Published Feb. 18, 2002
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20020218/EXTRAS02/202180307/0/search

Europe was home to veteran’s relatives

By Joel Burgess
Following on the tracks of the D-Day invasion force, Samuel “Sammy” Williams did not know exactly where he and the few dozen other Army radio technicians were headed.
Armed only with a portable radio station and a three-quarter-ton four-wheel-drive truck to pull it, the 24-year-old private and the rest of his complement of Army Airway Communications found themselves pushing into France on June 23, 1944 ó 17 days after the beginning of a massive allied World War II operation to reclaim Europe from Nazi Germany.
Only two years before, Williams had been working at his father’s hardware store on Seventh Avenue in Hendersonville.
He had no idea at the time he would end up living in an abandoned French chateau outside the city of Lyon or moving deep into the continent of Europe – a continent his Jewish parents left a few decades before and where cousins, uncles and aunts died in a small Polish village razed by German forces in the early 1940s.
His parents, Louis and Minnie, both hailed from the area around the village of Trestani in Poland, but met in New York City.
They married, and Williams was born Dec. 11, 1919, in Detroit. His first language was Yiddish, a German derivative spoken by many Eastern European Jews.
He moved with his parents in the early 1920s to Asheville, where the mild climate and clean air would speed his mother’s recovery from a lung ailment, Williams said.
The family moved to Hendersonville in 1926 and his father opened Louis Williams, an auto salvage and later hardware store, in 1928. (His mother recovered from her sickness and lived to the age of 92, Williams said.)
When World War II began Williams’ older brother Jacob was drafted. Williams said he too was ready to go.
A draft notice came before he could volunteer and he was off to California for processing. There he got his first taste of the sometimes irrational method of military specialization when the Army decided he had a talent for radio work.
Baloney, said Williams, who had never before worked on a radio.
“The clerk called me up and said, ‘You show a remarkable aptitude for radio,’ which was a lot of baloney. I saw the classification clerk, and even he said, ‘We need 75 men for radio school.’ He took the first 75 men on the list.”
From there it was off to Madison, Wis., for training – then Scottfield, Ill., then the University of Idaho in Boise.
He never went through basic training. Never learned to shoot. It was just radio work. Williams’ job was to keep equipment for airport communication running.
“They kept me in school quite a while. I don’t know if I learned anything, but they kept me there,” he said.
And during that time, the one thing Williams knew is that he would rather be a mechanic than a radio operator. An operator, he heard, could end up bobbing on a ship, hammering out Morse code in a dark cabin while bombs and torpedoes whizzed by.
So during training, Williams made sure he was in the right line when the Army made another less-than-rational decision and split the men, half into mechanics and half into operators.
After training, the Army sent Williams to Redmond, Ore., for his first assignment, then in 1943 to Sacramento, Calif., which he was sure would be the staging ground for a tour in the Pacific. But a quick turnaround shipped him off in the other direction – to Oxford, England, a staging ground for a different operation.
On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies began their biggest assault of the war from England, throwing men, ships and planes at the German-fortified shores of France.
“Our job was to bring the planes back from their runs,” Williams said. “Some of them didn’t come back. I don’t know how many were lost, there was just so much chaos.”
Seventeen days later, it was his turn to go, and Williams, as part of a complement of 25 to 30 radiomen, floated over the English Channel for France.
They followed on the heels of invading Allied forces, setting up and breaking down, never seeing much except devastated towns and villages. At one point, Williams and his group fell in with legendary Gen. George Patton’s tank division. They were ordered to set up communications that night for the general’s troops, but the next morning found all the tanks gone.
The complement ended up near the city of Lyon and set up communications in an airport in that section of Vichy, France.
“We were some of the first people to arrive when the engineers put up a pontoon bridge over the Saone-Rhone River. We immediately went out to the airport and took it over.”
From there the radiomen kept air traffic flowing, guiding Allied pilots on routes that linked Paris, Dijon, Lyon and Marseilles, and later at the end of the war, Wiesbaden, Germany.
The Germans had left the airport, nearby Lyon and much of the region relatively unspoiled because of leaders’ collaboration with occupying German forces.
German commander Klaus Barbie, also known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” was infamous for his brutality in deporting thousands of Jews to death camps and having hundreds of other residents killed for involvement with the French resistance movement.
The radiomen took over a chateau from fleeing Germans and soon learned an example of the brutality. As it turned out, the home had belonged to a prominent Jewish scientist.
“The reason I know about this is we were there some time, and I was sitting in the deluxe living room,” Williams said. “We heard a knock on the door and this well-dressed lady with a boy about 10 to 12 years old said, ‘My name is Mrs. Benet. This house had belonged to us. My husband was killed by the Nazis. I’m not asking you to leave, but would you mind if I stayed in the servants’ quarters?'”
As a Jew in the American Army, Williams said he felt little of the anti-Semitism that European Jews experienced. But some of his relatives suffered its full brunt.
Williams had hoped to visit his ancestral home of Trestani, Poland. But he later learned there was nothing left and no one to visit. The Nazi Holocaust had consumed all his family living in Trestani and surrounding villages sometime around 1941.
“I didn’t find out about it until I was in Germany for a very short time. I met one of the Polish brigades. They were Jewish soldiers and they had joined the British army. And I asked them about this town and they said it had been destroyed. So I didn’t ask when,” he said. “I knew what they had done. They killed my grandmother, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins. They destroyed the entire town in Poland, where they had lived … all those villages were destroyed and they just killed everybody.”
Though he was not sure if he wanted to, Williams visited one of the concentration camps, Buchenwald, after the war when it had been cleared.
“I could just imagine what was going on – just in my thoughts, you know,” he said.
Williams spent the majority of his overseas service maintaining equipment at the small airport outside of Lyon. It was there he got to know many of the locals and picked up quite a bit of French. He was among the first of the Allied forces to get a good glimpse of Paris and take time off on the beaches of Nice. Only toward the end of the war did his service take him into part of Germany.
After nearly four years, Williams was discharged in 1946. He was 26, a staff sergeant and had a good working knowledge of French. But even after the bright lights of Paris and beaches of Nice, Williams was ready to go home
So it was back to the hardware store, where Williams worked until 1988. Now his son, Danny, runs the store, he said.
“I went back to work for my dad at the hardware store. It was all I ever wanted to do. I got discharged on the weekend, and Monday I was at work. Back right away. I had the job waiting for me.”