Norman Grotheer: World War II Veteran

Norman Grotheer has worked as a farmer, a troubleshooting electrician, and a factory foreman for W.S. Dickey Clay. His ability to successfully perform those jobs was greatly enhanced by the lessons he learned and the skills he gained as a part of his first job: a Medic in the United States Army during World War II. He was a Staff Sergeant in a company whose tour was highlighted by extensive work at the Battle of the Bulge and leading in the effort to end the war in Europe.

Norman Grotheer during his days in the Army.

I was born April 18 , 1921 and raised in the, in the farmhouse that’s, that’s three quarters of a mile south of the hospital. My mother’s name was Mary and my father’s name was Carl; my mother was born in South Dakota and my dad was born right here in the east part of Pittsburg. They lived on this dairy farm. My dad started out with this eighty acre farm and a team of mules that he farmed with and that was their beginnings.

The thing that I can remember [of my childhood] was mad dog scares, that was in the days when we had general ring on the old wall telephones, and they would come on the line and say, “Hey, we got a mad dog in the area comin’ down Rouse, come through and bit some cattle in Hildebrand dairy,” and we had to get all the pets inside and get ready for this mad dog comin’ down the road. We had one go rabid after that--a collie, and that was back when I was just a small child, would’ve had to be in 1925 or six, somewhere in there. [I] remember my dad had a hired man at that time workin’ for him, and I can remember ‘em lookin’ for this dog that had gone rabid. One of ‘em carried a lantern, a kerosene lantern, in front of ‘em and one behind--one of ‘em walking backwards--so that they could not be surprised; and they found this mad dog under the front porch. And it was coughin’ and wheezin’ and carrying on under there, and they shot it right underneath the front porch. The people that lived where the Hildebrand dairy is, [near the intersection of Rouse and Centennial] lost two or three [cows] that the dog came through and snapped the cows waiting to be milked in the barn lot.

[I went to a] one room school that was called Able School. One room, one teacher, and that was up here across the corner where Chatter’s [restaurant] is now. It was quite a experience. They usually had all eight grades in one school. They had a couple benches up at the front of the school, and each class went up in rotation and recited their stuff up by the blackboard in the front of the school. Usually twenty students [in that one room]. Lookin’ back on it it was a pretty good education for the grade school.

When my brothers and I were young teenagers, or before that even, we always did hunting and fishing. The one thing that I can remember was usually every summer we would save up enough money to buy a twenty foot minnow net, and we would sain [for] bait [in] those various farm ponds. Once in a while we would catch some nice perch that were big enough to eat.

I was drafted in ‘40, maybe early ’41. I wanted to fly, and I spent several hundred dollars on my teeth, and so forth, thinking that I’d make it to the Air Force; but I didn’t. Then I got inducted into the Army.

Basic training started out in Arkansas, and I was in the medics very early in the game. All through my basic training we had doctors that were our instructors, and they gave us a lot of first aid stuff--intensive first aid stuff. In fact, had it [the emergency medical service] been going at that time we would’ve been like paramedics. We did a lot of practice with bandages, and splints, and bandages, and so forth. I can remember it being really very hot that summer we were there [in Arkansas], and I remember a couple of special forced marches that were tough because of freshly oiled roads. The hills around Little Rock, Arkansas, they were tough. Then, after I took the basic training in Arkansas for the medical corps, went to Camp Barkley, Texas and was changed into an ambulance company. I was in a ambulance the rest of my time. [There we were] workin’ on the roads and the barracks; that was a newly activated post; and part of my time I would get on a detail that was hauling road material, some stuff that they called Calechi, kind of a, oh, a weathered limestone gravelly material that we put on the streets there in Barkley.

We had a good cross-section [of officers]. Of course, we had medical administrative officers that were all college men. But my particular platoon officer, a first lieutenant, was a professional horse trader from DeBet, Colorado and that was his livelihood--trading horses. [I was a] Staff Sergeant. I had tried for an officer’s position after I finished my basic. My IQ score was almost borderline; I was right at the cut off line for the general IQ.

Before we went to Europe, I did some photography stuff when I was stationed in National Barracks, New York--which was a permanent installation up there, only about a thousand troops on the whole post. In the wintertime, we convoyed from upstate New York to West Virginia with our ambulances. Was good experience coming down the East coast. With all the traffic they got up and down the East coast, we made that with one night overstay. We came from upstate New York down to Allentown, Pennsylvania and then come on down to Clarksburg, West Virginia the next day. So we made that convoy in about two days’ time.

I can remember going to Europe real plainly; it was August the thirteenth, at thirteen o’clock, from pier thirteen New York City. So, I thought, boy if you were gonna be superstitious nows [not a good day]! We landed in Scotland, and were in England. Crossed the full length of the British Isles from Scotland clear down through, and wound up south of London for a couple of months. Then we left Liverpool to go across the channel, and landed on Omaha beach, ‘course it was long past the exciting part of it. It was all pretty well--roadways been made up through the sand dunes and stuff at Omaha beach.

I had a good time in England. We stayed in a place south of London that was Sir John Dill, that was some kind of a diplomat over there in England at the time; we stayed in his summer home in a little town called Maidenhead, and we were within bicycle distance of Windsor Palace. [We were there] a couple of months--not even that much, maybe a month. It was good time. I went to see the sights in London a couple of times. I made a special trip to the London Zoo. They had a special building, it was like a two or three story building that housed nothing but birds of the parrot family, from Australia and all the connected colonies that they had. They had already moved all the dangerous animals, all the big cats and the bears and things, they had already moved them out of town.

Once we got overseas, we spent a lot of time servicing our vehicles. When we had slow time we would rig up a confiscated German, engine-driven pump and figure out a place to wash all our ambulances. In our whole bunch, we had thirty ambulances. Each platoon had ten, and I was in the first platoon. I had ten ambulances, and each one had a driver and an assistant, two guys working together. We spent a lot of time washing our trucks. Mostly it was a lot of waiting time, with ambulances waiting to fill up. We were capable of hauling four at a time and sometimes we would stay a day and a night without having a single casualty. In fact, the company that I was in, the 489^th ambulance company, and a sister company the 488^th lost one man out of the two companies; now, each company had a hundred and fifty and so that meant one loss out of three hundred troops. So, we were real fortunate in our losses, our casualties.

[In] France, we were in tents; two-man pup tents, and we had a lot of rain. The only hazards that we had at that time was German soldiers that were scattered up through the woods that would snipe if they saw any lights at night. So, we had to be real careful with any kind of flashlights and stuff around camp. We were billeted in a little village close to Fountain Bleu. It wasn’t-uh-hazardous or uncomfortable or anything except a lot of rain. They had an awful rainy season, that would have been early winter.

The Dutch village of Eigelshoven

In Holland, we were there I guess a couple of weeks, [there was] a little middle- aged couple. The fellow was the air raid warden of that town, and he had a wife and two little girls. I can remember carrying those two little girls, sometimes both of them, down to the air raid shelter--they were like two or three years old--till the air raid was over. That little coal mining town seemed to be a target. The Germans wanted that coal mining town out of production ‘cause they bombed it a couples of times while we were there. One time there was a bomb that lit like fifty yards to the side of the road when we were returning from the mess hall. You could see the bomb leave the airplane and fall on the ground, and hit the ground. But it was a dud, it didn’t go off. The thing that’s scarier than the bomb, as far as the war was concerned, was strafing [attacking ground positions with machine gun fire from low-flying aircraft] from an airplane. They loved to catch a convoy crowded on the highway where you couldn’t move any faster ‘cause you were stopped with the traffic. And then they would come down, almost always come out of the sun, where the only thing you could see that you knew anything was wrong [was] the trucks up ahead of you would be stopped, and guys would be bailing out on both sides of the highway. Jumpin’ out and runnin’ away from their vehicles; and they’d come strafin’ down through there. Usually, one or two passes and that’d be all; they’d be gone.

After the stay in France, we went into Achen, Germany; and it was fairly cold.

This is quite a fortified area, and it took ‘em quite awhile to get past that. After that [stay], things moved pretty fast. We were back far enough that we hauled a few casualties, and I can remember a couple trips with bad head injuries--that had to go back to Liege, Belgium to the main hospital in Liege. We crossed right at the Browning Gun Factory at the north end of Liege. We came past it time after time on our way back and forth to the hospital. I usually rode a jeep, and was leading a convoy of two or three. Many times we were just single, and I would take the lead and get them out on the main highway and get them going.

I had a jeep accident in a town in Germany that had a lot of wreckage and a lot of rubble and bricks piled up at the crossroads. Another army vehicle clipped the back end of our jeep; and my lieutenant and I were, were in this jeep and turned it over. During the early stages of the war, the German soldiers would string up piano wire just the right height to clip you if you were riding with your windshield down because of the blackout. We had this angle iron to clip the wires that they strung across the road. That angle that we had bolted to the front of the jeep kept it [the wreck] from hurting either one of us anymore than it did, even though we rolled the jeep a couple circles, the angle kept it from mashing us. One time we were moving the ambulances, and an American soldier [was] walking along the road with his hands up to his face. When I got up even with him, there was blood streaming down his cheeks. He was uncovering land mines, and he had thought he had found a mine, and he throwed a forkful of frozen earth over to one side and hit another one that blew the dirt and the splinters in his face.

[The Jeeps] weren’t anything special, they were made to carry four litters at a time, and almost all of ‘em were manufactured by Dodge. [The people would have been] hanging from straps, two on the bottom layer, two on the top. If the weather was bad, we

could string out and sleep four back there. You didn’t have room to wrestle around, or didn’t have any head room to amount to anything; but it was comfortable sleeping, whole lot better than outside. The only time that we had narcotics and stuff like that [was] if we had a person that we were transporting that was hurtin’. Sometimes we carried morphine to give ‘em a shot or two if they got to feelin’ bad enough to need it. The only time we carried any service arms at all was when we were stateside on maneuvers. We--my lieutenant and I--were issued a forty-five caliber pistol to guard the payroll; and you know, I don’t remember how much that payroll amounted to. It wasn’t astronomical, but it was several thousand dollars and we would go to the local post office and draw that cash and the guy at the window would count it to my lieutenant and he would turn and count it to me. We were responsible to come up with down to the penny what we had to have to come up with the payroll. That was the only time that I can remember being armed. Of course, you know, once we got overseas in Germany, everybody had a souvenir pistol. I brought home a Luger, but it’s not a practical weapon.

Medical Jeeps crossing a pontoon bridge.

We didn’t see many casualties then, but when we got to the Battle of the Bulge at Christmas time, that’s when we really went to work. I can remember the one thing that was hazardous. All the highways were covered with ice and snow; and those big old tanks that were trying to get up front to help, they were actually helpless on that ice. They’d slip off the highway and get off the edge of the soft earth along sideways, and that’s as far as they could go. That was the first time I’d seen where they didn’t keep the dead bodies, uh, gathered up. We would see ‘em run over, run over on the highway. Looked like a rag rug four feet wide. It [the pile of bodies] made some kinda color, just like you’d see a rag rug.

We were very busy at Christmas time. I could remember we had a aid station set up in what had been a tavern. I can remember that it had two or three large pool tables, and we had all the pool table’s tops loaded with two or three stretchers on each pool table where the doctors were workin’ on ‘em; and that was about the first time that we were busy enough that I was called upon to put in some needles for interveneous feeding of plasma. We were doin’ pretty good until we got some old men come in that were German civilians that were movin’ away from the battle zone. Some of those old people had tough veins that were hard to do. One time, we had sent ambulance into a little village in Luxembourg, not too far from the Battle of the Bulge area, named Troypont, which meant three bridges, and we sent a ambulance or two in there; and there also was a two and a half-ton truck bringin’ refugees out of there. On the way out, there was a shell burst of some kind that injured and killed some of the people on the two and a half-ton truck. Anyways, there was a little blond headed girl, about eight years old, that had a piece of shrapnel in her heart that died; and the girl’s parents, the dad at least that I remember, built a coffin out of some old barn boards and buried this little girl right there at the hospital where we were. Well, one time there was about two days and two nights where I finally crawled up into a hayloft and got some sleep; and when I woke up in that hayloft, I--I couldn’t figure out what day it was. I slept clear through a day and a night and never woke up. But that was the longest time that we were without any rest.

We saw the V2 rockets in Brussels that were trying to bomb Liege, and some of the bigger cities and so on. Saw ‘em many times, one of ‘em hit a fuel dump within a few miles of where we were stationed. When they first started flying those V2 bombers they ran out of fuel, and then they would coast to their destination and then drop. You always had a little warning when one of ‘em would start to sputter. You’d say, “Hey you better find a foxhole.” Later they worked on the controls in such a way that they almost made a ninety degree turn when they headed to the ground, and you didn’t have that warning anymore. They must have carried a pretty good load of explosive.

When we got into Germany, we had houses to stay in. That was very nice. A lot of times there wasn’t any electricity because the power had been knocked out, and several of the places where we stayed we took an old motorcycle and belted it up to a generator, and made our own lights; but they were very, very short-lived. One of those motorcycles standing still would burn up in a couple weeks time, wear out completely.

I had just enough knowledge [of German] that one time I was pressed into service as an interpreter. When we got a little farther into Germany, I can remember one experience that sticks in my mind. The little village that was close to a town called Reda, and we were huntin’ quarters for our troops, for our people to stay in. I picked out a nice big brick home and I went to the door and I knocked on the door and some young lady came to the door and I said, “We’re gonna need your house for about a month,” we were anticipating a rest there that we thought maybe would be about a month.

And a this little girl, we thought maybe she was eighteen, twenty years old, she said, “Oh my!” she said, “My dad has got a incubator full of chicken eggs, incubating in the basement, and he said that if he loses those he can’t get anymore,” because the chickens were getting scarce in that part of Germany by that time.

I said, “There’s a ruling that says that we can’t stay in the same house as you--with people there. You’ll have to get out and stay out of sight.”

And she begged some more, she said, “Like to save that incubator full of eggs,” she said, “we got a back door to the basement. We can stay out of sight and still take care of that incubator, and stay in the back part of the house.”

So I said, “OK, we’ll try it.” And sure enough we did. We stayed in the top part of the house and her, her sister, and her dad stayed in the basement; and they didn’t give any trouble. In fact, later on, those two little girls came up and kept our uniforms pressed out of this world. We had the best pressed uniforms in Germany for quite a little, for couple of weeks there.

[After the Battle of the Bulge, we] went on into Germany and we went to a kind of rural country where they were raising a lot of asparagus. That was the place that we were supposed to wait until the Russians came in from the other side. We didn’t have anything to do until the war ended. We had about three or four days--or a week--that we were super busy. We had motorcycle wrecks; and in the area that we were, there was a troupe of Hungarian cavalry horses that had given up, right there. There was a stack of saddles as big as this room. All stacked up nice and neat, and our guys were riding those horses and gettin’ throwed off. When the war ended, it was quite a celebration; but we were hauling those guys [who] were gettin’ bucked off those horses. We were busy for about a week at the end of the war.

After the war, that was a pretty lush way to live. We were supposed to train for physical fitness. We would swim and box. They would form a half dozen boxing rings, and just by chance you’d get a sparring mate; most of the time it was just good natured, unless you’d get two of ’em that didn’t like each other much and then the sparring got pretty rough. Swimming and boxing. You couldn’t hardly beat that. [We] played a lotta volleyball, and then after I got my knee injured--it kinda put me out of the volleyball.

We had a lot of canned sea rations in Europe. I know that among the favorite canned rations that we had over there, franks and beans tasted the best. There was stew. It wasn’t bad, no; but they weren’t real whippy. We used to put the cans on the exhaust of the ambulances to warm them up while we were on the move. A lot of times we had to punch a little hole in them so they could steam without blowing up. Several places, when we were over in Germany, the fellows managed to get a deer, and hang it up overnight. We would trim the meat off the bones, and fry that all into miniature steaks, with the deer meat, for change.

They had a massacre at Five Points, [Germany]. The Germans were moving a bunch of political prisoners, mostly Pollocks, and they had been hard pressed with staying ahead of the lines getting their prisoners out. And during a real heavy snowstorm they lined ‘em up and machine gunned ‘em. The ambulances were traveling on the same road as those five points came together there--kind of a main intersection of a couple of main highways--we came by there. We could see arms sticking up out of the snow, and that’s when we first discovered it. I don’t remember how many was killed there, but they machine gunned a bunch. Another time they had a bunch of prisoners they were moving in a German town called Gardelligan. It was a German airfield there and they had a big hay barn that they had dropped their prisoners in for the night, and I think they were all political prisoners again except one or two American soldiers that were prisoners of war. But they put these guys into that hay barn and told ‘em that they was gonna sprinkle some gasoline in the straw to kill the lice. After they got the gasoline down, they pulled the big roll doors shut and throwed a fire grenade through the top window and set that barn on fire. The people tried to break down the doors, and they had machine guns set up where they almost cut those door in two with machine gun fire. They had bodies stacked up on both sides where they had machine gunned those doors. When we got there, they were clearin’ those bodies out of that barn and you could smell the stench of those dead bodies for like a mile. They brought in some of the city officials to carry those bodies out, and put ‘em in a mass grave right there in the town of Gardelligan.

The thing that I can remember about meeting the Russians was a farm that had been raising a lot of hogs, and a part of these Russian prisoners had been working on that farm. When they were liberated, I think each one of ‘em killed a big pork and had it hanging in a tree, and had a fire going there. I can remember ‘em having a piece of sheet metal, like a peace of roof tin on the fire. They would take a big ol’ slab of fat pork, looked like pure fat, and throw it on that sheet metal, and let it sizzle a little bit and proceed and eat that fat pork meat. I can remember, when they liberated them prisoners that had been working on this hog farm, they did this dancing deal where they danced with their knees drawed up under them. Of course, at that time, they were celebratin’ being loose. They were drinking what was available and celebrating big time. [We were there] just a matter of a week or so.

Now we were being groomed to get the white gloves and all the parade stuff to come in and occupy Berlin. I don’t know what happened, but we were all prepared to move to Berlin, and there was a rumor that we were still in the war with Japan enough that we were gonna get out of there and prepare to go to Japan. That’s the reason we left and got outta there [Germany] then. The last few days of the war we would spend breakin’ the stocks out of army rifles that were layin’ alongside the road. We stopped and break the stocks out of them to make them unusable for anyone. We did that for several days. Travel the highways and break the gunstocks--break ‘em around a tree and stack ‘em up.

Well, a lot of times we had USO movie, both overseas and in the United States. They had movies set up even over there in the combat zone--back a few miles they had movies set up where you could go see a movie. They weren’t anything special ‘cause they were usually a few years old, but they were pretty good entertainment, especially if you’ve been away from that kind of stuff for a while.

In Europe, they had some nice farms. Most of those farms, in the best part of the farmland, had stone wall enclosures around the farmsteads. They’d been there a long time. In Luxembourg, and that part of Germany that goes next to Luxembourg, they had a lot of forests and nice hilly scenery; but a lot of it was nice, flat, big sugar beat fields, grain fields. Most places raised the sugar beats. [There was] a lot of slate or terra cotta tile roofs, and whenever they were exposed to explosions, like shell-fire and so forth, they would rattle. Each one of those tiles had a half a dozen straws under each tile to cushion ‘em a little, and a shell blast would loosen all those roofs. Those tile roofs don’t stand that kind of damage very well. In England I saw some straw-thatched roofs, but I never saw them in Europe any more after that.

We come outta France, near Sherborn. Comin’ and goin’ both ways were crowded. On the way over; that was a troop transport, I think the name of it was Monticello, I got a kick out of that. When we got back home, one of the write-ups said we were the most grizzled and hardened yet to return, I thought that was kinda odd because we hadn’t seen that much. We came into New York Harbor; it was summer time. I got discharged late summer-early fall. So things happened pretty fast after we got stateside. We went to Texas and got discharged from Camp Swift, Texas. We were awfully glad to get home. I had a knee injury when we got back home. I was takin’ treatments on this knee that had been twisted out of shape and was givin’ me some trouble, and I was scheduled to take some more treatments on my knee. Instead, my discharge papers come through and I went on home.

As soon as I got home and got rested few days, I roofed my dad’s big barn that had been needing cedar shingles put on the roof. I can remember shortly after I was home, there was an old man get his leg broke getting’ a horse shoed at the blacksmith shop. That old horse put his foot down and broke that man’s leg, and I helped load him into the ambulance and so forth. His bone’s broken in such a way that the bones grating. You could feel the end of the bones grating when we handled him to go to the ambulance. All the stuff that I had been through, that hadn’t bothered me, but I knew this old man a little better than the usual; and that made me sick handling the guy with the broken leg.

[In conclusion], the leadership skills [you learned in the army] will stay with you, probably the rest of my life. I don’t need much leadership any more, I’m eighty-three years old; but those haven’t been hurting anything. The camaraderie you had with the troops was about the best thing you had. I had those ten ambulances and their drivers and assistants. That accounted for twenty, and then myself and the first lieutenant were the other two, and that would have been my platoon. Would’ve been like twenty-two and that’s my platoon, but we had a little over a hundred in our company. We had three platoons.

I feel so bad when I think about the situation we’ve got going now in Iraq because, in our case over there in Europe, once the fighting was over hey those people were friendly and good to get along with. In fact, you know, we had rules that you weren’t supposed to fraternize with the locals; but, hey, you did. They were nice friendly people. Hey, they had rules against it, but it still didn’t stop it. In contrast to what they’ve got over there now, where it don’t look like they can trust anybody.

Norman Grotheer in January 2005

This Oral History was researched and prepared by Eddie Penner, January 2005.

[Italics] indicate words added for clarity.