This is the Man Who Raised me

I've got
stories I could write about until I die about this guy and what he did
to protect YOU and I from the bull **** that went on and is still
going on to undermine our great Nation!

Write the book, Bill.

I promised to never write the stories he told me while he was alive
because he was still under wraps. Now that he's gone, I may just open
Pandora's box. Yes, it's been 60 years, but I know the truth behind a
lot of it that this guy knew while working for the CIC.

All the more reason....to write the book, Bill. It's how we all learn.
It's how we grow; it's how we get better. History has a way of
repeating itself, lest we all forget.

Six or so years ago I sent a note to Hugh Mills, author of "Low Level
Hell." I thanked him for the contributions he made during that war. To
live through that, on two tours, and tell a moving story of survival.
He said "thanks for the words...especially from a Marine." Semper Fi,
Hugh. I'm just one jarhead who'd wish you'd write the sequel. It's how
we learn.

I'll have to think about it a bit but I'll bet none of it could
compromise any security at this point. I'll just sit and think for a
while then I might tell some of it.

Seems like you dabbled recently in some writing yourself Bill. A few
folks on the NG, including myself, hope you'll put some pen to paper.
You know that rascal Bob Barbanes was gonna write a book too. I wish
Bob well; don't know what ever happened to him. Did you guys ever
hook up and log a little rotor time together? If you did....there's
yet another story to be told.

Here is his obituary. I cut a bit out of it about the family, but I
heard these stories for nearly 60 years about what really happened
over there.

My condolences on the loss of your father, Bill. No words can ease the
pain. Perhaps in time, however, your ability to tell his story to
others will be one of his, and your, most significant contributions.
Write the book, Bill.

Regards,
Dan

(Badwater Bill)
shared these priceless pearls of wisdom:

Bill, my condolences.

Your father passed on what would have been my dad's 94th birthday. My dad left
us in '98. He was too old to be drafted into WWII, but in those days, the
Marines would take anybody that was breathing. He was "privileged" to have
volunteered and fought at Guadalcanal and Okinawa as a 35 year old "old fart".
My mother was LIVID that he would have signed up after getting the oldfart's
deferment, but in her later years would confess that being a latent warbride was
very pleasing in that she had a hero coming back home.

Old fart had three kids during the war, me being serial #1. How he managed to
get back home during "that part of the month" for Mom and my two brothers was a
stroke (you should pardon the expression) of luck at being reassigned after
battle to teaching island combat techniques to the new recruits. That happened.
The military hospitals were FULL of us brats born to ... heroes.

That's the word. Heroes. In his later days, dad had a stroke. It may have had
something to do with his earlier career as a professional boxer (google on Kid
Gavilan out of St. Louis) or it may have had to do with his war wounds. It
matters not. I put him to bed many a night when he was crying (this is a former
Marine, mind you) about those "poor boys" being killed on the beaches.

As a young kid he taught me how to box. As an adolescent, he taught me the
truths of life. In my later years, he is still teaching me the values that he
revered.

Bill, we had the same kind of daddy. God bless you and yours. We honor our
heros. Your daddy is in my memorial wall.

Bless and keep you.

Jim

Jim Weir (A&P/IA, CFI, & other good alphabet soup)
VP Eng RST Pres. Cyberchapter EAA Tech. Counselor
http://www.rst-engr.com

Bill,

No words can assuage the loss in your family. Draw some comfort from
the fact that your pops lived and died defending our FREEDOM. The
FREEDOM to live, OR end, our lives in the way we choose. To quote a
line from Apocalypse Now, "He just wanted to go out standing on his
feet like a soldier, not some wasted rag-tag renagade." Everyone will
forever be grateful for his sacrifice.

Kindest regards...

I raise a toast to your father while a tear falls for you and your family...

S.G.


"Badwater Bill" wrote in message
...

There was a tragic incident in our family six days ago. My father who
was suffering from diabetes, palsy, lower back disk dehydration and
depression decided to end his life. He was scheduled for a hip
replacement operation on Monday. We all were planning a big party for
his 80th birthday which was yesterday, but instead received his ashes
from the crematorium instead. Here is a tiny, small, insignificant
glimpse of what this true hero was all about. And none of it is bull
****. This guy was for real. I could never live up to the standards
he was required to live by as a young man. Many of us could never
approach the true horror and misery that a guy like this lived
through. I heard the stories my whole life. At Dochau and Goettingen
he was assigned the duty of unloading the corpses from the boxcars to
examine the bodies. Many of them were still alive but starved into
unconsciousness. My father found many who were alive and saved them
from the crematoriums. They then examined bodies laying around the
courtyards who were unconscious and found many who were still alive
but almost skeletons covered by skin due to starvation.

In Goettengen most of the prisoners were Mongolians. He still never
told me why that was to the end of his days but the info was probably
still classified and he was still under wraps as CIC. He helped them
find food by opening a cheese factory there once the concentration
camp was liberated. Of course he was under investigation since the
town mayor and cheese factory owner were not in agreement with the
liberation of the food necessary to feed the starving and liberated
prisoners, so my dad shot and killed them, opened the wherehouse doors
and gave the food to people who would have died within days if that
had not been executed.

The Germans had just began using the ME-262. I have a black and white
photo he took of it somewhere during the war. They thought it was
powered by gravitation or something since it had no propellers. He saw
things that no one admits today like ME-109's pulling away from
P-51's. He said he saw it many times. There was some kind of super
propulsion unit they had on that thing that left the P-51's in the
dust-might have been some kind of early JATO bottle or something.
Anyone know? Was it a turbo of some sort?

There are many of you guys here that lived through this too. I take
my hats off to you. I'm proud that people like you protected this
great country so that people like me could live in freedom for all of
their lives.

I will put a picture of this great warrior who worked for this country
openly and under cover for most of his life on the binary file thing.
I will post it here when I do it.

You guys think Air America was something, you should have known this
guy...and he was my dad! This is the tip of the iceberg. I've got
stories I could write about until I die about this guy and what he did
to protect YOU and I from the bull **** that went on and is still
going on to undermine our great Nation!

I promised to never write the stories he told me while he was alive
because he was still under wraps. Now that he's gone, I may just open
Pandora's box. Yes, it's been 60 years, but I know the truth behind a
lot of it that this guy knew while working for the CIC.

I'll have to think about it a bit but I'll bet none of it could
compromise any security at this point. I'll just sit and think for a
while then I might tell some of it. I might even run it by "security"
before I do that. I'd love to write about what he told me about
Anzio, Innsbruck, Paris and the Nazi roundup after the war.

Here is his obituary. I cut a bit out of it about the family, but I
heard these stories for nearly 60 years about what really happened
over there.

Bill Phillips

__________________________________________________ ______________________

William Phillips Sr.


William L. Phillips, died March 13, 2004, in Boulder City, Nevada.

Bill loved his wife and family. He was a devoted husband, father,
grandfather, brother and uncle. A class act, he was a kind and
patient man with a special way with children. He loved the desert,
history, and he loved to read, write and recite poetry.

Bill retired in 1979 as an operations foreman at Hoover Dam.

Bill, a veteran of the US. Army, served in World War 11, from 1942
through 1945. He was one of the few survivors that saw continuous
unending battle, with nearly 500 days of active duty on the front
lines over a two-year period. His tour of duty took him from North
Africa to Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, then on to Belgium
and Holland.

Although he initially trained to be an Army artilleryman, as the war
progressed and the horrendous number of casualties mounted, he had to
assume many roles such as battle-line forward observer, supply-support
man for the engineering units, infantry rifleman, (nowadays called a
sniper) and other positions required by front line units.

He also served for nearly a year alongside the Huey P. Long's
Louisiana National Guard, which was inducted into the Army during
World War II.

His battle history began in North Africa then into Sicily. His unit
began in Europe with the battle of Cassino and on to the bloody battle
of the beachhead landing at Anzio, Italy. Then he proceeded with the
liberation of Rome, the engagements with the 6th-Corps in Southern
France, across the Rhine River, followed by pushing the Germans back
in a clearing action over the mountains into lnnsbruck, Austria, the
Brenner pass crossing to Garmish and on to Salzburg. His duty
proceeded back to Germany with the liberation of Dachau and Goettingen
concentration camps.

He was then assigned to the Central intelligence Corps (CIC) after the
European treaty was signed. He worked undercover in France, Belgium,
and Holland tracking down Nazi war criminals for the Nuremberg war
trials. He was then transferred to Paris before returning to the
United States to be granted an honorable discharge with the 141st
Field Artillery Battalion.
.

I am sorry to hear about your father, Bill. My sincerest condolences.

Let's have a moment of silence...

Bryan "the monk" Chaisone

Thank all of you so much. You have no idea how much it means to me to
read your comments. I see that some of you also had fathers who were
great heros. It was hard being a kid growing up under a man like
this. I had no idea until I was an adult what horror and terror this
man lived through, fought through and overcame to become a functioning
person in society. Actually, he never really connected with the
system after the war. He did well. He did function and go to work,
but he just was always clamped up to himself. He went to work each
day and supported his family, but he was tainted, he was worried, he
was scarred so deeply that he never recovered from the war.

He knew what can happen. That's what I think the real deal is. He
knew what can happen when the world goes to hell.

He should have never had a family, but things were not that simple.
He was so scarred from that war, the concentration camps, the death,
that he never recovered. I had a birthday party for him on his 70'th
birthday to honor him. All he could think about was the war. All he
talked about to his friends was the war.

After that as he grew older I couldn't ask him questions about the
concentration camps he'd been a soldier and helped liberate. He'd
break down and cry. So, most of what I know are those things he could
talk about until he was about 60 or so. When he's be explaining a
battle to me sometimes I'd ask him about the Jews and the
concentrations camps just to hear more of the details. It just
brought such agony and misery to him for my questions that he couldn't
respond without breaking down.

He told me that he was a seasoned combat soldier when they went into
the concentration camps at the end of the war. He was vivid too. He
told me that it was common place to see arms or legs or even sexual
organs, heads, ears, etc. hanging on branches of trees in combat
after shelling. He was used that. But when they went into Goettengen
near Stuttgart and saw the starved emaciated prisoners, it was like
their first day in combat. It was like they'd never heard a shell
explode. It was "Goofy" he said. No one could believe that the
Germans were torturing and starving people like this. It was a sick
feeling even for a seasoned combat soldier. So they reacted
appropriately. They let the prisoners go. They did all the medical
things they could do and then they went looking for the assholes who
were in charge. My dad admitted to killing the owner of the cheese
factory when he and his men tried to pursuade him to open the doors
and feed the liberated prisoners.

My father said, "I asked the factory owner many times to open the
doors. I had hundreds of mongolian prisoners behind me who were
starving. They hadn't eaten in weeks as far as we could tell. His
wife bitched and screamed at us then spit on us. His daughers were
standing there with him along with the Bergermeister (town mayor). I
told them I would assrest them then blow the door if they didn't move
aside. Instead, the rat-******* pulled a pistol on me and shot at me.
I shot him and his wife. My fellow soldiers shot his daughters and
the mayor. We blew the door and oppened the food supply to the
starving prisoners."

Dochau was the same. My dad said "you won't read it in any history
books but the city of Dachau was open ground. After they saved all
the prisoners they could, or during that effort, a small band of
soldiers went south a couple kilometers to that city and hunted down
that *******s who had run that prison camp. All ranking SS officers
(assholes) who had anything to do with that camp were executed."

"The ally soldiers were really ****ed from what they had seen at the
prison camp so the SS families, their children, even their dogs, cats,
rats, other insects in their homes, etc. suffered the same fate."

"We killed them all."

At that point, the occupational forces were moving in and knew these
ally soldiers were crazed and confused. Men with many hundreds of
days of combat like my dad just went "goofy" he said. The sight of
the crematoriums and the "God Damn Germans" shoveling living human
beings into the furnaces just ****ed them off. The soldiers could not
control their emotions...even after years of combat.

Dad said it was like his first day in combat, or the first day he was
ever shelled. It was just "Goofy" he said. It was like we'd never
been in a war at all. It was so horrible, so strange and so bizarre.

[My dad couldn't swallow a pill. It was an emotional thing from
childhood. Later, when I knew him as an adult, he could. But when he
was a kid, he couldn't swallow a pill.]

After they shot and killed all the SS-assholes they could find in
Dachau, the occupational forces knew they had a problem. I mean,
soldiers just don't go killing people in civilian clothing at random,
or even wiping out an entire city (you history buffs check this one
out). The medical folks made dad swallow a pill about the size of an
quarter. He remembers is to this day. He said it was a big white
pill and he couldn't even imagine swallowing such a large round pill
since he was unable to swallow even a tiny pill. So, he broke it up,
cut it up into four (4) pieces. He said the MP's had him at gunpoint
and made him "eat" the four pieces of the pill.

The next thing he remembers is that he was over in France. He was in
a bomb-crater under a canvas tent on a cot. Most of his buddies were
there too and they were all groggy. They had been knocked out and
loaded on a train to get them the hell out of Germany "completely."
He knows it's true because he couldn't swallow the pill.

He asked the officers about Dachau and what had happened and they
wouldn't tell him anything. They just told him the war was about over
and that they had a pile off books that they could read if they
wanted, and that they were in R and R. He never heard another word
about Dachau.

He said they'd been "OUT" for three days. I don't know how factual
that is, but he told me he checked the dates and he'd been unconscious
for three days. He looked at me and said, "How in the hell did I end
up from Dachau into France in a blink of the eye? The CIC was
covering up the murders of the the SS we pulled off in the little city
of Dachau south of the prison camp. They were so scared about us
getting caught and the treaty negotiations that they drugged us and
got us the hell out of there because they knew were were all seasoned
combat soldiers and didn't give a ****. Later I was told to keep my
mouth shut or I'd spend the rest of my life in Leavinworth (sp)."

My dad purposely avoided having a computer and never uncovered his
deep and horrible memories of Dachau or Goettingen.

I heard so much about it when I was a kid I went to Dachau in 1979. I
even felt that I might have been a prisoner there in the 1940's and
been reincarnated. I knew so much about the place, the human
experiments, and the crematoriums, I needed to see it.

My feeling about Dachau was that it was a strange place where I had
never been "In any life" and I had no identity with it at all.

I saw the memorial, the museum all of it. It was like any other
museum other than it was terrible to think that humans had ever done
that to one another in a more civilized society.

Goettingen is a completely different story. I will tell you what dad
said about that in detail in some book I write or so.

It's interesting that I have a neighbor who was raised in Munich and
she was never taught of any of this. The germans errased this history
from the children who grew up after the war. You ask Germans today
who are our age. Many don't even believe such a thing happened.

I mention this because I worked with a Ph.D. chemist for many years
who was born in Goettingen. He told me there was never a prison camp
there. I'd like someone here to verify that there was. My dad told
me hundreds of stories about the liberation of that prison and how he
liberated food for the starving Mongolian prisoners.

Have at it you guys. I'd like to see what you come up with. I'd like
to know what supporting facts there are about that concentration camp
which held Asians, not Jews.

Bill

In article ,
(Badwater Bill) wrote:

There was a tragic incident in our family six days ago. My father

I'm so sorry. Bill, please accept my condolences on the passing of your
father. As you say, William L. Phillips lived a full life. The world is
a poorer place for his death, but it is a richer place for his life.

-=K=-

Kevin O'Brien

On Fri, 26 Mar 2004 22:59:37 -0500, Kevin 'Hognose' O'Brien
wrote:

In article ,
(Badwater Bill) wrote:

There was a tragic incident in our family six days ago. My father

I'm so sorry. Bill, please accept my condolences on the passing of your
father. As you say, William L. Phillips lived a full life. The world is
a poorer place for his death, but it is a richer place for his life.

-=K=-

Kevin O'Brien


Thanks Kevin. This, from a man like you who has been a true warrior
himself for most of his life, really has a lot of meaning to me. I
hope one day that I can be privileged enough to meet you.

I appreciate all the posts that all of you, my friends, have made in
this thread. I will save it for the rest of my life. Many of you,
like Kevin are great patriots like my dad was and have given much more
than your share to keep out great country what it is.

The protection of America and the love of the United States runs deep
in my red-blood, my brother and my mother-and the red blood of every
one of my relatives,. I will not say anything about it now but I will
tell you what I'm doing at a later date to protect our borders from
terrorists. I'm in one of the finest projects I've been involved in
for years. I don't even have the time to read RAH but once a week-or
less. Can you imagine that?


Bill

I'm so sorry. Bill, please accept my condolences on the passing of your
father. As you say, William L. Phillips lived a full life. The world is
a poorer place for his death, but it is a richer place for his life.

-=K=-

Kevin O'Brien


Thanks Kevin. This, from a man like you who has been a true warrior
himself for most of his life, really has a lot of meaning to me. I
hope one day that I can be privileged enough to meet you.

I appreciate all the posts that all of you, my friends, have made in
this thread. I will save it for the rest of my life. Many of you,
like Kevin are great patriots like my dad was and have given much more
than your share to keep out great country what it is.

The protection of America and the love of the United States runs deep
in my red-blood, my brother and my mother-and the red blood of every
one of my relatives,. I will not say anything about it now but I will
tell you what I'm doing at a later date to protect our borders from
terrorists. I'm in one of the finest projects I've been involved in
for years. I don't even have the time to read RAH but once a week-or
less. Can you imagine that?


Bill


Bill,

I haven't been following most of the threads on RAH lately and missed this
entirely. I am very sorry to hear about you dad. My best to you and your
family at this time.


Bob Reed
www.kisbuild.r-a-reed-assoc.com (KIS Builders Site)
KIS Cruiser in progress...Slow but steady progress....

"Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice,
pull down your pants and Slide on the Ice!"
(M.A.S.H. Sidney Freedman)

I have a friend whose mother just passed away. Does anybody have anything this
beautiful and powerful for a mother instead of a father?

Jim



"Rich S."
shared these priceless pearls of wisdom:

-Shifting the Sun
-
-When your father dies, say the Irish,
-You lose your umbrella against bad weather.
-May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.

[snip]




Jim Weir (A&P/IA, CFI, & other good alphabet soup)
VP Eng RST Pres. Cyberchapter EAA Tech. Counselor
http://www.rst-engr.com