James Sandoz was born in New Iberia, Louisiana in January 1924. His father was a farmer. They did not have electricity or running water. School was hard because his mother did not speak English. His father would be in bed early, so Sandoz had to study on his own. He was sent to a Catholic school and his father sometimes paid for it with chickens. There were only 11 grades then, so Sandoz graduated at 17. He went to SLI [Annotator's Note: then Southwestern Louisiana Institute of Liberal and Technical Learning, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette or ULL] in Lafayette for a few months. He turned 18 and decided to quit school and get a job. He got married in September [Annotator's Note: September 1942], and in February 1943 he was drafted. His daughter was born in March while he was at Camp Hulen, Texas. He got to visit his wife and daughter for three days. His mother-in-law had friends at the Red Cross. She got the Red Cross to call and get him an extension to five days. He returned to Hulen and did his basic training. He then moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee for more training and then to South Carolina. In late 1943, he went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. In December, he got word he was headed overseas. In February 1944, he boarded the RMS Queen Mary to cross the Atlantic. It took six days to get to England. They were there for three or four months. They left England a few days after D-day [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. The weather was too rough to land, so they stayed about five days on the boat. After the weather cleared, they went ashore on Omaha Beach [Annotator's Note: Normandy, France]. They went into Saint-Lô, [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô, France] where they had their first action. They were assigned to the 29th Infantry Division and provided them protection from low-flying aircraft. They stayed with them a good while. There were about 25 bombers flying and they demolished Saint-Lô. From there they just kept going up through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. They were in Germany when the war ended.

James Sandoz was drafted in 1943. He was at school when Japan invaded [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] and that is what brought it to the head. He was in college when we [Annotator's Note: the United States] declared war and he quit school. He did a lot of physical training at first, a lot of walking and digging. He understands why now. In action, they had to dig their gun down to keep it at a certain elevation. They had 40mm [Annotator's Note: Bofors 40mm antiaircraft autocannon] and 50mm guns [Annotator's Note: Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun]. They would put a wall of sandbags around it. He thought the 40mm was good gun for the height it could reach. In France, they could hear rifle shots and realized they were being fired at. The lieutenant had put them ahead of the infantry instead of behind them. They killed 14 to 17 Germans because they were firing at them point blank. Sandoz was a corporal gunner. The first job he had was as gunner. He would move the gun in the general direction of an aircraft. The first shot was a tracer, and the other men would adjust to that. He was to make sergeant, but he got busted one night. They were near the Rhine River and had instruction not to fire unless they had orders. He was listening to the radio and heard Axis Sally [Annotator's Note: Mildred Gillars] give their location. It was freezing and raining. They were pulling four hours on and three hours off. His sergeant got sick and was sent home. Sandoz was to take his place the next day. That night Sandoz decided not to pull that much guard. A major would go around and check the guns. One gun crew would call the next gun crew and tell them he was coming. That night, there was no communication. Sandoz was on guard when the major approached. The other guard was asleep. Sandoz was relieved of his stripes. They had some good officers and they had some not so good. He volunteered to be the cook for the crew and did that until the war was over. They had four guns in each battery and there were four batteries. They all had the 50mm and a couple of half-tracks. He was in A Battery [Annotator’s Note: Battery A, 554th AAA (AW) Battalion, 29th Infantry Division].

James Sandoz had a good trip overseas even though it took longer than normal. They made a lot of detours due to submarines. The RMS Queen Mary was a good ship going over. The smaller ships coming back were rough. The worst part of the trip was the food. It was English food. The first breakfast they had was liver and nobody ate it. The English were alright. They could go to little pubs nearby. He was in A Battery [Annotator’s Note: Battery A, 554th AAA (AW) Battalion, 29th Infantry Division] and they stayed in a big castle. The beer was more like cider. They did not get to mix that much with the people. It was pretty country. Some guys were lucky and could go into town. There was no bomb damage there. He was in Wales for a while too, but it was strictly training. Sandoz could speak French. They did not trust the French near the coast that much, because the Germans had been there a while. Further in, it was different. In Belgium and Holland, were the best people. Sandoz spoke Cajun [Annotator's Note: archaic form of French spoken in southern Louisiana] and it was different. Holland was clean. An old gentleman in Belgium came to them when they were digging potatoes in a field. He offered to dig them and cook for them. He cooked for six to eight of them. The people were happy to see them. In Holland, he saw a young lady in the town square who had been fraternizing with the Germans. They cut all of her hair off in public as punishment.

James Sandoz's battery [Annotator's Note: Battery A, 554th AAA (AW) Battalion, 29th Infantry Division] was credited with shooting down two German aircraft. One was a paratrooper transport plane. The other was a fighter plane they shot down in France. They had to go make sure everything was in line if they shot a plane down. They drove in a jeep and found the plane. The pilot was dead. They shot at a lot of them. The other plane was a Ju-52 [Annotator’s Note: German Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft]. They were not supposed to fire. The plane was flying real low for some reason. Two gun crews shot at him. Sandoz and another guy were going souvenir hunting, but it was cleaned up when they got there. He only got some flags. The plane was destroyed and scattered so they did not go in it. They got a report from an officer about how many were on board. So many things happened with them that never got written down. Sandoz was the secretary for the whole battalion and kept a diary. Every time they meet, somebody will say something that they did not know. He can remember traveling behind the infantry. They had the guns and crew in two trucks for each battery. Sandoz was behind the gun truck when the gun went off. The shell hit underneath his truck and destroyed the engine. They had sandbags under them that protected them. They made the sign of the cross after that. He cannot find that in any news.

German aircraft shot at James Sandoz's battery [Annotator's Note: Battery A, 554th AAA (AW) Battalion, 29th Infantry Division] several times. They were in an orchard once and they hit some trees but not them. They would drop personnel bombs that would explode and send out some small ones. One of the bombs killed a Mexican [Annotator's Note: Mexican-American] soldier. They had a lot of Mexicans in their outfit. There were times there were shells that just missed them. He cannot understand why there were so many planes flying over them at high speed and low on 1 January [Annotator's Note: 1 January 1945]. There is no way they could hit the antiaircraft gun units. Maybe they were trying to stay away from the 90mms [Annotator's Note: 90mm Gun antiaircraft artillery] and 102mms [Annotator's Note: QF 4 inch MkV gun] that fire up high. The gun units could shoot them down easily. You do not hear about this though. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer states that he thinks seven aircraft were shot down that day. Sandoz tells the interviewer of information that he has received from a woman. The interviewer then asks him how he feels about shooting down a transport aircraft with 16 paratroopers aboard.] This was a war. It never bothered them. Sandoz captured a German. They had some time off and he started souvenir hunting. There were a lot of trenches. He was walking with no rifle and he jumped into some straw. An elderly German jumped up and raised his hands. Sandoz turned him over to other men. That is not listed in their history.

Being a Cajun [Annotator's Note: a member of self-contained communities in southern Louisiana of French Canadian descent] in the military was good for James Sandoz. The battalion [Annotator's Note: Sandoz was a member of Battery A, 554th AAA (AW) Battalion, 29th Infantry Division] was maybe 50-50 Northern and Southern men. A lot were Mexican [Annotator's Note: Mexican-American], and they made good friends. A lot were from the Detroit, Michigan area. They were different. They would talk about how much money there were making, and he was envious of them. When they were training in Hulen, Texas, it was so hot that they [Annotator's Note: Southerners] had the advantage. They did a 33 mile hike and a lot of them fell on the side. A lot a people asked questions about being a Cajun. The Mexicans would learn more Cajun [Annotator's Note: archaic form of French] than he would their language. He feels bad about this now. Being Cajun, helped in France and in Belgium. He could communicate. At that time, he felt that the South was behind the times. When they started having reunions, and he went to Michigan there was a difference. Things were a lot more even. Sandoz hosted more reunions than anybody else. He hosted smaller reunions because a lot of the men in his area could not afford to go to the major reunions in Michigan. They loved to come to Harvey [Annotator's Note: Harvey, Louisiana] because they would do more, and the entertainment was not that good. They had one reunion on the RMS Queen Mary when it was being taken from Florida to California. He enjoyed going aboard it, it brought back memories. He had not seen much of the ship going to war.

James Sandoz was in Germany when the war ended. He does not recall how he heard, perhaps by an officer. They were moved to a beer factory that they were guarding. It was a big celebration. A few days later, it was rumored they were going to Japan. That brought everything down again. But then they dropped the big bomb [Annotator's Note: Nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on 6 and 9 August 1945] and that cleared it up in Japan. They were not happy about going to Japan. He was in Germany for five months after the war ended. They played a lot of ball touring the area. When not playing sports, they had a lot of guard duty. He started boxing to get off duty. He then went to France where he got a ship to Boston. It took seven to nine days of a rough ride to get home. They were served ice cream, all they could eat. Sandoz's life changed for the best in the war. He thinks young men should get one year of training in the service for discipline. When he was at Camp Hulen, Texas, they were getting ready to get their rifles issued. It was hot and they were shirtless. A Mexican [Annotator's Note: Mexican-American] came up and offered him a cigarette. He took it and started feeling good. The sergeant came out to issue the rifles. He called them to attention and asked Sandoz why he was not wearing a shirt. He gave him five minutes to get it and get back. That was the last time Sandoz ever thought of smoking weed [Annotator's Note: marijuana]. That was the discipline part of it. He was not a bad kid, but he sees where he could have gone astray but for that. He went to Washington and the younger people were thanking him for what he did. He blames the country for not teaching this history in school. If we go to war right now, where are we going to get the people from? He would not go overseas with some of these kids. He left his mother and daddy, wife and daughter. Oklahoma Junior College had called him to offer him a scholarship in football. His mother did not want him to do it. Then he got drafted and went overseas. It helped a lot of people. It destroyed some but helped more. He was more mature, and it helped his career afterwards. It made him respect people too. He had a successful business and did it through persistence and work. When you are in the service, you have to do it. A lot of times, it was a matter of life and death. Sandoz feels it is definitely important to have The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana]. He hears people talk about what they learned that they did not know. It is a reminder. He loves the Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe; 34th President of the United States] quote that no matter what happens, he made the decision alone. He took full responsibility.