Interviews of Oscar (with transcripts) - Page 11 of 11

I went to get Ben and we had a pump, we were going to suck it out, and hell, a U.S. paratrooper was what we got out first. The one that hit in the lake, that was it. That was the end right there.

If they hit water, they couldn’t get rid of it alone. It was just drowning right there. Too much weight.

Oh, hell, they was carrying 60, 70 pounds of munitions. So the guy was in the water tank? Well, they took the water out and took it and that’s what we drank. We ran into the GI blast at the stream.

And what was it? No, it was a wet pill. It purified the water. I forgot what the name of it was.

The French kid would give them some candy and had them them pills. They knew they soon learned that they didn’t like them pills. He would eat the pills? No, we had candies that looked a little bit like that.

Oh, he figured out he was right. Give them French kids them pills and they threw them away. So you didn’t use the purification pills much? I never did use them.

Just the GI blanket? I drank what they had. I didn’t ask questions. That’s probably better not to ask.

You know, it’s amazing, amazing. I guess they were little orphan kids, little boys. They’d come and go and hang on with good freedom and give them candy.

And they couldn’t speak English. And it didn’t take them no time at all. They could speak English.

They could learn it so darn fast. Little kids can learn that stuff with no problem. Yeah, that’s true.

I was amazed how fast they could learn. We had little boys that we adopted. Oh, not at all.

We took in. He stayed in the tents with us and he couldn’t speak a word of English. And it wasn’t long he was talking English real good.

What a little mascot we had. I guess his parents probably got killed. I want me to sit down.

Yeah, here in the middle.

Gliders landed. They were mostly all flight officers that were glider pilots. Well, that’s what I was originally, but they were still flight officers when they were glider pilots on their mission.

And then with CG-4A we had, it wasn’t a very good glider. Oh. And the ones that had hard chute release or stuff like that in there, if he made a hard landing, phew, he took everybody out the front end, you know.

The auxiliary would break loose. And, man, I saw lots of crosses with flight officer insignias on it out there. Yeah, make a run.

It was probably easy to land it hard. Well, and the Germans, they knew they was German. They put up poles on them fields that made it look like it would have been a good landing spot.

A lot of them had poles sticking up in them, so.