Remembrances: Darrel Carnell

As I write this I'm wondering what I was doing carrying a carbine after war's end. But come to think of it we didn't stop carrying weapons until we were transferred back to Austria with the 83rd Division. And the more I write the more I remember things I have not thought about for years and years. For example, writing about Van Loton's nurse reminded me of a transient 1st Lt nurse at Twenty Grand with whom I was friendly. And that's all that it was. Just friendship! I managed from time to time to get the jeep for myself and we used to go riding around the countryside together. When she was finally shipped out she gave me her down filled sleeping bag. It was a regular GI sleeping bag, but down filled. It also retained the scent of her perfume, which was so erotic that falling asleep in it was difficult for this 21-year-old with raging hormones!

While we were stationed at Camp Twenty Grand there wasn't an awful lot to do. The prisoners of war did all the cooking, policing and most of the other work incident to keeping the place going. I don't remember us standing formations, nor do I remember blowing the bugle while there. We were processing troops going back to the United States and then, presumably, on to the Pacific Theater of Operations. My Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) number at that time was 803, Bugler. Because it was becoming apparent that I would not be doing any bugling in the foreseeable future and since I hated riding in the back of a two and a half ton truck I asked First Sergeant Jack Dorigan to change my MOS to 345, or truck driver, light. By that change I would be driving, rather than riding in the rear of, those trucks. Dorigan obliged but with my change of MOS also came the assignment of driving truck loads of pleasure seeking soldiers to Paris two or three times a week. We usually left Twenty Grand immediately after breakfast, arrived in Paris a couple of hours later and then I'd have to whole day to kill before loading up the visiting firemen for the return journey around midnight. I soon got sick of Paris because money had a way of disappearing in Paris like snowflakes in a heat wave and after my second or third trip I'd be flat broke until the first of the following month. Killing time in the City of Light with no money was not a fun thing to do. When I wasn't driving troops to Paris I was hauling POWs on garbage detail to the dump in a three-quarter ton weapons carrier. My dealings with the prisoners of war were not hostile, nor did they treat me with any hostility. I always thought they were pretty decent men until a couple of them escaped one night with my jeep. After all these years I still remember that jeep's serial number: 20662589-S and if I ever see that jeep again I'll reclaim it for Uncle Sam.

The Pacific war ended on September 12, 1945 and shortly thereafter I was reassigned to Battery A of the 323rd Field Artillery Battalion of the 83rd Infantry Division. My battery commander's name was Captain Yankovich but everybody called him Cap'n Yank, even to his face. He was an easygoing man with no axe to grind and no aspiration to anything other than getting back to civilian life.

The Austrian hamlet in which we were billeted was Ostermiething, which had a population, including livestock, of 100 or so. If the cows and chickens were eliminated, the population dropped to about 40. But it was home so we made the best of it. We were billeted in a gasthaus, with a bar and restaurant on the ground floor and sleeping rooms on the second floor. All buildings in the village were two story affairs with animal stables on the ground floor and living quarters on the second floor. The buildings were constructed around a central square in which the animal manure was deposited daily. After a while the smell of the manure was no longer offensive; we became so accustomed to it that we thought of it as "healthy" or "earthy." Which only proves that one can become accustomed to just about anything.

We had almost nothing to do in Ostermiething except make an occasional trip with our trucks to haul displaced persons from one place to another. One day they were displaced at location "A" and then next day they were displaced at location "B." A shell game on a much larger scale. Our sole source of recreation was the beer hall in gasthaus' bar. It was run with battery funds on a break-even basis. Charge just enough for the beer to break even and have only enough money at the end of the week to replenish the kegs when they ran dry. Which was somewhat of a problem because the beer was costing us something like six cents a liter and the smallest denomination of occupational currency we had was a schilling, which was worth ten cents. We solved that problem by selling the beer four nights a week for one schilling per liter and then giving the stuff away for the remaining three nights a week. I drove a three-quarter ton weapons carrier once a week to refill our kegs at a brewery in Freising, a few kilometers north of Munich. The very large, very jolly, very Bavarian caricature of a very large, very jolly, very Bavarian who filled my kegs from a spigot from which issued beer that was so cold it was almost frozen would give me a liter of that amber ambrosia for one cigarette. Never did beer taste so good as it did at the loading dock of that brewery which was reputed to be the oldest in the world and whose name, Freising, was the same as the village in which it was located.

One day the guys decided to use some of that beer for a party at which all the local damsels had been invited. Those ladies were of good, sturdy peasant stock and were, in my estimation, about three axe handles high and as many axe handles wide. The prospect of frolicking with those broads was not very appealing until somebody offered me a belt of green potato schnapps lovingly distilled, aged and bottled that very morning by Frau Kšenig, the Burgomeister's wife. That was the second drink of hard liquor I had in my life and in a few minutes those peasants started growing visibly slimmer. Well, I thought, if one drink will make them look this good, then another drink should make them absolutely gorgeous! So I had another drink and the pounds melted from those girls like snow from a snowman in July! And not only that, they became quite witty and sophisticated. Hardly what one would expect from women who had only hours earlier had been shoveling manure from their doorsteps. By then I was on a roll so I had a third drink and became just as witty and sophisticated as my charming companions.

My recollection of what happened after that has mercifully faded with the passage of time, but two things I do recall. I began feeling quite indisposed when the room started spinning so I repaired to the sleeping quarters I shared with three other gentlemen. We had two double decker bunks and I had one of the top bunks. The lower bunk of the other bed was occupied by not only one of my fellows, but also by one of the fair maidens from that evening's cotillion and they were engaged in horizontal calisthenics. My indisposition grew to the point that it was necessary to expel some of the stimulant of which I had earlier partaken, so expel it I did right into the shoe of one of the calisthenics participants. I seem to recall hearing some objection to my gross behavior but happily I fell asleep before becoming involved in lengthy debate. I don't think I'll ever forget how I felt upon awakening the next morning. Just as the girls' girth had diminished the night before, the size of my head had increased to the point that it was hanging over both edges of my bunk. The left side of my head hung over the left edge of my bunk and the right side of my head hung over the right edge of my bunk. But the malaise was not permanent and I eventually recovered. And when I saw them later that day or the next the girls too had recovered and regained every bit of their lost weight. While I continued to enjoy that wonderful German beer in moderation, I never again drank hard liquor nor did I become intoxicated during the remainder of my military service.

I e-mailed the foregoing episode to Ed Quick who immediately shot back some post-89th experiences of his own. Ed wrote: "I also went to Austria, and into the 83rd Division, and was stationed in a little town called Ebensee, at the south end of the Traunsee in the mountains of the Saltzkammergut area. Ebensee is about 75 kilometers or so due east of Salzburg. "Our job was to guard a lager full of German PWs who were being screened for war criminals. The lager was a former concentration camp, complete with double wire fences, one of them electrified, and guard towers every hundred yards or so. The guard shifts were stupefying. Four hours on and eight hours off. Six days a week. Ten to two in the morning and ten to two at night for a week. Then two to six in the afternoon and two to six in the morning for the next week. Then six to ten in the morning and six to ten at night for the third week. Then start all over again. But good German beer was a nickel a liter and at midnight in the bucket of blood we called our EM Club they broke out the cognac: fifty cents for a water glassful.

"We were quartered in a school building, but it didn't take long for a lot of the men to find private quarters, with or without local frauleins. Marty Martinez and I rented a first floor room in a nice rooming house near the school. It came with maid service included and I remember it had one of those beautiful iron and ceramic wood stoves that were so common in German homes. It also had two large beds and on some evenings when we were on guard duty, we allowed others to use the room for nefarious purposes. One night, while Marty and I were sleeping in the room, some friend of Marty's got his schedule mixed up and arrived, stewed to the gills with his lady friend. After much negotiation with Marty and much complaining by me, the guy bedded his girl in Marty's bed and Marty came over and got into my bed with me. Well, this guy was the noisiest guy at his trade I have ever heard and it seemed to take him forever to get the job done, but finally he quieted down and I figured that Marty ought to get his bed back. But all of a sudden there was a patter of naked feet on the floor and Marty and I had company in the bed right between us. Seems as if the fraulein was unhappy with the guy's non-performance and she wanted some of Marty and me. I rolled away in one direction, Marty in the other and just at that moment the slats under the mattress collapsed and we all landed in a tangled heap on the floor. My memory is unclear about exactly what happened next except that the guy and his fraulein were summarily ejected from our room."

"I too had little experience with hard liquor prior to Austria, and I went to bed many a night with a spinning head and a rebelling stomach. I can remember going on guard duty right from the club and certainly in no condition to guard anything. But it didn't make any difference because everyone there just wanted to go home. Nobody was going to try to escape.

The PWs cleaned the .30 cal. machine guns in the towers for us as well as our carbines. They brought the wood up the ladder for our stoves and we slept or wrote letters or read most of the time. I remember one night a guy fell asleep in his tower and his overheated stove set the tower on fire. The PWs gathered at the fence and watched in glee as he bailed out, but then scattered in a hurry when the machine gun ammo began to cook off. And I remember that Christmas Eve I spent in a tower with the snow falling and the smell of wood smoke and the soft strains of "Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht" coming from inside the lager. Talk about homesick. "Enough for now. You get me going with your memories of that time in our lives you aptly named our Great Adventure."

On January 27 I wrote to Ed: " I wonder if you were in Ebensee when I passed through there en route from Twenty Grand to Ostermiething? Do I remember Mad Ludwig's castle as being nearby? "I remember stopping briefly in Ebensee for either food or a rest stop. Back at Twenty Grand a mostly dachshund bitch had adopted the Detail Section and she gave birth to a litter of puppies with a dozen or more godparents looking on.

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