The Stories/My Life as a Fish

Soldier profile

5 February 1920 – 1998

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Chapters provided for the Ritchie Boys documentary site by Vera Meyer, daughter of Alfred G. Meyer. Posted here are the passages that concern Camp Ritchie and closely related wartime service (not the full autobiography).

Full chapter PDFs on the film site:

Chapter 3 (Camp Ritchie)
Chapter 4 (Europe; two later Ritchie references)
Chapter 5 (postwar graduate study; one Ritchie reference)

Camp Ritchie

From Chapter 3.

Shortly after my course at Harvard was over, I was transferred to Camp Ritchie, Maryland. We continued our relationship by correspondence, which, once I was overseas, took the form of V-mail.

Situated in the Blue Ridge mountains, between Gettysburg, PA and Hagerstown, MD, a stone’s throw away from Camp David which was then known as Shangri-La, Camp Ritchie was a military intelligence training center. It was supposedly very hush-hush, but our dance partners at the Hagerstown USO could not help noticing that most soldiers from Ritchie spoke English with foreign accents, and they put two and two together.

One slogan at Ritchie was “I spick six langwitches, English da best.” At Ritchie, officers and enlisted men sat in class together, in non-segregated fashion, and the instructors included both officers and enlisted men. In one of my classes, the instructor was a Private First Class, and among the students there was a Marine Lieutenant Colonel. Very unorthodox! At Ritchie I also saw the first Black officer I had ever met. The students were, on the whole, highly intelligent. They either had been born abroad or had learned foreign languages in their Ivy League schools. KP duty in the mess hall was performed by Italian prisoners of war that grinningly referred to the WAC soldiers as “le vacche.”

As one entered the camp and walked down the main street toward headquarters, one noted that the street was lined with captured enemy weaponry—artillery and armor—with which we were supposed to become familiar. To the surprise of visitors, men in German battle uniform could be found walking around freely, singly or marching together. On close inspection, these enemy troops did not look like Germans at all, but more like Native Americans, which, indeed, they were. In Camp Ritchie their task was to demonstrate German uniforms and German battle tactics to us. Since we were being trained to be prisoner-of-war interrogators, they also served as our guinea pigs when we practiced interrogation techniques.

The story I was told about how these Native Americans came to be our ‘Germans’ was as follows. In battle situations, friendly units must be able to communicate with each other. Communications must be quick, but the faster the communication between friendly units, the more open it is to the enemy. In order to prevent the enemy from listening in, one must encode and then decode communications. In order to overcome the resultant dilemma, some genius in the War Department had the idea of using Native Americans to be telephone operators. They could talk openly, and if the enemy were tapping the telephone lines, he would hear only ‘Indian language.’ Alas, this brilliant scheme, tried in North Africa, did not work out because the genius in the War Department had not been aware that Sioux, Apache, Cherokee, and other Native American tribes speak different languages. I understood that at the time of the Normandy invasion and in the Japanese theatre of operations, Native Americans from one single nation (Navajo) were used quite successfully as communications personnel. The ‘Germans’ at Camp Ritchie, however, were veterans of the failed experiment in North Africa.

One of the first slogans I was told after entering the Army was “There are two ways of doing anything—the right way and the way the Army does it,” a primitive early version of Murphy’s Law. At Camp Ritchie things worked very smoothly and efficiently, but once in a while one was reminded of the slogan. In the camp PX one day I asked the sergeant who had served me a beer why he was at Camp Ritchie. “Because I was born in Berlin,” he said.

“So why are you now a bar keeper in the PX?” I asked him.

“Because they discovered that it was Berlin, New Hampshire,” he replied. Perhaps he was pulling my leg; perhaps it was true. Our training was demanding, physically as well as intellectually. We had to study the German order of battle, become familiar with German uniforms, were trained in the art of interpreting aerial photos, in Morse code, in reading German military maps, and in interrogation techniques. We received training in marksmanship, weapons maintenance, and scouting skills, such as finding our way through unknown rough terrain alone. The combination of challenges to the body and the mind was a marvelous experience. The week was a ten-day week. We worked or studied for nine days and had the tenth day off. That day was called Ban-Day, after the camp commandant, General Banfield. In early June, my course was completed; I was promoted to Second Lieutenant, and few days later was a passenger on a troop ship bound for Liverpool.

Commission on D-Day

From Chapter 3.

In the early summer of 1944, I participated in a 48-hour exercise at Camp Ritchie, MD, which was supposed to be the culmination of a three-month training course for Military Intelligence NCOs and officers. I had served in the U. S. Army for almost three years when the Army discovered that I spoke German, and decided to train me as a prisoner-of-war interrogator. Now the War Department had apparently decided that they needed officers who had this training. While the 48-hour exercise was still in progress, a number of us enlisted men were called back to camp and told that we would, within the next few days, be commissioned as Second Lieutenants. I remember the date, which was June 6—D-Day in Normandy, also my father’s birthday. What I did not know at the time was that my father was no longer alive.

We were given one day of instruction on how to be officers. Before I could pin the gold bars of my new rank on my shoulder straps, I was given a day’s leave so I could go to a large PX in Philadelphia to buy myself officer’s uniforms, including some fancy parachute boots. I was also called into camp headquarters for an interrogation. A middle-aged man in uniform without insignia of rank—probably a Major or Lieutenant Colonel in Counterintelligence—asked me lots of questions about my background.

He then pulled a document out of his briefcase: the photocopy of a letter that my relative in Chicago had written to his brother in Buenos Aires, in late 1939 or early 1940. The letter mentioned me and reported that “the business with Cuba” looks promising. The “business with Cuba” had been mistranslated as “the Cuban cause,” and my interrogator wanted to know with what revolutionary conspiracy in Cuba I had been connected. I explained the matter. We both laughed, and next day I was commissioned.

(The “Cuban cause,” Meyer explains, was his attempt to explore bribing a Cuban consular official to help get his parents out of Germany—efforts that came too late after mid-October 1941.)

Europe with the 29th Infantry Division

From Chapter 4.

To sit in Broadway, Worcestershire, for three months while exciting battles were being fought in France was very frustrating. One by one my fellow soldiers and officers received assignments and left for the Continent.

In September, I at last received orders to go to the Continent and to report to Military Intelligence Service, ETO, for assignment to a combat unit. A short but stormy journey took me from Southampton to Normandy. From the ship we were loaded into landing craft, and from them we waded ashore at Omaha Beach.

Military Intelligence Service was quartered in St. Germain, a very elegant suburb of Paris. There I was assigned to an intelligence team commanded by Capt. Hans Kohler. Beside the two of us, our team included four enlisted men, all of them graduates of Camp Ritchie. We were given our individual weapons, either carbines or pistols, two jeeps and a trailer, and ordered to join the 29th Infantry Division, an outfit to which Kohler had belonged since before D-Day. The division had suffered heavy losses on D-Day and in the battle for St. Lo, had participated in the siege of Brest and in the bloody battles around Aachen.

In our training at Camp Ritchie, we had been told that there were several techniques for [breaking a prisoner], and that each of us should develop his own technique or personal style. Some of my fellow interrogators sought to get information by intimidating or even terrorizing the prisoners. Sometimes that worked. I, for one, did not have the necessary personality traits to do that convincingly. My style of interrogation was the opposite: I treated my prisoners humanely and gently. When a soldier was taken prisoner… If, in this state, he found that the interrogating officer offered him a cup of coffee or warm soup, or in other ways treat him like a human being, with compassion and gentleness, this might open the floodgates of speech.

Another technique I found very useful was a show of knowledge. Once I had found out any little detail about the unit we were facing… I could display my knowledge to any new prisoner brought in to me. “Your espionage system,” many of them would say to me, “must be fabulously efficient.” All I had done, however, was to tell them something I had learned from a previous interrogation.

A later echo

From Chapter 5 (Harvard graduate studies and Soviet research).

…the military, after all, was interested in facts, not ideology. As they used to tell us at Camp Ritchie…

The Stories/My Life as a Fish

Contents

Camp Ritchie

Commission on D-Day

Europe with the 29th Infantry Division

A later echo

See also

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The Stories/My Life as a Fish

Camp Ritchie

Commission on D-Day

Europe with the 29th Infantry Division

A later echo

See also

Navigation menu

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