By Kevin M. Hymel
If there was one thing frontline soldiers looked forward to after weeks of fighting in Europe’s mud and ice, it was a shower and a change of clothes. Making that happen was the mission of Corporal Benjamin Berry and the soldiers of the 863rd Quartermaster Fumigation and Bath Company.
As the 863rd began setting up the tents, showers and other equipment for their temporary oasis, it was Berry who was tasked with locating a local water source. Once the water was decontaminated, Berry would pump it into a tank and truck it to the company where it was heated by portable units and directed into the showers. Next to the showers, an Army quartermaster laundry outfit set up tents supplied with clean uniforms.
The frontline soldiers showed up looking haggard and dirty. “They brightened up when they saw us,” Berry said. They stripped off their dirty clothes and handed them to Berry’s team, who would, in turn, give them to the laundry unit. Some soldiers took off their dog tags, rings, wallets, and watches, while others held on to them. Then Berry and his men handed out towels.
The naked soldiers then filed under the hot showers. Berry’s team let them stay in as long as they wanted. “They were happy,” he said. When the men finally exited the showers, Berry’s company, working with the laundry unit, issued them clean clothes as close to the original size as possible. If a soldier needed a size 38 pants and Berry only had a size 42, he would give the GI the larger pair. “They were so glad they were clean that they didn’t care they were dragging their clothes,” he said.
Sometimes the soldiers were so happy about the shower and new clothes they forgot their personal items, leaving Berry’s team to find them and return the items before the soldiers returned to the front.
Berry enjoyed his mission. “It was a nice unit, well organized and well thought out, and it worked out great,” he said. “And the soldiers were always grateful.”
During some of the shower stops, Berry noticed French civilians washing their clothes in the soapy water that rolled down from the showers. Even more impressive, the GIs in the showers also spotted the civilians and would often let their soap slip and flow downstream for the civilians. “They appreciated it and we appreciated it, too,” he said. “Whenever we left the area, they would be out to wave goodbye.”
Berry was a 17-year-old high school student working as a dishwasher at the Casa Cani Italian Restaurant in Glenside, Pennsylvania, when he heard one of the waitresses burst out, “Those damn Japs!” He did not understand what she was talking about until he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. “That was the first time in my life I ever heard a woman curse,” Berry said.
Berry lived with his parents, brother, and two sisters in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. He was a senior at Abington High School, in a suburb of Philadelphia, when he received his draft notice in January 1943. The Philadelphia Draft Board granted a deferment until his graduation in June. He was drafted in July and allowed to choose the Army or Navy. “I could not swim,” said Berry, “so I took the Army.” Before departing, he said farewell to his girlfriend, Lois Miller Graves, a student at Haverford High. They would write to each other his entire time overseas.
Berry headed to Camp Ellis, Illinois, for four months of training in a segregated Black unit. He found the training difficult. “I saw other guys jumping over hurdles and climbing under barbed wire and I’m struggling,” he recalled. He had decided he was too out of shape for the Army when one of his drill sergeants told him, “You can peel potatoes.” As the weeks went by, Barry did not peel any potatoes, but his arms and legs turned to muscle and he completed training.
Berry and the other Black recruits trained on the M-1 carbine .30-caliber rifle. “The carbine was just like a pea shooter compared to the M-1 Garand,” he said. “All it was good for was shooting rats or mice, but with humans you gotta hit the right spot or he won’t fall.” Berry went overseas with the carbine, but neither he nor any of the other Black soldiers in his unit were issued ammunition.
After basic training, Berry learned how to drive a truck. “It was quite different from a civilian vehicle,” he explained. “You’re sitting high, and the gear shifts were different.” With truck driving under his belt, he reported to the headquarters of the 863rd Quartermaster Fumigation and Bath Company, where he received a Dodge WC series Three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, which he would drive for the rest of his time in the service.
Berry teamed up with Thomas Stevens, a soldier with whom he had a lot in common. “We didn’t gamble, and we didn’t do a lot of cursing and card playing,” said Berry. “We hooked up because we were the same kind of person.”
It was during Berry’s training that he first encountered racial prejudice. He and some fellow soldiers traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to watch one of the opening World Series games between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees in early October 1943. They took a bus to Sportsman’s Park, home of the Cardinals, but the game was sold out.
They noticed some men sneaking under a stadium fence, but since Berry and his comrades were in their uniforms, they thought better of it. Instead, they headed into a restaurant for something to eat. They ordered hamburgers and hotdogs without any trouble, but when they sat down the restaurant manager told them, “No. You cannot eat that here.”
Infuriated, the soldiers stood up and left without touching their meals. “Here we were, service men all in uniforms out to serve our country,” recalled Berry, “and our country treats us like this?” The soldiers departed St. Louis, never knowing or caring who won the World Series. “It hurt quite a bit.”
Once training ended, Berry and his company traveled to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to depart for Europe. With an off-post pass and time to kill, Berry decided to go home to Philadelphia to see Lois. He invited Stevens to accompany him. Once there, he introduced Stevens to Lois and her sisters. Stevens would go on to correspond with one of the girls.
Back at Fort Dix, Berry and his comrades boarded a converted steamer and headed below deck. “It wasn’t fancy,” he recalled. Once at sea, he quickly succumbed to sea sickness. Every time he threw up, he had to clean the mess himself. The ship felt like it was rocking and rolling until Berry went topside and saw the calm sea and other ships headed to England. “It was me that was rocking and rolling,” he laughed.
One day in the middle of the Atlantic, the ship’s engine stopped. “We said uh-oh,” said Berry. One of the men jokingly told the troops, “Get out and push.” The men later learned the ship’s captain discovered there were German U-boats in the area so he cut the engines to prevent their sound from giving away his position. After about an hour, the captain restarted the engine. The dangerous situation led Berry to promise to God, “I said, ‘if you ever get me out of this, I’ll serve you until I die.’ And I have.”
After six days at sea, the steamer docked in Northern Ireland. The company then traveled to Liverpool, England, where the men got their first taste of war. Berry saw destroyed buildings, civilian dugouts, and air raid wardens in their famous white British Doughboy helmets. The soldiers spent their time training, waterproofing their vehicles, and awaiting the cross-Channel invasion of France, which would come on June 6, 1944.
On June 28, 22 days after D-Day, Berry and his company landed at Omaha Beach in a Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM), which carried Berry’s weapons carrier, a Jeep, and a couple of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. The craft’s front ramp dropped into shallow water, and all the vehicles drove off. As Berry reached the beach, he looked up at the camouflaged bunkers built into the overlooking cliffs. “We could see the pillboxes the Germans built,” he recalled, “and I realized how hard it was for our guys to get ashore because the Germans in the pillboxes could pick them off with ease.” Berry credits the survival of the American troops at Omaha Beach to the grace of God.
Once inland, Berry found that the civilians accepted the Black troops well, except they were curious about these Americans. The white GIs had told them not to mix with the Black soldiers because they were descended from monkeys and had tails. The civilians wanted to see the Black soldiers’ tails, so Berry and his comrades dropped their pants. “That was quite an experience to see the expressions on their faces,” reminisced Berry, “especially the embarrassment on the girls’ faces.”
Berry’s company was assigned to Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army, which became active on the continent on August 1, 1944. But the GIs initially had little use for showers. “They were too busy chasing Hitler,” he explained. Several times Berry and his comrades set up their showers, only to take them down because the soldiers had advanced too far east.
Berry first came under enemy fire when his company left the nearly-destroyed town of St. Lo. They had set up camp about eight miles behind the front lines when Berry heard the unmistakable noise of a German Nebelwerfer—a multi-barreled rocket launcher that fired with a shrill howling sound, earning it the nickname “Screaming Mimi.”
“We could hear that guy,” Berry said. But he had learned by then that if you could hear the screaming, it was safe because the rocket had passed over. “If you heard it cut off before then,” he explained, “then you were in trouble.” Sometimes the noise would cut off directly overhead, meaning that it would still land in the distance. “One landed near us when it exploded,” he said. “It was close but not a danger.”
As Berry drove his weapons carrier across liberated France, he noticed that the towns were nothing but rubble. “There was no life at all,” he said. “You’d think you’d see a chicken or dog, but no.” He and his team would often pass shot-down aircraft or destroyed vehicles and tanks. “We saw one tank that had caught fire and the operator was trying to get out,” he recalled. “He got halfway out when he collapsed, but by the time we saw him he was pretty well bloated.”
Berry spent every night sharing a two-man tent with a buddy. “If he wasn’t your buddy before then,” he recalled, “he would be now.” Most of the meals were served hot since the unit was behind the lines, and most consisted of eggs. Berry’s best meal of the war came at Thanksgiving, when the men were fed real turkey.
In the skies above, Berry could see fleets of American bombers flying east to bomb Germany. “They were pretty high,” he recalled. “You could see them and a few minutes later you could hear them.” He knew they would be combing back with their bomb bays empty. “What a great sight.”
As Patton’s lightning advance eventually slowed at the end of August, some troops were allowed to leave the front lines for some rest and relaxation and, of course, showers. That’s when Berry found a water source, and his men prepared the showers for the frontline soldiers.
At one stream, Berry got a taste of home. He struck up a conversation with a soldier charged with purifying the water, who was also from Philadelphia. The soldier turned out to be Stanford Frank, the grandson of Jacob Frank, who founded Frank’s Beverages, best known for their Black Cherry Wishniak soda. “They had the best soda water,” said Berry. “We had a nice chat.”
Sometimes, Berry and his team set up their showers in French and German towns, which included hotels and USO entertainers. In one town, the famous boxer Joe Louis entertained the troops. When the 863rd Company received permission to attend, Berry was charged with escort duties. “That’s how I got to get a glimpse of Joe Louis,” he recalled. Berry’s company even bivouacked in Paris, where he visited the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame cathedral, and the Arc de Triomphe.
On December 16, 1944, the Germans broke through the American lines in Belgium and Luxembourg—the Battle of the Bulge. With the Army desperate for riflemen, Berry and his team were finally issued ammunition for their carbines and were told to man the front lines and show resistance.
Berry’s team headed out in the snow and freezing temperatures and tried to dig foxholes, but their shovels could not crack the frozen ground. Instead, they laid their tent halves over the snow or other equipment and lay prone to fire. “We couldn’t do anything but let the enemy know there was someone there firing back,” he recalled. “That’s all we could do in the face of all that firepower.”
By the end of January 1945, the Germans had been driven out of Belgium and Luxembourg and the Allies cracked the German Siegfried Line—a belt of anti-tank defenses known as Dragon’s Teeth interspersed with concrete bunkers and machine-gun nests. When Berry passed through the Siegfried Line, it was under American control. Still, he had to show identification and use a password to prove he was not a Black Nazi. A few days later, Berry returned to have his picture taken among the Dragon’s Teeth. He took the film to a local developer, but his unit pulled out before he could pick up his photographs.
Berry rarely saw an intact bridge in Germany; most had been blown by the retreating Germans. There was also very little civilian life to be seen. “Almost all the civilians were females,” he recalled. “The groups I saw were 8-to-80, and they were blind, crippled, or crazy,” he said with a laugh. “That’s an old Army saying.”
One day in a German town, Berry saw a large group of women crying. He wondered what had happened until he saw Army trucks hauling German prisoners of war to the rear. The crying women waved to the prisoners. “When I saw that I said to myself, ‘I’ll never go into town on a furlough because one of these woman might say you have a male prisoner and I don’t know what you’re going to do to him so I’m going to do something to you.’”
On April 12, 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt died. “It was quite a shock to us,” said Berry. “We paused and recognized his death, wishing him God’s speed, but the war had to go on.”
Berry was in for a bigger shock when he and his company entered Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which had been liberated on May 5. “We were there to fumigate the Jews and the camp,” he said. There were only a few inmates left when he arrived, but they made Berry feel like a giant compared to their emaciated bodies.
One tall and thin inmate approached Berry. “I could see nothing but skin and bones,” he recalled, “and the skin was holding the bones together.” It was an image he never wanted to see again. “How could human beings be treated that way?” he asked.
As the war in Europe wound down, Berry and his company set up camp in a Luxembourg schoolhouse. Berry was there on May 9 when he learned that the Germans had surrendered. “There was some excitement and gunfire,” he said. “And the civilians came out, since they were as happy as we were.” All Berry could think about was his mother’s cooking and seeing his girlfriend.
Berry’s company was one of the many Army units slated for the Pacific, to help win the war against Japan. The men of the 863rd Company boarded a ship bound for the United States, where they would all get a 30-day furlough before heading across the country and shipping out of California. But about halfway across the Atlantic, word came in that an atomic bomb had been dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The date was August 6, 1945. “There was so much excitement on the ship,” Berry recalled. The war would soon be over.
Berry arrived back at Fort Dix and traveled home to Philadelphia. His mother greeted him with a big smile and said, “This is my boy! He’s home!” Both Berry and his mother cried tears of joy. His father was more stoic. “He was tough,” Berry recalled, “but he made me a man.” His two sisters were there, but his brother was still in the service. His mother was ready for Berry’s return, having made his favorite meal: pork chops, applesauce, and cornbread. Still in his uniform, Berry went to see his girlfriend, Lois. Her entire family welcomed him with open arms. “Oh, happy day!” he said, recalling the moment.
The U.S. Army discharged Berry in October 1945. That same month, his buddy Tom Stevenson married Lois’s sister, whom he met before shipping out. Berry served as best man, and Lois served as maid of honor. The wedding inspired Berry and Lois to elope.
In January 1946, Berry found a Justice of the Peace, who told him he needed a girl and a ring. Berry had the girl, but it took him a week to find the ring. The two showed up at the Justice’s office, a converted room in the Justice’s house. They needed a witness, so the Justice called his wife, who came in and witnessed the ceremony.
Because of the post-war housing crunch, Berry and his new bride rented a room from a friend of a friend in Germantown, Pennsylvania. They lived there until Lois became pregnant. Eventually, they had four children, Linda Marlene, Benjamin Douglas, Susan Elenor, and Lisa Annet.
Berry worked as a paperhanger, putting up wallpaper in homes. The job paid little, so he took a night job at the Standard Press Steel Company, which he eventually quit. “I had a wife stuck in this little apartment in North Philly who didn’t know anybody and got bored,” he explained. When Berry made enough money, they moved into a house with a yard and basement. “We converted the basement to a kitchen so my wife could see the children in the yard.”
Berry stayed in the wallpaper business the rest of his career, retiring around 2009. Since then, he has returned to Normandy with a tour group, where he was treated like a celebrity. He has received medals from France and Luxembourg for helping liberate their countries, and he has visited places like Gettysburg and Arlington National Cemetery to speak about his war experiences and honor his fellow soldiers.
Reflecting on the war, Berry regrets the U.S. Army’s segregation policies and how they kept races separate and unequal. “We all bleed the same, we all want the same things, desire the same things,” he said. “We are our brother’s keeper, but a lot of times people won’t accept you as a brother.”
At age 100 in 2024, Barry says the war stays with him. Whenever he flips through magazines or books on World War II, he still looks for pictures of himself on the Siegfried Line, hopeful that someone developed the film he dropped off in 1945. He does not need film to see the image that haunts him to this day—the tall concentration camp survivor who approached him at Mauthausen. “I have a mental picture of him quite often.”
Frequent contributor Kevin M. Hymel works as a historian at Arlington National Cemetery. He is the author of Patton’s War, Volumes 1 and 2 and leads tours of General George S. Patton’s battlefields for Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours. His article “Fighting a Two Front War” for this magazine is now a major motion picture called Six Triple Eight by Tyler Perry for Netflix.
Talk about unsung contributions to victory!
I wonder if any other army went to such lengths to keep their men clean and healthy.
(On my first business trip England in 1986, I met Brits who could not comprehend “Americans’ obsession with hygiene,” as one young lady put it. Ummm…ride the Tube in London on a summer day, and you’ll get a clue.)