Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
1:33 | Ira Bray, while training to be a combat engineer, remembers how a stalled truck saved his life.
Ira Bray recalls the process of how he repeatedly tried to enlist during World War II but was repeatedly turned down, only to be drafted afterwards.
During a live-fire training exercise, Ira Bray remembers a phosphorous grenade being accidentally thrown towards him and his fellow trainees instead of a smoke grenade. He quickly tried to protect his fellow troops, leaving himself with painful phosphorous burns on his fingers and elbow.
While training in England, Ira Bray talks about his experiences with German V-1 and V-2 rockets. He remembers being blown across the room by an explosion, helping evacuate patients from a hospital destroyed by a rocket, and losing one of his good friends, Bert Jones, to a V-2 explosion.
While stationed near the border of France and Germany in 1945, Ira Bray describes how he happened upon three German officers, the first Germans his unit had seen, and was able to take them prisoner.
Ira Bray talks about how American Jeep drivers had a habit of driving with their windshields down, which led to a nasty German trick of running piano wire neck-high across roads. The Americans, in turn, devised a means to disable the wire without having to raise their windshields.
Ira Bray tells the humorous story of how a British officer accused American troops of stealing his tanks, when in actuality the British officer had been parking his tanks in quicksand.
Ira Bray recalls an anecdote about how, prior to his military experience, he delivered newspapers to Gen. George Patton among hundreds of other soldiers. Patton always found a way to get out of paying and Bray never did get his money for four months of newspapers.
