Jack Tilley

Jack Tilley, Sergeant, Army Airborne Infantry

How old were you when you enlisted?

I turned 18 years old three days after the June 6th landing and invasion of Europe. I turned 18 on the 9th of June and I had two more weeks of high school left until graduation. Then I went to the Draft Board but they didn’t take me until September.

I was sent to Camp Blanding Florida for basic training and stayed there until mid-December. During that time the Battle of the Bulge occurred and they were in a hurry to get replacements over to Europe. Those who had finished their basic training were sent home for Christmas and then we were sent to New York City where we boarded the Queen Mary. There were ten of us in a single room.

Because the Queen Mary was so fast, it did not go in convoy. Its fastest speed was about 40 mph, which was faster than any German submarine. We did not sail straight across, but changed course every seven minutes. We ended up as far south as the Azores not too far off the coast of Spain. We made the crossing in eight days and landed in Glasgow, Scotland. We took a train through England to London and immediately got on a ship to cross the Channel.

We landed at Le Havre France and then went to the railroad station where they put us in 40&8s which are small French railroad cars. They were named during WWI because they could hold forty men or eight horses. There were many more than forty men in the cars and we went to our first replacement center. We were in the process of moving closer and closer to the front and at this time there was only about two months left to the end of the war. We went through France and Belgium, spending a day or two at each of the replacement centers. When we got to the Netherlands, we stopped at a little coal mining town right on the German border.

The Germans had already left when we got there. We were standing guard when two young boys came up to us. They had been learning English from the soldiers. We would see them every day and one day they told us that Mom and Dad wanted my buddy and I to come to their house for dinner. Food was hard to get there and I don’t remember what we had to eat except the mother made an apple pie. Apples were probably not hard to get, but sugar was very scarce and here they did this for two American soldiers. We were invited to stay the night and slept in two feather beds.

From that point we went to a replacement center ten miles west of the Rhine River across from the German town of Wessel. They were preparing for an attack across the river and on March 23rd the artillery started firing for about 3hours straight. Then, on March 24th, the 17th Airborne division along with the British 6th Airborne division paratroopers and gliders crossed the Rhine and the regular troops crossed on a pontoon bridge and boats. I volunteered and crossed the pontoon bridge in a truck and joined the 194th Glider Infantry and I became a member of the Regimental Defense Platoon which was in charge of defending Regimental Headquarters which was always a few miles behind the line. We stood guard duty, two on and four off, for the next month and a half.

The 17th Airborne spearheaded for the British 2nd Army across northern Germany and sometimes we would move a couple miles a day and sometimes twenty miles in a day and not always knowing where the front was. We would be on guard duty for short stretch of a street or the side of a building. One of the scariest nights, it was so dark I could not see my hand in front of my face. The sergeant warned us that a previous night a German werewolf (a German soldier) came through the line and killed a couple soldiers with a knife and told us to be very alert.

We would stand guard duty day and night, rain or snow. We would usually be able to sleep under a roof, although a few times we had to sleep on the ground. We had army overcoats and sleeping bags but it was in March and it was cold. The only thing I took off was my shoes.

One day, we took a jeep to see what was happening at the front line. The road took us through some woods, and out of the woods came a formation of about 100 Germans, who were fortunately surrendering. They had no weapons and marched up to our jeep and asked for directions. We told them to keep going in the direction they were going.

About the first week in May, we were called off the front line and sent back to Wilheim on the Ruhr River. Regimental Headquarters was in an architect’s house and our barracks were the Wilheim Police Station.

The war was over now and they set up all kinds of things to keep the troops busy. We could swim in the local pool and I was asked if I wanted to be on the swimming team they were developing. So I got detached service away from my regular outfit and went back to France where we worked out and went to a few championships. I made the next level swimming team and we had a meet in Paris and then flew back to Germany. The ETO Championships were in Munich.

When we were in France, we were there on July 14th, which was the first Bastille Day after the War.

Being one of the guys with lower points, I was transferred to the 82nd Airborne division and we were sent to occupy Berlin in September 1945. We took freight cars to Berlin and were stationed in a suburb of Berlin. The suburbs were in pretty good shape, but in downtown Berlin nothing was standing even though people were living there underneath the rubble in the basements.

While in Berlin, I would get extra duty being a prisoner chaser. This meant I would guard American prisoners while they were performing jobs around the city so they did not escape. We were told to shoot the prisoner if he tried to get away after he was told to stop.

We stayed in Berlin for about three months and started back in mid-December 1945. We spent three weeks in England. I went to Christmas Eve services at Salisbury Cathedral. I was invited to Christmas Tea. I sailed back to New York on the Queen Elizabeth. Coming back it was a more relaxed experience: going over there were 20,000 soldiers on board.

The Division marched down 5th Avenue in New York City in January 1946. We then went to North Carolina to the home base of the 82nd Division and I was stationed there until July when I was discharged.

I was concerned that if the war with Japan had not ended, I would have been shipped over there. The atomic bomb killed a lot of Japanese but it saved a lot of American lives. I could have lost my life if the bomb had not been dropped. If my division had been sent over there, we would have led the way in an invasion of Japan.