it was already liberated. Our battery and outfit never had a love for Patton after that.”

Even that wasn’t the end of the war for Ray’s division.

“A few days later, I was on a switchboard, because I was in the communications section. I heard through the BBC that we were one of four divisions picked to go to the Pacific theater because the war with Japan was still going on.”

The division was shipped to the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Japan, but Japan surrendered before that was necessary.

“They decided that we were going to Japan anyway,” Ray said. “We went into Japan somewhere around the second week of September.”

While he was there, Ray was one of fifteen soldiers selected for a special mission. American Counterintelligence Corps officers were after fifteen high German officials who had fled to Japan on U-boats. They were wanted back in Germany for the war trials.

“On a certain morning 15 jeeps with the CIC guys and us all hit at the same time, at six in the morning, and got the 15 people that they were after. We brought them back to the hotel and kept them under guard for 24 hours a day until the CIC got ready to transport them to Germany.”

While Ray was in Japan, he contracted asthma.

“MacArthur had given strict orders to our air force that when they bombed Tokyo during the war that they had to stay away from the hospital,” Ray said. “They knew that eventually they would have to invade Japan, and if they ever got a foothold in Tokyo that they would need that hospital. Everything around it was bombed, but the hospital was left intact. I was sent to this hospital, and from there I was sent back to the states.”

Ray arrived in the Presidio of San Francisco on Christmas Day.

“We were escorted into the hospital, and on every bunk there were all kinds of gifts wrapped up in Christmas paper. Later in the afternoon we were given a call to order and we had to stand by our bunks. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby came in. They talked to each one of us, and gave us an envelope. There was a twenty dollar bill in every one of those envelopes. They talked to us for an hour or so in appreciation for what we had done. From there I was sent to the army hospital in Staten, Virginia, and I was discharged from there.”

Ray got home in the early part of 1946.

“When I left for the service, my dad’s hair was as black as coal,” Ray said. “This was just three years later, but his hair was white as snow. – mainly from losing my brother Eddie.”

Eventually, Eddie had his own homecoming. The Belgian government wanted to reclaim the cemetery where he was buried.

“They gave us four alternatives,” Ray said. “They could either have him sent to Flanders Field, in France, or Arlington, in Washington DC, or the military cemetery nearest to us, which at that time I think was around Harrisburg. Or he could be brought home. My parents decided if they’re going to have to move him, they’d bring him home.”

When the VFW in Grove City found out about it, they wanted to start a veteran’s section in the Grove City cemetery. Eddie was the first soldier brought back from the war to be buried there.

The family continued to grieve for Eddie.

“From 1946, until my daughter was two years old, my mother never had a Christmas tree in the house because my brother was wounded on Christmas day, and he died on New Year’s Day.”

Ray’s grief was rooted not in the loss of Eddie, but in his own experiences.

“After I got home I had continually nightmares of what I saw in Flossenburg,” Ray said. “When we went into the barracks and saw the conditions of the people in those cubicles, it imprinted on my mind. After that, anything that had to do with the army or war movies would bring back these. My folks thought I was going nuts for a long time, because I would have these periodically, and they didn’t know what was going on. They would ask me about them, and I just didn’t ever want to tell them about what I saw because it was hard to try to tell anybody. There was so many war stories, and of course my brother had been killed, they were still going through that grieving.”

The nightmares continued until 1995, the 50^th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. Ray saw an article in a VFW magazine telling that a woman whose grandfather had been in Flossenburg wanted to know more about it. Ray responded to the woman, sending her photos and information. That brought him around to facing his nightmares, thus beginning a healing process that was accelerated when he was invited to talk to a group of concentration camp survivors in Pittsburgh.

“There were quite a few of them in the Squirrel Hill area. About eight of them were prisoners in Flossenburg.”

After that, Ray began to talk to about the Holocaust to anyone who would listen – service clubs such as Lions and Kiwanis, and especially students.

“Sometimes when you get maybe 200 or more in an auditorium, you know how rowdy it is,” he said. “But when I start talking about it you can hear a pin drop. That’s how much interest they show in it. They always ask about whether we hate the Germans. I tell them that’s the trouble, we have too much hate and destruction in the world today. We don’t have any love and compassion. I tell them that they are our future generation. They’re going to be our CEOs in industry, our elected officials. I talk with them so they will know the horrors of war, to want peace. I always tell them that I hope to hell that none of them ever have to go through the horrors of a war.  And that’s the way I end up my talk.”

One of his most important talks was before an audience of only two – an interviewer and a video camera man at his home in Greenville, PA. It was part of a project to record the remembrances of people who had personally experienced the Holocaust. The tape is now a permanent part of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

After the interview, Ray received a thank you letter that sums up his contribution:

“In sharing your personal testimony as a liberator of the Holocaust, you have granted future generations the opportunity to experience a personal connection with history. Your interview will be carefully preserved as an important part of the most comprehensive library of testimonies ever collected. Far into the future, people will be able to see a face, hear a voice, and observe a life so that they may listen and learn, and always remember. Thank you for your invaluable contribution, your strength, and your generosity of spirit.”

The letter was signed by the chairman of the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Stephen Spielberg, Academy Award winning director of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

 

Rauch, Shirley Werner

Greenville, PA

Women’s Army Corps – World War II

The collection of military memorabilia in the basement of the Mercer County Historical Society includes a poster of a cute young lady posing wistfully in a pseudo-military uniform. She is saying, “I wish I were a man so I could enlist!”

Fortunately, there were more than 400,000 women in the early 1940s who had more sense than that. They enlisted even though they weren’t men, and contributed to victory in countless ways.

One of them, Shirley Werner Rauch, enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps early in World War II. She learned how to fly a plane without ever flying a plane, and taught others to fly the same way had she learned. There’s no telling how many lives and planes she saved as a result.

Here’s the secret to that success: She was an instructor on the Link Flight Trainer, a simulator invented by Edwin A. Link in the early 1930s. Through a system of air bellows and electrical devices, it moved in very realistic response to the manipulation of controls like those in an airplane cockpit. A recording device on the instructor’s desk traced the “flight path” of the “plane” on a map or chart. It provided a safe and effective means of training pilots to rely entirely on instruments to fly through zero visibility and night conditions.

However, Shirley wanted to serve her country overseas. She probably would have been delighted with today’s opportunities for servicewomen. At that time, the only duty available was one that would probably have delighted the cute girl on the Historical Society’s poster: telephone operator on the old plug-in type switchboards.

The duty may not have been exciting, but the location was stellar: at the Hotel California on the Champs Elysees in Paris. It also gave her the opportunity to meet up with her father there, Lt. Col. Herbert Werner, who was in Paris working on a project for the 12th Armored Division

Shirley is a charter member of the Women in Military Service for America organization. She has a plaque in her honor for her military Service at the Women in Military Service Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Greenville, PA

U.S. Navy – World War II, Korean War

One fine spring day in 1944, Greenville High School senior Tom Hodge became one of the 10,110, 104 men who received “Greetings” from the Selective Service System during World War II. He was sent to Erie for a physical and initial processing.

“I went to a table manned by a lieutenant commander in the Navy and a major in the Army,” Tom said. “As you put your papers on the table, they stamped one ARMY, the next one NAVY, next one ARMY, and so on. By chance I got into the Navy. I was with a boyhood friend of mine. He wanted to be in the Navy so bad he could taste it. I said I don’t care that much. We decided to talk to the officers thinking maybe they would switch it. They wouldn’t even listen to us. Later on, I was glad I was in the Navy because it worked out better for me,” he said.

During boot camp at Sampson, New York, everyone took placement tests, including one on the ability to understand Morse Code.

“I had learned Morse Code in Boy Scouts, so I got a good mark on the test,” he said.

While many from his boot camp class were sent to amphibious forces preparing for the D-Day invasion of Europe, Tom completed a five-month radio school course right there in Sampson. Along with two of his buddies, he was assigned to the radio station at the headquarters of the Fifth Naval District in Norfolk, Virginia.

“We were seaman first class at this point,” he said. “The first three months all we did was make coffee for everybody else. It was good duty. It was mostly all WAVES there and they were excellent operators and knew their business. I had a second class WAVE supervisor. She said I’m going to make a radio man out of you or know why. She did.”

After those three months, they started standing watches on the radios. For two days, they were on from 7 a.m. to 3 pm. The next two, from 3 to 11; and then two from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

“You were sleepy all the time because you never caught up on your sleep,” he said. “We had to type out all of the incoming messages and key the outgoing messages.”

The radio operators had to type the incoming messages and key in the outgoing. All messages were encoded in groups of five letters. Some were one-to-one ship to shore transmissions, while others were broadcast to all of the ships and land bases in the navy through two transmitters, one in Washington, DC, and the other in Hawaii.

“The only excitement I ever had on the radio was one evening when I was sitting on a ship to shore circuit. All of a sudden I heard this loud message come through – a repeated O O O O meaning ‘urgent.’ The ship was trying to reach Charleston, South Carolina, but they weren’t answering. I broke in and said I could forward their message to Charleston. He sent me a message in plain language, which threw me because I wasn’t used to copying plain language. They said they were being attacked by a submarine. German submarines were cruising up along the Atlantic shore, sinking a lot of ships. So I gave message to my supervisor who sent it by land line to Charleston. I never did hear what happened.”

Tom was very content with his duties there, but one of his friends wasn’t. “After about 3 or 4 months, he decided he wanted to go to sea. He requested sea duty on the part of all of us, against my will. We were sent to a receiving station at Norfolk where we sat around for three or four months. Finally our orders came through. We were being sent to be sent to the Azores.”

They sailed on a troop ship to Oran, in North Africa.

“That’s where the British early in the war had sunk the whole French fleet to prevent its ships from being captured and used by the Germans,” he said.

After a week there, they took a train to Port Lyautey, Morocco, then flew on a B-24 to Lajes Air Base on Terciera Island in the Azores. It’s a small island, only about nine miles long and six miles wide, with two small towns, Praia de Vitoria and Angra do Heroismo.

“I remember them well,” Tom said. “I use to go to them on liberty.”

Tom manned radios with a “split circuit” controlled with a toggle switch. One ear heard messages from Bermuda, New York, Norfolk, and Agentia, Newfoundland; the other from Londonderry (North Ireland), Paris, and Port Lyautey, Morocco. Besides the international messages, they handled a lot of air-sea traffic with ships in the area.

“So I encompassed the entire North Atlantic on those two circuits,” Tom said. “When traffic came in, I flipped the toggle switch so I could only hear with one ear to keep from being confused.”

One night he heard a message from Norfolk.

“I knew all the WAVES at radio station there. I sent a message, ‘What is your call sign?’ It turned out that I knew her. So I started asking her questions in Morse Code: what’s so and so doing, how are things in Norfolk, blah blah blah. This was during the war. That was strictly forbidden. A Long Island station captured all this on the log, so the captain of our base got a notice that someone was doing unauthorized transmission. They looked back and sure enough there were my initials on the log. I got a Captain’s Mast, a low-level disciplinary action – basically, a reprimand.”

When the war was over the “point system” was used to determine eligibility to go home. As one of the youngest, Tom had the least points.

“So I was one of the last to leave,” he said. “I had option to go back on B-24 as its radio operator. We landed in Argentia, and were socked in about a week. Then on to New York City. I had never been there. You could go anywhere on the subway for a nickle.”

When Tom was processed out of the Navy at Bainbridge, Maryland, he was receptive to the pitch they gave about joining the inactive reserves.

“It sounded good. We wouldn’t be called up unless there was a war,” he said. “Then in late forties, there was trouble with Russians, so I signed up for active duty. I didn’t hear anything for several years. During that time I graduated from Thiel College with bachelor’s degree, got married, and had two children.”

Then came the Korean War. Tom was activated. After refresher training, he was assigned to the reconditioned USS Wasp aircraft carrier.

“During re-commissioning, Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch came aboard and spoke,” he said. “Captain McCafferty, the ship’s captain, said he would see to it that the Wasp would be a taut ship. And he did. He was a good captain.”

The USS Wasp had 3000 people on board, including the radio crew of 50 men. There were ten radio shacks, each with five radios.

“We weren’t too busy,” Tom said, “but during General Quarters (emergency alert), all radios were manned. I was a pretty good operator so they assigned me to radio central during GQ.”

The Wasp headed for Guantanamo Bay for a shakedown cruise. On the way, they had operational exercises.

“Landing on an aircraft carrier is very difficult,” Tom said. “The ship would be tossing backward and forward and side to side. They had to catch a cable that brought them to a halt. We lost two new pilots right out of training who missed the cables and didn’t have the power to take off.”

The carrier didn’t have the same planes all of the time. “Squadrons would come and go. We always were glad to see the squadrons leave because that meant chow lines would be a lot shorter.”

Tom was released from active duty almost exactly one year after he had been recalled. He credits the Navy with giving him discipline which made him a better person.

“I went in as an immature kid,” he said. “For the first six or eight weeks I was so homesick I could hardly stand it. But once I got into radio school and had something to learn, I enjoyed it from that time on.”

That’s not too surprising, given the nature of his duties. “I was always warm and comfortable with a mug of coffee right at hand.”