Biography of Jerry Bayer
CCCman, Camp Long Lake, CCC WI HQ, Sparta, Wisconsin
Surgical Technician, 7th Army, USA
I went in 1941, early summer, to run away from a bad home life. I got there by train and truck. The trip was exciting, it was my first train ride.
I was in the CCC at Camp Long Lake, WI, near the Michigan Border. My short time there was interesting. The camp was set up for work in the Nicolet National Forest, which covers a lot of territory in Northern Wisconsin. It was between Tipler and Newald. The only "big" city was Iron River, Michigan, about 20 miles away. All of these towns were on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, which made it easy to get from one town to the other. I believe we could travel for free, or at a much reduced price. Hitch hiking was also fashionable at the time.
It was, I believe, one of the first camps in the state. It was an old camp and we had good barracks, already built, when I was there. It was rough living at the camp. The barracks were army type with black tar paper on the outside which had little effect on cold weather in winter or heat in the summer. I was there in June so the weather was OK. Pot bellied stoves fed with wood provided heat when needed.
We had footlockers for our things. My foot locker was made of a light sheet metal like steel. It had a paper type lining with a wallpaper like design and a removable shelf. It was made exactly like the GI one I had in the army.
My company did Forestry work for a State Park. The work was heavy cutting of roads through a state park and forest fire fighting.
One of the camp's prime projects, as I remember, was to open land-locked lakes to the public. To do so the boys first had to cut a road through the forest so they could get to the lake. Once that was done, they would build ramps to launch boats and build picnic grounds. The one project I worked on was on a lake that one of the officers of the camp had property on. It was just coincidental that the lake was one he chose to add improvements to. We all knew it but what the hell? That's the way things were during the depression.
We ate in the Mess Hall, where we were served by K.P.s. The food was very good. The food was like army chow. We ate a healthy breakfast of eggs or pancakes with oatmeal or other cereal. Milk was plentiful and so was the strong coffee. We ate lunch (dinner) was brought out to us where we worked in the field and was mostly big bologna sandwiches, a piece of fruit and either Kool Aid or lemonade. Supper was ham, roast beef, chicken or other meat with mashed potatoes a canned vegetable and desert. Recreation was meager. You went to town or played cards.
Being in the company of men and boys all day and night brought on the need to see women. A trip to town meant, like the army, a search for manly relief and getting as well "loaded" as possible. To go to work the next morning without a hangover was rare. Each town had bars where even the younger kids could get all the beer they wanted. The young ladies in town were available for dates, and if that did not work, there were professionals as well. Iron River was well set up for anything a kid wanted. Prices were cheap. After all, it was the depression.
Our Company Commander was Captain Wenger and the project superintendent was Mr. Smally. We would have periodic inspections, but otherwise discipline was pretty easy.
I do not remember anyone else at Camp Long Lake. I made few friends in the short time I was there. One reason may have been that I was a big city kid from Milwaukee where most of the others were tough boys from the farms and small cities in Northern Wisconsin.
After one week on the road crew they decided I was too frail for that kind of work. I was then made permanent K.P. in the Mess Hall.
I asked to go to school. They needed cooks so I was sent. In July 1942, I transferred to the Wisconsin Headquarters camp at Sparta, Wisconsin to attend the cooks and bakers school. Sparta was the headquarters of the CCC in Wisconsin. This was part of the Army 6th Service Command.
I got to Sparta by train and walked to camp. Headquarters was a collection of warehouse buildings from which all supplies were sent to the various camps in Wisconsin and Northern Michigan. These warehouses were manned by men, not boys. A lot of stuff was sent out of there on trucks and by railroad as I remember.
The day I arrived the school was disbanded but I was made a cook anyway. Most of the time, my job there was to cook and serve meals to the men in the warehouses who had a special and separate dining room. The cook I reported to was a Russian immigrant who spoke little English. He was an alcoholic and missing most of the time, hence my job.
This Camp was much less rugged than Long Lake, rather plush compared with the rest of the camps in Wisconsin. Nicer guys. We had all the recreational facilities as well as comfortable army barracks and a large mess hall. I believe we even had a library. The camp was built alongside the Milwaukee Road Railroad tracks and within walking distance from the town of Sparta. Camp McCoy was nearby so Sparta was really an Army town. It's about 100 miles west of LaCrosse on the map. Since we wore army type uniforms, most everyone in the town took us for soldiers. We had little trouble finding whatever kind of recreation we were looking for. It was good duty with a lot of time off to spend in the town of Sparta.
Being from Milwaukee, I was...and still am...fond of beer. I had a favorite bar in Sparta where I could buy the few beers my allowance provided. I have very fond memories of that bar and its juke box playing the Harry James records that were so popular at the time. I do remember being accosted by a man as I walked home one night. He wanted me to join him in the railroad depot men's room for a little romance. He said he followed me from the bar a couple of time and that I looked like the kind of friend he was looking for. That being the first time it had happened to me, I ran like hell back to the barracks.
I made a few friends there, but I don't remember their names. Nicer guys. One was a young cook from Viroqua, Wisconsin. Our mess sergeant was a skinny brute who had some problems. One of his favorite duties was to accompany the doctor as he made his monthly shortarm inspections. There was an officer, called a subaltern, whose name was Henry Venus. I remember too that about three months after I arrived, we were issued new forest green winter uniforms. The idea was to show we were not soldiers. I really liked them because they were rather sharp looking and very warm for Wisconsin winters. The jacket was a lumberjack kind of garment that really was great. After leaving the C's I had it dyed black. I don't believe many of the CCC guys got them or even saw them because the C's were broken up shortly after they were issued. We got ours only because we were at headquarters.
After cook school I went back to Long Lake and was a cook. At Long Lake, we would go into town on our off time. We went into the small town of Long Lake or a larger town of Iron River. Mostly went into bars or to movies. Long Lake was a good long walk from camp. Much closer than our work sites which were 10 miles away.
In camp we would play cards. The recreation hall had a pool table, card tables, ping pong, checker boards, magazines, newspapers, dart boards, horseshoes We also got mail, which was delivered to the camp headquarters where we could pick it up.
There were Cats and dogs that hung around camp for food. There were also Deer that stayed around camp.
Our meals were very good. We would have Roast beef and mashed potatoes, no spam but other cold cuts. SOS for breakfast. I liked it. Breakfast with eggs and French Toast. You could also get candy, and cigarettes, at the Canteen between meals.
On Pearl Harbor Day, I asked to be discharged to enlist in the Army. I left the CCCs and went home by train. My family had saved the $25 a month that had been sent home.
I was home a week later but the Army refused me because of my eye sight. However, a year later I was drafted and went on to be a cook at Fort Custer, MI. Later I went into a field hospital and they made me a surgical technician... because I knew how to use a knife, maybe... I served in Europe with the 7th Army and was discharged in 1946.
My time in the CCCs helped me in later life. I went through the cooking school at Sparta, Wisconsin. It was all hands-on training. I wound up being the cook for the officers mess at headquarters. When discharged, I used my training to get a job at the Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee as an apprentice cook. When I went into the army I was assigned to the Reception Center Mess at Camp Custer, Michigan as a second cook. I still do a lot of my own cooking and enjoy it.
I went back to the old CCC campsite.But the Camp is no longer there. The State Park we opened to tourists is though.
Overall, the C's were good to me. I learned a lot in the CCC and looking back it was one of the happiest times of my life. I, like most of the guys, grew up there in a hurry. Good too was the fact that when I got home my parents no longer had their arguments, at least not in front of me. How wonderful it would be if the government had such a thing now to keep the kids off the street.
I went into the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1941, early summer, to run away from a bad home life. I was in the CCC at camp Long Lake, WI, near the Michigan Border. Our Company Commander was Captain Wenger. In July 1942, I transferred to the Wisconsin Headquarters camp at Sparta, Wisconsin to attend the cooks and bakers school. This was part of the Army 6th Service Command. On Pearl Harbor Day, I asked to be discharged to enlist in the Army. I left the CCCs and went home by train.
I was home a week later but the Army refused me because of my eye sight. I had to wait most of a year before those standards were lowered. Then I volunteered for the draft and found myself at Camp Grant, Illinois, where I was outfitted with a uniform and shipped to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin for basic training. I was there for 6 weeks and trained in 30 degree below zero weather. We didn't get much training except for short hikes and a lot of lectures on VD. It was so cold the water in the toilets froze over. That happened because the firemen charged with stoking our furnaces usually fell asleep. From there I was sent to Camp Custer, Michigan as a cook in the huge reception center. About the only interesting thing there was that I spent much of my time as a cool on troop trains taking recruits to various camps in the country. The mess cars were freight cars outfitted with wood-fed ranges and old ice boxes. We did manage to prepare decent meals for the guys despite the meager equipment.
To feed the guys we would send the front half of the train to the back half, turn them around and have them pick up their meals in proper plates as they returned to their seats through the mess car. On one trip, we had white guys in the front half of the train and African Americans in the back. About the second day the guys in the second half blocked the way for the white guys, claiming the whites were always going first and getting all of the best food and more of it. Being a cocky PFC I told them where to get off and ordered them back to take their seats. The leader of the group just smiled, showed me his long bladed pocket knife and said, "You did say we would be first today, didn't you?" "Of course," I said, "that's what I had in mind anyway." For the rest of the trip we traded front half to back half every other meal and there was no more trouble.
Otherwise life was uneventful at Camp Custer so I and 3 other guys agitated to transfer to a unit that would go overseas. In a couple of days we were sent to Camp Ellis, Illinois, where I was assigned to the newly formed 64th Field Hospital which was to be sent to Europe, where we'd serve in the 7th Army. Half of the guys were cadre and the other half were raw recruits. I fully expected to be assigned to the mess department but the CO said he had enough cooks but was short on Surgical Technicians, because I knew how to use a knife, maybe. So after taking basic training for the second time I was put into a class of Surgical Tech's. We were trained by the cadre who had a lot of experience in various camp hospitals. Our next phase of training was to set up our field hospital under tents. It took 6 weeks to be able to do that. We had to learn how to use all of our portable equipment like gasoline fed autoclaves (instrument sterilizers), generators, x-ray units, labs and operating theaters.
We did well and were then sent to Fort Dix to get some hands-on training in a large orthopedic hospital. It was interesting that the permanent staff there gave us very little training because they felt we would take their place if they were needed overseas. I was lucky though when I was relegated to the case room because I was not one of the head surgical technicians favorite boys. It was there that many wounded men in the hospital would go to have their old casts removed for new ones. This was known to be a very messy job and a waste of time as far as surgical training was concerned. There is a disease known as osteomyelitis that sets into bones that have not been thoroughly cleaned before the case is put on. The odor of removing a cast from such a case is unbelievable. But, anyway, I volunteered for it rather than sit around waiting for an assignment in surgery I knew would never come. Most casts had wounds under them so I not only learned how to do the cast work, I also worked with the surgeons to change bandages and clean out the healing wounds. By doing this I learned more about surgical procedures than the guys who had been assigned to the various surgical wards.
One night there was a bad automobile accident on the post and since I was still working in the cast room with the head surgeon, he asked me to work as his scrub tech during the surgery that would be needed for the accident victims. We worked all night taking care of the men. Still working on an operation in the morning when he came to work, the head surgical technician was shocked to see me handing instruments to the head surgeon. He lost his cool, as they say today, and removed me from the cast room and put his favorite in my place. Did no good. We shipped out a few days later.
We were sent to camp Myles Standish for a few days of shipboard indoctrination. We had lecture after lecture about abandoning ship if it were torpedoed. The training finally ended with a live practice of abandoning a ship. Over the side with ladders. Some of the better swimmers had to jump overboard. Some fun. A few days later we boarded the Niew Amsterdam, a large Dutch ship, in Boston. We were the last to board so we had staterooms. The only trouble with that was there were ten of us in a stateroom built for two. But we had the real luxury, a bathroom where we could take a bath in cold sea water. The voyage to Scotland took 7 days. We had rough weather for the first few days but I managed to hold down any sea sickness by staying on deck as long as they'd let me. The food was miserable. We had two meals a day, breakfast and supper. The ship was run by the British with an East Indian crew. It was filthy. Everything we ate out of was greasy for not being washed properly. Breakfast was a loaf of bread with a smelly lard-like substance called butter. The "bacon" was what we call salt pork - all fat. Then there was the usual powdered eggs. I survived on American cold cereal and powdered milk. A few days out of Boston we found out why we had all that abandon ship drill. We did not travel in convoy. We were on our own and relied on not being torpedoed by the speed of the ship, one of the fastest in the world. We zig zagged all the way and did not see a navy ship until we got into port.
I won't go into detail about our stay in Scotland. We were there from November of 1944 until January of 1945. We found out later our long stay was due to the navy losing our equipment. We lived in Quonset huts and could go into Glasgow or Edinburgh as often as we wanted to. The Scots treated us well. There were places in Glasgow for us to take hot showers and get non-Army food. I had two interesting experiences there though. On New Years Eve ten of us were invited to a Jewish New Year's Eve part. The people wanted to treat us well, especially to provide Scotch whiskey which was in short supply all over Scotland and available only with a special ration card. To make it legal, our host would take us, one by one, to one of the bathrooms and hand us a water glass of Scotch. "Drink it down, there's more where this came from." Upon returning to the party another man would take me by the elbow and invite me to another bathroom for another glass of whiskey. I have not been able to drink Scotch to this day.
The other experience occurred in Glasgow one night after I had been very lucky in a poker game. I went into a French Restaurant hoping to spend my winnings on a good dinner. The waiter gave me a menu which was all in French. Not knowing a word of it, I pointed to one of the items. He smiled and indicated I had made a good choice. When my meal came it was in a large silver platter covered over with a large silver cover. The whole mess was over a flame to keep it warm. The waiter lifted the cover, smiled, poured a liquor over all the meat and set it aflame. When at last I got to taste it, it was Spam. I hate Spam. We had it every other day in camp. So much for my special dinner.
We landed in France at the port of Rouen. It took 2 days to cross the Channel and we had to stay in our English hammocks all the way. We lived in tents until it was time to go to where the war really was. An interesting experience there was that the army failed to provide us with coal for our tent heaters so we started chopping down the trees near us. The farmer who owned the woods had a real fit. Little did we know that chopping down a tree in Europe is the worst kind of sin.
A few days later out trucks and equipment finally arrived and we headed for the war. Our destination was the Rhine River. I wish I had taken pictures of the landscape as we passed through the battlefields of France. There were shell holes all over, bloated German bodies lay around. The towns were nothing but rubble. We stopped at a school that was still standing and set up our cots. In the morning we surgical technicians were sent up to a working field hospital which was in another school. It was there I saw my first newly arrived battle casualties. Nothing could have prepared me for this. We were not allowed to work on any of the operations going on or take care of any patients so I wandered into the receiving area where the wounded arrived. I was stunned by the quiet of the place. They were wild eyed with fear. I made myself useful by talking to them, trying to soothe their fears and anxiety. Most knew by then they would undergo surgery, perhaps to lose an arm or leg or both. One kid, no more than 17, had been shot through the throat and could not talk. He had a tube in his throat in order to breathe. I held his hand until they came to get him for surgery. He did not survive the operation.
A few days later we moved up closer to the Rhine. We knew we were near the fighting because we could hear the artillery. That night a truckload of infantry from the 45th Division came into our bivouac and gave us cases of vintage French wine. It worked out to three bottles for two men. When the truck left, the guys yelled, "Remember who gave you the wine in case we get into your hospital". The next morning, hangovers and all, we moved up to a position near the Rhine and waited until nightfall. Then we moved up further. We set up the hospital in the dark and took our first casualties near midnight. We were so close that our own artillery was firing over our heads. I was never so scared.
In an hour our receiving area was full with over twenty wounded. They were engineers who had fought their way over the Rhine to build a pontoon bridge. They were mostly bullet wounds but later we got the wounded from artillery. That was always the worst. A bullet wound is easy to patch up but shattered arms, legs and torsos often took six to eight hours of surgery and often the man died anyway. We worked there for three days before another field hospital "leapfrogged" over us. Before we left we sent a dozen men to graves registration and sent a lot of German prisoners to the local churchyard. The worst of the three days was seeing the kids just 18, maybe. They did not have the combat experience of the older men and got hit because of carelessness. Scared, God there were scared! To see a kid that young lose his arm or leg or part of his face was devastating to me. I will never forget it.
We moved up again, this time across the Rhine in Germany. We had less casualties but those we had were worse than the others. Our hospital had been assigned to take men who had laid on the field or were hidden in rubble for days. They had lost so much blood that we ran out of supplies and finally wound up giving our own. Men in such condition cannot be given morphine, it would kill them. So we did what we could to alleviate pain by talk and maybe even prayer. It did so little good. Our rate of deaths were so high we could hardly stand it ourselves. Finally we got in a lot of German prisoners. Most had lain too long to help, but the surgeons did what they could. I knew a few words of German and worked with a man of over 60 and a boy, hardly 16. They were Volksturm, civilians who had been pressed into service. The boy was dying and he knew it. He asked me to pray for him. The old man was arrogant and said he hated us. He was dying too but his hatred lasted to the end. That was our final setup in a combat situation. The war was ending. We were then sent to set our hospital for the thousands of French and Russian men and women who had been made slave laborers of the Germans. Most were starving and almost all had some kind of disease. We did this until we were taken out of service to get ready to go to the war in the Pacific.
I think the experience that most impressed me happened during our first setup at the Rhine. I was working in surgery cleaning and sterilizing instruments. During a lull, I went to watch an arm amputation. When the arm was removed I began to wonder what they would do with it. I soon found out when the surgeon turned to me and said, "Here take care of this." He then handed me the arm. To this day I don't remember what I did with it. Perhaps one other was when a German mother brought her child, a boy of about 7 or 8, into our hospital. He had stepped on a mine and had lost both legs. Our doctors worked on him for hours to save him but he had lost too much blood. He lived for a few days and when they did an autopsy on him, found that he had been given too much blood and fluids by our own people. We all tried so hard to save him but our eagerness may have caused his death.
I'll end my story here. I was discharged in 1946. In the last 5 years I've located over half of the guys in the 64th Field Hospital. I've sent out over 20 newsletters to keep them abreast of what happened to us in civilian life. Most of the other half are no longer living, but I did hear from their families. I'm including some of my background material if you want more details of our movements.
I am sharing this because I think the younger generation must know what war is all about. We need to pass all of our experiences on to our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren. I'm also a student of WWI. So much of that war is lost. What a shame. No one knows why 20 million men died in that war.I hope we never forget we lost so many of our men during the last one.
------- Jerry Bayer
jerbayer@postoffice.swbell.net jerbayer@swbell.net
64th Field Hospital, Unit History, 7th Army, ETO, WWII
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