Ralph Baer

RALPH BAER

PIRMASENS, GERMANY

Rudolph “Ralph” Baer was born in 1922 in the town of Pirmasens, Germany, a small city in the Rhine-Palatinate region of southwestern Germany, near Strasbourg on the French Alsace-Lorraine border. After arriving in New York, he taught himself electronics through a National Radio Institute correspondence course and then took over two radio repair shops on the East Side of New York City. Three years later, he was drafted into the army and trained as an order of battle specialist at Camp Ritchie before shipping out to France. He became an expert on both Allied and German weaponry and lectured to thousands of Gls. He is pictured above in Tidworth, England.

I was beginning to wonder whether I would ever get that letter from President Roosevelt telling me to make an appearance at the local draft board or at some induction center. It was early 1943 and I was certainly overdue. While I waited, I continued to work at Parkay Radio, the idea of getting out of the rut of servicing radios and TVs being uppermost in my mind.

My dilemma was resolved in March 1943 when I finally got that long expected official notice. By this time the United States was building up troop concentrations in Great Britain. Anybody and everybody who was male, breathing, and unattached was being called up.

I was proud to be finally part of the action. Despite having lived in the United States for barely more than four and one-half years, | was well on my way to feeling at home here. Furthermore, if there was one war that seemed to have the support of most of the American public, it was World War II. It was hard not to be swept along with the spirit of the times. Having had my life turned upside down by Hitler was another piece of the picture. Time to get even ...

A WEEK AFTER MY INDUCTION, I said goodbye to my folks, packed a small bag of things, and reported back to the induction center in the cavernous Grand Central Terminal building. I was assigned to a group of several hundred new draftees and promptly shipped off to Fort Dix in New Jersey.

After a four-hour ride in the back of an army truck, we arrived in Fort Dix in the midst of an early-March downpour. Once there, we ate our first army meal in the mess hall; then we lined up in the stockroom, where we were outfitted with GI clothing from top to bottom. “Civvies” (our civilian clothes) were shipped home. Underwear, socks, shoes and boots, overcoats, fatigues, and dress uniforms loaded us down as we dragged them to our assigned bunks in a large barrack.

Daily close-order drill in the company street started the next morning. It took a while before it sank in: we were going to be bullied and yelled at and generally treated like some subspecies barely worthy of the drill sergeant’s attention. As we got better at close-order drill, we no longer stumbled around like drunken sailors.

Little by little we began to feel and act like soldiers in “this man’s army,” as the phrase goes then. The weather was frigid and wet. I caught a bad cold the first day I was there and so did everybody else. We slept in barracks that were about as cold as the outdoors.

Finally, three weeks later, orders arrived and a number of us were shipped off to a place I had never heard of before—Fort Belvoir in Virginia. I wasn’t too sure exactly where Virginia was, never mind Fort Belvoir. Based on what little I knew about the job of the combat engineers, it sounded to me like I was going to be trained to become prime cannon fodder, preparing roads and bridges for infantry grunts and armored troops. I had been dreaming of becoming an engineer, but this was not exactly what I had in mind.

It was early April 1943 when I started my combat engineers training, along with all those other raw recruits from the Big City and a fair number of six-foot-plus Texans, Georgians, and Tennessee hillbillies. This was also my first encounter with southern drawls and anti-Semitism in the ranks.

True to my nature, I kept much to myself, did what I was told to do, and took the training seriously. If anything, I took it too seriously. I was certainly uptight about my performance. My German upbringing and the martial discipline of that school system were part of it.

Even in April, it was hot and humid in Virginia; we drilled and worked hard, building roads, assembling sectional Bailey bridges and erecting pre-cut wooden barracks; we also laid and removed lots of mines and booby traps, both our own and several German models.

There was, of course, the usual contingent of twenty-mile hikes. We would lug full field packs, wear our heavy helmets, and carry the even heavier M1 rifles slung over our shoulders. I held my own; even my feet didn’t bother me. Hiking, walking, and all other forms of physical exercise had not exactly been my thing, but I was surprised to note how many of the young, athletic looking guys in my platoon had difficulty during the forced marches, while I just plowed on.

Several men in the platoon were well over thirty years old; they had a hard time coping with the strenuous regimen, what with their bum knees and bad backs. I wondered why they would draft some of these guys and felt sorry for them. There was definitely a war on!

We were taught how to fire both the army’s standard M1 rifle and the much smaller carbine. Out on the firing range, I turned into a good marksman with the MI rifle. Actually, I enjoyed firing weapons, a sign of things to come.

During one of our firing exercises, it was my bad luck to wind up next to the platoon fuck-up. Every small organization seems to have one of them. He would do stupid things while laying prone on the firing line. One time, he pretended to have a misfire, whereupon he would turn the rifle around and look down the barrel. I didn’t particularly care whether he might blow himself away, but naturally I didn’t like having a loaded rifle swing by me in the process. When I complained to our noncom about this, I got my just desserts and wound up getting assigned to cleaning that man’s rifle.

I MSSED MY RADIO WORK most of all during those first weeks in basic training and took every opportunity to fix odd radios that were kicking around and needing attention. I tinkered with radios even if they didn’t need attention. In my spare time I wrote my first technical paper: “Converting Radios from AC to AC/DC Operation.” It described the theory and practice of the art form that I had practiced so often in my Lexington Avenue repair shop.

After four weeks of basic combat engineers’ training in the 2nd Platoon, we got a week’s leave of absence. My folks were glad to see me. I was in great physical shape and was tanned a deep brown from the exposure to the strong Virginia sun. While I was home, I moved into my new bedroom-cum-lab. I hurriedly installed all my test equipment and wired up the heavy desk that served as my bench, ready for work. In the short time before my pass expired, I designed and built a tiny battery-operated covert listening device. It consisted of a small microphone, a battery-operated amplifier, and earphones for listening in on conversations through walls and the like.

My naive assumption was that the U.S. Army would really appreciate my compact design. At Fort Belvoir I had seen and operated the crude, oversized, vintage gear that the service was using at the time. My experience with battery operated portable radios had taught me how to build amplifiers using the latest tubes. The army’s covert listening gear was a generation behind those radios, a situation typical of operational equipment in the military back then.

I took my little battery-operated amplifier by train to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Monmouth was the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ headquarters during World War II. I hoped to get transferred there and get an assignment as a radio operator. After all, |was a radioman with almost five years of technical experience.

At Monmouth, I demonstrated my amplifier to an officer, but nothing came of it. It was naive of me to think that an unauthorized private currently undergoing basic training in the combat engineers could simply walk into Fort Monmouth and get himself transferred on the basis of some prior professional ability. The army didn’t do business that way. In the first place, nothing

short of a pile of documents obtained through the “right” connections could affect such a transfer.

During service, my major connection with my previous electronics experience was converting German mine detectors into radios that would tune in the American Forces Network in Europe so we could listen to Glenn Miller. What else is an electronics education good for in the army? Cooks and bakers’ school?

When my leave was up, I left New York and took the train back to Fort Belvoir for the last four of our eight weeks of basic training. By now it was early summer. As usual, the Virginia weather was extremely hot and sticky, yet the daily grind of marching went on. We went back to building bridges, erecting barracks or shooting our M1|s or carbines on the firing range.

On several other occasions, we were ordered to shed our green fatigues, dress up in formal khaki uniforms, and march in formation around the camp’s parade ground. There, we stood at attention in the hot sun for review by some higher brass. It wasn’t long before we would hear a rifle hit the dirt, followed by the thump of its owner dropping to the ground seconds later. Pretty soon, two or three other guys would pass out with a similar bang and whoosh. The moral of the story is this: When you’re in the army going through training exercises, you follow orders, oftentimes suspending your belief and common sense—until you get into combat, where you may have to do exactly the opposite.

One day in July we were up to our necks in the Patuxent River working on a Bailey bridge. It was a relief considering the heat. Soon after I got to work in the water, fatigues and all, I was called out again to report to the orderly room. I got into the back of a jeep, still sopping wet and dripping all over the place. The driver drove me back to camp and told me to report to the first sergeant’s office. That was more than a little peculiar—what had I done this time? Nothing, it turned out; they had received orders to ship me off to Camp Ritchie, then a Military Intelligence (MI) training camp near Hagerstown in Maryland, wherever that was!

Camp Ritchie was a unique place among U.S. Army training facilities. There were perhaps two to three thousand Gls stationed there at any one time, and not one of these guys was a U.S. national—Ritchie comprised a bunch of foreigners! What we all had in common was the ability to speak a foreign language fluently. In particular, men whose native tongues were German, Italian, or French might wind up in Camp Ritchie. Most of us were there to become interrogators of prisoners of war.

We spent the next six months studying intelligence subjects such as the order of battle for every European army then in existence. The order of battle is the organizational structure of an army starting with the smallest unit, the squad, and moving up through the platoon and company level to the battalion, regiment, division, corps, and finally the army—as in Eighth Army. Of course, there are dozens of variations on that theme in various regular foreign armies and also their specialized organizations, such as their armored groups, mechanized groups, or paratroops.

Now, one cannot properly interrogate an uncooperative prisoner unless one can immediately determine such basic things as his rank and organization by looking at his uniform or by observing other telltale signs. An interrogator would have a hard time getting useful information out of his prisoner unless he had the experience to figure out these basics, even in the absence of any insignia, which many prisoners remove and toss away during capture if given a chance. Those were the tricks of the trade, we learned at Ritchie.

Three months into our training, we graduated from classroom instructions and started doing special intelligence field exercises. We often used maps of the area printed in German or in French, or worse yet, in Russian—as if it wasn’t hard enough to get oriented using only a map and compass in some godforsaken part of the Maryland woods. Some GI truck drivers would drop us off there, often after nightfall on some moonless night, and tell us to find the trucks by a specific deadline. The trucks would then be waiting for us at a destination marked on our doctored maps.

BEFORE THEY COULD SEND the non-U.S. citizens overseas, we had to be sworn in. That was the law, or least, it was back then. So, they had piled groups of us into trucks and took us to a courthouse in Hagerstown on October 5, 1943. Once we were inside, we lined up in front of the Maryland judge, raised our right hands, and pledged allegiance to the flag. The ceremony was short and sweet. We were sworn in within five minutes. Then they handed us our citizenship papers. This qualified us to become legal cannon fodder.

When finally our training was complete, I found myself standing outside on a sunny day, one man in a long line of Gls, duffel bag at hand, waiting forever to get onto the trucks that would take us who knew where on our way overseas to the war.

We shipped out in early February on the Mataroa, a British freighter no bigger than about twelve thousand tons. Altogether, there were about sixty MIs onboard, including me, plus a much larger number of GIs from various other organizations.

At night the MIs slept together in a hold below deck, using hammocks slung over the wooden tables and benches where we ate and sat during the day. Antiaircraft guns went off frequently above us on deck, but nobody told us what was going on. We never knew whether the gunfire was for real or simply a training exercise. We also did not know initially where we were headed. It turned out we were part of a large convoy of ships that zigzagged across the Atlantic toward England, in the hopes of avoiding German submarines.

For the duration of the ocean crossing, about ten days, I lived on imitation Coca-Cola and boiled potatoes. I couldn’t stomach the limey mutton that they served us down below. It was forever stinking up the mess room and our hold. I haven’t eaten lamb since, except when it’s been prepared as shish kebab and that basic lamb taste is conspicuous by its absence.

While onboard the Mataroa, a pecking order among the MIs began to develop. Hans Otto Mauksch became our virtual leader by dint of his strong personality. Hans—who was a private first class in this man’s army, but had been an officer candidate in the Austrian Army in the 1930s—gradually became our recognized leader. Hans was about twenty-six—old compared to most of us—fairly tall and imposing, and light-years ahead of most of us in maturity, with guts and leadership qualities. He was abundantly equipped with the chutzpah needed for coping with unusual situations.

He was a guy with a mission and he had a vision of what we could do for the troops with our MI training once we got to England. Wisely, he kept the details to himself.

Heavy betting on assorted card games went on amongst the other troops all the way across the ocean, but not by the MIs; somewhere along the line the first mate was reputed to have been heaved overboard during a game—tough crowd!

WE ARRIVED AT THE PORT OF Liverpool on the east coast of England on a sunny afternoon. Leaning over the railing topside, | watched our deckhands and the British dock workers secure the vessel while we looked out at our first sight of old Britannia. She was already well past the major portion of the clobbering by the Luftwaffe, but the scene looked serene and completely

normal that day. Liverpool was too far north to be accessible to German bombers or V-2 rockets.

We spent our first cold February night at Miller’s Orphanage in Liverpool, sleeping in a cavernous place that had once been a gym where we were quartered alongside troops who had arrived before us. Late at night, we promptly got called out of that huge barn to hit the trenches outdoors because of an air raid alert. The tail end of the Blitz—what was left of the intensive bombing of English cities by the Germans by aircraft and V-2 rockets—almost reached us.

After morning of marching and doing close-order drill as a unit, our group of about sixty MIs got orders to report to the 19th Replacement Depot. On our way there by train, we stopped over in Manchester. While hanging around the station’s elevated platform for a couple of hours, waiting for the train that was to take us to Chester, we got a glimpse of Manchester. I remember looking out onto the street from the open platform that was one level above and seeing that old, grimy textile mill town full of ancient brick factory buildings.

After we arrived in Swindon, we were quartered with other troops in a large barracks. We were assigned a new course of basic MI training, the so-called combat intelligence refresher course given at the American School Center, located in Bristol. It was déja vu all over again!

In Bristol, we were quartered in a large barracks and would soon become an active MI training cadre group for the first time. We would be charged with running classes and lectures for GIs on such esoteric subjects as recognizing German uniforms, ranks, organizational affiliation, and the handling of German weapons and prisoners. Before this, however, most of the group did several weeks of the usual infantry drill stuff, to say nothing of day and night KP.

The major subject headings of various syllabus summaries were:

German infantry weapons—a detailed discussion and a demonstration of German small arms that we had collected for this purpose

Identification of aircraft a two-hour lecture on recognition of U.S. and foreign aircraft in daylight or at night

Reading foreign maps—a four-hour lecture series covering the reading of German maps and an hour each on French and British map reading in comparison with our own

Military sketching—a quickie course in the art of making stride scales and planometric sketches for practical field use

Reconnaissance a two-hour lecture on day and night reconnaissance methods and procedures

Aerial photography—a one-hour lecture on definitions and uses of aerial photos, making photo maps, obtaining stereoscopic images from photo pairs, and so on

Staff duty procedures—a lecture explaining the procedure used by intelligence personnel in handling information from collection to evaluation to interpretation and, finally, dissemination

Additional MI training subjects included a series of lectures on German Army identification, for which I drew several sketches showing the many insignia, patches, head dress, boots, and uniform styles worn by the German Army ground forces and those used by the tank, air force, and paratroop units.

I also reworked a lot of Camp Ritchie material into a series of lectures on German history, with details about the most prominent military and political leadership persons. Abstracts from that lesson material came in handy during our next assignment, when I had to lecture on this subject to large numbers of troops then being staged for the imminent invasion of the mainland. Part of that lecture was an overview of what the German male can expect from life. I made a sketch showing the conscription duties of every German boy and man.

In a matter of a couple of weeks, I was done with the syllabus. Our highest-ranking noncom, Corporal Massimi, became our clerk-typist and helped crank out the lecture notes. Mauksch assigned various members of our group to study my notes and begin teaching classes. The group, now down to fifty-five MIs, was organized into an orientation section, a terrain intelligence section, a German Army section, an aircraft team, an armored vehicle team, a security team, and a training aids department. Our courses covered map reading, identification of enemy personnel, safeguarding military information, German Army, handling prisoners of war, identification of armored vehicles, identification of French, German, and English aircraft, and French and German phrases. “Zip your Lip” also stayed on the program.

As for me, I was soon far more interested in concentrating on our new weapons collection than teaching classes. To that end, I started to pick up whatever training manuals were available on German handguns, rifles, submachine guns, and light machine guns. Although I certainly had no notion of planning it that way, this activity started me on the long road of mastering all manner of detail about European weapons. Almost imperceptibly, I slid into a pursuit that occupied much of my waking hours for the next two years and more.

We packed our duffel bags, left Bristol behind on May 1, 1944, and took a train to Warminster. Our destination was a former British horse-artillery camp located outside of the town of Tidworth. The camp was part of the Salisbury Plain, which was—and still is—basically a very large British Army reservation. It had been used as a training area, where artillery, tanks, and other weaponry had been exercised indoors and outdoors since long before World War II.

The U.S. Army had taken over most of the Salisbury Plain by 1942 and used it as a staging area. The army stationed and trained large numbers of our troops there in preparation for the invasion of the European mainland. There would soon be several hundred thousand U.S. servicemen in the general area. Our common home for an undetermined time would be Tidworth.

We went through our now standard speech of how our group of Mis would serve as instructors for intelligence subjects.

I sat on my bunk in our barrack and updated the lecture notes that I had first generated for the Bristol MI school. They covered the same material of message-handling and recognition of German uniforms, insignia, and weapons, but also some new instructions on the training and psychology of German soldiers, whom the troops would soon encounter.

In short order, we rounded up additional German weapons. In this, we were aided by a ground forces training inspector who saw what we were planning and procured some German small arms for us. The idea was to introduce our troops to the handling of these weapons when needed in a pinch.

I have no idea how all these weapons got to the British Isles. Most likely, they were captured during the North African campaigns and brought back for training purposes. In the weeks that followed, we took advantage of that situation and started hunting for additional German light and heavy weapons, uniforms, rifles, handguns, machine guns, mortars, mines, and booby traps.

Lucky for us, that stuff seemed to be everywhere in the Salisbury Plain and places beyond.

After we had acquired a collection of German arms suitable for a teaching display, Mauksch persuaded the camp administration to give us sole access to a huge, empty brick building. It had an arched, corrugated sheetmetal roof, perhaps forty feet high along the crown. Before we Yanks moved in, this building had been used by British horse-artillery troops for indoor exercises, thus it was big enough to allow drilling horses pulling howitzers inside the hall across a dusty dirt floor. Anything would do to keep out of the British weather and the all-pervading muck outside, particularly heavy artillery weapons!

One of the major pieces of heavy German weaponry was the 88mm antiaircraft and antitank gun. We acquired an early “88” that had been used in the Spanish Civil War and did not yet sport the recoil-reducing muzzle-break of the later models.

We focused our collection on German weapons, of course, since the job of our Military Intelligence training centered on the immediate enemy. Specimens from other European countries would come into our collection over the course of the next year, before we established a second Military Intelligence school and museum in Normandy.

Somewhere in Tidworth, we also found a working model of a German Army Volkswagen. It was open on top, its canvas roof was missing, and it had a two-cylinder, air-cooled rear engine. That early version of the civilian VW was a real piece of junk and no competition for our jeeps by any stretch of the imagination. Our specimen was working and we tooled around in it for a bit. Someone was brave enough to try and give me driving lessons in that crate. After I nearly drove it off a small, wooden, banister-less bridge over a shallow gully, my instructor decided to cut my lesson short.

On several occasions I taught visiting British artillery troops how to disassemble and reassemble the German quad antiaircraft gun and the 47mm antiaircraft gun. The antiaircraft gun barrel was about six feet long, so the gunner sat on a perforated metal seat and traversed and elevated the gun with two rotary hand cranks.

It was recoil-operated like an ordinary machine gun and could be disassembled without the need for tools—exactly like the German MG38 and MG42 light machine guns, except that every part was oversized by comparison. As precision machinery goes, it was a good-looking piece of hardware. I got really fast at taking it apart and reassembling it.

In exchange for taking the time to instruct them in the details of these guns, the British invited me to their artillery range in another part of the Salisbury Plain. They offered to let me fire a German 105mm field gun, lobbing shells from one hillside into another across one of those British villages that had been abandoned ages ago when the plain first became a military installation. Of course, I didn’t know that little detail. [ saw them shooting across a village in the valley below and thought “What a callous bunch!” Nobody set me straight at the time.

A big, burly noncom with a Scottish brogue called out to me and said something I couldn’t understand. I thought he’d said, “Fire!” so I pulled the lanyard of the 105 that was assigned to me and off went the shell. It impacted a couple of seconds later on the opposite ridge of the valley and exploded. Echoes of the sounds rang through the valley for several more seconds, whereupon the noncom sauntered over and asked me whether I was in the habit of ignoring commands. Embarrassing moment! Good thing those guns were laid in properly, so no harm done.

I also gave speeches on German arms and psychology to very large groups of soldiers from the 3rd Armored Division, including their general staff. That was something of an anomaly, for I was still only a lowly private. The armored troops were on their way through Tidworth to other staging areas.

At one of these lectures I read from those notes that I had already made in Bristol. I faced about three hundred Gls assembled in a huge barn of a building, one similar in size to our “museum.” Halfway into my talk, my microphone went dead; I also dropped my prepared notes. Since they weren’t stapled together, they flew all over the stage and were instantly useless. I had to extemporize from there on, but I got a standing ovation by finishing up my talk by yelling something like “Let’s go get the bastards!” Throughout it all, my knees were fairly knocking.

Our weapons exhibit kept growing and its reputation began to spread. Eventually, we wouldn’t allow anybody into the building after hours to see the weapons collection if they were below the rank of major. We couldn’t be bothered to unlock the front door unless they were serious brass—office hours are office hours. Hubris had already set in.

Those weapons soon became entirely my responsibility. Before long I was caught up in the details of their fascinating history and of the technology of European small arms in particular. I started studying whatever descriptive material I could lay my hands on, which were mostly German and British military manuals. It had taken us several weeks of hard work to get the museum in shape for classes and casual visitors. After we opened the doors, over four thousand Gls wandered through our place on their own time.

Our training course was so successful that word got around. The press showed up one day and interviewed us. A story, almost exclusively about Mauksch, eventually appeared in the November 3, 1944, issue of Yank magazine, the Sunday edition of the army newspaper. Mauksch was shown demonstrating a heavy machine gun to Colonel Moore, the station commandant. Next to that photo was a great view of the museum as it was late that year. A very complimentary story appeared inside.

After that article appeared, MI headquarters in London—located at Eisenhower’s European Theater HQ on Grosvenor Square—duly noted what we were doing.

All had gone well except for a detour late in May 1944, when I was accidentally separated from my MI group. Some orders got screwed up and even Hans Mauksch couldn't get them countermanded in time to keep me from being shipped off. Suddenly I found myself among a bunch of other Gls on the way to another replacement depot somewhere else in the south of England. It was not a great place to be. I was unassigned, had no recent combat training of any kind—including no U.S. weapons firing—and I seemed destined to become a prime candidate for combat of some sort in the near future. The invasion of Normandy was just a month off, though of course no one in the ranks knew that.

The weather was abominable. It rained constantly. There was foot-deep mud all over the place. Duckboards were laid out in the company streets so people wouldn’t sink in past their ankles. Everyone was cold, damp, and mostly miserable all the time.

We were housed in old, single-story British Army barracks that had a dirt floor and a single, little potbelly coal-fired stove at its center. In the morning we would wake up covered with soot. Our GI blankets were black with coal dust and so were our nostrils, mouths, faces, and hands.

I wasn’t happy. I had left a secure and interesting job behind in exchange for waiting to be shipped to the Continent along with other, basically undertrained replacement troops. Meanwhile, here I was, pulling night KP, or guard duty. Once, I “walked a post” around a water tower on top of some godforsaken hill in the middle of the night, with my M1 at right-shoulder arms, in pitch darkness! Around midnight, the officer of the guard appeared from nowhere and made me jump.

Like everyone else around me, I looked ahead to an uncertain future amongst troops I did not know. Rumors about the impending invasion of France set the scene.

Probably the worst duty I had during those weeks at the replacement depot was night KP, during which I scoured the inside and the carbon-black outside of GI garbage cans from the canteen, working outdoors in nearly total darkness in the dead of night. I came back to my barracks looking like a chimney sweep.

When I wasn’t sleeping off guard duty or night KP, or wasn’t washing my clothes, underwear, socks, or my heavy GI overcoat in cold water, I sat outdoors during every available daylight hour studying my algebra correspondence course. My feet were constantly caked with mud, and my leggings and socks were soaking wet, like everybody else’s. We still had canvass leggings at that time. Paratrooper boots with leather bindings a third of the way up the calf from the ankles hadn’t been issued yet—at least not to the regular ground troops; that came later. Naturally, and as if I had planned it so I could leave that miserable place, I caught pneumonia.

The next thing I knew, it was morning, I was on a stretcher, blood was trickling from my nose once again. I was feverish and I was being carried—along with my duffel bag—into an ambulance. I was taken to a field hospital occupied by the U.S. Army, somewhere to the north. During my hospital stay, I sat in bed between clean, dry, white sheets. Meanwhile, the replacement troops I had left behind were on alert. Shortly after I had left them, they were shipped off to the Normandy beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

A couple of weeks later, now Lt. Hans Mauksch managed to get me reassigned to Tidworth and I was reunited with my MI group. Who knows how he pulled off that one. Fortunately, Mauksch appreciated my contribution to the group and wanted me back there—needed me, in fact. By now, I was the only member of the group who intimately knew every aspect of each of the many weapons that we toted around with us. They were our most prominent calling card. That suited me fine.

While the battles in France raged on, we remained in Tidworth, training troops on their way over to the mainland. The war was next door, but it seemed far away. How fortunate we were! We had no idea, of course, how long our present situation would go on.

Meanwhile, we were definitely earning our keep. During our stay in Tidworth, over 120,000 American and 5,000 British soldiers received training in important subjects from us. We worked all kinds of hours, and all that before we were even “officially recognized” and attached to Military Intelligence Service (MIS) in London. It was all highly irregular, but it worked.

TWICE DURING MY PROLONGED stay at Tidworth, I got an opportunity to go on leave and visit my uncle, Heinz (now Henry) Kirschbaum, my mother’s youngest brother. Even before I had met Heinz and his brother Fritz in Berlin in May 1938 during my brief vacation there and in Guben, Heinz had already briefly wound up in a concentration camp, ostensibly for “fooling around” with an “Aryan” girl. By the time I met him in Berlin, he was starting to keep company with Lea Goldhammer. I met Lea several times in Berlin during my last late spring vacation in Germany and liked her instantly.

Both Heinz and Lea were fortunate to get to England in 1939. Heinz managed to join a rescue program for German Jews run by a Jewish aid organization in Berlin. That got him out of Germany and into England, where he first spent some time interned at a Kitchener Camp for displaced persons. Lea had also been lucky. She had a cousin in Wales who provided an affidavit for her so that she could immigrate to the United Kingdom. Later that year, this same cousin got Heinz out of the Kitchener Camp. Heinz married Lea and went to work in her cousin’s factory. They moved into a small house in Tufts Wells, a town near Cardiff in southeast Wales.

Winter had finally ended, and with it went the miserable English weather. In the spring of 1945, everybody else had been sent off to France. We stayed behind and waited for orders or a new assignment. Finally, a decision was made at MIS and we were told to report to MI HQ in London.

We took a train to London. Once there, we moved into the Red Cross building at Charing Cross, not too far from Eisenhower’s headquarters on Grosvenor Square. A few buzz-bombs were still coming into London at night. I heard one of them hit one morning while I was standing in front

of a mirror and shaving at our Red Cross quarters. The mirror blurred my image for a second, but that was all. The worst of the Blitz had passed by then. British and American air forces had taken over the skies, and German bombers now rarely ventured into English airspace. Normandy was also a much safer place now than it had been nine months earlier, particularly on D-Day.

Our new assignment from MIS was to move our training activities to a new camp in Normandy, near the small town of Dreux, sixty miles southwest of Paris. The army engineers had built barracks for a Military Intelligence School there.

To get over to France, we boarded an Army Air Force “Gooney Bird,” Douglas C-47, the military equivalent of a commercial DC-3.

We had an uneventful flight that November 30, 1944—just a short hop—to an airfield near Paris. Once there, we boarded a decrepit French passenger train. We rode along for about an hour and finally passed through Dreux and the small French village of Saint George-Motel that bordered our new camp. It was a warm and sunny that early spring day; I saw daisies everywhere as we passed through the village with its ancient stucco houses and cobblestone streets.

Much to our amazement, our “camp” turned out to be located on what we were told had been a former Vanderbilt Estate. Driving through the gates of the estate, we entered what once must have been very beautiful, sculptured gardens. A few hundred feet farther, a French chateau came into view, complete with steeply gabled twin wings. All that was missing was the drawbridge over the moat. The grounds were in bad shape, but the castle seemed untouched by the ravages of the war and the occupation. A Luftwaffe contingent had cleared out of there months earlier, we were told upon our arrival.

Soon our small group got ready to teach again. We were scheduled to conduct our standard curriculum of training courses—basically the program that we had offered the troops in England, but adapted to a new contingent of Gls, mostly officers and noncoms. Everybody quickly settled into a routine. Their work was not particularly strenuous. There was plenty of free time for most of our crew. It was also definitely safe.

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER OUR ARRIVAL in Normandy, we finally succeeded in having all of our small arms shipped over from England; they were our teaching tools and we needed them urgently. The heavy weapons had to stay behind, much to my regret. In no way were we going to be able to cart the 88, the mountain howitzer, those antiaircraft guns, and other heavy equipment across the English Channel. We had enough for a new small-arms display; now we needed a proper venue in which to display our goodies.

I had small group of guys assigned to me for a few days. Together, we planned how to build a really good-looking and functional weapons exhibit. We settled on having one display case for each major machine gun family in our collection. Handguns would be displayed on tables throughout the large open floor area.

We kept an eye out for additional small arms, and over the course of several months, we assembled and displayed quite an impressive collection of European small arms, as well as a few Japanese guns. Those display cases around the three walls were very professional looking. The Smithsonian would have been proud to have them, we thought. Tables located on the floor throughout the large arboretum displayed additional small arms, mostly our large collection of automatic pistols and revolvers, all appropriately labeled. We also acquired a sizable number of German uniforms, several German mines and booby traps, and a motley collection of other gear including some mortars and light antitank guns. These were displayed on the floor against one of the two short end walls.

I was beginning to think of myself as a small arms expert and was busy writing my manual whenever there was a free moment to communicate my insights to the rest of the world. I also studied my collection of small German antipersonnel mines and booby traps, some of which were of doubtful safety. On one occasion, I tried to determine whether they were really disarmed. I tied them in place behind a large rock near my museum and pulled their releases via a hundred-foot-long string. Nothing happened; that I didn’t blow myself up goes without saying.

THERE WAS A LARGE GERMAN AMMUNITION DUMP on top of a hill adjacent to our camp; it was located in a wooded area half a mile behind and two or three hundred feet above the estate. The dump was filled with a great variety of stuff. We had been up there repeatedly to take a rough inventory. Various types of ammunition and rockets lay piled up in stacks throughout the dump. After we had been up there to inspect the place, Mauksch made an offer to an interested ordnance officer of letting him have him at least one sample of each of the different types of ammo we had found up there. Hans also offered to transport these selected items to a designated ordnance depot located elsewhere in Normandy. I didn’t comment on the wisdom of this offer, although my intuition told me it wasn’t a great idea.

That German ammo dump occupied several thousand square feet of wooded terrain. Everything that was ever fired out of a barrel or otherwise launched into a suborbital trajectory seemed to be stored there. We found Polish mountain howitzer rounds, German rockets in their wooden launch crates, Italian, French, and Spanish artillery shells, and mortar rounds of many types and calibers. Cases of small arms ammunition were piled everywhere in no apparent order. It was our guess that the Germans had hoarded this stuff for emergency use with captured weapons, or perhaps it was stored there just to keep it out of the hands of the underground army. There was no sign of matching weapons anywhere, however.

Our job was to deliver as many different samples to that ordnance depot as we could manage to squeeze into a two-and-a-half-ton truck. Our route was a drive of about seventy-five miles over bumpy French country roads that sported large potholes left over from World War I, never mind the current one.

Throughout this trip, I was in the back of the truck, sitting on the wooden launching crate of a German rocket. Assorted pieces of ammo were bouncing up and down on the floor of the truck during the entire trip. Mortar rounds and artillery shells were clanking and banging into one another—but what the hell, there was a war on! Those rounds weren’t designed to go off by merely bouncing around. All the same, we were not too unhappy to unload the stuff at our destination.

I wondered what the recipient was going to do with that motley collection of bullets, shells, and rockets. Possibly, he was an ambitious, self-elected collector of foreign arms, like myself, who would eventually make them his ticket to go home, bound for some appropriate U.S. destination ordered up by the War Department. A kindred spirit—good luck to him!

The following month, on April 20—Hitler’s birthday—someone sabotaged the ammo dump, and it went up in flames. The bushes and other combustibles burned for the next week until the fire spent itself. At the height of the heat up there, stuff would cook off and come flying through the air. Those projectiles didn’t actually explode on arrival, thank heaven! After all, they were not armed, but some of the pieces weighed several hundred pounds.

SUMMER OF 1945: The war in Europe was finally over. The Allied armies were in parts of Eastern Germany, but we were still in Normandy. Plans for redeploying troops to the Pacific were being put into action, so I was ordered to start training U.S. artillery officers in the recognition and handling of Japanese heavy weapons, just in case these officers were redeployed to the Japanese front. Of course, those transfers never happened. We dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and that ended the war over there before any of my student officers had to make that move.

In January 1946, I boarded a Liberty ship and our vessel began to plow through an Atlantic winter storm.

When I returned to New York, I went through the discharge process; I was handed a Bronze Star for meritorious service and they gave me a “ruptured duck,” the embroidered eagle emblem of the discharged World War II vet, which was sewn onto the Eisenhower jacket I was wearing. Overseas, I had already received a Bronze Star, a Marksmanship Medal, a Good Conduct Medal, an ETO medal, and four overseas stripes for the left sleeve of my jacket—one for each six-month period of overseas service. And so I came to the end of my army career—being unceremoniously tossed out into the streets and on my own now!

It was April 2, 1946. More than three years had passed since I was inducted, three unforgettable years.

After the war, Ralph Baer pursued his interest in electronics, graduating from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949 with a bachelor of science degree in television engineering. He went on to pioneer the development of console video games and other electronic peripherals and games such as the handheld game Simon. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded Ralph Baer the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his “groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development, and commercialization of interactive video games.”

The above content is from "The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II" by Steven Karras. Steven has given us permission to reproduce the chapters in their entirety. All content is copyright Steven Karrass and ‎ Zenith Press. No reproduction without permission.