

Hardened soldiers were stunned by the horrors of Dachau

YORK - Nothing prepared Allen Orndorff for the horrors of Dachau.

Not parachuting into France after just one practice jump. Not the wound that left him with a bellyful of blood. Not carrying enough explosives through the brush to blow himself up if something caught the wrong way.

Orndorff, was a last-minute replacement for the 101st Airborne Division before the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. He jumped ahead of the beach landing, fought through the confusion of those first few nights and eventually was wounded three times.

As the war wound down, he returned to action in time to help his unit liberate a smaller Nazi work camp. Then they came upon the huge concentration camp of Dachau.

Seeing it wasn't the hardest part.

"That odor, you could smell it miles before you ever got there," he said. "The odor of burnt flesh is something you ain't never going to get over. It's terrible."

Today, Orndorff is 87 years old and lives along the water in York County. He has volunteered at the Virginia War Museum in Newport News and worked with the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond to keep the stories alive.

It wasn't always this way.

"For years and years I wouldn't talk about it," he said. "And then I got over at the Virginia War Museum and a little boy over there, he spoke up and said, 'It never happened.' That got me going. Eventually, these kids will drag it out of you where you can actually talk about it."

On a day when America pauses to remember its honored dead, Orndorff's recollections are a stark testament to the truth that American forces did not die in vain. The sight of Dachau was unspeakable.

"The troops that had seen other soldiers blown to pieces, lose arms, legs and everything, you would think that they'd be hardened to it," he said. "But when we came out of that camp, you could not speak to each other. Your buddy — you'd just look at him.... It was just so horrible."

World War II was winding down when the Allies discovered German concentration camps, where 6 million Jews met their deaths. As Orndorff recalled, the soldiers just stumbled onto the camps, not knowing what to expect.

German civilians who lived nearby insisted they didn't know what was going on, but Orndorff didn't buy it.

They had to smell it.

"It was like the smell penetrated your uniforms," he said, "and all you wanted to do was get the damn things off, taken a shower, something. It was devastating. It really was."

Orndorff was trained in demolition. Still a teen-ager on D-Day, he defused bombs and carried explosives to detonate ammo dumps, mine fields and other targets.

Of his three wounds, the first two were relatively minor. He has a white scar down his right arm that shows were shrapnel sliced his skin. The final injury happened when he got too close to an explosion.

"The guys who had seen it said it blew me as high as a telephone pole — and back down in a ditch," he said. "I was bleeding like a stuck pig. 'My God,' I thought. 'I must be really messed up.'"

He remembers random, heart-wrenching moments of war. Months before reaching Dachau, he watched sadly as a determined old man plowed his fields with the help of a mule, ignoring the dangers of unexploded ordnance.

"This poor guy don't care about the war," he said. "He ain't bothering nobody. There wasn't nothing I could do about it, but you feel bad about something like that. There were duds in that field, and if you stepped on one, you could be gone."

Post-combat stress is all too real for troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Orndorff said he couldn't recall having difficulty adjusting to civilian life, but years later, his grandmother confided that Orndorff would cry in his sleep and scream out while in bed.

"I didn't realize I was doing that," he said. "But I was just recalling what I had seen. It was so horrible."

Their Words, Their War

To watch video of Allen Orndorff and other veterans recalling World War II, visit "Their Words, Their War," a Daily Press collection of World War II memories. And please consider adding a recollection of your own, or perhaps helping your parents contribute. You'll find a link to "Their Words, Their War" at

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