Photo of the Tuskegee Airmen, from the National Archives and Records Administration :”Pilots of a U.S. Army Air Forces fighter squadron, credited with shooting down 8 of the 28 German planes destroyed in dog-fights over the new Allied beachheads south of Rome, on Jan. 27, talk over the day’s exploits at a U.S. base in the Mediterranean theater. Negro members of this squadron, veterans of the North African and Sicilian campaigns, were formerly classmates at a university in the southern U.S.” February 1944. 208-MO-18H-22051.
By USGov-Military-Army [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
For this assignment, you will visit the online Rutgers University Oral History Archives pertaining to World War II. You will see when you follow the link that the archives are split into different “theaters” — European, Pacific, CBI (China-Burma-India), and American. For the purposes of this assignment, it does not matter which location you choose.
Inside each of the sections, you will find dozens of interviews with combatants and other individuals involved in the war effort. Most of these interviews are 50 or more pages long, and I do not expect you to read an entire interview for this assignment. Instead, I want you to choose any interview, and then skim through the interview until you find the soldier’s recollections of their time while in the service (the early parts of the interview usually discuss their life before the war.)
While you are skimming the interview, choose any paragraph or response consisting of ten or more lines long that catches your eye, for whatever reason.
Write a short 250-300 word reflection on the recollection. This reflection could be what you found interesting about the passage, and what else you would like to know about the references mentioned in the selection. You could pose this as a series of questions, or you could even analyze the passage further. You could bring in the biography of the interviewee (there is usually a short capsule biography of each of the combatants.)
The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize yourself with oral history interviews, as this is your final paper of the semester.
Here is an example of a recollection from combat infantryman Andre Beaumont’s interview. I found this interesting for several reasons. First, it is stunning how primitive the weaponry of U.S. soldiers was at that time (only eight bullets to a clip, compared to the millions of privately owned AR-15s in the U.S. that can shoot 30-40 rounds from a single clip). Also, Bauman talks of the minor aspects of combat which can’t be taught in training, such as how you can tell when another soldier has finished firing. Bauman’s interview excerpt here made the conflict seem so immediate…
AB: Yes, they fired German weapons and American weapons over our heads, so that we could recognize the difference in sounds, and there was a substantial difference. Particularly, the German machine guns were very fast firing, compared to American weapons. … Also, they wanted us to recognize the voices of our sergeants, because that was one of the problems that these guys had that were trapped in the snow. They didn’t know who was yelling at them, because they didn’t recognize his voice, anyway. … That was very invaluable. Then, the other thing that we did is, we went out in the snow and we practiced assaults with marching fire, which was a technique that we were not at all trained [in] and was essential in practically all our future [engagements]. At least in my stage of fighting, [it] was the basic attack technique by infantry. … Marching fire took advantage of the fact that the M1 rifle was a semi-automatic rifle. Basically, that means that every time you pull the trigger, … you fire the bullet and … there’s another bullet in the chamber, ready to be fired again. So, you had eight bullets in a clip, so, you can fire eight times in a row without having to reload your rifle, or having to move it from whatever position you’re in. … [In] marching fire, you carry the rifle at your hip and you just aim in the direction of the enemy, with the concept that if you fire a lot of bullets at people, you may not hit anybody, but you have a psychological advantage and, sure as heck, they’re going to keep their head down. … They’re not going to be looking for you and trying to shoot at you. So, you put a hail of bullets over somebody’s head and that’ll keep them down and that will give you the advantage of moving up on them. … Then, there was a little trick about the M1 rifle, which the Germans picked up on. The M1 rifle, as I said, has a clip of eight [rounds], when you fire your eighth round, it not only ejects the spent cartridge, but it also ejects the metal clip that held those eight bullets together, and that metal clip comes [out], “Clunk.” It makes a funny noise. You fire it; your last shot goes, “Clunk.” It makes that noise, I guess, when the spring hits that empty clip. It goes flying. So, the idea, the trick, was that you have a couple of those in your pocket, those empty clips, … because the Germans would know, “Oh, this guy’s out of ammunition. He’s got to reload, so, he’s got to stop. He’s got to get a clip, put it back in the rifle,” da-da-da, “and then, he’s ready to shoot. So, it’s going to take about, I don’t know, fifteen, twenty seconds before the guy is ready to shoot again. So, that’ll give me a chance to shout.” Now, the trick is, you take an empty clip and you throw it, and so, he’ll think you have expended your clip and he thinks he has time to find you and shoot at you. So, that’s when he sticks up his head up and that’s when you shoot him. So, that’s a little secret system.
