Tony Bennett impacted millions of people with his singing, but he once told Howard Stern how he himself was impacted by an experience early in life.
After Bennett died Friday at the age of 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, turned him into a pacifist.
“I really dislike war,” he said on Stern’s talk show. “To me, life is a gift, and you should enjoy it. It’s a great gift. To be alive is the best thing that could ever happen.”
Bennett was drafted into the war when he was a teen. Although he said he was scared, he wasn’t the only one.
“The Germans were frightened. We were frightened. Nobody wanted to kill anybody when we were on the line,” Bennett said. “But the weapons were so strong that it overcame us and everybody else.”
Although Bennett became a corporal, he told Stern that he had his “stripes sliced from a bigot captain” because of his friendship with a fellow soldier who was Black.
“He was the greatest guy,” Bennett remembered. “He was a fantastic drummer, and we used to be in high school together.”
They reunited one Thanksgiving during the war in Germany.
“He took me to his Baptist church, and I said: ‘Well, they’re allowing me one guest in the Truman Hotel in Mannheim, why don’t you join me? We’ll have Thanksgiving dinner.’”
The friend agreed, but the captain was apparently unhappy that a white soldier was hanging out with a Black one, because he told the future star that he now had a new job: digging up the bodies of dead American soldiers for reburial elsewhere.
It was a horrible task, and it changed Bennett permanently.
“It’s eliminated all bigotry from my life as a result,” he said. “It’s a premise in my life that I think one of the most ignorant things that could ever happen are people that are bigoted about other people.”
Listen to the full exchange in the video below: