Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
2:07 | His time was up but European duty was so different from his Brooklyn home, Irv Press decided to re-enlist and carry on. Eventually, though, he felt the need to continue his education.
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Irv Press had a neat trick for avoiding KP and it worked for three weeks after he was drafted. Then, standing in the hot sun one day, he decided to volunteer, despite all advice to the contrary, when the call went out for anyone with a specialized skill.
You had to pass the final physical test to be certified to fight overseas. Irv Press recalls how the ones who faltered were carried by their fellow recruits to the finish so they could all pass. Once they were on a Liberty ship, they faced a different kind of test. Can you make it to the railing?
Irv Press was really fond of the French family he was bunked with and he missed the down comforter and hot brick at the foot of the bed when he moved out across Belgium toward Germany. When he reached Cologne, he was astounded at the total destruction he encountered .
The job was easy once the artillery battalion was in position, just keep lobbing shells toward the thousands of German troops across the river. Then the word spread through the ranks, recalls Irv Press. It was over.
Americans were known as compulsive picture straighteners and so the retreating Germans booby trapped many of the pictures hanging in the buildings they abandoned. Irv Press remembers this and also another German trick involving wire and troop carriers.
At the end of the war, Irv Press was given a special assignment and an unusual partner. The partner was a former Wermacht captain and the mission was the liberation of farm workers forced into labor on German farms by the Nazis.
Irv Press was approached by a Russian soldier who only wanted to know one thing, "Do you have Mickey Mouse watch?" He couldn't help with that problem but when he was asked to set up a nightclub for non-coms, he really delivered.
The first time Irv Press faced discrimination, he heard it from the head cook at basic training. He dismissed it as the ravings of a redneck but it wasn't so easy to dismiss the deaths of six million Jews.
