Plemer East: An 18-year-old grows up during war
Nov. 11—Last week at his Oxford home, World War II veteran Plemer East had plenty to say about the year and a half that he and fellow soldiers spent chasing Germans out of eastern France.
The 98-year-old was only a 17-year-old senior at Lineville High School when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He understood America had begun drafting young men to fight in the war, and he took it in stride when he was called up for military service. By his birthday in September of 1942, he was 18 and old enough to be drafted.
"I registered," he said, "and they drafted me the following April of 1943."
Before then, he had never traveled outside of the Lineville area, except for a a senior class trip to the nearest tourist attraction, Oxford Lake.
He reported for service in Clay County and then took a bus to Fort McClellan to be fitted for his uniform. He left behind a praying mother, father, two brothers and a 15-year-old girlfriend named Ruth.
By the time another year had passed, he found himself on the beaches of southern France around August or September of 1944 with orders to liberate the towns and villages from the Germans who had occupied the area for the previous four years. Before he arrived, he had been trained as a rifleman on a Browning automatic rifle, known as the BAR, but he had to make a quick adjustment and become what superiors told him to be, a machine gunner, the heavy hitter in battles who was the target of the enemy.
"I knew machine gunners usually didn't live long," East said.
East's role in the war
East and the five fellow members of his squad with the Third Division received a short lesson on operating a water-cooled machine gun, probably a Browning M1917A1.
"I had to learn to use it really fast," he said. "It was a .30 caliber. It came in three parts or maybe two, and it needed about a gallon and a half of water."
He formed a circle with his hands about the size of a navel orange and tried to show how the gun fit together.
"It was a good gun," he said.
When it was broken apart, the gun and its tripod had to be carried across the shoulders by two soldiers in addition to their backpack. One soldier carried 51 pounds and the other carried 33 pounds. Three soldiers carried two boxes of ammunition each, and then there was a squad leader.
How the next few months developed
During the fall and winter of 1944, the soldiers walked from town to town, village to village, but sometimes they rode on a truck or a tank.
Day after day they walked, always facing injury or death. The soldiers were surrounded by falling mortar shells and artillery in some towns, and they found others were quiet. They moved in all kinds of weather, crossing small rivers, rounding bends, and climbing over hills.
As a machine gunner, East had to provide cover for the riflemen, firing over their heads toward the enemy. Sometimes, on the good days, the enemy seemed to melt away as the Americans moved forward. Some of the French townsmen wore dark armbands with the large initials "FF" stitched on them. The letters stood for "Free Forces Interior," but the soldiers changed the name to "Free French." The soldiers did not fire on those wearing the armbands.
"We got a break occasionally," East said. "We would get a day to rest behind the lines. Mostly, though, we moved every night before daylight. We had to get to the point where we were not scared, but there was always danger from the German soldiers we were chasing out. It's either you or them, and sometimes you outsmarted them and sometimes you didn't."
At some point during the event, East became his squad's leader, and he was promoted to the rank of sergeant.
Alsace-Lorraine
The unit had left the beaches of Southern France in either late August or early September. By Christmas of 1944, it had reached the outskirts of Alsace-Lorraine, an area between France and Germany. Ownership had often passed back and forth between the two, depending on the political situation. East was 20 by then. The Americans found an intact farmhouse on the outskirts of Alsace-Lorraine. Members of the French family living there were kind and fed the soldiers a hot meal.
"We were supposed to move everyone out of the house and take it over," he said. "The French family had helped us, so we moved them upstairs and took over the bottom floor. By then, the weather was cold."
Christmas came, and the family killed a hog to feed the soldiers. Before he ate, East remembers being "out on the gun" and pausing to listen to two or three children singing "Silent Night" in French. Soon, he was called in to get his meal.
"The day after Christmas, the people got a message that they had to leave the house," East said. "'Why?' they asked, and then they asked us to feed their horse and cow. We told them we might be leaving too, but whoever replaces us, we'll tell them, and we did."
East's unit moved out two or three days later and arrived at the Vosges Mountains, walking all day in six to eight inches of snow.
On top of the mountains, the Americans had to stay alert. Half had to be on duty while the other half rested. They spent 12 days and nights without a hot meal, bath or even a shave.
During East's time to rest, he, being the squad leader at that time, chose to sleep beside the gun in case he was needed, which almost proved to be disastrous. Because he had laid so long without moving around, his feet froze. He had to go on sick call for a few days because he was struggling to stand. A medic gave him three red pills and told him to put them in water and then soak his feet, which he did using his helmet as a basin. The pills, probably an antiseptic, worked. He began walking more normally but had trouble feeling his toes for months afterward.
"Throughout the rest of the war," East said, "I never went on sick call again."
Crossing the Siegfried Line and the Rhine River
Eventually, the unit moved off the mountains and headed toward the North Sea. They had no idea the Battle of the Bulge was taking place, which was the German army's last stand. All they knew was that they had to cross the Rhine River, comparable, East said, to the Mississippi River.
Before they reached it, though, the intensity of the gunfire became fierce, and East's squad got separated from its unit.
The German's defensive line, called Siegfried Line, was near the Rhine, with 18,000 concrete bunkers, soldiers called them "pillboxes," concrete rooms with narrow pane-less windows from which the Germans fired weapons. The line had barbed wire, tunnels and tank-trap ditches. The Siegfried Line was 400 miles long. Americans and allies had been destroying sections of it since the operation's beginning.
When East's squad approached the area, the only way they could counter Germans' incoming fire from the line was to walk alongside it until they could pass through. East was still the squad leader and had been told to tell his men to walk behind the tanks. He knew the situation was too precarious, so he dodged bullets and went from tank to tank, asking the operators if he could fit a few of his men inside. He was able to find a place for each of them.
"We made it through that," East said.
Next, they had to move across the Rhine on boats as snipers on bridges were bearing down on them.
East and his squad, still separated from their unit, got into a boat. There, he saw his first outboard motor, which didn't do them much good. The engineer who was supposed to be operating it had disappeared.
"There was an old boy from Minnesota who was familiar with outboard motors, and he said there was some dirt on the motor preventing it from cranking," East said. "We had to paddle back to the bank, and by that time another boat had come back to get a load. We jumped in that boat, and he got us to the place we were supposed to go."
Afterward, East's men finally caught up with their unit.
Near Hitler's hideout
By the spring of 1945, the unit made it into Austria. They had heard about Hitler's hideout in Berchtesgaden, the second seat of government where Hitler had relaxed and partied before and during the war. Capturing the hideout, known as Eagle's Nest, had become an objective for the American and allied forces.
East's unit wasn't far from a town. They found themselves walking beside their tanks on a highway heading in when their superiors told them to get on the tanks.
"Since they told us to do it, we didn't think we'd get shelled," East said. "We got on them and the tanks speeded up. As we were going down our side of the highway, we looked and in the other lane, walking in the opposite direction were unarmed German soldiers walking four abreast. We figured they had surrendered. We got into the town and learned the British, French and Russians all were bringing their flags. By then, we knew that Hitler had either been killed or had committed suicide."
Coming home
In January of 1946, East came home. He was 21 years old by then, no longer the 17-year-old boy who had searched for dimes and quarters to pay for that senior trip. He was a seasoned soldier coming back into the family fold.
The day after he arrived home, sitting at Lineville High School, was his brother, Gerald. The teacher asked him why he was squirming at his desk so much. He had a good explanation, East said, "Perm's come home last night."
Looking back, East doesn't remember as many stories about coming home as he does the ones of the grueling, often cold, heavy and hard days of walking across France.
He was in a new world.
East's 15-year-old girlfriend was 18 years old by then. By September, he had married her. Also, he had made other two big strides: He had begun working for Alabama Power Company and had bought his first car.
"I had gotten a car pretty quick," he said, "and I had never thought I'd own one."
Today
As East sits in his home, surrounded by family photos and the glassware his late wife had loved, he thought back over his days in the war. He said being a soldier had made him a disciplined man. He remembers how, even while they were in France, he had learned that his mother had taken a job packing ammunition at Brecon in Talladega to help her bring her boy back home.
"We soldiers knew all of America was behind us," East said. "I wonder today, if attacked," East said, "Americans would support each other like that."
