David Chorney Library of Congress Testimony

January 12, 2002, we are interviewing David Chorney.

2006.

I said 2002, didn't I? Oh, Lord. January 12, 2006, we are interviewing David Chorney at the Jewish Community Center, Omaha, Nebraska. Interviewer is Sandy Nogg. What did you do before you joined the service?

I was a student at Central High School.

So you were drafted straight out of high school?

Straight out of high school.

So you were living in Omaha at the time, with your family, I suppose. And you were drafted?

Yes.

Were there a lot of you drafted from your class?

No, I had a little different situation. I had been ill when I was young, and I was running a little bit behind. People of that age would probably have been out of high school, but I was just finishing up. I was just in my senior year.

And what was your age at that time?

18.

Okay, so you were just draftable age?

Just draftable age. And so I didn't get the chance to graduate at that time. But when I came back from the Army, I took the equivalent examination and I passed and I went on to UNO after that, so yeah, I was able to make that up. But that's the reason I was a little bit, I was 18 and still in high school, because of the health history that I had. I had asthma very bad when I was young. And so I missed a lot of school at that time, but I made up for it.

So you didn't actually choose the Army? The Army chose you?

No, I had my choice.

You had your choice?

I was drafted. I went to Fort Crook, which is now Offutt. And that was the center that we went to. And I had my choice of any of the services. And I chose the Army. I didn't choose the Navy because I couldn't swim. I figured, well, I didn't want to go to the Navy. And the Air Force, my eyesight, I thought would keep me out. So I chose the Army.

And what were your first days in the service like?

Well, the first day that I went to Fort in Lawrence, Kansas, the first day I was there, the first night I was there, I was selected for KP. So the next morning, they woke up at about 3 o'clock. And I went over to the mess hall, and I was there all day long until the following night, about 6 o'clock. That was my introduction to the Army. And then from there, I was sent to Camp Walters, Texas, which was like a camp, a replacement camp. And because I had played the bugle, not the bugle, the trumpet when I was, you know, as a kid, I played the trumpet. When the person that was interviewing when you came into the camp saw that, he says, would you like to be a bugler? And I thought, yeah. So he put me into the bugle corps, not knowing anything about it. And so I went to the bugle school, and we were in the same barracks as the cooks and bakers. And as it turned out, we took some infantry training, but most of it was not, then after I finished at Camp Walters, Texas, I was sent back home for a delay in route.

I had 10 days at home, and then I left Omaha and went to Camp Shanks, New York, from where I was put aboard a transport and went over to Belfast, England. From Belfast, I went over to Bangor, North Ireland, and that's where I found out that I was going to become a radio operator. So, we took our, I spent, I forget how long I was there, probably amonth or so, and we were taking radio training, and at which time they decided that they were now going to ship us over to England. They were getting ready for the invasion. So we went over to England and went to camp there, and at that point, I just took a little training, you know, for shooting the .45 and what have you, but negver had any, we had some infantry training, but not, I figured, that's what I was going to be, was in the rear echelon. Well, as it turned out, from there I went to Portsmouth, England. Portsmouth, Enland was the jump-off spot for going up to Normandy. Well, I went, we went from there, I went the whole bit, climbed the side of the ship, came down, went into Normandy, we were there D plus six. So I was in Omaha Beach on six days after the invasion, joined up with the 2nd Infantry Division there, and was with them all the way to Normandy, at which time I was wounded in Brest, France. We had bypassed Brest, France, and the army was moving towards Paris with Patton, and they took our division and the First Division and sent us back to Brest, France to capture that, and that's where I was wounded at.

How badly were you wounded?

I was wounded in my right leg, and they sent me, I went to the general hospitals and had surgery on the front line. Then they sent me back to General Hospital back in Paris, and then they sent me back to the front line just before the breakthrough, the other one, the Germans counterattacked. I was there probably about a month before that happened, at which time the regimental surgeon examined us, and we were not ready for combat and sent us back. At that time, I went back to the 8th convalescent hospital, to recuperate, and about that time is when the breakthrough came through the Germany, yeah I think it was Germany, or Belgium, and they took all of us that were there, that were ambulatory, could move around all that, and assigned us to jobs with the 8th convalescent hospital because the people that were available there, they took them and sent them to the lines because they were short men, and that's how I got out of the infantry and into the 8th convalescent hospital. I stayed with them until the war was over, and at which time I was assigned to the 165th General Hospital because I didn't have enough points to come home, and that was rough duty, that was up in Nice, France, in the Riviera, so I spent a little time up there after the war, until I got enough points to come home.

What was your most memorable experience? Was it getting shot or was it something else?

No, my most memorable experience, you mean as far as there's nothing memorable about being in combat, because there's too many things that happen that you don't know, but there's one funny thing that happened, I had my 19th birthday on the front line, I was on Hill 165, don't forget it, it's just before we jumped off to go to St. Lo, it's when the invasion, when the Army was moving into St. Lo, which was near Cherbourg, I don't know if you know any of these places, but St. Lo was a very important city, and the Germans were heavily fortified there, and our job as far as the 2nd Infantry Division was concerned in our outfit was to capture the highway that went from Paris to St Lo, so the Germans couldn't send reinforcement out. So I was on that 165, Hill 165,before we jumped off and we had mail call. It was just before my birthday, it was my birthday, it was really in July, so I get this letter from home, and I open it up, and it's from my mother, and she's sending me a birthday card with $20 in it, and she's wishing me a happy birthday, and she says, go out and have a good time. So I carried that $20 with me until the end of the war, at which time I did go out and have a good time..

Were there many casualties in your unit?

Yeah, there was. You couldn't, you know, you never know. I remember those times when we were in one area, and there was a bunch of replacements came up, and some of them were from Camp Waters, Texas, where I had taken my training, and we sat down that night, and we were talking to them, and the next morning we jumped off for an attack, and there was a mortar attack, the Germans shot mortars there, so I was fortunate to not get hit, but some of the people I just spoke to that night were killed. So if you believe in things happening, I don't know how to put it, your number's not up. And I went all the way through there, and I had close calls, and I remember one time we went into a field, and I was, at that time, I was a runner for the lieutenant from my platoon. I went into this field, and I don't know if you remember the hedgerows, that was back in Normandy, they had hedgerows. And so we went into this one field, and the machine gun squad was setting up there, and my lieutenant was over on the other side, and he told me he wanted me over there, and I was thinking, I don't want to go over there, because that's what they're certainly going to shoot, because they're bombarded with those shells. Well, he insisted. So I went over the hedgerow, and I got right down to the side of it, and I no sooner got there, and the Germans opened up with the 88 artillery on that field I just left, and wiped out that whole machine gun platoon.And it was just a matter of just seconds, like it would have been there, but I went over there and got on the other side. So you never know.

And then another time, I was sitting on this hill, with another, we were sitting there waiting to move, and the Germans started to throw more shells at us, and I remember we went down, and they bent down, and I no sooner bent down, and all of a sudden I heard a pffft. A piece of shrapnel had just gone behind my head. If I had been up here, it would have hit me, but I bent down to do something, and it went right behind me. So if things are meant to happen, I guess they're going to happen. So I believe in that. This might seem an odd question.

Were you ever fearful?

Didn't have time.

I had several men tell me that. Didn't have time to think about it.

Once you tasted the first part of combat, I got another thing that goes back to when I first, before I joined the 2nd Infantry Division. Being I was a radio man, they gave me a .45 gun. Well, I was going to the front line, and I had no use for the .45. I needed a rifle, so I went through this, I was going through this tank division that was waiting in reserve, and I saw one fella, he had a rifle, and I said, are you with the tank division? And he says, yeah. I says, well, I should have a .45. He says, I've got a .45, I need your rifle. So we went to the Lieutenant, and he authorized us to switch. So I took his rifle, he took my .45. I went to the front line, and I finally get up there, and the Lieutenant and the Sergeant who was assigning me to a foxhole said, where did you get that? I had a World War I rifle, an 03, a bolt action. He said, where did you get that? I said, I traded it with the fella down at the tank division. He says, no, we don't use those anymore. He took it away, and he gave me an M1. So that's a little levity.

Tell me about your food and provisions.

Well, in the front line, most of it was K rations. And once in a great while, they would send up some hot coffee or a hot meal, but not very often. Most of the time, we had our K rations three times a day. When we went back to reserve, which was once in a while, they would replace us, and we would go back just behind the lines for showers and downtime. Then we'd get what we called C rations, which was a larger kit but with more provisions. And that's what we had. We very seldom had a lot of hot meals in the front line. Most of it was K rations. Today, we used to have a coffee. It was a Nescafe. I don't know if you remember Nescafe. Nescafe was a standard. Lemonade was a standard. All of us got four cigarettes. And other such things that you needed.

Your mother obviously got your birthday card to you.

Yeah.

Did you stay in touch with people at home?

Oh, yeah.

Did you write letters? E-mails.

E-mails?

Not e-mails. Those little victory letters, whatever they ever brought. And they were censored, you know. And then, you know, in the front lines, you didn't have a lot of time. You didn't get your mail every day. You had to wait for them to bring it up.

Did you have time for recreation at all?

No.

I mean, on your downtime, what did you do?

Which was? Mean when we were behind the line?

When you were behind the line.

We would just take showers and write letters. And that's about it.

Did you ever get the chance to celebrate holidays?

Not the front lines.

What skills or lessons did you learn?

Skills or lessons did I learn? Well, I don't know if I really learned anything. That I could use in the civilian world because that's not what we were there for, to learn. I met a lot of people. I found out one thing about people. I was of the Jewish faith. And you find out that when you're in close contact with people and you're under the same threat, those things mean nothing. I mean, you're a human being, and you make friends very quick, and you watch out for each other. And everything else goes out the window. It doesn't make any difference where you're at, where you're from, who you are. I learned maybe that's one of the lessons I did learn, was that people arepeople no matter where you go.

So did you experience anti-Semitism at all?

Only once. That was when I was waiting to be sent back to the front line. I volunteered. I had heard, which was stupid, but I had heard. And if you volunteer that, sometimes you can get delayed from being sent back. Well, I didn't want to necessarily run back there the other way. So, I volunteered for guard duty. And one night we were walking, me and another fellow were walking, we were walking guard. He started, he didn't know that I was Jewish, but he started to comment about Jew stores, and Jews in general back home when he was there, when he was in the army, when he went to leave the furloughs. And I stopped right there, and I says, well, you may not know it, but I says, I'm Jewish. I says, if you have a problem with that you better let me know right now.

The standard thing, oh, I don't mean you, you're different. I said, I'm no different. I says, you're talking about my faith. I don't know what faith you are, but in anybody's faith, there's all kinds of people. There's good people, there's bad people. There's so-so people. I says, what you're doing is you're taking a whole religion, and you're comparing it to maybe one thing that happened to you, and you're figuring everybody's like that. And I says, if you have a problem with it, I says, I want to know right now. I says, I'm not going to go around with you. He says, no, no, no. He says, I'm sorry. He says, you're different. I don't mean you. So we let it go with that. But that's the only time.

Did you practice Judaism at all during your service?

Yeah, I'll tell you. When I was in after the war, when I was still in Nice, France, the holidays came, and we went to, they took one of the hotels down on downtown, had Rosh Hashanah services, Yom Kippur services. And I went, and I observed it there. It's the first time I had ever met anyone Jewish that was African. I never had seen that before, and there were a lot of them. They were probably from New York. But yeah, I observed it when I could, because we had a chaplain that come up, but we didn't have time to, you know, like, some religions, they had their services like on Sundays, and the chaplain would come, and these folks would go. We didn't have too much of that.

Did the war or your service change your Jewish life later, do you think?

Well, I don't know what you mean by changing it, my folks were observant, they weren't Orthodox. I mean, they were Orthodox, and they kept kosher, and they kept all that. But my dad was always very working all the time, and didn't really, wasn't able to participate in a lot of religious things. And so I guess from that, I wasn't that religious, although I never, I knew where I came from and I knew what my roots were, and I was always proud of that, and I never hid that from anyone. So when I came back home, yeah, I guess it did. I joined up at the synagogue here and participated in all the Jewish activities, you know, with the J and all that.

Did you or do you have a siddur from the armed forces?

I do have.

You do?

I have it at home. It's the one I carried with me all through the war. I carried it in my pocket, and I used to read from it. Yeah. Now that you mention it, I forgot.

Did you know what was going on during the war? I know you were on the front line. Did you know what was going on anywhere else?

No, we used to get the Stars and Stripes, and that used to keep us informed as to what was going on in the war. But outside of that, there was nothing else. There was no radio or anything of that sort. So I got my information through the Army newspaper. So we knew some of the things.

Was kosher food available to you at all?

No, never asked for it.

Were you asked to do anything against your Jewish beliefs?

No.

Did you take any ceremonial objects with you?

I carried my mezuzah. I wore my mezuzah with me. That was about the only thing I did. I was hoping I never got captured, what would I do? Although on the dog tags, they did say H for Hebrew. If you were Protestant, it was P. If you were Catholic, it was C. So they did identify you that way. That was because if you were killed, they would know what kind of service to give you.

Did you ever doubt your religion?

No.

And did you meet other Jewish service members?

Yes, I did. Not in my outfit, but outside of the outfit. In fact, after the war, when I was in Germany at that time, we were in Bad Salzungen was a city that was declared an open city. The war did not go in there. Everybody went around it. And it was a resort. There was a lot of hospitals up here. And they had this mineral water. A lot of people used to go there and have treatment. And in that city, we were in the hotel, and the Germans had a hospital down there. And we would walk down the street, and the Germans also would walk down the street, but they would get off the street, off the sidewalk, where we walked, which was okay with me. But I did go to a, they had a service, a Friday night service, and the army provided us with a truck. And everyone who was Jewish went with that and went down to this. And we met a lot of the refugees that were from Hungary that were just making their way back. And so that was interesting. I met a lot of them there at that time. So, no, I was probably, I was Jewish, and I didn't hide it, and I didn't care who it knew it.

Do you recall the day you left the service?

You mean from overseas?

Mm-hmm. From overseas, and then once you were out?

I don't remember exactly. I remember getting on board a ship. And I can't remember exactly where that was. And we were aboard. We came across the North Atlantic in March, during wintertime. And we had a very tough trip coming back. We were going on the North Atlantic in the wintertime. And I landed at... It wasn't New York. It might have been Baltimore, Maryland. It might have been Baltimore. On the East Coast. Then I was processed and put on a train back to Omaha.

What did you do after the war ended? You came back to Omaha, and then what did you do?

I came back to Omaha, and I went to UNO. I. And I signed up for the G. Bill of Rights. And I went to UNO. And then I met my wife. I was still in early, I'd been in there about two years, and I met my wife. And got married. Ruth Albertson was my first wife.

Did you maintain any close relationships from your service time at all? Do you know anybody?

No.

Did you keep in touch with anybody?

No, because after I left the outfit, back in Brest, France, I never did return to it, so I don't know what happened to it.

And after the war, what was your career? What did you do?

Well, after the war, I went to work for my father. And then I went into the... I don't know if you remember HG Brokerage, which was a retail store for paint, wallpaper, salvage, and things of that sort. And I was there in that for 15 years. And then things were changing in the area, and that's when they had the riots on 24th Street, and then we went on 16th and Webster, which is entirely different now. So we got out, we closed the store. And I went into real estate, and that was 1970. And I sold real estate for 10 years, 10, 15 years. And then I went to appraising, which I am now in, and I've been in that for about the past 20years. So probably real estate's what I got into - retail and real estate.

Your experiences in the service, how did that contribute to the way you think the military and service today, military service?

I respect them. I know the job that they do is not easy. Politics get involved, and they can't really do what they are meant to do. In fact, Vietnam was a very good example of that. I respect the people that served there, and I think they were handicapped and not allowed to win the war. And it's all politics. So I think even today we have that in Iraq. We have the Army trying to do their job and what they're supposed to do with politics and letting them do it. So I respect the Army and I respect the military. I resent the politics that get involved with it.

Do you have anything else you'd like to say to wrap this up?

No, I'd just like to thank you for your taking your time to do the interview. I think it's very nice of you to do that, to talk to us fellows that were in the service back then. And I just hope the world will find its way and peace prevails.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chorney.