Gilbert Clift was born in October 1924, the youngest of three brothers, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. As an infant, Clift's family moved to Winfield, Kansas where they remained for 13 years at which point, they moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma. Both of Clift's parents were teachers. His father became superintendent but left education as he found the position to be too political. His father opened a furniture store during the Great Depression [Annotator's Note: the Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1939] and had little success. Clift attended junior high and high school in Stillwater. He was 17 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He was on a date at the local movie theater on that afternoon. He and his date left the theater and were greeted on the street by news of the attacks. Clift had no idea where Pearl Harbor was, but his date knew very well because her father was in the Army Reserves. She began to cry because she feared her father would be called into active service. He often listened intently to the radio to learn about any new updates of the war, as his oldest brother, a petroleum engineer at the time, volunteered for service with the USAAF [Annotator's Note: United States Army Air Forces] and served as an aircraft mechanic with the 100th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force. His other brother initially signed up for the Marine Corps but ended up as an ensign in the Navy. This brother never got the chance to go overseas. As his ship cleared the Panama Canal en route to the Pacific, the Japanese surrendered. In the Fall of 1942, Clift enrolled at Oklahoma A&M [Annotator's Note: now The Oklahoma State University for Agriculture and Applied Science in Stillwater, Oklahoma] and volunteered for ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps] training hoping to avoid being drafted into the infantry and to graduate with the rank of second lieutenant. However, two weeks shy of his final exams, Clift was called up into the infantry. The Army gave everyone in the ROTC program high grades because they knew that many would not be returning from service. Clift reported to basic training at Camp Maxey in Paris, Texas. He was housed in a "Jap trap," or a temporary prison used to accommodate Japanese prisoners of war. He did well and was able to keep up with all the physical activity. After basic training, Clift attended six more months of college courses in Huntsville, Texas at Sam Houston College [Annotator's Note: now Sam Houston State University], what the G.I.s [Annotator's Note: government issue; also a slang term for an American soldier] referred to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, S.H.I.T. for short. In January 1944, Clift was sent back to Camp Maxey to join the 99th Infantry Division. He was classified as a runner for the platoon's lieutenant. He was trained how to fire and clean a machine gun, but shortly after found out that the lieutenant would be doing the shooting and he would be doing the cleaning. Clift then requested to join a new squad as a rifleman. His request was granted and Clift began live ammunition training drills. The drill required him to advance across a field under artillery fire. One mortar shell landed short, seriously injuring several men and killing the runner who Clift had just swapped places with. Clift was hospitalized with shrapnel in his foot. He managed to help his buddy who was seriously injured. He was commended for his action later. The invasion of Normandy [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] took place during Clift's hospitalization. The shrapnel remains in Clift's foot today.

Gilbert Clift was at Camp Maxey [Annotator's Note: in Paris, Texas] for weeks without any idea where they were headed until the day they received warm weather gear. Then, they knew they were going to Europe. From Paris, Texas, Clift boarded a train to Massachusetts where he boarded a converted luxury liner to Southampton, England. He arrived in the Fall of 1944 and was housed in the same barracks used to house those who had invaded Normandy [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] months earlier. All their equipment was greased for travel, so when they arrived in England, they had to clean it all. While in Southampton, Clift's oldest brother found him and took him for a ride in a B-17 [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber]. The day was 28 October 1944, Clift's 20th birthday. Three days later, Clift boarded an LST [Annotator's Note: Landing Ship, Tank] for the cross-Channel [Annotator's Note: the English Channel] journey to Le Havre [Annotator's Note: Le Havre, France]. After a night in a Le Havre apple orchard, the men of the 99th Infantry [Annotator's Note: 99th Infantry Division] boarded trucks for the Belgian-German border. It took 1,000 trucks to move his division from Le Havre to the front lines. All the truck drivers were Black [Annotator's Note: African-American] infantrymen. Arriving along the front lines, men from the 9th Division [Annotator's Note: 9th Infantry Division] gave up their foxholes to Clift and the rest of their replacements and warned them not to shoot at the nearby German pillboxes [Annotator's Note: type of blockhouse, or concrete, reinforced, dug-in guard post, normally equipped with slits for firing guns]. The holes were three feet wide, three feet deep, and nine feet long, and they were covered with logs, dirt, and snow. After a few days, one soldier took a shot at a German who had exited the pillbox. The shot missed and the Germans returned fire in the form of three artillery shells that exploded in the trees above Clift's foxhole. Clift realized war had to be played by certain rules. You never get out of your hole at night because someone would shoot you. The field between his foxhole and the German position was heavily mined [Annotator's Note: stationary explosive device triggered by physical contact]. Men would be chosen to go on patrols to locate mines. Clift served with I Company, 393rd Infantry Regiment [Annotator's Note: Company I, 3rd Battalion, 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division] and was positioned on the northern end of the front line during the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. The foxhole was wet and freezing and he struggled to sleep each night in all of the clothes he had with him. He gladly shared body heat with the other man in the foxhole. One morning at breakfast, his buddy reported to sick call complaining of trench foot [Annotator's Note: immersion foot syndrome] and pneumonia, leaving Clift without a foxhole partner for a few cold nights. A replacement was sent in a few days later. He was a big man who was a cook and complained that he had been sent to the front by mistake. The cook placed the barrel of his rifle on his foot and fired so that he could return to the rear, so Clift was without a partner again. A smaller replacement came after a few days. On the morning of 16 December 1944, the two were sent out as lead scouts on a mission to reestablish contact with L Company [Annotator's Note: Company L, 3rd Battalion, 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division] after contact had been lost when the Germans shelled their positions earlier that morning. Not long after heading out ahead of the squad, a shell flew over and crashed not far behind Clift's position. He got down into a small ditch and his partner hid behind a tree. Clift could see Germans advancing on his left flank and hollered back to alert the rest of the squad. He began to fire at the Germans and instructed his partner to do the same. He heard his partner call out "Mama, Mama" before going quiet. Clift's squad was no longer firing at the Germans when the Germans began throwing hand grenades near his position. He could hear the Germans calling for his surrender, Clift chose to be "a live coward rather than a dead hero," and surrendered to the Germans using a phrase he had picked up from a German phrasebook on his journey across the Atlantic, "helfen sie mir" - "help me." The Germans found Clift and removed his helmet, signaling that he was now a POW [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war]. He looked down at his watch and saw that it was 2:30 in the afternoon when he was captured, the Germans took the watch and he never saw it again.

After becoming a POW [Annotator's Note: prisoner of war], Gilbert Clift was taken back to the German positions where he came across six other prisoners who were from L Company [Annotator's Note: Company L, 3rd Battalion, 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division]. At this point, he felt he had completed his assignment and found L Company [Annotator's Note: Clift was a member of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division and had been attempting to link up with Company L when he was cpatured]. L Company's lieutenant had been shot and they carried him on a litter across a minefield [Annotator's Note: stationary explosive device triggered by physical contact] to a pillbox [Annotator's Note: type of blockhouse, or concrete, reinforced, dug-in guard post, normally equipped with slits for firing guns] that had been converted into a first aid station. At one point, they heard American artillery going over their heads and took cover in the snow. Clift and the other prisoners were soon marched deep into Germany on roads that were jammed with tanks. Clift tried to count all of the tanks he saw but stopped counting after 100 because the sight of the enemy's strength made him sick. He was then interrogated. The Germans knew more about his division than he did. Every night, Clift was locked up in a chicken coop or in a gymnasium. He was finally able to rest because he no longer had to worry about freezing or being shot at in the night. He was hungry all the time because they rarely fed him. About 40 prisoners, including Clift, were loaded onto a boxcar, and transported further into Germany. As a prisoner, Clift was given very little food and lost 30 pounds in four months of captivity. After five or six days on the boxcar, Clift arrived at a POW camp filled with thousands of British soldiers who had been captured during the evacuation of Dunkirk [Annotator's Note: Battle of Dunkirk, 26 May to 4 June 1940], some four and a half years earlier. Upon his arrival, Clift was given a postcard to send to his parents to alert them that he was alive and mostly unharmed. He was told that he was in camp 4D [Annotator's Note: Stalag IV-D, Torgau, Saxony, Germany], but does not remember the name of the town the camp was located in. The British were very class conscious and, as a result, the Americans kept their distance and bonded with one another. Clift volunteered for a work assignment that allowed him to board a boxcar and travel to various German cities filling in bomb craters. At one point he visited Torgau [Annotator's Note: Torgau, Germany] on the Elbe River where the Russians and Americans would eventually meet. Then Clift was housed in a monastery in Zeitz, Germany, which was home to a large lens factory. The guard in charge of the work crew was an older World War 1 veteran. In the monastery, the prisoners were given only one meal a day. One night, they were taken into the basement as protection from air raids. Clift later found out that Zeitz was on a direct line to Dresden [Annotator's Note: Dresden, Germany] the night it was firebombed [Annotator's Note: British and American attacks from 13 to 15 February 1945]. Another work detail involved loading rocks that German crews had blown out the side of a mountain to build a large U-shaped air raid shelter. Clift and his wife visited Zeitz 50 years later to see the sites of his imprisonment and found that the shelter had been bricked over. One morning, the old guard told the prisoners they would begin marching west to avoid being liberated by the Russians.

Three days into a march [Annotator's Note: from their prisoner of war camp], Gilbert Clift and the rest of the prisoners [Annotator's Note: from Stalag IV-D, Torgau, Saxony, Germany; liberated April 1945] were liberated by an American tank column and the guard was taken prisoner. Clift hitched a ride in an ambulance to a hospital in Frankfurt [Annotator's Note: Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany] where he was declared malnourished. From Frankfurt, Clift was flown to Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] in a DC-3 [Annotator's Note: Douglas DC-3 cargo and passenger aircraft] to continue his recovery. While in Paris, he met a woman with a deep Southern accent working for the Red Cross. Without any money to send a telegram home to his family, the woman agreed to send the telegram for free. [Annotator's Note: There is a break in the video at 0:52:10.000.] Years later, Clift realized his experience as a prisoner of war had been relatively easy. Once the Germans realized the war was lost, they began treating American prisoners better because they wanted to surrender to the Americans rather than to the Russians. A World War 1 veteran who guarded Clift's work detail was a decent man and never threatened the prisoners with a rifle. However, in the early days of his captivity, Clift was threatened by a young German soldier who demanded that Clift clean his mess kit or be shot. From Paris, Clift flew home to New York and then boarded a train to Chickasha, Oklahoma. After hitchhiking north with a lady he knew, he reached Stillwater [Annotator's Note: Stillwater, Oklahoma]. Clift arrived home on a Sunday afternoon in May 1945. Upon his arrival, Clift discovered all of his family members had gathered there to greet his brother who had returned home one day earlier. It was quite the celebration. Clift was assigned to an Army hospital to continue his rehab [Annotator's Note: rehabilitation] process and was sent home after every visit with ration coupons. Clift was sent to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas [Annotator's Note: now Fort Chaffee Joint Maneuver Training Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas] and given a 60 day furlough [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time]. In November 1945, Clift was sent to a reassignment center at Fort Sam Houston [Annotator's Note: now part of Joint Base San Antonio in San Antonio, Texas] and told he would soon be going to Japan to serve in the Army of Occupation. However, at the same time the government lowered the point [Annotator's Note: a point system was devised based on a number of factors that determined when American servicemen serving overseas could return home] threshold required for discharge and Clift was released from service in December 1945. He received a Purple Heart [Annotator's Note: the Purple Heart Medal is award bestowed upon a United States service member who has been wounded as a result of combat actions against an armed enemy] which gave him five points. He took advantage of the G.I. Bill [Annotator's Note: the G.I. Bill, or Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was enacted by the United States Congress to aid United States veterans of World War 2 in transitioning back to civilian life and included financial aid for education, mortgages, business starts and unemployment] and attended college, graduating in 1948. Clift has dealt with foot problems caused by trench foot [Annotator's Note: immersion foot syndrome] since the war. When he returned home, he was determined to forget the entire ordeal. Thirty years later Clift was asked about his training and wrote down his entire war story. This was the first time in 30 years he had thought about the war at all, and he realized that he had forgotten some things. His first wife and children knew almost nothing about his time in the Army. He went into the Peace Corps [Annotator's Note: volunteer program run by the U.S. government for providing international social and economic development assistance] for two years in Honduras. He divorced his first wife and married his second wife. His wife died in a nursing home years later.

Gilbert Clift survived the war by being lucky. He did not have any kind of religious experience. He has done a pretty good job about forgetting his World War 2 experience. About 30 years ago he wrote down some of his memories and he has some photographs. He fought in the war because he made a choice to volunteer to enlist in the hopes of not being in the infantry. Clift is anti-gun and anti-war, but realizes the role played by America in World War 2. His life was changed by the war because it interrupted his college experience. He also developed a cough from his service experience that he still suffers from today. He takes medications to help relieve his condition. Today he feels that, although reluctantly, he did his part to the best of his ability and is happy to take advantage of Veterans Affairs benefits afforded to him. Without America's help, Clift believes that the British would have gone down the tube, and the world would have suffered severely. He believes the wars America was involved in after World War 2 have been unnecessary and political. He believes there should be institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana], and we [Annotator's Note: the United States] should continue to teach World War 2 to future generations because this was the last successful war.