Leo Hill WWII Reminiscences

New Ipswich Historical Society

Leo Hill

When Patricia Kangas Ktistes published Finns: An Oral History her faculty advisor requested that she shorten some of the interviews. Leo Hill was one of the soldiers that was part of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. This is the complete transcript of that interview.

Ralph Kangas and Bruno Maki went to Worcester to enlist in the Navy.  I told them, “I don’t want no part of the Navy.  I can’t swim.  And I can’t walk on water.”  If I was going to get in, the Navy said I had to have a couple of teeth fixed.  So I told them, “If they don’t want to fix my teeth, forget it.”  

I was working at Simonds—Ray Richardson was an executive there.  I showed him my draft card.  It said, ‘GREETINGS!’  And Ray said, “You wanna stay?  Would you like to have me try to get you a deferment?”  I said, “Okay.”  So he wrote a letter saying that I was a good saw filer.  I had worked in the woods all the time.  That was war-time crosscuts.  

Then about nine months later, the draft board called me up again.  Ray said, “You want to try again?”  Everybody else was gone by then, so I told him, “Nope.”  Milton Burton, a guy I went to high school with, used to walk down the streets and get madder every day.  Some woman would always stop and ask him, “How come you’re not in the service?” 

I went into the service when I was around twenty-seven years old.  My brother-in-law was working at Fort Devens.  He said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t get put into the infantry.”  But when I walked into Camp Adabury, Indiana, I found that the infantry was where I was assigned.

Then we were on a march on maneuvers.  And here comes a guy, I think his name was Powell.  A major.  In a jeep with the flaps down.  We were sitting by a gate.  There was a guy there by the name of Lewis that was forty-two years old.  Unlimited service.  He’s over there and getting ready to go to combat.  He could hardly walk because the balls of both his feet were all white—like rotten.  And I told Powell, “What’s that guy doing here?”  Powell said to the guy, “How long you been in the service?  You got bad feet?”  You’ve got to go in the water, go in the grit, go in the mud. 

Once Patton took us out—this could have been at Murphysboro or somewhere.  He comes up with white gloves.  White leggings.  Pistol—all white or something.  Then he’d get out there, everyone from the rank of staff sergeants and up.  First sergeants, lieutenants.  On the hillside.  

“Oh, what a wonderful-looking buncha guys!”  And he could swear.  Every other word.  He says, “There’s 90,000 whatchamacallits of them over there that are dead or they’ve surrendered to the United States.  And it ain’t gonna happen to you.  When you go back home, you can tell the folks that you wasn’t shoveling horse manure on The Island”— England.  

We went to England, then from England to the New York port of embarkation, then landed at Omaha Beach.  Ernie Pyle—the news reporter, he’s the guy that got us over there.  We had been in training a heck of a long time.  At Camp Breckenridge and Camp Adabury, then we went to maneuvers in Kentucky.  We had a good record in maneuvers.  So Pyle wrote an article in a paper, I think The Stars and Stripes, that said, “What’s that crack outfit doing in the cornfields?”  And the next day we were on a boat. 

Ten days after the invasion, ‘D plus 10,’ was when I was there at Omaha Beach.  Guys were still floating around in these lifesaving things—you could see them going by, dead, once in a while.  We were in the 83rd Infantry Division—under the Commander of Blood and Guts.  “What a F-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-N-E lookin’ bunch of fellas!”  That was a speech he gave later, when I was a staff sergeant.  

We took the 101st Airborne’s place—replaced them.  I didn’t see a man left from that division.  One guy was a staff sergeant and he told me, “Dig deep and dig under, so shrapnel won’t get you.”  

Then every night the 88th would be going by about four o’clock with the rocket thrower.  It would just whistle when it went overhead.  They were aiming for a church because there was somebody up in the church telling them about the bridges.  They blew up a bridge every night—and that group of combat engineers was a rough, rough outfit.

We were going behind a hedgerow or stonewall or fence.  I asked, “Hey, who are those people down there?  Are those Germans?”  And they said, “Oh, yeah.  Those are Germans.”  So I decided I was going shooting.  That gun of mine—the wood went right up on the barrel.  It was so hot, that barrel, that the creosote was coming out of the wood. 

There were so many Germans, you could see the whites of their eyes.  You had to start shooting, or else it was going to be you.  And I didn’t know how many guys I hit because I had an M-1 rifle, which shoots eight bullets in a row—zingzingzing.  If one of the Germans got hit, the others would grab him and take care of him so the Americans wouldn’t know how many guys were wounded.  

It was unbelievable though when you walked up Omaha Beach.  The pillboxes were not even scratched.  Pillboxes are a sandbag hut in the ground where they mount a gun. We walked by them and it was like they had just been made—there were no scratches on them.  Not even touched with all that bombardment.  A breakaway front in the water—they had sunk the ships.  

But then I got busted.  There were cider barrels—big cider tanks underneath a house nearby, in a cellar.  And we were drinking some of that and got feeling too good.  The staff sergeant or whatever, he saw us and said, “We’re going to see the company commander.”  “Look, fella,” I said to him.  “You’re blind in one eye and you ain’t gonna see out of the other eye if you don’t watch out.”  They put me under guard and this and that. 

Later I was assigned to bring two prisoners back who were captured in a house.  The sergeant came and told me, “Why don’t you take them up to the stockade?  Because you’ve been a non-com—you know what you’re doing.”  So when I got back, he said, “Go over and drag them out of there.”  And they wanted to make me back into a squad leader.  I got along good with the boys.  

It gets risky when you take prisoners of war back to the lines.  Because you’ve got miles and miles of troops coming up: all loaded with bandoleers and ammunition. When another guy and I were escorting the two German prisoners, the Americans coming from the other direction told us, “Get away, we want to kill them!”  I thought they were going to start shooting and they didn’t seem to care if they hit us, too.  We brought the prisoners back to the POW area.  

The first thing the American in charge of the prison asked me is, “Are these guys hurt?”  I said, “I don’t know.  I think one guy’s got a little cut in the back.  He was bleeding a little bit.”  But he never asked me if I was hurt. I could never figure this out.  

Then headquarters gave an order, “Go over there and grab some guys.” One from headquarters, 83rd Infantry Division, and a another guy.  And a lieutenant came around and said, “You, you, and you.  You three come with me.  We’ve gotta go on a patrol.  We’ve gotta see how much fire power they’ve got over there.”  

They had girth guns—like a single-barrel shot gun.  They go like a jack hammer—Brrrrrr Brrrrrrrrr Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.  That’s all you could hear: like bumblebees.  And then they would take the barrel off when it got hot and throw it aside.  They had a guy near them, carrying two or three extra barrels.  And they shoved another barrel back in and away they went.  

There was a sentry, sleeping, leaning on his gun, right down on the roadway.  A German guy.  We had to get by him.  So one of our guys ran across the dirt road.  Then another guy.  And another guy.  And we all went around a high pile of dirt.  The guys stopped.  This was daylight: they had stopped for a smoke.  

‘Course, I didn’t smoke anyway.  I went up to see the lieutenant, Lt. Young.  I asked, “Where are we going?”  He said, “We’re going over there.  We’ve gotta see how much fire power they got.”  “Can’t you hear?”  I said, “I’m not going.”  And so we didn’t go.  We wouldn’t have been alive if we had gone into that bumblebee nest.  Christ, you could hear that a mile away!  So that ended that deal.  I didn’t go back and give a report on the firepower.  That was his job: he was the lieutenant.  

Then when you’d go out on night patrol, they’d blacken up your faces and everything.  And when the German had to go to the toilet, he didn’t bury it.  The United States guys, they had to take a little shovel in their pack—a pickmatic—an amateur thing you can dig a hole with.  “And whether you’re in the foxhole or not, don’t just go on the ground.  ‘Cause your buddy’s coming along.”  

And I was going on patrol one time in the dark and had to hit the ground all of a sudden.  And: stink!  Because the Germans didn’t have shovels.  But you didn’t dare to move when you hit the ground. We started the attack on July the first.  On July the fourth I got hit.  I didn’t last but three, four days when we moved out.  The bodies were so thick in Ste. Lo where I got wounded, you couldn’t step on the ground.  If you wanted to move along, you had to step on the bodies.  That’s how many boys we lost.  

When I got hit, the Germans had dug a ditch, like a grave, but only about two feet deep, to  lie down in.  The German was right in there in that ditch and he didn’t shoot the first guy who went by, the guy ahead of me.  Whatever happened on that day, we only had one scout going ahead.  And I had been pulled up from the back to follow him because I had a 30.06 bolt-action rifle. 

So that German in the fox hole let the first guy go right by him and then he picked on me.  Because it takes seven people to take care of one wounded person.  ‘Course the German probably thought I was a squad leader, but I wasn’t.  I had been busted already.  

When I got into the hospital up in England, they put a cast on my leg.  They never thought about washing your feet.  Well, you’ve got half an inch of crud on them.  As a result of my injury, I’ve got a ccc on my left leg.  I’ve only got one bone left on it.  And I’ve got osteomylitis: Mickey Mantle got that.  

I was in the hospital almost two years.  I went to so many hospitals, it was unbelievable.  In 1945 at one hospital, there were two of us in wheelchairs, riding around.  The other boys are all going home: they named all of the guys’ names who were returning to Fort Devens.  They never said “Hill” and whatever the other name was of the other guy in the wheelchair. 

I got hit in Ste. Lo and he got hit, too.  They had a hill they were trying to take, Number 607 or something like that.  And it was so bad up there, but the United States Army never retreats.  It ‘withdraws.’  So these boys were coming down.  But Patton was going up the hill.  And he stopped them.  

And according to this kid, Patton says to their outfit, “Where are you #&*@ guys going?”  He was swearing: you could see the blue smoke.  He says to them, “Come on.  We’re going up.”  Patton went up to the top of the hill and they took the hill.  

So this guy and I chased the nurse—the night nurse—to find out why we weren’t on the list of guys going to Fort Devens.  We said, “How come they didn’t take our names?”  She said, “I’m going to tell you, but I’m not supposed to.  You two are going to fly.”  We said, “We ain’t going to say nothing, don’t worry.”  So we flew home in a plane.  The other guy had a knee injury—floating condyle, I always remembered that.

I never saw another Finn when I was in the service.  The Army sent the guys from New England to the South or they brought Southerners up here, so you didn’t get to be with your buddies.  But a family from Greenville lost all those brothers.  One of the brothers used to drive a truck for Brockelman’s, a store in Fitchburg.  His name was Johnny Delay.  They put four or five of them on one ship and I think they all got killed: the Delay brothers.

They say you can’t buy yourself out of the service.  I got the fiftieth anniversary medal—they gave me a bronze star after 50 years.  They finally found out I was still living.  Members of the Legion from Greenville came over.  A lady came with them and she thought one of our local judges was one of the best people in the country.  And I was going to tell her, “He never went in the service because he bought himself out.  So did his boys—they went in the service after the war was over.  Go shake hands with Clinton.”

James Roger diary entry

13th June 1912

Fair, cool and windy; wind northwest. Dave and W. Hardy on the sidewalks all day. Pomona Day at Grange. 85 present. Got letter and post card from Hamish. Grange at night. Got letter from Jennie Mair; her father has bought an auto–a Brush.