On the evening of March 16, 1945, Sten Gould stood on the gangplank of the Queen Mary, docked in New York Harbor, close enough to see the city lights but forbidden from stepping off.
"Felt sort of sad as I looked at the City in the evening," the 19-year-old soldier wrote in his journal. "Here I was so close to home but unable to get off. Walked on the gangplank and was almost off the boat a couple of times. Of course, I wouldn't leave."
He was heading to war. His family was only a few miles away in the Bronx.
On Feb. 21, Gould turns 100 years old. For the past eight decades, those wartime journals, written throughout his Army service, have preserved the voice of a soldier who copied Nazi morse code transmissions, walked through Hitler's bombed-out home and came back to build a life after the war.
"All the things I learned were instrumental in getting me a safe career in the military," Gould told Military.com. "It took a long time to train a high-speed radio operator. It was safe."
Childhood in New York City
Gould was born in New York City in 1926, the youngest of four children. His parents were both Jewish and had immigrated from Eastern Europe. They met in America. Their relatives who stayed behind would not survive the impending war.
"Their families were wiped out in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus," Gould said. "Families that did not come over were wiped out."
The family lived in a community called "the Coops" in Bronx Park, short for cooperative, a housing project with unusual origins.
"It was started by the Communist Party at the time, they built a lovely community," he said. "A lot of people, what we could call communists today, lived there."
Years later, Gould returned to visit. Above the doorway, a hammer and sickle was still engraved in the stone.
His fascination with science started early. He stuck bobby pins into electrical outlets just to see what would happen. When one glowed red, then white, then melted in a tiny flash, he didn't run away. He wanted to understand.
"What was in the outlet on the floor that could do that?" Gould recalled.
The moment that shaped his life came when he was three years old. His older brothers got into one of their frequent fights and knocked a radio off a shelf. The radio cracked open on the floor. Inside was a twist of tubes and wires as somehow the music kept playing.
"I had assumed that little people playing tiny instruments lived inside the radio," Gould later said. "What else could produce music and talking? I was so puzzled by my discovery, I immediately forgot my unhappiness over my brother's fighting and demanded to know where the music and talking were coming from."
They glued the cabinet back together before their father got home. He never found out. But Gould continued to pursue his interest in science and technology.
He later taught himself morse code, earned his amateur radio license and became a ham radio operator as a teenager. When war came, those skills would play a vital role.
Enlisting into the Army
When Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, Gould was 15 years old. He wasn't surprised.
"Somehow I expected it," he said. "War was already going on. I was certain it was going to overtake us and I would be in."
On Jan. 24, 1944, the day he graduated from high school, Gould went downtown with his brother Sid and enlisted in the United States Army. He was 17.
"Perhaps one of the most important days of my life," he wrote that night.
Because he wasn't yet 18, the Army enrolled him in the Army Specialized Training Program at Alfred University in upstate New York, a program that sent promising recruits to college campuses for technical education. On Feb. 21, 1944, Gould turned 18 at the small school, far from home for the first time in his life.
"Just had breakfast and the boys sang 'happy birthday' to me," he wrote. "It's different having my birthday away from my family. No one actually knows me. Although I've been in the army about a month, I think I'm losing my ability to know my own feelings. I think I'm beginning to feel only what the army wants me to feel!"
The ASTP wouldn't last. By early 1944, the Army was hemorrhaging men in Italy and preparing for the invasion of France. It needed bodies. That spring, the program was gutted. A sergeant delivered the news that after basic training, they would be "whisked overseas so fast we wouldn't be able to read the name of the boat."
Basic Training
Gould reported to Camp Crowder, Missouri, for basic training in June 1944, the same month Allied forces stormed the beaches at Normandy.
The training was brutal. His first day of KP duty, he scrubbed floors on his hands and knees, scoured massive pots encrusted with food, and peeled over 100 potatoes.
"I never worked so hard in my life," he wrote. When he finally got off at 8 p.m., there was no rest, the entire barracks was preparing for an inspection the next morning. "I continued working like a coolie with all the other guys."
Rifle practice terrified him. "Watching the first group of men fire scared the hell out of me," he wrote. "The kick is tremendous and the noise hurts your ears. My first shot almost dislocated my shoulder." To his surprise, he nearly qualified as Expert.
The grenade range was worse. One morning in July, Gould stood in a sandbagged pit, live grenade in hand, waiting for the command to throw. Before it came, the grenade in the pit next to him detonated.
"It was someone else's hand grenade," Gould recalled. "That was a terrible incident. Some guy let go of the handle before he should have."
The culmination of basic training was an infiltration course designed to simulate combat. After a 14-mile hike, Gould and his fellow soldiers arrived exhausted at 5:30 in the morning. They had been awake since 2 a.m., marching through darkness on a forest trail lit only by the moon.
At dawn, they began crawling. Ninety yards on their stomachs, through simulated minefields, under barbed wire, while live machine gun fire cracked inches above their heads.
"If you get up you get riddled," he wrote. Generals watched from command cars. "I was happy I made it."
When asked what job he wanted in the Army, Gould mentioned his background in radio. The recruiter's eyes lit up.
"They needed people who were knowledgeable of morse code," Gould said. "I learned it by myself, got a license. In a sense it saved my life."
In August 1944, he was accepted to High Speed Radio Operators School. The schedule was punishing, up at 4:45 a.m., six hours of copying code before lunch, more code and radio theory all afternoon.
"It's a long, long day," he wrote. His efficiency rating was "excellent."
Going Overseas
On Dec. 20, 1944, Gould got his shipping orders. He was elated to leave the misery of on-the-job training, freezing nights in a rat-infested farmhouse, eating cold C-rations while copying practice messages until dawn.
He made it home for Christmas, seeing his family for what might be the last time. On New Year's Eve 1944, he went to Carnegie Hall with his parents to hear the New York Philharmonic. In a few months, he would be in Germany.
"And so ends the year 1944," he wrote that night. "It wasn't a very bad year...but it was far from good. Nevertheless, I hope the next year will bring this darned war to a close, and with it, the return of millions of GIs to their homes. For keeps."
In March 1945, Gould boarded the Queen Mary in New York Harbor. The luxury ocean liner had been converted into a troopship, its elegant swimming pools filled with bunks stacked four high, its grand dining rooms packed with soldiers eating in shifts.
The ship sat in the harbor for days before departing, and Gould could see the city from the deck. On March 16, he walked out on the gangplank and viewed the city one last time. At 2200 hours, the Queen Mary finally pulled out.
The crossing was rough. The massive ship pitched so severely in heavy weather that soldiers were pinned against the walls.
"When it hitched from side to side, slowly to the other, it stayed there, all the soldiers were pinned to that side," Gould said. "We all laughed at the grotesque in a funny way as the boat slowly returned to the center. Then the other side."
At one point, the crew dropped depth charges on a possible submarine contact. Gould wasn't worried.
"There was possibly a submarine, but who knows," he said. "None of us put it in our mind. It was so huge, how could you sink a ship like that."
Four days and 13 hours later, they landed in Scotland.
The 124th and the War in Europe
From Scotland, Gould traveled by train through England, by boat to France, and by rail into Germany, arriving in April 1945 as the Third Reich collapsed around him. Along the tracks, he saw shell holes, dead livestock and the bodies of German soldiers.
"I wasn't affected by the dead," he wrote.
He was assigned to the 124th Signal Radio Intelligence Company, one of only two such units in the entire U.S. Army, the other serving in the Pacific. Their mission was to intercept, locate and copy German military radio transmissions, feeding raw intelligence to the codebreakers who would decrypt it. They set up their operations in a building that once served as the headquarters for the German Gestapo.
Gould's job was straightforward but demanding. He had to sit at a radio set and copy German morse code as fast as it came in, at a minimum of 25 words per minute.
"All I did was copying," Gould said. "There was another unit that did the breaking down of the codes. I just copied them. It was hard enough."
The work required total concentration. During one session, a group of high-ranking officers stood nearby talking loudly. Gould didn't hesitate.
"I yelled 'shut the fuck up,'" he recalled. "They all ran out. It was a good excuse. No one bothered me anymore."
The 124th used direction finders to triangulate enemy transmitter locations, and Gould learned to identify individual German radio operators by their distinctive sending styles, what operators called their "fist."
"Every operator had a different way of sending," he explained. "The Germans had one kind of fist, Americans had another. Very sensitive. I could pick out who I was listening to."
Ironically, German technical excellence made them easier to find. Their transmitters produced a perfectly steady tone; American, French, Russian, and Italian equipment had a slight warble. "It was their technical excellence that gave their identification away," Gould wrote.
On April 13, 1945, word reached the unit that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died.
"The news hit the boys very hard," Gould wrote. "We all had tears in our eyes. We've lost one of the greatest men of this era."
The war in Europe was nearly over. On May 8, 1945, V-E Day, Gould was working a direction finder in a field when he heard Winston Churchill's voice on the radio announcing Germany's surrender.
"I turned the volume up; I was so excited I wanted the whole world to hear it," he wrote. "I had the world at my fingertips; and together with the good news I was really one very happy and homesick boy."
An Enemy People
What surprised Gould most about Germany was not the devastation, the bombed cities, the ruined infrastructure, the defeated army. It was the people.
"When I did get to Germany, that almost knocked me off my feet," Gould said. "They looked like me. That surprised me. I had expected in a silly way that they would look different. They looked like me. That was the beginning of my education. I started thinking on a higher level."
He was an American soldier from a Jewish background whose extended family had been murdered by the Nazi regime. He might have harbored hatred for every German he met. He didn't.
"I didn't feel any different than anyone else," he said. "I didn't feel Jewish. I was an American soldier. No one said 'I'm Catholic' or 'Protestant.' We were just soldiers."
After the war, Gould became a supply sergeant, managing German workers and processing former soldiers for labor details. He conducted interviews, investigated backgrounds and managed men who only weeks before served in an enemy army.
"Whenever I spoke to Germans I would get the current baloney that they were all duped and hypnotized by Hitler," he wrote. "Of course, they weren't going to tell me that they voted the bastard into office and 'sieg-heiled' themselves hoarse whenever he drove by."
One man admitted to joining the Nazi Party just a month before the war ended.
"Why did he join?" Gould recalled asking. "He said, 'We were starving and if we didn't join they wouldn't give us food.' They suffered for listening to Adolf. They paid for it. The loser pays double."
Gould spoke Yiddish, which shares some of its vocabulary with German. He picked up the language quickly and communicated easily with civilians, who often asked which German city he came from.
"I would say the Bronx," he said.
That summer, Gould visited Berchtesgarten, Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. He walked through the bombed ruins and sat in chairs where Nazi leadership had once sat.
"It fascinated me, how in all that beautiful scenery such inhuman conniving was taking place," he wrote.
In August 1945, he heard news of the atomic bomb. Gould walked around town hoping to find some celebration. It was raining. There was no one around.
"I always thought the end of the war would bring some kind of big change...like a new star in the heavens...maybe a bigger sun...or something," he wrote. "But no, it's just a very ordinary day, and a rainy one at that. What a very strange dream this world is experiencing."
He got along with the locals as he served briefly on occupation duty. Though his time in the Army was coming to an end.
Coming Home
Gould left Germany in June 1946 and returned to New York. He used the GI Bill to earn a physics degree from City College of New York, then a master's from NYU. He taught high school physics for more than 20 years before retiring in the 1970s.
Throughout the decades, he kept possession of his wartime journals which documented his daily experiences at the end of WWII. In 2000, with the support of his wife Ellie, Gould turned his journal entries into a book. The result was "Echoes From the Past," a self-published memoir now available on Amazon.
"I felt I had a lot of things to say," Gould said. "It reminds me of the stuff that I couldn't remember any longer. It was a backup of the stuff I experienced."
Looking back nearly 80 years later, Gould has no regrets.
"I'm glad I was in it and made it," he said. "It was an interesting learning experience, and those who didn't make it can't write it down. I was able to. If you've gone through tough times and made it, you did it."
As for his secret to reaching 100?
"Having a lot of fun in life," Gould said. "You need to be interested, motivated, and get enjoyment out of it. Give other people some degree of enjoyment."
That curious kid from the Bronx who stuck bobby pins into outlets and thought little people lived inside radios, went on to use those interests to copy wartime German codes. He survived the war, returned home and had a family. Even as he turns 100 on Saturday Feb. 21, his memory is still as sharp as ever.
