Norman Philip Swaney, F Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division

Abstract

Drafted just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Corporal Norman Swaney entered the Army Air Corps in January 1942, and volunteered for "the glory outfit"-the paratroopers. As a member of F Company of the 101st Airborne, although he lost a lot of buddies, he terms his experience in Normandy a "piece of cake" compared to what was to come. Wounded by shrapnel during Operation Market Garden, he recuperated in England before rejoining his unit in France, only to be taken prisoner by the Germans on January 3rd, 1945, during the Battle of Bastogne. Put through a series of work camps and eventually transferred to Stalag IX-B, he was liberated in early April 1945, and arrived stateside before his family had even been notified that he was a POW.

Interview with Norman Philip Swaney [9/18/2004]

Thomas Swope
This is the oral history of World War II veteran Norman Philip Swaney. Mr. Swaney served in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division, 502nd Regiment, F Company. He served in the European Theater, and his highest rank was corporal. Norman was a prisoner of war. I'm Tom Swope, and this interview was recorded at Norman's cottage in Conneaut, Ohio on September 18, 2004. Norm was 84 at the time of this recording. Where were you living in 1941?

Norman Philip Swaney
In 1941 in Youngstown proper.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
With the family, living at home.

Thomas Swope
Still in school at that point?

Norman Philip Swaney
At 21. I was 21 in '41, and I was working for a painting contractor.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And got drafted.

Thomas Swope
In '42 or something?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, I was drafted in '41 but didn't go in until January 15th of '42.

Thomas Swope
Oh, really? All right. Well, then you -

Norman Philip Swaney
That was sort of a stupid thing.

Thomas Swope
You got your draft notice before the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, yes, yes.

Thomas Swope
Do you have specific memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Norman Philip Swaney
I was --I had gone to Jamestown, New York to visit a girlfriend when the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived, and I went home because I figured, well, they're going to call us early. See, I was set to go originally on December 15th.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And so I had quit work and was fooling around and got --on the 15th they had two bus loads and --they had about two and a half bus loads of people. So they said you guys --going down the alphabetic list, they got to my name, you go home, we can't take you for another month. So I went in in January 15th.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. So that's when you reported?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah.

Thomas Swope
Do you remember your first day at basic training?

Norman Philip Swaney
My first day of basic training, well -

Thomas Swope
After induction, yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
Went to Camp Wolters, Texas. Going into Fort Hayes in Columbus, Ohio and being sworn in and indoctrinated into the service and stinking like mothballs for a few days, it was sort of a pleasure to get out to Camp Wolters, Texas and be able to get the clothes washed and get the mothball smell out of them, and I was shocked at the treatment. As a basic new guy coming in in January of '42, we were served dinner with tablecloths. The tables were set. We'd come in and sit down and they served us. We had servants. Absolutely shocked that it went that well. That didn't last very long because I had volunteered for the paratroopers, and normally basic training is thirteen weeks, and apparently they were short on guys to be paratroopers, new thing, new outfit. Eight weeks and I was on my way to Fort Benning.

Thomas Swope
Why did you decide to volunteer for the paratroopers?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, hell, the Glory Outfit, you read all about them, the Glory Outfit. I worked with two other guys, and we all three were going to join the paratroopers. The other two chickened out. So that's how I got into paratroopers.

Thomas Swope
When you first reported to the Army, was it a tough adjustment for you to be there with guys that were coming from all over the country, basic training, when you went through basic training?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, I went through high school.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And had an understanding of life. I was shocked at how many of the people that I was with, some of them hadn't finished grade school; some of them couldn't write, and this really --this served me that here we are in a good qualified country. Where did these guys come from that they can't write, can't talk, and we had a number of midwesterners and so on.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And I was quite shocked about that, that they just couldn't handle the English language.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
Basic training in Texas was cold, miserable, wintertime, January and February.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
So, yeah, basic training there wasn't comfortable as far as training was concerned because you were out on the desert sand of Texas.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And cold, cold wind, like today.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
Wind that cut right through you. Not much snow but awful cold wind and biting --when it did snow, it was biting but you didn't have snow on the ground really. You'd get a little bit in the corners really and that was it. So I was very pleased when we got down to Georgia, nice warm weather, and I got there midweek and there was, oh, a group of about twelve of us together, and immediately we were told what we were going to do, but we didn't go into school. So we watched the other guys for the whole three or four days, and at night we went out and did exactly the same thing they were doing. So when it came to parachute training, most of it was a snap. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a good deal, and then you had your five basic jumps. Number one and two, you were too dumb to know what was going on. Number three, you realized, hey, I could die, and that was the most scary jump I had was number three only because it was cycle.

Thomas Swope
Did many guys drop out before they made the _____?

Norman Philip Swaney
We had a lot of guys that never even got out of the plane.

Thomas Swope
Really?

Norman Philip Swaney
Absolutely. No. In the group, the training, the towers and so on, dropped a lot of guys out, and so I think that we started with probably 175 and we ended up with a hundred. That's the way the training went because they just --a lot of it was psychologically I think it was that they were scared to death of the stuff, and so -

Thomas Swope
After you survived three, were four and five okay?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, they were --they were good. In fact, then you got to enjoy it, yeah, because going down the fourth and fifth jump, you were fairly decent altitude and you could sit there and watch and see the river and all that stuff around you, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to go on a bond tour. We made jumps on weekends in various cities to promote the sale of bonds. And we jumped in, oh, I don't know, half a dozen cities. Every weekend we were on a tour someplace.

Thomas Swope
How many guys would jump during those -

Norman Philip Swaney
We generally had two plane loads, and there would be twelve in a plane.

Thomas Swope
Jump into an open field or something?

Norman Philip Swaney
No. You jumped on --supposedly on a golf course.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
We'd go to Charlotte, North Carolina, and the ground troops, the people that had been there, had laid down the smoke signals for the planes. We had a breeze blowing like today. The pilots went directly over the golf course. We ended up out in the woods.

Thomas Swope
Probably good training?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah. Yeah, we're half a mile off the golf course because of the wind. Oh, what a fiasco that was, but anyway, we had a grand time then, and I had a very lovely weekend. Oh, I thought --I forget their name. They were in Greensboro -no. That was Charlotte. Anyhow, it was some big factory owner took us into his house for the weekend, three of us and, my God, he had a house that was just so big, you couldn't find yourself in it. The worst jump that we had, we went to Massachusetts, two plane loads. Well, we dropped in in the field in the evening, and we were going to go out in the morning. So me being a gung-ho individual, I'm out all night in town. I get back late, and the plane I'm on has already flown off, and it crashed into a mountain.

Thomas Swope
Oh, really?

Norman Philip Swaney
And so we --later we jumped but, again, Air Force intelligence, we were supposed to land --we were supposed to go out of Cape Cod, go out over the water and come in and land on the beach. Well, the pilot didn't give us the jump signal until we were directly over the beach and, again, the breeze carried us on inland and we ended up landing in a bunch of brush and canals. So I hit into a canal, sprained both ankles, couldn't hardly walk. Ended up in the local hospital for three or four days before I went back home. So those things --those things are quite normal. That does happen.

Thomas Swope
Well, did they keep doing these sort exhibitions after -

Norman Philip Swaney
That was the last one.

Thomas Swope
Was it?

Norman Philip Swaney
When the plane crashed, that was it. That stopped it entirely.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
No more bond jumps. I shouldn't say that. We did no more bond jumps. So that was -

Thomas Swope
You were sent to the 101st at that point?

Norman Philip Swaney
I --when we were in, first went in, we were told that we were F Company, no division, no nothing, 502 Battalion, and later on we were designated as 101st because the 101st was formed on a different base and they had no idea who they were going to put into it, and that is why the outfits were -well, one on each base and pretty soon they were put together.

Thomas Swope
So what else can you tell me about that, about your airborne training?

Norman Philip Swaney
Rigorous training in daily five-mile runs morning before breakfast, and then you'd have ___ through the boondocks of Georgia. You had the normal skirmishes that you would run and, so help me, dig a foxhole in that stuff down there, and you had to dig it because this was a training. You'd dig a healthy foxhole, crawl into it and lay there for a while, and finally it would be evening and away you'd go back to camp again. We went on maneuvers into Tennessee in --well, let me reverse this. By the time I got out of jump school, it was June --May, and then the bond tours were on for a while, and then in the fall our outfit moved to Fort Bragg from Fort Benning, and then we --that's the fall of '42, and then in the spring or summer of '43 we made what they called the Tennessee maneuvers, and they took all of the paratroopers that were in existence at that time, plus a whole raft of ground troops, and we went into Tennessee. Now, experimenting, we had always jumped at 800 to 1,800 feet. They jumped us at different altitudes, but realized that, hell's fire, at those altitudes, you were in the air too long. So we jumped one jump 250 feet. Now, it takes 100 feet for your chute to open, and you're falling at 11 feet per second, so when you've got 150 feet to go, it gives you about 12 seconds from the time your chute opens until you hit the ground, and that made a lot of guys pretty sore. I mean, there was a lot of guys that got pretty well hurt on that. So that ended that. We never jumped again at 250 feet. And I have no idea what we jumped into Europe on. We never knew what it was, but going into Holland in daylight, you could see and we weren't very high. Going into Normandy at night, I felt like I was in the air quite a long time. I was coming down and coming down and coming down and, fortunately, I could hear gunfire, but none seemed to be right close to me.

Thomas Swope
So I guess we're probably about ready for you to tell about your trip overseas. When did you go overseas?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, we went --101st Airborne has a tale to tell.

Thomas Swope
All right.

Norman Philip Swaney
We --in the fall of '43, maybe in September, I don't know exactly when -

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
--we went up to Fort Dix, New Jersey or whatever it is and loaded on the ships right away, and we got on a ship called the Schaftsnabor, and we were going to go out in a convey, and there's 6600 paratroopers on this ship. I have no idea why the military did this, but we got out in the water and there was an enormous convoy. You could see ships everywhere. The only trouble was that our ship could only do nine knots and everything else was doing 12. We couldn't keep up with them. So pretty soon the convoy was gone, and we were running around with a couple little Navy escort Corvettes, and this was fine. We --didn't bother us a bit. We were stupid; we didn't know. But --this was a British ship, and with the volume of troops, we were only on deck for a short period of time a couple of times a day. The food was truly British, and so many of our guys got, oh, so disgusted because you got rolled oats for breakfast with no milk or anything and maybe a boiled egg just thrown in in its shell and all, and for supper, kidneys, kidney stew, and so that was rather funny. But, anyhow, to get on to the story, we were out west of Newfoundland some place and a Germy sub picked us up, and these two little Corvettes cutting circles around us dropping depth charges, and I think that --I don't know what it was, but all of a sudden, there was an explosion on our ship. They were never told --did they race the engines too much and blow a boiler or were we hit? We don't know. But anyhow, the ship was watertight enough that we were able to get into St. Johns, Newfoundland, and we sat on the ship and immediately there was repair work of all sort on the ship, and eventually they decided that we were going to go again. So we started out. They ran the ship aground. Back into the harbor to do some more repair work, and they finally decided that ship isn't going to make it. So they took the ship and instead of going across overseas, we went from St. Johns, Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia. They pulled us in there and immediately we transferred to another ship and headed for England. So we were 44 days from the time we left New York until we got to England. It's probably the longest trip for a bunch of paratroopers that ever happened.

Thomas Swope
And the second part of that crossing there was no sub scares or anything?

Norman Philip Swaney
No, because they were on a captured German passenger ship.

Thomas Swope
Oh, really?

Norman Philip Swaney
And it had speed, and so -

Thomas Swope
Is it possible that that was --that they would know that; if a sub had spotted you, that they would know -

Norman Philip Swaney
No. I think -

Thomas Swope
They would probably know it was captured anyway so it wouldn't matter?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, uh-huh. As far as I know, it was a captured German passenger ship, and it took across in a hurry. We went into Liverpool and onto trains and down to a camp --I can't even tell you exactly where it is. The villages around it --we were at a village called Hungerford. Newbury was one of the bigger villages. Swindon was one. We were about 50 mile out of Paris or out of London I guess, uh-huh. And, again, the training there was in another one. Normally when you jump, you have your --I was a machine gunner. You pack your machine gun in a pack with ammunition and everything, and it has its own parachute, and you strap it to the bottom of the airplane. When you are over the drop zone, the signal, the green light comes on. My job, being the gunner, was to knock those bundles off, in other words, throw the switches to drop the equipment.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
We --the government decided that that gun is too far away from everybody. Well, I should really revert that a little bit. First of all, because of the fact that the lead guy in the plane dropped the bundle, it would go floating down and everybody followed it. The last guy was half a mile away from it. Now, he needed to be at that gun. So going to change altitude. The guy that is in control and has always been dropping the bundles is going to jump in the middle of the group. So half of them will go out. You'll jump and knock the equipment out and the rest will go out. Sounds ideal. The only difference is that once you start moving, nobody stops. It's a grand push to get out of the airplane. I get up to the door, slam on the brakes like this, try to hit the switches, and I went out backwards. There was no other choice. The guy behind me pushed me right on out so I went out backwards, and that was in England also, and we --I got shook up a little bit on that.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
Then they decided, well, the gun --why not the individual carry the gun. So they rigged up a harness that we would put the machine gun in. You strapped it to your side. Worst thing that ever happened, I hit the ground with that machine gun. My leg and the machine gun kept going down in the ground on one side and the other side isn't. So it was torn all to hell.

Thomas Swope
You tore your leg up?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
So when we went into France, we jumped with the machine guns on a tether.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
In other words, you'd drop --once you get out and floating, you dropped the machine gun and it was 15 feet below you, so we'd hit the ground first.

Thomas Swope
And it --well, I guess you'd slow it down enough so it would survive, the machine gun would survive hitting the ground?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, it was in heavy enough packs.

Thomas Swope
Right, so it wouldn't be damaged.

Norman Philip Swaney
And when you dropped it, it came --the way it was set up, it was horizontal the ground.

Thomas Swope
so when it hit, it wasn't burying itself in Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And that worked a hell way in Normandy and Holland.

Thomas Swope
of a lot be tter. So we jumped that What else do you remember about life in England? You were probably there for, what, about, six or seven months before -

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, yeah, yeah. We had our usual training programs and these couple of training jumps like we did for the stick lineup, and --a group in a plane is called a stick.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. How many are in a stick?

Norman Philip Swaney
15.

Thomas Swope
15?

Norman Philip Swaney
15 normally because that's all you could get in. That's all the men you could stack between the pilot's place and the door. If you could have put more in, they would have, but that was it. So we --in general in England we had --fairly comfortable. We did maneuvers out on the English plains that they called them and daily marches and exercises, and basically to keep fit was our big thing, and always we had weekends off, and it was in --actually I went to Reading most of the time, but some of the guys would go to London or some other place.

Thomas Swope
Were the British people pretty nice to you?

Norman Philip Swaney
British people were always congenial to my knowledge ever since --forever, and I've been back to Great Britain a couple of times and thoroughly enjoyed being with them.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, what else now?

Thomas Swope
Well, let's see. I guess we're getting close. When did the rumors start flying that D-Day --D-Day was approaching?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, D-Day was going to be any day at all.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And we practiced and assembled at the airport a couple of times just for training purposes.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And then they decided, well, D-Day was going to be a certain day. So the planes were there and we went all in, and it didn't happen. It was --Eisenhower or somebody had set the rules up that it wouldn't happen.

Thomas Swope
Was that the June 5th?

Norman Philip Swaney
No, earlier, earlier. Then we went in on June 5th, and we never left the airport then.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
We stayed there that day.

Thomas Swope
But that earlier time you were actually airborne?

Norman Philip Swaney
No, no. We never got in the planes --we loaded in the planes but never left.

Thomas Swope
But never left?

Norman Philip Swaney
Never left, no. Then we were on the airfield on the 5th and then Ike came around, and I've got a couple of photos with Ike.

Thomas Swope
So you got pretty close to Ike?

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, yeah, yeah, I talked to him, shook hands with him.

Thomas Swope
Do you remember what you said?

Norman Philip Swaney
Nope, I have no idea.

Thomas Swope
Do you remember what he said?

Norman Philip Swaney
No.

Thomas Swope
Okay.

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, in the course of being in England -

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
--Ike and Churchill used the train to go out to see where the troops were, to see the --see the troops. Our battalion was specified to supply the protection personnel for his train for a period of time.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And I was selected as one of the guards for the train, and so I --one night I'm standing very stiffly at attention outside of a train door, and Winnie steps out and lights his cigar, so I had a few words of conversation with Mr. Churchill.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
But immaterial. He lit up his cigar and said pleasant evening and a few pleasantries and he went back in, but I --I didn't get close to Eisenhower when I was on train duty, but when we were at the airport in the evening before the jump on D-Day, Ike was with us, and he came through the company and there was a lot of pictures of Ike and our gang -

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
--in various sections. Yeah, Mark Bando has his new book, has a couple of them.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
You know who Mark Bando is?

Thomas Swope
Refresh my memory. The name sounds familiar.

Norman Philip Swaney
He lives in Detroit. He's an author. He's an ex-policeman, but he's written three or four books about the 101st.

Thomas Swope
Okay, all right.

Norman Philip Swaney
And another one that's up there is --well, there's two guys in Cleve --in Detroit. Can't think of his name. Oh, yeah --no. Well, that's beside the point. There's another author, but he was the radio operator for our division general.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And so he had

Thomas Swope
a different story than the rest of us. Mark did?

Norman Philip Swaney
No, no. The

Thomas Swope
other guy. No. Mark Bando - Younger guy?

Norman Philip Swaney
He's younger. I think he was in Korea. I'm not sure.

Thomas Swope
But the other guy whose name you don't remember or don't like was the -

Norman Philip Swaney
I know we was talking about him here about two hours ago.

Thomas Swope
So what was kind of going through your mind when you realized that this was D-Day?

Norman Philip Swaney
This was what we're here for. We're going. We're going to do it, and that was it. You got everything ready together and it was a gung-ho situation. Boy, we're going in there and just tear things up. After all, we were convinced that we were the best in the world, and I think we were.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
So the jump into Normandy was very, very peaceful for me. We were not where we were supposed to be, but I come down with virtually no weaponry, no ammunition, no firing right close to me. I could see it off in the distance. You could see tracers and stuff flying up, and we could hear a lot of it before we jumped, but I came down and landed in a field and quickly stowed my chute out of the way because they were white and they showed up very well, got my gun and I decided, well, now I don't hear a sound and it's time for me to move. So we had those little clickers that they call them, the little grasshopper things. Squeeze that a couple of times, no sound, nobody. So decided, well, I'm in the wrong field. It's one of those fields, fairly small field with the big stone hedgerows, and so I --by laying down on the ground and looking around, I could see that there was a gate, and so I slowly got over to the gate and went through the gate and with the clicker, and right then there's one of the guys right by the gate, one of my buddies. He said he was afraid to do the clicker, afraid to answer my click. Yeah. So in the course of, I suppose, the next hour, pitch black, we gathered up nearly everyone that was in the plane that I was in, but we came across a lieutenant who I had never seen before. Now, where he came from, I don't know, but immediately the lieutenant took over the control of the group, and we were going to go. He had a map, so he could tell us where we were going, at least he said so, and I don't think he knew where we were going either because we landed fairly close to the city or village of Carrington, of which we were nine miles from where we were supposed to be. So eventually it took us two days but we got back with the company, but they had already made the objective and got it out of the way, but in the course of going in those two days, we did a whole raft of skirmishes. You'd --well, for instance, we was going up a roadway and here come --with these darn hedgerows on both sides and came to one with a gate, and so you stopped, and you made a run across because there might be somebody in the field, and we all did that, made the run across there, and my --one of my best buddies, who was the last man, decided there was nobody in that field and he just walked across and they shot him. That was the first guy I seen die was him. He wouldn't run across. Hell, I don't have to run across, there's nobody there. So he got shot. So that was quite interesting.

Thomas Swope
Anything --what was the objective for your company on that day?

Norman Philip Swaney
We were supposed to go to a town near the coast that had heavy weapons of some sort and we were supposed to get up to this.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And our company, most of the company got where they were supposed to be, and we didn't, but we apparently did what we should have anyhow.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. Do you remember what you were thinking --you talk about the skirmishes --when you were first under enemy fire?

Norman Philip Swaney
Uh-huh. One thing that sort of bothered me, that in our entire training with a machine gun, we had been taught a burst of four or five shots and that was it, but when you get in a combat, a burst of four or five shells isn't worth a damn. You got to lay down a field of fire, and so getting it out of my mind automatically to hit the trigger and quit, that was hard to do, to learn just to lay out a half a belt of ammo down the stream because you didn't know who you were shooting at or what, but actually for a machine gunner, you didn't need to hit anybody; you just need to lay a field of fire down so nobody moved, and so that was quite interesting.

Thomas Swope
Kind of relearning in combat what you had previously been taught?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, uh-huh. You learned a hell of a lot in nothing flat about what you did, and it was quite interesting. I felt sorry for one of my buddies. We was on the first attack against the city, and troops had been back and forth everywhere, but anyhow, we were --the typical thing, you'd get up and run and hit the ground and go on. One of my buddies hit the can, gashed his was gashed on a

Thomas Swope
ground, arm all C-ration and there the way up can. was a damn opened here. The whole C-ration damn arm Was that it? He got sent back then?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, he got sent back. He had no other choice because he was -

Thomas Swope
Boy.

Norman Philip Swaney
But later on he rejoined us, so --but that's it, but funny things like that do happen.

Thomas Swope
Did you have any communication at all; so did you have any sense of how D-Day was going?

Norman Philip Swaney
No. We had no knowledge. Had --we knew what the things were supposed to be because we had been told that the troops were coming in on the Omaha and Utah Beach, but as far as how they had succeeded, we had no knowledge.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And really didn't need the knowledge because what we were doing is basically creating havoc in the background.

Thomas Swope
Right.

Norman Philip Swaney
And you could run across Germans, and they would see some coming down the road and you'd lay ambush for them, and then all of a sudden, hey, maybe you'd be under ambush, that somebody --some --well, basically two or three Germans someplace would lay a fire on you, and eventually you caught up with them and got rid of them. So that was the way it went.

Thomas Swope
Did you encounter any French civilians when you were out there?

Norman Philip Swaney
In our dealings we did run into the French, yes. Not knowing directly that we had a lot of German sympathizers, and the officers would pick this up fairly well, and we had a few guys who could speak French and German that would pick up the scent, lingo or the indications, and, yes, we had --in one instance that I know of, we had a Frenchman directly fire for the Germans, and I don't know what happened to the Frenchman. That was not my concern. I didn't get hit.

Thomas Swope
Someone took care of him?

Norman Philip Swaney
Somebody took care of him pretty quickly, uh-huh, yeah. They found the house. I would say this, though, that in France, due to the fact that I was a machine gunner, I never had to storm into a house or a building. I was always sitting on the perimeter with a gun going, so these guys running house to house was not me.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
We made our advance towards Carrington when the --when the Germans had moved in and retaken the city, and we went back and took it again. I was hunting --in the process of moving and moving, all of a sudden I came up across --and you saw lots of dead animals, and there was a dead cow laying off in the field, and so we were stopped in a line of skirmish there. That cow made the perfect background for me. I laid my gun down behind that. The barrel fit right over the top of it, and that cow took an awful lot of beating, but it worked for me, and so we took Carrington, and the next day we went out -because there was so many of us, we went out to gather up Germans or prisoners or anybody, you know, and I was surprised at how many Germans we had killed there and how many were still laying there wounded, and this was a big thing, that they were laying there overnight wounded and couldn't move. What can you do for them? Our medics were not mobile. At that time we didn't have ambulances or anything, and the word would get passed back that, hey, there's a guy over there 50 yards or so that's still alive, and somebody would eventually take care of him, and most of the time --that was mostly Germans. Our own guys were pretty well taken care of right quickly.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
So we were in Normandy from June 6th until late July, some sort, and I never got a scratch as far as anything of any value. Yes, I got grazed three different times with shells but not bad enough to be bothered with.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And so -

Thomas Swope
Are shells bullets or -

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah. Well, one was a piece of shrapnel. I know it came off a grenade. It grazed me. I got pretty well scarred right here on the hand with a shell --or, well, yeah, a rifle bullet, and natural cuts and bruises just from going through the brush and everything. So I never had any great problem in Normandy at all. For me it was a piece of cake.

Thomas Swope
Did you say you lost close buddies, though?

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, a lot, enormous. We lost --I would say we lost 30 percent of our crew, not all dead. A lot of them injured and sent back and so on. So we were down probably 30 percent when we got out of France, and we went back to England purely to -and to recoup and rest up so we could make another jump, and so that was a case of we tried two or three times, prepared to jump but didn't have to because the armored division was moving up faster than they expected. So our next one came in September when we jumped into Holland on the Market Garden situation.

Thomas Swope
Go ahead and tell me as much as you was, like, September 22nd or something

Norman Philip Swaney
can about that. like that? That Yes, uh-huh.

Thomas Swope
Almost exactly 60 years ago?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, uh-huh. Again, we were coming in in daylight, that was surprising. We were going in in daylight, and can see the things, and you can see the enormous volume and you of airplanes, and looking out from where I was, I was right at the door on the plane, I saw one of the planes hit the ground. I mean, the engine went on fire and the plane right down and hit the ground, and --but when we got to the landing area where we were going, there was nobody there. Hell, we landed on the ground and walked around like we were in Youngstown. Gathered up our equipment and moved off to a staging area, and so the first day for us was very peaceful. We didn't have any much trouble at all, but that was the last time we ever had a peaceful day. From then on it was a case of skirmish and moving, running, hunting for ammunition. Machine guns used a lot, and the machine --you had a squad of guys, machine gunner, an assistant gunner who carried a rifle and a tripod, and every other guy in the squad is supposed to have a box of ammunition for the machine gunner. We went racing across a field in one instance and came up to a road, and we were going to use that road because the Germans were right on the opposite side of it, and I --my assistant threw the tripod down. I set the gun up on it, looked around for ammunition. I didn't have any. I had to run back across the field and pick up two boxes of ammunition and come up to load the damn gun because --I don't blame the guys, you know. If you are running across the field to beat hell, you got a rifle in one hand and a box of ammunition in the other hand, and you're supposed to hit the ground ever so often just so you don't get shot. Pretty soon that box of ammunition is useless, and so they dropped them, and so I set up my machine gun and laid out a hell of a field of fire for a while, and the Germans realized where I was at, and they cut the trees down with heavy weapons around me and so I got loaded with shrapnel, and that was my end for being in Holland.

Thomas Swope
How heavy were you hit?

Norman Philip Swaney
I was pulled out of the line. The medic took a look at me and ripped my shirt open or my sleeve and said we're going to evacuate you, and so a jeep come along and he loaded me on the jeep, and I'm still walking, no problem, and we get back to what they'd set up as an aid station someplace, and the doc looked at me and they did --they peeled my clothes off. They didn't take my shirt off, they just peeled it up from behind and I was full of shrapnel in the back. I don't know how bad I was. I know I lost a lot of blood, and so they put me in a British ambulance, and we started off for someplace, and the next thing I remember is being in the hospital in England. So I lost I don't know how many days, but when I woke up in England, I was in a tub, a big tub soaking in water trying to get the shrapnel shells out of the --I was laying in a hot tub.

Thomas Swope
That would sort of help them work their way out?

Norman Philip Swaney
Right, keep the skin soft and move them out, and so I was in the hospital, I don't know, ten days I guess, and then went back to our original area where our camp was, and it's surprising that we had three or four guys there a day. Next day you had two more, all coming back out of the hospitals, and so then our outfit was relieved in Holland in the --well, mid-November I guess it was. They were there about - we'd been there about two months.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And they were sent into France for recoup, re-rest and leave and so on, and so when they were brought back to France, all us guys that were in England were sent back to join them, and I got back with them on December the 5th, and I had --I was sicker than hell. I had the flu and couldn't hardly talk. They put me in --no --yeah. I was with a company for about a week and I didn't know half the guys. My --one buddy who had been my assistant machine gunner at one point was now my sergeant, and our --one of the guys, who I never thought would be up, was the top sergeant of the whole company, and so things quite changed, and the group that I was with, I didn't know a one of them. I was --they were brand new people to me, and so anyhow, I went to sick bay because I couldn't hardly talk and the doctor put me into their hospital that they had, dispensary type, and I was there for two days, and then we went to the front line for the Battle of the Bulge.

Thomas Swope
So you were part of that convoy that went from France to Bastogne; did you go to Bastogne or where did you go?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, we went to Bastogne. Should I say this, the 101st Division was spread around Bastogne. We were north. Our battalion was north of the Bastogne village itself. We went in in trucks.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
And got in so close and then you got out and walked, and I mean we traveled and traveled and traveled, trying to get to where we were supposed to be. Then we moved a couple of times, and finally they decided we're going to hold this perimeter, and that was fine. We had no trouble holding the perimeter at all. In fact, we had little activity, not much at all. Occasionally you'd see a German off in the distance. You'd lay a couple of rounds towards him and he would disappear, and that was the end of that. You wouldn't see any more for a while. But it was colder than hell, and I had a pretty good size foxhole dug, my buddy and I, alongside of a road, and I had good control of a road. I'd fire down the road a few times and knew what it was like. Anyhow, and I mean it was so cold that you had one heck of a time chopping that out to get a foxhole and get something to cover it so you could keep an eye out and get your head above ground to see where things were and try and stay warm down in the ground. So, anyhow, the company decided that a few guys at a time [tape skips] --did to get back and cleaned and rested, our booth were filthy and our overcoats were muddy and everything. So I was pulled off the line, and my buddy and I, both of us, and we went back to the --to a house. Great. We had a full night's sleep in a warm house. Boy, what a relief that was, and in the morning I got up. First thing you do, my good jump boots are all over mud and dirt, and I cleaned them up and set them out, and the sun was shining, and I did the same with my overcoat, and I cleaned it and hung it outside, and the word came that there's a tank attack coming. I don't have a gun. We're going to the front line. There's the lieutenant. He handed me a radio and he said you're my radio operator. This was a guy by the name of Lieutenant Wolfe, and so we went to the front line. I don't have a weapon, and we get up on the front line and fortunately we're able to get into a swail and, truthfully, I don't know why he didn't seem to have any direction for anybody. There was other troops but he didn't say anything to anybody, didn't do anything, and we just stayed there, and he never asked for the radio or anything, and I don't suppose we had been up on the front line more than fifteen minutes when there was a German behind me. Now, what had happened was our line was spread out, and our captain and some other guys had been over on the right flank, and the Germans had hit that section first and taken it, and they come in behind us, and there was about ten of us there. They got --the Germans were all behind us before we even knew it, so we were all --they said raus, raus, and that was it, but we had been watching a tank coming at us, and the tank got up so close and stopped, and apparently the tank commander knew that the Germans were coming around. So that's when we were taken prisoner, and as near as I can find out, there was 45 of us captured that particular time.

Thomas Swope
Do you remember what day that was?

Norman Philip Swaney
January 3rd, 1945.

Thomas Swope
I thought you would, uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
You can't miss that one.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
We went back. The first night we were put into a barn, the whole group, some bleeding, some not bleeding, and some of us in pretty good shape and some not. We were interrogated by an officer, individually and collectively, and I don't think he found anything out of any importance because none of us knew what the hell was going on anyhow. So the next day they took a group of us uninjured guys, put us in a squad, and back we went. Two or three soldiers --about 20 of us that went back, maybe 15 of us, and we were marched for quite a ways and put into a compound, a fenced-in yard in the Ardennes Forest and just left there, and there was one guard on the outside, and we were standing in there and waiting. We stayed there for 24 hours, no food, no clothing other than what we had on, no shelter of any sort, and then the next day they moved us on further, and they took --there was three or four of us that they put into one compound, and we were wood cutters. We --I shouldn't say we were wood cutters. We were wood collectors. They had a whole raft of German women and older men, Home Guard and so on, were felling trees and doing this all by hand, all with axes and so on, and we, as prisoners, was the guys that gathered up all the branches and stacked them up, and eventually those were all used. They were all - there was never a trace of wood left. It was gone someplace. Most of it pulled out of there by horse and wagon.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And I worked there for probably a week, and then they moved us on back, and I came to another compound. I didn't know what the situation was, but the German come in and spoke English, looking for farmers. Yeah, I was a farmer. Do you know how to drive a horse? Yes, I know how to drive a horse. So for a number of days I was a horseman on an airport. I had one horse that I took --during the course of the day I took care of the horse. If they wanted the horse to pull a little cart, the German guard would go and say I go here and there, and we'd go, and they'd bring --maybe we'd pick up a piece for an airplane on this little cart, take it out. Then change the hitch, use the horse to pull an engine up so they could put it in the airplane. Ever ything was done manually. There was no mobile equipment except that horse of mine, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hell, being in a prison wasn't too bad. I had a horse and a half warm place and I wasn't starved. So I thoroughly enjoyed it. Well, that didn't last a whole lot of time, but then I was moved on back to another area, and I was in a German mobile bakery, a military bakery. The vehicles would come in at night with the sawdust and the flour and whatever was needed, and we would unload it and do other chores around there, and I must have been in that place for maybe three weeks. I don't know how long I was there. But that wasn't too bad either. At least I was fairly warm during the night, and we had --some days were half days. And then moved on again, this time into Limburg, and Limburg is a mar --or a railroad area, and so our job then became to repair the railroad. We would go out at night. They would take a whole group of us. Some of us were given shovels, some did other things, and we filled in holes where it had been bombed and moved railing and all sort of things you would do for the railroad, and by daylight you were back in a compound, and the British would come over and bomb it out again. So we did that, and as the --apparently as the number of prisoners increased there, the collection, then we were moved on back farther, and we were getting weaker and weaker, and so two boxcars, we were loaded up in the boxcars, and we sat for --we loaded up in the daytime and at night they moved us, and two days later we were in the section of Bad Orb, Germany, and the train stopped and they left the car sitting there and unloaded us half a dozen at a time or maybe a dozen, and one Home Guard would march us up the hill into the camp, and I was in that prison camp for two --two weeks, maybe three, and we got released in early April by Patton's army when he came through.

Thomas Swope
What was that boxcar ride like, the train ride?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, we were in packed tight enough that we slept on each other. You had no other choice. There was no opening like most of them. One corner had been used before as a urinal, and that's about all you had was urinals because nobody ever had to take a --because you didn't have any food.

Thomas Swope
Exactly ____.

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, and so we tried to stay clear of that one corner, and it got --the one thing I will say, it was warm because there was so many of us, but by this time we had all developed a series of bedbugs and lice and so on, and so when it got warm, you got itchy, and being accustomed to going without food every so often or without anything to drink, you accepted it. What the hell can you do? There's no way out, but when we got to the prison camp actually, we were marched in and put into a room, this whole two boxcar load of guys and, of course, by the time they got us all in, then a soldier come in there, an American, and said okay, you guys, all outside, line up. The company of --or the commandant wants to talk to you. So we go outside and here's an American soldier dressed in like he was right of the United States, nice uniform and so on, well fed, and he's the camp commander for the Americans. Told us what to expect and so on and so forth. Then I never saw him --I never saw him again. I don't know who he was or what, anything about him, but that was the end of him.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
So we fought the bedbugs and got our daily ration of a piece of bread and a cup of ____. And then in mid April, the Germans --we could hear the Americans coming closer and closer, and they --the German guard, who spoke good English, called us all out, the whole camp, and said that you guys can do what you want. We're going to lock the gates and we're going to leave. They said if you try to escape, you'll probably be shot. He said if you stay here, you'll live and your American troops will soon be here. We had three guys that escaped. They got out of the fence. They got back in, too, later on. So they didn't make any advantage. So that's --that was my war.

Thomas Swope
Do you remember that day of liberation then?

Norman Philip Swaney
I can't tell you what day it was. I don't know.

Thomas Swope
It was Patton's -

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, supposedly the armored division entered, and who come into the camp, I can't tell you whether it was the infantry group or an armored group or what. I have no idea. We lost track of it. It was sometime after Easter because we calculated we might get released by Easter, but we didn't quite make it.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. I think Easter -

Norman Philip Swaney
April 3rd or April 5th or something like that.

Thomas Swope
So you were released before you heard about FDR's death?

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, yeah. We never knew that.

Thomas Swope
Never knew about that?

Norman Philip Swaney
No.

Thomas Swope
How long were you in that camp in Bad Orb before -

Norman Philip Swaney
I was only in there for about three weeks.

Thomas Swope
About three weeks?

Norman Philip Swaney
Uh-huh.

Thomas Swope
Okay.

Norman Philip Swaney
Which is a whole different thing from what most of the guys went through. None of these guys ever was in work camps like -

Thomas Swope
Not much?

Norman Philip Swaney
No. So I led a different story than a lot of the guys. Hell, my buddies, the guys that were taken --part of the 106th that was captured before we were.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
In fact, there were 22,000 of them that were captured -

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
--they went directly from where they were captured to that prison camp.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. And spent the whole time there?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, spent the whole time there. They were captured December 17th, I think it is that they were taken, the 16th and 17th, and they were there when I got there so --and they were a pretty rag-tag bunch, but the thing was they had all their clothing.

Thomas Swope
Yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
We had --some of our guys that were captured when I was, the Germans was desperate for anything, and as you went along the way, a lot of the guys lost their shoes and their coats and so on. Well, I didn't have a coat in the first place. My overcoat was hanging down on the fence, and I had on my old combat boots, the ones with the double strap on the side, and they didn't want them. Besides that, I have big feet. So my shoes didn't suit anybody so I kept my shoes, but one of my poor buddies got --his feet got so bad, he died in camp with us.

Thomas Swope
He did?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, gangrene.

Thomas Swope
In fact --gangrene?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah. He got frozen feet, nothing to keep him from --and he died from gangrene.

Thomas Swope
So after you were released, were you taken to Camp Lucky Strike then?

Norman Philip Swaney
Went to Lucky Strike. We were in there sicker than dogs. You know, everybody had dysentery, got over it pretty well, and loaded on an LST, and I was sitting in Birmingham, England when the Germans surrendered. I was on a ship heading for home. So the next day or next two days I think we laid there while they loaded other equipment on, and that was on a Liberty Ship and headed back to the States. Got back to the States first part of June. 60 days leave. Got married July 9th, and went back to camp. They couldn't find my papers. I --I went down to Miami, which was the --supposedly the rehab section, and we sat there. I took my wife with me, and we sat there all day long waiting for --they called names out, now you are going here, you are going here and so on. It came towards the evening, and here Mary and I are still sitting there. Nothing. The guy says we don't have any record of you supposed to be here. Are you supposed to be here? I said, well, here's the papers that I got to ship me from Camp Atterbury, Indiana to Miami. So they kept us there for three days and hunted around for what they could do for my wife and I, and finally said we'll send your wife back home and you are going to Fort Benning. So I went to Fort Benning and was -joined a cadre company of misfits and so on, people in and out, some discharged, some fresh ones. Stayed there until mid-October before they found enough paperwork to discharge me.

Thomas Swope
Was there a possibility that they were thinking about sending you to the Pacific?

Norman Philip Swaney
No, no. See, the Pacific was already over at that time.

Thomas Swope
Yeah. I guess when you said 60 days, yeah, I guess by the time you got to Fort Benning, yeah.

Norman Philip Swaney
Pacific was already over. So that was never it. The thing --the company commander, I told him, I says, hell, I've got 99 points or a hundred some points and I am not in condition to pull military duty with some of these other guys, and I says I don't think I should run with a mailman, sort of

Thomas Swope
have to. an assista So nt. I was put on He had a tr a mail uck. Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And we'd go deliver mail every day to some places. By noon we were done. In the afternoon I did nothing.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh. What was your reunion with your family like when you first got back?

Norman Philip Swaney
Oh, well, I got shot in Holland. They got a Telex to the effect that I had been shot. They never knew I was a prisoner.

Thomas Swope
They never got that

Norman Philip Swaney
word? Never got that

Thomas Swope
word. Wow.

Norman Philip Swaney
I called there. from New York. They we re sho cked that I was

Thomas Swope
They just assumed that you were still over there somewhere?

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah, sure, because I'll say from June, letters were very, very intermittent in going across.

Thomas Swope
Right.

Norman Philip Swaney
Because while you were in Normandy, you didn't have a chance to write because you were busy. So then when you got back to England in late July, you started sending letters again, and then when we went into Holland in September, there was a lull, and then the same going into the Bulge, that there was a lull in letters, and so they had received --oh, I suppose early December I had sent letters.

Thomas Swope
Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And they didn't hear anything from me then until May when I got home.

Thomas Swope
No one had reported you missing?

Norman Philip Swaney
They never got a Telex or at least my mother told me they never got a Telex, and I have the Telex of when I was wounded.

Thomas Swope
Right.

Norman Philip Swaney
But they never got a Telex to the effect that I had been taken prisoner -

Thomas Swope
So -

Norman Philip Swaney
--or missing in action. Nobody was ever -

Thomas Swope
Were you ever reported missing in action or did someone goof up there?

Norman Philip Swaney
Well, it --it never got to my home.

Thomas Swope
Well, it just never -

Norman Philip Swaney
Yeah.

Thomas Swope
So you might have been reported, according to the Army, you were missing in action but they never sent it to your home?

Norman Philip Swaney
Never got the word home.

Thomas Swope
Woops.

Norman Philip Swaney
Who knows? There was a lot of guys, but then you see right now there's a lot of guys who don't have prisoner of war record on their

Thomas Swope
discharges. Uh-huh.

Norman Philip Swaney
And why? Mine shows 90 days -no. and other guys have nothing on them.

Thomas Swope
It shows three months, Yeah, I have seen that doesn't say that. My dad

Norman Philip Swaney
before. Seen says that. papers wh ere it So that was my war.

Thomas Swope
Any other vivid memories or do you think we've covered it?

Norman Philip Swaney
I think you've done pretty well. Okay?

Thomas Swope
Excellent.