Andrew Roy Armentor; Jason Theriot; Mrs. Roy Armentor

-Spoke French all his life; there was even a few times when Armentor was sent home from school because he spoke only French
-By the time Armentor was a teenager, he was speaking English; taught his parents
-Armentor was out of high school working when WWII broke out; he had worked at the rice mill in the packing department
-On December 7, 1941 he was at home and heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio and his brother, who was in the Marines, was called immediately back from leave

-Armentor was drafted in February 1943
-Left Abbeville by bus and came to New Iberia and then Fort Polk
-He was the sole supporter for his family after the war broke out
-He had tried to volunteer with 3 friends at LSU but Armentor failed the eye test; did not want to go into the infantry but the Air Corps

Training (13:03)
-No one from New Iberia that he knew of made it to Polk with him
-Then went to Camp Butner in Durham, North Carolina took basic training there
-Came home on leave once after basic
-Thought they were well disciplined soldiers that stuck together; last company of the battalion all the time
-Armentor was a part of a group that volunteered for a special unit that spoke French and went to D.C. for more training
-altogether there was five in Armentor's group: Claude Galley, Nolan Frickey, an Allamon by the name of White from Perry, a Veilleux from Maine and Billadoux from Nova Scotia
-They asked them questions on whether they would be able to do certain duties, like jumping out a plane
-hazardous duties; they had no idea what they were getting into
-Lived in tents on the outskirts of Washington D.C., had a small potbelly stove to keep warm as it was snowing
-Ran 5 miles every morning, ate breakfast, exercises and then to classes

Then went into Maryland and then shipped to Norfolk, Virginia to go onto a big Liberty Ship and cross the Atlantic (28:43)
-At the time Armentor had tonsillitis and suffered from motion sickness; sailed for 15 days and 13 days he was sick
-Landed in Casablanca, North Africa and traveled by train through Oran to Algiers
-All the towns they went through they heard "C'est la guerre!" which meant "It's the war!"
-Stopped near the seashore for parachute training for 3 days and made 5 jumps
-Armentor always jumped in the middle or the rear to make sure everyone made it out; known as the static line out of a C-47
-They had a section of 30 men, but they had 15 men in their sub-section; Armentor stayed with the same 5 men he volunteered with
-They were a special reconnaissance battalion, part of the OSS (but they didn't know what that really meant)

Went to maneuvers with the French Foreign Legion in the Atlas Mountains (39:40)
-They had to live off the land in the fields and did not have rations; ate better this way as they knew how to cook
-Either they hunted or stole from the Arabs' gardens
-The French Legion were rugged people and were from North Africa, so all were black, but they had good communication with them
-Was easy to even talk with the people they met in towns, could order anything from places; a lot was donated though, like wine

First mission (50:50)
-First mission Armentor hurt his back and they landed in a field
-Assigned one night and flew over France but they did not find the signal so they had to go back to Algiers
-Reassigned another night with the French Marquis and the landing gear of the Liberty Bomber had trouble so they turned back around
-Third time they went, jumped out of a British Sterling; commanded by Lt. Weeks from Mississippi

-Armentor was a T-3 sergeant trained in demolitions; used pencil types and C-2 explosives
-They were equipped with a .45 pistol, a carbine rifle, trench knife, machete, a canteen, ammunition, grenades and rations
-explosives were dropped in containers with the men at the same time
-French Underground were tell them where to jump and then gathered up everything for them
-They jumped into the Castle Naizere, France in the Pyrenees that first night, supposed to be an 800 foot drop but it was a 500 feet fall
-it was dark and when the shoots went out
-they just fell and that's when Armentor hurt himself and was knocked out for a while; had to stay with a French family to heal

The French family (1:05:26)
-They were very serious and much against the German occupation forces
-They were like everyday people that anyone meets
-Had 2 story house, first floor had the cattle and second floor was the living space; very clean
-The family was very nice, "overly nice"; stayed there for about a week

After rejoining the group in the hills he was still too injured to go out with the group on a few missions (1:08:00)
-Near Carcassonne they were able to capture a few Germans, "a few bosses," one had a lot of money but he gave it to the French people;
-Armentor didn't believe he would ever make it back home so he kept nothing;
-the work they did was dangerous
-Did not know the mission in France was to stop any Germans from going into Spain as it was a haven for agents as it was a neutral country

Invasion of Southern France (1:11:58)
-They could hear the guns from Montpellier and on the radio they heard "le song liege et da vive" otherwise "the invasion has begun."
-Had 2 invasions, of Normandy and Southern France from over the Mediterranean
-Later on the group went to Grenoble while Armentor was sent to Marseilles and then Naples, Italy to a hospital (from his injury from the fall)
-Discharged and sent to below Naples at a repot depot to go with Patton's army as a replacement
-Armentor requested a 2 day leave and walked around the repot depot to see if he could find his group; he did and they took him the headquarters
-Hadn't seen his group for over a month and when he saw the colonel and told him that he was being shipped out with Patton but the colonel said he was going back home
-Out of the five that had signed up with him had all come back with him to the states

Speaking French in Combat (1:20:29)
-While in Toulouse at a hospital, the first night some German agents were shot trying to get in to kill Armentor as he was part of the French Underground
-He was always being moved around as the Germans were always targeting their group

Going Back (1:22:40)
-Stayed in the states for 30-35 days; still in a crouch
-Went back to Washington on the west coast then shipped out to India
-While in the Indian Ocean they got word of Roosevelt's death
-Once in India they went to Burma, flew over the Hump and into Kunming to start training a Chinese group (early 1944)
-While there in Kunming the bombs were dropped
-they were there training these men because there was to be a Chinese invasion on the coast

-Armentor was to go with his group and Lt. Weeks for a jump into China and the night before he was pulled out
-A major took his name off and sent him home; was supposed to be discharged a year ago
-Went back through India and through the Red Sea and Suez Canal back into the Atlantic
-That night of the jump it was cancelled as the bombs were dropped

-The five men that signed up together, Galley got shot through the hand and Armentor hurt his back, but all lived and came back home

Transcription:

Andrew Roy Armentor
804 Prioux St.
New Iberia, LA 70563
337-367-8823
Born: December 25, 1923
2477 Special Recon. Battalion/OSS
Southern France

I was born in Abbeville, Louisiana. My parents were French-speaking people and we spoke French all of our lives. We didn’t speak any English at home at all. Everyone around us spoke French; our friends, our neighbors, everybody spoke French. There was no way for us to learn English. In fact, when I went to school I was sent back home because I was a French-speaking student. They were trying to do away with the French-speaking language. I was sent back home three times for speaking French. I knew a little English, but I was going to continue going until they accepted me.

Once you know French, it stays with you all the time. Of course we speak a different language than the French-speaking people in France and in North Africa. It’s very close, but they speak what we would call a patios, which is a derivative from the French language, but they add words to it, like we add words over here. The French that we spoke in Abbeville when I was a young boy was on just about the same level as the language spoke when I went into the central part of France.

I was speaking English by the time I was a teenager. The schools that I attended growing up were made up of mostly French-speaking people. We were all Cajuns. In fact, there were very few who didn’t know any French. As the years progressed, we learned English because we had to, and then we’d try to teach it to our parents. We were all Cajuns alike in those days.

I was working when World War II broke out. We didn’t have government loans in those days; you either had money to go to school or you worked. We poor people, the Cajuns, we worked. I worked at United Gas for a while, then at the rice mill in the packing department.

On December 7, 1941, we were all home in the backyard because my brother had come home on leave from the Marines. We heard the news on the radio and he was immediately called back. We were not too impressed with what had happened, to be frank, because we didn’t know the actual meaning of it. We did realize that we were at war, however, we didn’t know what war meant. We had never been to war before. But because we had one in our family our view of war from then on was a little different.

Three of us tried to volunteer for the Air Corps. My two buddies made it my I didn’t. So I came back home and worked. I didn’t want to go into the infantry, but they drafted me anyway. I became a grunt instead…and I’m still a grunt! I was drafted in February 1943. I left from Abbeville and came to New Iberia. From there our group left on a bus and went to Fort Polk. From Polk I went to Durham, North Carolina, Camp Butner. It was rainy and cold, with ice-cickels, and we took basic there. We were becoming good soldiers, I would say, because we were very disciplined and we all worked hard. We came home on leave once, after basic (I got married), and when we returned that’s when all of this started to happen.

Wearing a full field pack, we would do about five miles in about 35 minutes. We were taught that if somebody dropped out, you would give your pack to another man, and you would pick up the other guy and carry him. We had a group of us that spoke French that became pretty good friends. This group of us volunteered for this special unit and we wound up in Washington D.C.

We saw some information that was posted on the bulletin board saying that the army was looking for volunteers who spoke French and other languages. So those of us who spoke French went to this meeting in a big auditorium and they spoke to us. They told us about the kind of work we would be doing and about what we would be expected to do. They asked us questions like whether we would jump out of an airplane. All together we were five; five French-speaking soldiers from south Louisiana; they were from Algiers, Merroro, Westwego, all from the New Orleans area, but Cajun nonetheless. One was Claude Galley, the other was Nolan Frickey, one was an Allamon, and a fellow by the name of White from Perry. There was also a Veilleux from the Maine area and Billadoux from up near Nova Scotia. They were from the Northeast but we all spoke French. And we all spoke the same French, the same patios. So we got along real well.

We all decided to volunteer for this special unit. Each one of us was investigated before we were accepted. The FBI investigated my background. The FBI came to Abbeville and contacted different people asking about my background. After the investigation we got our orders to move, and that didn’t take very long. And they didn’t give us too much information about it. All they wanted to know was if we would do hazardous duty, such as jumping into an area. We didn’t think about it too much, because when you are young, you didn’t think too much about things like that; you more or less thought about everyday life. I didn’t think about the hazardous duty we would be doing with this particular group; I had no idea. And I wasn’t the only one. None of us had any idea what we were getting into.

In November 1943, we got to Washington and we were assigned to these tents to live in. We didn’t have any special treatment; we were just regular soldiers. We lived in those tents with a little bitty potbelly stove to keep us warm at night when we would sleep. It was snowing and it was cold and we coonies didn’t know what snow was. In the mornings we would fallout with just a T-shirt, shorts, and jump boots. We’d run five miles every morning. We came in and had breakfast, took exercises, went to classes—demolition classes or knife-fighting classes—all kinds of classes. We even learned Kung Fu. It was really harsh training. But understand, we didn’t know anything about what was going on. I knew there were people experimenting with different types of explosives. They would invent it and we would try it out. We stayed there training for several months.

We went to Maryland to continue training. We were shipped out of Norfolk, Virginia on a great big Liberty Ship. We traveled across the North Atlantic on the thing and I had tonsillitis at the time—I’ll never forget that. We were all in a hole in the bottom of the ship and it was stuffy, it smelled like diesel fuel, and I suffer from motion sickness. This young doctor gave me an intravenous shot that didn’t go into my vain. It went all throughout my body. I had to strap myself in this bunk with my belt to keep myself from falling off. And that ship was rocking back and forth. We rocked and rolled across the Atlantic for 15 days.

We landed in Casablanca in North Africa. I couldn’t walk a straight line when I got off that ship. We traveled on these rail cars through Oran and into Algiers. It was a slow moving thing and it took us a few days to get there. It was moving so slow that we would jump off and walk for a little bit and relieve ourselves, and then jump back on. There was no beds, no bathrooms, and we ate C rations—those beautiful rations. The toilet was outside and you held on if you had to go do a number two and you did the best that you could. We traveled through the towns that way. C’est la guerre! That’s all we heard when we came through those town: “C’est la guerre.”

Our section encamped about 4 or 5 miles off the seashore. We were preparing for parachute training. We began preparing on a Monday thru Wednesday doing mock training: jumping out of planes, how to roll, what to do, how to hold your risers. On the fifth day, they brought us to the airport and we drew our shoots. We had two shoots, a main and a reserve. I was a sergeant so I jumped in the middle of the stick or the end of the stick. We were 15 men training for static line jump out of a C-47. Three days of training. On that first day, we jumped out, landed, rolled our shoots, put our gear in the trucks, went right back to the airport, drew another shoot, went back up again, and jumped out again. We made two jumps a day. I did well until the fourth jump. I was in the middle and the fellow who jumped after me jumped on my shoot and got his feet entangled in my shoot. We were coming down and my shoot wasn’t open. I looked down, then looked up and saw that his feet were caught, so I started whipping my risers until finally he got loose and my shoot blossomed. I came down and rolled right away. He landed and broke his leg.

The five of us stayed together in a section. We went to Algiers as a group, and we trained as a group, and we jumped into France as a group. We were a special reconnaissance battalion, part of the OSS, although that didn’t really mean anything to us.
We were briefed in Algiers and went on maneuvers in the Atlas Mountains with the French Foreign Legion. We lived off the land because we didn’t have enough rations to eat. But a “coonie” is hard to beat when he gets on the outskirts, living on the land. He knows what to steal; he knows what to kill. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like and he knows how to prepare it. All of us knew how to cook. We had goat and lamb and we’d hunt javalinas in the moonlight. We skinned them and cooked them. We’d steal vegetables from the Arab’s gardens. We’d raid the fruit trees and bring all that back to camp.

Those French were very rugged soldiers. They were dark-skinned Moroccans and they were very tough. Most of them were from North Africa and they all spoke French, the same kind of French that we Cajuns spoke, almost. So, we got along pretty good with them. We’d go into town every once in awhile and go to the burless shows. The actors would make fun of us because we were paratroopers, but we could understand their French. It was little jokes about us, but we knew. We could go into the communities and drink all the wine that we wanted; we could order anything at the restaurants. We paid for it all, but very little. Sometimes the five of us would go into the little towns and the people would give us wine and bread. The wine was very plentiful in North Africa, very plentiful…too plentiful!

I would rather be in the paratroopers than any other branch of the service. You were on your own and you were with a group. And you operated with this small group. We never worked with a large group. We worked with a group of British Commandos while we were there, too. All of us—the French, British and Americans were all Special Forces training in that area.

Prior to us, there was another OSS unit formed in England. They were jumping into France and working with the French Underground, the Marquis, gathering information and wiring it back. Sam Broussard was apart of that.

We were trained in demolitions, to cut rails for trains, blow up bridges, how to attack a column. It was a hit and run deal—we’d hit, then run, but we stayed in. We’d jump into a section and conduct our mission and then regroup to go to attack another section. We never stayed in the same area very long. And we did all of this in conjunction with the French Underground, because they gathered the information for us and then we prepared the attacks and went to work.

On our first mission into France we flew in a British Halifax over our jump area, but we couldn’t find the signal on the ground. So we had to come back. We had gone from Algiers, across the Mediterranean and into France and we had to come back. We were reassigned for another night to jump in with the French Marquis. Their job was to light up a section for us to jump into at night. On that second time, we made it over the Mediterranean, and then our plane—a British Liberty bomber—had trouble with the landing gear. So, we had to turn back around. The third time was on British Sterling. We got the signal over the area and we jumped out of the bomb bay. You would sit in a line on the floor and scoot up until you got over the hole and then you just fell out of the plane. You see, the C-47 could not make that trip on two engines. We had to fly in the big bombers to get us there.

We were one plane, one stick, commanded by Lt. Weeks from Mississippi. I was a T-3, a sergeant, trained in demolitions. We used pencil types and C-2 explosives. You could apply this explosive like a putty and you could cut a rail with just a little piece of it. All 15 of us had the same training, the same skills, same weapons, same specialty, and we all spoke French. The one thing that I carried that I wish I would not have was this bush knife—a machete. It was a long blade with an arrow point. We should have never had that, because we were so overloaded. You had grenades, you had your gun, you had your parachute, and you had a little pack. It was all a bit too much. But I guess that’s what we needed.

I had a .45 pistol and a carbine rifle with a folding stock. I had a trench knife, that machete, a canteen, ammunition, grenades and rations. Our explosives were dropped with us in these containers. Both the men and the material were dropped at the same time. The Underground was there waiting for us. They would secure the area from the Boch. They gathered everything on the jump, including our chutes and our containers and they threw all that into wood-burning trucks, and that’s how they powered their automobiles. We would gather ourselves and go into the mountains with them. They had a headquarters up in the Pyrenees Mountains. We jumped into Castle Naizere, France that first night.

We jumped into the southern part of Aude and we worked our way up in Toulouse. We did a lot of work in Carcassonne. On our first mission in southern France, we started off out in the open, in a field. I didn’t think too much about our position and I wasn’t the only one. As I’d go around checking each man, they all felt the same way: “We’re too much in the open. We’re too much in the open.” But you are taught and disciplined to the point that you obey your commanding office and he tells you ‘this is it and that’s it.’ But we were fortunate. At dusk it happened… and it didn’t last very long. The column turned and they went another way. We regrouped up in the mountains and prepared for another mission.

We were supposed to make an 800-foot jump into the Pyrenees. But it ended up being about a 500-foot fall. We jumped out and our chutes blossomed. It was dark and we landed in this area. We all converged with the French Underground and moved out.

I injured myself when I landed. The landing knocked me out, but I came to shortly after. Our medic, Guion from Mississippi, fixed me up. I went into the headquarters and then went down into the village with the French people. I stayed with a French family. The man was le guard de forrestia—a forest ranger. He wanted my rifle but I couldn’t give it to him. He had never seen a carbine and I’ll always regret not giving it to him, but I would not have had a rifle to protect myself. So I gave him my machete. Damn right. I’m glad that I gave it to him because it was a pain to carry around.

The French were very serious people and they were very much against the German occupation. They were like everyday people that you would meet, just like our neighbors that we had growing up in Abbeville. They took me into the safety of their home. They had an upstairs where they lived. Downstairs they kept their cattle and made their milk and butter down there. In other words, the dairy part was down below where they lived. But everything was spotless, clean, well taken care of. They were very, very nice to me; overly nice, you could say. The wife tried various kinds of medicinal things to relieve the pain. I’d exercise every day for a week or so. The rest of my unit was up in the hills and eventually I joined them. That was the last time that I saw that French family. I am very sorry that I did not get their names because I would like to have communicated with them after the war. This was in Castle Nazaire.

I rejoined my group up in the hills, but I was still too injured to go out on a mission. From there we went to different sections.

We captured a few Germans, a few bosses, near Carcassonne and brought them into the French. I captured one who must have been a gambler. He had a purse full of money. So I took the money and gave it to the French people. I was so sure that I wasn’t coming back home. I didn’t think that I would ever make it back.

Our job was different from a regular GI. We lived in danger…there was danger around you all the time. Our mission was to stop the Germans from getting into Spain, more or less, but we didn’t know that at the time. We only knew what we had to do on these missions. Spain was a haven for agents; it was a neutral country, a free country. Anybody could go into Spain. We had a hand radio to communicate back and forth with the army. The only ones who really knew what was really going on were the radioman and the commanding officer. He told us what to do and that was it.

When the invasion of Southern France had commenced, we could hear the guns from Montpellier, because we were just north of the city. And we could hear the guns very plainly and we knew something was happening. We also heard on the radio, “le song liege et da vive”—the invasion has begun. And we heard that on the radio all day long.

Later my group went on the Grenoble and I went down to Marseilles. From there I was sent to a hospital in Naples, Italy. I was later discharged from the hospital and shipped to a repot depot. I was destined to go in with Patton’s Army as a replacement. I was waiting to be shipped out and so I requested a two-day leave. I started walking and I told myself, You’ve got to walk around and spot your group’s number on a truck or something. And sure enough, as I walked, I saw this truck coming down the road and on his bumper was the Special Recon number #2477. I got in the middle of the road and I stopped him I told he to take me to the headquarters and I told him why. So I got in the truck and passed right by the repot depot on our way. We drove a few miles and there was my headquarters. I had not seen my unit in over a month. I got in and requested to see the colonel. I went in and he recognized me. I told him that I was being shipped out with Patton’s Army. He said, “No you not. You’re going back home.”

One of our guys, Galley had got shot and one of the lieutenants was killed. The boy from Maine got in a confrontation with some Germans and he got out of it all right. All five of us, the original group, came back to the States.

I was in a hospital in Toulouse. There was a nurse who took care of me. The first night I was there, the French had shot some German agents who were trying to get into the hospital to get me. She told me about it the next morning. These Germans were on our tail all the time because we were with the French Underground. If those Germans would have got into that hospital, that would have been it for me. I would not have come back; they would have done it right there in the room. But I was very fortunate.

I left from Italy and came back to the States. I stayed in the States for 30 days. I was still in a crouch from my injury. I was sent to the west coast. The people up there used to marvel at us because we would run all the time. They said we were the runningist outfit you ever saw. We’d run through the compounds. We went across the Pacific and into the Indian Ocean. We were enroute to India when Roosevelt died. We went to India, then to Burma, flew over the Hump, and went into Kunming. We landed in Kunming and started training Chinese troops. While I was there we dropped the bomb. We were training to make a jump during the invasion of the Chinese coast. We were training these Chinese boys, but they hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

I was destined to go out with Lt. Weeks. We were all there up in the mountains again. The same group. All five of us were together again. The night before we drew our equipment, my name was called out, and that was it for me. This major saw my name on the jump roster and pulled me out. He said, “I going to send you home; you should have been discharged a year ago.”

From India, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, we traveled. On my way back, the bomb was dropped. Lt. Weeks eventually jumped in with another group into to China.

The five men that went all made it back. I hurt my back, Galley got shot in his hand. This lieutenant, who had joined us in the latter part, got killed. The original five all made it back.

A lot of those people thought of us as a “frog, with webbed feet.” A lot of them believed and still believe today that we go around and communicate in pirogues and bateaus down the bayous. We were looked down on because we were from Louisiana; they thought they were better than us. But I was never downhearted about speaking French. I was always proud of speaking