WWII Soldier on his D-Day Landing, Nazi Treasure, and Liberating a Concentration Camp | Herbert Sisk

As I headed back towards the Hedgerow to eat, a shell burst in front of me, about 50 yards in front of me, and I hit me in my right thigh. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression and make no mistake about it, good will prevail. Harold Holbein, I saw it on the movie theater downtown Lynchburg, and it raised a little patriotism into you. And I was born in 1925, and in 1943, in our senior year at AC Glass High School, we all left, over 20 of us left high school that senior year and went into service. Most of them went in the Navy and Marines, a few of us went into the Army. Training camp I did at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in communications. I learned to be a radio operator at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Well, we learned to operate switchboards. We learned to lay wire, climb poles, and carry the radio pack on our back and do the radio operation. Well, we sailed on the Queen Mary across, and that's where we went into Mercer Flats. We started out by ourselves because the Queen Mary could outrun one or two submarines. We got up to around Nova Scotia, that part of the area, top part of the United States. The report was we ran into a wolf pack. And we turned around, and it was cold in March up that area, and each day got warmer and warmer and warmer until we found out we was off the coast of Florida. They captured the ships that was off the coast of Florida and told us what had happened. Then we came gradually north, and as we came north, we picked up troop ships, supply ship, tanker ships, Navy vessels, and we sailed the Atlantic with over all but 175 ships, and I believe that was called the invasion convoy. I was only a young kid. I was a teenager, so I didn't know what was going on. And I had been adopted, more or less, by a big old guy from Texas, a rancher. Worked on a ranch in Texas. He had a daughter my age and had a son about two years younger. So I was like having a second father. He took care of me. Because I was the youngest one in the whole battalion by about 12, 13 years. So I was like a brother, a kid brother, and a son to him. Well, the 359 Infantry was attached to the 4th Division under Roosevelt, and they went in early morning on LSIs. Late afternoon on LSTs, we went in where we had all the artillery hooked up to trucks and the jeeps and everything. We just rolled off on the beach and went in. Our first objective was St. Marie-LaGuece. We went into St. Marie-LaGuece. We would beat the 101st and 82nd Airborne. We had no opposition hardly on that, because what I was told that morning, Roosevelt informed all his officers that they were off by 2,000 yards off course. And a sand dune opened up there, and he said, this is where we start the war. So they went in through open sand dunes. We went to St. Marie-LaGuece, met the 101st Airborne. We were supposed to go to Sherbrooke, but that was changed. We went to the Bay of Brittany, and went down the coastline of the Bay of Brittany, relieved two towns that went by St. Michelle, and go that way, down that way. We were supposed to relieve, we were supposed to reliberate Perrier, France. That was a few miles away, but we captured the highest point in Normandy, Hill 122. And the lieutenant and I was relieved on the front line, so we came back on top of Hill 122 to, that's where we were built, that's where we were supposed to stay. That chair truck was there. And I went around, we were ordered to stay 25 feet apart around the hedgerow. And we got around 25 feet apart. I got to the chair truck, and I got my meal on the canteen cup, and as I headed back towards the hedgerow to eat, a shell burst in front of me, about 50 yards in front of me, and it hit me in my right thigh. And I was evacuated back to England that next day. And I spent four months in England. We first went to Oxford, Portsmouth, England. And the lieutenant there, the doctor, looked at my right leg, got all torn up, and he put a tag on the amputee. And then the bombs came over close to the hospital that night from Germany, buzz bombs. So we were evacuated from the hospital from Portsmouth, England to Oxford, England, 91st General Hospital. Then I met a doctor up there, a major. He looked at the tag and ripped it off, said, see what we can do. So he operated on me five times, got big hunks of metal around my leg, and saved my leg. And I found out later in life that he turned out to be an All-American football coach, a football player at the University of Notre Dame, Hunk Anderson. I was hurt for four months. I didn't join my outfit until Thanksgiving Day. So we had Thanksgiving. I had Thanksgiving done at Townville, France, eastern France. And we liberated that part of the area first. And finally, we crossed the Mosel River, which had been flooded. And we went through the secret line. And we was in Weiden, Germany. Not Weiden, Germany. It was Dillen, Germany. And we stayed at the German ambassador's home. And then orders came back to come back across the Mosel River into France. And they get in convoy and wait. So we got back across there about 11 o'clock in the morning. Orders came through about, oh, 10, 11 o'clock at night to force march towards Luxembourg. We liberated Luxembourg and went into Bastogne. And we were ordered to go down to the road. And we had one tank destroyer with us. And the scouts orders were to be quiet. We had Germans on both sides of the road. During the battle that day, we had a heavy battle. We had heavy, caused a lot of trouble, casualties to the Germans. And we were told to be real quiet and don't make any noise. So we went down the road. And next morning, we were at the farmhouse. Smoke was coming out. And we had a German officer, didn't have his tunic on. He came out to relieve himself. And all of a sudden, he turned around, looked at us. There's about 200 of us looking at him. He ran back to the farmhouse, and they all left. So we went into the farmhouse. And about two hours later, the corporal came in and said, told the colonel, said, you better come outside and look what's going on. So we all went outside. And there was about 300 or 400 Germans surrendering to us at night, at morning. And without a shot being fired, we captured prisoners and vehicles and everything. We liberated Tanser Cross. And that was a mercury salt mine. We, a 357 infantry, it captured mercuries. And we went into it. And the report was later that we was under curfew from six at night to seven in the morning. And so we had a patrol going through. And about 11 o'clock at night, the jeep patrol saw a woman walking down the street real fast, almost running. And they stopped her and pulled her over and asked her what was her, being her, after their curfew. She said she was a midwife heading to deliver a baby. So they picked her up and put her in a jeep and took her to where she was supposed to go. Well, the baby was born about four thirty, five o'clock in the morning. So they put her back in a jeep and took her to her home. And when you go into America, they made a right turn into America. And she made a comment in German. That's where all the gold and silver is. And the one of the guys spoke German real well. So that's when he reported to his command that reported to the Corps of Generals, reported to Patton, and then reported all the way up to Eisenhower. But we kept on going. We just stayed there. But I did, Lieutenant Landay, myself, was in a jeep coming back. And he heard about it. He said, let's go by there. So we went by the salt mine. And I happened to look over there and there was a 90th MP I knew. And he came over to us and said, come on, I'll show you something. There's only about maybe 10 MPs there, nobody else. So we went in and we did see the stacks of gold all piled up. And then we got back in the jeep and we kept on fighting the war. Then they brought up the thousands of MPs and then had all the generals up. Even Eisenhower came up. But we didn't stay there. We kept on fighting. We liberated Flossenberg Concentration Camp. And I took some photographs. I had a small camera. I took some photographs with it. We first thing that went in, all these American soldiers started throwing K-rations over. Then we had a flock of medics came up and said, don't feed these people anything at all. He said, the system can't take it. So all the medics came up in ambulances and they took care of the ones that were in bad shape. And the mountain, a little bit higher rise mountain type thing, was behind the houses where the concentration members were. And that was a factory, a forced labor factory for the ME-109 parts for the airplanes. And we left there. We left there with the medics and they took care of them. We kept on going until the war was over with. During the whole 11 months and two days of combat, the 90th Division was always on the front lines. We never had any rest period at all. We had units on the front lines at all times. And about a week or two weeks before the war ended, May 8th, we got relief for the first time. And then another division was put in, had no combat, and suddenly there were five or six Germans came up with a white flag to surrender. They said they'd only surrender to the 4th and 9th Division only, nobody else. So Patton put us back on the front lines to take the surrender. General Patton met with us. He said, I can no longer call you Texas and Oklahoma. He said, I'll rename you Tough Hombres because you've been my best soldiers as I've commanded.