Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

U.S. Army, 1943-1945
71
Line, and we stayed there for about oh, it
was a little over a week before we gather or
muster up all our forces to really make an
assault on the Siegfried Line. And what I
used to do is—I had some clear area out there
and any vehicle that was broken, I would
bring it out there and work on it. So one
morning I was out there, and I was working
on a jeep, but I had a radio with me (battery
operated) and I used to go in and listen to
the Armed Forces news at certain times. And
this morning it was nine o’clock and the news
was coming on, so I came on inside to listen
to the Armed Forces news. And I was sitting
on an orange crate in the room there, and
all of a sudden I got knocked off the orange
crate. A German eighty-eight shell came in
and just—well, it hit that jeep and just blew
it to smithereens.
So, all the fellows said, “Well, we’d better
go pick up Pete again; last I saw him he was
out there working on the jeep.” I was laying
on the floor inside the farmhouse listening to
the news [laughing]! So that took care of that.
We went on through, and we crossed the
Siegfried Line, went on through and across
the Rhine River, and on down into a little town
called Landsburg, Austria. And that’s where
we were taken off the line just a week before
the war ended.
But, again, an incident that kind of
rubbed me the wrong way, when I mentioned
earlier that after finding out a few things that
everything didn’t seem quite like it should be
with World War II, and the thing that turned
me off completely was, we were holed up in
a factory. And of course, GIs, young fellows,
they get snoopy and they have to go around
every place and see everything. As a matter
of fact, the Germans had quite a time with it
because they would have little pens like that,
you know, that they’d leave around. People’d
pick them up, and they’d blow up and blow
their hands off or something. They didn’t
particularly care to kill anybody. If they’d
maim them, why it just put that man out of
action and it would take two or three guys to
bring him back to the hospital. So it just meant
taking men off the front lines to take care of a
wounded man. I mean this was their object in
doing it. They didn’t care about killing people.
They just wanted to maim them or wound
them so they would have to be taken back.
And that just took that many men off from
the fighting force.
But anyway, this other fellow and I were
snooping around this factory and strangely
enough, towards the end of the war, civilian
trucks and transportation in Germany were
converted to burning charcoal for their fuel.
And in so doing, they had to have—they had
a big boiler on the back of the bus and then
they had a little twelve-volt electric motor
that turned the fan that would blow this gas
from the burned charcoal up to the front of
the engine, so that the engine could utilize it
to run. And this factory that we were in was
one of the factories that was installing these
motors and installing the charcoal burning
boilers on these buses and trucks and so forth.
So we went into one of the rooms where they
had a big supply of these little electric motors.
And you must remember that World War II
started on December seventh of 1941, and
the name plates on these little twelve-volt
electric motors was Electrolux Corporation
of America 1943! So that kind of turned me
off and made me wonder whether it was really
worth it or not.
Of course, then after the war was over
we were occupation for quite some time.
And that was very enjoyable there. We had
homes to live in, and I was in charge of one
house where several of us stayed. And it was
very interesting. We had the USO-supplied
doughnuts and stuff.