Over the sea to Great Britain

The Aquitania was the last of the four-stackers.
Cunard Lines retired it in 1950.

Early in 1944, the 474^th boarded yet another troop train, its last stateside, and moved up the east coast to New York City. The unit was billeted at nearby Camp Shanks and, for a short while, lived it up, taking the bus and the Weeahawken Ferry to the city.

Then one day the man said, “No passes today.” In the early hours of the next morning, the youths, who were green rookies just a year ago, and who were now polished soldiers, crammed the last of their belongings into a bag almost too big to be carried, staggered onto a ferry boat into which they were packed like sardines and sailed down the Hudson to Manhattan. Arriving at the pier, they carried their heavy barracks bags up the gang plank, which went up several stories into a ship that seemed to be some 10 stories high and a block long. Inside, they went up stairways and through corridors until they reached “A” deck, the top deck of the ship and found large ballrooms packed up to the ceiling with bunks. Some had to climb five bunks up to get a place to sit down.⁵

The four-stack Aquitania, sister ship of the sunken Lusitania and the retired Mauretania, set sail for Great Britain on Saturday morning, Jan. 29, 1944. For most of the men on board, it was their first ocean voyage but not to be their last. Jack remembers the boat ride well. “Manned by the English, we naturally had crappy food,” he recalls. “The traveling conditions were salt water to wash in and a terrible storm for most of the voyage with everybody getting seasick. We went around Iceland twice to avoid German submarines.”

The outfit pulled MP duty and manned the ship’s anti-aircraft guns, mounted in turrets high above the boat deck. They got their first shot at the Germans while aboard, firing on a German reconnaissance plane. A master sergeant became ill during the voyage and died, and Jack remembers that the corpse was lashed to the deck at the front of the ship to keep it frozen for the remainder of the voyage.

All commissioned officers, Navy nurses and Red Cross workers had their quarters on the top decks, “and we were not permitted in that area,” Jack says. “In my area, I was on the bottom bunk with three or four bunks above me. I had to be careful when I exited from my bunk so that I could duck the heave-ho from the seasick guys above.”

The Maverick Outfit reported, “As the Aquitania rolled and dipped into towering waves in a storm-tossed ocean, some of the fellows feared they would be thrown into the sea. Others wished they would. At one time, the boat listed 30 degrees, losing one of its lifeboats.”⁶

Jack adds that he volunteered to go with a few guys to the front of the ship and then down into the hold to secure his battery’s PX rations. “That was a mistake! This is the worst place to be on a ship when you’re in a storm. You lose all sense of direction and have to hold onto the rails on the stairs. What an experience!”

Eight days after leaving New York, the Aquitania passed the Shetland Islands along the west coast of Scotland and went through the North Channel past Northern Ireland before easing into the Firth of Clyde. Still aboard ship, the men received a letter on White House stationery bearing the signature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and addressed to members of the United States Expeditionary Force. It said in part:

We who stay at home have our duties to perform—duties owed in many parts to you. You will be supported by the whole force and power of this nation. The victory you win will be a victory of all the people—common to them all…You bear with you the hope, the confidence, the gratitude and the prayers of your family, your fellow-citizens and your President.⁷

Another paper carried this message from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

To each American soldier who has left home to join the great forces now gathering in this island, I send a message of greeting and welcome. Wherever you may go in our country you will be among friends. Our fighting men look upon you as comrades and brothers in arms. Welcome to you while you are with us, and when the time comes we will go forward together and carry the good cause to final victory.⁸

Nordhausen and the beginning of the end

The capture of the city of Nordhausen, where a Nazi concentration camp was located, had a sobering effect on all in the 474^th. Thousands of displaced men and women labored there—prisoners from Russia, Poland, France and other conquered areas were kept at Nordhausen to operate the huge V-bomb factory built deep into a hillside just outside of town.

Every member of the 474^th was ordered to visit the camp so that he could see with his own eyes the inhumanity and appalling living conditions people had to suffer. The dead far outnumbered the living. Thousands of bodies were discovered in the partially destroyed barracks, lying in the fields or stacked at the crematory, waiting to be burned. Bodies were found lying where their owners had died or were crammed into rooms set aside for the dead and so full that the bony remains tumbled out when the doors were opened. It was not a pretty sight. Most of the dead had died of starvation. The living were practically dead, too weak to move. Even the ones with strong stomachs could not finish the tour of the camp without getting sick. As each GI passed through these rooms and surveyed the scene of so much suffering and tragedy, the stench of rotting bodies and the smell of burning flesh seemed to rise to his nostrils, and as he came out into the clean fresh air, he raised his eyes toward the heavens to clear away this haunting vision of evil. Troops seeing this hell-hole needed no urging to get back into the fight against a race that could care so little for human life. In retribution for their parts in this awful crime, whether their parts consisted of active support of those who directed such horrors or merely of passive acceptance of the regime, all the women citizens of Nordhausen were made to dig graves on a hillside overlooking the city. All the male citizens were made to carry the dead by hand and bury all the bodies in this cemetery, which will always bear evidence to the brutal sadism of the Nazis.⁴⁴

“Our gun crew was stationed at the airport, which was at the edge of town,” Jack says. “Even there, you had the terrible smell from the dead bodies in this concentration camp. When we found out what caused the smell, we were horrified! We were told to keep with our position, and that we were not allowed in the camp. Rumor was that some soldiers, upon witnessing the camp, started shooting some of the German townspeople, and that’s why they didn’t allow any more to go in. Now I find out after all of these years that we were supposed to observe the horrible results. I would have gone to see it had I been allowed.”

A Battery was still stationed at the Nordhausen airport when word reached the troops that President Franklin Roosevelt had died. But the war wasn’t over yet, and the 474^th would suffer still more losses in the war’s final days. April 15 brought with it some casualties, and April 16 saw three fatalies—Capt. Gordon Potter, Sgt. Albert G. Algeier and PFC William J. Ouseley. Ouseley, along with A Battery’s Mort Daroff, painted the pictures and names on the half-tracks. These three men were on a scouting mission when ambushed by a German machine-gun crew.

“The Germans weren’t too resistant from here to the end of the war,” Jack comments. “They didn’t have many planes left. And if they did, they didn’t have fuel for the planes and probably not too many pilots to fly the planes All the units became involved then in keeping the natives and displaced persons in line.” By April 23, all resistance in the VII Corps sector had ended. A Battery went to Hoym, then to Bruanrode. Many prisoners were picked up in this period right before the cease fire called on May 8.

“When the Germans surrendered, we were occupied with getting the workers from a lot of farming camps back to their native lands,” Jack explains. “One woman refugee asked me to hold her baby while she loaded her belongings onto a boxcar. Her husband was standing nearby but wouldn’t lend a hand to help. My officer wondered why I was holding a baby, so I explained the circumstances. He made the husband take the baby, and we made certain the family got on the train, all three of them.”

This video details the liberation of the Nordhausen concentration camp: