We Who Are Alive and Remain (5 page)

My name is Herbert J. Suerth Jr. My dad was Herbert J. Suerth Sr., that’s how I ended up with the nickname Junior in the outfit. My dad sold insurance for a living and also had a couple other jobs. In the Depression you did about anything and everything you could. He ended up being a model maker in a furniture manufacturing business. Dad was of German descent. Our last name traces back a thousand years from Cologne (sometimes spelled Köln), Germany. Our last name used to have an umlaut over the u, but it was dropped before World War I because of the anti-German feeling that existed in those days, and even worse as we approached World War II. My grandparents were both born in the United States.

I was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 28, 1924, an only child. My dad did not speak English until he went to grammar school, but I never knew that until years later because he never spoke with an accent. I learned a little German from him but not enough to get me a drink of water in Berlin. We were middle-class. Dad inherited a few thousand dollars in 1937 and he and Mom bought a house in a nice middle-class neighborhood. They lived in that house until they moved in with me and my wife in 1956.

I grew up in Chicago. I’m a product of a very Christian/Catholic family. I went to a Catholic grammar school, then spent most of my high school experiences at a Catholic school, DePaul Academy, a high school attached to DePaul University.

Out of ninety graduates from DePaul, four or five were already in the service by the time we graduated. I enrolled in Marquette University in mechanical engineering the summer of 1942, then went to university that September. Before the semester was out, Congress lowered the draft to include all eighteen-year-olds (the upper limit was age thirty-seven), and we knew that we would all be drafted if we didn’t enlist. I chose to enlist. I stayed in university until the end of the semester; then, rather than start another semester, I dropped out and worked for a couple months. This proved to be a good decision, because all the guys that I was in class with were all on the same train going to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a few months later.

When I dropped out of university to work for a few months, I had no job skills to speak of, but you could get a job just about anywhere right then because the country was revving up for the war. My mother worked in the accounting department of a foundry, so I got a job there, working in a factory that made metal castings. Everybody on the crew was Hispanic. No one spoke English. I worked there to get myself toughened up. I worked a different shift than my mother, so we didn’t commute together. Every morning I rode an hour and fifteen minutes on a streetcar to be at work by 6:30 A.M. I worked manually all day. When I came into the service it was really a breeze for a while. Getting up early didn’t mean a thing to me, and most of the physical training early on was not that difficult.

My call came up in March 1943. By that time some of the classmates who had dropped out of the school when the war started were already overseas. Those early draftees got yanked into combat early. One of the reasons I had enlisted when I did was so I could select my branch of service. I figured since I had studied mechanical engineering I should go into the Army Corps of Engineers, so that’s where I went at first. I shortly found out that it didn’t involve much mechanical engineering and was mostly construction, deactivating mines, building bridges and roads, not what I wanted.

We grew up near Allentown, in rural Pennsylvania. During the Depression we didn’t have much money, but we had good parents who always provided for us. In his earlier years my father was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Then he worked as a station agent for the Redding Railroad. They closed during the Depression, and he worked in a cement mill. Then he went back on the railroad. My mother worked in a clothing factory. They were hardworking people, Pennsylvania Germans. We had four children in my family, three boys and a girl. One of my brothers went into the navy. My sister was a nurse. My other brother was the smart one and became superintendent of a cement firm—it was a defense industry position, and he didn’t go to war.

My parents never gave us kids money to buy things. If you wanted something, you had to work for it and save up. I worked for other farmers harvesting potatoes and earned enough money to buy a bicycle. Being poor was actually a good experience because it taught me how to improvise. I learned how to make things and be mechanically inclined. If I needed a part for my bike I couldn’t go to a hardware store and pick it up. But we had a dump close by so I’d go there and look around. We found enough wood at the dump to build a little boat. It was helpful to learn all that. Later on in the service I became the armorer for the guys. I could repair and modify weapons. When we came back to England from Normandy I altered a few carbines for the guys. Sometimes I fixed their rifles. In combat you didn’t have much to do because there are always lots of weapons around that aren’t being used anymore. So it’s easy to resupply then.

Out in the country our school went up to eighth grade. But for high school, we had to go by bus to the city. I graduated from high school and went to work with Bethlehem Steel, making armor plates for battleships. The job was in the defense industry, which meant I was exempt from military service. But I had two crazy friends, Rod Strohl and Carl Fenstermaker, who talked us all into going into the paratroops. The three of us enlisted in August 1942 and stayed together through most of the war. All of us were in the hospital at one time together. All three of us came back after the war.

Young Lions, West

I was born April 27, 1923, on the Colville Indian Reservation, up in northeastern Washington State. I’m three-eighths Indian. My mother was half Indian, my father was a quarter.

During the Depression we were poor but we always had enough to eat. There was always wild game. We always raised a garden. My mother always canned. Eating was never a problem, but sometimes it got awfully cold in the winter because the building we lived in wasn’t that good.

Hunting and fishing—that’s what I loved to do as a kid—anything outdoors. I trapped beavers, muskrats, coyotes. Once in a while I got a mink. I killed my first deer when I was eight years old. I was with my father. We were on horses, quite a ways up in the mountain. There was snow on the ground. He spotted it and handed me his rifle. He said, “Here, you want to shoot a deer?” I sat down and shot it. We dressed it up and brought it home. It was really something—it sure was to me, anyway—I was beside myself. Ammunition was hard to get for one thing, and I was amazed that he let me shoot his gun. That’s why I knew I better not miss. His gun was an old World War I 30-40 Krag. I had a .22 that I carried all the time and I was pretty good with that. I had killed grouse before but never a deer.

On an Indian reservation, you more or less learned to fight before you learned to walk. If you don’t learn to fight, you wouldn’t get on your feet long enough to learn to walk. It guess it was tough growing up, but I never really thought about it. I thought that’s what everybody did. I never noticed alcohol while growing up, but some of the kids did. I never drank until I got in the service. After the war it got to be a bigger problem.

I went to school in a little town called Inchelium, Washington. There was one teacher and eight grades, maybe only fifteen kids total. I never did really good in high school. We had a lot of work to do around the home, and I missed a lot of school. They drafted me in February 1943, which didn’t matter to me—I knew I was going in anyway. I wouldn’t have graduated until June of that year, but they graduated me early.

I was born in Alhambra, California, on Independence Day 1922. Growing up, we always had big family celebrations on the Fourth of July. Mom made a birthday cake in a huge dishpan. Everybody came over, and we had enough people in my extended family to make two softball teams.

Dad used to work twelve to fourteen hours a day. During the Depression he worked for Ralph’s Grocery Company in Los Angeles, but the store he worked for was destroyed during the big earthquake of 1933, so Dad was let go. After that my dad and uncle painted houses for thirty-five cents an hour, doing whatever they could to make ends meet. We grew vegetables in our backyard and ate healthy foods. We did all right.

During the Depression we had nothing but we had everything—we had each other. We didn’t need to have television to entertain ourselves. Many times we kids just sat on the lawn in a circle and played games or talked. Everybody in the neighborhood had a lot of friends. We played kick the can, rode bicycles, and roller-skated. Everybody had roller skates. We took the skates apart for the steel wheels and made box scooters out of wooden boxes and old two-by-fours.

Our neighborhood was a combination of Latino and Caucasian families. All the kids played together. If the weather was bad we invited kids to our house. We had a pool table and a huge dining room with a fire-place. As many as twenty-five kids came to our house for games, sleeping on the floor of our dining room overnight. As long as the kids acted right they were welcome, but if anyone caused problems he was sent home. Being banished from the other kids was considered a horrible punishment.

You could drive in town when you were twelve years old. I got my license at thirteen. Our family had an old 1926 Buick. Alhambra had streetcars then and tracks going down the streets. You could put your car in the streetcar track at one end of town, start driving and not touch the wheel, and go all the way through town on the tracks. We packed up to nine kids in the car, with everybody hanging out the window beating on the side and went to football games that way. The kids all played bumper tag with their cars. Somebody would be “it.” Everybody else parked someplace around town and hid. The person went to look for them. When he found a car he’d bump it with the bumper. Then that person was “it.” Nobody really got out of line. The police knew everybody. Anybody who touched liquor or drugs—they were considered outlaw kids.

I was just barely thirteen when I went into high school in Alhambra. We had a wonderful school music teacher, and I joined the orchestra and played kettle drums. When I was fourteen I played in the Pasadena Symphony. The San Gabriel Valley Opera Company recruited in our school, and I learned how to sing opera in two different languages, Italian and French. Half the time I didn’t know what I was singing, but it was a very good school experience. I don’t think kids had as many distractions then as they do today. We made our own toys and got old bicycles and reconstructed them. We had a marvelous library in town and always read books.

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I never considered medicine, though later I became a medic in the paratroops. I spent many years in Boy Scouts and took first-aid classes, but that was about it. A medic needs to have a certain amount of compassion, but he’s also got to have strength. Looking back now, I think what helped develop these qualities in me was a creed that a buddy and I adopted as our own. As kids we were fascinated with the stories of the Knights of the Round Table—King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Ector—extraordinary warriors who lived with service, honor, and valor: that’s what impressed us. We made wooden swords and dashed around. The knights were our heroes as young boys. They were all we hoped to become.

I was born October 14, 1925, in Orange, Texas. My father and grandfather were from Scotland. How did our family get to Texas from Scotland? Well, in those days these old steam vessels came across the Atlantic up the Gulf of Mexico over to Texas and picked up barrels of oil, then returned to Scotland—that’s what my dad did for work. On one trip to America—1921, I think—my father landed in Texas and went inland to see the Native Americans. He wound up in Oklahoma, where he met a girl and fell in love. On his next trip over, they got married. My mother was a full-blooded Cherokee.

Mom and Dad bought a farm in Texas, where I spent my childhood. The farm was about 120 acres, 20 of which we tilled. We also had chickens and cows. My father made some money from his work on the tanker but it wasn’t much, so during the Depression we used to barter stuff we raised on the farm. We might barter a dozen eggs to get a sack of flour. Then Mom might use the flour sack to make us clothes. We weren’t rich by any means, but we got along okay. With Dad’s job we only saw him about every three months whenever he returned from the trips. I was an only child, so it was just Mom and me working the farm. As soon as I learned how to walk, I learned how to follow a mule out in a field.

Then there was wood. It was an everyday job for me. The only heat we had in the house came from a huge wood cooking stove in the kitchen. It never snowed in Texas, but it got down to twenty degrees in winter. By the end of fall, if you didn’t have all your wood in, you were hurting.

I chopped thirteen cords for the year and kept four cords on the front porch and half a cord in the kitchen. The kitchen floor was just dirt, but Mom kept it clean. I soon figured out how to saw up wood an easier way. After I chopped down the trees, I hitched up our mule and drug the trees up to our house. We had an old Model T Ford. I jacked the Ford up and put a belt on it attached to a table saw. It worked. That’s how it went. A lot of kids around that area did the same type of work I did.

In school I was an average student. We had a one-room schoolhouse with maybe fifteen students in it at any one time. Sure, I got in a lot of fights at school—you know:
half-breed, your mother’s a squaw
—I heard stuff like that a lot. Also, you have to realize in that part of Texas everybody is named Jake or Big John—and my mother named me Clarence. That got me into a lot of fights, too. I always wondered why in the hell she named me that—there were no Clarences in my family. I asked her once. She said, “Don’t you know what Clarence means in Latin? Illustrious one.” I thought, Oh, shit [laughs]. I grew up defending myself, that’s for sure.