HomeMy WebLinkAboutR.F."Sonny" Franze, Brazos Valley Heroes
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Special to The Eagle
R. F "Sonny" Franze, soon to be 91 years young,
is a lifelong resident of Brazos County. He has many
memories and stories about life in Brazos County as a
child. He also has memories, stories and souvenirs from
his service in World War II. Time. spent with Franze is
educational, entertaining and time well spent.
According to Franze, "I was born in October, 1916
in the Wixon Community and went to school in a one-
room school with one teacher. In 1925 we had a plague
of rats and rabbits in Brazos County. They were eating
all the crops, and a contest was held for the school that
could collect the most rat tails and rabbits' ears. Our
teacher, who had all she could stand of us, said Wixon
School should do well because all of us boys weren't
good for anything else. We didn't win the county prize,
but we did a good job of helping solve the rat and rabbit
problem.
"In 1929 Wixon School closed down and we went to
Bryan to school. We had an old Model T which I drove,
loaded with other kids, to Travis Elementary. I was 12
years old at the time. I attended the old Stephen F.
Austin High, which is where Fannin Elementary is now
located on 29th Street, and I graduated in 1934. Back
then high school only went to the eleventh grade.
"I~farmed and worked on pipelines until I was drafted
into the servige in September 1942. As a country boy
I had never traveled. I not only traveled across this
country and back again but halfway around the world."
Franze was eventually assigned to the Army
Signal Corps as a pole lineman in a communication
construction company.
As Franze recalled, "They sent us all over the West
Coast for training. When we finally received our orders,
we boarded a train and rode across country from
California to Newport News, Virginia. We .boarded a
converted passenger ship named the Santa Paula. The
Santa Paula had 1,600 beds and 3,200 troops. We were
supposed to share the bunk, but my bunkmate was so
seasick he couldn't get out of bed.
"I moved out on deck with what bedding I could get,
but the weather was so bad I was cold and soaked. If I
hadn't found an engine room to crawl into and get out
of the weather, I don't know what I would have done. I
know I wasn't going back down into that smelly ship
with all those seasick soldiers.
"After arriving in England, the one thing we had to
adjust to were the air raids. We had air raids almost
every night. One night the sergeant in charge came
in yelling for us to grab our helmets and head for the
woods: I didn't even have time to get my pants on. I
hit the ground behind a log when I heard something go
"DIO~" 6Phlnd me_ It was a hnmh that lanriari 9~ varric
"When D-Day occurred, we followed over the
Channel on November 11,1944. We drove off the beach
into the hedgerows to try to find the rest of our outfit.
We stopped when we heard the rattling of a machine
gun. Our job was to try to keep up with General Patton
and keep our communications intact. We were always
laying field lines and were almost always just behind
the front lines throughout the war. One thing I will
always remember was getting to see Bob Hope and
Jerry Colona at a USO show in a field somewhere in
Belgium. It was something we all enjoyed. That was just
before the Battle of the Bulge."
After the defeat of the Germans at the Battle of the
Bulge, Franze and his unit followed the advance into
Germany.
"After we crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge, all
the German villages we saw were almost all destroyed.
Pursuing the retreating Germans across Central Europe,
we ended up at Weimar, Germany. We were told to
take a German compound at Buchenwald. We were
now operating as infantry and as we approached, we
came across dead people in prison attire lying beside
the road. I was the first American to enter the gates
at Buchenwald. There were no soldiers'there but what
we found is something I will never forget. One prisoner
who could still walk came over to me and we conversed
in German. He told me what happened there, but it
was hard to believe until I saw the furnaces with the
stacks df dead bodies waiting to be burned and the
huge mound of partially burned human bones behind
the furnace. If we hadn't seen so much death already, I
don't know how we would have handled it.
"That prisoner gave me a token, which was the
only thing of value he had, for saving them. The token
entitled the holder to a meal, most often soup. When the
war ended I came home with that token as part of my
war souvenirs.
"At our lines near Weimar, we had a German pilot
land his jet plane in a field behind our lines. He had his .
family with him because he didn't want to surrender to
the Russians. It was the first jet I ever saw. If they had
more time to develop those, the war could have turned
out very differently."
After the war, Franze worked for Sinclair Refining
Company in charge of their pipeline terminal. The
company eventually became Arco, and he retired in
1975. He continued his cattle operation until he sold
out a couple of years ago.
"Looking back, I don't regret the experience I had. Of
all my memories and war souvenirs, that token is the
most special to me."