Kurt Piehler: This begins an interview with Mr. Herbert H. Newton on November 7, 1996, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey with Kurt Piehler and ...

Patrick Rinato: Patrick Rinato.

KP: I would like to begin by asking a few questions about your parents. You grew up in Long Valley, where there were mostly dairy farms back then. What led your father to come down to New Jersey from Vermont?

HN: My mother and father were both native Vermonters, both grew up on small dairy farms, family dairy farms. My mother had two years of what they called "normal school" at that time, at Johnson State College. My father didn't have any education beyond grade school. He and my mother were married in 1916, and he worked on the farms in the Vermont locale and he worked in a furniture factory in Orleans, Vermont. He got word, I am not sure how he got word, that a farmer in Long Valley, New Jersey was looking for a herdsman. He applied and he got the job, and he and my mother moved to Long Valley in 1917. I was born in 1918. My father went from the farm into a small creamery owned by the John Welsh family. Today, it is Welsh Farms, known to most people in this part of the state.

KP: As a matter-of-fact, I have actually seen the creamery that they still operate.

HN: Is that right?

KP: The one they still operate in Long Valley.

HN: He had an ambition to operate his own business. He saw this milk route for sale in North Arlington, New Jersey, in the old Newark Evening News. He had no idea where North Arlington was, but it led to the purchase of this one-horse-drawn milk route, and he bought it and we moved to North Arlington in December of 1926.

KP: So you grew up in Long Valley and then you moved to North Arlington.

HN: I have some memories of Long Valley, even though I was only about seven and a half years old when we left there. But I went to school there for about three and a half years, I was midway through grade four when we moved. … Then, too, it wasn't long after my father came to North Arlington that he started buying his milk products from Welsh Farms, and he trucked from Long Valley into North Arlington. I rode that truck as a kid, lots of times. I had some memories of Long Valley. I lived in North Arlington from 1926, right up until 1980.

KP: How did North Arlington change over time, particularly comparing the North Arlington you knew in the 1920s and 1930s?

HN: Back in the late '20s and early '30s, Newark was the "Hub City." North Arlington was just a little town. The street, Forest Street, where we lived, wasn't paved, it was a dirt street, which most all streets at that time were. I don't believe you could buy an acre of open ground in that town today anywhere.

KP: I think of North Arlington as a very suburban little town, but it sounds like the North Arlington you grew up in was still very much like the country.

HN: Initially, yes, but by the time, I had four children, they were all educated in North Arlington. By the time they got through grade school and high school, it was on its way to a small metropolis.

KP: Your father didn't serve in the military because he lost three fingers.

HN: He lost his thumb and the first two fingers on his left hand when he was twelve, thirteen years old. He had, somehow or another, obtained dynamite caps, he carried them in his pocket and took them to school. At lunchtime, so the story goes, he played with them, and one of them went off and his fingers went with it, so he lived the rest of his life that way.

KP: And how did it effect his work?

HN: It's like anybody that's handicapped suddenly. Of course, I don't remember. I wasn't around for the growing up part, but he adapted, let's put it that way. I would not say it didn't affect things he could do, but he could do most everything. One of my greatest recollections of my father, he was brought up on a dairy farm, not a professional by any means, he was what we call "a damn good carpenter." He could drive nails just as fast as you or I, because he would take a hand full of nails and put them in his mouth, and, with his left hand between these two fingers and a hammer in his right hand. He would take those nails out of his mouth just as fast as you or I would pick them up out of a bag or a box. He was handicapped, but he adapted.

KP: How successful was your father business? How rough was the Great Depression for your family?

HN: Very rough, as a matter-of-fact. He moved to North Arlington, bought one milk route in 1926, and, by 1930, it had grown, and we had several milk routes at that time. By 1930, things were such that he sold them.

KP: He sold some of his routes?

HN: He sold them all. He sold his entire business. I am not quite sure what transpired after that, but the buyers backed out, reneged on the contract. So he used all the credit that he could find, the bank, his in-laws, wherever he could get cash, put it back together and held on to it.

KP: It sounds like there were several rough years.

HN: Many rough years.

KP: Did your mother ever work in the business at all?

HN: All the time.

KP: What did she do?

HN: She did the clerical work. My mother lived to be ninety-three years of age. People around that knew her said, she worked up until she was ninety-three years old. She was active. My father died very young, he died at age sixty-one, in 1949. She was still "the president" of the company, so to speak.

KP: Your mother was a teacher before she got married. Did she ever express any regret about leaving it? Did she ever consider going back?

HN: I don't know. She was a teacher, she taught in the state of Vermont. She never had a New Jersey teacher's certificate. She taught me the first grade at home. I did not start public school until I was in second grade.

KP: You were home-schooled?

HN: She self-taught me at home, one year.

KP: Do you know why?

HN: Yes, we lived in an area of Long Valley, on one side of the railroad tracks, the school was on the other side, and I was considered too young to walk over the tracks myself. It was not convenient, apparently, to take me to school and come and get me every day. She, being a teacher, said, "I'll do it," and that's the story I am told.

KP: What was it like having your mother as a first grade teacher?

HN: I don't remember anything about it.

KP: You don't remember any of the lessons or the subjects?

HN: As far as I was concerned, it was just part of growing up. I had never been to school, I had nothing to compare it to. My children asked me that same thing. I have absolutely no recollection of school, as far as first grade was concerned.

KP: What about when you entered second grade?

HN: I have good memories of that.

KP: What was it like?

HN: I don't know, at that age … they didn't have pre-school and kindergarten and all that stuff. When you were five years old, you went to first grade. Well, I was six years old and went to second grade. The other kids were six years old and in second grade. It had no bearing.

KP: Was your mother active in any organizations?

HN: She was very active. She was active in the church, the Presbyterian church. She was active in the women's club. She was one of the founders of the North Arlington Women's Club. She was active in the school through the PTA.

KP: How about your father?

HN: No, he was active in his church, our church. He was too busy most times. This was a seven day business, seven day operation.

KP: How did your father deliver milk? Did he use vehicles or did he use horses?

HN: Well, it was horse-drawn. It wasn't long after he went there, he bought a Model-T Ford truck, progressed that way. World War II came along, and garages that had been converted from horse stalls and horse stables, he reconverted then back into horse stalls and horse stables. He went out and bought four horses and four wagons, harnesses, etcetera. "There was no way that gas rationing or the war was going to put him out of business. I will get rid of the trucks and go back to horses."

KP: So during World War II, milk in North Arlington was delivered by horse-drawn vehicles?

HN: We went back to using horse and wagon.

KP: Do you have a lot of memories riding on the horse and wagon?

HN: Of riding a horse and wagon, yes.

KP: A lot of kids today don't have that experience.

HN: I'll tell you something, my father treated those horses like they were working for him, like they were on his payroll. If the horse had to do a day's work, that was it. If, for some reason, the horse didn't have to work that day, all the kids in the neighborhood could ride that horse.

KP: That must have made you very popular.

HN: So we rode a lot of horses.

KP: You went to elementary school and junior high in North Arlington, and then you went to Bordentown Military Institute.

HN: High School.

KP: Why did you leave North Arlington to go to Bordentown?

HN: Well, a couple of reasons. North Arlington didn't have a high school of its own. Students were going to Kearny High School.

KP: In next town over.

HN: Next town over, at that time. That was one reason. My father and my mother were both from Vermont but came from families that believed in the best education possible for their children. My grandfather, my mother's father, had two daughters and sent them both off to private school. My mother graduated Northfield Seminary, Northfield, Massachusetts, so it was a concept that their children would go off, too. I went to Bordentown, not the fact that it was military, but they liked the school. My sister went to Northfield Seminary, followed my mother there. My brother went to Peddie, another private school. My other sister went to North Arlington High School. They had their own high school by that time. It was considered the thing to do, if possible, if you could afford it.

KP: So you mother and father put a premium on education. Did they want you and your sisters to go to college?

HN: I graduated from Bordentown Military Institute in 1935, and I came home and my father said, "What about college?" I said, "I don't want college. Give me a job. I have had it." So we talked and I had taken to that military bit in the four years that, I did real well and went up in the cadet corps, and so forth and so on. He knew that I liked that, and so he said to me, "I'll make you a deal. You go back down to Bordentown," he said, "and you take a post-graduate course down there," and, he said, "If you still feel the same way about future education at the end of that time," he said, "that will be the end, and I'll give you a job." So I went back down and I stuck by the fifth year down there.

KP: Which obviously was pretty crucial, because you ended up not going to college.

HN: Well, not quite, at that time. I came home and I told him, I said, "No, I am all done with school, give me that job." He gave me the job and he put me on a milk run down in Harrison. I don't know if you know Harrison, New Jersey, or not.

KP: Oh, yes.

HN: There are more third and fourth floor and tenement houses than you will ever see. It was night work and a lot of stairs and, boy, I did that for a year, and I said, "Boy, there has got to be a better way." So I came down and got my transcript from Bordentown and brought it here, and I am in Rutgers. We had no SATs or anything at that time.

KP: It sounds like you liked Bordentown a great deal.

HN: I did. How can I put it? That was the first introduction to the military and I adapted to it, and, I guess, maybe, why I agreed to go back for the fifth year, because, in cadet rank, I was number two when I graduated in '35. So, if I went back in '36, I could have it all. So that is what happened. I graduated again in '36 as the senior cadet.

KP: Had you been interested in the military at all as a young boy?

HN: Boy Scouts, that was all.

KP: You had no dreams of being a general?

HN: Nobody in the family.

PR: Did your experience at Bordentown make you more likely to join the military?

HN: It favored me a great deal. Because at that time, now I understand, or have been told, that these prep schools and a lot of public high schools even are offering or have what they call "Junior ROTC" programs. Now, I don't know what a Junior ROTC program is; it doesn't make any difference. Bordentown, after four years, completing four years of the requirements, I was commissioned in the Reserves. I went out of Bordentown at age eighteen with a commission as a second lieutenant in the Reserve Corps, effective June 6, 1939, because I was only eighteen and you had to be twenty-one. So, on June 6, 1939, when I was twenty-one, it was automatic. I got my greeting from the President, and I am a second lieutenant.

KP: Because of Bordentown.

HN: Because of Bordentown. So, then, I came to Rutgers, and they said, "Okay, two years of required ROTC." I said, "Hold it. I got it. I got four, I got the certificate, already. I don't need this." So I never was enrolled in the ROTC at Rutgers at all.

KP: That's pretty rare, since almost everyone was required to join.

PR: Were you active in the Reserves while you were at Rutgers?

HN: Only for the basic requirements, to keep your Reserve status effective. I did, well, I had already done my six weeks required at the end of my ROTC at Bordentown. I did that up at Plattsburg Barracks in New York in the interim, 1939, when I was commissioned, and then, something like two weeks of summer training. I did that at Plattsburg Barracks in New York. I did it at Camp Drum, New York, wherever I was assigned.

KP: It sounds like you tolerated the academics at Bordentown but you really liked the military part of it.

HN: I guess you could say that. I did pretty good in the academics. It wasn't too long ago. I have a great family. I have four children, and three of them are married. I have eight grandchildren. We have a great family life.

KP: Initially, you didn't want to go to college?

HN: No, I didn't want to go to college.

KP: What was the curriculum like? What was a typical day like in Bordentown?

HN: It was a military schedule. They had reveille every morning, about six o'clock. Everybody was up and down for breakfast by six-forty-five. It was very, militarily, formal. Morning formation, and you had recall at night and retreat at night, formations for all of those. You went to church, you went to the public church of your choice on Sunday morning, but it was always a formation for Presbyterian, or the Catholics, or the Synagogue. You marched down through the main streets of town to church. You had a section in the various churches where you sat and you marched back to headquarters.

KP: What was the curriculum like? Did they stress anything in particular, like engineering?

HN: No, it was predominantly college prep, no SATs or anything like that, but you did have a transcript and you did have to have so much in math, so much in science, so much in languages, and so forth.

KP: What was it like to live away from home?

HN: I was homesick.

KP: You were fourteen when you left home.

HN: I was homesick.

KP: How often would you come back home?

HN: You mean come home in Bordentown?

KP: Yes.

HN: I came home, the first time I came home was Thanksgiving.

KP: That's a long time.

HN: It was from September, October, the end of November, almost three months. I was sick.

KP: Did you expect that you would be called up for active duty?

HN: No, not initially. But, at the time, when I was commissioned, because I became of age, I became twenty-one in 1939, and, in 1939, things were heating up pretty good over there. September 1, 1939 was when Hitler went into Poland, and Dunkirk followed after that. Things were heating up pretty good, even though President Roosevelt said, "No, we will provide supplies and equipment," and so forth. Most people, including myself, had the feeling that it was only a matter of time until we are going to send personnel. I had that feeling in the back of my mind that one of these days, of course, I didn't know for sure. Except on that Sunday after Pearl Harbor, the first thing I said to my wife, no, she was not my wife at the time, I said, "That's it. I'm gone."

PR: Did you feel any of this while you were taking classes or while you were in your advanced training?

HN: No, not that I know of, in '35, '36, or '37.

KP: Were a lot of your instructors in camp veterans of World War I?

HN: Oh, yes, sure, sure. The family that owned the school, Landon family, he was an elderly man. I don't know how old he was, but he went all the way back to the Spanish American War and served in World War I. A lot of the ROTC personnel that were sent there by the government, and so forth, [were] World War I veterans.

KP: Why did you choose to go to Rutgers?

HN: I don't know. It was close by.

KP: You didn't think of attending a school in Newark or at a New York school?

HN: No, I don't really know why. I commuted from North Arlington my freshman year, up until Christmas time.

KP: What made you decide to live on campus?

HN: Football. I went out for 150 pounds football, made the team, and by the time practice was over, it was, sometimes, nine or ten o'clock at night when I was getting home. So, I said, "I've got to give up one or the other."

PR: Was there a big transition from commuting to living on campus?

HN: No, because, don't forget, I had been living at home, and I had been out of school for a year, from June to September, so, I was actually home for fifteen months, prior, or in the interim, between high school at Bordentown and Rutgers. I didn't have any problem with that. … Then, I had a sister who was exactly two years younger than I; we were both born in June, two years apart. She went from Northfield Seminary, graduated, and she enrolled in New Jersey College for Women, (Douglass). Going to Bordentown for the fifth year and staying out on the milk run for another year, she and I ended up in Rutgers and Douglass, and she was in the same class. I hung around for two years and she did what you are supposed to do.

KP: There was a lot of contact between Rutgers and Douglass. Did your sister help you get dates?

HN: No, not too much, because, there again, I had been home for a year or so forth, and I had renewed old friendship with the guys and the gals that I grew up with there. I spent most of my dating life, let's say, with that crowd.

KP: Not with Douglass?

NH: No, not too much. No, I didn't go that way, not that it was planned.

KP: You mentioned that Professor Morris was your favorite professor at Rutgers.

HN: Yes, I guess you could call him that. I liked the man, and he was a good man, a teacher.

KP: Do you remember Vinnie Utz when he was at Bordentown?

HN: I knew him for one year, we crossed over one year. I'll tell you what I remember about Vinnie Utz. In Bordentown, if you got into an argument that developed into a fight, I mean a real fist-fight of some kind, it was broken up on the spot. But a time and a place was set by the administrators and so forth, and you put on boxing gloves, I mean the actual gloves, and you fought it out. That was the rule, no bare-knuckles fist-fighting. Well, Vinnie Utz got into a lot of fistfights, more than his share. [What] I remember about Vinnie Utz was he had no style as a boxer. Vinnie Utz, and, [a guy] who was a heavy weight fighter that came out of East Orange and trained on beer, Tony Delento, had the same style.

KP: I have heard the name.

HN: Tony Delento and Vinnie Utz had the same style, and the style was that they never used their arms in the raised position to defend themselves, or to hit from that position. Their arms were only down at their side, and they were swinging from the bottom up, and that's how Vinnie Utz would win the battle. Outside of that, I did not know him.

KP: People seem to have had similar stories, even if they didn't know him. How did you end up rooming with Vince Kramer?

HN: There was a fellow from Bordentown, by the name of Tom Wylie, who graduated a couple of years before me, and Tom was a member of Phi Gamma Delta, but he didn't live in the house. He had a room on the third floor in a boarding house next door. I was with Tom one particular day and we went next door to the Phi Gamma Delta house and that was my initial contact with Phi Gamma Delta. That was my initial contact with fraternities, and that was my initial contact with Vince Kramer. He was there on this occasion and so Tom Wylie said, "Hey, Vince is coming in, why don't you come in?" and so forth and so and so, so that is how the whole thing started. So Vince and I matriculated the same year here and went into the house. He was the only person that I knew, that I had met, and so forth, and we just teamed up and decided to become roommates, that's all. It worked out great.

KP: We have interviewed Vince Kramer and his interview lasted about six hours. Do you have any recollections about him?

HN: I think, rather than to answer that question in the light of a college student, I would rather answer it in this way. After the war was over, and others in our class have talked about this from time-to-time, Vince really surprised us, in the manner in which he had become worldly. He had learned so much, particularly about history, and even until this day, he will tell you all about the Russians, the Germans, the political aspect of Nazism or Communism, and so forth. You ask him, "Why did such and such happen as far as," take like the Bosnia war over there? You ask him questions about the ethnic groups over there, and so forth, and he will tell you. Not only give you an answer, but he will tell you the political aspect behind it. He is well-mannered and he went all through as a career officer in the Marine Corps, but that enabled him to go to service schools like the General Officers' School. To be in the infantry in the Army, it would be like Fort Benning, in the Infantry School, and so forth. He is very, very knowledgeable.

KP: And he had not been that interested in history before?

HN: No, I never saw anything that would indicate such.

KP: When I interviewed him, he knew a lot of history. You could tell.

HN: We even kid today, something will come up, and he will make some answer, or some remark, or something like that, and I will say, "You didn't learn that in Rutgers."

KP: You really thought that he was changed by the war.

HN: Oh, yes. Everybody will say the same thing. He has mellowed. He is more serious, though always a great kidder and still funny. He changed, he really did. Maybe we all did, I don't know. You don't see yourself as somebody else does.

KP: Why did you major in business administration?

HN: For me?

KP: Yes.

HN: Well, that was my father again. He, as I said before, didn't have any formal education beyond grade school, but he had been brought up on a dairy farm and he had spent a lot of time in the dairy industry. I don't mean just on milk runs, too. He eventually bought up his own processing plant, pasteurizing, bottled, and shipped, and so forth and so on. So right from the beginning, I guess it was taken for granted, I don't know if he and I ever talked about this, but, I guess, it was taken for granted that, eventually, when I finished with Rutgers and school and so forth, I would come back into the family business, which I did. But getting back to your question, of why business administration. He said to me, one of the last things he said to me before I came here to Rutgers, he said, "You know, if you are coming into this business," he said, "the mechanics of processing, bottling, and shipping and so forth, I have done them all my life." He said, "I think that I can teach you things like that, but," he said, "my shortcomings are in the logistical end of it, or the bookkeeping end of it." He said, "I don't have enough education." He said, "I have to hire that all, and if you can work that aspect of it into your college education, I think it could help you." Others have asked me, actually, knowing that I came from a family that was in dairy, in processing, and so forth, said to me, as an undergraduate, "How come you are not over in the Ag school?"

KP: That was my next question.

HN: Well, you don't go to the Ag school to get a degree in business administration, and that is how it happened.

KP: Did you take any courses in dairy production?

HN: Straight business administration.

KP: Did you about think that a lot?

HN: Oh, yes. No doubt.

KP: Because there were hard times ahead for the dairy industry.

HN: I'll tell you where it helped me. Maybe I'm modest, I have two sons, and we don't have that … milk business anymore. One is in convenience stores, and one is in sporting goods and both doing real well. I am responsible for no day-to-day operations at all, but I look at things like taxes, insurance, accounting, and they are all things, that go hand-to-hand [with] what I studied.

KP: Do you have any memories of Dean Metzger?

HN: Well, I remember him. I know what he looked like. What I liked most about Dean Metzger, I used to love to listen to him give a church sermon, which he did occasionally. He was a good preacher, in my estimation. I don't remember too much about him as, sure, he was the Dean of Students and all that, but I don't truly remember him. …

KP: It sounds like you didn't have very many run-ins with him.

HN: I didn't have them with him, no. But his assistant there, Curtain, the Assistant Dean, what was his name, Edgar?

KP: Yes.

HN: Ed Curtain, that is what it was, and Curtain, I don't know, I guess, as the second in command, so to say, he did all the disciplinary, I don't know too much about Metzger.

KP: What about President Clothier? What did students think of him at the time?

HN: Just the president of the University.

KP: Did you work at all when you were going to college? Did you have any odd jobs?

HN: Oh, yes.

KP: What type jobs?

HN: I had a laundry business with Kramer. Went to all the dorms here and picked up laundry every week, took it to some laundry downtown and got it washed and brought it back.

KP: How big was your laundry business?

HN: Well, I don't know, we had a Model-A Ford with a rumble seat in the back of it, we filled that up.

KP: Any other businesses that you started?

HN: Not down here.

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KP: Did you know what the people in ROTC thought about the war?

HN: Oh, by that time, I mean, we are gone. Vince had joined the Marine Corps, and he was gone and had to get special leave from, I don't know where it was, Quantico, or somewhere down there, to come back for graduation ceremony. He didn't even wait to be called.

KP: Did you think that you would get called up?

HN: There was no talk that I was going in June of '41. December 7, '41 was Pearl Harbor, and there was a lot going on. But it was not like somebody in the Class of '42, or beyond may have, or probably did have, not in '41.

KP: What did people think of the peacetime draft?

HN: Well, it was a peacetime draft, for registration, but they hadn't actually called up too many …

KP: How did you feel about Roosevelt's actions bringing us closer to war?

HN: Well, I can only speak for myself, but I thought that it was well and found no fault in providing supplies and equipment, etcetera, because there was no doubt about it. I mean, Europe and their forces, as far as I am concerned, were being overrun by some form of dictatorship, whether it be the Nazis, or the Commies, or whatever it was, and I had no fault in that. Secretly, I was hoping that it would work out in total that way, which it didn't. … Then, of course, after Pearl Harbor, there was no doubt where my responsibility should be, and go and would go.

KP: How did your classmates feel?

HN: I don't know. They must have had different feelings. I mean, they were all scattered here and beyond. Some, from their ROTC beginning here in Rutgers, went on up. I think we had two generals in rank. I think Bill Archibald, too. I think he was a brigadier, but I don't know too much about that.

KP: Do you remember anything that was said about this?

HN: Well, from June '41 and Pearl Harbor was in December, and by the end of 1941, I mean, I was gone and there wasn't that contact, at all. I was surprised at Fort Benning, I met quite a few, not classmates necessarily, but Rutgers graduates.

KP: Did you go back to your father's business as soon as you graduated?

HN: Yes.

KP: What did you do in those months before the war?

HN: I had six months, but I set it up just as if, you know, he didn't know what was going to happen, or when it was going to happen, or anything like that, and, so, I went back and I became a route inspector. I don't know why they call it an inspector, but that is what they call it. I had six routes under my jurisdiction. Manager, I guess, is why they call it inspector.

KP: So you supervised these six routes?

HN: More than six routes, but it wasn't too long in '41. The war was, I got home from the war in '46 and he died in '49. So, from '49 on, I was it, had it all.

KP: Where were you on December 7th?

HN: I remember it very vividly. I was in the living room at 411 Chestnut Street, in Kearny, New Jersey, which was my wife's, now I was engaged, my fiancée's home at the time. … It came over their radio, the announcement came over the radio, and I said, "That's it. I am gone." So, we, at the time, we were engaged to be married in March of 1942.

KP: And those plans changed rather quickly.

HN: They got changed rather quickly. As a matter-of-fact, we were going to be married over a weekend. We set a weekend at Christmas. Dorothy was working for Home Insurance Company in New York, and she went in and told her boss that she was going to be married. Christmas that year was on a Thursday, and she went and told her boss she was going to be married that weekend and asked him could she have Friday off. So he gave her Friday off, and, so, instead of waiting until the weekend, we married on Christmas Day. So we got Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and we both went back to work Monday.

PR: I guess you will never forget your anniversary.

HN: That's right. We rented a furnished apartment in Kearny. … Pearl Harbor came along and three weeks after Pearl Harbor, I had been called, so we gave up the rented apartment. In the meantime, we had furniture on order at Haynes Department store in Newark. It's not even there anymore. And after the Pearl Harbor announcement, we went down to Haynes and canceled the order on the furniture. We took the money and went across the street to, at that time, it was Brownings Clothing, and they were doing a big business in military uniforms, so we went over there, took the furniture money and we bought officers uniforms and that was it.

KP: Had you thought of delaying getting married at all?

HN: We talked about it. Our families said, "No, don't wait."

KP: What did your wife do during the war?

HN: She did a pretty good job in saving what little bit of money that the military paid. I left in January of 1942, and she was still working at the time. Our first son was born in February of 1944, just before I went overseas. So, from that time on, she had a son to take care of.

KP: How long was it before you saw your son again?

HN: A year and a half.

KP: What was that like?

HN: I got pictures whenever we got mail. Pictures, pictures, pictures. She lived next door to a professional photographer, and he was forever taking pictures. Oh, I can't tell you, every mail was full of pictures.

KP: So that is how you followed your son.

HN: They had a baby contest of some kind in the military, in the units, and I remember I submitted his picture. I didn't win Best Child or anything like that, but it got his picture on the front of a military paper. She kept me really informed to the best of her ability.

PR: Was infantry your first choice, or did you even have a choice?

HN: I didn't have any choice, or, at least, it was never offered.

PR: If you had a choice, would you have picked the infantry?

HN: Probably, because that's, you know, infantry, even West Point, where they have a choice and so forth, unless it has changed recently, I don't know about that, but it always was the infantry. The ground training was always the initial part of any officers' training, prior to graduation, or making a final selection. It is sort of like when you go off to college and you have got your freshman year before you got to say, "This is what I want for a major," you know what I mean? My granddaughter down in Trenton State I didn't think she was ever going to select a major. She went about halfway through her sophomore year before she came out and said. I think the military is like that, the Service Academy, I didn't have any choices. They never offered me. But you do have, come to think of it, you say choice, I mean, even in the infantry, you have a certain leeway there, because you can be in the infantry in a front line rifle company, but you can also be attached to a division, or regiment in artillery, or the engineers, or communications. I mean, that is all part of infantry. I think, basically, it means that you walk. Nobody gives you a ride.

KP: After you reported, how long did it take the Army to issue your orders?

HN: It didn't take long at all. I had my orders sometime between December 7th and December 20th, in that two-week period. The orders came, and then they gave me another week to report. It was a matter of three weeks overall. It was a very busy three weeks.

KP: So you reported in January of 1942 to Camp Croft, initially.

HN: That's right.

KP: And where were you initially assigned to?

HN: Initially, in this area, reported to Camp Croft, at that time. I don't think it even exists any more, but Camp Croft, then, was an infantry training center. It was our job to take recruits, we got a lot of them from Fort Dix, and, what was the one on the other side, over by Brooklyn? Fort Hamilton. We got a lot of troops in there that first part of 1942. We trained them on the basics of the military, all the way from discipline to close order drills. We didn't spend much time on that. They went through the whole course. It was a thirteen-week basic course. They went through as civilians and now, you are eligible. But I went to Croft in January 1942, and sometime in the end of 1942, I did a tour of duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. That was the infantry school.

KP: Did you go through infantry school or did you instruct there, too?

HN: No, all the Reserve officers like myself that had not formally been on active duty at some point, at some early time after being called up, they called it a refresher course, and they sent you to Fort Benning for that Infantry School Basic Course. It is the same course later on. You had a lot of recruits that joined the Army, and they were well educated and showed signs of leadership and so forth, and they were ASTP program, Army Specialized Training Program. They even sent a lot of them to various colleges and so forth. Where they sent them to colleges, they all ended up in this basic training course down in Fort Benning, Georgia. They took Reserve officers like myself and they sent them down there. It was a three-month course, and it was a refresher course. It had been some years since we had done it.

KP: What did you learn at Fort Benning?

HN: Lots, lots.

KP: Really?

HN: Oh, yes.

KP: Anything that sticks out in particular?

HN: I just, maybe, paid more attention at that point than in some of the early [ones]. Yes, what sticks out in my mind is this. Everything at Fort Benning was done twice. It was done in a classroom and then the laboratory aspect of it. If you want to call it the lab work was then put into actual training processes of one type or another on the actual ground, which, back in ROTC at Rutgers or Bordentown or somewhere, you didn't have that last ground portion. So it was explained in the classroom, proven in the classroom, but then the real test is out on the ground. It was a good, intense three months.

PR: How much of the time was spent doing field exercises?

HN: At what point?

PR: At your Officers Basic Course, at Fort Benning.

HN: Oh, every day. As a matter-of-fact, there was no real class work. You didn't have a class. If the weather was good, it was outside, and you would go through all the various demonstrations and so forth, and then hit the ground and actually do it.

KP: People I have interviewed told me it was a very rigorous training program.

HN: It was rough, I mean, physically.

KP: What were your responsibilities at Camp Croft?

HN: Basic training for recruits. As I say, they come in there and you start out with an explanation of what is expected, discipline and the close order drills, and regulations. From there, [you go] into what you call dry runs, rifle, how to pick up your line of sight, in all dry runs. No ammunition or anything. But then it ends up on the rifle ranges going step, by step, by step.

KP: What was your relationship with the sergeants, the drill instructors? They must have been pretty old.

HN: That's right. You leaned on them a lot. I mean, most of them were older soldiers. It wasn't just at Croft, either, I mean. When I got with the 100th Division over there and we were on Tennessee maneuvers, and, boy, it was those top sergeants and those older guys in there that were your professors, so to speak. You got right into a real question and they come up with the answers. You respected them and hoped that they did the same for you.

KP: It sounds like you learned that lesson fairly early.

HN: Definitely.

PR: Did they teach you leadership skills during the basic course?

HN: Not so much in the basic course. It is the details of how to fight a war, to protect yourself, to defend yourself, and so forth. Then there is another course down at Fort Benning called the Advanced Officer Training Course. Usually, on the basic, they will send the second, first lieutenant, captain, and then the Advanced Training Course, they tell me, was designed, initially, for field grade officers. But during the early war years, there they sent a lot of other, I went back down to that course as a first lieutenant, and I wasn't the only one. I am not saying it in a bragging way, or anything like that, but we had a lot of lieutenants in there, and captains. I would say that the majority of them were lieutenants and captains. By far, the minority of them were field grade officers, and there was, you really got your training and lessons in a tactical aspect, and your relationship was with junior officers, rather than directly with the enlisted men.

KP: What was your next assignment after Fort Benning?

HN: I came back to Benning and I finished in the early part of 1943 and came back to Croft after the basic course. In '42, I came back to Croft. I was there until mid 1943 some time. I had been promoted to first lieutenant, and I was sent back down to Fort Benning again for that advanced course. So, out of my first eighteen to twenty months, six months of it was spent at Fort Benning for the basic and the advanced course. … At the end of the advanced course, I was reassigned to the 100th Infantry Division, which was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I reported over there, and that was at the end of 1943 and in the winter maneuvers of November, December, and January, that was '43 and '44 with the 100th Division in Tennessee. It was cold down there that winter.

KP: It sounds like you have strong memories of the weather.

KP: Yes. Then, after we finished winter maneuvers, the division came to Fort Bragg. We finished up our training at Fort Bragg and shipped out overseas in October 1944.

PR: The 100th Division is a Reserve division now. Was it a Reserve division then?

HN: I don't know. I mean, it's a Reserve division now. I would like to think that it was a new division. I am not a hundred percent sure. It was the 100th and the 101st, of course, that was Airborne, that was brand new. I don't know about the 102nd. The 103rd was in Europe along side of us, that was a new division. I think the 100th was a new division, but I am not certain of that.

KP: What was your initial position with the division?

HN: I was company commander, G Company, Second Battalion, 397th Infantry.

KP: What about your fellow, the junior officers and your ...

HN: That was kind of hard because, here was the 100th Division that was activated in early 1942, and they had their full cadre, meaning their full complement of officers and non-commissioned officers and so forth, and, fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, the 100th Division had been stripped once. I mean, that they had come in and they pull all your officers and your junior officers, and all your noncoms out, and use them for replacements overseas, or somewhere else, and you get something from the Replacement Training Center, as far as officers are concerned, or a new bunch of recruits from here, or there. Well, that is what I faced going into the 100th Division, because the division, to use that phrase, had been stripped, you see. So, here I am, a captain, and a whole bunch of us had been assigned to the 100th Division at that time. So, we go in there and we are captains, so we have to be assigned at least as a company commander. We can't be a platoon leader. We can't be, being a captain is being a company commander, or "acting-something," on up. Well, you are not going to be acting-something on up, but they have got to make you a company commander. So, I am assigned to G Company, Second Battalion, 397th Regiment Infantry. So, the officer that was commanding G Company, Second Battalion was a first lieutenant, because they had stripped and he was an acting captain. Well, now, they got a, let's say, a real captain. I mean, don't take that for real, reality.

KP: But none the less, you …

HN: I have got to get that job because I am a captain in grade, and he is a first lieutenant.

KP: But he is already there.

HN: But he is already there, see. He is already there.

KP: And he has had a taste of command.

HN: Yes, that's right. So, I report in and I get that assignment, and, now, I go down to meet First Lieutenant Hightman, but it doesn't make a difference. I had it so lucky, because he knew I didn't ask to come there, and he was very, very cooperative. And, as a matter-of-fact, he introduced me to the company first sergeant, who was one of these older guys, he might have been World War I for all I knew. He was older, so Hightman said to me, "It doesn't make any difference to me whether I am the company commander, or you are commander of the company." He says, "This is the man you got to follow, see." … We became friends and he became my executive officer.

KP: How long was it before you got to know each other?

HN: He got hit in the leg and ended up in the hospital in Lyons, France. Up until that time, I had gone to, you go in a war like that, and, boy, attrition is fast, death, wounds, and so forth, like that. Here I am, I went in a company commander and less than a month's time, I am the battalion executive officer. You just keep going up and up, battlefield will take sergeants, first sergeants, line sergeants, or whatever, you will be surprised the lists of battlefield promotions. You call them in and tell them they are eligible, and be for a breakfast that morning, they are a sergeant, and [they] go back and spend a half a day down at Division, and they come back with bars on their shoulders. But that is the way it works in battlefield.

KP: It sounds like you learned a lot during maneuvers.

HN: Yes, as a forerunner, you are supposed to do things like you do on maneuvers. You are supposed to do the same thing in battle, under fire.

KP: How long did your battalion perform during maneuvers?

HN: Three months.

KP: How was their performance?

HN: How was their performance?

KP: Yes.

HN: I don't know. I don't think it is ever graded. You go from day-to-day, and, at the end of every day, there is a critique, so your officers, your company commanders are all gathered and can go over the whole situation and how it developed and critique and give you a chance to answer any questions.

KP: What can you tell us about your superiors? You mentioned Wiley Wisdom.

HN: I can tell you that in about one sentence. I look at it like, he was my immediate commander. He was a graduate of West Point, Class of 1939, and a better tactician in my opinion, you will never find. … He commanded that battalion, and I was his executive officer, and he commanded that battalion all the way through, from the time that we landed in France to when it was over, and he would always ask, all of his junior officers, his company commanders their opinions. … After the order was issued, he would always ask, "Do you think you can do it? Do you think there is a better way? Do you think there is a different way?" Very, very flexible. But, then, he always made the final decision, say, "This is what we are going to do." So, I and a lot of others followed his order, but we had input and so forth, but we followed his final order. And the tactician that he was, he brought most of us in and he brought most of us out. I feel like, "Well, he took me in, I followed his orders, they brought me out and I am here."

KP: It sounds like you were very impressed with him.

HN: I am impressed with him for at least one other reason. This word "fatigue" could mean a lot of things. Fatigue, in general, means that you are all tired out, you're out of it, and so forth. But there is a phrase, when you go into battle, called "battle fatigue," which means that you have been under fire and have been there for so long that you are all fatigued out. But when you go in to battle on a, as we did on the 1st of November, and by the 16th of November, your battalion commander is done, because he is a victim of battle fatigue. But that is what happened. We had a major commanding Second Battalion, and we got into an artillery bombardment this one particular morning, and he missed his jump off in a certain attack, and he went all to pieces and they had to carry him out of there. They sent a major down from Regimental headquarters, did the best that he could, but he didn't know anything. He didn't know the men, he didn't know the officers, he didn't know anything, but it was all that they could do under the circumstances. Then, when they finally sent Wiley Wisdom down there, you got a professional soldier that graduated from West Point, a smart man, and he just called all of his company commanders into his CP together, and he said, "We were going to put this thing back together the way it should be." He said, "We are going to go into it together and I'll do the best I can to bring you out of it," and he did.

KP: So he had all the attributes of a good leader. Do you think he learned all of this at West Point?

HN: Yes, he learned them at West Point. With our experience on the first sixteen days, with the other leader, he was tops.

KP: What about John King, the regimental commander?

HN: What do you want to know about him? Well, John King was an officer like myself, he was a Reserve officer. … I will have to say this about Lieutenant Colonel Wiley Wisdom, Reserve officers had to prove themselves to him. He didn't take every one of them to be there because of training, or because of qualifications, some of them, he was there just because they had been placed there, you know what I mean? Well, anyway, John King was a good man. He was a good officer, in my opinion, but, nevertheless, he was a Reserve officer, and in that first sixteen days, when the battalion commander we had went all to pieces, battle fatigue, whatever, we had a regimental commander, his name was Ellis. … This battalion commander went all to pieces, and Ellis took a jeep and a driver and started out to find the headquarters of the Second Battalion, to find out "Why are they in some kind of a predicament, why are they not jumping off on the attack and all?" Well, Colonel Ellis, with his map and his driver and so forth, didn't find the headquarters CP of the Second Battalion right away, and they got out in no-man's land. They were machine-gunned, and the colonel was killed, all as a result of looking for this battle fatigued officer. So, now, we don't have a regimental commander. Well, of the three lieutenant colonels, battalion commanders, John King was the senior. Makes no difference if you are a West Point graduate, a Reserve officer, whatever your date of rank is, you are the senior. It has nothing to do with age, nothing. It is the date that you were made a lieutenant colonel that sets your rank, so John King was the senior. So he became the regimental commander, and I think he did a good job. But, if you ask Wiley Wisdom, Wiley Wisdom would say in his southern Georgia drawl, he would say, "John King, goddamn him." … He didn't see eye-to-eye, but, nevertheless, he followed his orders like a good soldier should, and so forth and so on. John King fought with valor and dignity. He was a good officer.

KP: It sounds like you had two really good officers who came from totally different backgrounds.

HN: Absolutely.

KP: What did you think of your division commander?

HN: I think he was good. He was a good gentleman with a good background. I think he was a Reserve officer, too. He came out of Virginia Military Institute, VMI, but he had some experience in the late periods of World War I. I am not sure whether he was overseas or not, but he had good division staff. …

-----------------------------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO-----------------------------------

KP: When was the last time you saw your wife before you went overseas?

HN: Very shortly. We went from Fort Bragg, the staging area, to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. ...

KP: Camp Kilmer?

HN: Kilmer, Camp Kilmer. So we were in Kilmer, in there for ten days, I guess, two weeks, maybe, and, of course, my wife was from Kearny, still lived in North Arlington, and she didn't miss a single night. She would come in there, sometime between six and seven o'clock at night, down by the back fence, and, by that time, we had a hole cut in that fence. She didn't miss a single night in the whole ten days, two weeks that we were there. … She would come down there through the fence, and, sometimes, we would go home, and, sometimes, we would go out to eat. So we didn't know until that morning, definitely, that we were going to ship out, but she knew that, when she didn't get a call, I didn't call.

KP: That the obvious signal that you were shipping out.

HN: Yes. So, from her standpoint, and, I guess, from mine, too, it was easy. I mean, there were no tears, no, you know. Sometimes, she would come down there at six o'clock at night and you had to be back by six o'clock or seven o'clock the next morning, go back through the same hole.

KP: What do you remember of the voyage over?

HN: I was sick. Not really sick, but I was up to here all the time, and it wasn't a rough trip, either. I just don't sail good. I get sick on a fishing boat.

KP: In what type of vessel did you go over?

HN: I went over on the USS George Washington. There was a converted luxury liner, I can't think of the name of it, I don't recall the name of it as a luxury liner. But, years ago, there was an Olympic swimmer, Eleanor Holmes. She won a medal in the Olympics, and was on board this ship. I am talking about the USS Washington, when it was a luxury liner, and she got into some kind of a party, drinking, and discredited herself to the country. They took her medal away. This was the ship. I am just using that to identify the ship, had nothing to do with troop movement. But I don't recall, anymore, how many men it had on board, but it was a good sized ship.

KP: How were the living conditions?

HN: They were all in hammocks and being a luxury liner, I guess, we had the deck staterooms. Again, I don't know, we were crowded. We were full, too. I mean, four, five six, seven.

KP: So it was tight for officers, too?

HN: We were packed in.

PR: Was it difficult to be the battalion executive officer?

HN: It wasn't difficult, because there was nobody standing there [waiting] to be bumped out of place.

PR: Did you have a lot of support from your battalion commander?

HN: Oh, sure. As a matter-of-fact, it was his selection for me to stay.

KP: When did you know you were going to France? When did you learn what your division's responsibilities would be?

HN: I guess, we pretty much figured out we were going to France when we had a point of debarkation on the East Coast.

KP: It was not until then that you realized where you were going?

HN: No, we didn't know. If they had sent us to California, we would have figured we were going to the Pacific.

KP: When did you arrive in France?

HN: Arrived in France on 21st of October, 1944.

KP: There was some optimistic talk in the early fall that the war might be over …

HN: By Christmas.

KP: By Christmas. Did you believe any of those rumors?

HN: No, no, no.

KP: You didn't?

HN: No, it couldn't be. I have talked to members of the other units that were there for a long time. A good friend of mine that fought with the Forty-fifth Division, the Forty-fifth Division that fought in Africa and came up through Sicily, Italy, and on up. They were still fighting when they brought them up into France, and then they brought this 100th Division in there, and we relieved elements of the Forty-fifth Division. We talked to my cousin's husband there, and, on Christmas, and he said, "Well, nobody asked us." He said, "We just kept going and going and going." The Forty-fifth Division was the division that Bob Dole lost an arm, or whatever [in].

KP: What was it like relieving a division that had been in almost continuous combat since North Africa?

HN: Well, how can I tell you what my feelings and my thoughts were? We relieved elements of the Forty-fifth Division, and it was a wooded area, and I don't think it was more than two hours. It was a very, very short time, that whole area came under a, what we thought was a major artillery barrage. Eight or ten shells came in. It was also, I can't describe that. I mean, it scared the hell out of me.

KP: Later on, you went through more intense attacks than that.

HN: Oh, yes.

KP: But this first one was pretty memorable.

HN: The first one that hits …

KP: What was your most vivid memory of combat?

HN: You have a lot of vivid memories, but some are good. You make a lot of good friends. There was a lot of camaraderie, joking and so forth, in between, but when you are in an attack situation, it is a lot different than outside. You have a job to do and you do it the best way that you can at the time. … When you come into a major situation where you got an objective up there, or a certain hill, or a certain city, or fortifications, or whatever the job might be, each one is different. There is no one that develops like they taught you back at the infantry school. It is common sense, is what it is. You've got to figure out these little things in the best way, the best way to do it, the safest way possible.

KP: When did you realize that you would have to learn things all over again?

HN: The first artillery [barrage]. They hadn't taught us [that] in infantry school.

KP: They didn't tell you to expect that sort of thing?

HN: In infantry school, we crawled under some high machine gun fire and stuff like that, but they never actually put us in artillery bombardment situation.

KP: What was the sound that made artillery so terrifying?

HN: The sound. Normal artillery is "Ssssss," going through the air, but they had these rockets, what did we call them? "Screaming meamies," they would actually whistle, and the sound would get sharper and sharper and shriller and shriller the closer it got. You got so you could just about tell whether they were coming in close, or going on over by the sound of that shrill. Those are all things you can only learn by being there, by experience. There is no way I can sit here and tell you this and you can't really understand what I am saying.

PR: What was the most difficult decision you had to make?

HN: The most difficult decision that any combat officer has to make is when you are given an objective and you lay it all out and you say to your unit, a company or battalion, depending on how high up you are, particularly when you get down to battalion level, and you have to tell these company commanders and their platoon leaders, "Here is the objective, and here is how we are going to do it. This company is going on the left flank and you are going on the right," and so forth, and so on, and they're still, end it with, "Any questions?" and it's silent. What type of questions is anybody going to ask you? As the situation develops that you have to, you got to lay out there and you are not going to be sure you are going to be behind one, or the other, of those units. But you are not going to be the, you are going to tell the commanders of these other units, "You're the guy to go to the left, you are the guy to go to the right, or you are the guy to go over the top," and so forth and so on, and that's hard.

KP: You mentioned earlier that you had lost a couple of commanders due to injury and combat fatigue. How did that affect the unit?

HN: It's a lot of turmoil.

KP: How did the senior officers react?

HN: Your senior officers are looking up at them and you know there is something wrong. Here is a guy that, we are supposed to jump off at certain time, out of a wooded area there, and you can't get him up out of the foxhole. We took a lot of artillery that night. … We had a stone ledge and there were a lot of cavities underneath it, and no way you are going to get him out of there. I mean, it was devastating because it was all out in the open and everybody could see that the guy was going all to pieces.

KP: Do you know whatever happened to him?

HN: That was the last time I ever saw him.

KP: And no rumors ever circulated back?

HN: He went out of the division, that is for sure.

KP: But you didn't know what eventually happened to him?

HN: I don't know anything about it.

KP: Did you ever witness any other cases of battle fatigue?

HN: Sure, well, you could call it "battle fatigue," if you want to.

KP: How common an occurrence was it?

HN: Depending on the activity of the, your objective and so forth and so on, you come under artillery fire, small arms and so forth and so on, it was really hard to get up and move. You tell somebody else, "We are going to go and move," you look back there and one guy, and you got …

PR: Did you see any evidence that battle fatigue affected junior officers and enlisted men more?

HN: I don't know. It affected … I'm not sure. There were a few cases of officers, who had to be relieved of positions like that, but, there again, most of the cases were of enlisted men, but you got more enlisted men to start with, so the ratio would be, I don't know.

KP: Your division saw some pretty heavy fighting while you were there.

HN: We went over the Vosges Mountains, the Vosges Mountains in France. Southern France, you come up through Marseille, you come up into southern France, Italy off to your right and you come up to Switzerland, on top of that, and then France juts out on top of Switzerland over there, up against Germany. … In that little strip, where the Alps from Switzerland are still on the descending topographies, still coming down, they are pretty steep mountains, there are no highways going through there. It is all woodland and narrow roads. Up until World War II, in every other war involving the French, it was always a natural defense barrier. In other words, all they had to do was defend at the bottom slopes of the mountain and nobody was going to cross it and come in, until World War II. … That is exactly what happened with Alexander Patch's Seventh Army, of which the 100th Division was part, was one of Patch's divisions. The Seventh Army's objective was to cross the Vosges Mountains and come down in the Ardennes sector and hit the old Maginot Line, which, as you recall from your history, was a defense line, a defensive line facing Germany. … Then, twenty miles, or something, you got the Siegfried Line, the German line facing the other way. So the objective of the Seventh Army was to cross the Vosges Mountains, come down and hit the Maginot Line and move over into Germany. So that is where we spent that first winter. We went in, on the Line, on the 1st of November, or there about, and fought all across the Vosges Mountains, because the Germans had fortified it on the south slope, defensive movement. So we had to drive them off and out, and it had never been done before. So we did it, and we got down out of the Vosges Mountains and then we hit the Maginot Line.

KP: Did we take the Maginot Line?

HN: We took the Maginot Line, because, what the Germans did, they took that Maginot Line. It was a defensive type of line facing Germany and when the French, or when the Germans came into France in 1940, they took the country, they did not come through the defense positions along the Maginot Line. They came in through Belgium. They came in on the lower slopes of the Vosges Mountain there and hit France from the north and from the south. Then they took the Maginot Line, which faced Germany, the original intent. … They reconstructed a lot of the bunkers and fortifications and turned them around facing France. In other words, it was the, now, it was the first objective, prior to the Siegfried Line, to go from France into Germany. So it's, you came up on the Maginot Line, but you came up in the rear of it. But we didn't come up in the rear of it because, now, they turned it around.

KP: So you were attacking a very well-constructed fortification.

HN: Oh, yes. The artillery, the Air Force, they bombed that thing for three days straight and you couldn't move them, because, don't forget, these fortifications in the Maginot Line in there, you got the bunkers up on top and you got the field turrets up on top, and they got guns there that can go out on 180 degrees, 360, the way they rebuilt that thing in there. But, do you know that down underground, they go down fourteen stories in some cases? Down in there, they got tunnels from, or had tunnels, from one fortification to the next fortification. … Down on the very bottom, fourteen stories down, they got a full generating plant down there to supply them with electric power and air conditioning, and they got full kitchens and full, I mean, it is just a city in itself, where these troops lived. Like I said, artillery couldn't knock them out, the Air Force couldn't knock them out, and, so, you had to get under and over and around, and it was individual fighting that finally got through, mostly flame throwers. You had to get up close enough to use them, to burn it out. So they took one structure at a time, and they get them out, and then the engineers came in and they brought the dynamite in and they dynamited them, and they brought bulldozers in and they leveled them, and they covered them up so they couldn't get in. They probably buried people in them. That's what the Maginot Line was.

KP: And that was among the worst fighting you saw?

HN: Yes, it was. That was about the worst, I guess.

KP: Because the Vosges Mountain were very tough.

HN: Yes, it was tough, but that was all small arms stuff and artillery barrages, and there was, no, nothing but little small villages or rear areas. There was no real defense. I don't mean that you didn't take artillery, you didn't take the bombings and things like that. There were small areas of resistance where you had to drive through, but it was nothing like Bitche or later on, over on the other side, across the Neckar River there. Bitche was the toughest, the hardest battle we fought, and the second one was the battle at Heilbronn, Germany, after we crossed over into Germany, to get across the Neckar River. … Heilbronn has got this mountain right behind it, and we took an awful lot of artillery because they just stayed up there in the mountains and looked right down there in the city, and the city was just about leveled.

KP: By German artillery?

HN: Oh, yes. This is all, this is late 1944, early 1945. We were in that Bitche conflict there for Christmas that year. That's how I date it.

KP: Well, the Bulge is north of that area.

HN: Well, that is the rest of it. We were in this conflict here (?), with the Maginot fortresses at Bitche on this end of it, and, then, the Germans came in with that counteroffensive, the Battle of the Bulge. So they had to stop a lot of the advancing alone the Bitche and stop that and pull troops out of there and send them north to cut off the Battle of the Bulge up there. So, we were aligned past the Seventh Army, and we were aligned on our left with Patton's Third Army. Well, we pulled Patton's whole Third Army out and sent them north to take care of that situation up there. So that meant that the units that were left there had to cover the ground and kind of spread out on the primary there. So we went on the defense at that point, and they didn't finish Bitche off and really go in there until later that spring.

KP: So you took a lot of losses and couldn't complete your objective?

HN: Exactly.

PR: How efficient was the military in sending you replacements?

HN: You had to have major, to be of major proportion, when we were on the defense, winter defense there at Maginot Line, and all winter long, there were small counterattacks. By small counterattacks, I mean, they were nothing of any major proportion, but it was like patrol sized attacks, small unit attacks, here and here and here. Just enough to keep you awake. If you lost one of those counterattacks and they got into one of our areas, in one company, we lost three officers and thirty-five men, out of one company. Now, thirty-five men is about a third of your strength of a rifle company. Well, we got replacements very fast, I would say, but your reports go back every day to regiment, up to division, and so forth, with your KIAs, Killed In Action, and WIAs, Wounded In Action, and how many officers and how many enlisted men. … They have got to start out with the duties of those men. Were they infantrymen, were they artillerymen, were they engineers, were they communication? There are a lot of requests, a lot of requests going back up the line, "Send us, send us, send us," requests.

KP: How did you go about integrating replacements into the unit?

HN: Yes, you are conscious of the problem, but what you try to do is, as best as you can, is take what they call "raw recruits" and you take those raw recruits and you try to place them within smaller units where you have the leadership in your squad leaders, your sergeants, all your noncoms, and you try to put them in there where you can help them as best you can with the leadership. After a while, you get to know them. I suppose it is the same way on up, when you get up in the Army. You get up in division and you hear stories about General Patch and General, one of our deputies ...

KP: Beddle Smith?

HN: No, he is, it doesn't make any difference, but Patton and this other one, I was trying to think of his name, these are two generals, they didn't get along, what was his name?

PR: Was it Omar Bradley?

HN: Omar Bradley, that is it, Omar Bradley. You are right. So, General Bradley and General Patton, so history stories tell us, I remember they didn't get along. … All through Africa, Patton's Third Army, but Bradley was a junior serving under Patton, well, after Africa was over and he came up through Sicily and Italy and so forth. In the meantime, the Channel invasion was being organized and Eisenhower was over there organizing that. So he has got Montgomery, with his English armies, and so forth, and he takes Omar Bradley and he makes him the Deputy Commander of about twelve Army units, of which Patton is now an Army unit CO, in one of those units serving under Bradley. You see, they just twist them around. See, when you get into the general rank, officers and date of rank does not make that much difference in there. Wherever the senior commander wants to place them is, all of these guys are West Point graduates, all at about the same year, like in the Class of 1913 up to 1917-'18 or something like that, and they all know each other. They all went to school and they all got their own ideas on who can do best for them, you see, and, so, nobody wants to get into the middle of things, and, so, they have, even up at the general line of rank, nobody wants to get into a squabble between Patton and Bradley. Well, it is the same thing down at the junior lines. It is not that there is a squabble, but you get to know which units and which officers and which noncoms and which leaders you can really depend on and, you like, I don't like to say "favor," but, you know, if you got to send out a patrol, you figure, "Well, I will send this out under Lieutenant So and So, because he gets out and he gets back," and it is the same thing all the way up the line.

KP: What about training the new officers?

HN: In combat you didn't have any of that. They got the training. I mean, they got the training as far as officers are concerned. I said you had battlefield promotions, you took your best noncoms who made it up after the lieutenant was knocked out of action, was killed, wounded, or whatever it may be, and "Sergeant Smith" takes over the leadership of that platoon and you send him back, and, in twenty-four hours time, he is a second lieutenant now.

KP: It sounds like you preferred to give battlefield promotions, rather than get replacements from the States.

HN: Oh, definitely, definitely, because you know the guy. You know these noncoms, you know what they are capable of and so forth. You get a new lieutenant in there and you don't know …

KP: People have told me that they would lose a lot of new lieutenants because they didn't know any better and they would get themselves hurt, or killed.

HN: Happens all the time.

PR: The sergeants didn't have a chance to train them.

HN: Oh, yes

KP: Did you have any creature comforts when you were on the line?

HN: I never counted them. Well, when you say a unit is in the line, don't forget, starting out, you got three platoons in a company, and you got three rifle companies in a battalion, and a weapons company, and so forth and so on, and you heard the word, "reserve." Well, it is always, the simple thing is everything always goes in threes, and, so, you got two up and one back, and the one in the back is what you call your reserve. It plugged the hole whenever needed, and this way you never commit one hundred percent of your force. I don't care what it is. A platoon of so many squads, or a company of so many platoons, or a battalion, so, not in the thick of the battle, but when it comes down to your reorganizing, and you still got the same responsibilities for your defense and so forth, and that's where you give the one that is sitting back there in reserve. You rotate that so that not the same one is back there all the time. So, they get cleaned up, and we had portable showers come in on the back of an Army truck and would line up, you would see steam come out of the back.

KP: How often did you get one?

HN: When it came around, you got to wash your face, you know. The hardest thing in the wintertime, not only is it cold, it rained and it rained and it was mud and it was wet and you got a lot of trench foot. Do you know what trench foot is?

KP: I have read that that was a real problem.

HN: That was the big problem. You had your boots on and they had liner soles in them. They had a double pair of those. … Then you hung one pair that goes on a string around the back of your neck, and you had one pair that you put under your armpits and wear that in there all day long. That dries it out, and that next morning, you changed and hang the other one around your neck. You do what you have to do.

KP: What about food?

HN: Whenever we could, we took pride in our kitchen, because our cooks, our mess personnel, we kept them as close to the front lines as we possibly could. They traveled right with us, and then we would bring our men out of the line and they would eat in groups of six or something like that, and then we would send them back in. We only lost one kitchen in the whole time we were going across France. We got counterattacked on New Year's Eve. They overran our kitchen, and we had just made an issue of new sleeping bags. Initially, everybody had a blanket, two if you could find it, and you curled up wherever, in a foxhole, or the brush, or wherever. But the blankets were heavy, they got wet, and what guys ended up doing was sending their blankets with the kitchens, back, and then, the next night when they would come up, hopefully, they would get their blankets back. On night, we lost the kitchen, we lost the blankets. No, we didn't lose the blankets, that was, we got an issue of bedrolls that were light and a kind of plastic material and so forth, that were lined, that would roll up, they would fold up and they would not be any bigger, or much bigger than, this thing here. The small thing, and we had just issued those the day before, and the guys from the blanket deal, they kept those things with the kitchen, and they said, "Bring them up." When they lost the kitchen, they lost all the bed rolls, but those bed rolls were nice, they were light, they folded up. Well, needless to say, they didn't leave the stuff with the kitchens anymore.

KP: What do you mean when you say you lost your kitchen? Did you lose the staff or just the equipment?

HN: No, we didn't lose the men, but we lost the trucks, we lost the jeeps, we lost the big steel pots, and all the food.

KP: So this was a significant counterattack, because a lot of equipment that was fairly mobile ...

HN: Well, the reason we lost the trucks, the whole thing, is because it is so muddy that we couldn't get them out of there.

KP: You seem to remember the mud a lot.

HN: A lot of mud and all rain.

KP: How good was the medical care?

HN: The medical care, what medical care I came in contact with was very good. Don't forget, down, until you get up to regiment, I was at battalion level, regiment has its own medical detachment, doctors, units and so forth and so on. Our medical personnel down at battalion level, company level and so forth, consisted of first aid men to give comfort and what treatments you could on the battlefield. We didn't have our own doctors, or hospital units and so forth. You had to go, anything on battalion on down just goes to the rear.

PR: Did you get to see the effects of air power during the war?

HN: That late in time, the German Air Force was, I don't want to say eliminated, but it had decreased in intensity. … Don't forget, too, at this particular time, the Battle of the Bulge was in late November, or December of '44. … Remember the account on the Battle of the Bulge up there, they picked that day, because the German air power was at the point where the Allies had definite superiority. So they picked that day to start the Battle of the Bulge so that it was overcast and it was cloudy and air cover didn't really, you didn't need any. But for us people down in the Bulge, down south of the Bulge, that meant that whatever air power the Germans did have, most of it would have been used up there in the north. The only air power, air bombardment that we used was our own in the fortification on the Maginot Line.

--------------------------------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE--------------------------------

PR: Did you have to deal with any disciplinary problems?

HN: The major disciplinary problems that we had were during occupation duty, after the war in Europe was over. They had more time on their own, more time to socialize, more time to fraternize, a lot of drinking and that kind of disciplinary thing. But during the course of combat, it is one for one and I don't call them disciplinary problems. I don't call "refusal to advance," refusal of any nature on the spot, I don't call that a disciplinary problem. It's a lack of training if anything else. We didn't have any disciplinary problems, to any great extent, until after the war was over. Don't forget, the war was over on May 7, 1945, and we did occupation duty there for the rest of the year. We had a lot of time to kill.

KP: What did you think about the Germans?

HN: Didn't respect anybody during combat. No, seriously, I don't think that the German soldier or the German enlisted men, junior officers, were any different than us. They were there because they, I don't think any of them were there because they really wanted to be. They were there because they should be and had to be, and so forth. I don't think that is true as you get up the line in general command, because, I think, when you get up on top in German command, I don't think there was any respect from one organization to another. For example, you had the Wehrmacht, the German regular army was there, well, they not only didn't get along with, they didn't trust the, what was that, Hitler's, the other force that he had there? The SS. … The SS people were the people who were really loyal to Hitler and his people, and it was a two pronged thing there. I don't know how you differentiate. The SS were truly loyal and the Wehrmacht were career officers and career soldiers and there was always that disagreement there.

KP: Did you get a lot of German POWs?

HN: After the spring breakout, in about February '45.

KP: That was the first time you took prisoners?

HN: Well, it wasn't the first time we took any prisoners. We took a lot of prisoners out of the Maginot Line, out of bunkers. There was no place for them to go. They couldn't turn around and run the other way, and, like I said, they were down deep, deep into the ground, and you had whole units down there, quartered and fed, slept and everything else down there. So when you overpowered one of those fortifications units like that, you usually got the whole pie, so to speak, out of there. Everything that came up was yours.

KP: Did you ever take part in any interrogations of prisoners?

HN: No.

KP: You just turned them over?

HN: I will take that back, to a certain extent. Not interrogation of senior officers, or where it would go to trial, or anything.

KP: No, I mean just questioning people you captured.

HN: We would send patrols out and their mission would be to bring back a couple of prisoners. I mean, that's what they were supposed to do. They were supposed to bring them back and bring back the highest rank that they could find, and then we would interrogate them as prisoners to try to find out what was their unit, how strong is it and, if possible, where they were headed, what was their objective, and that kind of thing, tactical information.

KP: How useful would that be?

HN: Lots of times, it was very useful.

KP: You mentioned that crossing the Neckar River was one of the most difficult missions your division had. Would you elaborate on that a little bit?

HN: After we went through the Maginot Line, we had to go through sections of the Siegfried Line there. But that was just a short distance, over there, and that was more difficult for armored vehicles to get through because of the spikes that were still there. But, by that time, we got through the Maginot Line and the Germans were in full retreat in back, so there were pockets of resistance. One of which was the city of Heilbronn, with this humongous mountain in the background, and it controlled, from the top of the ridges of that mountain, it controlled the whole Neckar valley. They could see everything that came or went and moved, so you were trying to move convoys and supplies, troops, one thing and another, down there, and you were taking a lot of artillery, because they had observation points up there, so it was important that we get rid of those. So, we had to cross the Neckar River to get to that mountain over there, and they put up quite a fight in the city itself and we took a lot of artillery. But we had to cross a river and that was a first and only experience where we had to work under cover of smoke screens. And then, under the cover of smoke screen, the engineers had to install pontoon bridges. We had to cross pontoon bridges and we had never done that before.

KP: You never tried this during training?

HN: Under fire.

KP: How did it go?

HN: We lost a lot. We lost a lot. The section on the south, it would be the southeast side of that Neckar River, there, it was an industrial portion, a lot of factories, so we had our men in our battalions in the various factories in, if you could imagine what house-to-house fighting is. I mean, that is over two or three stories high. But you got these factories in here, and you got these Germans in these factories buildings and they are all sizes. You know how a factory district is and so forth and so on, and …

KP: What tactics did you use to take over this city?

HN: That is what I am getting at. It was what you call "house-to-house," "building-to-building." You went in and you cleaned out the building and then you went to the next building and it was just one after the other, trying to get a clear passage way down to that river so that you could get across. It was all hand-to-hand, building-by-building.

KP: Is it true that you would blow holes through the wall to get into the adjacent buildings?

HN: Oh, sure.

PR: Was this kind of fighting taught in infantry school?

HN: Yes, at Fort Benning, but mostly, it was house-to-house, which was a lot different than a factory. They had mock villages set up in, though, we had never seen anything like this. We came down onto this river and we took the fire and it was coming from these buildings on the river edge. So, to get to the river, we had to knock the buildings out. It is one thing to say, we had the artillery, "put the artillery in there and knock the buildings apart," that helps, too, but you got to get at the individuals.

KP: When did you see German resistance collapsing?

HN: At Bitche.

KP: That is really when the resistance began to fall apart?

HN: Yes, although coming through the lines like that, there were little small pockets of resistance here and there, and so forth and so on. You come into the little villages and there would be light spots of resistance, and so forth, and you were pushing them back, pushing them back.

KP: When did you get the sense that the Germans were in a full retreat and you could take as much ground as you wanted?

HN: That was after Bitche and after Heilbronn. Heilbronn, on the Neckar River there, that was our major engagement, and from then on it was just village, to village, to village. We would go through two, three villages in one day's time, and there would be some pockets of resistance, but nothing. As a matter-of-fact, it was good living, because we were going through villages, after village, after village, and we slept in beds all that time. We would go into these little villages, and some were good-sized villages, and we would get ahold of the bergermeister, who was the mayor, responsible person, and we would say, "We need so many buildings in this area to billet one hundred men, or whatever." So we would take over the buildings, and I don't know, we would give the civilians two hours to get out, or something like that, and we would take over those houses, put our defenses around, our security, and go to sleep. We did that all the way down through after Hamburg; we slept in a house every night.

KP: That must have been quite a change from sleeping on bedrolls.

HN: We got into one village, we got into a village and made a night march, and got into this town. We took over this section of town and we had our headquarters, our battalion headquarters, set up in a house right on the edge of town where the two highways came together there, and there was a lot of action. You could hear our security out there, challenging, and every once-in-a-while, there would be rifle fire and so forth. What had happened was the German soldiers, quite a few of them, they had been off on leave somewhere and their headquarters had been in this town when they left, and, you know, they were coming back unexpectedly and their headquarters were not there anymore. The Americans were there. We had quite a few prisoners that night.

KP: When did you notice Americans starting to fraternize with the Germans?

HN: It broke down when you were in the vicinity of the center of the larger cities, some place for the troops to fraternize.

KP: Were you more distant with the people when you were in a small village?

HN: There was more of it, in the end of the war, when we were in occupation duty.

KP: Did you encounter any chaplains at all?

HN: We had chaplains. We had three chaplains in our battalion. We had two Protestants and one Catholic chaplain. We didn't have a Rabbi. I guess the Jewish boys had to do with what they had, or something, I don't know.

KP: How effective were the chaplains in terms of keeping morale up?

HN: Well, my own opinion is that we looked up to the chaplains and spent more time with the chaplains and depended on the prayers of the chaplains more than I ever did in my church before the war. I can't give you anymore than that.

KP: So you really got to know the chaplains.

HN: Oh, yes, they were right with you all the time.

KP: Were they on the front lines with you?

HN: On the back of the line.

KP: I've heard some accounts that the chaplains couldn't be found anywhere.

HN: No, they were very, very good. We had the breakdowns and the refusals and the fear and all that, and the chaplains would counsel the best they could.

KP: So you could really rely on the chaplains to help men who had problems.

HN: Definitely, while they were waiting to be transported somewhere else.

PR: How did it feel to get a Bronze Star?

HN: Well, any award like that makes you feel that somebody, well, whether it be a Bronze Star, or a Silver Star, or any decoration, it has to be recommended by somebody, so it makes you feel, well, somebody took notice of a few things, anyway. It's not like a Purple Heart. I mean, a Purple Heart, you have to get wounded. You bring that on yourself.

KP: Who recommended you for your Bronze Star?

HN: I don't know.

KP: You don't know who it was?

HN: I imagine it was [Lt. Col.] Wiley Wisdom.

KP: Was it for a particular action you had taken?

HN: No, I didn't get a star for action, I got a star for exemplary service, or something like that. I don't know what it was. Part of my job as the executive officer was to keep the ammunition coming, keep the food coming. I was always there for every order that went out, so to speak. But, just like it says, executive officer, you have the other things in order to keep that front line going, you have to keep that other stuff coming.

KP: And how difficult was that?

HN: It was very difficult to be able to always promise, and never, in the rain. Everybody was more the less on their own. I mean, intentions were good, but supply lines were late in getting there and the quartermaster was late in making deliveries. It was a real problem. We had a battalion mess sergeant that did a good job for us. He didn't just go to the quartermaster and just draw what provisions he was entitled to. He would come back twice the same day and get a second load, and, I am not kidding you, we had a depot, a quartermaster depot, if you want to call it that, of our own in the area, in the building, that winter when we were on the Maginot Line. He would get everything that the division quartermaster would give him and store it up. We ate good that winter, but it is all an individual thing.

KP: How was he able to do that?

HN: I never signed anything. He had some kind of an arrangement that went like this. He went down there with his order, you know, making them write it all out, and so forth and so on, and he would back into this quartermaster depot down there and he would get his stuff, and, then, he would pull way on down to the far end of the platform down there, and, I guess, wave his copy of the order and somehow, or the other, he would come up with a double load most times. But that is how you had to survive. I mean, I guess, it is called stealing, but we ate it all up. We didn't give any of it away, or sell it, or anything like that.

KP: Do you remember where you were VE Day?

HN: It was on May the 7th, and, I don't know, it was somewhere between Heilbronn and Stuttgart, because that is when we were really racing down there. I don't remember exactly where it was, it was on the 7th. A few days after that, we went into the City of Stuttgart, or our objective was the City of Stuttgart, and there wasn't much resistance. … We got on the outskirts of Stuttgart and our orders told us to go so far and then to report our progress. So we told them where we were and we got orders to make certain contacts in the City of Stuttgart and to quarter our troops, meaning, stay in the city. While we were making arrangements to do that, they changed the orders and told us to move further south, down toward Ulm, and then we found out later on, that the reason for the change was that the French had claimed the City of Stuttgart. For some reason, they decided to let the French go in there and take the bows, and so forth and so on. Some of our guys are pretty much upset, to the point where they wanted to fight the French. The French are terrible. I hope you guys are not French.

KP: Did you ever have any contact with the French?

HN: The Winter Line, after the Battle of the Bulge, when we all went on the Winter Line, and the 100th Division pretty much had that sector facing that section of the Maginot Line that we spoke about, and we had the Forty-forth Division on our left flank, and we had the First French Army on our right flank. The story goes that the reason the Seventh Army was left there for that winter defense is because the French Army could never depend on the French being where they are supposed to be on any given time. But we had situations like going through the Vosges there, where we would take ground, and our order told us to move on, to another section of ground, and the French are supposed to come in, to occupy where we had taken, and they wouldn't show up. So, what do you do? Are you going to wait there, or are you going to go on? You never knew where those Frenchmen were. And the thing that bugged me tremendously, as far as the French are concerned, every time we saw a French unit on a move, a convoy was American trucks, American equipment, and there were trucks there that had whole French families, the women, the mothers, the children, they carried their families with them everywhere that they went. There was so much of that and there was so much ceremony among the French, the biggest one was after the capitulation. The City of Paris was not fought for, I will give the Germans credit for that. They did not devastate that city when they left. They just left and we came in. No, the 100th Division didn't come in, I am not saying that, we, meaning the Allied troops, came in. But the ceremonial part of the recapture, if you will, or the repossession of the City of Paris, was delayed for two days until they could get Charles de Gaulle out of England and bring him over. … All stuff like that, defensively, that is the way these French were. They were always on ceremony, or something like that. We saw, we were supposed to be relieved at the bottom of the Vosges campaign by parts of the French First Army, and while we were waiting on this hill, we could see them. … They are coming with their convoys and their vehicles in parade ground fashion, down the main street there, with reviewing officers and everything else there, like they're sending them on their way, and, now, they are going to come up, and so much ceremony. So much ceremony to me is useless, I mean, in a situation like that.

KP: You must have looked at this and couldn't believe it.

HN: … That's why my wife and my family can't understand why I am not one hundred percent loyal to the French.

KP: One of the things another person told me was that the French were also very loud.

HN: And lazy.

KP: What do you mean when you say lazy?

HN: Well, we go through France, and the agricultural portion down there in the Ardennes is nice ground, … all that backed up against the Rhine River Valley. The other side is Germany. I am talking about, this is in the springtime now. Nobody is in the fields in France. They are all grown up, weeds and so forth. You don't see any cattle. You don't see any horses. There just is no activity that you would find in a rural, or agricultural community. … Then, you go over the Rhine, and you come out into Germany, and there, the defeated enemy, or about to be defeated, and [you would] think the morale would be zero, and yet, in their fields, just on the other side of the river, everybody from the smallest kids to the oldest grandfather are all out there working the fields and growing something and doing something productive. Not the French. They just sit there and they wait for all the aid they can get, the benefits. Boy, I hope you don't send them to Washington.

KP: No, it won't go to Washington. Did you think your unit would be sent to the Pacific?

HN: Definitely, from within a week's time, after May 7th. No, I shouldn't say a week's time. The latter part of May, after the war in Europe was over, we started on jungle warfare training, with the expectancy of being transferred to the Pacific. Don't forget, the 100th Division didn't go over there until late in the fall of '44, and we didn't have too many points. … It was all on the point system of who was going to come home and who was going to stay for occupation and who was going to on to the Pacific. We didn't have very many high pointers, so we were "destined," if you want to call it that. I won't let anybody tell me that Harry Truman didn't do right in the dropping of the atom bomb, because, in my opinion, had he not have done that, that war would have gone on a lot longer with a lot more casualties.

KP: How much occupation duty did you have to do before the war ended?

HN: Well, this was occupational duty, but it was training. But you had to be responsible for occupational duty, but you can't spend twenty-four hours a day on occupational duty. What is it? You withdraw, you act like a policeman, you advise the bergermeister there of what he can do and what he can't do. But, as far as the troops on the ground are concerned, there is only so many men that you can patrol a city with, and so forth, so training was intermingled, I might say, you know, entwined, with the occupation duty. Because after the war in the Pacific ended, there was a support team. … We knew we weren't going to the Pacific and the training stopped like that. … They started the movement of the troops and the shipment and, you know, back Stateside.

KP: Do you remember any serious discipline problems?

HN: No, most of them were drunkenness, you know, alcohol.

KP: So you didn't have any major crimes?

HN: At most, you lock a guy up overnight .

KP: Did you get to know any of the Germans during your occupation duty?

HN: No, not in any lasting way. I have, up in Rutherford where I live, there is a man there who I talked to once, that was in the 398th Infantry Regiment, which is part of the division, and he talked about, he had become acquainted with a family over there that had some teenage children that he became fond of and he corresponded with them and had been back over to visit them. But I never got that close.

KP: How often did you deal with German officials?

HN: Well, no. The initial occupation duty were the ground troops that were on the land, on the location, at the time. In other words, you had a battalion, take this example: the Second Battalion in the 397thInfantry was assigned the city, it was a small city of Ulm, as its responsibility at the end of the war, until such time as the government, what was it called, the government officials took responsibility.

KP: Civil Affairs?

HN: Yes, the Civil Affairs people, the civilian portion, is what I am trying to say. But the military units had a certain sector, and this Second Battalion had this city of Ulm, and whatever unit goes in there, the leader, or the commanding officer always works with the mayor. … Then, you go on down, and the next one he works with the, I don't know what happens in the city, the president of the council, or the next one down, and somebody works with the Board of Health, and so forth and so on. … We had the City of Ulm as our city, to work them in occupation, so I only worked with the mayor, the bergermeister of the city for a short period of time. That was my only occupation duty that I ever did.

KP: How long were you in Germany?

HN: I went in Germany, when I was in Germany, we were on a winter defensive line there for '44. We went into Germany in the spring, in late February, early March.

KP: And when did you go home?

HN: I left there to come home in January 1946.

KP: Did anything strike you about how devastated Germany was, like the bombing damage?

HN: Definitely that. The people were lost. I mean, you get into the inner cities, and how they would have been [through] massive bombings, and you always think back, what if that ever happened over here? They didn't have any place to live. They were just holed up in cellars and factories, any place, you know. There was no place to go. It was just complete devastation and ruin. That's all there was to it.

KP: Did you have any responsibility for any displaced persons?

HN: Do you mean like the camps?

KP: Yes.

HN: No.

KP: Or displaced person camps.

HN: No.

KP: How tough was it to keep a unit going after the war was over? There were probably people with enough points to get out after VJ Day.

HN: Enough points after VE Day.

KP: Yes, but after VJ Day, it really accelerated.

HN: You had enough points to either keep you there to retrain, or enough points to come back.

KP: But by VJ Day, that process …

HN: That ended it.

KP: How tough was it to keep the unit functioning?

HN: It wasn't hard to keep the unit functioning. I will tell you what the most difficult part was. We got orders to come Stateside, as they call it, and our port of debarkation, meaning coming out of Germany and France, was the same way I went in. I went in through Marseille and came out through Marseille. We were sent to the debarkation center in Marseille at Thanksgiving time, in November of '45, and we never left Marseille until late January of '46.

KP: In the end of '45.

HN: In '45, we stayed there until Thanksgiving of '45, November of '45.

KP: You stayed in Germany.

HN: We stayed in France. We never shipped out of Marseille until January of '46. We stayed there a little over two months.

KP: Which is a long time.

HN: You know why we stayed there?

KP: Why?

HN: Because there was a maritime strike back here and they couldn't get ships to go over there to bring us home. … What they were doing, they were taking every ship that came in that had any kind of cargo space at all to put troops on, and I came home on one of those Liberty ships. It had 125 men on board and that is all it could take. What it had done, it had brought a load of molasses into Marseille and the hold, you know, the bulk of the ship was tanks for bulk molasses. … They scrubbed it out a little bit, I guess, and flushed it out, but they filled the tanks with water just to give that ship ballast, and 125 men was all that they could take on board that ship. … It was a Liberty ship and it was called the Roger G. Griswald and it got renamed the Rolling Greaseball. But that is the way they were bringing the troops home, in drips and drabs. They couldn't get maritime people to work. That didn't set too well.

KP: You got back to the States in February?

HN: No, I got back to the States on the 16th of January. I think it was the 16th of January.

KP: You were not discharged until April of '46. Did you go on terminal leave after you got back?

HN: I went on terminal leave, because I had what you call "leave time."

KP: Did you think of staying in the Army?

HN: I thought about it. I bet Wiley Wisdom tried to get me to stay because he was regular Army, too.

KP: He must have liked and respected you.

HN: I hope he did. He really would have liked me to stay. He must have liked me, because, in 1947 I guess it was, I was best man at his wedding at West Point.

KP: You stayed in the Reserves, but you ruled out the regular Army. You had advanced to be a major, which ¼

HN: I came out a major.

KP: It could have led you to a promising career.

HN: I suppose, but I don't know. I talked to my wife about it a little bit. I don't want to say that that was the total reason.

KP: It also sounds like you just wanted to come home.

HN: Well, my father wasn't too well and I wanted to come home, and, you know, it was all those things to consider. As I said, my wife wasn't, you know, she would say, "Well, if that is what you want to do," you know. She didn't say, "Oh, yes, I think that is what you want to do." She never liked army life as an army wife. She was with me a lot until I went overseas.

KP: Where did she accompany you to?

HN: She was with me, not from the beginning, but sometime later. Before I left Camp Croft, she was with me for a while. … When I went to the 100th Division, she had to come home, because we went to Tennessee for maneuvers. … We came back to Fort Bragg, after maneuvers, and she was with me up until the time we recieved debarkation orders.

KP: Where did she live?

HN: You mean where did she live during ¼

KP: During the time she was with you.

HN: There is a story there. I mean, do we have time?

KP: Yes.

HN: We were living in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and we had a furnished, three room apartment, upstairs over a dentist office, so he was a dentist and his wife was a school teacher in the City of Spartanburg. We had this three-room apartment. … I got promoted to first lieutenant and the rent went up. I paid it. So then I went down to Fort Benning and I came back, and just before I joined the 100thDivision, I made captain and the rent went up. Well, at that same time, the government Rent Control Board had come into practice. So when she raised the rent the last time, I tried to explain it to her and she didn't understand, or didn't want to understand. But, anyway, it became a matter of "I refused to pay it." … But what I did, I sent a check, by registered mail, every month for three months for a lesser amount, whatever the rent was, no increase. … For three months, registered mail, my check came back. We played that game and then she took me to court. … My military friends at Camp Croft, in the Judge Advocate [General's Office], advised me to go to court and explain to the judge, and they said, "You have nothing to worry about." So, I said, "Don't I need one of you guys to come down there with me?" "No, you don't need that. Just go." So I go to court and she has a lawyer there and I have my wife there. … At some point in the proceedings, every time I would try to say something, the lawyer would object and the judge would sustain the objection. So, finally, it came down to the point where the judge said, "Okay, I have to rule on this now." He said, "The law says you have failed to pay your rent for three months, so, according to the law, you must vacate the premises." He says, "But the law doesn't say how much time I have to give you." So, I figure, this old boy is going to be pretty good to me.

----------------------------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO-----------------------------------

HN: But what the judge didn't know was that I was already under orders, being transferred to Fort Benning sometime within the month. So I said to the judge, "Well, Judge, you know, this is a military city and finding living quarters is quite a chore, but," I said, "I think, if you give me thirty days, I might be able to find other quarters." The judge says to me, "I will give you ten days to get out." Well, okay, so we hurried around and we found some other place to live, and I had to pay the additional rent and all that kind of stuff. So I couldn't do anything about that, but I did put in an appeal with the new Rent Control Board. … Of course, they don't act too fast. … I went on maneuvers and came back and went overseas. At a mail call, overseas, one day, I received a check and a letter from some District Court of South Carolina and they returned me whatever the increase was, while I was in France.

KP: You got this check when you were in combat?

HN: Yes.

KP: That was a good story.

HN: I didn't win it in court but I won it on the battlefield.

KP: How hard was it for your wife to make ends meet while you were gone?

HN: It got bad at one point. When I was transferred the second time from Camp Croft to Fort Benning, Georgia, that was in Columbus, Georgia, and it took, I don't remember the exact time now, it took considerable time for the Army finance department, for the paymaster records to catch up to me at Fort Benning, Georgia. … I was a second lieutenant, and I was making 125 dollars a month at that time. … We couldn't find quarters and we were living in a hotel in Columbus. Well, I was not concerned for myself, because I could always move out to the post, but I have my wife with me and all that kind of stuff. … So it did get straightened around and we got our money. I didn't get a penny from the hotel, I didn't have any money. One hundred twenty-five dollars a month didn't go too far.

KP: No, not even in World War II. Is there anything that we forgot to ask you?

HN: I don't think so.

KP: Did you ever join the American Legion or the VFW?

HN: No.

KP: You never had any interest in it?

HN: I guess because I never had any interest. I am not a joiner, probably, if somebody had requested, or made an effort, it might have been different, but it didn't.

KP: But you did join the 100th Infantry Division Association.

HN: Yes.

KP: When did you join?

HN: That started out overseas.

KP: So it was that early.

HN: Yes, I don't know if we signed up or what we did. I have always belonged to that organization.

KP: Have you gone to Division reunions?

HN: I have been at two reunions. The earliest one was several years ago, but the last one I went to was three years ago, 1992, I guess it was, or '93, I don't know. At that particular one, there wasn't a single person there that I knew personally, I mean, from the 100th Division. There were others, but there was actually no one that I knew.

KP: That you knew.

HN: No. So we walked around a little bit and stayed one night and decided to go home. But it is a good organization and they do a lot. I mean, the fact that they have reunions are nice, and I am not knocking the reunions. But they do things, they give awards, and they received awards for Fort Jackson. … They have a scholarship established, I don't know how much money is in it, but they have a scholarship established to go to dependents, or families, or cousins of the 100th Division, or former 100th Division members. They do a lot of good from that standpoint. The convention that they have every year is fine, too, for those that want to go, but I don't particularly get anything out of it anymore.

KP: You mentioned that you were best man for Wiley Wisdom.

HN: I stayed in touch with him up until, well, I am still in touch, but not like years ago. He lost his wife and everything [stopped]. She was the communicator. They had three children, and she was the communicator. She and my wife exchanged short notes, and we would always [get something], like a birthday, or Christmas card, and definitely a wedding anniversary, you know, good wishes and all that kind of stuff. If we had occasion, I go to Vermont a lot, I don't go to Florida anymore. People tell me I am crazy to go to Vermont in the wintertime. But, anyway, the few times we did go to Florida, we would go out of our way to see Wiley, he is retired, living in Columbus, Georgia, we would always go by and see him. So we did stay in touch with him, but then his wife died. I don't say we lost contact, but he doesn't write and I am not a great writer. … I did call him, I guess, about a year ago, and tried to talk to him, and, I don't know, he is a man, now, of about eighty-one, eighty-two years old. We didn't get too far over the telephone. He was still talking, or maybe grieving even, I don't know. He said, "My wife died." I said, "Yes, I know that, Wiley." It just didn't make sense, unfortunately, that's all I know, but, yes, up until his wife died, we stayed in contact.

KP: Did you stay in contact with anyone else from the division?

HN: Not particularly, no. There were several, up through Connecticut, but I never stayed in any personal contact. But I have a classmate here at Rutgers, Bob Satter, I don't know if you know him?

KP: Oh, yes.

HN: Bob Satter got into politics up there in Connecticut. … I asked him if he knew these other two people I knew. They were lawyers and he said he knew them. They are still around, but he said that they are all retired. I said that "I forgot they're that age."

KP: Because you are still very active.

HN: In what?

KP: In business. You are not fully retired.

HN: Only on paper. I am drawing social security

KP: One of Patrick's comments was that you were very hard to get ahold of, so it sounds like you are keeping fairly busy schedule.

HN: Yes, but I think that is good. I hate the thought of being retired and having to wake up every morning and say, "I wonder what I better do today?" I think I have the best of two ends. I am in a situation where I have two sons in active positions. The way I put it when anybody asks me, "It's their expertise but my money." But from that standpoint, I don't do anything on a day-to-day basis. So what I want to do is tax work and insurance work and accounting work and stuff like that, not work, but, I mean, you know, check here and there, so if it comes. I am leaving tomorrow morning for our place in Vermont, as a matter-of-fact. You guys kept me here today. I am getting off the subject here, but when I want to go somewhere, all I do is pick up and go. … I tell the boys, "Hey, I am going." "When are you coming back?" I say, "Well, I don't know yet." So, that is nice, but when I am here, we maintain what is my former dairy office. I have one girl working there and I do the administrative work. She does for both of those businesses. We have one computer system in there, she, and with them, of course, you know, but we do the whole thing. So when I get up in the morning, I am going to that office. … Then, I have been treasurer for the Presbyterian Church in North Arlington for thirty years. I resigned three years ago, but I am still treasurer. I don't think they are looking very hard. … Then there is the new Beta Foundation, which is Phi Gamma Delta, and the Rutgers chapter is the new Beta chapter, and we have a scholarship foundation, have had ever since 1946. … Vincent Kramer is the president of the foundation and I am the secretary and the third member of our class, Bobby Bunnel is the treasurer. So being the secretary takes quite a bit of time, to keep everything going. Vince and I have to go somewhere and I will say to him, "Do you know what you are going to say?" and he will say, "No, you didn't write it," you know, and that kind of stuff. But between that and I have been quite active with the Class of 1941, they have been particularly active, last year was the fifty-fifth reunion. That is where I stand.

KP: Did you use the GI Bill when you got home?

HN: No.

KP: What about the GI mortgage?

HN: No, I didn't need the education, I already had my college [degree]. I didn't care about a graduate degree.

KP: You didn't want to get an MBA or a MA?

HN: No, and the rest of them ¼

KP: The GI mortgage.

HN: No, my father, in the early years of the war, bought a house immediately next to the family home. … He bought it just because it was for sale and it was next door and it was through a mortgage foreclosure, or something and he got a deal for that. So when I went home and I asked him about the house, if it was for rent, and he said, "No, it isn't for rent now, but it will be if you want it." So he gave it and so forth and so on, so we rented that house. It didn't have too much of a mortgage on it, by today's standings, because he only paid something like 6,000 dollars for it. So he died in 1949 and I paid off the mortgage and it was only a couple thousand dollars. There was no use for the previsions of the GI Bill.

KP: You had to take over the family business sooner than you had expected.

HN: Sooner than I had expected. It would have been nice if, but that's the way it is.

KP: The dairy business became very tough.

HN: That is why I am out of it today.

KP: There used to be scores of independent dairies throughout New Jersey at the time. I interviewed someone who also had a dairy operation, and he said that now, they're just a handful.

HN: Used to be on the University Board of Trustees, I can't remember his name, Alvin Rockoff.

KP: Yes, yes, he mentioned how tough the dairy business became.

HN: He hadn't been in the dairy business for years.

KP: That is part of what he said.

HN: Made a dollar in the dairy business and now has got it invested in the investment business. I knew Alvin. I have not seen him in a long time, but, I mean, I don't know him on any Rutgers University basis. I know him as a competitor, so to speak. It became very, very competitive with the advent of the supermarkets.

KP: Well, you saw that.

HN: Cash and carry, you know. Go for your own. Don't pay for the delivery, that kind of stuff. So our retail routes, home delivery routes, went down, down, down, and we rolled with it and we went into the wholesale end, stores, and schools, and hospitals and all that kind of stuff. That was okay and the boys got out of school, got out of college and all of that. When they were going to college, you know, we had all kinds of labor problems. Nobody wants to work those early morning hours, and you never could pay them enough. So the milk was like the mail, it has to go. So what happens, you have some convenience stores and you have some milk runs, so what do you do when some guy calls you at three in the morning and doesn't show at four o'clock in the morning, so one of the boys would have to jump on the truck. So it got to the point where the milk runs were going out fine but, at the convenience stores, nobody was watching the cash register. In other words, we weren't taking care of the responsibility of the convenience store, so I put it right to my two boys. "We can't go on like that. We have to do something. We have to get rid of one, or the other. What do you want to do?" One of the boys said, "Let's get rid of the milk routes." We sold the milk routes, and that was my retirement. We took the money and put it into the convenience stores.

KP: When did you make this transition?

HN: 1973. My son graduated from college in 1972, and he married in his junior year in college. I talked to him then and I said, "Well, getting married and you have got another year of college. You're going to finish, aren't you?" He said, "I will finish," and I said, "Well, I'll take you through college, but I am hoping you are not asking that I support a wife for a year and a half until you get out?" He said, "No, we will take care of that, too." So he said, "All I am asking you to do is give me one of those milk runs. Let me run one of those milk runs." So I gave him the good old Harrison milk run. That is because that is always the hardest route to keep someone on, because it was the most physical run and it was always open, it seemed like. So, anyway, they got married his junior year in college, and, boy, I have to put it to him, he ran that milk run. … He was up anywhere from midnight to two o'clock every morning and ran that thing and hopped in his car and went to school. … He did that for a year and a half and she was working, too, of course. … Then he came along in his senior year and he said to me, "Dad, I graduate from college here before too long." I said, "Yes, I know that." He said, "I have to do something. I got a wife to support. I've got to work." I said, "Yes, I know that, too. What do you want to do?" He says, "Well, it's not what I want to do. I know what I don't want to do." I said, "Well, what don't you want to do?" He said, "I don't [want] to run anymore milk runs." That finished that right there. That was in 1972, and, in 1973, the rest of the story is, well, he didn't want to run any more milk routes. "Well, what do you want to do?" "Well, how about if we take a look at convenience stores?" They were just starting to come in, so I said, "I don't know anything about convenience stores. I don't know anything about grocery stores." I said, "Go and gather some material and get some facts." I said, "If it looks like it is something worthwhile, I will back you to whatever extent I can." So he goes out and he gets himself a part-time job. He says, he is still running the milk route, but he gets himself a part-time job afternoons and early evenings, with a guy that is running a delicatessen in Lyndhurst. … The guys, well, I will tell you who it is. I am sure you know him. I am sure you know the name even if you don't know him, Tony Scardino.

KP: Oh, yes, I do know him.

HN: They say, now, he is the executive director for the Hackensack Meadowlands Commission. Just had his picture, full-length picture on last month's issue of New Jersey Business magazine. So Tony, at that time, was mayor of Lyndhurst. He was running this delicatessen, and, so, Doug went to work for him. … Then, at some point, Tony said, "I know you are going to graduate from school." He said, "I am going to run for state senator or representative of somewhere in the state. I need someone to take over the store and run it for me." He said, "Would you like to do that after you graduate?" So Doug said, "I have to be honest with you. I have been using you." Tony looked at him and said, "Using me?" Doug said, "Yes," and his delicatessen was a milk account of ours, so he says, "Yes, I have been using you. You don't know my father," he didn't at that time, except that he had this lawyer, he said, "My father owns Forest Dairy." That's the name that we went under. "Your father owns Forest Dairy?" He said, "Yes, and we are thinking about going into convenience stores on our own. I can't take your job." So that was Tony, and you know, Tony has never forgotten that. Every time that I read, or see Tony, he always wants to know, "How is your son, Doug?" He says, "That kid put it over on me."

KP: But it sounds like your son learned a lot from this.

HN: I hope he did.

KP: When did you stop delivering milk?

HN: I sold the milk business in 1979.

KP: That was your last home delivery.

HN: The last home delivery, that was everything. I mean, the home deliveries, wholesale and so forth and so on.

KP: Do you remember when home deliveries stopped?

HN: Well, no, there, when we sold out, we were down to two home delivery routes at the time. At one time, we were running fifteen or sixteen routes.

KP: How many convenience stores do you run now?

HN: We have two right now. We were up as high as six, but those things, you know. So these convenience stores paid off. We had six of them, and, one-by-one, on four of them, usually, you would get a call from a broker, and he would say, "I got somebody that is looking for a convenience store," but this one broker, he said, "I got somebody I would like you to meet." So he brought this guy in, and, I tell you the truth, my first impression was not very good. He is what I classify as an Indian. I don't know whether he is an Iraqi, or an Arabian. I don't know what he is, but every time he came back, he had more money, and after a while, things built up to the point where he was serious. "Well, I am crazy if I don't do this," so this guy came back and he bought this store. He's doing fine. Our other, what we call our "home store," in Rutherford there, and that's a busy, busy place. We do a lot of business. I just show up on payday.

KP: Did your wife work at the dairy business as well?

HN: No.

KP: Not like your mother.

HN: We were talking about that the other day. My two boys, Doug and Glen, and I don't know how the subject came up, but both of their wives work, and I said, "These things have changed. You guys are making a lot of money and you got your wives out there working." I said, "Your mother never had to work. I had to get along on one salary." I said, "You guys are rolling in it, you know." But it is true. I don't think it is true that they are making a lot of money, but ¼

KP: Your wife never had to work?

HN: No, she worked up until the time she got married. I remember an insurance company in New York, but that was before social security. She didn't have a basis to draw social security on her own. I tell her she didn't contribute too much to this fifty-fifty deal.

PR: What was your position when you joined the Seventy-eighth Division (Reserves)?

HN: Seventy-eighth Division, 310th Infantry, and I went in as a regimental supply officer. No, I am getting ahead of myself. I went in as a battalion commander, I came out a major, and I went into the Reserves as a major, so I was commanding a battalion. Now, you have to keep in mind, this is all before the Reserve Pay Bill came in. It was all volunteer. It was strictly volunteer at that point, and then, a few years, I don't remember exactly when the Pay Bill came in, well, you never saw such an influx of discharged officers that wanted to get into the Reserves in all your life. I told you about the story about the going to the 100th Division and coming down there and bumping the first lieutenant out of his job. Well, the Pay Bill came in, and there was a big influx of Reservists, officers, joining the Reserve Corps, and I was a major acting as battalion commander, so to speak, because that calls for a lieutenant colonel. Well, lieutenant colonels came in by the score and so I got bumped out and I lost the battalion. Well, I ended up as the regimental supply officer. I guess nobody wanted that job. Anyway, so that went on for a couple of years, and I went to all the meetings and the camps in the summers and all that kind of stuff. It all went pretty good over there in the Kearny shipyards, they had a big warehouse over there and we had the three battalions of the 310th Infantry. All of us had space in the basement of the big warehouse over there in the shipyards. They took this room and they drew two lines down the center, we got like three basketball courts, you see one, two, three battalions, so we had everything in there. Shelves in there, everything, clothing, arms, you name it, it was in there stacked up. … They got a flash flood in Kearny, over there in the basement. It was in about three feet of water, everybody's stuff was floating all over. There were no walls, or anything in there, you know, so I get a call from I don't remember who it was now, the supply sergeant, I guess, or somebody, [saying] "The place is underwater. You better get over there and grab what you can, because somebody is going to come up short somewhere." Well, I wasn't too concerned. I came out of the Second World War, I was the executive officer. I had inventoried a lot of stuff, I had replaced a lot of stuff, and I knew what a Report of Survey meant. I mean, every time you are short something, you put it on a Report of Survey. It goes in, comes back, and gets replaced. So, by the time I got to the yard, I guess, the other two guys had gotten there first and there wasn't much left. So I put it all on a Report of Survey, and sent it up to Division. You know that division commander wouldn't sign that survey? He would not sign. He was, what do they call it? A gang plank colonel. He got his full bird coming down the gang plank, out of somewhere, and he would not sign that thing. So I appealed it to First Army, and First Army held a lot of hearings on it and they taped a lot, and when they got all done, First Army said, they reviewed it and, "We are splitting the responsibility fifty percent on the battalion commander and fifty percent on you, as the supply officer." Now, there was about three thousand dollars worth of stuff that was short over there, and coming back, in those days, fifteen hundred dollars was a heck of a lot of money. … I don't know, they tell me I got a little bit of Irish blood in me, or something, I guess, enough so, I guess, this is one of the big, big, big mistakes I have made in my life. One of the big ones, because, in my mind, I told them all where to go, and, physically, I told this colonel where he could get off and wrote a letter to First Army and tried to appeal. Of course, they didn't want to listen and so that finished me with the Reserves. I walked out of there, "If that is the way they are going to do, okay. I don't want any part of it." So I walked out of there, and, do you know, for the next, oh, a good ten years, maybe, or longer, I get about two letters a year from the government, "You owe the government something." After a while, it goes into a pool, what do they call that? Well, they took it out of the hands of the Army. It was in the General Accounting.

KP: The Controller General.

HN: The Controller General. But, anyway, the balance of fifteen hundred, or whatever it was, and I just ignored it, and ignored it, and ignored it and never paid it.

KP: Eventually they stopped sending letters?

HN: They stopped sending letters, but they did send me a letter and I was given an Honorable Discharge.

KP: But you were also shy of your twentieth year.

HN: I gave up my pension.

KP: You gave up your benefits.

HN: That is what I said that was the, you know, that was foolish on my part, but what the hell, I was young and … Do you know where I am going? Boy, you don't want to get on to that.

PR: Was there anything that you learned in the Army that you could use in civilian life?

HN: Well, I don't know, good or bad? I have been accused of being too demanding. In other words, I have been accused by former employees, from time to time, that I run things like a military unit. I guess that is all, I don't know.

KP: For someone so young, you had an awful lot of responsibilities.

HN: Oh, yes.

KP: Do you think that helped in your business career?

HN: Well, I don't know. It might have, to a certain point, but, I mean, I think in my own case, my father died at a young age. It seems young today, he was only sixty-one years old. You don't consider that old anymore. … I mean, I was thrust right there. One day, one thing, and the next day, it's something else. Could be, I don't know.

KP: Is there anything we forgot to ask you?

HN: No. I don't think so.

-------------------------------------------------END OF INTERVIEW----------------------------------------

Reviewed by Dennis Duarte 5/1/01

Reviewed by Sandra Stewart Holyoak 5/4/01

Reviewed by Kathryn Tracy 5/11/01

Reviewed by Herbert Newton 5/01