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By Al Zdon
Clarence L. Ollum made his living by whacking cows on the head before he joined the military.
Ollum was a "knocker," the one at the South St. Paul stockyards who slammed the cow's
head with a sledgehammer. The cow was then shackled by his feet and hoisted upwards where a butcher would slit it open.
"Sometimes you'd be up to your knees in blood," Ollum said in an interview at this Oakdale
home. "In some ways, that prepared me for the military."
Bud Ollum grew up in Jeffers, Minnesota, where his father, D.C Ollum, owned not just one, but two pool halls in town, one across the street from the other.
"There wasn't much to do in those days, and sometimes the farmers would come in and play pool all day long. It was all they had to do."
Along the way, his father sold the pool halls, and, after an unsuccessful
stint at farming, he tried his hand at owning a bar in South St. Paul. Bud Ollum was a teen-ager, and shortly after the move to the big city, his school career ended. He spent some time at a CCC camp.
Meat
processing was South St. Paul's claim to fame, and the young Ollum applied for and got a job at Swift's, although he was only about 16 at the time. After he took his physical, though, he got some bad news from the
management. He had a hernia that would have to be fixed before he could get a job doing the heavy work of a meat packing plant.
The problem was that the family had no money for the surgery. "My dad was a First
World War veteran, and he had a friend from over at the Legion Club. The friend asked what I was up to, and I told him I had a job at Swift's, but we didn't have the money. He told my dad, 'Have him get the
operation. Maybe I can help a little bit.'" The friend advanced the money, and the hernia was fixed.
A few weeks later, Ollum was knocking cows over the head with his hammer, a job he held right up to the time he
got drafted in August, 1942.
Ollum reported to Ft. Snelling and was sent to Camp Roberts in California for his basic training. He was joined there by two other Minnesotans, Vic Lindgren and Camile Gagne, and the
three became fast friends.
"Toward the end of training, some guy stood on the platform and talked to us about the paratroopers. He was a captain or a major or something, and he said they were looking for
volunteers. He said it would pay $50 a month more than we were making. The three of us signed up."
Ollum's next stop was at Jump School in Ft. Benning, Georgia. "It was a little gutsy, a little scary going
there." He recalls that the trainees ran two miles before breakfast every morning.
One memory of Ft. Benning that Ollum has is how they lined up the men in formation. "They always put the taller guys in the back,
and then whenever they had a job doing some heavy lifting, they always picked the taller guys. The shorter guy in the front row might be built like a brick outhouse, but they never asked him to do any heavy lifting."
The physical part of the training was easy for Ollum, but, like most of the volunteers, the parachute instruction was sometimes a challenge. "When they took us up the tower, my knees were knocking together, I
was so scared. The sergeant looked at me and asked if I was scared. I told him, no, I was just cold."
One of the exercises included putting a soldier in a horizontal position and hauling him up the tower. At a
certain point, they would tell the trainee to pull the rip cord, and the young man would be dropped to the earth, simulating a parachute descent.
One of Ollum's classmates refused to pull his rip cord, though –
the fear of heights overcoming him. The Army's answer was to keep hauling the trainee higher and higher and continuing to give him orders to pull the rip cord. When he got to the top the tower, the instructors
pulled it for him.
"That would be enough for a washout, but sometimes they gave a person a second chance. They would talk to him after he screwed up, and if they thought he could overcome it, they would give him
another chance."
Ollum's buddy, Gagne, almost washed out in an exercise where the trainees had to climb to the top of a gymnasium on rope ladders.
In the end, though, they all did their five drops from
airplanes and got their wings. Ollum said if you were near the door, there wasn't much of a chance of not jumping.
"There were 22 guys on a C-47, and if you were near the door, there were all those guys in line
behind you. You went out the damn door whether you wanted to or not.
"It took me until about my third jump, though, before I could stand at the door and look out before I jumped. I told a radio interviewer once
that I would just close my eyes and say a little prayer, but that wasn't how it really happened. You didn't have time. Out you go."
The men were assigned to the newly formed 82nd Airborne Division, and Ollum was
a part of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was put in headquarters company as a demolitions and radio technician.
The 82nd was moved to Camp Shanks, New York, where they got on a transport to North
Africa. They disembarked at Casablanca.
"Have you ever seen the movie 'Casablanca?' It's funny, but that's really how Casablanca looked."
The 82nd participated in the mop up action in North Africa as the
German forces were pushed into an evacuation. They also did more training. "It was hot and dusty, really bad."
At one point, though, Ollum volunteered with some others to do an exhibition jump for Bob Hope,
Frances Langford and Marlene Dietrich. "They put on a show for us, and then we put on a show for them. I always volunteered for stuff like a damned fool."
The first major combat by the 82nd was a night drop in
Sicily on June 9, 1943, and it got ugly early. "A bunch of German planes flew across and the American Navy was pounding them. But then we came through, and they shot the hell out of us. I think we lost 43 planes.
"A guy I knew in another plane said that his plane got hit and he had to crawl over the dead bodies to get to the door to jump out."
Ollum's plane was coming in low, and it might have been hit. "I heard a little
noise, like a fire cracker. All of a sudden, they told us to stand up, hook up, and out the door we went. It was that fast. As soon as I got out the door, I reached up for my risers, and my feet hit the ground."
The 82nd was busy waging war on Sicily, but Ollum remembers most vividly a fig orchard where the 505th was bivouacked. "We didn't get much fresh fruit, and those figs were good. The Germans missed a big opportunity
to get us, because we were all up in the fig trees. They were so delicious."
They also weren't ripe. "Guys would be running like the wind to the latrines, and then they'd just stop. It was too late. The stuff
just flew out of you."
The conquest of Sicily was still going on when the 82nd was pulled back to North Africa to get ready for its next jump on the Italian mainland.
"It's funny, but I can't remember hardly
anything about our jump into Salerno, or what happened later. It may have been because I had malaria. At one point my fever got up to 105 degrees and they put me in the hospital. They had a canvas tub filled with
ice, and I had to lay in it."
One memory he did retain was of crawling into a German bunker in a rainstorm to sleep. "It was nice in there, but then I got to thinking, what if those bastards come back. I'd be a
dead duck in here. So I went back out in the rain."
Ollum was hit during this campaign by a piece of shrapnel on the arm. He still bears the scars of where the metal ripped his wrist, and it resulted in his first
Purple Heart.
Another memory is of the Gurkhas, Indian soldiers, that were part of the Allied Army, and how they scared both the Germans and Americans. "They said that a Gurkha could come up to you at night,
feel your helmet and feel the way your boots were laced. If it was a German helmet or a German lacing, they would slit your throat. It made you cautious about going out at night."
The 82nd was sent to Belfast,
Northern Ireland, after the Italian campaign to regroup for the next big assignment: D-Day. "There was lots of good Irish potato whisky while we were resting up."
The unit was next sent to a base at Leichester,
England, the scene of one of the ugliest racial incidents of the war. Word had got around that a crime had been committed by a black soldier, and some of the white soldiers sought revenge.
The upshot of the event
was that Gen. Gavin, the commanding officer of the 82nd, ordered his troops to turn in all their German pistols and other extra-legal armament they possessed. For Ollum, it meant giving up his prized knife that also
contained a brass knuckles on the handle, along with a triangular protrusion for thumping people on the head.
After the war, one of Ollum's friends bought him a replica of the weapon, and it again is one of his
prized possessions.
On D-Day, Ollum was the third man out the door in one of the first planes. His job was to serve as a body guard or runner for Lt. Col. William Ekman, the commanding officer of the 505th. "I
was supposed to be a pretty good shot."
"I came down in St. Mere Eglise, and I saw the guy hanging by his parachute on the church tower (played by Red Buttons in the movie The Longest Day). But when I saw him, he
was dead."
His responsibility, Lt. Col. Ekman, had a parachute malfunction and ended up two miles away. Ollum linked up with him after a couple of days, and the headquarters team also appropriated some Jeeps that
had come in on gliders.
It was during this time, that Ollum found out that his close friend, Vic Lindgren, had been hit. "There were two houses with kind of gully between them. There was a guy lying in there, and
it was Vic. He said, 'Bud, is that you?'
"He was completely bent over with the soles of his feet up by his shoulders. His guts were all exposed. I asked him what happened, and he said he'd been hit by an 88."
Lindgren then told him about what had happened while he was waiting for aid. A German soldier had come up and found a P-38 in Lindgren's belt. Some German soldiers took that as a death sentence for the American
caught with the souvenir.
The German took the pistol and fired three shots at Lindgren's head. Lindgren tried to cover up, and then play dead, and the German eventually went away. In the meantime, though, he shot
off one of Lindgen's fingers and part of an ear lobe.
"A radio guy came up behind me, and I told him to call for a stretcher. He said he couldn't because he was calling in artillery at that time. I said, "Dammit,
call for that stretcher, buddy,' and he did. Later he told me I should have been court-martialed for that, but nothing was ever said about it."
Lindgren lived for several years after the war, despite his
injuries. He credited Ollum with saving his life.
On June 11, D-Day plus five, Ollum and Ekman were in a Jeep in the hedgerow country of France when they came under fire. Ollum immediately took off toward the
shots, and his citation indicates he advanced on a machine gun position. "With no other thought save that of his commander's safety, he dashed forward toward the enemy emplacement, exposed himself to their direct
fire, and attacked them with his weapon. He closed with them, killed three Germans, and dispersed the others."
For his action, Ollum received the Silver Star.
At one point in the ensuing firefight, Ollum found
himself confronting a German soldier one on one. The German had the drop on Ollum and fired three times in rapid succession before ducking down. "This guy really knew what he was doing. The three bullets went right
through the pleat in my uniform, under my arm, missing my heart by a couple of inches. I didn't even know I'd been hit until later I found those three holes."
Ollum kept his rifle pointed. "I said to myself, if
that SOB raises his head one more time, I'm going to get him. He raised his head up, and I got him."
In the next few minutes, Ollum went through two bandoliers of ammunition as the Americans battled what turned
out to be a German command post.
The next stop for the 82nd was Operation Market Garden, the effort to secure a number of bridges through Holland so that British tanks could make it across the Rhine into Germany.
"It was the only daylight jump we did. What I remember most was that I had to pee so bad my teeth were floating. When I hit the ground, I was immediately pinned down by a machine gun, but when you've got to go,
you've got to go." Ollum relieved himself while lying on his back. "It's not easy to do that, in a wind, and not get it on yourself."
On the bridge at Nijmegen, Ollum's other Minnesota buddy, Camile Gagne was
killed. "Somebody told me that he was hit, but they told me not to go looking for him because he had been cut in half." Gagne was buried nearby and is still buried a few miles from where he fell.
The next stop
for the 82nd was the Battle of the Bulge, and Ollum talks quite freely about Bastogne, the encircled city that held off the German assault. Ollum was reminded that it was the 101st Airborne that held Bastogne, and
not the 82nd. "Yeah, but we were the ones who went in and got them out," he said with a smile.
It was not long after that that Ollum saw what he calls the worst thing he ever saw during his time in service. He's
not sure where it happened, either near the Ardennes or the Huertgen forests.
"There were three semi-trailers, and they were loaded to the top, higher than the cab with dead soldiers, both German and American.
They were stacked just like cord wood, and they had logging chains holding them on the trailer."
When the 82nd reached the Siegfried Line, Ollum was in his usual place in the back of the Jeep, providing
protection for Ekman. At the Siegfried Line, a series of major fortifications intended to keep the Allies out of Germany, there was a tank stuck in one of the ditches.
One of the tankers was cutting logs and
putting them in the ditch, hoping to give the tank enough purchase to get out. Lt. Col. Ekman sent Ollum over to help the man out.
"I went over there, and I grabbed one end of the log. We were just getting
started when he fell back, and I had the log on my shoulder. It just took me back over."
Combat in Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and four jumps had not been able to slow Ollum down, but he was felled by a log. He
tried staying with his job for another week, but his injury turned out to be a strangulated hernia.
"Somebody made me turn myself in, and one of the doctors said, 'Son, you're going home.' Actually I wasn't too
unhappy about that." Ollum said later there wasn't one day in his time in the 82nd when he wasn't frightened.
Ollum was on a hospital ship in the mid-Atlantic when the war ended. When he got to New York, he was
asked by an Army person where he wanted to go for his hernia surgery. He indicated that anywhere near Minnesota would be fine. So they sent him to Walla Walla, Washington.
He married his pre-war sweetheart in
1946, and he went back to work at Swift's. A disagreement with a manager, though, ended his meat packing career and he went into the printing business. He stayed in the trade for 33 years before retiring.
He and
Dorothy, who died in 1996, had two boys, Dennis and Timothy.
In a ceremony this past month at the Rotunda in the Minnesota Capitol, Ollum was presented with the French Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, presented
by French Counsel General Richard Barbeyron.
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