Henry Langrehr grew up during the Great Depression in Clinton [Annotator's Note: Clinton, Iowa]. It was a hard time. They did not have money to spend. His father was out of work for about nine years and did some projects with the WPA [Annotator's Note: Works Progress Administration]. Langrehr worked with the National Youth Administration [Annotator's Note: typically referred to as the NYA]. He got paid for helping out at the schools he attended. He came from a family of ten children, five boys and five girls. He was second oldest. His brother was drafted first. Langrehr quit high school to join the paratroopers. He had one month to go for graduation. His state recently gave him his diploma for his time in service. When Langrehr came out of the service, he went into construction. He worked for about a year and then went into a home remodeling business for himself. He went into industrial works, building schools and churches. His company had a wonderful relationship with the school system for 25 years. He was not quite 18 when he left school with about 40 percent of his class in 1942. Langrehr wanted to go into the Army. He did not want to be in the infantry. Paratroopers got paid more too. Money was important, but it was also a very good bunch of people. They would give their life for you at any time.

Henry Langrehr had heard about the paratroopers. When he went to join, he told them that is what he wanted. At that time, they were just forming. The training was very rigorous. About one out of five made it. There were different categories and he wanted to be a demolition man. He was sent to Camp Cooke, California for training with the engineers there. From Camp Cooke, he went to Fort Benning, Georgia for jump training. He graduated and went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina and joined the 82nd Airborne [Annotator's Note: 82nd Airborne Division]. He went over in the Queen Elizabeth in March 1943. They went to Belfast, Ireland and trained for a couple of months. They then went to England to an area north of Newcastle around Scotland [Annotator's Note: 14 February 1944]. They did jump training all over England. He and his company commander landed in Sussex on a night jump. It was a nunnery, and the nuns invited them in for tea and cookies. The English were very nice people. Some of the guys would get themselves into trouble. Langrehr did not drink or smoke so he stayed on the base. When the damaged bombers were repaired and taken on test flights, he would go up and jump from them. His jump into France [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] was his 67th jump. He was in the 505 [505th Parachute Infantry Regiment]. His discharge says he made 18 jumps because the bomber jumps did not count. Another reason he did not go into town was because he was saving his money. His girlfriend and he wanted to build a home when he got out. She was working in a plant building machine gun stands.

Henry Langrehr liked to parachute because it was a thrill. They used T5 chutes [Annotator's Note: parachute] which were small and dropped them really quickly. The ones they use nowadays, you can land standing up. You could not do that with their chutes. It was always a rough landing. He never got hurt but many did. The aid man was running all over after a practice jump, picking up guys who had gotten hurt. Langrehr landed in trees, water, and just about everything. Landing in a tree is very scary. In Normandy [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] that happened a lot. At night, you cannot see anything. They jump so low that the chute opens for a just a second and you are on the ground. Some planes jumped the guys too high. That made them a good target for the Germans. When he jumped into Normandy, he was at about 800 feet. He would hang around the base on weekends off and jump from aircraft on check flights after being repaired. He even jumped from fighter planes. He jumped from a P-51 [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft], P-47 [Annotator's Note: Republic P-47 Thunderbolt fighter aircraft], and P-38 [Annotator's Note: Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft]. The P-51 was the best fighter. The German jet [Annotator's Note: Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter aircraft] that came close the end of the war was good.

Henry Langrehr was told about the D-Day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasionm of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] plans. He was not a Christian at the time. It had rained hard on 5 June [Annotator's Note: 5 June 1944]. On 6 June, the guys were going to go to church to talk to the chaplain in the hangar. He went with a couple of his buddies. The commanding officer came in and said that Leigh-Mallory [Annotator's Note: British Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshall Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory], the head of operations had said that Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: US Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe] said there would be about 80 percent casualties in the airborne forces. Langrehr looked around at his buddies and thought there were not going to be a lot of them here tomorrow. He did not think it could have been him. Once he got into the hedgerow fighting, he thought he could be one of that 80 percent. You would see a fella drop on one side of you and another drop on the other side and wonder why the machine gun missed you. He had a few friends die that way. He was going across a series of hedgerows and a Christian friend, John, was running alongside of him and fell. When they pushed the Germans out, they knew they would counterattack. They always went back and got the ammunition off the fallen soldiers. Langrehr went to the area his friend had fallen and found he had been hit in the stomach. He was dying. Langrehr took him in his arms and he was smiling even though he was dying. Langrehr wondered if he would be able to face death like that. Another time, they were assaulting a town. They started across open ground and the mortars were coming down. Bill, a young Christian friend fell. A shell had landed close to him. After the town was cleared, he saw Bill laying there. He too had a peaceful look on his face. That happened several more times. Langrehr was a prodigal son at that time. His family never had a bible, said a prayer, or went to church. You wonder going across those fields if you are going make it. It was a lot of close quarter fighting as well.

Prior to jumping on D-Day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944], some of the fellas were smoking, some were talking and joking around but the closer they got to France they settled down. Henry Langrehr was thinking about his mission. He was dropped five miles from where he was supposed to land near Sainte-Mère-Église [Annotator's Note: Sainte-Mère-Église, France]. Some of the guys drowned dropping in the swamps. He had 120 pounds of equipment around his body and 30 pounds of demolitions attached to his leg. When the prop wash hit your chute [Annotator's Note: parachute], you felt like you were being torn apart. He carried a Thompson [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun] and his .45 [Annotator's Note: . 45 caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol]. When he jumped, the Thompson tore his dog tags off. Because he had the demolitions, he was the first in the door. It was a beautiful moonlit night crossing the channel. They had the door off so that if something happened to the plane, they could get out. He saw thousands of planes. It was fantastic. He could see everything by the moonlight. There was roughly 1,000 C-47s [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft], bombers above and fighters going in and out. He could pick out all the ships down there. He could not believe what America had done. It blew his mind. He was thrilled at the sight. He thought who could ever stand up against that. The Germans were good soldiers and they fought a good battle.

The pathfinders went out about 20 minutes ahead of Henry Langrehr and his men. That alerted the Germans and there was now a lot of ack-ack [Annotator's Note: also referred to as flak; antiaircraft fire] just lighting up the sky. As his plane passed over Cherbourg [Annotator's Note: Cherbourg, France] they took a lot of flak. One plane was hit, and it was veering off. Once a plane tips like that, you cannot stand up. He thought to himself they are not going to make it. A short distance from his plane, one took a direct hit and exploded. His plane had a shell come through the wing and hit one man. Right after that, they jumped. The man next to Langrehr and one across from him were killed by shrapnel. As they flew on, they came to a fogbank and, trying to get through, the planes became disoriented. They then were dropped all over and scattered. It was kind of a good thing as it made the Germans think there were more of them than there were, but it was a bad thing because they missed the designated places they were supposed to be. Langrehr was supposed to be blowing a bridge at Chef-du-Pont [Annotator's Note: Chef-du-Pont, France]. He was attached to Company F [Annotator's Note: Company F, 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division] to blow the bridges if they could not hold them. He came down in Sainte-Mère-Église, which was five miles away from his target at Chef-du-Pont. [Annotator's Note: Langrehr points off camera and says, "that's the greenhouse". He says he went through a greenhouse on his landing.] The second night, the beach forces had not caught up to them yet. The older women in the town were crying and praying for them not to leave them. He told them they were there to stay. They thought they would be pushed out because the Germans were counterattacking from two ends. They held the town and raised the first American flag in the city of Sainte-Mère-Église. It was the same flag that had been raised in Naples [Annotator's Note: Naples, Italy]. It is now housed at Fort Bragg [Annotator's Note: Fort Bragg, North Carolina].

[Annotator's Note: Henry Langrehr says he landed on a greenhouse in Sainte-Mère-Église, France during the Normandy invasion, D-Day, on 6 June 1944. He refers the interviewer to photographs on his wall.] Langrehr's leg bag with munitions broke through the roof and he landed on a table. He cut off his leg bag and he went out to join the fighting outside. He was fortunate that he was the first man out [Annotator's Note: of the aircraft], as some of the other men were shot while they were hanging from the trees and telephone poles. Sergeant Ray [Annotator's Note: US Army Sergeant John P. Ray] was killed there. A German was about to shoot John Steele [Annotator's Note: US Army Private John Marvin Steele], but Sergeant Ray shot the German and killed him. Ray was dying at the time. Langrehr could see the guys hanging on the telephone poles. One man cut off the tip of his finger cutting himself out of a tree. Firing was going on in the area. The French were fighting a fire in a big building. Blanchard [Annotator's Note: likely US Army Private First Class Ernest Blanchard] landed in the fire. The Germans were guarding the French. Lieutenant Colonel Vandervoort [Annotator's Note: US Army Colonel Benjamin Hayes "Vandy" Vandervoort] came in to town the next day and was mad that the dead Americans were left hanging in the trees. They did not have much control over their parachutes. If you came down in a tree, you were in trouble. They carried ways to cut themselves down, but it is a tough thing to do. The British had a different kind [Annotator's Note: of parachute] with a round disk on the front that they could hit and release the harness. It was a battle getting the American harness unsnapped. A lot men who landed in the swamps drowned because the chutes were pulling them through the water. What was thought to be land was not, and it was up to six feet deep in places.

Henry Langrehr fought his way through a church yard [Annotator's Note: in Sainte-Mère-Église, France on D-Day, 6 June 1944]. His objective was Chef-du-Pont [Annotator's Note: Chef-du-Pont, France], so he left the town right away, maybe 20 minutes after he landed there. Time is hard to gauge in first combat in close quarters. He could see the faces of the enemy and they were young. Hedgerow fighting was that way. You see people up close and it is kind of bad. You carry a lot of that with you. When you hit someone with a Thompson submachine gun [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun], it makes a pretty good sized hole. Some of that you just do not forget. Chef-du-Pont was five or six kilometers away. When Langrehr got to the bridge, the fight was going on. The Germans occupied one side of it, and it took a couple of days for the Americans to take it. The La Fiere bridge was further south. The area was flooded, and the water was pretty deep, up to your armpits in some places, but others were over your head. They fought there until they secured the bridges.

Henry Langrehr served under two commanders, Vandervoort [Annotator's Note: US Army Colonel Benjamin Hayes "Vandy" Vandervoort] and Cruise [Annotator's Note: likely US Army Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause]. Vandervoort was in charge of the 505 [Annotator's Note: 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division], and was at Sainte-Mère-Église. Cruise was going to mount an attack out of Sainte-Mère-Église to Neuville [Annotator's Note: Neuville-au-Plain, France]. The 8th Infantry Regiment [Annotator's Note: 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] was supposed to help them. Cruise and a battalion were going to attack Neuville down Montebourg Road. They were waiting to go and the 8th never showed up. Suddenly five tanks came down the road past them. The Germans were shelling them. Langrehr and the others were behind a hedgerow. The tanks passed them and headed down to Neuville, so the men took off to follow them. Five German tanks and five pieces of mobile artillery, came along. The first American tank fired and hit two German tanks. Shortly, the tanks knocked out all of them. This scared the Germans and they retreated back to Neuville. Three of the American tanks went down a small road, so Langrehr and the men followed them. The bullets started whizzing by. The tanks had gone up a grade and down below was a battalion of Germans they had cornered. They had them surrounded and it was a duck shoot. They might have killed 300 of them and took 260 prisoners. They captured the German battalion commander. This was on 8 June 1944.

Henry Langrehr was at the La Fiere bridge [Annotator's Note: La Fiere, France] when a German tank came down the causeway and knocked out another tank. General Ridgway [Annotator's Note: US Army General Matthew Bunker Ridgway] went out and put a cable on it to try and move it, because they could not get past it. A lot of guys were killed trying to get that done. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks if the men went back and forth on that road, the Montebourg Road.] Langrehr had to go back into Sainte-Mère-Église [Annotator’s Note: Sainte-Mère-Église, France] on 6 June [Annotator's Note: 6 June 1944] because the Germans were counter attacking from both ends and Vandervoort [Annotator's Note: US Army Colonel Benjamin Hayes "Vandy" Vandervoort] needed help. The bridge at Chef-du-Pont [Annotator's Note: Chef-du-Pont, France] was stabilized so Vandervoort called them back to Sainte-Mère-Église where they fought with Turnbull [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant Turner Brashears Turnbull, III]. Turnbull was something else. He was half Cherokee Indian and he was a brave man. Afterwards, they went back to La Fiere. The next day, they attacked Neuville and Essonne. They fought on Hill 20 too. The hedgerows are about the size of a football field. Trees and shrubs grow on top of them and it is impossible to get a tank through. They had one entrance for the farmer. You could not go through it because they [Annotator's Note: the Germans] had it zeroed in. They were good defensive fighters. The German tanks were positioned just so that the gun could fire through the thicket. They were pushing the Germans back and a tank was backing up with his guns on the Americans. Langrehr went around one edge of the hedgerow and the others came around from the other side. There were three Germans crouched by the tank and Langrehr shot all three of them. One fell underneath the tank. He wondered if he should go back and see what happened to that guy but thought he better not. [Annotator's Note: Langrehr laughs.] It was real close combat. He could see the expressions on their faces. When they see you, it was too late.

Henry Langrehr had times his guns jammed and by the grace of God, he never got shot. The Thompsons [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun] would jam. He was assaulting a village and as they were going through it, his friend Bill threw a grenade into a machine gun nest in a house. Langrehr was going through a door in a hallway, when the grenade went off. It knocked the plaster off and it hit him in the face. He thought he had been shot. Down further, he went into a house and did not realize there were three Germans there. He was raising his gun and it did not fire. The Germans did not realize it, so he took them prisoner. He could have been killed. Langrehr was wounded and captured on 29 June 1944. Until then, every day was a constant push. Fighting through the hedgerows was a miserable way to live. They did not get hot food often and it rained a lot. They would dig foxholes and then be in water up to their knees. It was a monotonous and dangerous thing. The German soldiers were good fighters. He respected them as soldiers but did not respect what they stood for. He had seen things happen. They drove them back once and there were a lot of dead and wounded. The Germans wanted to get them out and put up a white flag. Langrehr's officer said they would both do so. Their [Annotator's Note: Langrehr's group] two aidmen went out to get their wounded and the Germans shot them. They [Annotator's Note: the Americans] did not take many prisoners after that. Langrehr saw that happen to our guys too. They get pushed to the limit. It gets to you really badly. You keep thinking maybe you will get relieved tomorrow, but it never happens.

[Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Henry Langrehr to tell him about 29 June 1944.] They were assaulting a series of hedgerows and had the Germans pushed back. The Germans always counterattacked. Langrehr was in a row of foxholes when some tanks broke through about 50 yards away from him. He saw a tank aiming its gun towards them. He saw the bazooka [Annotator's Note: 2.76 inch man-portable recoilless anti-tank weapon] man had been hit. Langrehr ran back to get the bazooka and as he shouldered it, the tank shot at something behind him. The explosion knocked him off his feet. That was the last thing he remembered. When he came to, he was a prisoner of war. This was near Saint-Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô, France]. That was when Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] started rolling. Langrehr was with some German casualties. The German aidman spoke perfect English. They did not have any drugs for anything. He [Annotator's Note: the German aidman] could not do anything for his own soldiers. Langrehr had been hit in the back and legs. He still has shrapnel in his back. He was in a hospital near Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] and had some shrapnel removed. After leaving the hospital, he was loaded into a cattle car and taken to Stalag XII-A [Annotator's Note: Limburg, Germany]. It was a terrible trip [Annotator's Note: on the train to the prison camp]. They only had two slop buckets to use the bathroom in and it was standing room only. They were only fed twice that week with water and bread. They were in bad shape.

Henry Langrehr and his fellow prisoners of war entered Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz I; Oświęcim, Poland] in a roundabout way to Stalag XII-A [Annotator's Note: Limburg, Germany] due to the rail system being in bad shape. When they got to Auschwitz they could hear our [Annotator's Note: Allied] bombers going over bombing a chemical factory. The fighter escorts were shooting up the railroad yards. They strafed their train and killed 100 to 150 POWs, British and American. The Germans made a barbed-wire enclosure outside of Auschwitz where they kept the prisoners for about ten days. Trains were constantly coming into Auschwitz. He could see the people being taken off and divided up. The dead were stacked up against the fence. They were gassing them so fast they could not cremate them. They would bring them out on wooden carts and stack them right by the prisoners, who thought they were next. The dead were old women, little children, babies. Throughout the day, they would take them over to cremate them. The smell was terrible. From Auschwitz, he was put on trains again to XII-A, which was a work camp. He got his dog tags there and was assigned to a coal mine on the border of Czechoslovakia and Germany. He could see right away it was a very secure camp. It had been an industrial complex of some kind. The commandant lined them all up and welcomed them. He told them if they escaped, they would be caught and shot. They worked 12 hour shifts in the coal mine. The barracks were a bad place. There was not much heat and they were guarded by the SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization]. There were two rows of barbed wire around the camp. In between, SS guards with dogs patrolled. It was very secure.

Henry Langrehr was working in the mine the first day and he was sent work with an old Czech [Annotator's Note: Czechoslovakian] miner. The Germans were extracting oil from this coal. The old miner told him to get to work and Langrehr refused because it was against the Geneva Convention [Annotator's Note: standards for humanitarian treatment in war]. He had not finished before the Czech hit him in the ribs with his rifle, knocked him down, and kicked him. Langrehr was bleeding and hurt pretty bad. The next day, the same guard said the same thing. Langrehr repeated he was not working, and this time his ribs were broken. By the weekend, they did not have to work because the bombers had destroyed most of the railroad tracks out of the mine. They had three days off. The next time Langrehr went into the mine the Czech, who could speak good English, told him if he did not work, the Germans would kill him. Every day when he left the mine, there would be one or two bodies of people that had died in the mines. There were Russians, British, and Americans in there. People died from exhaustion, beatings, and starvation. He decided to work. They had cars they put the coal into. Each car had a number. He did not think the Germans kept track of cars, so he put rocks in the cars hoping to cause damage to the machinery. The Germans traced it back to him and he was beaten again. He learned that he had to work as slowly as he could. The mines were very dangerous. They did not care about the people in the mines. They always ate in the shaft. Langrehr and the old Czech had just come out of their area, when it collapsed. That happened quite often.

A friend of Henry Langrehr's, Jim McMillen, had been beaten up badly by a German guard with a club. The SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel; German paramilitary organization] had a truncheon about 18 inches long. They would hit them on the spine with that and it would knock them to their knees. Langrehr and McMillen decided that if they were going to live, they had to get out of those mines. They planned to escape. They were coming back from the mine in the winter of 1944, one of the worst in years. When they came out of the mine, they were soaked to the skin. Their clothes would freeze on them while walking the three miles to the barracks. One guard did not like Langrehr, and when they returned, he would make him stand outside for an hour. Langrehr and Jim were going back to the barracks in April [Annotator's Note: April 1945], snow, wind, and rain mixed, with only four guards this time. They passed a heavy thicket and left the column. He remembers somebody saying good luck. The Germans counted them at the mine and back at the barracks. They ran quite a ways. They did not realize how close they were to a village. There was a member of the German Volkssturm [Annotator's Note: literally "people's storm"; national militia established by the Nazi Party on 16 October 1944] there. He saw them and told them to halt. They ran to a barn. The Volkssturm entered the barn and shot and killed McMillen. Langrehr had stepped behind the door and found a two-by-four [Annotator's Note: piece of lumber]. He hit the Volkssturm, killing him. He took his pistol and ammunition. He ran and found a stream and took to that. He could hear dogs and people. The water was ice cold. He went about three miles until he could not hear any dogs. He was weak from hypothermia and started walking in the ditches. He found an empty building. There was a knapsack in there with bologna and bread. The next three nights, he went without food and water. He was in a cemetery with fresh graves and he drank the water out of the flower vases.

Henry Langrehr had some near misses while evading recapture [Annotator's Note: after escaping from a prisoner of war work detail]. He entered a building to look for food and did not realize it was a Volkssturm [Annotator's Note: literally "people's storm"; national militia established by the Nazi Party on 16 October 1944] barracks. There were two older Germans in uniform. He had to do what he had to do. They had cheese and bread and he got that. He met German soldiers on the road a couple of times. Since it was their area, they were not looking for enemies. He had to shoot them. They always carried some food in their knapsack. Another time he was in another building and had to kill a man who started to holler. He cannot believe that he got through that without getting caught. He tried to hide out during the day. He was behind the German lines for about two weeks. He could hear American artillery one day. He thought he did not stand a chance going through the lines. He thought it would be best to let them come by him. The civilians came down the road first, and then the German infantry came by moving fast. Langrehr saw a spotter plane. American artillery opened up on the road and just massacred the Germans. It took a day for the American tanks to come. He let them and the infantry pass. He saw a radioman in a jeep, and walked over to him, scaring him. The radioman took him back to the battalion commander. He got some food and got cleaned up. He was still in his jump uniform [Annotator's Note: from the Normandy, France invasion on 6 June 1944]. The uniforms wore really well. He was sent back to Camp Lucky Strike [Annotator's Note: Cigarette Camp, temporary staging camp between Cany and Saint-Valery, France] aboard a C-47 [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft]. He recouped there for a couple of weeks before being sent to Camp Shanks, New York.

Henry Langrehr returned to the United States and got a 60 day furlough home. He met his parents and he got married while there. He went to San Antonio [Annotator's Note: San Antonio, Texas] to have shrapnel taken out of his back and legs. His wife helped him see that God had helped through all of that. [Annotator's Note: Langrehr points out Bibles he gives out when he speaks.] It was probably a fluke that Langrehr saw Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz I; Oświęcim, Poland] due to the Americans bombing near there. His records had been destroyed in Saint Louis [Annotator's Note: National Personnel Records Center fire, 12 July 1973] in the fire and he had not been awarded all of his medals. His daughter-in-law worked to get them. He got a Purple Heart [Annotator's Note: United States military decoration awarded to those wounded or killed as a result of enemy action] through Senator Grassley [Annotator's Note: Charles Ernest Grassley, American politician]. He has the flag from his uniform he wore on D-day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, Fracne on 6 June 1944]. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks him about his medals and more on his wall, off camera.] He was telling his daughter a story that he did not see himself, but his men did. On D-day night, a girl from a family who lived by the railroad tracks near Chef-du-Pont [Annotator's Note: Chef-du-Pont, France] went out and collected the bundles and the men all over the area. They would have been lost if she had not done that. Her family also gathered up all of the equipment bundles and brought them back. She told them about a sunken road that would allow them to get between the bridges to Neuville [Annotator's Note: Neuville-au-Plain, France]. She probably saved a lot of guys lives. She never got any acknowledgement. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer tells of a similar story.] The 507th [Annotator's Note: 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 17th Airborne Division] held off a whole German regiment with only about 120 men. They finally had to retreat and leave behind their wounded who the Germans then shot.

All Henry Langrehr knows about Auschwitz [Annotator's Note: Auschwitz I; Oświęcim, Poland]] is what he saw. The people that they used on those carts wore striped uniforms and looked bad and sick. They would bring the people [Annotator's Note: dead Jews who had been gassed] up to the fence. The trains were running all the time. The stench was terrible. Because there were German guards, they could not converse with them. Even little babies would be gassed. That gas killed quick. Auschwitz was one of the worst nightmares. They did not care that it was out in the open. If they had been able to get rid of all the bodies, people would not have believed it. You talk to other POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war] that saw the way they were treated. The Japanese were bad to prisoners. The camps were all over and some American prisoners were there. How do you describe it? Man's inhumanity to man. There were women guards there too. Your life did not mean anything. Even working in the mine, if you would get them aggravated enough they would shoot you. The Geneva Convention [Annotator's Note: standards for humanitarian treatment in war] did not mean that much. [Annotator's Note: Langrehr starts to get emotional.]

Henry Langrehr looks at it [Annotator's Note: World War 2] as the last good war. The country was united, we were doing the right thing. What sticks out the most in his mind is the loss of his close friends. After that, he did not get close to people. He felt sorry for the replacements, because the guys would not get close to them. It just got to be a slogging affair. One day ran into the other. Just killing, killing, killing. You learn to know what every sound is - a tank, a halftrack, artillery, whatever it happened to be. Screaming Mimis [Annotator's Note: German Nebelwerfer, multi-barreled rocket artillery] sounded like banshees going over. Germans had good artillery and good machine guns. The MG 42[Annotator's Note: German 7.92mm Maschinengewehr 42 general purpose machine gun] was the fastest firing gun he ever saw. The Schmeisser [Annotator's Note: German 9mm MP 40, Maschinenpistole 40, submachine gun] was also good. A lot of guys would get them. He stuck by his .45 [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol]. The M1 [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1 semi-automatic rifle, also known as the M1 Garand] was probably one of the best rifles to come out of the war. The Germans still used horses and Mausers [Annotator's Note: German Mauser 7.92mm K98 bolt action rifle]. You would have thought they would have a better infantry. The German potato masher [Annotator's Note: Stielhandgranate, stick hand grenade] sometimes did not go off and did not do a lot of damage. Ours were better. One thing we had was good grenades [Annotator's Note: Mk 2 fragmentation hand grenade].