The Reluctant Warrior

By J. Danahy

Copywrite by Charles T. Harrell January 15, 2005

The day before Memorial day, 1986, a few nights ago, I sat in a local bar. I did have one too many and noticed a map hanging behind the bar. It was a map of Italy, the Italian boot. Not being able to see too clearly and needing help to locate a place call Anzio, I asked the bar tender and several young people around the bar to point out where Anzio was located. No one knew where it was or cared that it ever existed!!

What a short memory we have for fallen comrades. Anzio, where we lost so many gallant soldiers, where we lost so many young second lieutenants, and I could have been one of them but for the Grace of God.

But, for the Grace of God, would any of us be here. I have talked with Him about World War II since it ended, fifty one years ago, and I am one of the survivors. Most of all the great generals are dead from that war, and I had served with honor under them. But the one of great significance to me was General George E. Patton, at that time only a one star brigadier general, who was located outside Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. In retrospect, he was probably located in Ft. Bragg with his 13^th Armored Division.

We were only one trial horse battalion, about one thousand men, sent down from Boston, Massachusetts, to do battle with George E. Patton and his 13^th Armored Division on what was called the ’41 Carolina Maneuvers.

Why were chosen as trial horse for George Patton?

The German Blitzgrieg over ran France. The French magino line was not a deterrent. The German tanks ran around the ends like a football team on a quick strike. There was nothing to stop them.

The Brass in the Pentagon realized it had to have some sort of defensive type unit to stop the Blitzing German army. Thus was born the beginning of the Tank Destroyer Battalions. At the time, we were a provisional ant-tank battalion called the 626^th out of the 26^th Yankee Division, a trial horse for Patton in the afore mentioned ’41 Maneuver.

It was the summer of 1940, the last carefree summer of my life. The dogs of war were already growling in Europe. Hitler’s Panzers were ready to Blitzgrieg the Mangineau line.

We were a fun loving group of guys and gals who loved to go to the beach during the days and dance to Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Band along with Vaughn Monroe. We didn’t really dance, we stood around the band and listened to the music and heard all the great singers. Bunny Bennegan, who played a terrific trumpet, was so drunk he fell off the bandstand one night. He was too high to get hurt. Someone helped him back on the stand, and he blew more sweet music and the kids went wild with the jitterbug, a popular dance in those carefree, easy going days. No one thought where they’d be within the year, we were all have such a good time.

It was soon Fall of ’40, and the last filing at the beaches was had by all. The sabers rattled louder in Europe, but we were having such fun, we hardly noticed Hitler on the prowl.

I had been working that summer on the other end of town. The high society boys, most of whom owned their own horses, decided to do the patriotic thing and form a calvary troop. They all had ROTC commissions, and so no other officers need apply, but they did need bodies and I was a reluctant body.

I didn’t want to play war games. This was a National Guard Troop and National Guard had no appeal to me. You see, I was having too good of a time to be bothered playing soldier boy. It just wasn’t for me. I didn’t wanna fight, but it seemed to be my destiny to be in the wrong place at the right time, and this followed in all my life. I was not the one looking for trouble, but being of Irish extraction, with a little Newfoundland British and American Indian thrown in, it would seem I couldn’t back away from a fight. After all, my Uncle Matt was a former welter and light weight champion of New England. My other uncle, Jack, who I was named after, was a barroom brawler, and my father was a great street fighter. So you see, I was destined somehow to follow their footsteps.

I saw my father take on two thugs at one time an whip them soundly. They attacked me in front of my house. Thank God my father heard me call for him. I was about ten years old at the time, and no match for one thug, let alone two. I had wished at the time that I were old enough to help him, but you know he didn’t need my help. They thought two against one would be easy. They didn’t know they had a tiger by the tail, and when he finished them off, they ran away. I was proud of my father that day. I just wish I could have seen him in action, when he was a young man. I remember seeing all of the knuckles broken on both of his hands. He probably should have been in the ring with gloves on, but this was not to be either. About five year later, my mother took me to the Boston Garden to enter me in the fights using my uncle Matt’s name as a reference. I remember the promoter showing interest in me, but then he asked, “How old is the kid”, and fifteen was a year too young, thank God. You see, I was still the reluctant warrior.

I had the usual school yard brawls, out of the sight of the sisters of Saint Joseph, one or two of whom could dish out the stick with a vengeance. I wondered many times if they were the avenging angles!! In my sophomore year in high school, I took a mean whacking from Gussie the Gasher. She was one tough cookie fighting in the classroom. There was another kid who wanted my hide for some unknown reason. I put up with his taunts as long as I could, and so it happened that sister stepped out of the classroom, and he started on me in front of the whole class. This was more than I could take, so I got out of my seat from the other side of the room and walked across to tell him to get off my back for the last time. I guess he was waiting for me; he threw the first punch. I ducked and let him have it with both barrels- left and right- and it was all over in a minute. Just as Gussie walked in the door as I was finishing him, and she saw me as the attacker. So I got the whip, but I never told her who started it, not ever.

The fight led to a much bigger one a few days later in the school yard. Here goes the reluctant warrior again!! We were all gathered around a circle as I pushed my way through the crowed to see who was in the circle. I was Fats Rafferty, the biggest kid in the school, and also known as the school bully. He could whip anybody, and he knew it. So the gang started to call out different names to be his opponent, till they got to my name. And where the others had refused to get in the right with him, somehow I couldn’t cut and run. I was born Irish. So, I put on the glaves, and he knocked me down two or three times before I realized the reluctant warrior was again force to do battle, not of my own volition.

So when I picked myself up, I was now not reluctant. I had to fight in self-defense, so I knew in this case attack was my best defense, and I cut loose with both hands again. I backed him up to the metal shed, and the last punch I threw dropped him on the seat of his pants and laying up against the shed, out cold. I only had one more gihts before the Army got me. I was again the victim of being in the wrong place at the right time as usual. I would be remiss if I left this one out.

My best friend and I were playing handball away from school for $.25 against the tallest guy I ever saw, and my friend and the tall guy argued all through the match. Finally, the game was decided by one point, and we thought we won. The tall guy disputed the decision, and thus began a giv argument with my friend and the tall guy. You understand I never said a word all through the argument. Finally, my friend said, (looking for support), “Isn’t that right, Jack?” And I said, “Yes.” The tall guy said to me, “Take your coat off,” and here goes the reluctant warrior again!! Well, when we clinched, I wasn’t up to his armpits, and this is no exaggeration. He knucked me down twice. The last time I got up, I measured him with a right and threw it over his shoulder. Okay, I missed. Fine. Next shot I’ll adjust six inches. I caught him flush on the nose and his light went out. End of fight for the reluctant warrior.

This is also the end of a fun loving summer. I was destined to do my next fighting for my other uncle, the guy called Sam.

I gave you all this fighting background as the reluctant warrior, because I never wanted to fight but had to to survive.

So, I was one of the bodies my friends at work recruited for the National Guard. I joined reluctantly: I must have said “no” a hundred times. I was still saying no when the recruiting officer signed me up. I was having too much fun as a civilian. I was no warrior. I was really the clown in the group. You know, the one who makes everyone laugh. Well, after a few clown episodes on the drill floor where I excelled at making the wrong turns on purpose and disrupting the drill session to the thorough enjoyment of the troop, they all laughed and so did I. We were having so much fun, but comes an end to all things, and mine came to an abrupt end right ther in the armory basement.

I was making the gang laugh one day, and I was standing in the aisle when out of the corner of my eye, here came a big body charging down on me. I had been a defensive hockey player in my high school days, and a blocking back on the single wing football team, so, instinctively, I knew this big body was gonna run over me. I was 5’9” and ax. 150 lbs., but I stuck my left shoulder right between his barrel chest and stopped him dead in his tracks. He was surprised and said, “What’s your name, soldier?” I didn’t know I stopped the big 1^st sergeant. No one laughed anymore. He said, “I’ll see you in camp in a few weeks, soldier,” and everyone but me knew what he meant. I said, “What is he talkin’ about, he’ll see me in camp?” And they all said they had made camp with him before (I was a rookie)! “You’ll see when you get to camp,” and they were right. This was to begin the end of the reluctant warrior.

Chapter 2

The next chapter changed my life forever. Now 1^st Sgt. McQuader was promoted to Lieutenant McQuade, and he proceeded to make my life hell on earth till I became no longer the reluctant dragon. He made me a warrior. Inwardly, I had been a fighting survivor from birth. I was supposed to die in my mother’s arms as a baby in convulsions whose body turned a deep shade of blue. I survived this episode to escape death as I did more times in my life, as we’ll see in many later chapters. God wasn’t ready to take me yet. He must have had other plans in store for me.

So, the boys of summer arrived in the snow at Camp Edwards to play soldier, I thought. I didn’t know the lieutenant had other plans for me, and my happy-go-lucky, carefree style of life changed abruptly.

I found shortly after arrival that I was assigned to shovel coal for three barracks, day and night. Many strokes of the shovel full of coal into one of the monster furnaces would be paid back in revenge for the lieutenant who tried to break my spirit. He should have known I didn’t die easily, nor was I a quitter. This made me all the more determined to catch up to the lieutenant in grade was an officer in Uncle Sam’s army. Destiny determined this should almost happen. We’ll see later!!!

After two weeks of the shovel detail, walking between barracks, day and night, perspiring heavily, I came down with pneumonia and was sent to the camp hospital. This was early 1941, and Dr. Saulk had yet to come up with his wonder drug, penicillin. So, I lay in the hospital taking sulpha, and I remember the nurses admonition. “Now drink your juice,” as she walked away with no a look back. I was lucky again. My guardian angel hovering over said, “Drink your juice and plenty of it.” So I did, and plenty of it. This was easy for me, for the curse of the Irish this time worked in my favor. I was a liquid drinker of no definite determination, just so long as it was liquid. This does not mean to say that I was an alcoholic. I was an athlete and always needing to replace lost liquids in my body, thank God. There was other guys in the beds close to me that died later, because they did not drink enough liquid to keep their kidneys from crystallizing. So, I escaped again.

As I lay in the hospital, I thought of how I had to change my lifestyle. Gone was on of the boys of summer. My carefree life ended there in the hospital bed. Now onto the new warrior, not now reluctant. I had a goal and was determined to achieve it: catch up to the lieutenant in grade before this war was over.

I came out of the hospital and prepared myself to practice convey movements and camping in the hills of upper state New York. Because I had been a volunteer from the start, we were sold the idea from the beginning that if we could do a year for Uncle Sam, then our obligation to our country would be complete. Thus the phrase: “Good-bye, dear. I’ll be back in a year.” This was stretched into five. The bombing of Pearl Harbor changed things again. So the boys of summer began to realize this might change from play soldier to the real thing. As a volunteer, I was given a stripe and made a private 1^st class. This to me at the time meant more money, just a kiss and a promise to do better. This was early February, 1941, and the snow was coming down as we arrived at Camp Smith or Drum. We selected our place in the snow, which had been falling lightly, and bedded down for the night on the cold, cold ground. I remember the snow on the cold, cold ground, but never thought I’d live to love it in reality.

We awake the next morning, and I remember pushing the snow back to find my other shoe. The boys of summer were transformed into the boys of winter. In all the miserable weather, the boys of summer hadn’t been completely transformed yet. There was still time for fun, and this happened before dawn. The background is a major attached to our unit was known to be a habitual drunk, and our head cook was likewise. This seemed to be an appropriate time to pull the fake injury act. Some of the guys set it up earlier in the evening by starting a fight (fake) with the cook who grabbed a long butcher knife and went for the agitator, and, of course, the accomplices broke up the melee. This was a good enough stage show to get ready for the real show to come early in the morning. In all the snow, we awoke to screams and moans from the kitchen area. Someone hollered, “He killed the cook!!”

The cook passed out from an over abundance of beer, and lay prostrate. A couple of the guys grabbed ketchup and smeared it all over his head, and called for the drunken major medic. “Come quick, Doc! He’s killed him!” Can’t you see the old Doc stumbling out of his cozy ambulance at the crack of dawn, eyes blinking, saying, “Where is he? Where is he?”, as he rubbed his sleepy eyes. The gang encircled the prostrate cook, and when I got there and pushed my way through the circle of bodies, I found a scene of mayhem. The cook was swathed in bandages with the ketchup oozing through and out cold. The doc said, “Let me at him,” and of course when he got close enough for his old drunken, tired eyes to open, he realized the ruse. And there was hell to pay, but the boys of summer hadn’t lost their sense of humor, not yet anyway. It takes a while, especially with a wild bunch of happy-go-lucky cavalry men like these.

You will remember, I joined the machine gun cavalry. Sounded like fun and adventure to me. Of course, I never saw a horse. They changed us to an artillery battalion shortly after we were inducted into federal service, Jan. 1^st, 1941. Someone must have realized the show for the horse cavalry was over, and now we go the big 155 mil. Howitzers, and we became artillery men, so to speak, after a fashion. The older guys were singing the current favorite song all the time, and I soon fell in, enjoying a song myself. It went something like the: I was a farmer boy pitching up the hay. I worked from the break of dawn till the end of the day, when along come a captain in the cavalry and said, “Come along with me.” They gave me a rifle, a pistol and a boot and took me up to Wakefield and taught me how to shoot, etc., etc. But the old cavalry days were over now, and we had to learn how to shoot straight.

We returned to our camp on the beach on old Cape Cod and prepared to defend our American shores. There were rumors the German subs were lurking off the eastern shores and were preparing how to shoot through from the shoreline. This brought up a funny incident and, but for the Grace of God, I would have been involved. I was stuck with being in charge of quarters. By now I was raised to acting corporal. I was acting, too!! Anyhow, I was stuck for day in the barracks, or I know I’d have been on of the riders of the purple sage, ha ha!!

They arrived in the gravity run range early next morning to shoot up a few moving targets. They had the old 105 towed guns in position, and at the end of the day, walked to the top of the rise to see the results of the days shooting. We had a young 2^nd lieutenant in charge, and along with Joyce Welch and four or five others as they walked up the hill, the lieutenant noticed a piece of track was knocked out by one the shots. He mentioned this. At the time, they all said let’s forget about it, till they all said let’s jump on the small rail car with target on top and on down to the bottom of the hill. Well, all agreed and jumped on after a good running pushy. No one anticipated how fast that thing might go with a load of leaders on it, but as it gained momentum, they all knew they were going too fast. There were no brakes, and this was a gravity run all the way to the bottom like a free fall from an airplane. They went plummeting to what end, no one knew. About half way down, the lieutenant remembered the broken piece of track and made a wise and quick decision. He said, “When we get to the bend in the track and we try to ride over the broken track, everyone lean to the left at the bend.” He hoped the weight of the men might be enough to carry the car over the broken track. So at the appropriate time, he hollered, “Lean to the left.” It didn’t work!! All you could see were bodies flying through the air and down the track and hill. Legs and arms flailing in the wind. Speed was estimated at between 45 and 50 miles an hour. And this was no time to get off and walk, but no one had a chance. This was disaster. Welch broke his hip and was later discharged from the service. Joyce got a dislocated arm and shoulder and several cracked teeth. All the others had cuts, bumps and bruises. Blood was everywhere.

Whey they limped back to the barracks, I greeted them wishing I had been along for the ride. I was the lucky one, but I missed a thrill. Marty was a real tough guy. He wouldn’t go to the medics, even though he was in excruciating pain. So we did the next best thing: one guy held him; we put a leather belt between this teeth to ease the pain; and I pulled and twisted his arm till it went back in the socket. It finally did, and he never fainted or cried out from the pain one time. He was a tough Irishman!! As tough as they came.

This ended shooting for a while and on to something else. We were learning to be warriors a little bit at a time on a new gun, the 105. We all wondered at the time, especially me, if we had chosen the right outfit. You see, it was my own choice to get in this wild outfit. I had had it made previously, as a range finder corporal on the O.P. My job was similar to a computer operator today, only we didn’t have a computer, and that, I guess, would be discovered 30-4- years later. Our computer was mental, and I had been selected as one of only four trained computers at the O.P. (Observation Point) at the top of the hill, observing the results of the firing of the 155 mil. Guns (howitzers). This to me was very dull. When the firing was completed, there was nothing to do but lay down and soak up the sun and go to sleep. This was not for me.

This was the time I noticed our anti-tank platoon in action. We had a terrific view from the top of the hill, and all I saw was weapons carriers and towed guns (little 37 millimeters) flying through the air, hell bent for something or other. I didn’t know, but I anted that part of the action, not this dull stuff I was doing. So, I talked to the platoon sergeant of the anti-tank platoon ( I was in headquarters platoon) and asked about getting in to his platoon. He said, “Sure. I’ll request your transfer.” He did, the next day. Colonel Manly, our C.O., inspected the O.P. and found one of his four computer operators among the missing, and back I went to headquarters platoon. But the sergeant said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get you. It’ll take time,” and it did. About two weeks, and I got into the wild, wonderful world of being an anti-tanker and on to a new and exciting way to live or die.

About this time, you see, we were only a few months ahead of the first draftees who were to join us. On March, 1941, and at this time, being a young corporal, I was selected to help great the new arrivals in camp, and I guess this is where I grew up fast. I was like a mother hen, but at age 22.

I showed the recruits where they ate and slept and walked the barracks floors at night, offering words of consolation where needed, and it was needed. We had guys jumping out of second story windows to get home to wives and children. They were lonesome for home and family. So was I, but I couldn’t show it. I was their father figure and, at age 22, growing up fast. I wanted to cry with them, but I couldn’t show or do that in front of them. You wonder how this will affect you in later life. It’ll get you or you’ll get it. It wasn’t gonna get to me. I had a goal, you remember. I had a job to do. I was gonna repay Lt. McQuade somehow or other someday, someday!!

After 30 days, we passed through our allotment of recruits for our battalion, and I moved back to take up my duties as range finder corporal in headquarters battalion with the big 155s. This was the time the captain of my outfit approached me an told me I had an appointment with a civilian approved by the army to talk to me about spy activities in the outfit. I was selected to observe any strange activities and report to a post office box # in Glouster, and I was given a fictitious name. I was to be known as Frank Featherstone, and I would sign my weekly report likewise. They knew something was to happen but had to have proof.

I didn’t realize it at th time, but the private under me in rank was a Nazi and had only recently come from the German army in Europe. You see, he had to be admitted into the U.S. Army. He was a bonafide citizen, or was he? We’ll see later as this story develops!! He marched with the German Army goose-stop. I took particular notice of this, because I was appointed drill corporal for my company on return from the temporary duty of helping induct the first drafters. I didn’t realize why I was selected for this duty except that my voice carried in the winds of this bleak, muddy, sandy, new camp on the cape of no hope. We were all still in the learning process, and I was just one step ahead of the draftees.

It was bout this time the Bid Red 1^st Army came back from duty in China. War in Europe was getting closer. I guess Uncle Sam needed the expertise of the grizzled veterans from the China expedition.

We watched in wonder as they rolled into camp, and they looked like a bunch of bums on a holiday. But, when the sergeant in charge said hop to it, they sprang to life. An amazing change of posture, they came to Edwards to help train Uncle Sam’s National Guard unit with the addition of new draftees to fill the ranks. They also needed to find help to help with instructing, and this is how I got started in a long career of instructing.

The first day, their big sergeant inspected us. He came down the line, inspecting our rifles as he came down. When he got to me, he stopped, stared right through me, and I stared back through him, ready to fight at the drop of the hat. He towered over me, but I was used to being towered over and not intimidated by anyone. So, I was fairly ready when he grabbed by rifle out of my hands, moved it horizontal to the ground and drove it into my soloplexis. This of course dropped me on my derriere (can), and I looked him straight in the eye. You do not strike a superior in or out of ranks in this man’s army, so I had to swallow my hurt pride and just with we were somewhere in the woods, just he and I.

I guess he was trying me out, because in a few days, I was selected with five other corporals to got to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina for Ranger training. We felt honored at the time. They were the survivors of the second Ranger battalion that assaulted the beaches of Normandy prior to the invasion of Europe. Little was said at the time of the disaster. I understand we lost the 1^st Battalion and about half the second, and these were the remaining survivors, and they were tough. These were the forerunners of the Green Berets.

They were to give us two weeks of unarmed combat training. The first week consisted of defensive movements. We faced our instructors individually. They told us to use the rifle we held in our hands to attempt to stick them with the six inches of cold steel on the end. We couldn’t believe they couldn’t do anything to stop the blood shed, but they did, and it was very easy for them to do. We couldn’t stick them, no matter how hard we tried, and we tried!!

Next came the pistol take-away. These pistols were not loaded for obvious reasons. They asked us to pull our pistols and point them at them, and when we did, they were gonna take the pistol out of our hands. This I wanted to see them do, and they did it also, very easily. The old adage was true, I though: The hand is quicker than the eye.

Next came the real slammer. We were told to attack them from the front and the rear and take them by surprise. Well, we all landed on our backs in the Carolina dust, and they threw us there vigorously. Whey we never got a broken bone, I’ll never know. But, I guess we were young at the time and in good physical condition.

We finished the first week of learning defense without the advantage of a weapon, bruised, battered and bloodied. We lay in our sacks over the weekend, dreading Monday morning. But it came anyhow, and we again faced our instructors, the survivors of the Normandy beaches, tough U.S. Rangers, the forerunners of the famous Green Berets.

They had not mercy on us. Higher command dictated that we be trained well enough to go back and teach others. I didn’t feel much like a teacher at this point. I was too busy learning how to survive this ordeal myself. Now the second week was spent trying to ward off the attackers, and you know we couldn’t do that either. They threw our battered bodies everywhere. The dust flew in all directions. But we did learn, and we did finish the week in one piece. No one had a broken or disjointed limb. This was a wonder in itself.

We were now ready to go back to our units and practice mayhem on the poor unfortunates waiting for our return. The lessons we leaned there in the dust of North Carolina stayed with us, me anyhow, for the rest of my five years in the service of Uncle Sam. The word from the Rangers was to teach your people to kill or be killed yourself. It was to be their choice, and they would not get a second chance on their choices to live or die. This was it. So, we left them, these gallant warriors, these survivors of the 2^nd Battalion U.S. Rangers. They had been through hell and back, and back to spread the word to prepare to live or die. This then was your choice. I was a survivor, and I chose to live.

And so, as one the happy-go-lucky boys of summer, life would never be the same. The fun on the beaches of New England was fading fast for me. I took one fleeting look back to see my summers of life o the beach where the idea of such daring-do was to go one night to Nantucket beach and on the darkest night (no moon) take off our bathing suits and run naked into the ocean. Well, I guess we were the first skinny dippers?! It was really so dark, no one on the beach knew that we didn’t have suits on or off but us. It as just the thrill of doing something as outrageous as this that make it an adventure. The things that young people did 10-20-30 and 40 years later would make this seem pale by comparison.

We arrived back at camp on Cape Cod in perfect physical condition to take up our work in our respective units. I was back as the head drill corporal for my company. In those days, a corporal was an important part of the unit. I drilled the men each morning. I noticed the Nazi with the goose-stop. I hesitated to call him a German. I realized that though German people on a whole were not representative of him, I’ll call him a Nazi spy which is what he turned out to be. He was hung later in England as a spy. I had been contacted earlier by mail and was asked it I would report an subversive activities in the unit and if I did, was report to a mailing address in Gloucester. I also was to sign my name Frank Featherstone (my undercover name). So, it happened suddenly one day, a new guy appeared in our unit, and he slept across the barracks from me. I noticed he was dressed in an o.d. uniform not exactly like the material ours were cut from. It was an off shade color of o.d. (olive drab), and the fact that he did not soldier too well and seemed secretive and highly intelligent made me wonder why he was only a private. It turned out later, he was observing the Nazi as a plant in our unit, something like an FBI agent. It would be a federal offense if he is fact were a spy.

About this time, our unit (headquarters) lost our tech. sgt. (head of the unit) to drinking. He was one of the social security boys out of the original polo playing group that couldn’t hold his liquor. So, he was demoted and transferred to some other unit. I never saw him again.

The three stripe sergeant over me was not a very bright fellow, and shortly he disappeared, leaving me the ranking NCO in the unit and the Nazi, second in command now. And, when shortly thereafter you recall, I was transferred from ranger finder corporal in headquarters platoon to gun corporal in the anti-tank platoon, he became the ranking sergeant of the unit. He really moved up fast. He was now tech. sgt., and few day after, I saw him in the PX talking to one of the guys at the counter. I moved up behind to listen to the conversation he was having, and it went like this: He was furious that his superior officer rejected his attempt to go to officer candidate school; he said, because of his nationality, he might be sympathetic to the Nazi cause. I heard him say, “I guess they don’t realize in my position as top NCO of our 155 Howitzer gun batter, I could wreck the whole unit,” and this was true. He was in charge of the operation as senior non-commissioned officer. Well, I heard they caught up with him at the P.O.E. in England. He was tried for attempted subversive activities and in wartime, this could lead to hanging, and for him it did.

In addition to drilling the troops daily, there were other necessary jobs to do. One was doing guard duty. My name beginning with the letter “D”, it seemed to me, came up more than routinely, and when I aksed the platoon sergeant why, he would always sya he lost the duty roster, after my turn of this tough assignment. I had the feeling, since he was so cozy with my lieutenant, that it seemed like I was getting the short end of the sitck, and it usually came on my weekends off. I found myself stuck on guard duty again!! This meant confinement to camp and work on the weekend while my everyone else was off having a good time at the local beaches without this boy of summer. There was nothing to do but grin and bear it, but time would be on my side. I just had to work and wait.

The prisoners we had in those days were a tough lot, but I felt their equal. We didn’t really have a cell to put them in, it was just one large single room, and there were several guard house lawyers in the group and real trouble makers who challenged each change of guard like kids to see how far they could go with the privates of the guard. You remember I am the corporal of the guard this particular day, and they decided to test me. I had been away getting my commando training in North Carolina, and they picked the wrong time to test me.

When the sergeant and I got to the prison room to change the guard, they wouldn’t let u in the door. I said to Monty (Sgt. Monty, my good buddy), “Let’s go on in,” and the two of us crashed through the door, pushing bodies back as we went. The fracas was over very quickly, and I picked out the troublesome ring leader, and he was supposed to be the toughest of the group. I said to him, “Come with me outside. I wanna have a talk with you.” He marched, and I marched behind him a short distance to an isolated wooded area.

We were alone, he and I, and I said to him, “Now I want to see just how tough you ar.” Being the guard house lawyer, he thought he was, he said, “You’ve got your stripe on. I can’t strike a non-commissioned officer.” I said, “That’s no trouble”, and pulled my shirt off. “Now let’s go. Let’s see how tough you are.” I figured he had a yellow streak down his back for all his tough looks and outward appearances, and he did. He backed down and refused to put his hands up and fight. I was not the aggressor, and I had nothing to prove by whipping him physically. I whipped him mentally, and that was enough. I took him back to the guard house and threw him through the door bodily. He was slightly subdued, but he wasn’t through yet. A few days later, he challenged one of my privates of the guard, a new kid from Tennessee!!! We’ll see what happened here.

One day, the prisoner had to be taken fro a routine health check. I told the Tennessee guard to take him to medics and not to take any foolishness from him. I said, “If he starts anything, throw a shell in the chamber, and he’ll settle down.” I didn’t intend for him to kill him, but I watched as he marched him away. They hadn’t gone far, when as I expected the prisoner thought he’d see how far he could go with the new kid from the hills of Tennessee. This kid didn’t fool around. When the prisoner acted up by moving out faster than the kid could march behind him, he said, “Halt.” The prisoner kept going. He didn’t say halt twice. He threw the shell in the chamber and put a shot an inch from his foot. The prisoner came to a very abrupt stop!! That was the end of the prisoner fooling around with the kid from Tennessee.

Our summer practice runs taken down the end of the Cape Cod sand dunes to put our big guns in action. These were British five pounders on loan to us from Great Britain to practice on. The U.S. Army was very short of weapons in those days. You see why when we had to borrow from the Brits. The gun had a straight box trail and was very difficult to push up a sand dune to prepare to defend our Eastern shore from what we were told might come a Nazi submarine invasion. So, for many hours, we fired at what were called towed targets pulled by a boat along with shore. We tried our luck at practice shooting these targets.

I knew very little about gunnery in those days; we were the boys of summer, and what we did know of warfare, and who was around to teach us. We practically taught ourselves by hit and miss, and mostly miss. Ammunition was scarce and weapons ever scarcer. We even invented our own weapons to use on short maneuvers, like taking an old boat trailer axle with two wheels, setting a log between the axle and calling it an anti-tank gun. We painted “TANK” on the side of a weapons carrier to symbolize a tank, and we used broken sticks for rifles. This was the condition of our army in early 1941. We hadn’t been to war yet. We were just practicing, and practice we did, up and down the Cape.

The summer past and now came time for the big ’41 maneuver in North Carolina. We left the Cape in late September or early October, 1941. The maneuver was to last three months, and we were to be used as bait for the great General George E. Patton and his 13^th or 14^th Armored Division. You’ll remember, we are only one anti-tank provisional battalion against Patton’s armored division, and we were being tested to see if we could, in fact, harass Patton’s division. Our tactics at the time were all off the cuff, so to speak. We had no books or manuals to follow. We were, in fact, writing the books ourselves, and we wrote history for three months, and we made history.

The Battles of Southern Pines Cedar Buffs, back and forth across the Pee Dee River, went for days and weeks at a time. We slept very little. We had a superior colonel, B.Q. Jones. I know nothing of his background. I met him for the first time on the ground and dust of North Carolina soil. I was gun (37 mil) corporal at the time. He lay on the ground beside me, with his lieutenant colonel insignia blazing in the Carolina sun, and he said to me, “Is this you best defensive position for the gun, Corporal?” I said, “Yet, sire,” without equivocation!!! He said, “Okay. I agree you have it.” I never saw him prior or for years later. A colonel who would lay in the dust and dirt, in his uniform, with his rank and do what he did!!! I think he inspired me at that moment. He believed in me, and I in him.

He was doing battle with the great George E. Patton. David against Goliath! In my humble estimation, Colonel B.Q. Jones, God rest his soul, was a superior tactician. I had a love/hate thing with Patton at the time. I would have given my right arm to be in his outfit, because he was in inspirational leader. After a week to ten days of much combat against his 13^th Armored Division, he would call a critique in an assembly area. I can still see him standing on a high piece of ground (as a tactician, he would take the high ground). He addressed us and undressed us!! He said we were ragamuffins, no goods, the scum of the earth. We would not whip his Division. He would bury us!! His Division, he said, was the greatest Division in the world. He told his people they were all ten feet tall, and you know what? They believed him! This would be why his 3^rd Army was the scourge of Europe. His men would follow him to hell and back, and as much as he berated our little battalion of one thousand men against his armored division, I would have loved to have had the privilege to have served under him.

But we had a great colonel too!! Let me tell you!! Colonel B.Q. Jones was his, in my estimation, equal. He just wasn’t flamboyant. He didn’t have top pearl handled pistols and a big black belt strapped around his middle. He didn't have a helmet that you could see your face in, and he didn't have a pair of tank goggles strapped to his helmet with the shinning aluminum sparkling in the sun. That I know my gunner, a 38 year old man with a heart of stone (Eddie Hunter) could have put a shot between his ears if this were real. we wee only playing like war, but you just don't challenge an Irishman to come out and fight. You don't call an Irishman a ragamuffin, a no good. Thems fightin' words. As much as I loved and admired General George E. Patton, and I say again, I wish I'd been in his great army, serving under a man I so greatly admired, it was not to be. I had to do battle against a great adversary. My colonel, B.Q. Jones, whom I also loved and admired, was no slouch as a commander (in my estimation). I to this day believe he got te short end of the stick!

I think politics sidetracked this great soldier. In our day, he would have been called a maverick. He, in my estimation, was ten years ahead of his time. He suggested we should have reconnaissance planes ahead of our armor on attack. He suggested we should have 37 mil. guns firing from attacking planes. The Pentagon said he was crazy. It couldn’t be done. Later in the war, it was done! No one at this time in history wanted to listen to advanced theory put out by a maverick colonel. The maverick colonel, God rest his soul, taught enough of his theories to his very small battalion to produce over 30% of his NCO’s to end up as officers in the Army of the United States, and who knows how much these officers and NCO’s might have contributed to the winning of World War II.

Colonel B.Q. Jones, even through politics sidetracked you, I salute you. You were banished at a later date in your career, because of a greedy major (your subordinate) who listened to your answers of how to stop Nazi blitz, and he capitalized on where this successful provisional battalion should start, training on property he owned outside of Temple, Texas!! Colonel B.Q. Jones wanted A.P Hill, Virginia. Major Bruce had the political pull, so you know where the Battalion went. Yes, Texas. But this was later. We had a battle to finish against General George Patton in Carolina.

So, the long road march from Camp Edwards, Massachusetts to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina began. One memorable incident took place in a small town in North Carolina. All the vehicles were traveling too fast through the city. Our weapons carriers with crew and 37 mil. gun made too sharp a turn and turned the gun over and spilling the crew on the street. I recall being near the scene and hearing Lt. McQuade, who arrived late, say, “Someone check the condition of the gun.” Someone said, “How about the men laying in the ditch, cut and bleeding.” McQuade said, “Don’t worry about the men. They’re expendable. The gun is not.” He had no compassion for his men. I thought he was a heartless commander, and I would remember to take care of my men first. To hell with the gun. This was more ammunition I was storing up for Bulldog McQuade (this was his nickname and rightly so).

We arrived in an open field outside Ft. Bragg. We were not to enjoy the luxury of a barracks, and this seemed to follow me throughout my career. I was not what you would call a barracks soldier. I was considered a field soldier, sleeping on the ground, in the corn and tobacco fields of North Carolina. They were trying to make us tough, and I feel they succeeded.

With the base camp set up, we were down to the business of doing battle with General George E. Patton, who was only a one star brigadier general at the time. I think the general wrote our little battalion off as insignificant. After all, we were to have his 13^th armored “hell on wheels” division and as he told us, they were the best troops in the world and we were a bunch of ragamuffins. We were in his estimation the scum of the earth and many other non-flattering adjectives. Of course, he was adding fuel to the fire. We would do battle to the best of our ability to show him what the former boys of summer could do. We fought his famous division back and forth across the Pee Dee River so many times, it’s hard to remember. We would spend a week to ten days at a time maneuvering against his division. We used hit and run tactics. We weren’t a big enough force to stand and fight. Our early tactic as I understood it was to practice finding his division, meeting them on the road, called a meeting engagement, firing a few rounds quickly after delaying off the side of the road, through pulling back by way of both flanks. We were gone when his troops got to where we were. They were simulated artillery shells, but they always landed in our dust. We were gone. We hit and ran; this was to be our specialty. We learned from Col. B.Q. Jones (one of the greatest). Our job was to get to a tank break through (meaning they were over running our infantry), throw up a quick defense in the best gun positions available and start firing. I got so I could take a quick look at the terrain and put my gun and crew in position automatically. We were learning how to be soldiers while the Nazi juggernaut rolled and rambled over Europe, and we better be ready, I thought, if we were called to defend our country.

Our night moves were endeavoring not to get caught in bivouac day or night. So many days and nights, we moved continuously. I had a buddy who has been dead many years now: Sgt. Marty Joyce. He and I would stand guard many nights while our exhausted privates slept. We were a bit weary also, but we were NCO’s. We earned our stripes, but we were learning at a young age of 22 to be father figures. We took care of our men first, then we looked to our own needs. This is an example of how to grow up fast. I recall one night when Marty and I decided we’d let the men sleep. Our two gun crews usually worked together, so we joined forces so to speak on many occasion. One night or maybe early dawn, we were standing in the rain, he leaning back up against a large oak tree on one side and me doing likewise from the other side of the tree. Every now and then we’d say, are you awake, Jack or Marty?, and if you never slept standing up against a tree in the middle of the night with rain running down your neck, it’s not the most comfortable position to sleep in the world. Matter of fact, it’s down right almost impossible. On one such night in the middle of the rain, we heard the ever present siren blow. This meant get goin’ on the double, the enemy found our bivouac are (get out fast). Marty and I would grab a guy, me at his shoulders, he with his legs, we’d go on the swinging count of three and throw the bodies on the back of on open weapons carrier, like logs of wood, dead logs at that, piled one on top of the other, and you know they never woke up through the ordeal. I can tell you we spun wheels getting out of a bivouac area. Our officers had a stop watch on us, and we had better be clear of our area in the allotted time they set for us. It was easy to see in a way why Patton’s troops never got us. We moved quick. This, however, had some unfortunate drawbacks. The battalion lost more than one soldier, crushed underneath a weapons carrier. He didn’t move fast enough, and so didn’t move again ever. The training was to see how much a man could endure and still function.

I can remember somewhere towards the end of the maneuver walking into a rest area for our squads. I never forget the sights half dead tired men going through the motions of their duties in slow motion, hardly able to function or think clearly. They sat like dead men going through the acts of cleaning guns, checking water in truck radiators, etc. I thought then this must be what it’s like to have battle fatigue, and this was the reason for all this training we had done time and time again, over and over the same thing. Practice makes perfect, but it also establishes a method where the body will function when the mind id too tired to work. I could see the reason here for learning the correct procedure in the beginning, because when they got in battle later they would do the correct thing automatically. I remember this scene and retold it many times to my troops when I became an officer.

Each day we continued our mission of seek, hit hard and run from Patton’s vaunted 13^th Armored Division. In retrospect, I guess it was frustrating for him to move a division to keep up with a swift and mobile battalion that we felt was getting the better with daily experience. I think the boys of summer were growing up, whether we wanted to or not. The beaches of Cape Cod and New Hampshire were slipping further and further away and becoming only a distant memory now. We all had opportunities to go to the local towns on a few occasions. Usually we all were so beat up from doing battle with Patton’s tankers, we were just happy to sleep when the opportunity presented itself. This was no summer boys’ camp. They were, though we didn’t know it, preparing us for the coming conflict with Hitler and his superb German trained army.

You see, we were not yet a trained force to reckon with, but we all felt we were learning to be better at our jobs. Thank God we had time to train and get ready. This learning process had to pay dividends later. I feel we helped Patton’s tankers despite the fact we were under staffed in officer category. We just had too few officers. We were after all a provisional battalion. We went to battle Patton with NCO staff sergeants as acting officer platoon leaders. In retrospect, it really was in my hind view lucky we had such outstanding NCO’s at this time. They took over and did an outstanding job. One instance would seem to illustrate my point.

Halfway through the maneuver, one day they parachuted in an officer fresh out of the air corps into our battalion area. He was assigned as platoon leader of my platoon, and he took over as we were leaving one day to do battle with Patton. He was riding in the command car up front, and we followed him down into Patton territory, I knew from previous days and weeks of experience but the lieutenant didn’t know this!!

I had been listening to Patton’s tanks clanking for about half an hour wondering when he was gonna give us the word to retreat, when he stopped our column flat in the middle of the road- a no no in any man’s army. We were sitting ducks. He waved his arm for me to come up to his command car. When I got there, he said, “I’ve been listening to a strange noise for sometime. What is it?” I shook my head in disgust. He didn’t now Patton was dead ahead and if we continued we’d have run dead into his force.

I explained the situation to him. He said, “What should we do?” I didn’t hesitate in reply. I said, “Sir, let’s get the hell out of here. We’re only a single platoon of 30 men. We can’t do battle with anyone.” I said, “Let’s haul you know what. We’ll have to fight and harass another day.” Incidentally, he had us lost at this time and so this was not a planned enemy engagement. It was accidental and gonna be a big accident if we didn’t move quickly. I think he got the message. I was trying to convey, and so we lived to fight another day. I also got a message!! This guy was not gonna take yours truly into combat. A decision of this magnitude was gonna be made in the future. I felt I should be deciding my own fate and the people under me. I just had to go to OCS and become and officer. Even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t want any more responsibility, but I seemed again to be stuck with command decisions. I couldn’t stand still in spite of myself. I had to try to be an officer in this man’s army (reluctantly). So, here goes one of the boys of summer, the Reluctant Warrior has to go forward and besides, how else could I catch the Lieutenant Bull Dog McQuade in grade if I didn’t go to officer candidate school and try to be an officer and a gentleman in 90 days. A 90 day wonder they mase you when you graduated. I found out you were a wonder if you graduated in 90 days. But that was to happen a while later. We were now finishing the three month battle with Patton. Would you think it strange on the last maneuver, to one morning on the last day, wake up and find yourself looking down the gun barrel to Patton’s 13^th Armored Division!!

They had us surrounded and out numbered. Col. B.Q. Jones was the accomplice. We all felt the orders cam down from a higher command. Patton had to win the war. It had to end in a high note for his troops, the greatest troops with the greatest general in the Army, and if he wasn’t at that time, he would be later. He was destined to be great hero and he was.

The historians would write his story of slash, splash and dash across Europe with his 3^rd Army. For as much as we were a bee in his war bonnet, he must have remembered our elusive and stinging stabs at his flanks in the dust of the North Carolina hills. We were his antagonizers. We were the elusive enemy he would face for real just about two years to the day later. He would remember our hit and run, cut and shoot operation. We were also gaining valuable experience for later encounters. Right now, we were still dealing with sweat, dirt, dust and thirst in the Carolina hills.

Recalling dirt, dust and thirst, this memory still hangs with me.

We were somewhere in the hills one day when they dropped another 2^nd lieutenant from the sky into our area. He landed near my squad and I had just caught one of my people taking a drink of water from our reserve milk can, and I knew it was getting low and I didn’t know how long it had to last. You see, we were on the move for three days and nights without food or water. Our chuck wagon couldn’t keep up with our fast pace and got lost. We scraped the bottom of the few K ration cans we carried for emergencies such as this, and you could only eat K rations in a emergency. After so long without food, anything tastes like a turkey dinner, and we used to fantasize about what we would eat when this thing was over.

Right now, he had to conserve everything, especially the water, and in comes the 2^nd John looking for a drink of the nectar of the gods. He spotted the water can on the bench of the weapons carrier and pulled the lid off and started to pour the contents in his helmet to wash himself. I blew my stack!! I said, “Drop the can, lieutenant, “ with an air of authority in my voice, and he dropped it.

I explained our dwindling supply situation. I told him I just finished chewing out one of my own men for trying to take a sip and he was about to pout who knows how much of the precious liquid into a helmet for washing his almost clean face. You see, we had to pout only a small amount at a time into a helmet and with this, we sipped a mouth full, maybe two, brushed our teeth, washed our faces, then reluctantly threw the remainder away. I had been supplementing our water supply from our medical supplies for purification. Man, this didn’t enhance the taste either. What you would have given for a cold bottle of beer in this situation. I knew when the chuck wagon found us at the end of the third day, we were almost too weak to walk to it. The wagon stood on hill visible for some distance and we all looked like walking dead men, heading for an oasis of hot food and drink.

Would you believe, when my mess kit was full of mashed potatoes, because I couldn’t eat ‘em, my stomach had shrunk and I couldn’t eat. That’s hard to believe, but it’s true. However, we survived to continue the battle another day.

We were the survivors. We’d make out and be tougher and better for it all if we lived through it, which some didn’t. We lost bodies in the river and under he wheels of truck and tanks. Some never heard the sounds to move in the haste to get away from Patton. If you were to be a survivor, you had to be alert, and sorry to say, some were not.

The time was around December 4, 1941, when the maneuver ended. We were now in the process of breaking camp and heading north. The advance detail had already left for home, and we were to follow in a few days. Life changed for everyone in the few days that followed. We all heard the news on December 7^th. It came over the radio, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!! This didn’t really change things for me, I though. After all, I signed a contract to do one-year service in Uncle Sam’s Army, and my year was up in less than a month. I was to get out January 2, 1942. This dream ended for the boys of summer. I was to be another four years with Uncle Sam, if I survived and I was one of the lucky ones. I did. Many thousands were not so lucky, and they lie buried all around the world. I guess we were lucky to get out of the Carolina maneuver in one piece. Some didn’t make it back home except in a wooden box. We past many a truck load of the rough hewed boxed on the road, and we were just thankful we were not in them.

The trip to Boston’s Cape Cod was uneventful. I did really anticipate the thought of getting under a real roof, after three months of looking at the stars and the roof of a canvas tent. We settled in our new area in the camp and since we were considered grizzled veterans of the big maneuver, we were to get some gunnery practice on the local firing ranges. We had to learn the fine art of shooting the 37-millimeter and 75-millimeter guns.

I was lucky again when a few days later the company had to go firing on a local range and this day I was left behind as a corporal in charge of the quarters, meaning in civilian vernacular, minding the house. I wanted to go too, but this was also not intended, thank God.

I had been there the day before so I knew or could visualize what took place that day. They had just finished firing their last shots at the downhill moving target. This was a small rail cart, large enough to hold six or eight men, depending on how many piled on. It was intended this day to carry only white target down the hill, but something else happened to change this. The young lieutenant (we had another new one) decided to walk up the top of the hill and look at the holes if there were any in the target. As they all climbed the hill, they did notice one of the shells knocked out a piece if the track, about a foot long, but in the haste to get to the target, this was forgotten for the moment but would come back to haunt them.

Having observed that someone got a few lucky shots in the white frame target, someone suggested they all pile on the little railroad cart and ride down the hill. This was a gravity run rail down a long sloping hill. It moved slowly with a light target on it, but no one calculated how fast it might go if two men pushed as hard as they could before making the jump on the back. The thing started to pick up speed and very soon they were exceeding the speed of sound. Well, someone calculated anywhere from 45 to 50 mile per hour, maybe.

Someone suddenly thought about the broken rail that was coming up, and at that speed, coming up soon. The lieutenant suggested quickly that when they got to the broken section, everyone lean to the left as they crossed over the track. All agreed and all eyes, twelve or sixteen of ‘em, were riveted on the track. “Here it comes,” someone shouted, and they all leaned at the same time to the left and the little cart jumped the track safely, but in leaning back to the right and being overjoyed that they made it, they relaxed and up came a quick sharp curve they didn’t notice. Everyone was looking behind them at the time the curve threw everyone flying down the tracks, and bodies flew in every direction. The casualties piled up everywhere. Private Welch broke a hip and hat ended his service for Uncle Sam. Marty Joyce twisted an arm out of socket and cracked several teeth. All were cut and bleeding when they got back to camp.

Marty was the first one I saw. He was holding his shoulder in obvious pain and trying not to show how much it really hurt. He wouldn’t go to the medics. He was tough, too tough to go to a doctor. He asked us to pull his arm back in place. I held Marty and one of the other guys pulled on his arm, twisting as he pulled. Marty had a leather strap between his teeth to ease the pain, and we both applied the pressure and put the arm back in place in the socket. Marty never did cry out with all the pain he endured. He was a real tough soldier. It was decided there after that no one would take a free ride down the gravity run, even if they could put brakes on the thing.

The Army decided our type of unit could indeed to the job they designed for us to do. Now it all had to be put down in writing in a field manual. Camp A.P. Hill VA was the place Col. B.Q. Jones decided we should go to smooth out the rough spots and put it on paper.

In March and April of 1942, we arrived south of a little sleepy town called Fredericksburg, Virginia. This was where some of he greatest battles of the Civil War took place. It was only coincidental that our type of tactics were similar to General Robert E. Lee’s, the great Southern general. On weekends, I visited the areas to look at the delaying tactics he and his famous generals employed while conducting their war, about 5 years earlier. I found not many things had changed in the conduct of war. The great German tank general, Marshal Rommel, must have thought so too, because it was said he also visited these famous battlefields. Later, he would use the deserts of North Africa, and later I will again be thankful to God that I would not be among his victims in the desert. In my humble estimation, he was the greatest general on wheels (tank wheels) at that time after Patton, or maybe before.

Rommel’s Africa Corps, as they were known, were, I thought, great soldiers. This was not the Nazi soldier, this was a very fine fighting machine. They fought brilliantly in the desert, and they had a master tactician to follow in Rommel, but more of that later. We had a field manual to put together in A.P. Hill, and the things were gonna practice and improve on over the red dust of Virginia we hoped would shorten the war we were not ready to fight yet. We were lucky, we had time on our side.

I was still a corporal. I had a long way to go to someday catch up to Lt. McQuade. He didn’t come south with us. He got a promotion out of our outfit. I just had to hope somewhere, sometime we’d meet again (in rank). For now, I had to wait my turn.

We were now operating out of a base camp about 17 miles south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The days came and went practicing our gunnery on ranges (firing) we helped build. We were among the first to practice in this area with our little 37 mil. gun we thought would help shorten the war against Rommel in the desert. How little we knew about conducting a war against Rommel or anyone at this time, but we had time on our side to learn.

We still had our daily duties to perform, and I somehow still seemed to get stuck for guard duty in my outfit. One day we were moving a tough bunch of prisoners from one area to another and these were people in our own battalion. We had a battalion stockade (a place to keep them under guard). As we were called to a halt in front of the stockade by sergeant, he got into an argument with one of the prisoners. The prisoner, I thought, should not be talking back to the sergeant, and I felt I should back up the sergeant’s orders. I said, “Do as the sergeant tells you to do,” to the prisoner who appeared to be very drunk. Where he got the booze, no one knew, but he was, I thought, under the influence and unruly and insolent to the sergeant.

I felt the argument was getting out of hand and the sergeant, who was at the time the oldest man in the outfit, wasn’t doing very well. I also thought we might have a riot if this rum dumb wasn’t silenced, so I said to him, “Shut up and get in the tent” (stockade). With this remark, he stepped up and hit me, karate style, across the bridge of my nose. So, he wasn’t so drunk after all. He was faking and trying to provoke a riot, and I realized he was already trained in mayhem. He knew the right spots on which to disable an opponent as I had learned when I had my commando training. That already seemed years ago in North Carolina.

When you get hit on the nose, if done correctly, your lights go out. You can’t see and for a brief moment, mine went out. But they came back on quickly, and I stepped out of rank and belted this guy with a right hang and knocked him backwards in the tent, sprawled on his back. He was not as drunk as he pretended to be, because he got up and was ready to battle. Ole sergeant McKearnan stepped in between us, to break it up. The three of us stood entangled in the middle of the tent. Mac was jammed up against my right arm, so that I couldn’t swing it. He wasn’t helping, he was hindering me, so I stepped back and picked up my rifle. It was not loaded. We faced each other. He said, “You’re not gonna use that.” I said, “No,” and stuck the muzzle in his left rib and nipped it up to his shoulder. Blood flew everywhere and someone took him away to the medics.

All this time, the group of prisoners were standing as observes. I figured then we wouldn’t have anymore trouble out of any of them, and here after, none of them would talk back to the sergeant or strike a corporal again.

I was called on the carpet the next day by the company commander. The meeting was brief. I expected to be given a dollar and then be transferred out of the outfit. Instead, the c.o. said, “Did ya kill him?” I said, “No sir.” He gave me a smile and said, “Okay. Go back to your outfit.” That was the end of that. But my thoughts were that discipline was established between soldiers and prisoners, and, for a while anyhow, there wouldn’t be any more disturbances in the guard house, and there wasn’t. They got the message. We weren’t fooling. We meant business.

Another incident took place a few days later. Marty and I were eating at a picnic table, when we heard a gigantic explosion, with people running every which way. We sat and waited. Someone came back and said McKenzie was using a blow torch under a truck to mend a leak in a gas tank that was half full. This was a big bang. Marty’s only comment was the poor s.o.b. should have known better, and we continued to finish our meal. Before going in the Army, I’m sure this would have bothered me to the pointof not eating that a guy just got blown away. The boys of summer were changing. We were becoming hardened veterans, getting ready for one day doing the real thing in battle.

We were helping to write an Army field manual on tank destroyer battalions. We had a new insignia on our arms. It resembled a big black panther tiger, crushing a tank in its mouth. The time came to learn how to do river crossing with jeeps and our 37 mil. guns. We practiced several days, wrapping the guns and jeeps in heavy canvas, stuffing empty five gallon gas cans under the jeeps and gun trails for flotation. When we felt proficient and fast enough, we were all timed to see how long it took us to drop this equipment in the Rappahannock river, which appeared to be a lazy little stream when we first encountered it. Someone said it was only a few feet deep, but it turned out it was much deeper. We knew this because the second day we looked at this little river, we saw a good sized ship coming up the river. We didn’t find out till later how deep this little river was.

We bivouacked the night before the crossing on the banks of the river, and as the sun went down, I decided it might be a good idea to see how many men would gather on a high place to say the rosary. Some of the others must have had their own thoughts along this line, because they all joined at the suggestion and soon there must have been fifty or more in a circle as I lead them in the rosary. This could very well have been a last night on earth for some of them. You see, half the battalion couldn’t swim a stroke and fifty yards or more is a long way to go when you weighed down with clothes and equipment.

The dawn came early on this great day, and shortly, a company of West Point cadets aligned themselves along the river bank to see maybe a disaster in the making. Would it work when we dropped a good sized gun and jeep on the river? I was the corporal in charge of the first fun to go in the water in my company. Three companies were strung out down the river- A, B and C- all going off at the same time. About a thousand men would attempt a river crossing never attempted before in such a large mass.

Well, the plan was for my men to wrap the gun and jeep at the edge of the river, and, at my command to the first sergeant who had his men hidden in the bushes, come forward and pick up the wrapped equipment and drop them in the water. The sergeant gave his men the order to move prematurely, and before we had the jeep completely wrapped, they picked it up and dropped it in the water, and the men jumped in and sailed away.

Disaster struck halfway across. One of the small canvas personnel carriers tipped over. None of the three men in it could swim, and they splashed around till they grabbed hold of the corner of the jeep and the jeep went down. How the men got across in all the confusion, I don’t know. Lt. Labnode (we did have one officer beside the company commander at this time) found himself floundering around in the water, holding his gas mask in the air. This was a funny sight, especially when he realized how ridiculous it was to have a gas mask. So, he threw it away. It went to the bottom with the jeep and the rest of the equipment. We didn’t lose a man, and I think this in itself was accomplishment of great magnitude.

All the various actions were taken as the cameras rolled. This was training for those who would follow us. We were wring history in preparation for the much bigger river we hoped to cross in Europe when our time came.

We found a few days later how really deep this little river was, when they sent a cable and a diver down to hook the jeep and pull it up. We found it was forty feet deep. Some little river!!

We had finished our training and established the fact that we were capable tank destroyers and ready to prove ourselves in combat with a gun we all believed in: The little 37 mil. gun. In reality, it was only a pea shooter, but when your young, it seems you can do the impossible. Thank God someone in the Pentagon thought otherwise.

We got orders in mid ’42 to pack up and head for New York, P.O.E. Our convoy was a few miles north of Fredericksburg, on old U.S. highway #1, when we were stopped right on the highway at Brown’s autocourt and told to go back to A.P. Hill. Someone in the Pentagon realized our 37 was not bi enough to do the job we all presumed in North Africa. Where else? The invasion of Europe was yet a year or two away.

So, they sent the battalion camped next to us at the Hill, the great 605 Tank Destroyer battalion out of Pennsylvania in our place. Thank God they didn’t send us us with our pea shooter that we all thought was the greatest gun in the world. We thought in our youth we could whip the world. The 605 had the bigger gun, the 75, on a half track, more suitable to movement through the sands of North Africa. So, they went and we returned to train on the 7 with the half track. For this, we had to go to Texas and Camp Hood.

We all thought Texas was the end of the world. Hot in the day and cold at night in the field. The clothes we sweat in during the day, froze on us at night. This was intended to make us tough. It’s a wonder we all didn’t get pneumonia, especially when we slept on the ground. I’ll never forget my first look at a local gigantic black snake. As we rolled into our first bivouac are, I spotted the back end of a black snake I know was easily five feet long. I never did see his head, but I was so tired after the long trip to get here, I felt no pain or care if he were to bite me as we prepared to bed down on the ground. We found out later, they were friendly, but we didn’t know this at the time.

We spent our days learning nomenclature and how to operate a new vehicle. A 75 mil. gun mounted on a half track with the gun facing to the front is a very similar idea to our original try at a self-propelled gun, except you couldn’t blow the hood of this baby. It was about ¼ inch steel.

Day after day, it was practice road marches and firing on the local range. This was a head rattling, can ringing experience. As gun commander, I had to stand on the passenger seat with my left ear a foot or so from the fun when it went off. We tired cotton in the ears, but this was very little help. It’s really a wonder that I can hear anything today. The gun was really inadequate for warfare, but we didn’t know this at the time, and we had to believe or we were whipped before we got a start. This certainly was not intended to go up against the likes of the German 88 mil. Now that was a gun!!

The 88 had a muzzle velocity of nearly 3000 feet per second. The 75 we had, had a muzzle velocity of 1950 feet per second. This difference should tell you we were out-gunned in North Africa before we started, and, thank God again, we didn’t go to North Africa with the 37 mil. gun. That would have been slaughter for us, for sure. The poor 605 Tank Destroyer Battalion that went in our place with this same 75 on half track found out the hard way at a place in North Africa called “Kassareme Pass.”

Marshal Montgomery, the leader of the expedition in North Africa at the time, told the commander of the 605 to defend the Pass to the death. He did not want the German forces, led by Marshal Erwin Rommel, to envelop his left flank, and Kassareme was the high spot of his flank that could have brought disaster had they attempted an envelopement movement. The German gunners with the superior weapon (the 88) knocked hell out of the defenseless 605 with their 75. I spoke to a staff sergeant who had at the time just gotten back from the desert. He said the outfit lost 75% of their vehicles and 25% of their personnel. I could very well understand what he was telling me, even though he had a severe case of shell shock. He was shaking all over as he recalled the battle.

The 75 didn’t have the firepower or distance to match the 88. The 88 gunners would wait for the 75 to fire, and before the dust and smoke disappeared, the 88 zeroed in on the American gun and had no trouble knocking it out. They had the superior weapon, but not the superior manpower, as we would prove later but not with this inadequate 75. I would take a 105 to do the job. But that is history and will come later, on the battle fields of Europe. Right now the battles raged on, on the sands of the North African desert.

It was while we were in Texas that we, Sgt.’s O’Neil, Joyce Scheppesi and myself, applied for about the fourth time for officer candidate school. We knew our officers were pigeon our applications. This is a phrase meaning they held up our applications so that we would not get out of their battalion. We were their key instructors, and they didn’t want to lose us. We all finally rebelled and found an officer sympathetic to our situation. Since he was being transferred our himself, he decided he had nothing to lose by going over their heads to Regiment and explaining our positions. It worked! Within the week we four were to appear before the O.C.S. board. Two of us made it and two didn’t. O’Neil and I were accepted to be officers and gentlemen, at least we were gonna try to become second lieutenants in 90 days. We would be wonders if we graduated in 90 days, thus the terminology 90 day wonders.

This is another step up the ladder of life I was reluctant to take, but I felt trapped. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So another door opened for the boys of summer.

The year was 1943, February. We said our good-bys to guys we lived with for two and a half years. They were some of the best fighting soldiers I would see for a long time and good many of them died in combat in Europe. I always felt I would have been buried with them had I not gone on to officer candidate school. That was a closed door now and the one that opened was in Camp Hood, Texas, where we arrived amid all kinds of heads hanging out windows singing, “You’ll be sorry!!”

Where we had been used to giving commands, now we were taking them. We were thrown in with a new bunch of guys to live with for ninety days or less. We all hoped to make it, some didn’t. One I remember because we were bunked down according to name. His name was Dietrich, a real character.

Because he slept next to my bunk, I had to notice he was bald headed. On the first weekend, we had an opportunity to go to the P.X., (Post Exchange.) It had a cafeteria included. We sat in the back and had to walk up front to get refreshments. As I was coming back to my table, I thought I saw Dietrich up front seated at a table, but he had red hair. That couldn’t be, Dietrich after all was bald headed. Didn’t I know? I slept in the bunk next to him!

We all discussed the pros and cons: Was it him or not? I said, “I’ll go up again and say hello to see if recognizes me.” Sure enough, it was Dietrich, but he had a red wig he only wore on weekends. Later we would glue this wig on his head while he slept one night. Dietrich was a graduate of Louisiana State University. He had brains, but something was lacking. He’d go to piece right before your eyes. He was so eager to graduate and become an officer in the U.S. Army, he tired too hard and fouled himself up all the time. He used to get up before anyone else and make his bed and straighten up his equipment. This was a riot. He depended on one to check him out before we fell out for reveille! Reveille was at 7:00 sharp, and you had to be on line when the whistle blew or you picked up what they called a gig!! If you got too many of these, you were asked to leave school. This meant you had your choice of going back in shame to your outfit, a failure, or going directly overseas in some outfit you never heard of. This seemed a fate worse that death at the time. One morning, we were standing at attention on the line at five minutes to reveille, and as usual, Dietrich would always say, “Check me over. Am I okay?” I took a quick look and there he was standing with a soft hat on when it called for helmet liners. I call his attention to this, and he made a mad dash back to the barracks, almost took the screen door off its hinges going in and running back to the line. He made it in two minutes flat. I saved him another gig.!

As I said, he was used to getting up early and getting a head start, which never worked. One morning he’d been up puttering around, waiting for the whistle and, at the last minute, asked me to check everything over. This morning, I noticed he had the U.S. insignia on his blanket facing the wall instead of he aisle, as it was supposed to be for everyone. I called his attention to this, and he almost fainted. I quickly called a couple of guys to help me just turn the whole bed around instead of his having to remake the bed. The U.S. now faced the aisle and Dietrich was saved another gig!!

Another morning, I noticed he had a book out of line on his shelf. It would surely get a gig if found on the daily inspection our training officers made after we left the barracks. Dietrich, in his haste to reach the out of line book, tripped over his shoes, fell against the shelf and books flew everywhere. I had to stop what I was doing and help pick the books up and get them back in rotation. Another gig saved just in time before reveille.

One day, they gave us a specific time to wash windows in the barracks. As usual, Dietrich worked the window next to mine. We were all busily engaged and occupied with our own windows to was and I didn’t notice that Dietrich, as meticulous as he tired to be, had taken the whole casement windows, upper and lower, out of their slots, to do a proper cleaning job, as he would say. Well, time was running out, when I noticed that on putting the windows back, he had them backwards, and, of course, they wouldn’t close. He fainted when I showed him his mistake, but we all got together and redid the windows in proper order and saved him another gig!!

Watching out for Dietrich and myself was an ordeal that lasted to the eleventh week of the thirteen we all had to go!! Everything caught up with him in the eleventh week, and he was dismissed. This was a sad day. He couldn’t go back to his old outfit. So, he opted to go overseas in the Pacific where he distinguished himself.

His first letter told about his dissatisfaction of waiting for the Army to make its move into the Pacific and battle. He couldn’t wait for the Army to go, and he heard about a U.S. Marine outfit taking off for battle further into the southwest Pacific, and he invited himself to go along. His commanding officer thought he’d gone A.W.O.L. and had an all points bulletin out for him. The Marine Commander, of course, had to send him back to his Army outfit, and they threw him in the stockade, where he stayed thinking he would be shot at sunrise for what the Army called desertion. He was lucky. There just happened to be an officer from the Inspector General’s office touring the camp, and he came across Dietrich in jail. The case was explained, and he got a commendation for attempted bravery. The I.G. said of him that thy needed more men in that outfit of his caliber to get the job done they were planning to do when the Army got moving into the Pacific.

From later letters, we heard he did distinguish himself in battle, and when he was sent back from the line to rest area and he heard his outfit was again on the move to take another island, he said it was like missing the opening kick off of his Louisiana State Tigers. This ended the saga of Dietrich. We never heard from his again. We don’t know if he was lucky enough to stumble back to the bayous of Louisiana or not. We had two weeks to go to graduation. In the twelfth week, everyone said I would graduate, because they had to have a regimental commander for the parade on graduation day, and I’d been selected for the job. This was a good feeling, but how could you be sure? Our class had a guy that got on the stage and was ready to take his dipolma, when they pulled him out of line. He didn’t graduate. Wow! That’s a shocker.

Anyhow, I got my diploma and was regimental commander of my graduating class. This was the top job in the graduating class. I had wished I had someone to share this honor with at the time. Most everyone had someone there to share the day. My mother and father were not living to share it, and my brothers and sisters were too young to come all the way to Texas. Anyhow, another phase of my life came and past. I was now a 2^nd lieutenant in Uncle Sam’s Army, and the boys of summer seemed further and further away. The beaches we knew in New England were all fading from cherished old memories. Would we ever see them again? If we were lucky and God was willing, we would. Yes, we would. We had faith, and we believed. Now on with the show to our assignments in the various tank destroyer battalions there in Camp Hood. I was assigned along with six or seven other officers to the 692^nd Tank Destroyer Battalion, and another door of my life opened!!

We appeared early next morning in the officer of the commanding officer of the 692^nd Tank Destroyer Battalion. He had us line up before him and announce our name is order. He then proceeded to tell about his battalion as a baseball team and our participation. He rolled back in his chair, picked up his cigarette holder, suck a cigarette in the end, struck a match to it and blew a stream of blue smoke at us.

He said, “I’m gonna give each of you a bat, pair of spikes (shoes), a glove and a cap. You’re gonna try to make my team, and if you don’t make it, and some of you wont, I’m gonna reclassify you.” Now, to explain reclassification, he said, “You may have already noticed we have a shortage of higher ranking officers. The fact that you don’t see them is because I reclassified them. They’re gone, “ he said, out of his sight. They didn’t measure up to his standards as officers and that fate, he said, awaited us if we failed.

He didn’t scare me. I accepted the challenge, because I felt I was fully grounded in the tank destroyer battalion system, having been an NCO for two and a half years in one of the original tank destroyer battalions, and, after all, we helped write the TDB field manual in A.P. Hill, Virginia the year before. I did feel sorry for some of the inexperienced officers with no prior military experience. My close friend at officer candidate school was fresh out of Detroit University with no experience of the military whatsoever. When chance permitted, I would slip over to his company and go over some of the things, practical things, I thought he should know. As for myself, I was assigned to B Company. Bob got Recon. Company.

I arrived at B Company where I met my new commander, Capt. Best. He was a tackle at the University of Georgia and a R.O.T.C. graduate. We were still fighting the Civil War in those days- he from the South, and I was still a “damn Yankee.” He told me about how his coach at Georgia Wally Butts used to prepare the team for a game. He said he reminded them that the forefathers of the damn Yankees came south in that great war and ravaged their forefathers’ lands, killing women and children. Then he would say, “Go take revenge for your forefathers’ sake,” and Best said, “ We had blood in our eyes as we ran on the field to do battle with the Yankee dogs. I think he always had the feeling I was a Yankee too, from New England.

There were three Platoon leaders and there were three Platoons, so I was an extra officer in the company. Capt. Best assigned me to the 3^rd platoon, a backup to Lt. Blazer. I had come out of officer candidate school full of high hopes to get my own platoon and build a unit superior to any in the battalion. I was full of myself, but after a week following Lt. Blazer around and observing the way he allowed the 1^st and 2^nd platoon leaders to run over the men in the 3^rd platoon, I’d had enough.

The first incident occurred on the firing range. I was observing the platoon fire my first day on duty, and I wasn’t helping the happy with the shooting. I noticed Lt. Blazer wasn’t helping the boys shoot. He seemed far away in his thoughts, and I guessed he was thinking about his wife in the near by area. I wasn’t only interested in what his gunners were doing for score, but also what the gunners in the other two platoons were doing. Being unattached as I was, I was free to roam the firing line as an interested observer. I wanted to know why the 3^rd platoon always came in gunnery instructor as a non-commissioned officer in my old outfit and I had one of the best gunnery sections in the outfit for which I was very proud. They couldn’t win no matter how hard they tried, and I had the feeling, as an observer, they had given up. They needed my help, but I wasn’t in command. ‘I wasn’t their leader yet, so I had to swallow hard and wait for an opportunity.

The opportunity came the next day on the firing range. I was interested to see some of the gunners in the other platoons shoot, so I wandered down the line unobserved and watched. There to my surprise, I saw NCO’s punching the targets with pencils so their gunners would get a higher score. By way of an explanation of the pencil punch, in those days, we had towed three inch guns, three inches across the muzzle, but to save expenditure of ammunition, we mounted a small 22 inch caliber rifle barrel to the three inch barrel and went through the same motions. The 22 inch made a hole in the target about the size of a pencil. Lt. Blazer was not aware of this. His thoughts were elsewhere, and his men suffered because the 3^rd platoon always came in last. The punishment was the losing platoon not only had to clean their guns at the end of the day, they had to clean the guns of the 1^st and 2^nd platoons as well. I told myself this would be corrected, if I ever got command of the 3^rd platoon.

A week was all I could take. I had heard that you could transfer in grade to the U.S. Army Air Corps, so I decided to try this. The captain asked me to wait. He was planning to send Lt. Blazer to Ft. Still artillery school in Oklahoma, and he could take the 3^rd platoon back when he finished school. Capt. Best said he might not come back, like that. I got the feeling he must have known Blazer wasn’t the greatest and had plans to dump him. Maybe I should’ve attempted the transfer to the Air Corps, but I thought about the poor souls in the sorry 3^rd platoon and decided to see if I could help their cause. It was gonna be a challenge. It was the worst platoon in the battalion. However, I could see with a few adjustments here and there, maybe we could be #1. That was the goal anyhow. They were not competitive, I thought probably because Lt. Blazer didn’t take up for them. He let them get beaten every time. This was gonna change, I told myself. I had to find the right people for the right jobs. The pieces of the puzzle were not all in place yet. The first priority were the gunners. As always, I had to find the best prospects and try as many men as I could for the four jobs as gunners on the three-inch guns we were currently using. We were employing strictly anti-tank warfare at this point, and we needed the best shooters we could get to stop the Nazi blitz tanks

I heard about a German kid who was a cook in our kitchen. His name was Schmidt (a real German name), and he even spoke with a heavy German accent. I’d never seen him near a gun, but I though at this time all Germans were born good soldiers and could be experts with a gun. I was right! The first time Schmidt got behind a gun, I watched his style. He was a natural gunner, and he took to it like a duck takes to water. In the past, as a non-commissioned officer in charge of one gun, I had the chance to pick my first gunman, and I trained him to be the best. Then as a sergeant, I had command of two guns, and they became the best. I had done it before, now, as a second Lt., I had four guns and I started with Schmidt as my first change in gunners. I needed three more as good as I knew he was gonna be. in only a few days, he was hitting 8, 9, and 10 for 10 at a thousand yards. This was good enough to win, and winning was the name of the game. I was determined that we were not gonna be second best.

As the third platoon, we always marched to the rear of the 1^st and 2^nd platoons, but to me this didn’t mean we were not the best. I taught the platoon a fighting cheer. I had them sing as they marched. Which platoon was the best? The 3^rd platoon, to hell with the 1^st and 2^nd platoons. The third platoon was the best. It was a fighting spirit they lacked, because no one believed in tem, and I intended to instill my fighting spirit into this group of thirty men no one gave a chance to. They were considered misfits. It became a challenge to me to see just how high we could go, and, believe me, we went up.

You know the 3^rd platoon was formed from castoffs from the 1^st and 2^nd platoons. Oh, there were a few good sergeants to start the platoon with. The rest were made up of draftees and kids the other platoon leaders didn’t want. I’d had tough kids before, and I could see the good in a lot of them. It was just up to someone to bring out their best side. I just had to dig deeper to find it, and I did!

The first day I took charge of the platoon on the firing range, we were experimenting with gunners. I was looking for the best four people, and this took time and practice, but we stayed with it. I taught them gunnery the best way I could. I was teaching from experience of having been through two and a half years of on-the-job training as a non-commissioned officer in my old outfit. As usual, when the day of practice ended, and we returned to the barracks for dinner, the company officers were eating together at a separate table from the men. One of the platoon leaders said, “Well, I guess the 3^rd platoon had the low score on the range today again, so they will have to clean the whole company’s guns.” I blew my stack. “No way will my platoon clean the guns of the 1^st and 2^nd platoon, when I know how their platoon leaders came back with an illegal target punch to get the highest scores!!

We got into a shouting match that I didn’t intend to lose. The captain took charge and decided each man would clean his own gun. Now the big break came in that I didn’t know on of my men in the 3^rd platoon was mopping the floor close to our table and heard the whole conversation. That night, he went back to the barracks with the story and told them how it happened that they didn’t have to spend the night cleaning the company guns.

The next day when the platoon formed outside their barracks for reveille, this, I noticed, was a different group of men. They snapped to attention; they stood with their heads’ high; they were on their way to trying to learn how to be the best they could be. I could just feel the ripple of pride. We would show them all who was the best. The 3^rd platoon was on its way. This was the beginning, and we had a long way to go.

Tactics and technique. With the towed guns at this point in training, our job was strictly defensive, and I knew this method as well as anyone. After all, we battled General George E. Patton and his armored division in North Carolina maneuvers for three months toward the end of 1941, the maneuvers ending just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. General Patton, as we know, was a great cavalry officer, and our job was to try to delay him. We couldn’t stop him. After all, we had just one battalion, about one thousand men. He had a division.

I remember a day of tactical training that I thought would serve the platoon if the occasion ever arose in the future. We were advised of an armored column moving in our general direction. I moved the platoon into a position I figured the tanks would most likely come, and before long, we heard the old clank of steel meshing with steel. They were slowly creeping toward us. I could hardly believe my eyes. They were coming straight at us.

My plans to the sergeants had already been given. No one would open fire till I gave the order, so we waited and waited. They crept closer and closer. I thought about the minute men at Concord, and the orders they got: “Do not fire till you see the whites of their eyes.” They were so close, and the suspense was killing me, so I knew it must have been killing the gunners waiting and waiting to hear the command, “Open fire.” I felt, here was the time to test their nerves. Mine were already tested, so I gave the command, “Open fire.” They did, and we nailed them. They were a surprised group of tankers. They never saw us hidden in the trees. I guessed they would have learned a lesson too. I hope so, because they were dead ducks.

We had many days of training like this, and each one had a significance. I was teaching them how to live, how to survive. Every day was a lesson in survival. I had survived two and a half years of intensive training as a non-commissioned officer, and this training I was now passing on to my men. They were being continuously prepared for battle, a battle I knew would eventually come to us all. They were gonna be as ready for it as I could make them. As a platoon, I could see improvement every day. We were getting better at our jobs, all of us.

The war in North Africa was swinging like a pendulum, back and forth. Patton was now in Africa, and wherever he went, things changed. Just his name alone struck fear in the hearts of the Nazis. I missed going to North Africa by fate, or I would have been obliterated at Kassarene Pass along with so many who died there trying to stop the Nazi sweep through the pass. They couldn’t hold off the superior firepower of the Nazi guns, the German 88. One of my friends, who was a defender of the Pass and in charge of a gun crew, said they didn’t have a chance. General Montgomery over all allied commander at the time ordered the pass be defended against a flanking movement. It was said, defend it o the death, and to the death it became. My friend said they lost ¾ of their vehicles and ¼ of their men or vice versa. In any event, it was a terrible loss. They, in my estimation, were sacrificed. They were certainly out gunned. You see, they had our obsolete gun to begin with, the old 75 mil. on a half track. To anyone who ever fired a 75 millimeter gun, knew it was a joke. As a sergeant, I was a gun commander and used to hope we never had to fight a German 88 crew. My friend said it happened just as I envisioned it would. When he fired his 75, the sand and dust from the muzzle blast was a dead give away to the location of the gun and with a muzzle velocity of only 1950 feet per second, if you smoked, you could have a cigarette before your shell landed. In the meantime, the German 88 picked up your blast, and you got blasted with a muzzle velocity of 2900 feet per second, and with a trajectory they said was no more than six feet off the ground. By comparison with our 75, when you fired our 75, you never thought it was gonna come down, let alone hit the target. Did we have a chance? No, we didn’t. I am very grateful to God that I but for the grace of God would had to have made the same sacrifice my friend made. My friend was shell shocked from this battle, but he told his story well. He was at this time back in the U.S.A., a much decorated staff sergeant. You see, it was his outfit that took our place and went to North Africa, or we would have been there with the little ea shooter, the 37 millimeter. Can you imagine how that would have stacked up against the German 88? Don’t answer that question!!

Tennessee in ’43! November, 1943. We left Camp Hood in Texas for the Tennessee maneuver in the winter of ’43. We fought many a mock battle, the red army against the blue; the umpired decided more battles than anyone. In one such battle, an umpire ruled in my favor. Our battalion was called on one day to stop a red tank force break through of our infantry line. Our company commander was leading a column of twelve tank destroyers. My 3^rd platoon brought up the rear. As we came over a hill, I had a good view of what we were heading into. I remembered my two and a half years as a gun commander sergeant and could almost pick the spots where the enemy should have a gun emplacement. It looked like a trap to me and here the c.o. had his company heading hell bent for election straight into enemy gun fire. He past a signal down the line to close up our tanks. I could see what was about to happen, and I opened my four tanks up, spread them out, in other words. I had seen too many sitting ducks get knocked off in the North Carolina maneuver of 1941, two years prior.

Suddenly, it happened enemy funs opened up on the 1^st and 2^nd platoons, and the umpire declared them both out of action. They were all bunched up together, and if those two platoons had to open fire, and if this had been the real thing, they’d have shot each other up. They were in no position to get fields of fire. This is another thing I saw happen in the ’41 maneuver, but it wasn’t gonna happen to my 3^rd platoon. I led my four tank destroyers off into a field on the right, allowing space between each tank with their individual fields of fire. We threw up a few smoke shells to simulate firing. The referee drove up in his jeep at the same time my company commander did, and the referee said, “Captain, you lost two complete platoons. This is the only platoon that survived- your 3^rd platoon.” Would you believe he tried to take credit for saving a platoon he would have lost had I closed up my platoon while on the march? He said I was acting under his orders, and this was not so.

The important thing is my sergeants learned a good soldier lesson that day on how not to get yourself trapped like a bunch of sitting ducks, charging like the like brigade into the face of enemy fire. The 3^rd platoon would live to fight another day and they did.

Another day and another week and another problem to solve. Our mission was always get to the enemy tank break through as quickly as possible and stop ‘em. We were doing this day after day, till I felt I could do it in my sleep, and sometimes I did. By the time we pulled into a bivouac for the night. I was in the lead tank, buttoned up to a tanker. This means the top hatch is closed, and you have the feeling you’re in a Submarine only on land. A sardine can would feel luxurious in this tin can. It was an M-10, one of the latest 50 ton monsters given us by Uncle Sam. This was supposed to stop the Nazi blitz, so they told us. We were training to get proficient enough to try. Anyhow, as we neared the area, we had to plow through a small forest. We didn’t always travel on the roads. We had to practice the fact the roads we would travel a little later would be mined, and they were. As we were going through the forest, I thought I would take a quick look-see to be sure where we were going. I threw up the hatch and stuck my head up. A tree branch was coming directly at my face. I reached up and caught it with both hands, shoving it to my left as I did. The end of the branch caught me in the corner of my left eye. I thought the branch was gonna lift me bodily right out of the still moving tank. When I got the tank stopped, I was in agony from the pain, but my men didn’t know it, and I wasn’t about to show weakness. If you could take something as small as this, what would you d in a battle. So, I wrapped a handkerchief around my left eye and moved on.

We pulled up to a summit to survey the situation. We were lined up, but spread out. I never allowed my tanks to bunch up. This makes for tougher communication sometimes, but I was teaching them a lesson on survival. They would use it later in the real thing. As I looked to see which way would be the quickest and safest to move on, my fourth tank took off and headed for the ditch we had to cross by himself. I blew my stack, but too late. He was gone, and he got himself stuck in the deepest part of the ravine. Them my #3 tank pulled up behind him, threw his cable around the rear of #4 and tried to pull him out all by himself. In the meantime, I’m on my way to stop them. Too late, #3 pulled a clutch trying to pull #4 out of the ditch. I pulled both my #1 and #2 tanks in position, and both pulled together and easily pulled #4 out of the ditch. Another lesson learned the hard way. They learned you don’t use one tank when it’s necessary to use two. The lesson cost me a tank. The first and only one I ever lost. I was proud of that record.

When we reached the bivouac area and gathered for small talk, as it seemed we were always doing, I stressed the importance of being a complete fighting unit at all times. If you didn’t maintain your tank and you did things without first thinking them out, you were letting your buddies down. We just had another lesson on what not to do and how not to react. In the real thing, this could have cost a few lives. I can tell you, we never got another tank stuck again. I think they must have remembered what I said.

The eye continued to ache. I tried not to go to the field medics, but the pain got worse and when night fell. I figured none of the men would see me leave for the hospital, and they didn’t. I was extremely lucky in that I found general field hospital just down the road. My special guarding angel found me a surgeon with special knowledge of the eyes, and he put a couple of stitches in the corner of my left eye. Can you imagine being lucky enough to stumble onto a doctor who would know how to do what he did? And this in the middle of the night in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of the Tennessee maneuver. Yes, it was indeed a miracle. I was needed for another day. I went back to the unit the same night, and in a few days got over it. Using only one eye for a few days was an experience, I can tell you.

The tank went to the shop for repairs and stayed for about a week. Another lesson to be learned on how to operate with three tanks minus one, but we did. It was common, I found, that most outfits were without their full complement of tanks at anytime. Of course, we weren’t just any outfit; we were the best we could be. As I said, we never lost a tank for disservice again. Another lesson: When your tank can’t go, you can’t go. So, take care of your tank. That’s your baby. Someday, it could make the difference in battle, when it was for real, and we knew the time was getting close to the real thing. German tanks were running all over Europe, and we were learning how to stop them, and we were learning the best way we knew how to stop them.

Nighttime in a bivouac area is really something else. The colonel’s headquarters was overrun one night, and he became curious as to how his battalion set up for security. It wasn’t unusual for him to walk in on you at anytime to see if he could get through the guards. He never got through my unit, and, because of this, he called the battalion officers together and had me demonstrate on a blackboard (where that appeared from, I’ll never know) how. I set up my guards and how I interlocked them with side by side units to prevent anyone slipping in between them.

He also discovered I had a special way to handle meals for my men. I was always last man to eat a meal in my platoon (when in the field). My sergeants were always the last to eat after their men, and again I ate after them. I can tell you, there were times I got a few cold meals. The lesson was, the privates stayed at their posts on guard, because they knew they’d get fed before me.

Time for the gas attack training in the field. Every outfit has a comical character, and we had ours. Joe Goldburg was his name. We were all told to keep our gas masks handy, never knowing when the attack would come. When it came, all was confusion even though you knew it was coming. I didn’t have to cover my face with the mask, because I had to observe the actions of the men.

When the siren went off, Goldburg took off running for the deep woods. He had his mask half on; the eye pieces were up on his forehead. This made him tilt his head way up in the air so that he could barely see where he was going, but he was going like hell wherever he was going. He got both arms caught between two trees, thus suspending him in the air with both feet barely touching the ground. He looked like a guy pedaling a bicycle, except he didn’t have a bike.

Next we encounter snow. Yes, it does snow in Tennessee. I had one sick man and no medic available. It will happen this way in combat, too, so you do the best you can. We were told there were to be no fires, but we were in the snow, in the woods, and no medic. So, we had a small fire. It was my responsibility, and I took it. If we got caught, I was to blame, but I wasn’t gonna have a man get sicker than he was if I could help it. We sat around the fire till it went out, and my plan was to put out the ashes, spread them, throw down a canvas and let him sleep on the dry ground. We were in two to three inches of snow. The men didn’t know I had planned to do this for the sick man, s all of them eyed the spot where the fire was, all with the same thought in mind. When the time came for bed, I walked up and told them the sick man would sleep on the dry ground alone and left hem there. They all left to find as dry a hole as they could get, under a truck was a good one, better in the truck if you could get in one. We never had a barracks, and we never had a tent. The saying, “Nature in the raw is seldom mild,” was true.

Anyhow, Goldburg didn’t leave when the others left. He was gonna get that dry spot. I had a guy feeling he was gonna try it, so I stayed concealed close by, and sure enough, he started cleaning the ashes for himself, so he could spread canvas and get his back on the warm ground. He was more than slightly surprised when I walked up and told him to move out, which he did with a scurry, stumbling and bumbling into the woods. I straightened out the canvas and got the sick man down on it. He was out for the night. Next day, he was better, and so we moved on. Sleeping under trucks and tanks was dangerous, if you were a good sleeper. We lost more than one man this way. You’d have to see it to believe it, but we had guys you couldn’t wake up even when the 50 ton tank started up. If a guy was asleep and a you had a careless driver in a hurry (which we were most of the time), you left his imprint on the ground, because a 50 ton tank can make a guy look like a pancake, flat. I saw a tank run over a jeep one day, and it flattened it just like a pancake with two men in it too, pancakes!!

Life in the winter in the woods is rough, especially if you were a city boy like me. This was a long way from a summer at the beach. It seemed our feet were wet half the time, and you’ve never been cold till you stand in a steel tank in wet shoes and socks. I did the nest I could to remind the men to keep as many dry socks on their person as possible. I said you’ll need them when the real thing comes along later, and it came to pass, and those that listened were grateful in combat for a simple thing like a pair of dry socks.

The 1943 Tennessee maneuvers ended, and the next stop was Camp Phillips, Kansas for more tank maneuvering and gunnery practice. The war in Europe was heating up fast, and we knew it was getting closer for us. I was close to being satisfied with my 3^rd platoon. I had developed the four best gunners I in the battalion. My sergeants became more knowledgeable, and esprit de corps was as high as you could get it. There were rumors that General Eisenhower would soon invade Europe, and we figured to be with invasion group, too.

About this time, Col. Shelton, our battalion commander, left us for a promotion to full colonel in some other outfit. He left without promoting one single officer under his command. We figured out it made his star brighter, because he was telling his superiors he accomplished what he did with only second lieutenants. I was in grade about a year at this time but didn’t feel badly, because all the second lieutenants were in grade one and a half years and some longer. He really didn’t believe in promoting anybody as he told us at our first meeting, and he kept his promise. Now he was gone, and there was a question if whether we could go overseas if we were not in grade, meaning first lieutenant, or if you were pals with your company commander. Politics again, and I didn’t play politics. I guess I was part rebel while being a Yankee. Damn Yankee, that is.

I was somehow chosen to be the battalion defense council about this same time. I defended a couple of guys on open and shut cases. They were guilty, and I had no chance to defend them, but the 3^rd case I had developed into a humdinger. My company commander and the 1^st platoon leader, who was acting as prosecuting attorney, were in a heavy discussion, when I walked into headquarters. Capt. Best said, “I hear you’re gonna defend Sgt. Mayham today. Well, he is guilty.” I looked Capt. Best straight in the eyes and said, “Captain, he’s not guilty till he’s proven guilty in a court of law.”

Best got red in the face. He always did when he thought he wasn’t gonna get his way. I headed for the jail house, and figured as I walked away, maybe there goes another nail in my coffin. But right was right, and form what little I’d heard, Sgt. Mayham was being given the wrong end of the stick. The captain and the lieutenant were trying to bust Mayham to private. He had been recently transferred to our outfit as a staff sergeant, and they didn’t want him. It seems he and one of the other sergeants went on furlough together someplace back East near Pittsburgh, PA, and on their way back to camp, there were 2 hours late. They didn’t make reveille. Sgt. Mayham was reported a.w.o.l., absent without leave by the first sergeant. The other sergeant was somehow not reported a.w.o.l. His sergeant was one who played politics with the first sergeant, the lieutenant and the captain!! If they were guilty, I thought they were both guilty under the law, but how to prove Sgt. Mayham not guilty was the important thing now.

I headed for he jail house. There I found Mayham sitting behind bars. This was our first meeting. After introducing myself, the jailer let me inside the bars, and I took a seat opposite Mayham. I asked him to tell me his story, assuring him I would do all in the little power I had to defend him in court that day. He didn’t want to talk. He said he knew he didn’t have a chance, because he’d heard this was a hanging court. It was common knowledge that a man was guilty before he went to trial. It wasn’t really a trial, it was a conviction before the man went to court. He was really right in his thinking all right. I remembered what the captain told me earlier that day before we went to trial. He said, “The Sergeant, he’s guilty,” and you know what my reply was: Not guilty, till proven guilty in a court of law. But how to prove it?

After pleading with Sgt. Mayham to talk to me, he finally agreed to answer my questions. I asked him to tell me about his trip back to camp. I asked him if he had to transfer to another train at anytime on the way. He said, yes, they changed trains in Cincinnati. Bang, a thought hit me like a bolt of lightening. I said, “You must have gotten a transfer ticket at the time.” He said he thought he did. I said, “Look in your wallet to see if it’s there.” He took his wallet out, and reluctantly started to look. I saw the end of a ticket sub sticking out like a sore thumb. I grabbed it and looked. Sure enough, it had the time and date of the transfer on it. This, I thought, would save Sgt. Mayham in a court of law. It would show no intent on Sgt. Mayham’s part to go a.w.o.l. He was doing his best to get back to camp on time, and the extenuating circumstances would be the delay of the late train in Cincinnati. And so I brought theses fact out in the trial. Later that day, the court found the sergeant, Not Guilty. I never felt so good in my life. There was justice for one man against so many odds. We won it!!

The celebration only lasted a short while. I was on my way back to my quarters and had to pass the company mess kitchen. I looked in the tent as I went by and who’s washing dishes, doing k.p., but Sgt. Mayham. I had to stop. Here I go again, defending the defenseless.

I said, “Who put you on k.., Sergeant?” He said, “The 1^st sergeant, sir.” I said, “Get out of the kitchen. You’re a staff sergeant, and no staff sergeant does k.p. in this man’s army.” He said, “But how about the 1^st sergeant, sir?” I said, “I’ll take care of the 1^st sergeant, “even though I knew he was the Captain’s bootlicker. I got hold of the 1^st sergeant and told him to replace Sgt. Mayham with a private and not to ever put Mayham on k.p. again. He had the nerve to say the captain would hear about this. I told him he didn’t have to worry. I’d take it up with the captain, and my order would stand, and it did. Mayham never did k.p. again, but I heard later, he went to a.w.o.l. for real, when they transferred me to another outfit.

This was one of the saddest days in my life. I guess I bucked the establishment too many times. There were about the same number of officers that started with the battalion, fresh out of officer candidate school going out to other outfits now. My platoon, the one they gave me, the one no one else wanted, the misfits they called them, turned out to be the best platoon in the whole damn battalion. I’d spent a whole year molding them. Now, I wasn’t t see them in action.

On my last day with them, I stood at attention in company formation. The Captain announced that this was my last formation as an officer of the 3^rd platoon, and he wasn’t red in the face now. I think he was slight pale. I did an about face and spoke to men for what I thought was the last time. I told them I did all there was to do for them, to make them combat ready. “You are as ready as you’ll ever be. You got all I can give you. There would be no way that any one of you should not make it through combat and back in one piece.” This almost proved true. They had only one real casualty. One guy lost his left arm. After the war, I met up with him, and the first time he saw me, he hugged me with his one arm and whispered in my ear and said if it hadn’t been for some of the things I had taught him, he wouldn’t have gotten back alive. The outfit fought through France, Belgium, Holland and finally, Germany at the Battle of the Bulge. And they never lost a man. Not one.

I told them, they didn’t need me. Anyone could lead them in combat, but I wish like hell that it was me. But it wasn’t to be. There were other things planned for me. So, I walked away, and, even though some of the men broke ranks and shook my hand as I walked down the lonely street, head up high, I did not want to let them see my cry.

* * * *

Fort Jackson, South Carolina. June, 1944. I arrive at the 648 Tank Destroyer Battalion, a platoon leader without a platoon to lead. All the platoons had their quota of officers, so I’m an extra officer. I was not a very happy person at this time. My outfit was on its way overseas by now, and here I am, stuck in an outfit trying to get themselves ready to go overseas. I took one look at them, and, in my opinion, they weren’t ready and never would be. I was always subject to making comparisons. Somehow, they just didn’t compare with my old outfit. I thought disdain, because I didn’t like the Captain or any of the platoon leaders. I might have been arrogant and cocky, but I felt I had enough training to consider myself the equal of a professional soldier. I had two and a half years a non-commissioned officer and to date a year as an officer. I had been on two of the biggest maneuvers the Army ever had. I had commando training, and I was a full-fledged commando-training officer. I have classes and demonstrations. I instructed on almost every weapon the army had. The new Captain gave me an assignment the first day to teach a 3 inch gun class to the whole company. I knew he had bird-dog follow me to the gun park to take notes for the Captain. Before I left for the class, he said, “Don’t you have to get a book to refer to in the class?” I said, “No,” and probably said I wrote the book anyhow. I was really confident, you might say cocky again, but in my own defense, it takes this confidence to be a leader. The men will know if you know our stuff or not. The bird-dog gave the Captain the report. I knew he would, and everyday, I didn’t carry a book for reference.

I felt I knew my stuff verbatim. Now, if there was just some way for me to get overseas! A captain in headquarters in my old outfit told me if I got to England in a replacement pool, (Carracio, he was the one who asked me to Critque Co. A’s firing when I was first graduated from O.C.S. 5-43) and if I could contact him somehow, he’d get me in the battalion where ever they were on the continent. I was getting desperate to get into combat. I felt I was more than ready and champing at the bit to go, but how to get there was the problem. I was tired of giving classes on weapons and tactics and techniques of a tank destroyer battalion. I wanted to see if what I knew worked in the real thing. I was getting letters by now from my men in Europe. I even got one from the lieutenant that took m place. He said the men were terrific, like it was a practice drill. I was proud and just a bit envious not to have been able to see for myself. The letters from my men said it was as I said it would be. It was as we practiced. We were gonna win the war and come back safely, and they did. Everyone of them.

They made it through France, Belgium, Holland and into Germany and fighting all the way to the Battle of the Bulge. As I said, they were trained; They were ready, and they didn’t need me. I guess I was needed someplace else. I didn’t know it was to the in the Pacific where the war with the Japanese was in full swing. But before this was to come about, it seems I had to take the necessary steps leading up to it. I heard it was possible to apply for O.S.S., Office of Strategic Services. Requisites were knowledge of a foreign language and use of explosives, and I have both: French in high school, explosives in officer candidate school. I was in a reckless mood at the time to see combat one way or another, and this, I thought, would be a great adventure. So, I went to my battalion’s one personnel officer and told him to send for the papers so I could transfer, if they accepted my application. I told him to send them directly to the Pentagon. I had heard you could skip going through channels in this case, and I told him to be sure and not sent them through channels. I figured they’d get lost in the paper shuffle and besides, I was in a hurry to get to Europe where the action was. He sent for the application, but he went through channels without telling me, so a after a week or ten days went by without a word, I decided to go to see him I asked him if he sent the request through channels. He said, sheepishly, he did. I blew my stack and said, that’s it. They’ll never go through.

I had a girl friend I met at school dance back in a little southern town in Virginia. She was going to college there, and it was a custom for the college to invite the local soldiers to dances. It was usually one dance and that was it. Somehow, this was different. Myself and my two buddies were invited to their parent’s farm not too far away for the weekend. In those days, we were Yankees, (her father said, “damn” before Yankees down South. He said it kiddingly, but I had the feeling somehow he meant it.) Pete’s mother was a very special cook as well as a very special person. You can imagine how home cooked country meals tasted! (Pete was the name of the girl I was dated. All of her sisters and brothers had nicknames, and that was hers.) Whenever I had time off (leave), I went to Fredericksburg to see her. We became engaged but not married. I didn’t feel that was the thing to do in the type of outfit I was in, they figured you’d only live a very short time in combat. I didn’t want to leave a widow. As it turned out, when the personnel officer said he’d sent my papers through channels of O.S.S., I gave up. I said to myself, there’s no way they’re gonna send me overseas now.

So, I got leave and went home to see Pete. I explained the situation and asked her to marry me. She accepted and a week later, she was back home and I was back at camp. You won’t believe my luck. The personnel officer at battalion called me in to tell me that while I was on leave, my application came in for O.S.S. Now I’m a married man and I lost the desire to jump out of a plane behind French lines and blow up bridges. A guy could get killed like that, and now I remembered how it was with my platoon. The men who were married seemed to be a little more cautious, and now I knew why.

SEE INSERT, PAGE 84.

So, I turned down the cloak and dagger application, but while I was making this decision, they sent me to Ft. Jackson, South Carolina to await a shipment to someplace else not known to me a the time. While I was waiting, they made me a mess officer for one unit of which there seemed to be hundreds all alike. It was close to Thanksgiving, and I thought it would help cheer up the guys if I put them to work decorating the mess hall. But what do you do for material? You’ll remember I came out of my original outfit where we always made something out of nothing. They were called field expedients, and I was an innovator, thank God. I went to the little capitol of South Carolina, Columbia, and went to a 5 and 10 cent store. I explained by problem to one of the young ladies in the store. She said, “Sure, we have plenty and we’d like to help y’all boys in any way we can.” She gave me enough colored paper to decorate the capitol. The men got busy and their minds were off their loved ones back home, for awhile anyhow.

As it turned out, the commanding officer of the regiment was by chance making an inspection of the mess halls for the Thanksgiving holidays, and mine was the only one decorated out of the hundreds in the center. This was hardly a criterion for promoting me to Regimental Ration Breakdown Officer for the whole damn regiment. What was a fighting tank destroyer platoon leader doing getting ready to order groceries for over a thousand men? But it was a challenge. When I took charge, they told me the regiment was hundreds of rations in the red, and no one had been able to straighten it out. I went to the warehouse where the food was stacked. I talked to the people in charge, and they laughed when I said I’d get the regiment out of the red. They didn’t laugh long. I was only thirty days in the center, and when I left in thirty days, the regiment was in the black. What I learned about the books that controlled the rations would serve me well later. Wait till you see.

I was sent back to Camp Hood, Texas, for retread training. Camp Hood was the end of the world for me. I was as far away from home as I could get. Wind, sand, heat, cold, you name it: Camp Hood had it. Camp Hood was at the time a sprawling encampment with Kelein, Texas at its doorstep. Kelein had one small general store with hitching posts outside on a dirt street. Across the dirt street was a one pump gas station. That was the town. We weren’t there for fun, anyhow, because there wasn’t any.

So, I’m here, waiting to be assigned for overseas somewhere. You’ll have to remember, I spent most of my service time in the field. I was not accustomed to being in a barracks. But now, I’m in a barracks with regimentation. I felt like a bird in a cage. I had to get out, so one night, three or four of my new officer friends went to a club on the post. We had several beers, but nothing to eat. So, it was about midnight and I said, “Let’s go raid the officers’ mess hall. We need something to eat.” They followed me, and we hit the kitchen. I was immediately cooking eggs, when the mess officer walked in. We had words of an unpleasant nature. One thing led to another, and he said the major would hear about this in the morning, and he did, and I was called to his office.

He said, “I’ll give you your choice: A 104 or we’ll forget the whole thing.” Why would he want to forget the whole thing, I thought. So I let him stew while I thought about it. This took several minutes, because what flashed through my mind was the officers’ mess incident the day before. We were having breakfast in the hall, when I finished food firsts. I felt like seconds and said so out loud to the guy across from me. He said, “You can’t get seconds. The mess sergeant won’t let you get ‘em.” This was like waving a red flag in front of a bull!! I headed for the kitchen.

I walked right into the kitchen, surveyed the half empty shelves, and thought, what are we being charged $21.00 a month for? Someone had a good racket going. There was an open book laying on the table, and I was looking through it, when the mess sergeant walked up. He didn’t know how long I had been looking at it or what I saw. He picked up the book and stuck it under his arm and said, “I’m gonna have to report that to the mess officer,” and, apparently, he did. The word was traveling fast. They had to get rid of me. I knew too much about what was going on. I figured the major, the mess officer and the mess sergeant had a money making game going. You see, if I elected to take a 104, this would have meant an inquiry from a higher order. He was worried about what he thought I knew. I was bluffing. I didn’t know anything. But, again, he didn’t know this, so after several minutes while the wheels of my mind turned, I said in a deliberate tone, “I think we’ll just forget the whole thing.” He almost came up off the chair. He said, “That’s a wise decision. Now go back to your quarters.” I knew now I wouldn’t be here much longer.

The next day, my orders were in the bulletin board. I was on transfer to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. I thought surely I would be on by way to the Pacific. No, it wasn’t to be. I couldn’t get overseas, no matter what. I was assigned as assistant intelligence officer for this tank destroyer group. A group was three battalions, and I was in headquarter as assistant intelligence for the whole group. My duties did not involve a direct command of any of the men. I kinda felt like an observer. I also felt I was getting close to D-day. So, I got another leave and went home. I stayed a week, and, when I returned, my orders were cut. I was on my way to the P.O.E. in Ft. Meade, Maryland. At last, I was on my way overseas.

A very interesting thing happened at Meade. I was assigned to a barracks full of officers waiting to be shipped overseas. There was a lieutenant with his back to me sitting on the next bunk, and he was telling another guy, he didn’t know what he was gonna do. He said, “I don’t have any troop experience, working with men. I spent most of the time in the mess halls.” You guessed it. It was the guy who turned me into the major back in Camp Hood. I told this guy I would meet him somewhere, someday and circumstances would be different. I was gonna confront him now, but a second thought told me he was gonna pay in a different way. So, I never said a word to him. He never saw me, but I saw him, when he turned his head for a full side view. It was him. What happened to him, I’ll never know. Maybe he’d get lucky and get another mess hall someplace.

I took a train ride in a few days to Camp Shank, New York for shipment overseas. At least I was really going. Louie Prima was singing “That Ol’ Black Magic in the City Across the Hudson,” but we couldn’t cross a river. We were gonna cross an ocean. On arrival we stood in line and got shots in both arms at the same time. Now we were getting rushed as fast as they could get us on the boat. I thought, this is really it, but that night, I came down with a fever one minute and chills the next. I didn’t say anything to the other guys about how I felt, but they had to notice, and now I was too weak to walk to the mess hall. I asked them to bring me a milk shake. This went on for a couple of days, and I got worse.

I was determined to get on that boat with them. They knew I was really sick, but we planned how to get me to the boat. I asked someone to carry my rifle, someone else my bag, etc., and two others would each take one of my arms and assist me to the gang plank. The third night, I got so bad, I decided to take a chance. I figured if one of the guys could take me in the dark to the medics, I could get something to hold me till I got on the boat. There was a medic on duty and no one else around. He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and walked away. I was so weak now, I almost fell off the chair. The medic came back a few minutes later and casually pulled out the thermometer. I saw his eyes widen. H immediately shook the thermometer down and stuck it back in my mouth. He took it out attain and took off. I heard him call the O.D. (officer of the day) on the phone. He said, “He’s got a temperature of 104 degrees. The next think I heard was the ambulance, and I wasn’t going to the boat. I was going to the hospital. I missed that boat, as the saying goes.

The flu bug took a bad time to bite me. While I was in the hospital for a week, the war ended in Europe. So, now I would be shipped to the Pacific. The train ride to California was not first class. Someone said they were first class cattle cars. You could really see through the slots on the sides. It was a good thing it was summer.

The P.O.E. was Camp Stoneman. After a week, we sailed out of San Francisco Bay. I thought was we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge, would I ever see it again? General Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, was nearly carrying on in the hills of the Philippines, and we were on our way to meet him. I never thought I would later be within six feet of him. We past each other in the corridor of the hospital in Manila.

The bay was very choppy. I had first chance at being O.D. (officer of the day) in the hold of the ship (bottom). I went down to see how the men were doing, and they were laying all over the beds on the decks, everywhere. I looked and saw green faces and purple lips. What a color scheme. Mal de mer was setting in. I never got seasick myself, maybe because I was so busy trying to get them topside. I thought the air would help them. I pushed bodies up the ladder, till I was a different color-blue in the face, as the saying goes.

We officers had quarters on the top deck, and the ocean was so rough, the water poured in the portholes as it rocked side to side. This old tub was a Dutch tramp steamer, about fourteen tome named the Kota-Bereau. I don’t know what that meant, but from the looks of the rot and rust, I thought it meant we wouldn’t get to our destination. We did. On the way over, there were four officers to a cabin. One of our group was just a kid, couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20. I felt old at 25 or 26. The others tried to pick on the kid, as guys will do in a group. He was, I thought, a good kid, just needed experience and with time, he would get it. In the meantime, I told them to lay off the hazing they were giving him, and they did. It must have been the way I said it. They stopped. The kid never said a word anytime in his own defense. I was his ally though, and later he would repay me in a different way.

We were all in Manila one night and got back late, like 11:30. We were all tired and wanted to hit the sack. As my luck would have it, someone was laying flat out on my cot and appeared to be snoring. I smelled the whiskey, when I got near the cot. That’s all I needed. A drunk stretched out on my bed.

INSERT AT PAGE 88

While I was making this decision, the Battle at Anzio Beach in southern Italy was under way, and at this time, they were using young second lieutenants as cannon fodder. (I got called back to battalion headquarters.) The story coming back was the troop wouln’t get out on order; the second lieutenants had to lead them. This made for a lot of officer casualties on the beach and called for a lot of replacement officers. I was sharing a one story cottage at Ft. Jackson with a young second lieutenant. He must have been about 19 years old. He had just graduated from Culver Military Academy, somewhere in New York or Pennsylvania and sent directly to Tank Destroyer OCS in Camp Hood, Texas. He was a 90 day wonder like the rest of us, but absolutely no experience. I shook my head when I first met him. I thought, and this kid’s gonna lead troops in battle? No way. I asked him about why he wanted to be an officer. He said the pay was better and he liked the pretty officer uniforms, and he was serious. I said, “Well what’s gonna happen when they say, ‘Let’s go to war”?” He laughed and said, “They can’t send me. You have to have 30 days troop duty before you can be sent overseas as a troop leader.” I said, “Oh? Buy they might sent you,” and the next day, the orders came in, and his name, mine, and several others were on the shipment to Italy. Anzio Beach. Well, with was to be it. He suddenly became worried. He lost his cockiness. He was shocked that he was going to war and he wasn’t ready. I felt sorry for him now and talked to him about some of the things he should know, not taught in any school. The first thing I told him to do was find his platoon sergeant when they sent him up to the front lines and explain to the sergeant that he knew very very little about being a soldier and step back and let the sergeant run the show. I hears later that he got all kinds of decorations, and I hoped I had helped him.

While we waited for shipment overseas, I got a call to battalion headquarters. The personnel officer told me I was being taken off the list of officers being sent to Italy, because my application to the Officer of Strategic Service (OSS) was being held in abiance and took preference over the shipping orders to Italy.

END INSERT

All the other guys were getting ready to hit the sack, except one: “Kid Cole,” he must have had a second sense. I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He sat fully clothed on a barracks bag and watched like a cat ready to pounce. I asked the guy stretched out on my bunk two more times to get up and find his own tent and sack. I finally said, if you don’t get up, I’m gonna tip the bunk over. With this announcement, he immediately got up. I immediately sat down on the bunk, because he towered over me. He said, “Now, who’s gonna tip me out a bunk? He said “I was the light heavy weight boxing champ of Europe.” I told him all I wanted to do was go to bed. I suggested he should do the same.

He was ready to fight and I wasn’t, but here we go again, the reluctant warrior. He took a big right hand swing. I was sitting down at the time, and I ducked the swing as it went whistling over my head. I realized he meant business, and I had to get up and go for him or he’d kill me. So, I threw my whole body at him, like a flying tackle, at the same time, “Kid Cole” came off the barracks bag in the same manner. We both hit him at the same time and landed right on top of him. Kid Cole took charge. He grabbed this big guy (anywhere from 175 to 185 or 190 lbs. and over 6 feet tall) by the collar, yanked him to a sitting position and said, “You’re in the wrong outfit, buddy, fooling with the wrong people. Now you’re gonna get up, go to your own tent, go to bed and come back here tomorrow and apologize to Lt. Danahy,” and you know what? He did this the next day. He explained that he had just come in on the shipment from Europe through the Panama Canal to Manila, because the was had just ended in Europe, and he along with the other people on the shipment, thought their war was over, now they were being asked to fight another war in the Pacific.

I never saw him again, and “Kid Cole,” they guy that took all the razzing on the way overseas that I defended came to my rescue. I couldn’t have taken they big guy by myself. The last I saw of the Kid, he was on the back of a 6x6, that’s an open-air truck on the way to the front lines to do battle with Yamashita’s troops in the mountains. I don’t know whether he got assigned to the First Cavalry or the 187 Regimental combat team. I was rumored the Regimental team was used as a battering ram, and I hoped he didn’t get that assignment. I’ll never know how he made out. I never saw him again. It was rumored a lot of officers got picked off sitting in the open trucks on the way to the front lines. Waiting to get your call to go up the front lines was really nerve wracking. Where we were located in the Replacement Depot in Manila, you mingled with officers coming and going to the front. Some of the stories were hair raising. After a while, you felt like you’d rather be up there than listening to someone else’s story. It couldn’t be all that bad or could it?

Since I was the only tank destroyer officer on my shipment overseas, the personnel officer at headquarters told me he’d hold me for the one and only tank destroyer battalion on the island, and they were engaged in combat in the mountains of Baggio. I was like waiting for someone to get killed so you could take his place. That’s the lot of a replacement officer, and that’s what I was at the time, and about this time, I got promoted to 1^st lieutenant. The commander of my unit in the depot must have had something in mind for me for later. He asked me why I hadn’t been promoted earlier, and I told him about Ole Iron Pants, Col. Belton. The one who said when he first saw us shave tail 2^nd lieutenants, “I’ll have to look at you at least a year before I even think about promoting you.” He was as good as his work, and he left us without promoting us. He did help me though by giving me the highest grades you can get on your 201 file (like a report car from school). He gave me not excellent but superior, so what was superior from him like? Well, this commander said, “You’ve been in 2^nd lieutenant grade long enough as of today, You’re a 1^st lieutenant. And that day I just happened to be in the Manila Hotel down town, and, of all people to run into, I saw Col. Belton. We greeted each other like old friends in a few minutes, he asked me to come with him to his officer. He was an eagle colonel now. You remember, he left us in Camp Phillips, Kansas, when he got his promotion and left without promoting us. Now, I had the feeling he wanted to rectify that oversight. He had me sitting on this right in his office, so you couldn’t see my first lieutenant bar. He had an appointment with two captains at this same time. He called them in, sat them down and proceeded to reem through up and down. Every few minutes, he’d stop and say, “We didn’t do it like that in our old outfit, did we Danahy?” I’d say, no sir, because he was right. We didn’t. He really was a great commander. I had the feeling he did like me from the start. Whenever I was doing in the field, I always spoke up to him, but not in a disobedient way. I remember one day on the Tennessee maneuver, we were to reach an objective and have our tanks ready to fire from the best defensive position available. Well, you’ll remember I had been doing nothing but this for about three years now, so it took me only a quick look at the area for me to get my four tanks where I wanted them, when up came Col. Belton. He must have been watching me all the thime. He said, “Lieutenant, can’t you find better positions for those tanks than what you have?” I looked him square in the eye, and I though I saw a slight smile as he walked away. I think he was testing me.

Anyhow, now he explained that he was the Port Authority Commander, and he’d like me to come into his outfit. I think he had misgivings about having not promoted us in Camp Phillips. I told him how bad it was not only for me, but the other half dozen 2^nd lieutenants he didn’t promote. I think he liked me, because I spoke up to him, and no one else got away with this. Anyhow, I refused his offer. I was still mad with him for not promoting us, a technical point so that we could then have gone with out own platoon in June 1944 to England, France, Belgium, Holland and the Bulge in Germany. I gold him how disappointed I was not to have gone, and then I saluted him and walked away. I know if I wanted only a promotion to the grade of captain, he’d have given it to me, but I didn’t want it. There was a principle involved here. I never saw him again.

The big concern was getting up to the front lines now as soon as I could. I went to the personnel officer in battalion three different times trying to find out when I was going. Three groups of replacement officers came through and went up, and here I was still waiting. I was the only tank destroyer officer in the bunch, and he said, “We’re saving you for the one tank destroyer battalion fighting in the hills.” So, I’d go back to the ten and listen to the stories from the officers who had been up front. They were on their way home. They were the lucky ones. They had been up and were lucky to get back. I remember the story about Lt. Goldberg, a new 2^nd lieutenant. When he arrived at the front line, it didn’t take the Japs long to pick up his name, and they called out his name day and night so that he couldn’t sleep. They kept saying, “We’re coming to get you.” The fox holes were, in many cases a few feet apart, and when you jumped into one, you couldn’t always be sure it was empty.”

The tin can string was another one. The Japs strung cans along a line and rattled them at different intervals. If you fired, you gave your position away. It was always a battle of nerves. After a few days of this stuff, they took Lt. Goldberg away in a straight jacket.

The waiting in a tent in the Replacement Depot was tiresome. We were always looking for something to do. I liked to fly, so I found my way to the Army airport close by. I found out all you had to do was go to the desk at the airport and ask when the flights were going that day. If it wasn’t too far, you figured you could get back before you were considered A.W.O.L. I flew a few trips, always by myself and mostly up to Ft. McKinley. Most of the time, you couldn’t get a flight back, and you hopped the first truck going back you could get. I discontinued this when I heard that snipers were picking off people riding in open trucks on the country dirt roads.

General Yamashita was being pushed back further up the mountains, and it befan to look like we were gonna finish him off. The next step planned was Olympic, the invasion of Japan’s home islands. The talk was getting stronger, and this would be an assault no one wanted. We had lost a great many first class troops getting as far into the Pacific as we did. A great many of the new kids who were supposed to be trained in the states didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other, let alone how to shoot it, and we were gonna invade Japan with these kids. God help us.

I guess they must have intended that the Philippine Army would go on the invasion also, because I was suddenly plucked out of the Replacement Depot and assigned to the Philippine Army as a guerrilla training instructor. In addition to being a tank destroyer platoon leader, I had had unarmed and armed combat training and had been an instructor in commando training. I had given lessons on dozens of U.S. Army weapons, and they were using out weapons, so if anyone looked at my 201 file (record), I guess I would have been the one they wanted. So, here I was in the Philippine Army. This was ragtag bunch if I ever saw one. I really didn’t know how I was gonna whip these people in shape to go on an invasion. Thank God, President Harry Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end the war.

When this happened, August of 1945, I was immediately taken off that assignment and given another one. I was one of only half a dozen officer selected to go to Japan on the first shipment to get out our prisoners of was interned in stockades there. We went to several meetings to be prepared for the trip. We were given team numbers. My team was #6655. It was composed of an Australian lieutenant, his sergeant, a Dutch lieutenant and his troops, Javanes, myself and a colonel I was to report to when I got to Yokohama at General Macarthur’s headquarters.

The convoy got underway shortly from Manila, but got only as far as Subic Bay, a naval base in the Philippines. We pulled in there for a night lay up. T was the hurricane season, and there was one on the way. It came and went and the next day, we took off again, full steam ahead to Yokohama Japan. We arrived in the evening and had to wait while they signed the peace treaty on the battleship Missouri the next day. When this was accomplished, the captain of our ship called me into his quarters and told me that since my group was all together on this one ship (apparently, some of the other teams were not together), I was to take my group at daybreak and report to a Col. Brown who was at Gen. Macarthur’s headquarters. I asked where this was located. He didn’t know. He said, “You’ll find it.” I said, “Yes, sir, but where is this north dock you say I should land at.” He said, “Oh, the boswain would know.” I said, “Yes, sir,” and just before the break of dawn, I had everyone aboard the small boat that was to take us ashore. I said, “Okay, Boswain, take us to the north dock.” He said, “no one has been in yet. I don’t know where it is, sir.” I was lucky I looked around and the sun was just peeping out of the water. I thought if that’s east, go straight ahead. I was looking at a line of empty docks two miles long with not one ship tied up. God was with us. We hit the right dock right on the money.

I left the group on the beach and took Lt. Lightbum, the Australian, with me, leaving the Dutch officer in charge of the group on the beach. We walked up the beach toward the city. There wasn’t a soul around except a Jap with a rear wood burning vehicle for fuel. We walked right up behind him. He seemed startled to see American officers on Japanese soil. I said, “Take us to Macarthur’s headquarters,” like he was a cab driver. He looked at me like he didn’t understand, so I pulled out my .45 pistol and repeated my request. He bowed a half a dozen times and indicated for us to get in his bus. We did, and he took us directly to Macarthur’s headquarters. I knew we were there when I saw about six 6’2” guards standing guard in front of the building. I left Lt. Lightbum outside and went in.

The lobby was loaded with high ranking officer. This was the Imperial Hotel, considered at the time to be one of the best in Japan. With all of this rank walking around and officers all over the place, how would I find Col. Brown? I spotted a little geisha girl with a pillow on back walking around calling out some officer’s name who was wanted on the phone. I called her over and asked if she would walk around and call out the name of Col. Brown. She said okay and proceeded to do so. I watched for some recognition and immediately got it. I saw a hand go up in the corner of the room. Had to be Col. Brown, so I scooted across the floor, came to attention in front of him, saluted and said, “Sir, Lt. Danahy reported and awaiting your orders, sir.”

He looked up at me and said, “I’m going home.” I thought maybe he didn’t hear me, so I repeated my orders, but this time I looked directly in the eyes and saw nothing but battle fatigue. He repeated, “I’m going home.” I thought, well, he’s already gone. So, I said, “I will billet the troops and report again the in the morning, sir,” and left. We put up the troops and picked a place to spend the night. How about a nice marble bank? The three of us felon our bunks as the sun was setting, dead tired. I thought better tired than dead. This was our first night in Japan, and we’d heard rumors about snipers picking off our people. The Japs hadn’t had time to turn in their weapons yet, so they had rifles and swords still on them. Again, this was the first day of the invasion. The other two, The Dutch and Australian officers, went off to sleep in five minutes. I decided to write a letter. The wind was picking up and before long, we had a full blown typhoon that knocked out all the lights in the city. That ended the letter I was writing.

I kept my clothes on, as we all did. I lay down to go to sleep. It was so dark that when I put my hand up in front of my face, I couldn’t see it. The wind blew, the shutters banged. What a first night in Japan to remember, I thought. With the Japs still roaming the streets, fully armed, we knew there were still fanatical Japs who’d rather die than accept surrender. With this thought in mind, I tried to go to sleep. The wind picked up even stronger than before. This was a typhoon so strong, the next day, they found a navy destroyer had capsized in the harbor. As I lay awake on my back, I thought it might be a good idea to put my cocked .45 pistol under my pillow. I had just gotten settled when I heard what I thought was a shot. I rolled out of the cot with my pistol in my hand, all in one movement. I had always heard the expression growing up about your body freezing up in place and your blood running cold. It’s the only time in my life the blood really ran cold in my body. The wind continued to howl. I couldn’t see, but could feel a draft. Believe it or not, I decided to stand up. I’d been laying on the floor all this time, again with my left hand up in front of me and pistol in my right hand. I followed the draft or flow of air toward the back of the building, and I found a 4x4 piece of timber on the marble floor by the open door. I then surmised the wind had blown the door open and knocked the piece of timber down on the marble floor. This was a marble bank, and you know how sound echoes and echoes in a building like that. I crawled back in the sack and went to sleep listening to the other two guys snore. They never moved all through the storm.

Next morning, we assembled in front of the Macarthur headquarters building. When I arrived, the Japanese truck which resembled our own one and a half ton flat bed was full of people: American, Australian, and Dutch, and A.P. and U.P.I. camera men and reporters. They told us back in Manila that we were to rescue the Allied prisoners of war from the stockades in Japan. The briefing officer I remember told us we should be prepared to take the stockades by force if necessary. I laughed at the time, by force with a .45 caliber pistol? That’s all I had. I was a pretty good shot with most all the U.S. Army weapons. After all, I ‘d had almost five years of experience now and had been an instructor, but I found to be proficient with a .45 caliber pistol was not an easy thing. I thought, well, if it came right down to using it, I might scare someone by just pointing it at them and looking nasty. And this came to be later sure enough. I asked the corporal sitting up front in the truck, where the colonel was. He said, “He’s on back, sir.” On back?, I said to myself. What’s he doing on back? He’s supposed to be up front leading this thing.” Anyhow, I walked to the back of the truck, and there he was sitting all hunched up, hands on knees, and head down like he was hiding. I said, “Colonel, we gotta go and you should be up front leading this expedition, sir.” He looked at me, and all he said again was, “I’m going home.” I never heard the man ever say anything except that he was going home. If he was briefed in Macarthur’s headquarters, and I’m sure he was, what he was told of the situation never got down to me. I’m sure what he told them, under his breath, was he was going home. I had just wished I had been at the Macarthur staff briefing, but only senior grade officers would have been able to attend that, and I was only a first lieutenant. The colonel was supposed to disseminate the information to his troops: Us! And all we go was, “I’m going home.”

So, I left him on the tailgate of the truck. He wouldn’t take command. I guess the poor guy had had all he could take. I saw the combat fatigue in his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but we had a mission to accomplished and again, as so many times in the past, I said I guess it’s me again. So, I told the Jap driver to take off, roll the wheels is the motion I gave him, and we were off. Somewhere there was a north dock and a naval officer waiting, I’d heard through the grapevine. We only got a short distance down the road, when the truck stopped abruptly. There were two Jap officers standing with hands placed on top of the cab. They were talking to the Jap driver. I jumped off the running board and told the officers to shut up. I jumped back on the running board and gave the wheel roll motion again to the driver. We went a short distance again, one of the officers spoke again to the driver. The truck stopped. I jumped off the running board, pulled out my .45, pointed it at both officers and said, “If either one of you say another word to this driver, I’m gonna put a .45 slug right between both your eyes. Now you driver, roll this truck and if you stop, you’ll get a slug right between your eyes.” You know something? The truck rolled and never did stop till I came to a lonesome M.P. directing traffic on the highway. I asked him the way to a north dock. He, to my surprise, said first road right, sir.

We pulled up to the dock. When I got to the rear of the truck, guess what? He’d really gone home. The colonel was missing. To this day, I’ve never seen him. Now I really had it. I’m in command. Where’s the naval officer? He’ll tell me what it’s all about. Here he comes, legging it across the dock, anticipation in his eyes. We both said almost the same time, “What’s up?” he didn’t know any more than I did. I told him I lost the colonel. He said all he knew was to pick up some Army guys and news people and sail around the harbor till he got further instructions.

So, we jumped on board and sailed. The radio cracked and popped. The naval commander grabbed the head phones. I couldn’t hear what was said. All I heard him say was, “Aye, aye, sir.” We sailed for some time and joined a (tin can) destroyer sitting in the water. We boarded this larger vessel in the dark and took off, to where, I didn’t know and now almost didn’t care. I didn’t know it but in the dark on the destroyer was a naval commander equivalent to an army colonel, and two high ranking naval officers, so that next day, by early morning light, when we pulled up to this big hospital ship, it looked like the Queen Elizabeth II painted white with a big read cross on the side. The skipper hollered down, “Who’s in charge and what’s your business?” He must not have been expecting company. Looks like he should have known who we were.

Anyhow, when he said who’s in charge, I looked around and saw all the brass, a colonel and two majors. Wow, I was relieved, but no one spoke up, and in a minute, the voice boomed again, “Who’s in charge?” No one spoke up. I realized the insignia on their collars was medical now, so even though I was a first lieutenant, I was a field officer and really the guy to make the decisions. In any event, it was obvious. They weren’t gonna take command. So, here I go again. I said, “I guess I am in command.” The voice boomed, “Come aboard.”

I was 26 ears old in top condition and didn’t wait for the net to bring me topside. I went straight up the side of the ship which looked like three stories tall and with a pack on my back. When I went over the rail, I was pooped. The skipper was red hot. He reamed me up one side and down the other. He was Navy, and I was Army and that in those days was enough for a war. Forget the enemy. Plus the fact that I was a lowly first lieutenant didn’t help. When he stopped hollering about what I didn’t know, I tried to explain that I’d lost my colonel, and I was doing the best I knew how. He said, “Come into my cabin,” and I did. There were about six navy men scattered in the room. There was what appeared to be a chief petty officer in front of me. He really looked like a boxer and probably was. He stepped beside of me, and I was ready to let a right hand hay maker go it he tried to make a false move. I thought twice, I was outnumbered six to one, but I was ready to give it a go if he tried to swing. I caught the eye of one of the young sailors, and he gave me the indication that something was gonna happen, and not in my favor. I think the skipper was gonna let it happen, but I think he had second thoughts. Maybe his chief petty officer might come out second best, so he probably thought, let’s hold it her, and decided to hear me out.

I thought afterwards, the chief petty officer and I might have had a good go, but not six of them, no way!! But if he started swinging, it would have been a donnybrook. I’d been trained to kill a man in less than one minute. Six I knew would have been too many, but I was ready to give it a go, if he started something. I was not the aggressor, but I was ready to reply.

The skipper stepped between us to hear me out. When I explained I’d lost my colonel and was willing to listen to him, he seemed to simmer down. It was obvious he didn’t like the Army in general, and I was the Army. When he stopped talking, I said to him, “Captain, you have a ship full of Navy people, and all I have is just a few Army people. Can I suggest you incorporate my people with yours? All I need is triplicate copies of what we do to send to CINPAC, etc.” He said, “Sounds all right to me,” and away we went. He explained he was waiting to pick us up and now would shove off to Nagoa to get the first prisoners of War. I think he got over the idea of dealing with a lowly first lieutenant, when he couldn’t deal with a missing Army colonel.

We arrived at Nagoa thinking we were gonna storm the beaches and attack the stockades with .45s. That’s all I had. That would have been a joke and thank God, it didn’t happen that way. The prisoners broke out of the stockade. The guards ran away when they saw our big hospital ship. The prisoners ran to meet the small boats at the beach. They were picked up and bought to the ship. We never went ashore. They were skeletons, loaded with sores and berrie berrie. Our people took their names and addresses. We were going shore to look for the places where the other soldiers were buried, but the survivors convinced us that there were no more survivors and no burials. They explained everyone was cremated and the shite boxes tied nearly with white ribbons that they carried so tenderly aboard the ship were enough evidence for me. There was one sailor lying on the deck. How they knew he was a sailor, I never knew, but he wouldn’t talk. The Navy medical officers gave up on him. I walked in on the last try someone made to reach him. I said, “Can I have a try?” I knelt down beside him. His eyes were rolling back in his head, and I said, “Son, where does your mother live? What is the name of the city? What is your mother’s name?” They had been asking him his name. I was using a different tactic, and it worked. After I asked three times, he spoke and told me. The doctors and nurses were aghast! He never uttered a word for them. We had a name and city: Detroit, Michigan. Now we could get off a message that a son who was thought drowned when his ship went down, was alive. How ell he was, was something else.

We picked up 2,500 prisoners of war here and sailed back to Yokohama. I visited with the survivors of Battan, Corrigadon and Cabanatuan in the Philippines. I wrote their atrocity stories and dispatched them to headquarters in triplicate. When we arrived in Nagoa, I left the ship and reported to my headquarters for further orders. I walked through the doors of the office where I’d started my mission a week ago and found the captain and his lieutenant in deep conversation. They were so engrossed, they didn’t hear me walk up. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I stood and waited to speak. I couldn’t help but overhear the lieutenant say, “I’ll put you in for the silver star, and you can put me in for the bronze medal. After all,” he said, “We had to stand duty for 24 hours counting those prisoners of war as they came off the ship!!!” If the Army was gonna give medals for such as that, I didn’t want them.

They suddenly realized I was standing there after the red in their faces turned to white, the captain took my report and said take a few days off and then get ready to go to Wakeama on another mission. He said I would head up another group. I said, "No way." I said, "Look, Captain, I'm only a first lieutenant, and it takes at least a colonel to talk on an equal basis with the Navy brass." He said, "We don't have a colonel with your experience, so you're it." I said, "Is that an order, sir?" He said, "Yes." So, that was it. In a few days I'm on a second mission.

I went tot he men with the good news. I told them to take off, stay out of trouble and report back to me in a couple of days. The next day, I had to go to Tokyo and get two of them out of jail for disturbing the peace. The following day, we were gathering in front of the headquarters to get started, and whose sitting dejected, looking on the back of this Jap 6x6, but my old buddy from the 626th Tank Destroyer Battalion. We were noncommissioned officers together and were in the same officers candidate school in Camp Hood, Texas. This was on of the wildest guys I ever knew. We talked about how he made the invasion at Leyte, Manila, with a mixed bunch of GIs and Filipinos. He had landed just a few weeks ahead of me. He went in with Colonel Chase and the 1st Cavalry. He said they went down one road into Manila while the Japs were going out another, parallel to them.

We swapped stories of the war like everyone did, then he told me about the young second lieutenant that went on a mission with him. He thought the guy was the bravest man he ever met or the dumbest. They were pushing through the jungle one day, pursuing this Jap patrol that was firing and falling back intermittently. The last time they stopped firing, he got up and walked straight up the hill, stood straight up, turned around and waved at the others to come on up. They were gone. Bert, my buddy, looked around and said, "Okay, let's go see what's up." Sure enough, they were gone, but how did he know? He was lucky, he should have gotten it here but didn't. He got it on the way back to camp. He took a different route from the others on the way back and never made it. The next day, they went to look for him. What was left of him, the body decomposes quickly in the jungle. H knew it was him only by the dogtags. Evidence again that most heroes are dead heroes. I remembered my buddy long ago in Italy who took a German sniper slug right between the eyes as he walked up the beach at Anzio. He was a tough guy to walk straight up a hill like that, but he was also dead. I'm still living, but I'm a survivor. I never pretended to be a hero like that.

Bart would liven things up later. We were on our way to Wakeama, a landing craft took us as close in to the beach as we could get. We were dropped in water up to our knees and as we were wading in, I looked up at the side of this mountain and spotted a Japanese house sitting on top. This was the objective, to take peacefully or otherwise. I though, if there are Japs in the woods on the side of the hill we would be dead ducks. We were in the water, no protection, the boat took off. As we were wading in, I heard shots. Wow, where were they coming from? The hills? No. I turned around and there was Lt. Bert, shooting at a tin can in the water!

Thank God there was no one on the hillside. We made it to the top. This was a gorgeous resort hotel we captured without a shot, except for Lt. Bert's tin can episode. The Jap guards had run off into the hills, and the prisoners walked up to the hotel, one assisting the other as they came. They were loaded with berrie berrie and emaciated looking. One of the first prisoners of war I interviewed was a Navy chief petty officer whose head kept bobbing up and down as he spoke about the Allied commander of the camp, an Australian colonel, who he said consorted with the enemy to obtain favors for himself. He said that could wait for what he said would be his court martial. He did tell me about how he was captured though. Seems he was a submariner. The sailfish or swordfish had been so successful knocking off Jap tonnage, just this one time, when they were surfacing, the skipper didn't do a 360 degree look and, when they broke water, they were almost on top of a Jap destroyer. The Jap hit them in the fantail before they got completely submerged, but they managed to get away, dragging their tail behind them. They got as close to an island as possible, and the skipper decided to sink the sub rather than give it over to the enemy. He said the sub was in bad shape anyhow. They had been on a long mission and really too far to get back to base anyhow. Their batteries were low, and they only had one torpedo left. The thing that bothered him most he said was leaving Admiral Cromwell in the sub when it went down. The skipper ordered the chief to open all pet cocks on the sub. He asked the Admiral to come ashore with them, but the admiral refused. He said he would have to go down with the sub. He knew too much, and the Japs would force the information from him. So, the chief said he pleaded with him to come ashore. As he went up the ladder for the last time, he looked down the hatch and saw him just sitting there with his head between his hands and went to meet his maker as the sub slowly submerged. Later they were picked up and interned for the rest of the war there in Japan.

I decided to scout the resort hotel and took a couple of the guys with me for a look see. We found steps leading up a turret. I was leading the way around a spiral staircase and when we reached the top, there was no one there. We saw a glass faced cabinet loaded with vial of all sizes with liquid in them. The cabinet appeared not to be steady. It rocked when I touched it, so I said, "Don't touch it, and let's get out of here." We passed a bunch of sailors on their way up as we were going down. We were down only a few minutes, and I was talking to a Navy medical officer at the time, when we heard this ungodly scream. One of the sailors came running down the stairs and as stood in front of us, his clothes disintegrated. He was naked. The doctor said, "Someone quick, get some water. Looks like acid burns." The sailor had gotten into the cabinet, and the vial turned over on his clothes. We were lucky. I never did know how he made out. We were busy taking names and addresses and stories of the Jap atrocities.

A British sergeant said he just had to tell me about a kid from Texas named Waggoner that he worked on the dock with. you know it wasn't until this time that we found out the Japs didn't list the prisoners of war as having been captured. When an Allied ship went down, the Japs said, no survivors, but those who survived and went to work in slave or work camps, and a great many were worked to death on Battan and Corregador and Cabatatuan. It seems this kid, Waggoner, was a big kid and required more food than the average person to survive. So what he'd do is sneak out of camp at night and get into the soy bean bins and eat all he could hold then sneak back.

One night, he was outside, and the Jap guards found his bed empty. The alarm was sounded and the guards went outside the camp gates looking for him. In the meantime, he got back to his bunk, when they came back, they found him, but the damage had already been done. He caused the Jap commander to lose face. he had to be punished. He was tied to a stake outside the gate and two guards with baseball bats book a swing at his buttocks as they passed each other. when he finally fell, they grabbed a water hose and tilled him till his stomach swelled. He was pronounced dead and taken to a room that served as a morgue prior to burial. He was so big, they had to break his legs to fit him in the wooden box. When the Allied prison doctor came around the next morning to inspect the sick, he thought he heard a scratching noise like someone scratching on wood, and he followed the sound to Waggoner's box. He pulled open the top and found that Waggoner had just died. The British sergeant said h was one of the toughest kids he ever knew.

Later, I was called by the chaplain to the quarter deck. He said, "What do you want to do with the boxes the men are bringing in?" I said, "What boxes?" He said, "The little white boxes that contain the ashes and remains of their buddies." "Oh," I said. "Have someone put them in my cabin," and later when I went to the cabin, it was almost full of white boxes, about the size of a cigar box, and they were all tied with white silk ribbons. I shook one or two and heard a rattle. Someone sad, must be the guy's false teeth. Anyhow, the names and addresses were there, and that's what we were after. Their loved ones would be notified, and they could rest in peace in their own home towns back in the States, England, and Indonesia.

We returned to Yokohama by train this time, and I reported 2,500 prisoners of war were processed. This oddly enough was the same number received from Nagoa. So, we processed about 5,000 prisoners of war. Back at headquarters, the commanding officer said, "I've got another mission for you." I said, "I've got news for you." He said, "You're going to take a group to the city of Ceba." I said, "The news is, I'm going home." I had just accumulated enough points, that is my time in the service counted up enough points, to go home and get out of this man's army after almost five long years. I was going home at last.

But, I had a long way to go. I had to take my group to Manila first. We left Tachicawa air base in a few days, and it was dark when we left, so I didn't get a good look at the plane. We stopped on the way back at Naha airbase on Okinawa and spent the night. We arrived too late to eat, and the mess sergeant told us the kitchen was closed. I'd been down this road before, it seemed to me, somewhere in my past. I said, "Okay guys, let's go. I found a mess hall down the road. We raided and ate that we could and took off. "No" for an answer was not acceptable for me where my men's welfare was concerned.

Next morning, we headed for the plane. We were all anxious to take off except on kid. He looked about age 18 or 19, and I guess I couldn't blame him much. The plane was a mixed bag of parts. Nothing matched: The wing, the tail and body looked like they belonged somewhere else, and to top it off, there were bullet holes scattered throughout the whole thing. Would it fly? We'd find out! The kid wouldn't get aboard. I told two of the guys to carry him on, and with much effort, we got him on. I told them to give him a bucket seat next to me. I'd watch him myself. We came into Naha, Okinawa airport, all by ourselves, but we weren't going out that way. We were picking up passengers and boxes, big crates of machinery. I watched in amazement. They started at the front of the plane loading the crates and didn't stop till the aisle was full clear to the back. The pilot was last to get aboard. As he passed me, I said, "Are we gonna be able to get off the ground?" He said, "I think so." That's all. I watched the runway as he gunned the engines and away w rolled and rolled. Were we ever gonna get off the ground? I watched in eager anticipation. Just as we reached the end of the tarmac, we lifted off, using every inch of the runway.

It seemed we were barely in the air, when we were over the mountains of the Philippines, we couldn't get clearance to land. there too many planes in the air and on the ground, so we circled and circled and went up and down on bumps till I thought the wings would snap off. I looked at the kid sitting beside me. He was white as a sheet. I said, "You're not nervous, are you?" He said, "No, sir." Then he looked down at a comic book he was supposed to be looking at, and he had it upside down. I think he was so nervous, and I laughed to myself.

After a spell of circling, we finally came down in on piece. My trip with these kids was over. They got off the plane with bags and clutching souvenirs of Japan. I was glad I could be instrumental in getting the souvenirs for them. That happened after our last mission to Wakehama. We were going home, and that day my corporal came to me all shook up. He said he and the others had gone to a center to get a souvenir to take home. They said they heard they were entitled to one but needed a slip of paper from an officer to prove they were going home, and a British officer wouldn't give them one. I said, "Okay, let's go." So we stormed the center en masse. I must have looked and sounded upset too. In a few minutes, he said, "Okay, help yourselves, and by the by, if you want some for yourself, you can go to the ordinance center for officers and get some there for yourself." Which I did. So I never saw those kids again. They weren't combat soldiers. I only had them a month, but could tell they had the makings.

Next day, I went for the routine medical examination preparatory for release to the States. I thought I had lost weight. I never could tell for sure, because I'd changed uniforms so many times. When I was with the 5th Fleet, the Navy gave me blue on blue while my uniform was in the wash. Then the 7th Fleet did the same for me, and by that time, I didn't have the uniform I left Manila with. So, this uniform hung on my body, but I though I was wearing someone else's uniform until I got on the scale in the hospital. I had lost thirty pounds in thirty days. I dropped from 155 lbs. to 125. You could see my ribs sticking out. I thought, my gosh. I look like one of the prisoner of war. It was then it hit me, where I'd been and what I'd done in a space of only thirty days. But it was really night and day for thirty days. I slept and ate on the run. Maybe that colonel wasn't so dumb. He probably knew, that's why he disappeared. I wondered if anyone even noticed that it was my signature on the bottom of all the reports that went in triplicate to CINPac, and all the other places in authority. For the colonel, no one seemed to care what happened to him. I guess they said they had me. I did a colonel's job, but never got paid for it. Oh well, I never did care for rank. When you took the brass off your collar, if you were a leader, everyone knew it, and if you weren't they knew that too. I remembered what Lt. Bert said on the way to retaking Manila. He told his men the first guy to salute him or say "sir" would be his last salute and last sir. The Japes were always looking to knock off the one who got saluted.

I guess I was in the hospital about two weeks before going sent hack home. Again, I felt like one of the prisoners of war. They were kept longer than two weeks to build them up before sending them home. They had lost more than thirty pounds and needed mental as well as physical help. A good many of them, I heard, snapped after they got back to Manila. They couldn't understand why they were being kept from going home and for many, this was too much. The atrocity stories I heard and wrote about kept me awake every night for two weeks in the hospital. I felt like I have lived through their ordeals, but I was a survivor too. It was also the end of the reluctant warrior. I was lucky: I was going home and I did.

Many nights in the hospital, I thought and dreamed about the survivors' stories that I wrote about and sent back to headquarters. I never kept a copy for myself. I thought what I did in triplicate was enough. A copy to commander, CINPAC, and two other commanders. I found out later, 10 years later, the reports I did were on file near the nation's capitol. It took me a whole day to locate them. All I had to do is go get them. It turned out there was only one little old man located in a back office in one of the buildings, who knew what I was looking for. All the guys I'd been seeking information from were not even born at that time. The old guy knew though, and his eyes lit up when I asked him about their whereabouts. He said they were in Washington, but had been moved to a town close to Washington. It had taken me all day, going from one lead to the next, and talking to many people, so the day was about over. So I said, I'd do it another day. In the meantime, I'd rely on my memory.

The survivors were anxious to talk about the Mad Dog or others who all carried nicknames similar to Mad Dog. The Japs had ingenious ways of getting information. More than one prisoner was strung up on poles to resemble a cross with spread eagle legs then a guard would swing a bamboo pole striking the groin area till the prison passed out. The finger nail treatment was another devious device to get information. If you thought name, rand and serial number were all you were required to give, they changed your mind with a few bamboo splinters driven with a mallet under your finger nails. All of these things occurred at the camps and many of the men had wished they had died on the way from Caban in the Philippines to Nagoa or Wakeama in Japan. Many of the prisoners who survived the death march from Bataan and Corregador to an embarkation point for Japan wished they hadn't. So many prisoners weakened by lack of food and wounds received at the besieged fort of Corregador and Battaan where Lt. General Skinny Wainwright, Macarthur's second in command who surrendered the Allied Army.

Those prisoners who couldn't march or walk were shot where they fell. No one bothered to bury them. They just moved on. When they reached the embarkation point to Japan, they were piled into boats so tight, they couldn't lie down. Many men died of suffocation on the boat trip to Japan. There was little air, no food, a ration of water and a handful of rice till they got to Japan. Some of the ships never reached Japan. They went down at sea on the way. No one would know of this but a survivor. The Japanese didn't keep records of survivors. They also didn't abide by the Geneva rules.

When a U.S. ship was sunk, the Japs picked up the survivors and interned the. They then worked them till they died and then no one would know when they died. About this time, the Japanese were building a back road for a supply route from Rangoon to Burma, and the Allied prisoners of war were used to build the bridges and the road. When the burden became too heavy for those swinging a pick or shovel, they were shot and left in the ditches. The names of the people shot is what I was looking for. The Army needed this information along with addresses, so they could inform their parents and loved ones. Army intelligence we got in the Philippines was lacking. They had originally told us to look for bodies. Well, we found out there were no bodies. Everyone was cremated. Thus, the earlier reference to the white cigar boxes wrapped in white silk with ribbons I found stacked to the ceiling in my cabin aboard the ship at Nagoa.

I wrote many a story of Jap atrocities, and they all came back to me in nightmares as I lay in a hospital bed in Manila. These were first hand reports from the survivors of Japanese prisoner of war camps. I guess I didn't have time to stop that thirty days in Japan. I thought afterwards that I was grateful to the U.S. Navy for the use of their clean uniforms that I changed into whenever the opportunity presented itself. I also wondered if the colonel could have forgotten his rank and id what I did. I also would have liked to have known what happened to him, and why de disappeared at the beginning of the mission. I never knew, and I guess I'll never know. I was only supposed to take a rescue team from teh Philippines to Yokohama, Japan, and turn the team numbered 66 over to the colonel at Macarthur's headquarters in Yokohama. The only thing the colonel said to me at the time was that he was going home. I didn't realize at the time, he meant it. Now I realize, I'm going home.

Where it took me thirty days to cross the Pacific on the Dutch tramp steamer Kota B, it took only two weeks to go from Manila to San Francisco, and as I passed under the Golden Gate, I thought to myself, I made it. The war was over, and I lived through five years of what they promised in the beginning would be only one year. So, I was singing a different tune. Good-by dear. I'll be back in five years, and I was. I had and have thought many times of all the guys I started the war with who are not here to celebrate with me. I heard it said that over 50% of the original outfit I joined didn't make it. Of the four of us candidates who went before the officers candidate school board in Texas, I am the only survivor. We lost several officers in my graduating class from OCS who were assigned to the same battalion as me. Some would say I walked under a lucky star, because thousands of men were killed in WW II, and I wasn't among them. But I had a great protector. It's been said that everyone has a patron saint. I was lucky because I chose the Blessed Mother, or maybe she chose me to watch over, and how could I go wrong? You better believe I called on her for intercession more than one time and was never let down.

I thought my military days were over. I left the Army with a first lieutenant's commission in the reserve. The war was over, and the reserve unit I was assigned to met once a month. We weren't really doing anything constructive, and I was about to resign my commission, when one of the officers in this group joined the local National Guard unit. It was a tank company, and it had a captain and one other officer. The one I'd been in the reserve unit with. He told me how badly in need of officers they were. they didn't have one platoon leader and would I come and help them out? I wanted at the time to help myself out of anything to do with the Army. I'm still the reluctant warrior, but after talking with the company commander and listening to his problems, I decided to help him out. When I told the other guys in the reserve that I planned to do, they said, "You're crazy. If we have another war, you'll be the first to go." I said, "If we have another war, we'll all go anyhow."

So, I went to Richmond to the headquarters of the National Guard. The adjutant looked at my 201 file (record) and said to me, "With your record (and I know they were all excellent and superior grades), you won't be required to take any tests. If you want a National Guard commission, you can have it." I said I did, and that was it. I was now in the National Guard, assigned to the tank company in my home town, and how was I to know that later on the Korean War break out? All the officers in the reserve unit were called back in. One of my good friends in the unit, a guy who was a non-commissioned officer in my original outfit and who had followed me to officers candidate school, and who was about four classes behind me, got through the war, winding up in Italy. Now was called up with the rest and were sent to Korea.

Before he left, I ran into him one day, and he told me he wasn't coming back. I tried my best to kid with him about that feeling he had, but he never changed his expression, he never smiled. He just said, "Jack, I'm not coming back," and his premonition was correct. He was dead thirty days from the time he left the states. He was a forward observer on a hill in Korea, when a Chinese shell hit his foxhole. His wife had the same premonition. I saw her after church one Sunday. She told me she thought something was wrong. She said, "He wrote every few days, and she hadn't heard in over a week from him," when the letter edged in black came. It's strange, they both knew.

So, I missed Korea. They just didn't call up our National Guard outfit, but we stayed on the ready at home. All the officers that I was in the reserve with are all dead now and strange as it may seem, the company commander and executive officer of the guard outfit I stayed with are also both dead.

After the Koran conflict, I thought there could surely be no more wars. So, I resigned my commission. Then came Viet Nam. I was too old, or was I? If they had called me, I guess I'd have gone back reluctantly. And looking back, I missed being among the first to go into the Pacific with the Americal Division in early 1941. By the whim of a colonel, missed North Africa and Marshal Rommel. By a smart decision of some planning officer in the Pentagon, who at the last minute as we were on the way to the POE in New York and North Africa, realized we couldn't possibly stop Rommel, the Desert Fox, with a pea shooter like th37 mil. gun. So, they sent us back and sent a 75 mil. tank destroyer outfit in our place. And they were obliterated at Kaserien Pass.

I missed Normandy, Belgium, Holland and the Bulge in Germany because a lieutenant colonel sacrificed four second lieutenants to get his eagle colonel's bars. He didn't promote us. What he was saying was he did what he did with only second lieutenants, but he should have promoted us before he left the outfit. We were ready to go overseas then, June 1945, but the freeze was on for promotions (we were all singing, bless them all, the long, short and the tall; there'll be no promotions this side of the ocean, so bless them all). The new commander realized our situation and sent the new first lieutenants to schools as they came to the battalion, to keep them from getting out platoons. He did this twice, then the third time, he called us in and said, he'd done the best he could and we had to be replaced. So, I didn't get to the Bulge, buy my men did, and they all got back, so I would have very likely done the same.

I missed Italy, because I elected to make an application to the Office of Strategic Services (the cloak and dagger outfit). Only because of a misunderstanding between the SI or personnel officer of the 648th Tank Destroyer Battalion that I was in, did I miss that trip. I told the personnel officer I knew he could submit my application directly to the Pentagon in Washington D.C. said he would do as I directed him to then he chickened out and sent the application through channels. When I went back to see if there were any news in about a week, he said, no news. I asked if he did in fact sent it through channels, and he said, yes. That's when I threw up my hands and decided I would never get overseas. I went on leave, got married, and when I got back, my papers had come in and very likely they would have accepted me. I had the qualifications, but I was married now, also this order took me off the shipping orders to Anzio, Italy, so I missed Italy. Colonel Wild Bill Donavant of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. cloak and dagger outfit). But I didn't miss the Pacific, and the war didn't pass me by. I always wondered what I was gonna say when my future children asked, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" No I could tell them and did.

Patton in North AFrica. When I was in OCS, Officer Candidate School in Texas in Camp Hood, he was charging with Recon companies of TD Companies. He might have remembered the 626th TD battalion that gave him a hard time in North Carolina maneuvers, September to December, 1941. He used some kind of troops as a reconnaissance in fore in front of his tanks in North Africa and later in Europe. We heard he challenged Rommel in the North African desert. It was said he told Rommel he could send his army to the rear, and he would do the same. All he wanted was for Genreal Rommel to pick his driver, gunner and loader, and he would meet him alone in the middle of the desert. He was something else. We also heard when he got to Europe and was given another army, the 3rd Army, he swam the Rhine River to show the subordinate troops it could be done. He didn't tell them he'd won a medal for swimming many years before in the Olympics. Anyhow, I felt many of his men adored him and would have followed him to hell and back. Personally, I would have. It was a love/hate thing. There was not question, he was controversial. I feel his quick decisions saved the lives of many of his troops, even though they refereed to him as "Ol' Blood and Gut." His Guts and your Blood!

We were inducted January 1st, 1941. I signed up for one year. Good-by dear, we'll be back in a year, we sang. We didn't sing very loud when December 7, 1941 came. We had just finished the three month Carolina Maneuver against Gen. George E. Patton when he was only a one star general. We went back to Camp Edwards, Massachusetts thinking we were gonna get out. Some of the guys who left from home on the advance detail were discharged, and the draft didn't get them for another year.

Oh, well, the boys of summer were just gonna have to hang in there and fight the war. The sad thing was the U.S. Army wasn't really prepared to fight a war at that time. When you think of it, the 1st Big Red I trained us in about 30 days. We were badly beaten in gun drill completion to begin with but in 30 days, my gun crew beat the best the Big Red One sent up. They couldn't believe it. But practice beat them. I drilled the team, day and night. I never let them quit, and it paid off.