Bryan Compton was born in Watonga, Oklahoma in 1919. He has lived around Watonga all his life and got to see the world during his five years in the Army. He served under Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] who told them they were the "fightin'est sons of bitches" he ever saw. After joining the Army in January 1942, Compton moved through four different camps in the United States, over a period of about a year and a half, before going overseas. He traveled on a ship, that carried everything, including gasoline, food and other supplies. The ship zig-zagged [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver] its way to Oran [Annotator's Note: Oran, Algeria], North Africa for 23 days. Oran Harbor was beautiful and clean, and the townspeople were religious and friendly. One battalion went into action the day after they arrived, on a mop-up mission near Tunisia. Compton had to walk ten miles to a camp, where the infantry slept in pup tents and did guard duty every night. He noted that the local men carried sabers [Annotator's Note: swords], and that was their rifle. The infantry lost three men who were on guard duty the first night; the attackers stripped the bodies and got everything. On the next night, two more soldiers were lost. After a week they loaded on the same ship and sailed overnight to Sicily [Annotator's Note: Sicily, Italy].

Bryan Compton and his outfit [Annotator's Note: Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] arrived in Sicily [Annotator's Note: Sicily, Italy] under fire. He saw several bodies floating in the water and had to ignore them. He was in the medical corps but said they do not bother the dead. When Compton was going ashore, two airplanes came out of nowhere, with their machine guns going. Compton was between two rows of bullets, with nowhere to run. The sand was flying. He remembers a buddy of his commenting, at the "dancing sand." After making it ashore, Compton was waiting for his truck when another plane came strafing. A man near Compton dove into a cave. It was booby trapped, and he was killed instantly. Compton moved away from the beach. He got his truck the next day and joined the rest of his group. The infantry had been fighting all night and ran out of ammunition. Their resupply was still on the ship and had to be brought up. Mid-morning, two enemy tanks and about 40 soldiers, all carrying white flags, came across the bridge over the Volturno River. The German soldiers were wearing overcoats. Two American tanks went to meet them. Infantry came up to offer them safe conduct, the Germans dropped their overcoats and opened up with machine guns The German tanks started firing. The American tanks got those German tanks, and the soldiers in the tanks jumped out and started running toward the bridge. The river was the dividing line between the two forces, and after a night and a day of hard fighting, the Germans had retreated behind a line of trucks. The Germans had very strict discipline. The American radio communications systems were very poor. The radios were squealing, and he could not understand them. While all this was going on, big bombers of every description, were flying over, going to Germany. The area was dark with the shadows of the airplanes. The Americans requested air cover, and two B-29s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber] caught the Germans standing behind the trucks. The attack killed about 50 soldiers and got at least ten trucks. At the same time, some planes were coming into a temporary landing strip about a mile down the road. The formation was supposed to be four fighters. A fifth plane in the group turned out to be German. Compton had a ringside seat for the dogfight that ensued. The German plane was overcome, its pilot bailed out, and the plane fell straight down. When Compton walked around the site of the crash, he said there was not a piece bigger than ten inches left of the plane. Leaving the beach, his unit passed the site of the bombing within an hour. There were two American bulldozers pushing the bodies of the Germans and their vehicles into a hole and covering them up.

For two or three days, the Germans would stop, shoot at the American troops and then run [Annotator's Note: during the fighting in Sicily, Italy]. On the second or third day, Bryan Compton was driving an ambulance, and turned a corner to find a burning tank. The orderly traveling with Compton jumped out of their vehicle to help a soldier, whose hair and face were black with burns. Compton, who was a medic, administered morphine to help with the pain. The orderly was eventually awarded a medal for the rescue. [Annotator's Note: Compton stops to refer to his notes.] Six or eight months later, when the battalion [Annotator's Note: 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] had worked its way up to the town of Venafro [Annotator's Note: Venafro, Italy], they met the mountains for the first time. After fighting and gaining ground to within two miles of the mountains, the Army decided to turn things over to the Free French forces [Annotator's Note: Free French Forces, forces of the Free France government in exile]. Compton's unit returned to Naples, Italy and headed for Anzio [Annotator's Note: Anzio, Italy]. The battalion had suffered casualties and had gotten no replacements. Anzio was a German rest base. Compton watched as one of the departing Germans ran for a retreating truck, and saw an officer put his boots on the wrong feet. At Anzio, Compton spent four months in the same foxhole. The ship that took Compton to Anzio was run by Merchant Marines, who only worked eight hours a day. The ship stopped about 30 feet from the dock, so that the sailors could take a meal break. While waiting, two American planes attacked their ship, and one of them dropped a bomb. Compton got under a truck on the deck, and when he got up there was a 25 foot hole in the ship. Five cooks were killed. When Compton disembarked, he found his company [Annotator's Note: Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division]. The infantry had moved off 20 miles to Rome [Annotator's Note: Rome, Italy]. They returned to help secure Anzio. The Germans had lined up tanks on a plateau above the beach, and had their barrels pointed downward. At night, the Germans had a big bomber that could idle in the sky and watch for activity. No one dared get out of their foxholes. About two months after he arrived, Compton didn't look well, and was sent back to Naples for ten days. While he was gone, his replacement hit a land mine, and the ambulance was blown up. Compton considers himself lucky to be alive.

Bryan Compton states that the Germans used the medics' red cross as a target. When they were moving out, his outfit [Annotator's Note: Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] was bombarded. Compton was in a foxhole by himself and couldn't stand any more. He decided he would move after the next shell was fired. Shortly after the fourteenth shell dropped right behind him and buried itself, it exploded and left a big hole. Compton had already jumped out of his foxhole and started running down a fence line. The Germans spotted him but missed him. He fell face down and laid there for 30 minutes. When the shelling stopped, Compton walked to the house of an old Italian who poured him a glass of wine. He walked back to camp and learned that there had been no losses. Meanwhile, the Germans were shelling the hospital, and two nurses were killed. That was when they started digging a trench about four feet deep with mounds on both sides to protect against artillery fire. When they had been at Anzio [Annotator's Note: Anzio, Italy] for a little over two months, replacements arrived. They were high school kids, who didn't even know how to break down a rifle and put it back together. The veterans told them everything they could. That night, they went up on the line and only one boy came back through the aide station. He had a "million dollar wound" [Annotator's Note: military slang for a non-fatal, or non-crippling, wound serious enough to be remove a soldier from combat] and was sent back to the United States. Most of the casualties the medics treated at Anzio came from small arms. Once, a bomber dropped a bomb in the sand, and an infantryman who had been near the blast had to be treated for concussion. Some English aviators had abandoned a plane that kept circling nearer and nearer to the Anzio camp. It hit the ground and raised up, and then hit the ground and raised up, until it came to a stop. He was glad when its flight ended, because it kept getting bigger and bigger as it came closer. The Germans had an 88 [Annotator's Note: German 88mm multi-purpose artillery] that was vicious, and they were pretty accurate with it. When Compton returned from a rest camp, his replacement didn't want to give up his position. Compton had to join a litter squad that retrieved wounded from the front. When he was bringing one patient back, the squad went around a man-made pond, and Compton asked to stop because he was tired. His leader said they had to press on, and after they had moved about 300 yards, a shower of mortar fire hit the spot where Compton had wanted to rest.

Jumping out [Annotator's Note: breaking out of the Anzio, Italy beachhead] on 4 June 1944, Bryan Compton's division [Annotator's Note: Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] fought its way to Rome [Annotator's Note: Rome, Italy] in order to hold the German troops in advance of the upcoming Normandy invasion [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. Every gun that the Americans had on the beach at Anzio had an object to shoot at, all the while bypassing the local population who were acting as observers and informants, helping the American troops. In addition, there was a camera on a P-38 [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft] taking pictures. The plane was so fast that when it came by it sucked him out of his foxhole. The soldiers called the pilot everything under the sun, because he scared them. When the division left Anzio, the dead littered their route like roadkill. About a mile out of Anzio, the convoy of medics stopped, and Compton walked around. He saw a hole that seemed to have been the headquarters for the German army. The 45th Division passed through Rome and stopped. They got back on ships and went to invade Southern France.

The war had been going on for about three years, and when Bryan Compton landed in southern France [Annotator's Note: on 15 August 1944 with Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] things were quiet. The Germans were surprised, and one or two German divisions surrendered at the beach. They were being held in a wheat field. The Americans had no infantry to spare, yet they had to guard thousands of prisoners. The Americans had no food or water for the inmates, and the prisoners were getting rum-dumb [Annotator's Note: slang for stupid or ignorant people] and started wandering. Compton said he saw three or four bodies of Germans who had been shot when they refused to obey orders to stay put. Compton's division went into the mountains, where they were holding, and it was cold in the high altitudes. The enemy was retreating and disorganized. Compton was driving an ambulance. He had to remove infantrymen who had frozen to death in their foxholes. They had to get the bodies out of sight because it was bad for morale. He remembers one guy who made sick call who had been riding on a tank and had to jump off when it came under attack. Another man jumped off the tank behind him and landed on his back. Compton's division held that line for three weeks or more. The German were retreating, leaving only a skeleton crew, while they were making defenses at the Nile River [Annotator's Note: Rhine River]. Compton was at the river, in tall trees with good camouflage, waiting to get across. There was heavy resistance, but the engineers brought in a prefabricated bridge. Tanks went across first, then any other armored vehicles. The medics crossed last.

Bryan Compton and his unit [Annotator's Note: Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] attacked the Siegfried Line [Annotator's Note: a series of defensive fortifications roughly paralleling the Franco-German border built by Germany in the 1930s]. It had big concrete piers that dynamite would not touch. They had to get TNT [Annotator's Note: trinitrotoluene, explosive compound] to destroy them. There were mines among the piers. A tank, with something like a rotary tiller in front, opened a channel about 24 feet wide, and the division moved through. From then on out, the Germans they encountered were disorganized and tired. They would retreat about five miles, then throw up a few shells, and then go again. The medics stopped to reorganize at a dairy. There, they found about 15 men who were bedfast [Annotator's Note: bedridden], and starving. Another 15 men were working the cows but had been forbidden to drink the milk. There was also a big old sow, and the starving prisoners asked the medics if they could kill it. The prisoners butchered the hog and drank the blood. The medics arrived at Dachau [Annotator's Note: Dachau concentration camp complex near Dachau, Germany in April 1945]. They saw 50 coal cars containing dead men, women and children. The Germans had run out of gas for the incinerators, so the dead were piled up. He noticed a large box near the incinerators filled with gold teeth. In the prison there was a big crater, probably put there by the Americans, where he could see discarded Red Cross equipment. There were two Russian women beating an already dead German guard. One of the medical officers stopped them and ordered them to dispose of the body. Compton got to Dachau after the 179th Infantry [Annotator's Note: 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] had gone through. Compton did not know about the concentration camps beforehand. When they walked into town, they looked in a boxcar and saw the dead. About a week later, the medics loaded up their patients, and took some of them to their home country. Compton made two trips to Czechoslovakia with patients. He s heard the citizens of the neighboring city of Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich, Germany] denied knowing anything about the camp at Dachau. Dachau was the worst thing he saw during the war. The memory will always live with him.

Going back [Annotator's Note: in his story] to Anzio [Annotator's Note: Battle of Anzio, 22 January 1944 to 5 June 1944], there were two men that Bryan Compton could not believe were still alive. One had bullet holes all over his chest and his stomach, yet his heart was still beating. Compton's squad [Annotator's Note: Compton was a medic in Company B, 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division] picked him up near the front lines and brought him directly to the hospital. The other was a German soldier who had his head split open by a shell. He had screw worms [Annotator's Note: a species of parasitic fly whose larvae eat tissue] in his head. Compton saw him sitting up, drinking lemonade. Every German soldier was carrying Limburger cheese in his pocket. In the ambulance, you had to have fresh air. Compton felt no different about treating the German soldiers. He had to do it. One of Compton's friends, who was in a service company that supplied food, routinely passed a wood that harbored German soldiers. He was captured three times by the Germans, but each time was able to persuade his captors to surrender. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Compton how he felt about being part of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp complex near Dachau, Germany in April 1945.] Compton did not feel any different, but he couldn't believe his eyes. For several hours after the Americans arrived, they let the prisoners run around free of charge. Eventually they had to pen them up and take them back home. The Americans got fuel to finish the job of incinerating the 50 carloads of dead people. The company settled in a big house. Compton was still in Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich or München, Germany] when the war ended. The 179th Infantry [Annotator's Note: 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] continued on for about 50 miles, to Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] hideout in the mountains [Annotator's Note: Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle's Nest, Berchtesgaden, Germany]. But Compton didn't go any further than Munich. He took no souvenirs. In less than two weeks' time he was on his way home from Le Havre, France by ship.

Once the war ended, the medical doctors left by airplane, leaving no one in charge [Annotator's Note: of the 120th Medical Battalion, 45th Infantry Division]. Bryan Compton and the medics drove their trucks to Le Havre [Annotator's Note: Le Havre, France], got on a ship, and went home. The return to the United States was quick, compared to the trip over. He remembers seeing the lady holding the torch [Annotator's Note: the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, New York], and everyone in tears. They went up the Hudson River, docked, went into camp and had breakfast. The next day he got on a train and went to Oklahoma. His time in the service changed his life quite a bit. He could not keep from looking up when he heard an airplane. When he heard the Star-Spangled Banner [Annotator's Note: national anthem of the United States] playing on the radio, he wanted to jump up. He was a soldier. Those five years he spent in service got rid of Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. It took a year for him to get over his service experience. He was sick of people, but there was a lot of work to do on the farm. It had been neglected, and his parents had grown old. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Compton if he thinks it is important for there to be The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana]. Compton thinks that if we don't have enough volunteers to have a standing army, it ought to be mandatory for every high school kid to spend some time in service. Compton remembers way down in Italy, coming upon a nun and two children. The Germans had cut the hands off the kids because they wouldn't give them information. The nun had been raped and more. Compton's unit found them, as well as a lot of booby-trapped items, including toys. A fellow Oklahoman was riding in a jeep that set off a German hand grenade. It blew the jeep end over end, throwing its passengers into a field. A local girl suffered an epileptic seizure because of the stress of the artillery exploding all around her home. The medics gave her a shot and medicine as they left the area. Compton guesses that is his story.