Fort Worth veteran, 96, fought Nazis in World War II, then designed military planes
Clarence Hart, then a dark-haired Army engineer, specialized in deactivating deadly land mines with a cool hand and quickly designing and constructing bridges, so his soldiers could cross rivers.
Though only 21 years old, he was chosen as the company C captain in the 1264th combat battalion in the spring of 1944, with a responsibility to lead almost 200 men on a mission to free European nations from the Nazi regime and its dictator, Adolf Hitler. And to free millions of Jewish citizens held in captivity.
Clarence, now 96, remembers the cold fenced-in structures not as concentration camps, but as death camps.
He and other soldiers invaded one of these camps toward the end of World War II in the summer of 1945, overtaking the Nazi leadership and tending to all the Jewish men, women and children who had been imprisoned. The malnourished victims, all of them “skin and bones,” were asking soldiers for food, he remembers more than 70 years later. He and others shared their rations.
The people, Clarence recalls, walked them to the gas chambers, where the Nazi guards would send a percentage of the inmates to their deaths. They showed them furnaces where they cremated the bodies.
It was devastating, Clarence said, so much so that American troops made German civilians come out of their homes to look at what had been going on.
But the Jewish prisoners, amid the misery, were grateful.
“They were glad to see us,” Clarence said. “We were feeding them, of course, with rations we had.”
He can still clearly recall that memory and so many others of World War II today, living in The Vantage assisted living facility in Fort Worth, the city where he was born and went on to raise his three kids.
Plaques, certificates and black-and-white photos of himself and military buddies decorate his white walls. Sitting high up on a shelf rest models of five military airplanes that represent the real ones he helped design in his nearly 40-year career with General Dynamics after World War II.
Clarence is still not exactly sure why he decided to join the military, only that he had wanted to since he was a kid.
The proud 96-year-old might be quick to push back when called a hero, but all his friends and family members — especially on a day like Veterans Day — have no problem telling him he’s wrong.
“He is a hero,” said Nancy Hart, his 69-year-old daughter who lives on Lake Weatherford. “He went through the war and went to college and (worked) at General Dynamics building these airplanes.”
Most important, she said, “he’s always been a good man” and she has the stories to prove it.
Clarence said he will spend spend Monday reflecting on those who have served, like the soldiers in World War I he learned about when he was a boy.
“I do think seriously on Veteran’s Day,” he said. “It’s a special day, and we need to remember it.”
He grew up with his younger sister getting to see a lot of America, going to five different high schools in four years and living everywhere from Abilene to Tennessee, to Louisiana, due to his father’s often-changing job as a hotel chef. But he was always drawn to joining the military.
He got the chance at Texas A&M in September 1940.
Joining the war effort
Though Clarence graduated from high school in Shreveport, Louisiana, a town where he spent a long two years and made close friends, he was set on coming back to Texas, and specifically Texas A&M.
There was nowhere better to train to be a military man, he said.
Back then, the flagship university in College Station only served about 7,000 students, all of them men who wanted to join the American war effort. Clarence, like everyone else, was in a three-semester-a-year program with the sole purpose of getting men ready for war amid escalating conflict in Europe.
He was in the ROTC as well the Army reserve, which was required of all students, and studied engineering principals along with coastal combat artillery. He was a sophomore when America joined its allies in World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he said.
He graduated with 625 other men in 1944. They were all immediately called to service.
“They called the entire junior and senior class to active duty at one time,” he said. “Wiped out A&M.”
He went on to Officer Candidate School in North Carolina, a three-month program where he learned about the complicated math of aeronautics. He graduated and became a second lieutenant before starting basic training, where he was responsible for training enlisted men, teaching “the soldiers to be soldiers,” he said.
When Clarence and hundreds of other men left New York Harbor in the fall of 1944 for their eventual destination of Normandy, France, he said, he didn’t feel like a kid thrust into an unbelievable situation.
“I was not a 21-year-old kid — I was an old man,” he said, laughing. “The men thought I was an old man.”
They landed on the same beaches in Normandy where several months earlier some 150,00 American, British and Canadian forces invaded 50 miles of shoreline on D-Day. The “ports were bombed out,” Clarence recalls, and damaged vehicles and landmines from the invasion remained.
Their job, Clarence said, was to make their way through Nazi-occupied France and into Germany, facing an enemy that couldn’t always be seen. His main responsibility was to keep his tank unit moving as fast as possible, building bridges to cross any water, such as the Rhine river, and clearing any barbed wire or minefields that posed a threat.
He “thought he was the world’s authority on landmines,” he said, understanding how to dismantle anti-personnel or anti-tank mines by unscrewing them and removing the TNT loaded inside, he said. And doing it carefully enough that it didn’t blow up in his face.
Building bridges usually took three days, Clarence recalls, and he doesn’t remember ever camping out. They would keep working on a bridge until it was finished, under the constant threat of enemy fire.
“The artillery was zeroed in on us, and they would knock our bridge out as fast as we would build it,” he said. “We lost a lot of men off the end of the bridge.”
Clarence says he was on the receiving end of rifle fire and bombs too many times to count, but he was only truly scared one time.
He had been sent to inspect a potential minefield when he saw about a dozen dead Americans in tanks that had been completely “knocked out,” he said. He quickly figured out bazooka fire was the culprit and not landmines, sending fear through his body. He didn’t know if fire would rain down, or from where.
Their unit formed a circle on a mountaintop, with tanks guns pointing out in every direction. And he slept in the middle.
“I told everybody I had the best night’s sleep I’d ever had, sitting in the middle of those tankers,” Clarence said.
A life after World War II
By the time Clarence made it to the Nazi death camp he helped free in 1945, the war was winding down.
He took his 30-day trip back home to Shreveport shortly after then and, during that time, the war ended. He didn’t have to return overseas.
The first thing he did after arriving to fire boats spraying water in the New York Harbor was eat ice cream and steak, he said. He then set out on a six-day bus trip to Louisiana, where he would propose to his girlfriend and eventual wife, Ruby Jo Hart.
Ruby Jo, who was friends with Clarence in high school, became something more when he returned from Officer Candidate School to Shreveport and asked her to a dance. He fell in love with her, he said, telling her after their fourth date: “I’m going to marry you.”
He asked her three times in person, as well as in one of the many letters he wrote to her. But she was never ready.
That was, until he asked her again as he dropped her off after their first night back together.
“I remember what I said. I said, ‘Are we or aren’t we gonna get married?’” he said. “And she said something just as dumb — ‘This is so sudden, I’ll have to think about it.’ And then the next day she said yes.”
They were married 10 days later and honeymooned in Colorado Springs, where he spent summers as a kid.
Despite everything he had seen overseas, he said, he had an easy time transitioning back to his normal life, motivated by the goal of starting a family. He took a job at General Dynamics as an engineer helping to design airplanes like the B-36, B-58 and F-16 bombers, as well as his proudest achievement, the F-16XL prototype.
It could fly at supersonic speeds with no afterburner, a milestone achievement.
All of his planes at General Dynamics, he said, started the same way — with “a blank piece of paper.”
“I did the fuselage design and preliminary design,” he said. “I was responsible for the lines of the airplane. I was responsible for the atomic bomb pod and the fuselage, including ejection canopies.”
He didn’t let his often-demanding job it get in the way of starting his family, and he and Ruby Jo had three children — two sons and a daughter, Nancy. Clarence jokes he had “three mean kids.”
Nancy said her dad has always been a jokester.
“I think I got my humor from him,” she said.
She remembers the fun they would have on family trips every year, going to places such as Colorado Springs, the New York World’s Fair and Disneyland. They would also often go to a lake house he built in Weatherford in 1963.
Ruby Jo died about 15 years ago, and Clarence moved into The Vantage about seven years ago, he said. He’s friends with plenty of residents and likes to play bridge, attend movie nights and go to exercise classes.
He gave the lake house to Nancy, where she’s close enough she can come back to see him and speak with him often.
She knows from personal experience that her father can be quick to reject praise for his service. Once, she said, he turned down a Purple Heart award because he claimed he was only hit with shrapnel in his hand.
But she has no trouble listing off all of the reasons he’s been a hero in his life.
“He fought in a war,” she said, recounting his long career. “He came back and worked at General Dynamics, and was still working for his country, building all these airplanes.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
