Ken Butler
Infantryman ETO
liberated Buchenwald
Ken Butler
Sergeant, U.S. Army
1944-1946
Sgt. Ken Butler Austria, 1945
I remember Buchenwald. I don’t know how many others we liberated. That’s a helluva way to die. I can never get that out of my mind.
I was born in 1925 and grew up in Fayette, Alabama. There were seven boys and one girl in my family. I graduated high school in 1943. My mother didn’t want me to volunteer like my brothers, and told me to wait to be drafted. Four of us boys were in the service: Marines, Army and Navy. We all came back.
I went into the Army in 1944 and had basic training at Camp Blanding, Florida. Then I had a few days home and they shipped me to Europe. We got to Normandy and I was assigned to General Patton’s 3rd Army in the 26th Infantry Division. That was the Yankee Division out of Boston. Here I was from Alabama and I was put in the Yankee Division. My first campaign was in the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge. That was my biggest one. I was a machine gunner, and you had to keep it from freezing up. I was out in the woods in a foxhole and I have never been so cold in all my life. I got frostbite in my feet. For five years after I was discharged, my feet peeled and bled. We saw a lot of combat. It took from December 16 to January 25. We lost a lot of men. Then it was pretty easy all the way to Germany and Austria.
When Patton got to the Rhine River, he pissed in it. He said he’d been wanting to do that for a long time. Patton loved the military and combat. How can anybody love war? That was his thing. I remember Buchenwald. I don’t know how many others we liberated. That’s a helluva way to die. I can never get that out of my mind. They starved the people and worked them as much as they could. How do you punish somebody like that?
When the war was over, we were in Czechoslovakia and learned we were going to the Pacific. Then Harry Truman had the atomic bombs dropped. You hear pros and cons about it. The American lives he saved was tremendous. I heard the Japanese were training 12- and 13-year-old boys and girls to defend the island. How would you feel shooting kids like that? I’m glad I didn’t have to face it. Shooting your enemy is not the best thing in the world to remember.
When Japan surrendered, I didn’t have enough points to go home and was stationed as part of the occupational forces. I was discharged in early 1946 as a sergeant. My best day was when the war was over. We just had a foxhole, two blankets and a canvas. We didn’t have a bath for weeks and months and no hot meals. We could finally get hot meals and a bed to sleep in.
My worst time was in the Ardennes. The weather was really cold and you couldn’t sleep. We didn’t have the proper uniforms. We put on everything we could find. I wore two pairs of pants, long johns and little knit gloves. Some time after the Ardennes, I got hit and it knocked me out. I don’t remember exactly what hit me. Maybe a shell exploded near me. I was in the hospital for about two weeks.
After the war I went to school and got a job. I got a transfer to Dallas in 1954 as an engineer with the telephone company GTE. I worked for GTE until I retired in 1991. I really enjoyed it. My wife, Erin Frances, and I had four kids—two girls and two boys. She passed away in 1991.
In 2018 I went to Belgium and visited Patton’s grave. When they first buried him, they had him with all his men as he had wanted. There were so many visitors, they had to move him because they were tromping down the grass. He’s in a spot by himself now. I met his granddaughter, Helen Patton. She found out I served with her granddad and she pinned a medal on me. {11-23-2019 • San Antonio, TX}