By OSCAR GOMEZ
CorpusBeat Magazine
 
Beeville native Felix Longoria grew up in a small rural town during the 1930's and 40's before becoming part of the last great war of the 20th century.

During his training in the states, Longoria rose through the ranks to Technical Sergeant before being shipped overseas in 1943. His first combat experience would come a year later on the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day invasion of June 6th, 1944. He fought alongside his unit, the 2nd Army division, through Europe, having received the Purple Heart for combat wounds, before reaching Germany in 1945.

With his grand fatherly patience, Longoria shares his experiences with CorpusBeat magazine.

CorpusBeat: Tell me a little about your life before the war started.
Felix Longoria: We went to A.C. Jones High School in Beeville and the kids would hang together. It was a big farm and the kids would play baseball and we went hunting. There was a lake where we could go swimming. During the school days, we would just hang out. It was just a regular get together. We had fun; we went to the movies down at the Rialto Theater.

CB: Any family traditions you may recall?
FL: My grandmother was 110 years old when she passed away, so that’s where I got all my information when we were kids because she used to tell us stories. She used to tell us stories about when she was in Mexico, that she knew certain people like [Mexican] Emperor Maximilian. I believe she was born in 1838.

CB: Did you struggle financially?
FL: We were better than others because my father always had a new car so you can go from there. We grew our own vegetables and we would take it to Beeville and sell it.

CB: When did you join the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and what did you do once in it?
[The corps was a youth work program created by Franklin Roosevelt during the Depression.]

FL: I joined in the later part of 1938. I was about 18. We worked with picks and shovels and axes to clear brush and trees, to make trenches for the water, and my job was to take care of the tools. When we got to where we were going, I handed out the tools and when the day was over, I’d see that they all got back. My brother joined the corps before I did and then my friends.

CB: What do you remember about your hometown of Beeville growing up?

FL: When I was there it was just another small town. The only other place I knew was Kenedy [city] where the [Civilian Conservation Corps] camp was.

CB: In the years after high school with the war raging in Europe, did you ever hear anything about possible war with the United States?
FL: We weren’t really thinking about the war then because there was no war at all, we didn’t think about it. I remember reading about it and we saw it in the newsreels but we didn’t think of what was going to happen.

CB: Why did you decide to enlist in the Army in 1940?
FL: Through my friends that had already joined the army, they told me about it and I just went ahead and joined.

CB: When the attack came to Pearl Harbor in December 1941, what was the activity like at the base you were stationed at?
FL: It happened on a Sunday and when we got called back, they told us about it and they put us on alert and it just went on. I was at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. When we first heard about it, I thought that we might end up going to war with the Japanese. It never did dawn on me what would become of it.

When I saw pictures of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that’s when I became angry and I thought, "We’re going to have to do something about that!" When I first saw those pictures, it just changed the way you think about being in the service. I felt sorry for all the people killed and wounded and I knew we were going to have to prepare because it was coming on. …

CB: How did your family react to the possibility of you going to war?
FL: My mother was scared. My mother started praying for this thing to end. My father was too but he never mentioned it.

CB: In the years during the war, how did life change in the United States?
FL: I was away from home at the time. When I would go home for leave, they would do dinners for us. But other than that, life went on the same way it did when I had left. I knew there was rationing of a lot of things, but it never really affected me nor the house when I came home. My daddy just kept on driving his car because he likes cars, but he never did complain that he never had enough food nor gasoline.

CB: How did you spend your time in the service during these years?
FL: I was in the infantry. We’d spend time on the firing range and we’d go hiking. When we were at Fort Sam Houston, we went to train at Camp Bullis. The thing I remember there was having a bunch of ticks.

Then we went to Wisconsin to do some ski training. That was my first time skiing and I didn’t know if I was going to get it or not. We landed up there with snow up to our knees and one morning, they gave us a bunch of skis and boots and different uniforms to put on that we didn’t have before. We put the skis on and we started skiing up and down the parade ground and we had a Norwegian instructor to teach us. I got pretty good at it but some didn’t like it and some couldn’t get to it. The people that didn’t like it would put snowshoes on and pull toboggans [a sled used on snow].

But I liked it and during the weekends, I’d go on my own and ski and I happened to be picked to go to Iron Mountain, Michigan for two weeks for more training and skiing.
When I got back, I was pretty good at it and I started teaching the other guys how to do it and the guys that didn’t learn to ski would put the snow shoes on. I thought that maybe some time in life or during the war I would use it. The only time we used skis was during the battle of the Ardennes forest [located primarily in Belgium and stretches into France], or battle of the bulge, where we couldn’t get an observation so we had to go and load up our skis and go up the mountain.

The reason we had skis was to get out of there fast because you’re not going to walk around in the snow — you put your skis on and got out of there. That was the only time we used skis. Before the invasion, we were in Northern England and we were trying to get the enemy to think we were going to invade in that shorter distance, so they had all the troops over there. They pulled the troops down and we went through Normandy, France. But they had vehicles made of rubber. I remember seeing pictures of this guy picking up a tank because it was nothing but rubber and they had them out there to make the enemy think we’d go through there.

CB: When you got your orders to ship out in 1943, what went through your mind when thinking you’d be overseas?
FL: I was thinking about how much fun we’d have when we’d get over there because really, the war wasn’t in our minds and we were just thinking, what are we going to do and where are we going to go?

It was in October 1943 and during the winter, the Atlantic is rough and we got seasick. We had destroyer escorts and sometimes we’d see them and sometimes we didn’t. [Destroyer escorts are warships that escorted troop transport and other merchant ships.] But when you got in a line to go eat, you’d better hang on to something because it was rough. I think it took about seven or eight days because we weren’t needed right away over there.

CB: What did you do to kill time on the ship?
FL: I volunteered to peel potatoes down at the fantail because it was open. This guy said, ‘What’s this sergeant doing here peeling potatoes?’ He told me to get out of there. I got another jacket from a private first class and went back in there because I didn’t want to be up in the ship. It was crowded to begin with. It was about three or four bunks stacked on one another and when somebody got off, they’d all move. It was awful.

We landed in Belfast, Ireland — we were glad to get off the doggone boat. Then, everybody would line up and all the people were greeting us when we got there. When we went out in the country, we noticed that the terrain was different from over here.

CB: What did you do when you got a chance to go on leave?
FL: We’d go to the bars to have a few Guinness beers and there were dances and stuff, but after dark, everything just went dark. We had a curfew to come back to the base at 10:30 p.m. They told us what to do in case we came under attack but we never did.

CB: Did you ever experience any racism because of your ethnicity?
FL: No, it never occurred. I was treated just like the rest of the troops. When I got out of boot camp, they took me to regiment. After a while my commander said, “I’m going to make you a Private First Class (PFC) but you won’t get paid until you serve 90 days in here, you’ve only been here 30 days.”

From there on they made me a corporal and I was being elevated for some reason and I never detected any racism and they never said, “You’re not going to get this because you’re Mexican.”

Every time you get promoted it changed because as a PFC, you’re just a private and you only got paid six more dollars. But as a corporal, they made you assistant squad leader so what the squad leader’s doing, you’re doing. From there, you become a sergeant and you get more responsibilities.

CB: How did you utilize those people managing skills in post military life?
FL: When I got back in the service in the Air Force, they sent me to New Orleans for a clerk typist. When I got out, they weren’t hiring anyone in Corpus Christi unless you were a disabled veteran. I came and joined them when I got out of the service in December of 1949 and joined the Naval Air Station in January of the next year because I was a disabled veteran.

CB: Tell me about some of the preparations before the D-Day invasion in June 1944.
FL: We where in Wales [located in Great Britain] and it was just like being in Ireland except we were living in tents. We’d go to town and basically do the same thing we’d been doing and we never thought of the [D-Day] invasion.

CB: When did you find out about the invasion?
FL: The day we got on that boat. They got us together and told us that we were going to invade Europe from France. That was the first time we knew. Like I said, when we were there we’d go to town but then they shut us off and nobody’s coming in and nobody’s going out. Then we knew something was taking place because they’d never done that before. One night they came over and gave us live ammunition and the next morning we were on that boat. We stayed on that boat about a day or two before the invasion. I remember reading that this weather guy said, “You have six to eight hours because if you don’t go before then, you can’t go this way.”

I think that weather man got some kind of medal because it was clear when we went in there. But two days later, everything broke loose. All the piers we had built over there, they were piling up against each other because of the storm and after we got in there, the rations started getting smaller. We’d get pancakes with syrup and the next day we’d get pancakes with half syrup and half water because it was running out.

CB: Tell me about the day of the invasion.
FL: We got in the boats about June 4 or 5 and everybody was thinking about it. But really it wasn’t that people were scared to go because we were ready. You weren’t thinking about getting killed or wounded. None of that stuff would come up. But then when we started hitting the beach up there, that’s when we started changing our way of thinking. I didn’t think about what I was going to do over there. I knew I had a bunch of men that I had to get up there. I guess everybody was scared, but we didn’t show it.

We got on those landing crafts and we circled the battleship Texas and they were firing the cannons and you could feel the heat every time they’d fire one of those. But once you hit that water, everything would disappear because you had to get those men out of the water and put them in a way where they wouldn’t get hurt. When you’re not doing anything, all this stuff would come up and you would think.

Before we hit the beach we saw bodies floating around the water. We were scared but we didn’t think that we would end up like that. You just kept on going. When you got to the beach, you had to step around the people that were dead on the beach. Once you get off the beach, it changes a little bit and then you start joking and stuff.

After they start attacking, you change your way of thinking again. But it's funny when people go in to battle they start joking and stuff. Somebody said, and I agree with them, it's better to be in the front lines than to be in the back. Because when you’re back there, you’re thinking about it and you’re stomach starts curling, but once you get over there, you forget about all that stuff.

CB: How did you react to see the German enemy dead?
FL: It’s a different way of thinking when we saw those dead Germans. You don’t see a dead German or American in different ways. But all this time, we’re talking about the enemy and all of a sudden you see a dead German and that’s when you start thinking that they’re the same as us. It’s a whole different ball game when you see a dead German or a dead American. After we landed at the beach, we went inland and we never saw the beach again.

It didn’t take us long to get off of there. We landed at the beach around 10 a.m. and maybe by 1 o’clock we were out of there. In the towns of St. Mere-Eglise, [in France] the people had wine and cheese and it was a lot of fun. Then about four or five days later, the whole thing changed.

We went to St. Mere-Eglise and we couldn’t take it so the Air Force strafed the forests. It looked like a hurricane had hit. We went all the way close to Saint Lo, [in France] and waited there a while for supplies to get in. Then we tried to take it and no way. The next day we went at it again and still no. They were not going to let us go through because once we got through, that was the easy way. But we tried and tried it and all of a sudden they told us to pull back and then waves of B-25s and A-20 bombers come pretty close and saturate the whole thing, and I mean the whole thing up at Saint Lo. That’s when we fought and took the city, but it took a lot of planes and a lot of bombs. If it wasn’t for that, we would have never taken it.

CB: Did you ever take anything, such as weapons, from those that had died?
FL: No, because after Saint Lo, we got up to the Vire river and took prisoners and searched them and they had a pack of cigarettes, like Camels and Lucky Strikes, and a .45 pistol that belonged to us. It’s a different way that you think the enemy had something we had. It made you feel bad. I can’t say that [prisoners] were disposed of but when they went back I could hear guns being fired.

Whenever Americans pick up stuff and [the Germans] happened to take you prisoner, I don’t think the Germans were going to treat you if you had a Luger [pistol] on you or a Swastika [Nazi symbol], they weren’t going to put up with that.

I did carry a Luger for a long time. I took it off a dead German officer. I had it where I could dispose of it because I wasn’t going to get caught with that thing.

CB: Did most soldiers carry side arms?
FL: Most soldiers carried rifles but it all depended on rank. The submachine gun was too heavy. I carried that for a day or so, and then I disposed of it. I carried a .45 but also, you carry that all day long and you’re going to feel it. But you had to have something.

I liked the rifle because you could hit an enemy from 200 to 300 yards but with the sub machine gun, you couldn’t hit anybody across the street. They’re too heavy to begin with, but I thought I would want one of those because we rescued some guys from a tank and they carried .45 submachine guns.

I got one of those and carried it for a day then I gave it to this guy — he didn’t know that it was going to be heavy to carry around. As far as souvenirs and stuff I didn’t keep them. Some people kept souvenirs and when we’d get to a rest area they gave them to the guys in the back to take care of them but I never did fool with it.

CB: As an infantryman, how did you get around Europe?
FL: We walked all the way up to the Falaise gap [area between the four towns in France]. The British came from one end, we came from another and we captured I don’t know how many divisions of Germans. We closed that gap and took the prisoners, but before we did, they strafed the whole thing. They loaded us up on the trucks and instead of going to Paris, we went to Brest, France. And when we came through there, we could see all the vehicles and dead Germans, dead mules, tanks and trucks just as far as you could see. It made you think.

You were on a truck and suppose they strafe you up like we did to them. But the thing was that the port city of Cherbourg [a town and commune in Normandy, north-west France] got too crowded and they needed another port. They wanted one in Brest, France so they loaded us up on trucks and we went all the way over there.

CB: Tell me about your experiences in Brest.

FL: That day that I went to check on another squad that was there, and when I was going up there a machine gun let loose. The runner that was with me got killed, another guy that was with me got wounded and I also got wounded. I was hit in my arm. If you get hit with a baseball bat in your arm, it’s going to knock you down.

I was laying there and they kept firing but they were missing. I saw the blood running from my arm to the ground so I ran through the hedges to where the command post was, where the medic was. They peeled my arm off and the medic says, “You’re going to have to go back to the hospital,” so I said, “Call the squad leaders!” They brought Sgt. Rivera, Staff Sgt. Ted Campbell and Buck Sgt. John Columbo and, boy was he talkative.

He came out there smoking a cigarette and they looked at him and he said, “What are you looking at me for? What happened?” and they told him the sergeant got hit. He looked at my arm and said, “You lucky bastard!” He got that cigarette and gave it to me. I told him you’re going to do this, and you’re going to do that and that was the end of that. I went to a first aid station, then to the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) unit, and I was there waiting to be operated on.

This medic came over and started cleaning it up and he asked, “Where are you from sergeant?” and I told him I was from Beeville, Texas and he said, “Oh, I’m from Goliad.” His name was Carvajal and I knew some Carvajals so we talked for a while. They took me to operate on and the nurse there told me they were going to put me to sleep and to count from 100 backwards. I started counting, 100, 99, 98...and that was the end of that.

The next day I was in the tarmac where all the planes were and they were shipping us to England. And this nurse was there and she took her blouse and covered me because there was sand and dirt blowing from the propellers. They put me on an airplane and through the window I could see she was still there. I waved at her, she waved back but before I left, she said, “I don’t want to see you again here.”
Then they took me to England.

CB: Were your parents notified of your situation?
FL: Before I got operated on, this Red Cross lady came over and asked if I wanted to send any mail. I told her yes, to my father and mother. She told me they were going to send my parents a letter before the telegram got there because the telegram don’t say anything other than he’s wounded. It was a good thing for the Red Cross to do that. I was in the hospital for about a week and a half. From there, they sent me to a holding area for about three weeks. Then we got on a boat back to France. I was wounded on September about the third or fourth and I was back in October.

CB: Tell me about your experiences when you returned to your unit.

FL: I met my unit in Belgium. When I got there we were trying to get through the Siegfried line. We went through the dragon’s teeth close to the border of Germany — Bonn, [a German city near the border town of Aachen], wasn’t too far from there. But we fought through a bunch of towns; one was St. Veit (in Austria). We were going to go across when they jumped us. It was one morning that they heard the tanks coming and we didn’t know what was going on. They took us by surprise and we had to pull back. We fought through St. Veit and we kept going.

Then, during the battle of the Ardennes, they took it back. That town was devastated all over. But we tried it again and we finally got to the Siegfried line [a line of defenses that included bunkers, tunnels and tank traps stretching about 392 miles] with the pillboxes. There we were trying to take the pill boxes. But you don’t take them through the front, we found that out.

[Pill boxes are enclosed concrete bunkers located above ground, usually on higher ground, with a port for machine gun emplacements.]

Going back to another story, during the battle of the dragon’s teeth we came up to some pill boxes and that’s where I learned to go to the rear and attack them from the rear. We did that and we’d come from behind and tell the Germans to get out or we’d blow it up.

Another squad went to the other pill boxes and got those guys out. And Columbo went in there, as usual, got the German troops out of there and here they come with their hands up and their white helmets and we all had camouflage.

I lined them all up and I said, “Where the hell is Columbo?” and one of the Germans pointed and Columbo turned his helmet around to look like a German. There you are getting killed and people laughing, but that’s the way it was. There was a time when you could laugh when death is right around the corner. But everybody was laughing, even the Germans.

In taking the pill boxes through the front, one of the squad leaders got killed. I told the first sergeant, “You’re supposed to take them from the rear” and he said, “If you know so much, why don’t you take them?”

I took about five guys and we went around and crawled those 200 yards and we took the pill boxes. When we were there taking the pill boxes, we saw a flag going up from our side so we came back. I asked what was going on and they said we had to pull out. I said, “But we just took the pill boxes” and they said there was about three more divisions coming in and that we had to get out of there.

I told the first sergeant that I had to go get the squad leader that died taking the pill boxes and he said, “No, you can’t go back there” and I said we’re not leaving without him. He said he’d court martial me if I did that. I took off, and untangled him from the barbed wire, put him on my shoulder and brought him back to the truck. Then I took my gun out and gave it to the sergeant and said, “Court martial me.” He said, “Put that gun away and get back in the truck,” and that was the last I heard of that.

We got to a farmhouse and we stayed there. We set up an observation post and the next morning, one of the troops hollered that there’s Germans coming down the street and there are American prisoners in front. I called my commander and told him I had three bazookas and I could take care of those tanks and he said, no get out of there because more Germans were coming on the opposite side. We loaded up and went to the town of Malmedy.

[The Malmedy Massacre took place during the Battle of the Bulge and was one of the worst atrocities committed against prisoners of war in the West European sector during World War II.]

We got there and I put the squads on each side of the road. I called the commander and he said, get the troops out of there because there are still more German troops coming.

I told the soldiers that we had to go and as soon as we cleared that town, we heard machine gun fire. A few days later I heard that the Germans had killed all the prisoners.
When I noticed that tank, I got the number and later on I found out that he was the one that executed those [US prisoners].

I knew the number of the tank that he was on. It makes a guy feel bad because you might have helped to get them out. You might have changed the course because you were there. You feel pretty bad but then you can’t do nothing about it, it’s just a part of the war.

CB: Did you experience a great loss personally?
FL: At one time after we went in to Germany, my leader got killed. He was a border patrol man and we used to talk because he knew all about south Texas. And I kind of got attached to him. During the battle of Koblenz , we were fighting there and all of a sudden a runner came over and said Lt. John Boland got shot. I went over there and there he was lying on the street. I picked him up and I took his helmet off and it was full of blood.

I got the little radio he had and I tried to call my commander and blood was all over that speaker. I felt real bad about it and before we went to take over the city of Leipzig, [Germany] I was sitting down writing the people that were wounded and missing, thinking more of Lt. Boland than anything else, and someone called me and said the commander wanted to see me.

I went over there and when I was going over to the command post, there was this Jewish guy there eating like he had never eaten before. They told me he was a prisoner of war and that about 20 miles north of where we were, they had about 200 women that were going to be executed, going to be gassed, the next day. They said, take your platoon, we’ll give you some extra machine guns and Bangalore torpedoes to get through there. When they told me that, it felt like someone had kicked me through my stomach because there I was with no help from anybody; the place was 20 miles in to no man’s land.

We took off, early in the morning and before we went in there, we looked at the place. Once in a while we could hear a dog barking, but we could see where every outpost was. I assigned the squads to every post that was there, I went back to the line to try to get some sleep but I didn’t sleep. My stomach was churning, and it was awful. All of a sudden, Columbo got a bazooka on one of the towers and blew the thing off; you could see the enemy coming out of there. Then he got another tower, and another tower.

After the first, my stomach cooled down.

Then the Bangalore torpedoes went off. Then we went inside. People were still sleeping, in their underwear, and start assigning people to where they were. Here comes this machine gunner with the gun on his shoulder and the Bangalore torpedoes and all of a sudden I heard a shot next door and there was this enemy that shot the machine gunner. I let him have it, twice, and that was the end of him. I grabbed the gunner and brought him to where the medic was and he said he was dead. I went and got the machine gun and across the street, there was this corridor with just glass. I could see the Germans running up and down. I trained that machine gun at them. I don’t know if I got anybody.

I came back to the men and I talked to Sgt. Campbell and he said, “Why haven’t you taken the barracks?” and I said, “Because there are women in there.” Then Sgt. Columbo came around and said, “Go get them, they’re probably a bunch of whores,” and Campbell said that he wasn’t going to do none of that stuff. Here comes Sgt. Rivera with all those Jewish women, naked and wet, who were about to get gassed. I hollered to see if anyone spoke English and one of them did.

They tried to hug you but you weren’t supposed to do that. You weren’t supposed to touch them because there’s a lot of disease. I put my hand out. They said those are the Jewish women that went over with the Germans. I got about five hand grenades and I got the biggest guy that was with me and I told him to lob them over to the other side and whenever they explode, we go in there and get them. There they were, these people lying in a pool of blood, some with no arms, no legs, awful.

There was this guy there with no arm, but he had his rifle and was trying to point it to where I was. But before he pointed, I shot him. We went across to another room and I remember Pfc. Sergio Garcia coming in to the room and one of the enemies was on top and he shot Garcia right through the shoulder. Another soldier, who was Jewish, shot the enemy and he fell like a sack of potatoes.

I heard a noise in a closet so I told them to come out but they wouldn’t. I heard guns clicking, so I told one of my guys to open up on him and he did. He busted that closet completely. That day, we took about 80 prisoners. They were dragging the German dead from where we killed them. I think I lost about five men and another six wounded.

This German was there and he kept hollering at me because his leg was shot off. I told one of the medics to give him some morphine and he said, “I’m not going to give morphine to the enemy” and I told him he had to do it. He took out a shot and gave it to him. When they came to take the prisoners out of there on the Jeeps, that German pulled on my pant leg and I looked down and he said “Danke” — thank you.

CB: Did the liberated Jews try to take retribution against the German prisoners?
FL: At that time, they were so happy to be liberated and they were just celebrating. Then, the army set up showers and they all showered. They asked the Germans where they had kept the clothes and they distributed them.

CB: Tell me about the events leading up to the bridge crossing at [the German city] Remagen.
FL: We first got to Aachen where we were supposed to take a break. But we found out that the bridge was there so they told us to drop everything and get up there as fast as we could.

Some of the other troops had already crossed by the time we got there. But when they found out that the bridge was still there they said, “Let’s go get it before they blow it up.” We got on the boats and crossed to the [German] city of Remagen. That’s what they named the bridge but the architect went by the name [Erich] Ludendorff. He was the one who made that bridge. We just kept on going, fighting here and there, until we got to the city of Dresden [in Germany].

The Elbe River crosses there and up North, the Americans made a big deal with the Russians and they shook hands. But we were not allowed to cross. We waited for supplies and we stayed in the German houses. We got everybody to stay in one house and we’d get breakfast and dinner, and oranges and bananas and we’d give them to the kids. There was always something for the kids like chocolate bars, stuff like that.
Some of the German people were glad we were there, like the ones at Dresden. We made friends in the three or four days we were there. They’d come over and make the beds and clean up the house. When we left, they all cried, maybe not because we were leaving but because they were afraid of the Russians.

But some were not as friendly. One time, we were going through a town. This lieutenant was on top of a tank, his body was half exposed. Somebody shot him through the window of a house that we were going through. We found out where it was coming from and we went after him. We went inside and opened up a closet and there was this kid in there about 12 years old. Everybody thought, ‘He’s just a kid,’ but it didn’t make a difference if he’s a kid or 40 years old, he still killed people.

The Germans that were there didn’t take too good at us being there. But there were some that it was a whole different ball game. We took this one town and there was a little plaza. People were crying and they were hiding their kids. When we asked why they were hiding their kids, they said because the Germans told them that we would cut their hands off. I said that’s not true, we’re not going to harm those kids. They all came out. And dumb as me, I should have known better, these kids come over, their mothers were there and their sisters, and I was going to give them a piece of chocolate, so when I took my knife out to cut it, oh they just fell to pieces. They thought I was going to cut their fingers off. I had someone explain to them that I wasn’t going to do that.

Before we got to the city of Vira, this guy stepped on what they call a bouncing betty, a land mine. It looks like a goose egg with three prongs, and if you stepped on it, it felt like you had stepped on an egg. This guy, he knew he had stepped on a mine. He hollered and I said don’t move. I went up there and I took the pin out to expose the mine, and I put the pin through the detonator. And when I did that, I told him to step off, and he didn’t want to. After he stepped off, he fainted. I took that bouncing betty and I threw it as far as I could. After that, I thought, ‘what did I do?’

It just automatically came to me to do this. But to have that mine right in your face, are you sure you’re doing it the right way? In the Falaise gap, they threw a bunch of phosphorous grenades. You’ve never been burned if you haven’t been burned by a phosphorous grenade. It’s like taking a red iron and putting it on you. This guy was already there and I had to remove all his clothes because he got the most of it. The medic put tape on it and he did a good job.

Another time I got hit by shrapnel in my leg. I told the medic, ‘don’t tag me up, it’s not that bad’ and he said ‘you’re going to need stitches’ and I said ‘I got hurt worse than that when I was a kid,’ so he taped it up. I didn’t want another telegram to hit the house.

CB: Where were you at the end of the war?

FL: We were in Czechoslovakia, about 20 miles south of Prague [the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic]. We suspected the way it was going that it was winding down. We heard rumors.

One morning, we saw four planes flying over; three P-51's and one Folkwolf, German. Three up and one down. Later on came four German planes, and one C-47. They say that the one is for the guys that got killed. We knew that the war was over and I got a card later on. We were in Rokycany, was the name of that town. There was dancing in the streets in that town at three in the morning.

CB: When you went back to Europe to visit, how had it changed and how did it make you feel?
FL: We went to the Port de Calais [a town in Northern France] where we stopped. I told my wife, ‘Do you see that little hut over there?’ She said, ‘yes’ and I said, ‘that’s a pill box.’ We got off the bus, and we went in through the back of the pill box.

When we went to St. Veit, it was already built up again. We also went to Goebbles In that particular town, there’s 14 American graves there. When the Americans took that town, those GI’s were killed there. The Americans gave permission for them to be buried there; they have a cemetery there. And once a week, there’s a Catholic school close by and the kids have to go through the cemetery and the kids put a rose on every one of the graves.

CB: Was it hard adapting to life back in the states after the war?
FL: When we came back it was all over. But you had to get used to a new life. When I first came in I got this job in a gasoline engineer office. I could see people coming back from the war and every time they came back, they’d lay one guy off. It wasn’t long before I was going to be laid off. I decided to join the Air Force where I spent three years and when I was discharged, I joined the Civil Service. I was stationed in San Antonio then went to Salt Lake City. I could do some skiing there. From there, I went to San Francisco. They asked if I wanted to go to Japan and I said no, so I went back to San Antonio. That was a good deal.

CB: Are there some parts of the war still with you today?
FL: There are things I think about sometimes at night or when I’m by myself, things that I couldn’t help but do — shooting people point blank. It don’t erase from my mind.

Going back to the concentration camp, after we blew the closet out of there, there were two Germans and about three women. They were naked so you could tell where they got hit. This particular woman took this gun away from the enemy and pointed it at me. I said, ‘No, stop.’ All I had to do was squeeze one off and she reared back. Then she got the gun and pointed at me again and I shot her again, this time for good. I walked over there, her eyes were still open, blood was coming out of her wounds. I still remember that.

Like all those movies with guns and shooting and all that, I never turn them on, I never see them.

This friend of mine asked me to go to his lease to shoot deer. I went with him and there I was in that blind and I looked over and there was this deer, a big old buck, from here to the street. I got that gun, all I had to do was knock the safety off. I put the sights on him, I could see his eyes, his hair, but I couldn’t shoot him. I took the shell out of that chamber, and the deer just took off. I couldn’t shoot him.

SOURCE: Felix Longoria. Personal Interview. 30 May 2007.