John L. Brown of Rehoboth Beach has seen the atrocities of war and remembers well the horrible discoveries GI’s made near the end of World War II.
“There’s an oven, see. My right hand touched that oven,” said Brown, 88, as he leafed through the pages of a U.S. Army yearbook that contains photos of what allied troops saw when they arrived at the Dachau concentration camp in the spring of 1945.
“When we freed the prisoners, the ones that could still move ran the guards down and killed them right there. They took the guards' guns and bashed their heads in. They had done so many mean things to them. You had to be there and see it to believe it,” Brown said.
Brown had been running a country store in Williamsville near Harrington before the war dropped him into an M-24 tank as a commander in Company D of the 20th Tank Battalion, 20th Armored Division under the command of Gen. George Patton.
“President Truman gave us a presidential unit citation because we had done such a heck of a job,” said Brown. Asked what it was like to serve under Patton, Brown said, “it was hell,” before quickly editing the comment.
“No, it wasn’t hell either, he was good to us. But when he said let’s go get the sonsabitches we went, because he meant every word of it,” Brown said.
Brown said before the Army sent him to Europe, he spent nearly two years stateside with young, second lieutenants sent in from Savannah, Ga., to be trained in tank warfare.
“We came out of Fort Knox with a good I.Q., and they wouldn’t let us get away from them and go over there and get shot up,” Brown remembers of training. Finally, Brown got orders and he shipped out from Fort Myles Standish in Massachusetts.
Several months later he was in a street in Austria standing next to a home in which an officer told him Adolph Hitler had been born. “At least that’s what they told us,” Brown said.
Brown said his unit was on the third line of defense at the Battle of the Bulge, which lasted from December 1944 to mid-January 1945. “We were outside our tanks on account of we couldn’t afford to run the motors and have the Germans hear us,” he said.
Brown said he remembers days of fog that never seemed to lift. But when the fog finally did lift, Brown said American pilots flying the famed P-51 aircraft dropped skip-bombs with devastating effect on the deeply dug-in German tank units.
“I’ve loved a P-51 every since. If those Germans had gotten loose with those tanks they would have given us a hard time and we would have had our hands full,” Brown said.
He said he also remembers being in the field upon hearing the news that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died.
“When were in the middle of winning the war and we had lost our commander. There are just some things like that you never, never, forget,” he said.
Back stateside in 1946, Brown found work with Shorgas of Dover, which would later become Suburban Propane. He operated his own bottled gas company from 1953 until 1967 when he took a job as Rehoboth Beach’s municipal building maintenance supervisor and head of the parks department.
Brown retired in 1979 but so enjoyed beautification of Rehoboth Beach and working with people that he returned to work for the city under contract.
Brown, a resident of Rehoboth Beach for 60 years, received a loan to buy his Sussex Street home there under the G.I. bill after his discharge from the Army in 1946.
Brown is proud of his service to country, city and fellow neighbor. He’s taken care of the old Rehoboth Beach Bandstand, managing the flag display there, kept the bandstand’s fountain maintained and helped prepare Christmas baskets for distribution to the less fortunate in the community.
He’s a past chief and lifetime member of the Rehoboth Beach Volunteer Fire Company and has served two terms as commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7447 and is a past commander of American Legion Post 5.
As a Nur Temple Shriner, Brown for the past several years has collected aluminum cans on behalf of the Shriner’s hospital, donating the money to the facility.
In 1979 he took his wife, Ellen, to Europe. “I took her all over to show her the places I had been. We spent 17 days over there,” Brown said.
About the war years, Brown said he used to lie in bed and think about those times. “But not too much anymore, I think I’ve sort of grown out of it,” he said.
“I lost some good friends over there ... good friends. There’s only about two of us living out of the whole company,” he said.
