Christmas at the photo plant, 1946. My dad and his future wife
 (arms crossed, kneeling with my dad)  and the rest of the friends
and characters they would talk about thereafter. Many became lifelong friends. 

Customs declaration

This Veterans Day is more sombre than most for my dad as he soldiers on after my mother, my dad's wife of 64 years, died Oct. 15, 2012.

She is mentioned late in my dad's story about his years crossing Europe because it was near the end of his tour that he met her. A Bavarian, she was working in a Munich photo processing plant that he found himself running as a civilian after the war ended.

 She was the only "thing" he brought back that caused a bit of ruckus in the Funk family household.

This is page two of the passenger list for the HolbrookVic which sailed
from La Havre, France. His future wife Elisabeth would eventually follow
sailing form the same harbor. 

Funks

My father turned 90 this year. This is what all Funks looked like back in 1970.

Picture In Landscape 5x7 folded card

Shutterfly offers custom St. Patrick's Day cards.

View the entire collection of cards.

The blog post lives on

It's been more than a year since I posted my father's "My War in Europe: 1944-1947." During the last year a few readers whose fathers also served in 398th have sent me information and photographs that may be of interest to those of you interested in World War II history as seen and reported by the common GI. 


By the way, my father just celebrated his 88th birthday. My mother, a Munich native, also will celebrate her 88th birthday this year. 


The attached photographs were sent to my by Tom Duvall, whose dad was Sgt. Thomas Owen Duvall and went by his middle name Owen most of the time.  He was from Atlanta, Georgia.  

From Tom: "I attached some other pictures from my Dad and named them using the comment on the back of the picture to explain them.  If you look carefully, on the door of the half track in the picture taken in Luneville France is the word "Tommy" which was for me (I was born in 1943.)  I believe Dad told me he had the words "Little Tommy" on his door of his track.  I remember him saying one of his half tracks was destroyed so he had to go to the back of the lines to get another one which he also named "Tommy"."

Sgt. Duvall, Sept. 1944, Luneville, France

Sgt. Duvall

Sgt. Duvall, Feb. 1945

Sgt. Duvall and Pat Rushing

10 years later

This is a photograph of me, my brother Kevin

and my parents in our home near 

Valley Cottage, New York. 

I'm the one in the blue jump suit.

The photo was probably taken in 1956. 

- - -

Fun with Film

In supervising the photo finishing operations, I noticed that a lot of the films coming in from the soldiers for processing didn’t have anything printable on them. This was because they were buying advanced Leica and Rolleflex cameras at the PX but didn’t know how to use them. I took some of the bad rolls of film down to the Armed Forces Radio Station in Munich and showed them to the manager. He got the idea right away.

“Why don’t we set up a weekly program where you can talk to the GI’s about operating their cameras and taking good pictures,” he suggested. That was what I had in mind.

Within a few weeks our new half hour program “Fun with Film,” debuted on AFN Munich-Stuttgart. Later it expanded to include almost all of the AFN stations in Europe.

The station assigned Alan Bergman, an experienced announcer/disc jockey to work with me on the program to ask questions so I could offer helpful hints on how to operate various cameras and take better focused and composed pictures.

I also visited the Leica camera works at Wetzlar and a film manufacturing plant in Munich and described these operations on the program. Being on the radio was not only a lot of fan but I was happy to note that there was a noticeable decline in the the number of unprintable films received at the Munich Photo Plant.

As we neared the end of 1947, I was offered the job of regional manager of Army Exchange photo operations but this would have involved relocating to offices in Frankfurt, Germany. I preferred Bavaria. Besides, I figured that the U.S. Army presence in Europe was not going to last much longer so I had better go home, finish my interrupted college education and get a long-term job. So I declined to sign a new contract.

My interpreter, secretary and administrative assistant for the past two years had been Elizabeth Oeser, and we had been privileged to fall in love.

Now that I was leaving, we began making arrangements for her to come to the U.S. as my fiancee under a new law that allowed fiancees of U.S. military personnel to visit the U.S. for a limited period if they did not get married, or to stay permanently if they did get married.

Qualifying under this law was no easy task. It took six months to complete the necessary interviews and investigations to prove that she was not a former Nazi party member, as well as numerous physical exams and x-rays to prove that she was in good physical and mental health. Compared to today’s immigration standards, it was ridiculous.

Nevertheless, she finally cleared the bureaucratic hurdles and arrived in the U.S. aboard the good ship George Washington on a sweltering day in July, 1948. I met her in New York and we returned to my parent’s home in Ohio where I had been living since my return from Europe. We were married in Elyria, Ohio on September 1, 1948, culminating my European venture which began with joining the U.S. Army in 1942 and entering active service in 1943.

We are married still.

The Munich Photo Plant

In the beginning, to provide immediate service, we contracted with a German photo finisher who had a plant in the small town of Bad Wiesee on the shores of Lake Tegernsee, about 30 miles south of Munich. However, as a result of what was known as the "denazification project" instituted by the Allied Forces to rout out former members of the Nazi Party, it was discovered that the photo plant owner had been a Party member. His plant was taken over by the government and Narkus became responsible for daily operations in running the plant.

It was obvious that demand would soon outstrip our ability to supply from the Bad Wiesee plant, so Narkus decided to build a new state-of-the-art plant in Munich with all new Kodak and Pako equipment shipped from the United States.

We took over a large three-story building that had housed a photographic school in Munich and was relatively undamaged by Allied bombing, After we had begun construction to repair and modify the building it suddenly occurred to us that there was a major problem. The only electrical service available in that sector of Munich was 440 volts DC. The new American equipment that was already in transit was designed for 110 volts AC. Now what?

A study of the electric grid serving Munich revealed that the nearest alternating current was in a 5,000 volt underground cable several blocks from the proposed new photo plant. After scouring the country, we finally came up with a 5,000 volt transformer that could step the power down to 110 volts. But how do we install a cable for several blocks under the city streets? The over populated prisoner of war compounds in Munich provided the answer.

Narkus somehow got a document from the Burgermeister permitting us to dig up the city streets to install the cable. We also found out that the prisoners of war were readily available to work on civic clean-up projects. All I had to do was send around a 6x6 Army truck each morning and check out 25 to 50 prisoners to dig the underground trench. In the late afternoon I would have to return and check-in the same number of prisoners.

The first week, we started with Hungarian P.O.W.'s, still in their country's uniforms, of course. The men enjoyed getting out of the crowded camp and sang as they dug up the street, inserted the heavy cable and refilled the trench. When we went to pick them up to start the second week, we found that they had been shipped out on their way back to Hungary.

"How about some Italians?" the prison commandant asked. So we picked up a truckload of Italian soldiers. They surveyed the scene and were not impressed.

"Is that all that the Hungarians could dig in a week?" they asked. "We can beat that!"

And they did.

Unfortunately, when we went to pick them the following week, they were being loaded up to be shipped back to Italy.

“I guess you’ll have to settle for some German prisoners, “ the commandant said, “but you’ll have to guard them closely.”

Fortunately we had recently been assigned another American civilian employee and a Dutch civilian employee so we let them alternate as guards, armed with our .45 caliber pistol.

The Germans contemptuously looked over the digging done by their predecessors and said they could do better than that. Which they did!

As we neared the end of the digging, our Dutchman went out one day to take over his afternoon turn at guard duty and encountered a surprising sight. The German prisoners were singing and digging with great gusto under the watchful eye of another prisoner, a German army sergeant who was armed with our .45 caliber pistol!

“Where’s the American?” the Dutchman inquired. “Oh, he’s upstairs with a blonde across the street,” the German prisoner explained.

Anyway, none of the prisoners wanted to escape and we completed the cable installation with no problems.

The new automatic film developers, electric eye controlled photo print makers and huge drum dryers were successfully installed and operated fine on our new source of electricity.

The photo plant in Bad Wiessee was shut down and most of the employees transferred to Munich. We had built dormitories on the top floor of the photo plant so that the skilled people from Bad Wiesee could stay in Munich during the week and go home for the weekends.

In addition, we hired more than 100 new employees and trained them to handle the new American equipment. Soon we were churning out as many as 25,000 to 30,000 black and white prints a day. (Color film was not yet available at the PX’s.)

Shortly after everything was running smoothly, Narkus’ employment contract expired and was not renewed, so he returned to the U.S. I was promoted to Munich Photo Plant Manager and signed a new one-year contract, to be effective after a 30-day furlough to my home in the U.S. It turned out to be a rather uneventful year as our business was good and we ended up making a profit -- which went to the United States Treasury.

Hooray! Out of the Army at Last

After several months of this work, I was asked by the Colonel if I would like to keep doing the job as a civilian employee of the Exchange Service. "Naturally," he said slyly, "it would require your immediate discharge from the Army and would pay more money."

Actually, immediate discharge from the Army was all I needed to hear.

I signed up for a one-year contract to work as a civilian with privileges equivalent to an army captain. At the time, they were just beginning the civilian employment program in Europe and no one was quite sure how to discharge me from the Army in Germany and retain my rights to transportation back home to Ohio.

Finally, they set up a discharge facility in Bayreuth, Germany, and it was there that I returned to civilian life with an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army dated the 18th day of December, 1945.

Now -- after three years, three months and 23 days in the U.S. Army -- I was a private citizen again. Yet it would be another two full years before I returned home to Ohio.

As a civilian employee of the Army Exchange Service stationed over seas, I was entitled to lodging and rations equivalent to that of an Army Captain and had to wear an officer's style uniform.

Instead of the insignias of rank and organization that customarily adorn the lapels, sleeves and epaulets of the uniform, the civilian version was a set of embroidered dark blue triangular patches containing the letters "US." I was assigned to work for another civilian, Walter J. Narkus, a tall lanky fellow who was well qualified as an expert in commercial photo developing and printing. He had run large photo finishing plants in the U.S. and had most recently installed large photo finishing operations in Great Britain to serve the American troops there. Now his job was to build new facilities to develop and print the black and white photographs taken by the occupation troops stationed in southern Germany, Austria and northern Italy.

To provide technical support he had brought along an Englishman, George Seagrove, to serve as a mechanic, electrician and general handy man.

Clerical, accounting and secretarial services were provided by a young German woman, Elizabeth Oeser, who lived near the Third Anny compound.

I rounded out the crew with an assignment to procure all of the necessary supplies to keep the operation running.