Five 101st Airborne Veterans Talking Bastogne (Part 1)

In 1994 I was a guest at the annual "Nuts" dinner of the General Anthony McAuliffe New York-New Jersey Chapter of the 101st Airborne Division Association. Before the dinner, I sat at a table in the lounge with five of the veterans, Bill Druback, Frank Miller, Len Goodgal, John Miller and Mickey Cohen. One of them said, "He wants to hear about Bastogne." Due to the background noise which can be distracting, I'm including in the show notes a transcript of the full conversation. The transcript is included in my book "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II," and an audio CD is included in my oral history audiobook "D-Day and the Bulge." aaronelson.com myfatherstankbattalion.com oralhistoryaudiobooks.com D-Day and the Bulge A Mile in Their Shoes 'Mixed Nuts' ©2020, Aaron Elson Excerpted from "A Mile in Their Shoes: Conversations With Veterans of World War II," by Aaron Elson Five 101st Airborne Division veterans recall of the siege of Bastogne Every December the General Anthony C. McAuliffe New York-New Jersey chapter of the 101st Airborne Division Association holds its "Nuts" dinner at West Point. McAuliffe is the general who uttered the famous one-word response to a German demand that he surrender the troops who were surrounded in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Before the 1994 dinner, I was privileged to sit at a table in the lounge with five veterans of the siege of Bastogne: Bill Druback, Frank Miller, John Miller, Len Goodgal and Mickey Cohen. This is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation. West Point, N.Y., Dec. 3, 1994 Frank Miller: In most cases some of the stuff that I've seen happen to us, and tell me if I'm wrong, most people wouldn't believe it. Bill Druback: They don't understand. Frank Miller: They don't understand how this could ever happen, especially if they've never been in the military or in any kind of a situation where it's life-threatening. So in turn, if I ever told them some of the things that actually happened to us, even by accident, they wouldn't believe it. Bill Druback: It's like I was telling somebody the other day, with all this new technology that they have in the service like these high-tech night glasses. Back then there was nothing like it, but yet, we were in a position there one time where we had a company firefight, and it got dark, and I was with this Oscar Dolenz, he and I were on a machine gun team, he's still living, he lives in California. And the firefight stopped, there were some guys hurt and killed, and things got quiet. All of a sudden right across the road, that's how close we were, we could hear this German saying, "Kommen Sie hier. I'm hurt." So Oscar, out of the clear blue sky, he says, "Don't you move, you sonofabitch." He says, "I've got night glasses." So I looked at Oscar, and I gave him a smirk, and he says, "Keep quiet." Sure enough, the morning came, we went across the road and there was this German, he was still living, and he had a couple of grenades by him and ammunition. The reason I'm bringing up this story is, here in true life now they have these things where they can see at night. Maybe Oscar was thinking ahead of himself, or maybe he knew something that we all didn't know. John Miller: And you know, too, back then they used to teach marksmanship, right? With the M-1 you had an eight-shot clip, and you put one here, one here, one here, each round. Now with the M-15, it's just like having a machine gun, they go brrrrppp, and they don't have to aim or anything, they just point it and spray. There's a big difference in the way they teach them. Frank Miller: I think that happens, but they do teach them how to shoot, and they still shoot marks. But we had the DCM courses, the Director of Civilian Marksmanship courses, when I was a kid I used to go to those. I belonged to the NRA and the Boy Scouts and I learned to shoot in high school. It helped. You may never need it, but if you ever need it it's good to know instead of taking a guy raw, and he's afraid of guns because his mother told him he's not allowed to have them, things like that. John Miller: Now they're taking toy guns out of the toy stores, because, oh, Jesus, there'll never be another war anyway the way we had it. Frank Miller: It's just not the same circumstances, like Bosnia is the closest thing to World War II in a sense, because they're fighting with conventional weapons. And they have, well, they call them firefights, we used to call them skirmishes. That's a hangover from the Civil War, skirmishes. Bill Druback: I still say that one of the toughest winters I ever spent was in Bastogne, throughout my 72 years. John Miller: That was the worst winter they had in Europe in 100 years. Frank Miller: You know, I remember times where they said it was 13 above during the day and at nights it went below zero, and we had on all kinds of clothes. I had a regular tank-type undershirt and a flannel undershirt, and the wool o.d. [olive ...