First Impressions
Wile: I was a Canadian Citizen, and I was drafted while living in Massachusetts. The first place I went to was Fort Devons. The next thing I knew I was shipped to Camp Croft in Spartenburg, North Carolina. The Judge came up from Greenville, and there were 130 of us in a room in the courthouse in downtown Spartenburg. He said, "Raise your right hand" and thirty seconds later I was a citizen of the United States.
Crawford: When did you first hear about the concentration camps? Was it before you got to Europe or was it after you got overseas?
Wile: I can't definitely say excepting that it does stick in my mind that there was a Jewish photographer on the S.S. Sea Owl (which was a liberty ship that took us over) that I believe was telling stories about what he'd been hearing on his previous trips and that he'd made several crossings and I think that that was the first word that I can remember and I don't even know why I say that, but somehow that sticks in my mind.
Crawford: Had you heard anymore about them as you finally got into the continent, or was there any talk about them?
Wile: No, at that time, we weren't talking about that. We were fighting a war and waiting to find out what we were going to be doing. We landed at Cherbourg and moved in from there. We did a lot of traveling very rapidly to try to catch up with Patton to get into position to do this very thing. From that stand point, why, we weren't talking about concentration camps because we weren't really getting any of that kind of news, it was just, "Where are we going to be today or tomorrow?" or, "What are we going to be doing?" or, "What's all that noise?" And then when we got up to where the third army finally was to turn south, why, that was the last foxhole I think I dug, right there. After that, no more foxholes, 'cause the war was moving so fast that there was no point in digging foxholes. And by that time we had isolated so many pockets of Germans that all we were doing was posting guards every night. They were trying to avoid us, and we were trying to keep them from pulling any of their last minute stand.
Crawford: Is this a picture of you?
Wile: No. This is Arthur Goldberg; a man that drove for me in several instances. He and I had been, I think, at Tech or some other place together in the States, and he was with me in England for awhile, driving. We later came across one another at headquarters command that used to be in Frankfurt. When we first got to Germany, there was an old fraternization ban on, and you could not fraternize with the enemy and Goldberg said that he was gonna fraternize and what he was going to do was to inseminate every German girl that he could in reprisal for what they had done, but to show you how the fates brew what you quaff in life, about the first girl that he met, he fell so deeply in love with her that it was impossible for him to carry out that particular design to seek vengence upon the Germans and it's one of the things that's stuck with me as to how the fates do twist the direction a person takes as time goes on.