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TI: And so after ten months, the war ends in Europe. And so tell me how they...

LP: We were out of there before the war was over. The 44th Division came through there and liberated us.

TI: Oh, so they liberated you, okay. And tell me your thinking, your thoughts, when you were being liberated. And you're nearly starving to death...

LP: I'm glad to get the hell out of here, that's what my thoughts were.

TI: So how did they, how do you recover from that? Do they bring you to hospitals with special food, or what happened next?

LP: We were liberated by the 44th Division, they put us in trucks and they hauled us down to what the Germans called a airport, which was just a street, no buildings or anything. Lot of planes, destroyed planes laying around. They had a fire going, and they had showers. And so you go up to the fire, you take all your clothes off and you throw it in the fire. Then you get in the shower and they've got a guy there with a watch, and he's watching you to see how long you were gonna scrub. And then at the end of it they had a guy with powder to spray in your hair because we had lice. And that was it. Then we got on, couple days later we got on a, I think it was a C-47 or something, a thirty-passenger military plane, and they flew us from there back to France, Camp Lucky Strike, France. Because right there was the channel between England and France. It was actually a city, a tent city. That's how big it was. And that's where we got... well, we had clean clothes, so we were pretty much there until we got shipped back to the U.S. by ship. We stopped in England, from France to England and then we got on this other ship. I can't remember exactly how we traveled from France to England on the way back. I think it was... I can't remember it.

TI: But I'm surprised that when you returned to the United States that you weren't discharged. That they...

LP: I was gaining a pound a day. By the time I got back to the States, I weighed 140.

TI: Weighed 140 pounds. But the military --

LP: That was about a month and a half.

TI: But the military didn't discharge you at this point?

LP: Well, we went down to Santa Barbara and we had a hotel there. And we were there for a whole month, and we had our wives or whatever with us. We spent a month there. All kinds of food, music, really luxury, you know.

TI: So this is like special treatment for prisoners of war to help them...

LP: Right, right. And then from there, we got transferred to a hospital near Santa Barbara there somewhere and I spent a month there, didn't do nothing. Then I got transferred to Vandenberg, and that's where I spent the rest of my... I was transferred back into a Military Police unit. I was in three Military Police units, one in Auburn, one in Tule Lake, and one in Vandenberg. And that was the easiest military life I had all the way through was Vandenberg. That was, I had a Class A pass and I had to, I could be off post anytime that I wasn't on duty, and I was on duty four hours every other day. Plenty of food to eat. We had German cooks, by the way, which were way better than the American cooks. I hate to say that, but that's the way it was. And we finally got discharged.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.