Published Aug. 4, 2003
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20030804/EXTRAS02/308040325/0/search

Veteran Remembers WWII camps

By Jennie Jones Giles
Since 1927, Marvin “Jake” Owings has been visiting Saluda, except during World War II, when the English professor became an officer of an armored division and was in Germany and France fighting the forces of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Owings was born in 1909 in Rock Hill, S.C., the youngest of four sons of a Methodist minister.
“I lived all over the upper part of South Carolina,” he said. “We spent four years here and four years there.”
The family moved from town to town as his father was sent every four years to a different church. He attended Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C., where he was a member of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and joined the Army ROTC program.
One of his fraternity brothers had a sister, Nettie Smith, whom Owings wooed for seven years. She was the daughter of Dr. Daniel Lesesne Smith, the pediatrician who operated a hospital for children in Saluda in the first half of the 1900s. Thus began Owings’ 76-year tie to Saluda.
After graduation from Wofford in 1931, Owings earned his master’s degree in English from Vanderbilt University, got a job as a high school teacher in Darlington, S.C., married and returned to Vanderbilt, where he earned a doctorate in Middle English.
It was 1938, Hitler was in control of Germany, and Owings and his wife decided to tour Europe.

Europe and war

“We went over on a German ship,” he said. “Every night after dinner we watched movies of Nazi propaganda and would see Hitler haranguing the German people. They tried to intimidate us as we traveled through Germany. We got on a boat in Cologne and went down the Rhine. At every harbor we would see on the roads the huge Nazis flags flying on both sides. They tried to coax us to join their side with their enthusiasm for the Nazi regime.”
Within a few years, Owings would find himself fighting against the Nazis and, instead of traveling down the Rhine as a tourist; he was battling to cross the river from France into Germany.
Three and a half years after his return from Europe, the Georgia Southern professor, who was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve infantry, received orders for active duty. Instead of being sent to an infantry unit, he was shocked to find himself at Fort Knox, Ky.
“I’d never seen a real tank, but after five weeks I was a full-fledged armored officer,” Owings said. “I learned to drive every vehicle.”
Owings spent several months in training. At Camp Chaffee, Ark., he trained officers in infantry tactics. He was assigned to the 14th Armored Division and began maneuvers in the mountains of Tennessee. He was supposed to get a two-week leave.
“But we got on a train, loaded up and went to Europe,” he said. “We passed by Gibraltar and steamed into the Mediterranean. At night we turned direction and landed at Marseilles.”

Alsace

It was October 1944, four months after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. The 14th Armored Division was assigned to the 7th Army under Gen. Alexander M. Patch. Within two weeks, Owings, who was part of the Combat Command Reserve, found himself in the Italian Alps, along the French-Italian border.
“We were sent there just to get bloodied and learn,” he said. “We were told we could not advance into Italy. We had to patrol.”
Owings said the border was dangerous and heavily mined.
“If you stepped on a shoe mine, you lost a foot,” he said.
Toward the end of November, the division began moving toward the Vosges Mountains in the Alsace region of France along the German-French border.
Owings was a lieutenant colonel and second in command of the 5,000 men of the CCR. They arrived in the Vosges Mountains a short time before the Battle of the Bulge began. The battalion was assigned a defensive position in the mountains.
“That’s no place for armor to be,” he said. “You have to have a road or flat area, but there we were in a defensive position. We were strung out defensively in the mountains on a 13-mile front.”
In mid-December, Hitler ordered an assault on the Allied forces in the Ardennes along the Belgian-Luxembourg-German border.
More than 200,000 men in 13 infantry and seven panzer divisions and with nearly 1,000 tanks and almost 2,000 guns began moving against the Allies. Five more divisions moved forward in a second wave, historians say, while still others followed in reserve. The Battle of the Bulge had begun.
It was the worst European winter of the 20th century. The Germans opened their surprise attack along a 50-mile front. Owings and the 14th Armored Division were to the south, in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.
“I was out supervising and checking on strong points,” he said. “I was walking patrol back and forth day and night.”
The Germans failed to quickly break through Allied lines in the Ardennes, so Hitler decided to attack the southern Allied front, where Owings was located. On New Year’s Eve of 1944, the Germans launched a strong force against the troops in Alsace. In January 1945, the 14th Armored Division was in a bitter defensive fight.
“I was in this schoolhouse in Baerenthal where we had our headquarters, right up in the front lines,” Owings said. “Artillery was firing at us, and then they came with a charge. We were fighting out of our command post. It’s our job to direct the troops. An officer’s not effective if he’s involved in a dog fight.”
The only weapon Owings had was a .45 pistol and he was firing it.
“That was the only time I ever got warm in combat,” he said. “We were burning all our secret papers and call sign lists. We burned everything.
“We notified the division we were being overrun,” Owings said. “So the division sent a tank company up, but the ground was covered in ice and snow at least 12 inches deep. The tanks had difficulty getting up the hills.”
They began withdrawing. But before leaving, Owings suffered a thigh wound from German artillery. With no medics nearby and no time to waste, he removed the shrapnel himself.
“His attitude was very much `pull yourself up and keep going,'” said retired Army Lt. Col. Leland Whipple, who served with Owings.
“I was more concerned about getting myself out alive,” Owings said.
Although forced to withdraw, the division remained intact. The Germans attacked at Hattan and Rittershoffen in the middle of January. Military men and armor met in towns, fields and roads.
“We had some tough fighting,” said Owings. “This little town (Hattan) was about a mile long. We were on the west side and the Germans were on the east side of the Main Street. We were hiding in basements and fought there two weeks. We couldn’t move and they couldn’t move.
“I lost one of my best officers there,” he said. “He had lost so many of his men he turned to hatred. You do that you’re going to get killed because you do foolish things. You’ve got to keep your perspective. You have to look out for your men, your GIs, and try to direct them so they will survive and carry out their jobs.”
The division was ordered to move back behind the Moder River in a night withdrawal.
“It’s the most dangerous maneuver any division can make,” said Owings. “It was handled beautifully and this was on ice at night.”
By March, the 7th Army had repulsed the German attack and had a short time to rest and head for the Rhine River. The 14th Armored Division crossed the river Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945.

Liberators

Owings described several “hot” fights as the division moved through Germany.
“We continued to attack one town after another,” he said. “These little German towns were just everywhere. We were moving and liberating POWs.”
Owings unit liberated Hamalburg, where Gen. George Patton’s son-in-law was being held prisoner. Another unit had attempted to liberate the camp, loaded the prisoners up and began moving out, but the Germans knew and were waiting on them, Owings said.
The Germans returned the prisoners to the prison camp, including Patton’s son, who was wounded.
The 14th Armored Division liberated Stalag VII at Moosburg, where 110,000 Allied prisoners of war were being held, including an estimated 30,000 Americans.
In an official history of the division, the scene of the Moosburg liberation was described.
“Scenes of the wildest rejoicing accompanied the tanks as they crashed through the double 10-foot wire fences of the prison camps. There were Norwegians, Brazilians, French, Poles, Dutch, Greeks, Romanians, Bulgars. There were Americans, Russians, Serbs, Italians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Australians, British, Canadians — men from every nation fighting the Nazis. There were officers and men. Twenty-seven Russian generals, sons of four American generals. There were men and women in the prison camps — including three Russian women doctors. There were men of every rank and every branch of service. There were war correspondents and radio men. Around the city were thousands of slave laborers, men and women. All combined to give the 14th the most incredible welcome it ever received. Men, some of them prisoners five years, cried and shouted and patted the tanks.”
The 14th Armored Division earned its nickname, the Liberator Division. Two days after the liberation of the infamous concentration camp at Dachau, Owings toured the camp.
He saw the gas chambers and the crematorium, where thousands of Jews were killed.
“The dogs were still there, penned up,” he said. “They were fierce, they truly were, and very vicious. About every few years everybody ought to see Schindler’s List. People really need to know what went on.”
The division kept rolling and turned south toward the Austrian border. The division’s last rounds were fired May 2, 1945.
Owings spent several months in Germany with the occupying forces. While there, he met up with a brother and visited Austria and Italy. He toured the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s hideaway in the Austrian mountains. For souvenirs, he picked up a piece of melted glass and metal from Hitler’s headquarters and two pieces of tile from Hitler’s bathroom and two from Eva Braun’s bathroom.
“Hers are an oyster color and his are robin blue,” he said.
Owings arrived back in the United States soon after Christmas 1947.

Postwar

He accepted a position as an associate professor of English at Clemson University, from which he retired in 1975 as emeritus professor and head of the English department. He reached full professor rank in 1951. In 1969, he was named the first head of Clemson’s English department. The M.A. Owings Teaching Assistantship was established in 1998 to support a graduate student chosen by the chair of Clemson’s English department. He spent 60 years in the Army Reserve, retiring as a colonel in 1961.
Owings has two daughters, Amy Forester of Saluda and Nettie Sweet of Franklin, and a son, Marvin Owings Jr. of Hendersonville.
He and Nettie Smith Owings were married 56 years. About two years after her death, he married Agnes Beaty. They live in Clemson, S.C., and Saluda.