Tony Bennett touched millions with his singing, but he once told Howard Stern how he himself was affected by an early experience.
After Bennett died Friday at age 96, a 2011 interview about his World War II service resurfaced online. In the video, Bennett explained how his time in the infantry, which included helping to liberate a concentration camp, made him a pacifist.
“I don’t really like war,” he said on Stern’s talk show. “For me, life is a gift and you have to enjoy it. It’s a great gift. Being alive is the best thing that could ever happen.”
Bennett was drafted into the war as a teenager. Although he said he was scared, he wasn’t the only one.
“The Germans were scared. We got scared. Nobody wanted to kill anybody when we were on the line,” Bennett said. “But the guns were so strong that they beat us and everybody else.”
Although Bennett became a corporal, he told Stern that he was cut “a bigoted captain’s stripes” because of his friendship with a fellow soldier who was Black.
“He was the biggest man,” Bennett recalled. “He was a great drummer, and we used to be in high school together.”
They had a Thanksgiving together during the war in Germany.
“He took me to his Baptist church and I said, ‘Well, I’m allowed a guest at the Truman Hotel in Mannheim, why don’t you come with me?’ We’ll have Thanksgiving dinner’”.
The friend agreed, but the captain was apparently unhappy that a white soldier was with a black one, because he told the future star that he now had a new job: to dig up the bodies of dead American soldiers to be buried elsewhere.
It was a gruesome task, and it changed Bennett permanently.
“As a result, it has taken all the bigotry out of my life,” he said. “It’s a premise in my life that I think one of the most ignorant things that could ever happen is people being bigots about other people.”
Hear the full exchange in the video below:
