Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
3:34 | After they took the town of Heilbronn, there wasn't much opposition left for Jim Denninghoff's unit. German soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds and he remembers one particular teenager who had been pressed into service by the SS.
Keywords : Jim Denninghoff Heilbronn Germany Stihl German Schutzstaffel (SS) Claude Shelton prisoners
Jim Denninghoff graduated high school in 1943 and was part of the Army Specialized Training Program which put recruits in college to study engineering. Manpower was needed on the battlefields of Europe, so he was made into an infantryman and, after a miserable Atlantic crossing, he entered the fray.
The Marseille harbor was full of scuttled French ships when Jim Denninghoff arrived to join the push on Germany. After his unit had taken several small towns and suffered it's first casualties, he came to a sobering realization about his chances of making it out alive. It was also a memorable moment when he saw his first dead German soldier.
What was it like coming under fire for the first time? Jim Denninghoff answers that question and describes the push into Germany that had become inevitable. The Germans had one more trick up their sleeve, though, and when the Battle of the Bulge started further north, his line was thinned out to send reinforcements. Then the battle came to him.
Once he crossed the Rhine, his unit had to fight city to city to make it's way toward Berlin. Jim Denninghoff was in Heilbronn, where the Germans were putting up stiff resistance. Through an odd turn of events he wound up covered in molasses and it saved his life.
During the push into Germany, Jim Denninghoff was assigned, with some other GI's from across the regiment, to retrieve bodies from the field. At first it wasn't too bad, since everything was still frozen, but when the spring thaw came, the job got more gruesome. Once, as he went about his task in the dark, he ran into a German patrol.
Did he ever have any close calls? Jim Denninghoff sure did and he describes the machine gun fire and the artillery barrages that he survived. Once, when the artillery shells began to fall, he dove for the nearest cover, which happened to be fairly disgusting. Then there were those tiny land mines made of wood.
Jim Denninghoff tells the story of the incident which got him a Bronze Star recommendation. His job was body retrieval, which could be very dangerous as it required him to maneuver near the enemy lines. After the war, he had occupation duty, first in a small town and then in Frankfurt at SHAEF headquarters.
