Free The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh Page A

never talked. They stared straight ahead, and you could tell that they had been in combat.

    Gerald Virgil Myers has never forgotten the horrors he discovered at Buchenwald. For combat operations with the 80th Infantry Division, he received the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart .
    “We were in this pup tent city, probably a mile back from Omaha Beach, and we were there for two and a half days. They put us in pup tents and told us that we were to watch the bulletin board, because our name would come up on the board to be moved. And if you don’t meet that deadline, you’ll be court-martialed. Well, back in those days, that just scared the hell out of you, so you went down about every two hours to see if your name was on there.
    “They had two meals a day, and you lined up and went down to chow, and they gave you a piece of Army bread that weighed about a pound, oh, a half an inch to three quarters of an inch thick. And you held it in your hand and they slapped peanut butter on top of that bread. Then you went down the line, and they put a big piece of warm Spam about a quarter inch thick on top of that peanut butter. And you went to the next place, and they gave you coffee in your canteen cup. And right at the end of the serving line was a captain. He said, ‘Gentlemen, enjoy your T-bone steak.’ He said it a thousand times, morning, noon, and night.”
    When Myers’s name finally came up, he and about a dozen other replacements were loaded aboard a truck with a sergeant in charge. The first leg of the journey took them to Neufchâtel. Half a day there, and Myers was loaded onto another truck and, after a five-hour ride, arrived at Pont-à-Mousson. Several of the soldiers were off-loaded, and he recalls the sergeant telling the remaining men, “Now, you’re close to the front, and if you hear artillery come in, you better duck. You’ve never seen what shrapnel can do to you.”
    “All of a sudden,” Myers recalls, “my God, the biggest explosion went off you ever heard. Well, if you’d have turned that truck upside down, you couldn’t have evacuated it any faster than we did, and we hit the ditch, and it was muddy water, and we didn’t even think about it. The sergeant came over about that time, and he says, ‘What the hell is the matter with you guys?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know that’s outgoing?’ It was a battery of 155s, just over the hedgerow.”
    After another short ride, they got off the truck, went into the woods, and were introduced to First Sergeant Percy Smith, all five feet five of him. He said, “We’re glad to see you, because in the last week, we have lost half of our company.” Myers volunteered for the 60mm mortar section, not knowing that it had lost five men just that week. He spent the rest of the afternoon learning his new job.
    The very next day, they got their first taste of battle, capturing a forced-labor camp where the Nazis had imprisoned two hundred Polish workers behind a ten-foot-high barbed-wire fence. In the process, one of the new men who’d been on the truck with Myers all the way up from the beach was killed by a chunk of shrapnel in the head. He’d never even fired his rifle.
    Myers fought with the 317th Infantry Regiment of the 80th Division through the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945, suffering frostbite twice because the men had only summer uniforms. He recalls getting winter boots in the latter part of February. His outfit went in on the south side of the Bulge, near Ettelbruck, and from there went to Heiderscheid, Luxembourg, where the fighting was vicious, without a lull, twenty-four hours a day. The snow was fifteen inches deep, and the temperature often hit fifteen degrees below zero. The American forces suffered 83,000 casualties; 18,000 were killed, the rest were injured or captured. Now a buck sergeant, Myers suffered a shrapnel wound in one arm, but since he could still walk and carry a rifle with his other arm, he stayed on the line.
    On