1

Rich Kells of Greenfield.

2

Rich Kells of Greenfield.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today and Saturday, in honor of Veterans Day, the Gazette is publishing excerpts from "American Veterans on War: Personal Stories from WWII to Afghanistan," by Elise Forbes Tripp of Sunderland. Tripp's new book, published by Olive Branch Press of Northampton, offers oral histories about military service across a half century. Among her subjects are many residents of the Valley. Today's focus is on World War II. On Saturday, we will present excerpts based on Tripp's interviews with veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rich Kells of Greenfield, born in 1922, graduated from high school months before Pearl Harbor. He signed up in 1943 and was deployed to Europe. He pursued the Germans up the Rhône Valley until he was captured and spent the remainder of the war as a POW.

We got on ship July '44, landed in Naples, Italy, just after the war in Sicily. Salerno, our camp, was on the battlefield. Who do I run into but my younger brother! He went in the service six months before me. ... We landed in Sainte Maxime, got all our gear, put on our hiking shoes, and we hiked for quite a distance. Eventually, we wound up near Grenoble, and this is where I started getting a taste of what the front line was.

We were going into combat, and some of the people were coming back and were mentioning a couple of things I don't want to repeat. ...

Once we got into France, we walked and walked and walked. We went through towns, villages, and the people gave us apples and flowers, the only time I got any thank yous. I'm going hurriedly through this combat because I like to skip over that, I've never talked to anybody too much about some of the things that went on. We were fighting all the way up. ... The fighting is what every combat soldier goes through-basic things that anybody would recognize. I'm a foot soldier, rifleman. I had an M-1, one of the best rifles in the war.

About a week, ten days before my capture, we were in a holding pattern and we knew the Germans were there, we could see them, so we moved up, we got our shovels and we dug slit trenches- not foxholes, which are down deep, just enough to protect my body. ... This is November, just before Thanksgiving. We were told they were going to pull us back because we had been on line and we hadn't had a rest for quite a while. ...

Our bazooka team got blown away, so they needed to replace the bazooka. This is how I got captured, incidentally. This friend of mine, Bill Banning from Boston (I tried to track him down after I got home and I never could find him), they set up a target, an old piece of junk a hundred yards away, they were looking for a bazooka team. You slip the ammunition in this tubular thing and then you hooked it up with batteries and it's mainly designed for knocking the treads off of tanks. We accidentally, and I mean accidentally, hit the target-so who's the next bazooka team? Bill Banning and me. My God, that was bad duty.

We're back in the hotel and word comes up that the unit that replaced us got in trouble and they were getting hammered on line. ... God, we moved out back to the same general area and that was a bees' nest for Germans. We now had a field-made lieutenant, second lieutenant.

There was one building there that they were going to use as a command post, alongside a roadway. The lieutenant said to Banning and myself, "You go up a hundred yards, and dig in and hold." I said-I can remember this-"Well, where are the Germans?" "They're not anywhere around." This is the new lieutenant. So we moved out and dug in alongside of the road, there was a culvert and we moved into this hole with the bazooka. Carrying an M-1 rifle and the bazooka and ammunition, I could have lightened it up a bit if I had taken a pistol but I tried pistol target practice and I couldn't hit anything, so I kept my M-1 rifle. ...

We no more than got dug in than the Germans started coming in with artillery. We're veterans now, we've learned a lot from just being on line, and we know that they're keeping us down in our holes. You're not going to get up because you're going to get hit by shrapnel.

The squad of Germans (about eight to ten people) were shooting away from our hole, they knew exactly where we were, but the bullets were glancing off the road. They deliberately avoided killing us right then: they were trying to tell us, We've got you pinned down. So my partner noticed what was going on. I can remember his saying, "You want to call it quits?" I answered, "Do we have a choice?" And we of course didn't. Now we're getting the signal "Kommen sie out mit the hands up." We understood that.

We got out, put our hands up, we walked up this little knoll where they were above us. They had complete control. We're now in the hands of the Germans and our troops are shooting furiously at the Germans and us. The troops behind me could see this action; we were in touch with one another. When the Germans started shooting at us that alerted the main part of our unit. Believe it or not, I was screaming and yelling to hold the fire and it got back, so whoever gave the order to fire gave the order to cease fire.

Over the knoll, down in a ravine, we were marched back to this building, fantastic, with all the typewriters and clerical people, you wouldn't believe. Not 200 yards away from where we were and nobody knew they were there. ... They were looking for information as to where the tanks were located, who my commanding officer was. I can remember saying, "I'm not telling you." Well," he said, "I'm telling you, it's Captain Robinson." They had all that information anyway-they'd captured a lot more people than myself and Banning. We were eventually all gathered up en route to the main holding camp for POWs.