When Melvin Kaminsky arrived in Europe with a field artillery unit, he thought he would be a radio operator. In need of combat engineers, though, the Army noticed the young private’s military operational specialty — the military service had trained him as an electrical engineer — saw the word “engineer” and immediately reassigned him.

Instead of receiving and sending coded messages, Kaminsky’s new assignment was far more dangerous. His main responsibility would be to defuse land mines, but true to his nature, he joked about what possibly could go wrong.

“I said, ‘Oh, you don’t really want me to do that, do you?'” he recalled in a 2022 interview with HistoryNet. “‘I mean, you know I’m liable to get blown up.'”

Despite any misgivings about working in close proximity to explosive devices, Kaminsky survived, changed his name to Mel Brooks and went on to become the comedic genius behind such laugh-out-loud classics as “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “The Producers.” His sense of humor served him well during World War II as Brooks found himself far from his native New York — where, as a teenager, he first honed his timing on stage while working as a comic during the summers in the Catskill Mountains — and too close to the Nazis for his comfort.

Brooks’ military journey began when the Army drafted him in 1944. He was sent to the Virginia Military Institute, where he studied electrical engineering and learned skills related to his role as a cavalry officer. During those drills, instructors taught Brooks how to ride a horse and wield a saber, skills for which he didn’t have much use while growing up impoverished in Brooklyn after his father died when he was 2 years old. Brooks’ military education continued during basic training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he learned the ins and outs of field artillery and “how to put Camel cigarettes in my ears. My ears are still yellow to this day.”

In November 1944, Brooks and his yellowed ears arrived in Europe as a forward artillery observer with the 78th Infantry Division before transferring to the 1104th Engineer Combat Group. Brooks participated in the Battle of the Bulge — Germany’s final major offensive on the Western Front — but to his everlasting good fortune, he was not involved in the most intense fighting. Still, harm’s way was never far away for the 1104th, which routinely dodged enemy fire as they worked ahead of the front lines; sometimes, they even engaged in close combat with German troops.

The 1104th’s role was crucial. When Brooks’ unit was not building bridges over rivers or streams, allowing Allied troops to cross in their military trucks and tanks, or destroying pillboxes or clearing roads, they usually searched for land mines. To do that, they literally poked and prodded.

“You would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet, and if you heard, ‘Tink! Tink! Tink!’ you knew there was something dangerous underneath,” Brooks explained. “You had to be careful.”

When they discovered a land mine, one of the service members gingerly approached the explosive, deployed a whisk broom to remove any dirt from the area carefully and then disabled the lethal device. During these tense moments, Brooks said, others in the platoon hunkered down a (relatively) safe distance area away, their helmets offering only so much protection and praying the next sound they heard would not be: Boom!

Not all mines were the same, either. Some were small and, unlike the larger ones, somewhat limited in the amount of damage they caused, relatively speaking. Others were more intricate, more deadly and involved tripwires; one that Brooks remembered in particular was the “Bouncing Betty,” an S-mine that, when tripped, would bounce chest high and spew shrapnel in all directions.

Then there were the booby traps, which unleashed their carnage when their targets least suspected it. Brooks said the 1104th’s combat engineers always were wary anywhere they went, even to the bathroom — when pulling on the chain of a toilet could spring a booby trap.

“To this day, even though I’m not a soldier and I’m not in Germany and I’m not in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode, I have a tendency to stand on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap … which hardly makes sense in a restaurant in New York,” Brooks recalled to HistoryNet.

Somehow Brooks, who saw only three months of combat, survived. Along the way, the born entertainer noticed some absurdities of military life, including his military job (“I was a combat engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.”); how a soldier’s food was usually served in one pile when they bivouacked, no matter what it was (“To this day, I’m vaguely nostalgic for some sliced peaches on top of my beef bourguignon.”); and simply missing some things he took for granted as a civilian (“I’d never gone to the toilet before with 16 other guys sitting next to me. I would go crazy waiting for the latrine to be free of people so I could rush in, do my stuff and rush out. It took a lot of getting used to.”).

Brooks, who was honorably discharged as a corporal, remained in Europe after World War II, helping with the Allied occupation and, much more in line with his natural gift for comedy, telling jokes and emceeing talent shows for the remaining troops stationed there. That lasted until Brooks returned home in April 1946. When Brooks spotted the Statue of Liberty, he became emotional, appreciative for making it through the war safely as well as for what the military had done for him.

“The Army didn’t rob me of my youth,” Brooks, who will turn 99 on June 28, 2025, told HistoryNet. “It really gave me quite an education. If you don’t get killed in the Army, you can learn a lot.”

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