Remembering service in World War II
Esser attended the Virginia Military Institute until Pearl Harbor hit in 1941. His chemistry studies led him to the Chemical Warfare Service, which had so few people that Esser easily won an officership. He remembers his service here, including his arrival in Europe a few months before the end of the war there.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with George Esser, June-August 1990. Interview L-0035. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
This didn't really bother me
as much because I went to VMI. Went to VMI because it had been in my
family, and father had gone there, and my mother's cousins
had gone there, and it was cheaper. But, I guess, in retrospect I hit it
just at the right time. Well, pearl Harbor came during my last year.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Ah, you stepped right into a commission.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
I was the last class that stepped right into a commission. I told
somebody the other day I'm probably the last generation that
has never taken a test in the Army. I mean, traditional exams, but
psychological testing or classification testing, that sort of testing. I
never took a test like that. But I went through the war.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Where did you serve?
- GEORGE ESSER:
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When I went to VMI, they had caivary, infantry, and artillery. And
everybody that I had known had been in the calvary. So I signed up for
the calvary, and that meant that learned to ride horseback, which is a
great privilege. But it wasn't very useful [Laughter] to war.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
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That's right. Not in the Second world war.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
I had my degree in chemistry, believe or not. So they took six of us who
had degrees in chemistry and transferred us to the Chemical Warfare
Service because the Chemical warfare Service had so few officers. That
was a break, too, because it meant that by September of 1942, when I had
only three months into the service on my part, I was company commander
of a company of officer candidates in an officer candidate school. I had
just turned twenty-one the previous month. I had
officers whose average age was thirty-eight.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
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Where were you stationed?
- GEORGE ESSER:
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At Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, which is twenty miles north of Baltimore,
just south of Aberdeen. I'll never forget, I mean, there was
a former first sergeant who was then a second lieutenant, and he roomed
next door to me. On the night he arrived, I stayed up with him all
night, practically, drinking bourbon. But a couple of days later, I had
another second lieutenant who had just gotten his commission, but he was
from civilian life. He was about thirty-eight, and he didn't
like one of my orders, and he said he wasn't going to obey
it, and I said, "You will or." So I walked out, and
there was actually a tent area and this little orderly room, little
porch, and I was standing on the porch. Ed Selinsky, who was the former
first sergeant, went up to this guy and says, "You obey the
lieutenant or you'll have me to put up with as
well." [Laughter]
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
[Laughter] That helped.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
So I had no more problems with Lieutenant Preston. But anyhow, at VMI I
read widely but I was in the sciences so I didn't have a lot
of courses that actually made me think about where the world was. You
know, today they do a lot better job in, I think, any engineering degree
or any scientific degree in giving some better background. Oh, I had a
course in economics and it was sort of a joke. The man that was teaching
history was a lot more concerned with the developing European war than,
understandably, he was in the past. So I went into the war, and I ended up, let's see, I left Edgewood
and went to California with a new unit, and ended up as a company
commander of a combat company that fired a 4.2 inch mortar, which is a
pretty wide mortar. It fired the equivalent, it was the size as 105
hundred millimeter shells. That is, the same diameter, but it had a lot
more high explosive and white phosphorus in it. On the other hand, it
didn't have nearly the range of an artillery weapon. There
were three companies, and each company had twelve of those, and we were
sent to Europe in late 1944. We didn't get into combat until
February of '45, and the war was over by May of
'45.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Did you go into France?
- GEORGE ESSER:
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We landed in France, and actually our first combat was in Holland and
Germany. I ended up on the other side of the Elbe River. Actually saw
the Russians.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
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Did you meet the Russians?
- GEORGE ESSER:
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Yeah, met the Russian troops. Another experience that lives with me is I
was in the second day, I guess—we were liberated the
afternoon before and the next morning I was at a concentration camp.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
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Oh, were you?
- GEORGE ESSER:
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So I saw, I'll never forget talking to a man who was there who
had been a professor at the University of
[unclear] in Belgium.
- FRANCES WEAVER:
-
Yeah, Joy and Bill Murphy go there. He teaches at
[unclear] from time to time. They're going this
fall.
- GEORGE ESSER:
-
By the time the day was over, that man no longer lived. So because we had
been sent in late, we were also returned home
early because we were destined to go to Japan. They dropped the bomb, so
I did not have, because I had not gone in until '42, I
didn't get out right away. But I had already decided before I
left VMI that I was not going to pursue chemistry. Because I learned,
from taking calculus as a matter of fact, that I could think well two
dimensionally, I did not operate well in the three dimensional things
like calculus and deferential equations and engineering generally. And
I've never regretted that.