“The main thing I got out of my military service was the realization that I was completely opposed to war,” Bennett wrote in his autobiography, adding, “I don’t care what anybody says: no human being should have to go to war, especially an eighteen-year-old boy.”
As bad as that was, Bennett was stunned when his regiment liberated a concentration camp in Landsberg, Germany — a subcamp for the notorious Dachau death camp. Women and children had been slaughtered long before the Americans arrived, while half the surviving, emaciated men had been shot only the day before.
“I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds,” he wrote. They “had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe we were there to help them and not to kill them.”
The war in Europe ended with Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945. Bennett remained with the occupying American army and was transferred to Special Services, where he entertained the troops with his remarkable singing voice. Bennett toured the country, performing in concerts and shows wherever soldiers were stationed.
On Thanksgiving Day, Bennett was in Mannheim when he bumped into his old friend Frank Smith. They had been in a quartet together at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan in 1942 and were excited to see each other again.
“I was thrilled to see a familiar face from back home after being surrounded by strangers for so many months,” Bennett remembered. “He took me with him to a holiday service at a Baptist church he’d found. We wanted to spend the whole day together — it just felt so good to be with a friend.”
Bennett invited Smith to join him for Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the fixings for American servicemen. The pair got as far as the lobby of the building the Army was using as a mess hall when they were berated by an irate officer. In the segregated military of the day, the two men were not allowed to be seen with each other at a military function, never mind share a meal together.
“This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there,” Bennett wrote. “He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Get your ass out of here!’”
Bennett was reassigned from Special Services to Graves Registration, where he dug up the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat for reburial in military cemeteries. The experience “was just as bad as it sounds,” he recalled.