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110 degrees magazine - 110° Magazine - July 2007 - Through the gates of Hell - Index

COVER STORY [THROUGH THE GATES OF HELL]
22 www.110mag.com July 2007
For more than 50 years I never told
anyone the story about how a bullet
from a German sniper ended the life of
my buddy, Sergeant Philip Rocker. He had
been standing at a schoolroom window
only eight feet from me when struck
down by a bullet through his head.
Seeing Sergeant Rocker lying on the
floor with blood gushing like a faucet
out of his forehead was the most
shocking experience that occurred to
me during the two difficult years that
I spent in General Patton’s Third Army
as we fought our way through Europe.
Like many of my fellow-combatants,
I brought back from the war memories
that for a long time were too awful to
put into words.
Perhaps we were anxious to return to
the normalcy of civilian life and
believed that our silence could prevent
the horrors of the war from infecting
the peacetime existence that, after all,
was what we had fought for.
Don’t imagine that silence
removed the strength from those
memories. A lifetime has been too
short to dim in my mind those scenes
that long haunted my dreams and to
erase from my waking thoughts the
continual replaying of the carnage
that I witnessed.
The memories seemed too difficult
to trust to words so I could never
bring myself to tell any of my stories
about the war until just three years
ago. However, we World War II vets
now need to tell the truth about
those terrible days.
Those experiences are in danger of
soon being lost forever because only
five million American veterans now
remain of the more than 16 million
who fought in the Second World War.
The ravages of age, disease, and
illness are now accomplishing in a
thousand of us every day what the
tanks, guns, and bombs of Adolph
Hitler and Emperor Hirohito gathered
forces couldn’t succeed in doing.
MY ORIGINS
I was born on Clay Street in San
Francisco’s Chinatown on March 2, 1926.
My father had emigrated from China
and had succeeded in becoming an
Asia-born graduate of UC Berkeley.
When dad arrived in California there
was a lot of discrimination against our
cultural heritage.
I heard my dad say many times, “We
Chinese cannot walk down Market
Street.” As a result we had to secure
our livelihood and conduct our social
lives within the confines of
Chinatown’s 10 square blocks.
My first contacts with normal
American culture occurred when I
attended school at Francisco Junior
High, which was a half-mile from our
home. I subsequently attended Poly
Tech High School, which was right
across the street from Kezar Stadium.
My early school experiences were
like being in a foreign country
because there were very few of us
Chinese students. My father had to
get a special permit before I was
allowed to attend.
The war was heating up in 1944 when I
was in the eleventh grade. I was 17 and
would become eligible for the draft on my
eighteenth birthday so I attended Curtis
Wright Technical School in Glendale,
California, and completed a course in
Aircraft Mechanics hoping to get a deferment
long enough for the war to end.
But my efforts were to no avail
because when I turned 18 I was drafted
into the US Army.
I entered the military September 6,
1944 and spent three months training
as a rifleman at Camp Roberts near
Paso Robles, which was one of the
world’s largest training facilities.
The camp still holds the world’s
record for having the longest parade
ground — an immense open space
that stretched the length of 14 football
fields.
We were supposed to train for six
months but losses occurring in the
Battle of the Bulge were so great that
only half way through our training we
were all suddenly shipped directly to
Europe. I made the trip aboard the
Queen Mary, which was serving as a
troop carrier. The ship had been
designed with accommodations for
4,000 passengers, but was crowded
floor to ceiling with 15,000 of us
troops. That was no vacation; we were
on no holiday cruise.
We disembarked at Liverpool, and
were immediately shipped by troop
transport to Normandy. Green and
under-trained as I was, I found myself
as a replacement in Patton’s Third Army,
90th Division, 358 Regiment, Third
Battalion, K Company.
On January 10, 1945, I reported to my
unit and without fanfare or ceremony
was thrown into the midst of the Battle
of the Bulge’s closing firefights. I
arrived at night and asked the sergeant,
“Where is the front line?”
“You will know when you get to it,”
he said.
And he was right. There was no
mistaking it when I arrived.
DAYS OF
WAR AND BATTLE
We replacements played a small role in
the almost unimaginably large conflict
that was the Battle of the Bulge.
Combat raged from December 16, 1944
to January 28, 1945. It was the largest