Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:11 | It was a rough life as a teenager in the coal mine. Walter Victor was stuck there where his father had died when he was a baby. He hitchhiked to New York City and got a job in his sister's dress factory but World War II had come and so had the draft.
Keywords : Walter Victor Scranton PA coal mine New York City Fort Bragg George Patton
After weeks at sea dodging German submarines, Walter Victor landed in North Africa where the climate was hot and the culture very different. He was protected by the rest of the men because he was a gunsmith, who kept all the weapons in fighting condition. He saw the awful, like a man selling what no man should, and the amazing, like the Spitfires destroying the Stukas.
The landing in Sicily was not too bad and the island was quickly secured. Walter Victor found the locals to be very nice people and they had the best spaghetti ever.
It was easy to die on D-Day. Walter Victor saw his friend drown before he ever touched the beach. After the beachhead was finally secured, he pushed into the interior and eventually had some strange adventures, like being tapped to manage a factory in Belgium because he spoke four languages. He was also captured for a brief time but the Polish prisoners had a plan.
It was at Dachau concentration camp that Walter Victor gave a duffel bag full of supplies to a starving prisoner. He then turned to the grim task of burying the dead. Decades later, as he prepared to make a speech, he had a surprising reunion.
They took his Jeep. It disappeared but it had one headlight out so when he saw a Jeep like that he and a buddy stopped it and questioned the men. They turned out to be enemy spies and he got a Bronze Star for that. He had some strange encounters while over there, including meeting the biggest of the big brass and falling in with some Poles with a plan for a big bang.
