Andrew George Jameson was born in San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California] in April 1925. His father was a merchant and was involved in real estate. Jameson was educated in the local schools. From high school, he went to the University of California, Berkeley [Annotator's Note: in Berkeley, California]. He was halfway through his freshman year when he was drafted in April [Annotator's Note: April 1944]. The next day he was in a training center in Idaho. He was selected for the Army Specialized Training Program [Annotator's Note: Army Specialized Training Program; generally referred to just by the initials ASTP; a program designed to educate massive numbers of soldiers in technical fields such as engineering and foreign languages and to commission those individuals at a fairly rapid pace in order to fill the need for skilled junior officers] and went to Brigham Young University [Annotator's Note: in Provo, Utah] for three or four months. The Army decided it did not have enough infantry after the failure of Anzio [Annotator's Note: Battle of Anzio, 22 January 1944 to 5 June 1944, Anzio, Italy] and the ASTP was eliminated. Jameson and many others were now in the infantry. He went to Georgia for intensive training to become a GI [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier]. Congress had passed a law that no 18-year-old would be sent overseas, however, the minute one became 19, they were on a ship. Jameson then went to Fort Meade [Annotator's Note: Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County, Maryland] repo depot [Annotator's Note: troop replacement depot] and then on to England. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Jameson what he thought about the ASTP program being canceled.] The program was to train engineers and scientists. Jameson was a Humanist [Annotator's Note: advocate of humanism, a system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters] and had studied Greek and Latin. The ASTP education was not what he wanted, so it was okay with him when they closed it. He could not continue the education he wanted until after the war.

Andrew George Jameson heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] on the car radio. The war came quickly to San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California] due to its large Japanese population. They were removed and that aspect really brought the war home. They had to turn off all of their lights at night due to fearing being bombed by the Japanese. Jameson was 18 and the worst possible thing that could happen then was not to be drafted or to be declared 4F [Annotator's Note: Selective Service classification for individuals who are not fit for service in the Armed Forces]. Several of his friends were 4F and that was psychologically bad for them. The ones who were drafted were considered acceptable American citizens. Jameson was taking an examination at Berkeley [Annotator's Note: University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California] and could not get to the draft board to register on his 18th birthday, 28 April 1943. He went the next day and they told him he could be arrested for that. The day after that, he was on his way to boot camp. The routine of military life was different for him. The use of weapons was also new. The infiltration course was very difficult and unusual. He was trained very well, especially at Fort Wheeler [Annotator's Note: Camp Wheeler in Macon, Georgia]. It was very rapid. In just a few months, civilians were trained, given M1s [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1 semi-automatic rifle, also known as the M1 Garand], and put on ships. Jameson became an expert in shorthand in high school and it was on his record. Command at Wheeler needed GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] who knew shorthand. He then took letters for the commanders and became a company clerk. He transferred to England as a replacement troop for the 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division. The 117th was from Tennessee and was the original unit of Sergeant York [Annotator's Note: US Army Sergeant Alvin Cullum York] in World War 1. They were heroic, but not very educated. Jameson was able to read and write and was respected. The ASTP types [Annotator's Note: Army Specialized Training Program; generally referred to just by the initials ASTP; a program designed to educate massive numbers of soldiers in technical fields such as engineering and foreign languages and to commission those individuals at a fairly rapid pace in order to fill the need for skilled junior officers] were college-types [Annotator's Note: Jameson had been in ASTP] who were put into the infantry. As draftees, they were members of the Army of the United States, and not members of the United States Army who were the older volunteers. Jameson was able to bridge that gap due to his position.

Andrew George Jameson's mother was born in Greece and had taken him there several times. Going overseas from Fort Meade [Annotator's Note: Fort George G. Meade in Anne Arundel County, Maryland] was unusual. The entire division [Annotator's Note: he was with Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division] was put on board the RMS Queen Mary. This was over 15,000 men. The ship did not need escorts and zig-zagged [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver] across the ocean rather fast. The u-boats [Annotator's Note: German for submarine] could not train in on her. The ship was crowded. They arrived safely in Manchester [Annotator's Note: Manchester, England]. The different units in England were arranged in the order they would go in on the invasion. His unit went across on D6 [Annotator's Note: six days after D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944; 12 June 1944 in this case]. The problem was with the landing craft. Many of them landed a few feet from the shore and those few feet meant seven feet of water. The Navy drivers wanted to get the hell out of there and that was traumatic. By D6, the Rangers [Annotator's Note: US Army Rangers] had taken out all of the pillboxes [Annotator's Note: type of blockhouse, or concrete, reinforced, dug-in guard post, normally equipped with slits for firing guns] and the men had about 1,000 yards above the cliff into Normandy. The Germans were still shooting mortars [Annotator's Note: a short smoothbore gun which fires explosive shells at high angles] onto the beaches. The GI [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] in front of him, wearing 70 pounds of gear, stepped into seven feet of water and did not come up again [Annotator's Note: at Omaha Beach, Normandy, France]. The opening shots of Private Ryan [Annotator's Note: Saving Private Ryan, 1998 American war film set during the Invasion of Normandy] were very authentic. They got ashore and climbed the cliff. The formed up there and then went through several months of the Normandy Campaign.

Normandy was bocage country [Annotator's Note: a terrain of mixed woodland and pastures] and was divided by stone borders that separated different farms. For Andrew George Jameson, going from one hedgerow [Annotator's Note: man-made earthen walls that surround a field that are often overgrown with impenetrable vegetation] to another was a problem. As his unit [Annotator's Note: Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division] did this, they got over one and a GI [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] there kept saying he was cold. He was holding his stomach after being machine-gunned. There was nothing they could do and that was the reality of war. If you did not understand war before then, that vision made it a full reality. Jameson's baptism by fire came later. When he landed [Annotator's Note: on Omaha Beach, Normandy, France on 10 June 1944], there were not so many mortars [Annotator's Note: a short smoothbore gun which fires explosive shells at high angles] from the Germans. The big battles of Normandy were at Saint-Lo [Annotator's Note: Battle of Saint-Lô, 7 to 19 July 1944 in Saint-Lô, France] and Carentan [Annotator's Note: Battle of Carentan, 10 to 14 June 1944 in Carentan, France]. His baptism came in the hedgerows trying to take a fortified village. The air display was unfortunate. The Allied planes were flying so high that many bombs were dropped on American troops. After Normandy, they built the Red Ball highway [Annotator's Note: Red Ball Express; Allied forces truck convoy system] all the way to Holland. His division was moved to Holland then. World War 2 for them was, for want of a better word, a good war. There was a purpose with a well-defined enemy, and they wanted to liberate the democratic institutions from the Nazis. That was the general psychology, but for a 19-year-old, war is a big carnival. You do not know what the hell is going on and you have one little role to play. You do not know where you are going. All he knew was the goal was the liberation of Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France], which they were not part of specifically. War became a travel experience. For a 19-year-old who was being fed and housed, it was kind of an experience. It had its moments when seeing GIs blown up, but that was a daily experience. The objective was to stay alive and to bear it all. In the big picture, the young infantry GI is really not a spectacular mover. It was quite dramatic to see hundreds of tanks with infantry moving across open fields. It is not anything you are brought up to recognize.

Andrew George Jameson's first assignment in Holland was a failure. They [Annotator's Note: Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division] failed to take the dams before the Germans broke them [Annotator's Note: as part of Operation Market Garden, Netherlands, 17 to 25 September 1944]. One of the tragedies was that they were walking in two feet of water. Trench foot [Annotator's Note: immersion foot syndrome] is a very serious reality. They were pulled away from there and went into northern Belgium at the end of November [Annotator's Note: November 1944], beginning of December [Annotator's Note: December 1944]. They had been online for a number of weeks and needed R&R [Annotator's Note: rest and recuperation]. Christmas [Annotator's Note: 25 December 1944] was approaching. Bradley [Annotator's Note: US Army General Omar Nelson Bradley] said there was no possibility of the Germans coming through the Ardennes [Annotator's Note: region in southeast Belgium that extends into Luxembourg, Germany, and France] even though they had done so three times in the preceding 100 years. On 16 December [Annotator's Note: the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945], reality hit when one of the great barrages of World War 2 occurred. What followed that were the 6th Panzer Army and the 5th Panzer Army. His unit was almost at R&R and were immediately told to get back on the trucks and were moved back into Belgium. They knew something was wrong but were not told anything. Every few miles, there were hundreds of trucks moving back into the front lines. Flares would light up the skies and they would have to jump off into a ditch. They were told to dig in along a little river that was the northern border of the Bulge. Jameson was now a sergeant, as his lieutenant and sergeant were killed. There were no morning reports to be typed then. They could not dig deep due to the hardness of the ground in that weather. They were two men for each foxhole. Jameson went to a house to find clothing . They had no overcoats. When he came back, a mortar [Annotator's Note: a short smoothbore gun which fires explosive shells at high angles] went into his foxhole and smashed a guy. Only half of the man was left. There were no medics around. Jameson pulled him into the house and left him there. The occupants complained about it. That was the ultimate kind of experience for the young Americans.

Andrew George Jameson and his unit [Annotator's Note: Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division] were on the northern border of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. The Germans' objective was to get to the French border in four days and then capture Antwerp [Annotator's Note: Antwerp, Belgium]. The 6th Panzer Army was in the center. The 7th Infantry Armor [Annotator's Note: unable to verify unit] was in the south to prevent an American counterattack. The 6th Panzer Army was commanded by Sepp Dietrich [Annotator's Note: German SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Josef "Sepp" Dietrich] who was one of Hitler's guards in the beginning. He was promoted above others to command one of the largest Panzer armies formed for the war. He failed to move and was held up at Saint-Vith [Annotator's Note: Saint-Vith, Belgium]. That prevented the 6th Panzer Army from moving as planned. That meant that the thrust was taken away from the northern border which was where Malmedy was. The battle then shifted to the center of the Bulge to the 5th Panzer Army under Manteuffel [Annotator's Note: German General der Panzertruppe Freiher Hasso Eccard von Manteuffel], who was able to break through, but then was held up by Bastogne [Annotator's Note: Siege of Bastogne, December 1944 in Bastogne, Belgium]. At night, there were flares and the Germans tried to penetrate through the forest. The forests were dotted with machine gun emplacements. The Ardennes is forested areas broken up by open fields. The GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] had to go through all of that and many were lost. The evenings were almost dead with periodic flares lighting up the skies. During this time, the special campaign that Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] devised was going on. Germans who could speak English were wearing American uniforms in the brigades of Greif [Annotator's Note: Operation Greif, operation carried out by German soldiers wearing captured American and British uniforms and vehicles during the Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. Getting supplies and food to the front line was difficult. There was a lack of hot food and they got only the D-ration [Annotator's Note: Army Field Ration D; chocolate bar intended as snack food] for each meal. That is enough chocolate to stop anything [Annotator's Note: digestion-wise]. When it came up in the early morning, the Stars and Stripes [Annotator's Note: United States military newspaper] came too. The heroes of the newspaper were the Mauldin [Annotator's Note: William Henry "Bill" Mauldin, American editorial cartoonist] characters, Willy and Joe. They identified with them, and they provided humor to the war.

For Andrew George Jameson [Annotator's Note: with Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division], the war ended when the command decided to combine the armored strategy with the infantry strategy. That had never been done before. Jameson was amazed to learn that a tank would not go forward without GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] around it. They lost a lot of GIs protecting tanks. Then command decided to put four to six GIs on each tank. What they neglected to understand is that when the turret of the tank turns, someone is vulnerable. Five of his men were on a tank with him. The turret turned and machine gun fire started hitting it. Jameson told his men to jump. A tank is quite high off the ground, and many would not jump. Jameson pushed them off. A couple broke their legs, but that was better than being cut in half by a machine gun. On the ground, they were not far from the treads and the fear was that the tank would back up over them. He pulled the two men aside and while doing so, he was shot in the back. He hit his head against a rock and lost his hearing. One ear was destroyed, and the other was damaged. He had operations after the war and his hearing returned to about 50 percent. He used hearing aids to get through his postwar education and career. He had two spinal operations. He has small pieces of shrapnel in his back still that have moved and block his sciatic nerve. It has been determined that he cannot have any more spinal operations due to his age. The VA [Annotator's Note: United States Department of Veterans Affairs; also referred to as the Veterans Administration] said they had a solution and gave him a cane.

When one is wounded in the field, it is impossible to get out until nightfall. Andrew George Jameson [Annotator's Note: with Company L, 3rd Battalion, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division] was tied to a jeep with four others and was taken to a field hospital. They took care of his bleeding and some shrapnel he had. He went to a hospital in Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] where he was treated more thoroughly. They looked for more shrapnel and then wrapped him tightly in adhesive tape to hold his body together for a couple of weeks. There were no MRIs [Annotator's Note: magnetic resonance imaging] to show what was inside. When they took his bandages off, it felt good, and they thought he was okay. [Annotator's Note: The video breaks briefly and on its return, Jameson is talking about the damage to his ears.] He was sent back to his unit. The war was almost over, and the unit was now part of the Army of Occupation of Eastern Germany and Western Czechoslovakia [Annotator's Note: present day Czech Republic]. He joined them on the Elbe Canal [Annotator's Note: unable to identify which Elbe canal, at the Elbe River at Magdeburg, Germany], which was declared as the border between the Russians and the Americans by Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States]. They waited there for two weeks and could have been to Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany] three or four times. They were not allowed to and just sat there. Horstmann [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling; unable to identify] appeared with their vodka and "comrade." The war was over after that in Europe and the unit was sent home to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. The 30th Infantry was "Old Hickory's", Andrew Jackson [Annotator's Note: US Army Major General Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States], division. They were all discharged there. Jameson took a train home.

Andrew George Jameson's objective was to continue his education [Annotator's Note: after the war]. He had been drafted while in his freshman year at Berkeley [Annotator's Note: University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California]. The G.I. Bill [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] came into play. He got his bachelor's degree and then enrolled in Sorbonne [Annotator's Note: Sorbonne University in Paris, France]. He spent four years in Paris and got his doctorate in history degree. He then applied to, and was accepted, at Harvard [Annotator's Note: Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts]. He spent a year there and then was hired as an instructor. He finished his dissertation [Annotator's Note: long essay on a particular subject, especially one written as a requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy, or PhD, degree] and received his PhD. He was then hired as a professor and spent the next 20 years there. His infantry experience did not have an impact on his education. Right after the war, the freshmen classes of most universities had an average age of 27 due to the returning GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier]. They wanted to forget the damn war, be educated, and get a career going. From then on, the GIs of World War 2 did not talk about their experiences, even to their families. The psychology was to forget the war and become a civilian. The G.I. Bill is what tied them to the war. It was almost a movement to forget the war and become what they were before the war. The Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] was never talked about by anybody. Books about it did not appear until the 1960s and 1970s. Jameson's only desire was his own field of study, work, and teaching at Harvard. He is not a Yankee [Annotator's Note: an inhabitant of the northern states of the United States] and wanted to go home to San Francisco [Annotator's Note: San Francisco, California], so he transferred and became Vice Chancellor at the University of California Berkeley. He retired from there more or less. He then taught for five years at the University of Istanbul [Annotator's Note: Istanbul University in Istanbul, Turkey]. He lectured a lot in his field. Suddenly people started asking him about the war and he realized people did not know anything about it. He then collected a large library on the war itself and published articles. A result of that is his being here [Annotator's Note: at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana at the time of this interview] to lecture on the Battle of the Bulge. Jameson had a very serious relationship [Annotator's Note: with returning home to see his family after the war ended]. Assuming civilian life overnight was very difficult. There are many studies on the psychology of how soldiers were received by their families. It was not a good relationship. It was almost as if they were different in the relationships than before the war. The change was a tremendous maturation of young men. Nothing will mature one faster than experiencing war. The G.I. Bill meant that many young Americans were able to go to college who they could not have before. It was good but had another side to it. His experiences at Harvard and Berkeley showed that many of the men were not academically inclined and would have been better off in vocational schools. They established committees to help the men get over their combat experiences and into the classroom. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. It was an important transitional period for a number of years. It all became history when Vietnam [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975] came along.

Andrew George Jameson had no feeling towards his enemy other than the general enemy represented by Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] and the German people as a whole, but not individuals. In the hedgerows [Annotator's Note: man-made earthen walls that surround a field that are often overgrown with impenetrable vegetation] and villages, the Germans looked like anybody else, and each was some mother's son. There was no special antipathy towards a German, but there was towards German as described by Hitler, Himmler [Annotator's Note: SS Riechsführer Heinrich Luitpold Himmler; senior member of the Nazi party], and Goebbels [Annotator's Note: Paul Joseph Goebbels; Reich Minister of Propaganda]. Jameson grew up faster because of the war and became independent. That training makes one take responsibility for one's own life. That is a problem of the current wars that have no purpose, Iraq [Annotator's Note: Iraq War, 2003 to 2011] and Afghanistan [Annotator's Note: War in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001 to 2014, Operation Freedom's Sentinel, 2015 to September 2021]. What do the GIs [Annotator's Note: government issue; also, a slang term for an American soldier] get out of those experiences? The mental problems that have been generated by these wars are not understood. The experience of World War 2 was very positive, and the veterans became the best and greatest generation. Jameson did not have an inkling of what is now called PTSD [Annotator's Note: post traumatic stress disorder, a mental health condition triggered by a terrifying event either experienced or witnessed]. He wanted to command his own existence and did that through education. It is absolutely vital to not only have future generations study World War 2, but to go through military training as well. Not only because of the country's purposes, but because of the physical pluses of that kind of training. It is good physical and mental training. The museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] is essential. Jameson is not only an ancient historian but is a military historian. He is delighted to see more and more studies of military subject matter are going into the universities. What Jameson has told [Annotator's Note: in this interview] is a positive part of American history that should not be put into a political context. Putting this history into a political context will destroy the presentation. That is a problem of many aspects of current American life. Instead of understanding issues, Americans tend to politicize them. That destroys the efficacy of the issues.