A World War II veteran has recounted in harrowing new testimony the brutal house-to-house fighting he survived in occupied France, describing an eight-hour firefight in which he killed enemy soldiers at point-blank range, watched a comrade shot through the forehead, and believed he would never leave the building alive.
The unnamed veteran, who served as a truck driver attached to an artillery unit, spoke in an oral history interview released as part of the Remember WWII project. His account offers a rare, unflinching window into the close-quarters combat that defined the Allied push through France after the Normandy landings, where soldiers fought room by room, staircase by staircase, and window by window in towns reduced to rubble.
His testimony begins not with heroism but with hesitation. Reflecting on the act of killing, he said he had thought about it many times, and that the more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He described a saying he holds to: a person has to have something happen to them before they can 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anybody.
It is not a good thing to do, he said. But in his case, he was helped by what he had already witnessed. He had seen crews being killed and knew immediately that he could easily be next.
That knowledge, he said, was a kind of help. Without it, he believes, everyone in his position would have died. There was no choice at that time, he recalled.
But it was not a good feeling. Not a good feeling at all.
The veteran’s unit had been on the front for about five days when orders came to realign the lines, an operation the men privately called a retreat. They hated the idea. They had not gone over there to retreat, he said.
But retreat they did, in miserable conditions, through roughly six inches of snow. The gun had frozen into the ground and had to be dug out before it could be moved. His truck gave him terrible trouble as he struggled to hook it up again.
Eventually they fell back to a town he remembered as Swaghasan.
The next day brought a terrible fight. As they entered the town, it seemed peaceful, not yet badly beaten up. Many roofs were gone, which was normal for the area, where every town was wrecked to some degree.
The French, he noted, took it really, really tough.
Before the battle, the unit placed its guns as it always did. Truck drivers had a specific job in those moments: hide in the truck. The truck was the biggest target on the front, and the front was close.
The Germans might be only a couple hundred yards away, and a truck large enough to pull a 57-millimeter gun was easy to see.
That night, he and another driver, Bob Gardner, found shelter in a brewery tower. Every town and village in the area had a brewery, and every brewery had a tower. He never learned what the tower was for, but it was dry, had a wooden floor, and stood about three stories high.
It looked pretty good, so they stayed there. The next morning they moved their guns into position and found houses in the village.
Around noon, he looked up at the hill where the brewery stood. The tower was gone. It had been shelled away completely, because such high points served as observation posts for either side.
Taking away the high ground was the first thing either army did. It was an odd feeling, he recalled, to realize he had slept in that tower the night before, and the next day it was on the ground.
They found places to stay. The next morning, he was supposed to go in for a hot meal. Every three or four days the men got hot chow, carried in what looked like a big vacuum bottle.
It was very good, but it did not happen often. He wanted to leave before dawn because he had to cross a hill to reach the kitchen, about three miles back toward the next town. Another driver was to go with him.
His plan was to get over the hill before the Germans could see him and open fire.
When he went out to his truck, he found a shell had landed nearby and flattened three of its tires. He could not use it. He walked about a block to where his buddy had another truck, intending to wake him and borrow it.
After a longer struggle than expected, he finally got the man up and into the truck. They were ready to start. His buddy was ready to turn the key.
Then he looked out along the tree line. About 200 men were coming out of the woods, dressed in white sheets or white uniforms. They had not thought much about German soldiers.
They had not thought about much of anything. They were still pretty green. He told his buddy to wait, to look at what was happening.
He did not like it. He thought they might be GIs, but he was not sure. Just then, one of the Germans yelled something in German to another.
Both Americans got out of there fast and ran to the house where his buddy’s squad was billeted.
He credited the Lord with giving them a two-story house, the only two-story house in the area. The rest were one story. They ran upstairs.
The Germans were right on them. He did not know why they did not fire as the two men ran from the truck to the house. They could have been knocked off easily.
But they made it inside and tried to wake the squad. The men would not wake up. Then the Germans started shooting into the house, and the squad got up in a hurry.
By that time, Gardner, the veteran, and a soldier named Cruz were upstairs. Cruz had been firing out the window. Just as the veteran reached the top of the stairs, Cruz said he had gotten another one.
Then a bullet struck him in the middle of the forehead. He fell over. It was a horrible scene.
He fell back, threw his hands up on the floor. The veteran knew he was gone right away.
The rest of the squad came up, and they fought from that upper floor for the entire day. After about twenty minutes to half an hour, a couple of Germans got the idea to come up the stairs. The layout of the house forced anyone entering to cross the back and then turn to climb.
The veteran thought to himself that they would be right behind him. He stopped at the top of the stairs with what the men called a grease gun, a weapon he described as marvelous, costing seventeen dollars to make and functioning as a great machine gun. He picked off the Germans as they came in the back and tried to come up.
That stopped the attempt.
From then on, the fight was fought from the windows. It got hot and handy. The Germans got into the bottom level and shot up through the floor.
The veteran described standing there as bullets came up right at him. It was not a good feeling.
His buddy Gardner threw a grenade out the window, but it was the first grenade he had ever thrown outside of training. The fuse had a seven-second count, far too long. The Germans threw it back in.
Fortunately, it landed on a bed, and Gardner had dropped to the ground immediately. That saved his life. The mattress took the beating, and feathers flew everywhere, but he was not hurt.
They learned that before throwing a grenade, you count to about three, and they will not throw it back.
They also learned other tricks. When firing an M1 Garand rifle, the clip that holds the cartridges together ejects with the last round and makes a small zing, not very loud but audible. The enemy knew that sound meant the shooter needed a couple of seconds to insert another clip.
So the Americans fired three or four shots, then dropped an empty clip on the floor. It sounded like the rifle had ejected. The Germans 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 themselves, and the Americans got them.
The veteran said they should have been taught that in training, but they were not. It came in handy.
The Germans also fired Panzerfausts at the house. The rounds would not go through the wall. They missed the windows because they were not very accurate, and they exploded, blowing holes in the wall.
It was a good thing they did not come through.
The fight lasted from about eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. They were pretty lucky, the veteran said. Only one of them was hit there.
Cruz was dead at the other side of the house, where the veteran’s own squad was. He had been away from his squad that day. His squad, he said, had a tougher fight because they were caught in a house.
One member of that squad, a man named Hickey, was thirty-four years old. The veteran was supposed to take the last watch with his squad, about half a block away. Hickey was with him.
They were all in one room. The veteran had just left. About five or ten minutes after he left, two German soldiers came into the kitchen and stopped for a few seconds to warm themselves by a stove where someone had made a fire.
Hickey heard them. The rest of the squad had jumped out the window and tried to reach another house that was safer, where their platoon leader was. They were under orders to try to make that house.
Hickey opened the door with his rifle, but the two Germans were a little ahead of him and had their rifles on him. He had to throw his hands up.
The veteran described one as a good German and one as a bad German. The bad German wanted to shoot Hickey right away, saying they had no way of getting him back. Instead, they took Hickey between them across the field toward the woods the veteran had seen earlier.
A shell hit and killed the bad German, or knocked him out of the picture with shrapnel. The other German then gave Hickey his pistol, he thought, and said they did not know who was in the woods now, whether Americans or Germans. If they were Germans, he had his rifle and would take Hickey prisoner.
If they were Americans, Hickey should take him prisoner with the pistol. It was a good idea.
They reached the woods. Unfortunately, the good German was killed right away. There were tanks in the woods, and they shot at Hickey, but he was able to get away until they had gone by.
Then he jumped on the back of a tank. He became a hero that day because the tankers had captured about twenty or twenty-five prisoners and did not want to spare men to take them back. They told Hickey to grab a rifle, since rifles were all over the place from the dead German soldiers, and march the prisoners back.
He marched twenty-five prisoners back to headquarters. They saw him coming over the hill and made a whole lot of it. The veteran said it was too bad Hickey was not there to tell the story, because he had a way of telling stories that was great.
The battle ended around four o’clock when they were rescued by part of the 79th Division.
Asked about the first Germans he had to fire at, and what it was like at twenty years old, the veteran returned to the weight of killing. He said he had thought many times about how it is to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 somebody, and the more you think about it, the worse it gets. He repeated his saying: you have to have something happen to you before you can 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anybody.
It is not a good thing to do. But he was helped in that case because he had seen crews being killed and knew right away that he could easily be next. Otherwise, he said, they would all be dead, whoever was up there.
It was not a choice at that time. But it is not a good feeling.
The interviewer noted that every German he knocked out meant that many more Americans or other allies got to come home and have families. The veteran agreed, but said that was not the thought at the time. It comes later, when you think the thing through.
It is a miserable thought then. It does not make you feel good.
The interviewer thanked him, saying people like him would not be there without people like the veteran. The veteran replied that they would do the same thing. They were ordinary guys.
The interviewer said he thought they were anything but.
Asked to describe how the Germans attacked inside the house, the veteran recalled that the first man came in and went straight across to a door instead of looking up the stairs. He tried the door, but it was locked, which gave the veteran a little more time. He opened up on him because he knew the man would be coming up.
Why the German did not come up right away, he did not know. The second man came in, and the veteran thought he was trying to pull the first one out. If he had had time to think of that, he would not have shot him, because the man was only trying to pull the first one out.
But by then his nerves were pretty edgy. He was looking for an arm to come up with a potato masher grenade, and he planned to hit the grenade and explode it downstairs rather than on himself. He did not have time.
As soon as he saw action, he fired and got the second man too.
He did not remember other Germans trying to make their way up. There were one or two or three maybe at the door, but they did not try to pull the second man back. He would have thought they would have.
At the end of that day, when they were rescued, they went down and looked at the first man. He was wearing a GI sweater, GI shoes or shoe packs, a GI wool shirt, and one of the American . 45 pistols.
He had enough American equipment on him that the veteran felt he was really an experienced soldier who had done a lot. He wondered where the man had gotten all that American gear. It made him feel just a little better, because it meant the German had been plenty experienced.
The interviewer suggested the man had taken the items off dead Americans, and that there was some justification in the fact that the German would not have given the veteran a second chance. The veteran agreed. It helped a little bit.
Asked what else he remembered after the battle, he said there were a number of dead Germans around. They all got to firing at them, and sometimes you did not know if you hit them. You did not want to stay on the target.
You moved as soon as you fired. That was one of the basics. If you can see them, they can see you, so you had to be extra careful.
He confirmed that after he and Gardner made it inside the house and the Germans opened fire, and after they got the rest of the squad up and upstairs, he immediately started guarding the stairs because he knew the Germans might come. He thought they would be right behind them, and nobody was there. It came to him that as the Germans walked or ran up the stairs, they had to be stopped before they hit the stairs.
So he held at the top of the stairs while the rest of the squad fanned out.
Cruz was killed after the veteran had reached the top of the stairs. Cruz had actually spoken to him before he was killed. He said he had gotten another one.
He was too near the window because he was firing out the side of the house toward the front, where the Germans were on the front road. As they came into view, he would fire. A sniper probably got him.
He had probably gotten two or three, the veteran did not know how many, at least a couple, before the Germans realized they needed a sniper on that window. Just as the veteran told Cruz to get back from the window, that they were going to pick him up, the shot came. He did not even have time to move.
Asked about Cruz as a man, the veteran said he did not know him too well. He was a likable person, a big guy. He was not gushy, just an ordinary, quiet person.
He and the veteran always got along whenever they had anything to do together. Like most guys, he was just likable.
During the whole battle, which ran from about eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, the veteran stayed by the stairs the whole time. He felt he had to stay there. The Germans were all around the house.
He did not know what was outside, and he was very careful about looking out the window, because they would see him.
There were no other attempts by the Germans to go to the door or near the stairs after the two soldiers were killed at the bottom. It was a long wait, because he thought more would pile in after them, but they did not choose that course. He could hear movement.
He could tell they were still downstairs but in different parts of the house. They had been at the end of the hallway at the door for a while, talking together. He could not understand what they were saying.
They may have been medics talking about something, he did not know. They stayed there for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes at the most. After an hour or a couple of hours, they got into the lower floor, and that was when they shot up through the floor.
The veteran began to think they could easily set the place on fire and their goose would be cooked. So they actually cut down on their firing, wanting the Germans to think they were getting them, that there was only one or two left. That was what he was thinking in his head.
He did not know what the Germans thought. They kept firing into the house for quite a while and eventually just stopped. There were a couple of men in the lower floor, because they could hear them talking down there.
He thought all they had to do was set something on fire, and there was not much chance of getting out alive. But that did not bother them. Gardner and he said together that somehow the Germans were going to get them there.
It did not bother him. Why not? That is the chance you take when you are a soldier in combat.
You have to forget, otherwise you would be pretty well paralyzed and unable to think at all.
The interviewer told him he hoped to be half the man, or even a quarter of the man, that he was one day. The veteran replied that he would do the same thing. They were all ordinary guys.
The interviewer said he thought they were anything but.
Asked to describe the layout outside the house and where the Germans were, the veteran said the road was in front. The house was longer than it was wide and had three stories. He could not see too much, and that kept you guessing.
It was not worth going to a window. The interviewer pressed on where the Germans were hiding outside. The veteran offered a story he found interesting.
The Germans were running up and down the road, hollering at each other, in bare sight of the Americans, yelling and acting crazy. He told Gardner they must be on something. They did not have drugs like they do now, but he was thinking to himself that they had to be on something.
Years later, they found out the Germans had some kind of concoction that made them care less and act that way, almost like alcohol. He said it was standard. The interviewer noted he had heard of some being on meth.
The veteran said the Germans were out in the open, running, and anybody in the right mind would not be doing that. They must have been prime targets.
The veteran also recounted a return visit to the town in 1982. He did not have an interpreter but could get along a little in German. He met people in the street who told him a man lived in a certain house, but he probably would not let the veteran come in.
The man had a high wooden fence around the property, which had not been there during the war. One of the women said they thought he had been a Nazi and did not really communicate with them. The veteran knocked on the door.
The man came out, a grumpy sort of guy about their age or a little older. The veteran said in his best German that they had been there during World War II and had a battle in that house, and he wondered if he could come in and look at it again. The man refused.
He would not budge. The veteran could not get past the wooden gate. The interviewer joked about needing a grease gun.
The veteran said he did not want any Nazis telling him that stuff.
He closed with a reflection that carries beyond the battlefield. He said everyone should be mindful of what wars entail before they are started, and of the terrible things that happen in wars. He said people must remember that God is in control, and as long as He is in control, He will take care of things.
Therefore, he said, we do not need wars.
The interviewer thanked him for his service and blessed him. The veteran thanked him in return.
His account stands as a reminder of the human cost of the liberation of France, where young men barely out of their teens fought through frozen fields and shattered towns, learned brutal lessons in real time, and carried the memory of what they did and what they saw for the rest of their lives. The Remember WWII project continues to collect and preserve such testimonies before the generation that fought the war is gone.