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By Al Zdon
Norb McCrady actually did make corporal once in his six-year Army career, but it was short-lived thanks to the lingering effects a strenuous game of craps.
Otherwise, he was happy to
weather his World War II tour of duty in Minnesota's 34th Division as a PFC.
Twice he was offered a path, by the Army, that could have resulted in his being an officer, but neither time was the
temptation strong enough.
"I got along fine with most people — as long as they respected me as an individual. But those who thought their rank made them intelligent, I had problems with."
Norbert A. McCrady grew up in Owatonna, Minnnesota, on the outskirts of town. "It was one of those places that had an outdoor biffy. We were on a clay and dirt road, and we had chickens, sheep, a barn
and a hay mow. As you look back, it wasn't a palace, but we were happy with it."
McCrady's dad worked at the post office until he contracted tuberculosis in 1934. With dad unable to work, the family
soon lost its house. For young Norbert, it meant quite a bit of moving around in the next few years, living with relatives and in board and room arrangements. "It sounds terrible, but it wasn't so bad. I
never felt the world was against me. People were good to me."
When not going to school, he helped out his local milkman, who had gout, by delivering his route. For that service he got a quart of milk
and a pint of chocolate milk every day, and a pound of butter every week.
He also sustained himself by setting pins at the bowling alley, racking balls at the billiard hall, washing bottles for the
bootleggers, and "doing whatever anybody asked me to do."
McCrady would also hustle a little pool action on the weekends.
He learned to drive at a tender age when he and his mother would travel
to the sanitarium at Aw Gwah Ching, near Walker, to visit his father. "My mom would be too tired after a full shift of nursing, and so she'd prop a couple of pillows under me and I'd help her drive."
McCrady fibbed on his age and joined the Minnesota National Guard in May 1939. "I was not suited to be a soldier; I was strictly in it for the money. They paid $2 for a drill night, and so every three
months I got a check for $12. That was a lot of money to me."
In 1940, word came down that his unit was being federalized into the regular Army. "We were so unsophisticated, we really didn't see it
coming. I know that's hard to understand now, but we thought Owatonna was the center of the world. We couldn't see how Hitler could possibly affect us."
Several of McCrady's contemporaries dropped out
of the Guard before being called up, but McCrady decided to see it through. "You've got to remember there were no jobs back then. I was lucky to get a seasonal work at the canning factory. I decided to
stay with the outfit."
Before leaving school, though, a special plan was worked out for the five seniors, who were being called up, to get their high school diplomas. "My trouble was with math. I
still don't know if it's 'plane' geometry or 'plain' geometry."
In the end, though, McCrady approached the teacher and convinced him that it was a good idea if he passed. "Sometimes you just have to
assert yourself. I've used that technique many times since then when I found myself on shaky ground."
McCrady was assigned to F Company, Second Battalion, 131st Infantry Regiment. On their day of
departure, the Owatonna men gathered in the armory prior to heading over to the railroad station. "We were all joking around up to that point. We thought it was a lark. But when we started marching over
to the station, it was a dead silence. All you could hear were the boots crunching in the snow. The stark reality suddenly hit us."
Camp Claiborne in Louisiana was a huge change of lifestyle for the
Midwesterners. "The snakes weren't garter snakes. There were wild boar running around. And there were chiggers. Plus there was a truly hostile civilian populace. They were anti-Yankee, plus they had a
contempt for soldiers."
McCrady recalls that one soldier was walking past the local municipal swimming pool, where a sign proclaimed, "No Negroes, No Dogs and No Soldiers," when he spied a fair young
damsel in the pool area. Forgetting his place, he softly called out, "yoo-hoo" to the young lady. A general, overhearing the young soldier's call, had him arrested and put in the stockade.
"There was
recognition of the fact that this general had been elevated beyond his talents. Once word got around about his putting this soldier in the stockade, he became known as General Yoo-Hoo. It followed him
the rest of his career."
The attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 was again something of a mystery to the rustic lads from Minnesota. "We didn't know where Pearl Harbor was. We had to look on a map
just to find out where Hawaii was. It was more confusing than anything else. We didn't know this would lead to war. We still had delusions that we were going home after a year."
The unit was quickly
assigned to Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans to stand guard duty. The assignment had some of the soldiers taking their job very seriously.
"One of our guys, who was not the brightest guy in the
unit, had been told that if anyone comes near, he was to ask for the password. Well, after a while our commanding officer went out to inspect the guards. When he approached this guard, he was challenged
for the password. He said, 'I don't need to know the password, I'm the colonel of the regiment.' The guard shouted back, 'Screw you, colonel. What's the password?'"
The next move was to Ft. Dix, New
Jersey, to get aboard a ship. "We left so fast that my buddy and I had to leave our car behind. We had a little business selling half pints to the guys."
The men boarded the British ship RMS Aquitania
in April of 1942 to travel to the British Isles as part of a massive convoy. In Northern Ireland, part of the duty was to guard the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Island.
In
early December 1942, the men left for Northern Africa. They landed near Oran and made their way across to Tunisia in order to help the British pursue the retreating Germans. It was the Americans first
taste of real combat.
"It was there that we found out how ill prepared we were. We thought our training had been pretty intensive, but we were like a spitball champion getting in the ring with Joe
Louis."
McCrady's job was as battalion scout, and one of his duties was to march in front of the unit to give early warning of any kind of enemy presence. "But the Germans were clever enough to just
let the scouts go through and then attack the main body."
McCrady said the early fighting was a tough, but lasting lesson about being in war. "You learn how to protect yourself. The first time you saw
someone dead who you had known, or even badly wounded, you came close to going into a state of shock. After that, you get kind of a cocoon that wraps itself around your psyche. It only allows a certain
amount of information into your brain. It kind of dehumanizes you. You don't become brave, but at least you don't panic anymore when something bad happens."
The example of the British army was a great
learning experience for the Americans. "I remember one time early on we were trying to dig foxholes in the solid ground when the British came up to our position. They didn't bother with foxholes, they
just threw a camouflage sheet over their truck. They sat down and started these fires so they could make tea, and the smoke was billowing out. Here we were, hunched down in our foxholes, and they were
lounging around drinking tea. We felt pretty silly.
"But you had to understand that they had seen their homes bombed, and their families killed. For them, war was just like going to work. For us it
was a trauma."
At one point, with their position in danger of being outflanked on both sides, the commanding officer ordered a retreat through a mountain pass. "They told me to go back and find the
rear guard platoon and show them where the pass was. They said they'd leave the command car waiting for me when I got back. I went back, and it was a bright, moonlit night. I was sneaking along the banks
of the river, keeping out of sight when I heard voices.
"I decided I'd better get a little closer, and when I did I found out they were speaking German. I just about turned green. I raced back to the
pass and found out that the rear guard had already gone through. And the command car was gone too.
"I had to walk 40 miles to get back to our defensive position. There are still marks on my feet from
the blisters I got that day. They've healed over, but they still hurt at times."
As the Germans retreated to the coast, McCrady was given another assignment. "They told me and this other guy to take
our walkie talkies and go up to this knob on a hill and report back what we saw. They told us in no uncertain terms not to leave until we got orders to leave. So we stayed up there, and there were just
thousands of Germans marching past.
"Well, a couple of days went by now we're out of food and water. The batteries are dead on our walkie-talkies. And by now, there aren't Germans marching by, they're
all Americans.
"I said to the other guy, 'Why don't you go down and get some food and water?' But he wouldn't do it, and he wouldn't let me go. Geez, he was a stubborn guy. About 12 hours later, we
were starving to death, and he said he'd go. He left and he never came back."
McCrady waited as long as he could, but hunger drove him from his post. He found an American unit and begged a can of
already opened sardines from a soldier. "He warned me that it might be spoiled, but I was so hungry I just gobbled it down. It wasn't long before I knew I had the worst case of stomach poisoning
possible. I spent the next three days in the hospital."
Still in the hospital and still weak from being unable to eat, McCrady found out that the division was going to march in a victory parade in
Tunis. He talked his way out of the hospital and found his division.
"We were marching 40 abreast, and as we got near the reviewing stand, I was smoking a cigarette. I figured no one could see me in
the middle of the pack, so when they did 'eyes right' I was still smoking. I bet I was the only soldier that day to march past Eisenhower and Churchill and Montgomery and Patton and DeGalle while smoking
a cigarette."
Oddly enough, the next time McCrady saw his partner from the knob on the hill was several years later when McCrady visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington D.C. and found
his former comrade on guard duty.
At one point in North Africa, the company got a new commander and he was not liked or respected by the men. "He was stealing cigarettes by the case and selling them
on the black market. Plus, he was a tyrant."
McCrady was a friend of Harold Nelson, a fellow Owatonnan who had been an officer in the 34th Division but had been forced to retire because of age. Nelson
now held the position of charge d'affairs for the Port of Oran. McCrady was asked by his fellow soldiers to see Nelson and see if he could use his pull to get rid of the crooked company commander.
McCrady paid the call and was welcomed warmly by his hometown friend. In the end, though, Nelson told McCrady there was nothing he could do.
"I went back, and the guys accepted it grimly. A week
later, though, orders came through and the officer was demoted from captain to second lieutenant and sent away. He was later discharged from the army."
The 34th Division landed a Salerno on the
Italian coast, and McCrady was sent back to his old company where he went through truck driver training. He eventually became the driver for the company commander.
"I was probably a better driver than
I was a soldier."
After some unfortunate incidents with bomb craters, McCrady was told to practice his driving skills, and on one of his excursions he encountered two Navy men by the side of the road.
Neither wore any insignia to show their rank.
"I asked them if they wanted a ride, and they said, 'Sure.' I asked them where their boat was, and they told me it was tied up at the pier." McCrady drove
them down to the waterfront. "All of a sudden there were whistles blowing and people shouting. It was the most attention I'd ever gotten as a driver. Everybody was jumping all over themselves."
The
two riders invited McCrady to come aboard. "I said, 'No I can't leave my jeep.' The next thing I knew there were two sailors guarding it at either end with rifles." The riders then brought him up
the gangway, onto the ship, and then down to the ship's store. They told the storekeeper to give him anything he wanted.
"They were loading up boxes of cigarettes and boxes of candy. I said, 'Hold
on, I don't want all that. Just give me a carton of smokes and some candy.' And the sailor says, 'Well, when the fleet commander tells me to give you what you want, I do it.'
"So it was the fleet
commander. I was just calling them, 'you guys.'"
After landing at Anzio, McCrady found out he might be suffering from some battle fatigue. "The shells started coming in from Anzio Annie, and I ducked
into a bunker. All of a sudden I just had to get out of there. I couldn't stand being shut up in there anymore. I dove into a crater filled with water and sat there during the shelling, all wet and cold.
I slept in that crater that night rather than go back into that bunker."
At one point, the company's commanding officer was wounded and was sent to a hospital in Naples. He contacted McCrady and asked
him to bring down his personal gear. McCrady received permission to make the trip, but was told that he'd be accompanied by two other men.
"We found out that as part of our trip we were to pick up our
dead at Anzio from F and G companies. They had been there a few days, and they were bloated. We put them in bread sacks with one dog tag attached to the outside of the bag. Then we just threw them on the
truck like cordwood. The smell was awful.
"The worst part was that we knew these guys. We left them at a cemetery and drove into Naples. The C.O. thought we'd be happy to be there, but we just had
this far away look in our eyes. We were stunned by what we had just done."
The unit marched through Rome, and McCrady took advantage of a chance to get some R&R in the Eternal City. By this time
he'd been transferred again, this time to the cannon company.
"It was time to head back, and I asked the guy if this truck was going to cannon company, and he said it was. I didn't recognize anybody
on the truck, but I was new in the company so I didn't think twice. I was sleeping away in the back of the truck when it arrived. I found out they had taken me to cannon company in another division."
McCrady had to retrace his route to Rome, and then scramble back to his unit, several hours after his pass expired. "But it worked out. They treated me like an elder statesman. After all I was 22 years
old."
At one point many months later, McCrady was asked to report to headquarters. He was informed that he was being considered, under a special Army program for enlisted men, to be sent to West Point
for training as an officer. McCrady and the commander talked over the discipline that would be needed to survive the hazing at the military academy.
"They asked me what I'd do if some senior classman
kept sending me, a war veteran, out to pick up cigarette butts. I said that at some point I'd knock him on his ass. We all agreed that West Point wasn't for me."
The division fought its way
north until the war ended. Again, the chance to enter the officer ranks was presented to McCrady. He was told he was being sent home for 30 days leave, and then would report back to his unit as an
officer with a field commission to serve in the occupation army.
"They said I had no choice, but I told them I wouldn't raise my arm to take the oath. There was a time when I'd have accepted a field
commission, but not now."
Instead, he was given orders to go home. His first stop was at a replacement depot in Naples. Every day, while the homeward bound troops were waiting for transportation home,
they were told to fall out to police the grounds and do other menial work.
"I just told them I wasn't going to fall out. They called the sergeant of the guard, and he called the OOD who was a first
lieutenant. He brought me into his office and told me I was facing a serious charge.
"I said, 'Lieutenant, let me put it to you this way. I've been overseas for four years without every getting leave.
I've spent over 600 days in combat. I've got enough points to get out of the Army two and one-half times. I'm not going to fall out to pick up cigarette butts. You'll just have to court martial me.'"
The officer looked at him and said, "Let's have a drink." He gave McCrady two nickels and sent him to the Coke machine. They poured whiskey into their Cokes and relaxed. Finally, the officer said to him.
"Listen, every time you are ordered to fall out, you come here to my office. You get a nickel and get a Coke. You put whiskey in it. And then you wait until the other men come back."
McCrady remembers
with wistful eyes. "Sometimes they would fall out two or three times a day. But I figured I had earned it."
In the end, he did get out. Times were still tough in Owatonna, but he eventually became
Steele County treasurer. In 1970, he was asked by the Republican Party to run for Secretary of State against DFLer Joe Donovan. He lost the election, but the statewide exposure opened many doors for him.
He became the executive vice president of the Independent Bankers of Minnesota and spent many years lobbying at the State Capitol and in Washington. The pictures in his collection show him with
Sen. Dave Durenberger, Gov. Wendell Anderson and a host of other Minnesota and national leaders. He retired, but continued to work, both as a writer and in running a speaker's bureau.
He and his
wife, Natalie, married in 1946, have five children, 12 grandchildren, and seven great grandchildren.
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