MR. DOUGLAS E. CLANIN: This interview is being conducted on September 24, 1983, at Lowell, Indiana, with Mr. Eugene Ruley, My name is Douglas Clanin from the Indiana Historical Society. I am in Lowell to conduct the interview with Mr. Ruley about his wartime experience in World War II.
Mr. Ruley, would you please give me your full name and date and place of your birth?
MR. EUGENE RULELY: Eugene Russell Ruley, June 21, 1921, Lowell, Indiana
Q. And what were the names of your parents?
A. My father’s name was Jacob and my mother’s name was Alice Agnes Evans.
Q. What were the names of your brothers and sisters?
A. I have one brother, Roy C. Ruley. He was a member of WWI. Mabel Ruley Hahn; Carl S. Ruley, member of WWI; Eva Ruley Leader; Elmer Ruley; Lyle B. Ruley; Evon Ruley Paulsen; and I am the last one, Eugene R., WWII.
Q. You were the youngest child in the family.
A. The youngest of eight.
Q. What was your early education and where was that?
A. I attended Lowell Grade School eight years, Lowell High School four years, and graduated from high school. No college. Commercial courses.
Q. What year did you graduate, Mr. Ruley?
A. In 1939.
Q. Did you have any work experience prior to your entry into military service after your high school graduation?
A. Yes, I worked as a laborer here at Globe Siding in Lowell, and was with the company as a millwright when I entered the service. I was drafted while working at Globe Siding.
Q. And the date that you were drafted was what?
A. September 7, 1943, at Fort Benjamin Harrison.
Q. Where did you take you basic training courses?
A. Basic training was in Amarillo, Texas, in October and November 1943, consisting of the usual fitness program and decision on the branch of service desired.
Q. How many weeks was you basic training?
A. Eight weeks’ training.
Q. An eight-week training course. After you completed your basic training, where were you assigned?
A. I chose the Air Force and I was assigned to Las Vegas, Nevada, aerial gunnery school after basic, and completed six weeks’ training there.
Q. What was the nature of your training course there at Las Vegas? What did aerial gunnery classes consist of?
A. I was what they called a flexible gunner, which is a one-barrel, .50-caliber machine gun and you do your own sighting with the gun, like in your turret guns. All the sighting was done for you. They call this a flexible .50.
And then we had flight training along with it. We had some range training where they run the targets down a little narrow ditch track and you fired at these with .50's and .30's or whatever you was going to use.
Q. Would those .50 calibers be called waist guns?
A. They are waist guns, yes.
Q. After you completed your aerial gunnery training and some preliminary flight training, where were you assigned?
A. We went to Avon, no, to Tampa, Florida, and waited for crew assignment there. From Tampa we went to Avon Park, Florida, for flight training prior to overseas assignment.
Q. What was the date that you were assigned to overseas?
A. I don't remember that.
Q. You don't remember that one. Let's see, this would probably be the beginning of 1944?
A. In and around the beginning there, I guess.
Q. Of 1944?
A. Yes, because I spent Christmas in Las Vegas and there was a two weeks' delay at home.
Q. So this would probably be January of '44?
A. Yes.
Q. What unit were you assigned to after . . . this would be early '44?
A. No, we weren't really assigned to a unit at that time. We took our flight training down there and then we moved on to Avon Park, Florida, and there was more training there, what they call phase training.
Q. What would that consist of? Could you describe that?
A. It's flying formation and some gunnery training. We had some .50 calibers, like they set up targets out on the coast and we'd fire from land out towards the sea with the 50 calibers. And then we had some bomb training down there where they used dummy bombs to bomb targets.
Q. Would you take part in the actual bombing or just the gunnery portion of that in the phase training?
A. In phase training the full crew always flew on whatever the mission was.
Q. Were you assigned to one particular group that you always flew with during your training?
A. We were assigned as a crew in the States, but after we got overseas the crews were split. They'd send maybe two crew members with the crew that had twenty to twenty-five missions then to get some experience. We never did fly as a full crew overseas.
Q. Oh, you never did fly as a full crew overseas. So after this phase training, did you remain State-side then for a time, or did you then ship out over to Europe?
A. We completed phase training at Avon Park and then we went to Savannah, Georgia. From there we picked up a ship, an aircraft, and got all of our overseas equipment, like your 45's and all the . . . well, we were issued the jungle parachute packs to go overseas in. (OFF THE RECORD)
Q. You were saying that you picked up your parachute packs then?
A. All the overseas equipment, and we picked up a new aircraft to fly overseas.
Q. What kind of an aircraft was that?
A. A B-17 "Flying Fortress."
Q. Do you remember the model number? Was it a G?
A. It was a G.
Q. I was just guessing on the (LAUGHS)
A. One of the newer ones.
Q. One of the newer ones, OK.
A. Our crew, out of all the crews that we had in phase training, I don't know how many there were at the time, probably twenty-eight, but our crew was the only one that went to Italy. We went overseas on our own. The rest of our crew went to England.
Q. With the 8th Air Force. You'd be in what Air Force?
A. Fifteenth.
Q. You were in the 15th Air Force, but everybody else went over into the 8th.
A. We went over as a replacement crew, so we flew all alone, and we carried K rations in the bomb bay and we had to disburse them on the way.
Q. Did they have that many B-17 units flying in Italy? My understanding was that a lot of those were assigned to England for flights, and they had a lot of medium-range bombers like your B-24's and B-25's.
A. We had B-24's in Italy and B-17's. The 463rd was a group of twenty-eight ships.
Q. That was your unit? You bomb group was the . . .
A. It was the 463rd Bomb Group, 772nd Bomb Squadron.
Q. OK, it's good to put that information in.
A. It consisted of four squadrons: 772, 773, 774, and 775.
Q. OK. Now when you were assigned over there, was there a transition phase where you . . . you didn't go directly into a combat situation then did you?
A. No, we flew . . .
Q. Your base would be what? I should have asked that question, too. When you got over there?
A. I've got that down. After crew assignment with the new ship, we flew from Savannah. Georgia, to Bangor, Maine. We left the States from Bangor, Maine, and flew to Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and from Goose Bay to the Azores Islands. From the Azores to Marrakech and French Morocco. From French Morocco to Tunis and Algiers, and we flew from Tunis to Gioia, Italy.
The only thing I could see in stopping there was that we got change for American money for Italian lira. Then we flew from Gioia, Italy, to our base in Foggia, Italy.
Q. Well, I've just talked to Richard Dunkin down in Anderson, and he was a P-51 pilot there at Foggia. In fact, he even mentioned that he was stationed there at Foggia.
A. Yeah, P-51's and P38's.
Q. And he would be there, too. That's interesting. I've talked to two people now who were at that same base. That is the first time that's happened to me, I think, in this whole program. Now this takes you up to Foggia, and the date would be approximately what, early '44?
A. (REVIEWING PAPERS) I should have that someplace. It would have been in early '44.
Q. In early '44, that's close enough. So there were twenty-eight planes in the . . .
A. In the 463rd Bomb Group.
Q. After you arrived at Foggia, (I guess I was jumping ahead of the story) did you go immediately into a combat situation?
A. The second day.
Q. The second day there. Oh boy! What were the feelings of you and the crew? Now none of them were veterans, right? Of your particular B-17 group?
A. Our pilot was a flying staff sergeant before the war, but he had never been in combat.
Q. I didn't realize that they had NCOs actually flying airplanes.
A. Yes, before the war.
Q. Before the war, that's right. He kept his rank and wasn't promoted to an officer's rank?
A. Yeah, he was promoted.
Q. But he was with an NCO grade?
A. He was promoted to first lieutenant.
Q. Oh, he was. So the second day you were there you go in combat.
A. The second day I was over France, scared to death!
Q. Scared to death. Yeah, I probably could anticipate your reaction of that!
A. That was really something. Like I said, I was scared to death, and we only saw about ten bursts of flak on that day, so I said, "This war is a real breeze." I found out later it was no breeze!
Q. This would be in southern France that you were flying formations and everything?
A. Yes.
Q. You had a total of how many missions overseas?
A. Thirty-one actual over in the 15th Air Force in Italy. When you flew over an eight-hour raid, you got credit for two, and that applied to your fifty missions, so I had credit for thirty-five, but actual thirty-one.
Q. Most of those missions that you flew, were they of high-altitude bombings of targets or . . .
A. Oh, I think our . . . usually around 27,000 feet.
Q. Did you ever have any credit for shooting down any German planes?
A. No, when I got over there, the German fighter planes were just about kaput. They'd all been knocked out, and besides that, when we got there we had fighters with us, 51's and 38's, so we always had protection. The men usually carried us almost into the target. Unless they were longer targets -- over eight hours -- why then they had to turn back, but we never had any problems.
Q. Even on these real long, deep penetrations that you would fly, on those deep penetration missions, do you recall where they would have taken place?
A. Oh, Ploesti, I guess that was a fairly long one. Gluckheimer, it was a big ball bearing plant way up in the northern part and that was a long one.
Q. What country would that be in?
A. In Prussia.
Q. That was a long way. Of course, Ploesti was in Roumania, and they hit that repeatedly, but you . . .
A. In Roumania I was in Ploesti three times, and lost a ball turret operator over Ploesti.
Q. From your plane?
A. No, he was flying with another crew and we split, and our tail gunner went down over Ploesti. He was picked up by Roumanians and he eventually got back to our lines and was sent home.
Q. He was extremely lucky.
A. Yeah.
Q. Gosh, so all the time that you were flying these missions, you were strictly a waist gunner? Did you help out on any other functions on the ship?
A. Well, I was assistant engineer of the ship, too. Everybody had two jobs and I was a gunner, assistant engineer, and there was an engineer and a gunner. He had two guns in the ball turret up on top. And like your ball turret operator, he was the armorer of this ship, so everybody had different functions.
Q. What was the size of the crew on your ship?
A. That was a ten-man crew.
Q. That's a good-sized crew. I didn't realize they had that many men on your . . .
A. Yes, they carried ten.
Q. Did you ever catch any fire?
A. Oh, my God, yes! We got a lot of flak! Ploesti you got full of flak! In Budapest, after I had been taken prisoner, I went through a bomb raid in Budapest and I went through a bridge. Budapest is two cities really, There is a river that goes through there and Buda is on one side and Pest is on the other, but we called it Budapest. I bombed that track and I know damned well we knocked it out. Here, when I was taken prisoner we went back over that same track and got into Pest, and went through a bomb raid there, by our own bombers.
Q. That must have been a really frightening experience.
This is just a little ahead of our story, but I want to . . . so you had a total of thirty-five actuals.
A. Thirty-five credit, thirty-one actual.
Q. So when you were taken prisoner, and this leads me up to the next question: when and where did this all happen?
A. We were going to Gluckheimer. That was the target that day. And we left in the morning, a beautiful day out, sunshine, and we'd been on the raid for about six hours, I guess, five hours or something like that, and anyhow we have what they call an I.P. point. This is where you turn in and make a hit going into the target. Well, we hit the I.P. point and we got fog. You wouldn't believe the fog!
There were twenty-eight ships flying in our squadron that day and I learned later, I think there were seven of them that got home, and in our case we made a forced landing. Some of them got shot down. Some of them went to other countries where they could land.
Q. It was just because of the fog. It was impossible to see, and you became . . .
A. Well, with us we got in there and the fog was so bad you couldn't even see your wing men. Well, everybody split. By the time the navigator found out where he was, it was three hundred miles north of the target, so we turned around and came back. We dumped the bombs on what we hoped was a target, and when we started back home, we got a ninety-mile-an-hour head wind, and of course, we didn't have the gas to get back. This is a decision the crew has to make. We had been briefed before we went out that morning that there was a valley in the mountains there that was supposedly held by the partisans, So we were briefed that if we had trouble we could land in this valley and they would take care of us.
Q. Excuse me, the partisans, what nationality would these people be?
A. Yugoslavians. There were all kinds of tribes over there. So as we came back, we knew we were not going to make it back to the base, so it was either ditch the aircraft in the sea or make this forced landing. Then we took a crew vote and decided to make a landing. We got down all right. It tore a hole in the tail, but the rest of the ship was all right. But when we got down there the partisans had been run out, and the Ustachis had taken over. That's another tribe in Yugoslavia.
Q. How do you spell that, Ustachi, do you have any idea? I've never heard of that particular group. It is like a nationality.
A. (SPELLING) U-S-T-A-C-H-I, I think it is. Rough, rugged men.
Q. This is in Yugoslavia and you had to crash down there.
A. Yes, we were about twenty miles from the coast near a town called Split, and we were about twenty miles north of that.
Q. That's an odd name for a town. (LAUGHS) What would the date be on this when you actually (landed), do you have any idea?
(OFF THE RECORD)
Now off the tape we have been discussing the possible date, Mr Ruley, that you crash landed in Yugoslavia. It says here on your service record that you left the United States on 27 July 1944 for Italy, and you arrived 6 August 1944. And you indicated that probably it was in October of '44 when you actually crash landed in Yugoslavia, you and your crew. We could go with that date until we can refine it a little bit later on if we happen to run across any more precise dates than that. That would be close enough. We know that it was in the fall of 1944 when this took place. I'll be in correspondence with you about this, and if you happen to run across a more definite date, why that would be really helpful
Now when you crash landed, were any of your crew members hurt?
A. No.
Q. Nobody got hurt on the ten-man crew. So you fell into the hands of Ustachis who weren't as friendly as the partisans at all.
A. As a matter of fact, we would have probably been killed by them, but the Germans had seen us go down. Of course, they wanted to interrogate us, so the following day they got us -- the Germans got us.
Q. What size force was it that actually captured you, do you happen to recall?
A. Do you mean the Ustachi?
Q. The Ustachi and then the Germans, was that a pretty good-sized group?
A. No, the Germans didn't need that many, five or six guys and they would just go in there and take over.
Q. There was no resistance on your part though, was there? On the part of the crew, because you couldn't fight your way out to the coast, and all that sort of thing?
A. No.
Q. After you got captured by these Germans, what did they do with you?
A. They interrogated us. The first man that interrogated me was a corporal in the Germany Army. When I went in for interrogation I was smoking an American cigarette and he made note of that, and I says, "Yeah, it's American." He said, "I'll trade you two German cigarettes for the butt," so I handed it to him and we got to talking and he said, "I lived in New York and my wife's still in New York, and when I get out of the service I'm going back to New York." So I asked him what he was doing here, and he said, "Well, Grandpa died," and he came over for the funeral and he got conscripted and put into the service in the German Army. I heard that from several people during the time I was a prisoner of war. They all lived in large cities or coastal towns where we had big munitions factories or . . .
Q. So he was telling the truth, do you think, that he had been over there?
A. Oh sure. He spoke as good English as I do.
Q. Very fluent?
A. Oh yeah.
Q. So he was the first one. It sounds like he was a fairly friendly person, and did he put you at ease at all, or were you pretty concerned? How about everybody in the crew? This is just a surmising, but I'll bet you were pretty anxious about the situation, weren't you?
A. Well, the only thing is that we were still in Yugoslavia. Of course, you're anxious in there because I imagine those tribes over there are fighting right now, because if they don't have a country to fight, they fight each other. They are just warlike people, I guess. I don't know. (LAUGHS) And they're rough. Real rough. As a matter of fact, well the thing is, the Germans got ahold of us and got us into Germany to their own prisoner of war camps there. So we were put on a truck convoy to go through the mountains.
Q. This would be what, probably about a week after your interrogation, do you think?
A. About four or five days. And while we were going through the mountains on this truck convoy, the partisans tried to recapture us again, but they didn't have a big enough force so they didn't get us.
Q. You mentioned the partisans, so you think that they were unfriendly to us, too?
A. Oh no, the partisans got a lot of our boys back.
Q. They got a lot of them out and helped them. These were Communists basically, or were they just nationalists fighting the Germans, or were they just a mixture?
A. They were more or less a mixture.
Q. A mixture of various people, and they had one thing that united them, that they didn't like the Nazis at all, and wanted to get rid of them.
A. Yeah.
Q. OK. They didn't have enough force to liberate you. Haw many Americans, would you say, were in this convoy?
A. Well, there was our own crew and part of another crew that I know of. And then they had an old woman there, and they said she was a spy and she had been operating the radio. They were taking her up into some town up in there, Graz, I think the name of the town was Graz, and they shot her when they got her up there.
But then we went to some small town after we left the truck convoy, and then they put us on trains and this is where they took us into Budapest. This was the bridge that I helped bomb once, and I knew we knocked that out, but we went over the same bridge. I had been told that it had been knocked out several times and had been rebuilt. And we got into Pest and they had a bomb raid and they took us down into a bomb shelter. After the bomb raid was over, then they put us on a train and started us then to Hanover and Bremen. That's where the camp was. We went through part of the outskirts of Berlin.
Q. Did you notice a lot of damage, too?
A. Oh yes.
Q. You could see that.
A. There was a lot of damage. Of course, it was shortly after [that] the war was over, seven or eight months from the time I got over there.
Q. So you went to a military prison camp in the Hanover-Bremen area?
A. Yeah, I was in two camps. One of them was #357 and one of them was #4. We left the one in February. Number 4 we left February 6th, '44.
Q. That would have been '45, wouldn't it?
A. Yes. From February 6th to March 29th we were with German Air Force guards. They were younger people. You had to watch them pretty close, or they'd kill you for any reason whatsoever.
Q. A little trigger-happy.
A. Yeah, they still thought they were going to win the war.
Then we went to another camp, in #357, and I'm not just sure where that was.
Q. Now this first camp you went into, #4, can you describe something about the nature of how the camp operated? I saw a movie a number of years ago -- a very good one -- and it was entitled Stalag 17. This is the place where they put air crew types?
A. Yes, #357 was another air force camp.
Q. And it was run by a Luftwaffe-type of personnel?
A. Yeah.
Q. I understand that those types of camps, now this is comparatively speaking, you probably wouldn't think so, but they were a little more humane to the American soldiers.
A. Sure they were, because the rule in the air force was, like I was a buck sergeant at the time I went down, and automatically you get one more grade, and so I went from buck to a staff sergeant, so this gives you a little more (clout). Well, in the German Army a corporal is a big shot. So here I am a staff sergeant, so it's way above this first guy who interrogated me, so you get better treatment. There was no doubt about that, but the enlisted men and the officers were all separated.
Q. Is that right? You were in a different part of the compound?
A. Well, I never saw my officers after we went down.
Q. Now in the camps, and I'm talking about Southeast Asia, they did have the officers in there. In other words, they had the camp commander among the prisoners. I remember seeing the movie called The Great Escape. Now this is based on a movie experience, because I never talked to anybody who was a prisoner of war, but they had the officers mixed in with the enlisted people. Maybe this is towards the end of the war and they probably decided to separate them because the officers were making plans to escape, and things like that. So you were totally isolated from any contact with the officer corps among the Americans?
A. I never saw them afterwards.
Q. Was there an enlisted man who was put in charge of the American prisoners to speak for them?
A. No.
Q. You didn't have anybody that the Germans singled out and say, "You're in charge of your people," and that sort of thing?
A. No.
Q. How many men would you say were in the first camp you were in? This would be #4, right?
A. Probably five hundred.
Q. This would be the enlisted people in that group?
A. Yeah.
Q. Were they mostly Americans, or were there some other nationalities?
A. We were all Americans.
Q. All Americans from mostly bomber crews that had been shot (down), and then they were brought together. They could be from raids over France or . . .
A. Yeah, we had guys in the 8th Air Force there and the 15th there.
Q. All mixed up together in there.
A. Yes.
Q. Do you recall the names of any Hoosiers, by any chance, that you might have been in contact with over there in that camp?
A. Well, yes, there were a lot of them. They're in that book. (See Appendix)
There was a guy from Monticello, Indiana, named Bob Williams. I'd met him here in the States and when we left gunnery school we came home together. When we went back, we went back to Tampa together, and we were separated down there. When I became a prisoner of war I was standing there reading a bulletin board and some guy hit me on the back and it was Bob Williams.
Prior to that I was in Italy, he was in the 8th Air Force, and they ran a cattle run from England to Russia to Italy and then back to England. He landed on our base (Foggia) and I met him there.
Well, after the war was over, we both were supposed to go to San Antonio. We had our orders together and we went out there together and got out of the service together.
Q. It was a small world; you were always bumping into each other (LAUGHING) sometime during the war.
A. Yeah.
Q. That's amazing. You could have a story about that, to be so separated and then come together a various points in time. That's something!
This camp had probably been in operation for some time. How was your treatment? How would you assess that -- by the German guards, and . . .
A. That's where I got my Purple Heart. They had a big problem out there. They used to run us out in the morning to take a head count. Well, it was kind of cold and when they dismissed you everybody would run to get back into the barracks, and they had this big German guard with his big hobnailed boots, and he liked to stand around the doors and give everybody a boot when they were going in. Well, he caught me one day in the left leg. Of course, with hobnails on there he tore all the flesh off, and then I contacted scabies and it left some scars on there, and it was a wound. So when I was going out of there we needed eighty-five points, so the guy said, "Do you have any scars that you didn't have before you went in?" I said, "Yeah." So I showed him and he says, "Oh, you should get the Purple Heart plus the points," so I took the points. I never did get the Purple Heart. I haven't got it yet.
Q. Even though it indicates it on your records that you were supposed to get the Purple Heart.
A. Well, I would have been eligible for it.
Q. Oh certainly. It was just like a combat wound, because he didn't have to do that to you, but he did that to a lot of people, just to kick them for meanness.
A. In the barracks I was in there were two men who had been in there for over a year, I guess. One of them had sixty-seven bayonet wounds in him and the other one had forty-three wounds in him. It was just when they were standing out just before they take you into camp, and they were telling what you can do and what you can't do. You were standing right there where they have a freaky guard out there, and he gives you a bayonet.
Q. Did those two men survive?
A. Yeah, they survived.
Q. All those cuts?
A. Yeah, sixty-seven wounds that one guy had.
Q. Did they give him any kind of medical treatment or did they just . . .
A. No, that was a big problem. If you got a wound like the wounds I got on my leg, you didn't have any medicine, and your food wasn't sufficiently good enough to heal up the wound, and once it was open it just kept getting worse.
Q. So with all these men in the camp, could you describe what a typical day would be like? I imagine it was pretty routine.
A. Well, you got up in the morning and they gave you hot water and if you had coffee from a Red Cross parcel, or something like that, you had your coffee and you went out for your head count and you came back in. Then you sat around until dinner, and what they called dinner was maybe they'd give you some cabbage soup, or something. Of course, I can't say too much about that, because they didn't have much to eat themselves.
Q. This is towards the tail end of the war, so they were really hurting immensely, our bomb raids, and of course, the attacks and things.
A. Yeah. When it came time to evacuate the camp they gave you a Red Cross parcel, but it was down to about one parcel for six guys per week, which was just enough to get a little taste of something. So when we left the camp we had to evacuate because they didn't have all the parcels you'd want. Well, they had plenty of parcels. I saw guys trying to have four of them, which is nothing they can do.
We went on the road then, just walking from one place to another. We crossed the Elbe River three times. The British would push us one way and they'd go back the other way then, and then the Russians would push us, and then we'd go back the way we just came.
Q. Did anybody escape during this time or while you were at camp?
A. Oh, it's possible; I don't know, there were so many people on the road.
Q. They could probably slip away during this time.
A. They could have slipped away, I suppose.
Q. Did you have to wear a distinctive prisoner uniform?
A. No, I had on my regular OD's. I had gotten a Christmas parcel and I had a bright green sweater from it, and I had that on. Well, for shoes I was walking on cardboard. And when we got into the second camp they asked if anybody needed shoes. They had shoes and they were British. I thought, "Well, hell, I'm going to go and see if I can find a pair of shoes." They gave me a pair of mediums. I had hobnail shoes. I said, "Hell, I could stick my feet in and turn around in them and the shoes stood still," but I took them anyhow.
Q. (LAUGHTER) You took them anyway. Were you able to get word to your family in the States that you were OK through the Red Cross?
A. No, they didn't know anything. They didn't hear anything back in the States (of where we were).
Q. Nobody was able to get word in or out, is that right? I thought maybe the Red Cross, acting as an intermediary, could do something like that.
A. No.
Q. That's too bad.
A. We were in Germany and there was a little town in there by the name of Greiz. This was coming up towards the end of the war. The orders were for all POWs on the road never to break ranks, which means if you are walking down the road and an aircraft comes over, let it go. Don't break ranks and get off the road.
Well, they gave us some Red Cross parcels in this little town of Greiz in Germany. There were a bunch of Canadians ahead of us and they hadn't had any real food for quite some time, and they ran out in the fields, and there was a British pilot, but when they broke ranks, he took them. I think that guy killed about twenty and wounded forty to fifty guys.
Q. What a tragedy!
A. Yeah, it was.
Q. He thought these were German soldiers out there.
A. Yes, his orders were if they broke ranks, kill them.
Q. But as long as you stayed in formation, they would . . .
A. He killed sixteen men and wounded between fifty and sixty.
Q. Is this town Greece or Grice?
A. (SPELLING) G_R-E-E-S-E.
Q. I've never heard of that. I'll have to look it up on the map.
A. I've tried to go through the maps and tried to find some of these, but the spelling has been changed. (Greiz)
Q. But that is what it was called at the time.
Now what part of Germany was that in? Did you basically stay in this Bremen-Hanover area?
A. No, we'd been on the eastern side of Germany. We were east of the Elbe River.
Shortly after that we were on a big farm there, and the British 2nd Army came in and liberated us. They didn't have enough men to get us back to where we should have been so there were combat zones between us, and we had to get back to the other side of the Elbe River again.
So we had to get out the best way we could, and all the survivors started walking. There were about fifteen or twenty of us, I guess, and a German half-track came along. They were going into this town that surrendered, so we stopped them and told them to get out of the half-track and took over the half-track ourselves. Well, we went on into town and when we got there the half-track was too heavy. They had a pontoon bridge across there and the half-track was too heavy to go across. So we got ahold of a British Tommy. He stopped the Red Cross truck and they had some German wounded in there, and they threw them all out in the street and gave us the truck, but (LAUGHTER) we didn't argue, we just took the truck and crossed the river. After we got across, why we came onto an airport. It was not an airport, but was a place where some of the planes had been stopping and they had some gun crews in there, some anti-aircraft crews. They were British. We had a kid from Boston, Massachusetts, who got to talking to one of these gun crews, and they said, "Well, come on in here and stay with us," so we went down in the crew with them and got to talking with them and exchanging stories. So one guy says, "Well, there's a Canadian pilot. He's flying a C-47 and he wants a motorcycle." We said, "If we find a motorcycle we'll give him a call on the radio and have him come in and pick it up." And he said that maybe when he lands, "Maybe we can get you out of here."
So they got ahold of a motorcycle in a couple of days and radioed and he called in, "Yeah, he'll be in there and will ride over and get it." So this guy told him, "Well, I've got a couple of Yanks over here and they'd like to get back." And he said, "Well, I don't know about that." So he finally agreed to take us, and when the damned plane landed he said, "When I hit the ground they're going to get that motorcycle, and you guys get right in here and I'm taking right off." When he hit the ground there were about fifty guys out there, (LAUGHTER) trying to get on that plane!
Q. Everybody heard about it.
A. Everybody wanted to get on the plane and get out of there! I don't know how many he got, but he got a bunch of them and we didn't have any parachutes or anything.
Q. Boy, if that plane had crashed, forget it!
A. He took us on and he flew us to Brussels, Belgium. He said, "Now I'm going to hit the ground and you boys bail out here, 'cause I'm taking right off again. I'm not authorized to pick you guys up." (LAUGHTER) So he landed us in Brussels. They took us there and gave us some food and clothes, got the lice off of us and gave us some medicine.
Q. You must have been in pretty bad shape.
A. I wasn't in real, real bad shape, but there were guys that were. Yeah, because of the damned lice, and of course, you start scratching . . . On some of them I could see their shoulder blade bones where they had been scratching the lice.
Q. They must have had scabies and a number of other things.
A. Scabies, yeah.
Q. They wouldn't permit you to take showers? Did they give any kind of sanitation -- pit toilets, basically, in the camp?
A. Yeah, they had pit toilets.
Q. Well I was going to ask you, you know you mentioned the guards. How many guards were there on an average in those camps?
A. There was a tower on each side. There were four towers, and through the day they'd maybe have about four or five guys walking, and at night the dogs. They turned the dogs loose.
Q. Dogs?
A. Oh yes.
Q. Oh, they had dogs. They had a dead zone? In other words, two parallel lines of barbed wire or fences and then other doges would run in between those two (lines)?
A. No, the dogs were right in the barracks area. They were right outside the door. You might not see a dog, but you'd step out the door and there'd be one there.
Q. Mostly German Shepherds?
A. Well, yeah, Shepherds and Dobermans.
Q. But they were trained to attack anything that was moving out there. Oh boy!
A. Yeah.
Q. That released their manpower then, because they wouldn't have so many people as guards.
A. Yeah, and they had those damned dogs!
Q. There weren't any plans then . . . I think what I'm trying to get at, for escapes within the prison camps?
A. Well, not at this time. Everybody was sweating it out anyhow because they knew it was going to end soon.
Q. That was common knowledge around there? The scuttlebutt was, people knew, and (thought), "We'll just have to wait a couple of months. Why bother to try to escape now?"
A. You could just get knocked off.
Q. Right, so they just sat it out at that point.
A. Yes.
Q. Now you mentioned those trigger-happy guards. Now this was at that other camp, #357; that was the second camp you went to?
A. Well, (it was) mostly the guards on the road.
Q. Guards on the road.
A. When we were marching on the road.
Q. They got real nervous?
A. Yes.
Q. Real young ones?
A. Younger guys, and of course, they thought they were still going to win.
But then after the old Air Corps guards, or I guess they were Regular Army. I don't know, but they were older people in their fifties, and hell, they knew it was all over then. As a matter of fact, they'd let us build fires. Where we used to walk from sunup till sundown with these young guys, and when we got the old guards, we'd start at eight o'clock in the morning and we had a chance to build a fire. If we had anything to cook, we could cook it. We used to take our clothes off and hold them over the big smudge, and hang our clothes over there and try to get rid of the lice. But they knew what the score was.
Q. Did they talk English where you could converse with them, and did they say things like that?
A. Yes.
Q. That's interesting. They were very frank about it and they knew that things were going to be over soon.
A. Oh yeah.
Q. I'm surprised that they would talk to the prisoners like this. Maybe they were thinking that once the war was over with, if they didn't treat you nice, (LAUGHS) there could be some repercussions as far as they were concerned.
A. You bet!
Q. If things had been going good in Germany, I think they may have been even harsher on you. Do you think so, the fact that the war -- if the war was going so good?
A. Oh yeah, I'm sure.
Q. Were there a lot of prisoners in there that had been there for a long time?
A. I didn't meet Americans who were, but there were a hell of a lot of English in there and they had been in there for five years.
Q. Five years!
A. And they spoke German as good as the Germans, (LAUGHS) and they were whizzes with radios and that kind of stuff, you know.
Q. Did they have radios in the camp, too?
A. Oh yeah, those guys made radios out of toothpicks, I think. Yeah, they knew what was going on all the time.
Q. We had some really resourceful guys. I remember seeing the movie, The Great Escape, where some guys were scroungers and some guys could make coats and things like that.
A. Yeah.
Q. It was just amazing the things they could do in the camps. Do you have any stories about guys making incredible things out of almost nothing? I mean the radio is one example. Do you recall if there was anybody else who was a whiz like that mechanically to make something, or somebody who could sew things together?
A. No. Well, of course, I didn't have much contact with these guys. It was only when we were on the road going to that second camp, and then we were only there about three days and we had to evacuate that one, too, so then we were on the road again, marching. But this book's (See Appendix) got some poems and stuff, that they wrote in there, and you can take this along.
Q. I'd appreciate it if I could make a copy of that material, and we could put that in the back as an appendix to it. I think that is very valuable, since it really related to that era. I'll take extremely good care of it and send it back Certified Mail.
OK. When you landed in Brussels, they deloused you and you had gotten some medicine and supplies for some people. I really didn't get the . . .
A. I think it was probably the Red Cross.
Q. The Red Cross. And this would probably be in May. I think when the Germans surrendered it was on May 8th of 1945.
A. In May.
Q. So the war was over basically. How long did you stay in Brussels?
A. We were only there maybe four of five days and then they took us down to Le Havre in France on the coast. We went down there to wait for a boat to come home on.
Q. Did you go through any debriefing about the conditions of the camps, or anything of that nature?
A. No, of course they had all the information. It's like when I was interrogated in Germany by the Germans, I said, "Hell, they know more about our things than I do."
Q. Oh, you didn't mention that before. You mentioned you were questioned by this fellow who spoke fluent English but at the camps, did they interrogate all the prisoners?
A. No, after they got into the camps they didn't. We didn't have any interrogation there.
We were in Metz and I was a prisoner. I don't remember whether it was after the truck ride or before we got on the train, but anyhow, they put us in a jail there in Metz, the local jail. That was at the time when George S. Patton was supposed to come in there with his tanks, and he ran out of gas! (LAUGHS) He left us sitting there!
Q. You mean you could have been liberated right at that moment? You should have been if he hadn't run out of gas that time. (LAUGHS) Too bad!
What kind of information were you told that you could only give them? Did you have to give them your unit number?
A. Name, rank and serial number.
Q. You never told them your unit? They probably could have figured that out as far as your unit was.
A. Sure they could.
Q. I'm getting behind myself, but that was all in Foggia, wasn't it, your takeoffs and landings?
A. Yes.
Q. At the time of your crash, that was your main base. They probably had that figured out from things they could find out . . .
A. Sure.
Q. . . . details on groups and squadron numbers were all painted on the aircraft, and they probably didn't even ask you the question?
A. They knew more about out tactics than we did.
Q. Now jumping ahead, when you got back to Le Havre, France, then you were put on shipboard almost immediately?
A. No, we set there I guess it was almost for two weeks. I met a kid from Gary there.
Q. Do you recall his name? From Gary, Indiana?
A. Yeah, it's in the book here somewhere. He wanted me to go to Paris with him. I said, "Hell, I've been over here a week and a half now waiting for a boat, and the minute I go to Paris the boat will come in." Aw, he wanted to go to Paris. He didn't have any money, that was the deal. So I had a few bucks and I gave him ten bucks and he went to Paris, and the next day the boat came in. (LAUGHTER)
Q. He was having fun in Paris, but he missed the boat!
A. For ten bucks, he couldn't have had much.
Q. That's right, not in Gay Paree, even in those days. So after two weeks in Le Havre you came back to the United States. Did you process out of the service immediately, or you said you had to have so many points?
A. The thing they told us was that once you were a prisoner of war, you never had to go back into combat again. So when we came home, we had a month at home, and then I was supposed to go to Florida for two weeks. In some big hotel down there. We were going to have deep-sea fishing, and all that malarkey. Then they said you'd go back into phase training again and retrain and then you'd go on over to Japan. Well, while we were home, the war with Japan ended, too, and I didn't get to go to Florida.
Then they changed our orders and we were to go to San Antonio, Texas, for discharge. Well, this guy I was telling you about from Monticello, Bob Williams, and I were together. We went in there into the day room and told the guy who we were and the sergeant in there was looking around, and he said, "I've got no records on you guys." And I thought, "Well, our papers haven't caught up with us." We were down there a good week. We'd go in there everyday -- nothing! "We've got nothing on you."
Well, it was the habit of the GI's to go around to different areas to places to eat. So we were over in a different area one day and we were coming back to our own barracks, and there was a bunch of guys lined up there with a bunch of bags and stuff. Bob looked at me and said, "Well, let's go and see what's going on." So we went over and asked the guy, and he says, "We're going to Greensboro, North Caroline for discharge." Well, we took off, went back to the barracks and got our bags, loaded them up and went back and got in line and two weeks later we were out of the Army. (LAUGHTER)
Q. Where were you stationed down there in San Antonio, because I was stationed there myself when I was in the Air Force, at Lackland.
A. I just got in, I don't know where we were. We went into town once and that was at night, so it was just San Antonio.
Q. You see they had an Air Training Center there, and they later changed it to Lackland Air Force Base, and they have Kelly Field and then they had Fort Sam Houston. There are many bases around there. It really is not that important at all, but the main thing is that you got out.
A. I'm not sure. I guess I'm out.
Q. We've got a paper here and I guess it says so.
A. Yes, it's so, but that is a "Temporary Record."
Q. It says, "No remarks. Wounded. Temporary Service Record (LAUGHTER) No remarks." This says a free permit, too.
After you got out of the service, this was in '45, you were actually discharged October 10, 1945.
(REVIEWS RECORDS -- OFF THE RECORD)
Here it is, "10 October '45. The Army Air Forces Overseas Replacement Depot, Greensboro, North Carolina." Then after you got out of the service, do you want to talk about your date of marriage, your wife, her last name and the children's names?
A. Well, I got married to Norma Joyce Roberts on 6-15-46. We have four kids: Benjamin Scott, the oldest; Mary Ann, the oldest girl; Amy Joyce, the youngest; and John Patrick, the youngest boy.
Q. What occupation or occupations did you have when you got out of the service?
A. I went back to Globe Siding after I left the service. And in the early '50's I was a custodian of the Lake County Criminal Court House in Crown Point, Indiana, and in 1963 I was appointed Acting Postmaster. On March 18th of '63 I was made Postmaster, and retired on a medical disability 9-11-76.
Q. So you were a Postmaster then about thirteen years?
A. Yes, and my service time now.
Q. Do you have any other comments you'd like to add about your military experience that you can recall, to kind of summarize it, maybe the effect it had on your life, if any?
A. I really don't like to make a comment.
When I was in Basic training in Amarillo, they gave you a pretty good physical to see whether you were able to fly or not, whether you'd be able of going on a flying crew.
And while I was there, they called me back three or four times and gave me a heart check. Well, to my knowledge, I never had any trouble with my heart and when I went in they said they didn't find anything wrong with my heart. Then about the fourth time they said, "Yeah, you're OK to be on an air crew."
So I went through the war, and when I was discharged they give you another physical when you go out. The doctor checked my heart and told me to step out of line. So I got out of line and he threw me back up on the table again and went over my heart again. And he said, "If you go to a hospital for three months, I'll guarantee you'll get a pension." I said, "Buddy, there's no way, all I want is OUT." He says, "OK," and I signed the papers and I was discharged.
Q. What he was saying, in effect, was that you could have gotten a disability based on the fact that you really had a defective heart?
A. There was something wrong. I had never any trouble with it, even in the service.
Q. But it was something they should have caught, right?
A. Right, and would go into the records. In the late '70s I had a couple of heart attacks and then I had open-heart surgery. Then I started looking for records and I thought maybe, "Aw, I'll try to get a pension." My records were in the facility down in Missouri that had burned.
Q. Right near St. Louis. They had a fire down there.
A. I think there were thousands and thousands of records down there. It seemed to me it was awfully convenient, because this was about the time that guys had something wrong and were getting in really bad shape then . . .
Q. To have a fire.
A. It seems to be awfully convenient to have a fire and destroy all those records. So I never got my pension.
Q. So your records, as far as you know, were destroyed down there when they had that fire near the St. Louis Personnel Center?
A. Yes.
Q. So this has probably affected your whole life then? The fact that you had to go in and it sounds like perhaps you shouldn't have had to go in, and it was dangerous for you to go in.
A. When I went in, they didn't find anything.
Q. Did you fly with oxygen at high altitudes?
A. Oh yeah.
Q. . . . on your missions, and things like that? Well, that's a strain on somebody with that high-altitude flying. Your heart could have gone at any time, it seems to me, and, of course, you crash landed.
A. We went on oxygen at 14,000 feet.
Q. You were up over 14,000 feet?
A. Yes.
Q. Well, thank very much, Mr. Ruley. Do you have anything else that you would like to add?
A. Well, I'm going to give you this book so you can go through that, if there are any questions you want to ask me on this book.
Q. OK.
A. I have a picture of my original crew if you want that.
Q. Yes, I would like to borrow that. Thank you very much, Mr. Ruley.
MR CLANIN: These remarks are being recorded later in the day on September 24, 1983, in my home in Anderson, Indiana. This is again Douglas Clanin speaking.
Looking through Mr. Ruley's book, the name of the individual from Gary, Indiana, who decided to go on to Paris rather than waiting in Le Havre for the ship to take him back home was Harold Butler. His address is 4451 Massachusetts Drive, Gary, Indiana.
Also, according to this book, the date that Mr. Ruley's plane crash landed in Yugoslavia was October 17, 1944, and he was released from prison on May 2, 1945, which was six days prior to V-E- Day. His Prisoner of War Serial Number also, according to this book, was #4557, and this was when he was assigned to Stalag Luftwaffe #4 in Germany, and this concludes these remarks.
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