Remembrances: Darrel Carnell

When I was shipped to Austria I took one of the puppies with me. I vaguely remember stopping in Ebensee and getting some food for the puppy and letting it sniff around and relieve itself. I was also aware that there was a POW cage there for die-hard SS types. And it seems to me that the cage was on the right side of the roadway as one entered the town from the south.

Ebensee isn't all that far from Salzburg, whose favorite son's birthday we celebrated today (January 27). And Salzburg isn't all that far from Munich or Ostermiething or Braunau, my last station in Austria. We were all in a triangle not more than 50 or 60 kilometers per side. A shame that we didn't know it at the time. I was in Munich on my beer run at least once a week and was also in Salzburg and Innsbruck several times. We transported tubercular and amputee displaced persons from camps in Austria and Germany to hospitals in Bolzano, Italy. Thank God I always transported their baggage, rather than their persons. I remember one cold day as I was nursing my six by six up the Brenner Pass I noticed that the road was wet with moisture from the low lying clouds. But I kept on barreling along, taking advantage of every level spot to build up my speed. At the time there were no guard rails along the roadway and if one was unfortunate enough the go over the edge it was a long, long way down. I was thus relived to reach the summit and out of immediate danger of going off the edge. I brought my truck to a stop, set the hand brake, stepped onto the roadway and fell flat on my ass. The "moisture" I had observed on the road was ICE! I was really shook up when I thought of the semi reckless manner I had come up the mountain and how easy it would have been for me to lose control on that ice. We spent the night at the summit of the pass as guests of the French, who were occupying that sector. When I could find no lighter fluid for my Zippo one of the Frenchmen filled my lighter with Calvados. It worked fine! When the convoy started out the next morning the "moisture" was still on the roadway and this Florida boy wasn't about to tempt fate again. I went all the way down that mountain in double low, much to the aggravation of the guys behind me. But by the time I reached the bottom all of them had passed me, had taken their prescribed break and were ready to roll again.

On our way back from Bolzano we detoured to Berchtesgaden and thence up the mountain to visit Hitler's Adler Aerie (Eagle's Nest). The place was pretty much a mere shell when we saw it but the opening for that enormous picture window was still there and I had my picture taken while standing in it. The window must have been all of fifteen or twenty feet high and twice as wide. The view from there was spectacular! I wanted to inspect the nearby underground bunker but it was not illuminated and we didn't have flash lights." Ed immediately wrote back: "Just before we shipped out for home, we engineers had an opportunity to attend a school in Bad Schallerbach to take a course in Physics and I jumped at the chance to get out of guard duty. Was Bad Schallerbach near Ostermeithing? Yes, the PW cage you saw near Ebensee was the one we were guarding. We heard at the time that it was full of SS troopers, but after taking them out on work details, etc. I grew to doubt that. We also heard that they were being screened and released on a regular basis. The army was looking for Nazi bigwigs who had put on German gefreiter (sp?) uniforms to escape identification.

The dachshund's name, I believe, was "Lady". She was aided in getting pregnant by none other than our friend Richardson. One afternoon while she was in heat a large mongrel came sniffing around but she was too low for him to have any success. So Richardson found a suitably sized box and held Lady on it while the mongrel did his duty. I know some other "Richardson" stories also, but they go beyond even the liberal restraints of this publication.

About the time Lady was due to have her litter, I remember that we tarred the battery street and she somehow got onto it and got the black stuff all over her feet. There was an MP (Was his name Sargent?) who was a vet and he about had a fit when he saw what had happened. He seemed to think the fumes might cause her to have a miscarriage. Anyway, in due course, as you related, she had her public birthing. The runt of the litter was named "Stumpy" and Linden Seamons adopted her. Stumpy went to Austria with us and when Linden visited me in Ebensee, he brought the puppy along. Stumpy had a nasty habit. Whenever no one was looking, she would jump up on one's bed and wet.

The MP I mentioned had picked up two German Shepherds who had been running wild for some time. The female, who was really on the vicious side, he kept and no one went near his jeep when he left her in it. She didn't bark or give warning, she just attacked anybody who came too close. The big five-year-old male he gave to me and I called him "Fritz." He was a gentle, well trained dog and big, 96 pounds big. As soon as he learned English, he would heel and stay and sit and lie down on command. He also could open doors , the latch handle type they had over there using his paw and his nose. So at night, when nature called, he just went outside by himself. I always said he wasn't all that well trained because he never closed the door behind him. I used to take him on wood cutting details with me and he would curl up by the fire with his nose in his tail and sleep. The German PWs loved Fritz and we all shared our rations with him. Again enough. You trigger a million memories.

I wrote back the same day: "You're partly right about that dachshund's name. We originally called her Lady. But she slept so much we changed her name to Lazy and that's what she was called the rest of the time I was at Twenty Grand. She used to ride on the passenger side of my three quarter ton when I made the garbage run. I remember that there was something on the front fender (a gas can?) on which she put her front paws with her hind feet on the floor and she'd hang out there the entire time the truck was in motion, ears flopping in the wind. I was always extra careful in making left turns for fear that she'd fall out. But she never did. She really loved to ride and that was about the only activity in which she engaged other than sleeping. But she was universally loved by all the guys in Detail Section. "I'm not surprised to learn that Richardson played a part in breeding Lazy, given that somebody probably gave the same assistance to his mother when she was bred. But knowing (and loathing) him as I did he probably just wanted to see how much pain Lazy would suffer by breeding with a much larger dog.

Braunau is about half way between Munich and Linz, as is Salzburg. Ostermiething is about as far northwest (35 km) of Salzburg as Ebensee is southeast of Salzburg. The highway distance to Ebensee is somewhat longer, though, because of the intervening Sees. It was not until I looked at an area map to write this paragraph that I realized that Dachau is closer to Munich than is Freising, where I got my beer. I always assumed that Dachau was in Poland. Nothing like learning the lay of the land fifty years after the fact!

Ostermiething wasn't near anything or anybody. Why the army bothered to station us there is a mystery to me. It was just a collection of farmhouses surrounded by fields and pastures. Bucolic in the extreme. Branau, on the other hand, was a typical Austrian town. Too big to be called a village and too small to be called a city. Its only claim to fame was that it was Hitler's birthplace. It should also be remembered as the town in which the local boot maker traced the outline of my foot on a piece of paper and one week later delivered to me a beautiful pair of handmade boots of the paratrooper variety. Somewhere in my travels I had acquired (read: looted) enough leather to make two pairs of uppers. But I didn't have leather for the soles. I gave the boot maker my "uppers" leather and a carton of cigarettes, he supplied the sole leather and I shall never again have the privilege of owning such exquisitely crafted footwear. The soles were attached to the vamp with wooden pegs, instead of stitching. I had those boots for years and years and they were the object of admiration by all who saw them.

I was introduced to the boot maker by a fraulein named Mimi Mange. I can't remember what I had for breakfast yet I still remember Mimi's name. I had admired Mimi from a distance for quite some time but she was going steady with another GI and if nothing else those frauleins were one-man women. After the GI transferred out to God knows where Mimi and I became very, very close friends. She had been sharing my bunk with me on a regular basis when she invited me to spend the weekend with her in her home. I was looking forward to having a little more privacy with Mimi than could be found in the billet I shared with three or four other guys so I readily accepted. I didn't know where she lived so we met at some appointed place in Braunau and she took me to her home. We entered through the kitchen which reeked, as did all German kitchens, of cabbage. The floor and table were scrubbed almost white but the smell of cabbage still prevailed. Seated around the kitchen table were her father, her mother, a sibling or two and her grandmother. They spoke no English and I spoke only fractured German and although they were pleasant enough we did not linger very long in the kitchen. Mimi took my hand and led me to her sleeping chamber: a bed in the dining room! For the rest of the family to get from the kitchen to their bedrooms they had to come through the dining room. And come they did, each one smiling and bidding "Gutten Nacht" to Mimi and me as we lay together under the covers. We had more privacy in my billet! I waited until I thought that the last of them had passed though before getting down to the business at hand but as soon as I got started the kitchen door opened and in came Grossmutti to bid us gutten nacht. I think that we somehow managed to consummate our burning passion before the night was over but I never spent the night at Mimi's house again.

The really remarkable aspect of this story is the cordial manner in which I was treated by Mimi's family. Here I was, a member of an occupying force, lying in bed with their unmarried young daughter and granddaughter, and the entire family was nice to me. They seemed to regard our coupling as "normal." Which, when I think about it, I guess it was. Other men in my unit told of similar experiences and it seemed not out of the ordinary for young couples to take unchaperoned vacations together. There was one guy in my outfit in Ostermeithing having a hot and heavy affair with a waitress in our beer hall. She was very personable and all the guys liked her but she, like all the local girls was a one-man woman despite the fact that she was married. We all knew that the GI was living with her. And we also knew that her husband was also living with her. The GI swore (and I believe him) that the woman slept with him while her husband slept in another room. Until it got very, very cold when they all slept in the same bed! Despite the unhesitating willingness of the frauleins to engage in sexual liaisons with GI's without benefit of clergy, they had ethical standards of their own. If it were known that one of their number was having a relationship with one of us, none of them would have much to do with the GI in question. They were monogamous to the extreme and treated their relationships with us as quasi-marriages. As a result the GI's were monogamous, too, like it or not. For example, on those occasions when Mimi was not with me the frauleins would be cordial, but very proper, with me because I was "Mimi's man." On the other hand, most American women I have since known had no such ethical standards.

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