Survivor Testimony #1

William McKinney
Survivor Testimony
I watched the survivor video of William McKinney. During the first part of the video it seemed to me as if he did not want the interview to happen, he acted as if the lady giving the interview was annoying him. William was born in Pennsylvania, a Christian who had been drafted into the war at the age of 18. Throughout training William was harassed by other soldiers due to his race.
William was with a battalion that would go through the cities as the second wave of an ambush. While over in Europe he had to experience sleeping in weather conditions that he had never experienced before such as rain and snow. He would have to carry half of a tent, and when he would stop he would use half of his tent as a mattress and blanket even though it didn’t really help. While going through one of the towns William encountered two little boys who had been forced to watch their parents walk into one of the furnaces and be burnt alive. William wanted to adopt the boys, but the army wouldn’t let him because they had already set up an orphanage program for parents who had lost their children, and children who had lost their parents.
William survived the war by not really having to encounter very much of the fighting. The major fights he encountered were in Normandy and in Omaha Beach. He didn’t have any consequences of surviving the war. William after the war got married to a woman he promised to marry after he would get back from the war. He married two years after the war had ended and had three children. Two of William’s children are still alive today. The youngest child died at the age of 38 due to multiple sclerosis disease.

“War is Hell”

“ The white soldiers called us monkeys and would tell the people that we had tails”