Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
8:24 | Bella Solnick was his neighbor for 31 years, but had never told her story of escaping the SS. When he heard that, Howard Margol was taken back in his mind to the snowy days in Munich, when he was greeted by civilians waving white flags, some of them from the Dachau camp where Bella had been.
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He had desert training and mountain training, so Howard Margol figured that with the way the Army usually worked, he would be sent to the Pacific. What he wanted was a transfer to the 42nd Rainbow Division where his twin brother was serving. Told there was no way short of a letter to President Roosevelt from his mother, he decided to try that.
The ROTC at the University of Florida had artillery but it was horse drawn. The horses were pretty smart, recalls Howard Margol. As his modern, mobile artillery unit prepared to embark for France, two jokers figured out a novel way to stretch out a half day pass.
As soon as they could clean the Cosmoline from their weapons after disembarking in Southern France, they were trying to stop one end of a German pincer movement. The other end was the Battle of the Bulge. Howard Margol describes that action and then tells how the men got even with a tyrannical Lieutenant.
When his unit was bogged down in the village of Wingen in Southern France, Howard Margol's commanding officer turned down an offer of a crate of glassware for every man from the town glass factory. 25 years after the war, an obituary caught his eye which led to a return trip to the village.
Howard Margol says the two West Pointers were the best officers in the unit. He tells why and then tells how they organized and held a Passover Seder in Germany. And how was it that all their water was poured out and replaced with wine?
To Howard Margol, Wurzburg meant the old castle and the questionable actions of a couple of soldiers. Schweinfurt meant the well engineered gun emplacements and the rangefinder he and Ed Joos tried to hack open for the lenses. And Furth meant the stash of German parachutes which were cut into scarves. He wouldn't have made it to Furth if he and Ed had not stopped banging on that rangefinder when they did.
As they were setting up a new gun position, everyone in Howard Margol's artillery unit detected a strange odor. Some said it was a chemical factory but Howard Margol said no, that was the smell when his mom burned chicken skin. The new gun position was near the town of Dachau.
Howard Margol and his twin brother went from college to Army life in 1943 and then the real learning began. They learned not to volunteer, not to go to Officer Candidate School, not to send your son to military school, and how to get a hot shower when only officers have hot showers.
If everyone who claimed to be there at the liberation of Dachau were really there, it would be more soldiers than actually served in the entire European theater, says Howard Margol. Fortunately, research By John Linden has uncovered the facts.
He was there when Dachau was liberated, but a more emotional experience for Howard Margol occurred on a convoy of several thousand Jewish camp survivors being taken to luxury resorts high in the Austrian Alps. Even though they were only 20 minutes away from their destination, it was sundown on Friday and they all got out and sat down on the side of the road.
Serving occupation duty in Salzburg, Austria, Howard Margol's unit was stationed at a large displaced persons camp. Each soldier had to take ten German prisoners into the woods on firewood detail. This led to an ironic situation when a prisoner escaped from one of the crews, though it wasn't the one you might think.
Some of the medals given out after victory in Europe seemed random to Howard Margol. A sergeant from his unit received a Silver Star for wiping out a machine gun nest, but he'd never encountered a machine gun nest during the war. At least it gave him what everyone wanted at the end of the war, points. When he got home, what Howard wanted was coffee.
