 I am Bruce Burns and I wish to start by thanking Lieutenant Colonel Siri of the West Point Center of Oral History and Dr. Steve Waddell, who allowed us to give this presentation in his World War II history class to the Getts of the United States Military Academy at West Point on October 17th, 2016. Lieutenant Colonel Siri then interviewed Mr. Resta for more than two hours and the interview will be able to be accessed through the West Point Center of Oral History site so that future generations will have an opportunity to hear the words of my friend Francis Resta. I came into the Army at age 39 after 9-11 and had my first deployment in Iraq in 2003. At that time combat stress teams were attached to forward combat units. I spent my deployment driving all over Fallujah and Ramadi doing critical incident debriefings and psych assessments. As the Army Psychiatric Therapist for the unit I was attached to the 3rd ACR and Fox Troop. Our battle captain, Josh Byers, West Point Class of 1996 was killed by one of the first IEDs in Fallujah at the end of July. He had just rotated in so I didn't know him well. My driver was wounded by RPG so I was driving my Humvee when it was hit by an IED a week later. While it killed a dump truck driver across the other side it hardly scratched the door of my Humvee. I was back in the States 10 days after the attack and was trying to find someone to talk to about my experience. I joined the BFW and learned that many veterans don't want to talk much. There were more World War II veterans then and I remember my 12 year old son asking a battle of the bulge vet what it had been like. Cold was his reply. Then I met Francis who told me he had written a book called the Combat Veteran and PTSD but wasn't sure if it was any good enough technically to be used by the Veterans Administration for their treatment of PTSD. I took the book with me to Afghanistan for my sixth deployment and felt it helped the combat soldiers due to its plain language and deep understanding. Francis was an engineer and also had some psychology schooling that helped design work teams in Detroit auto industry to work together as teams. He worked for Aerojet and later for the United States Air Force at Mather and Travis Air Force bases as the industrial engineer branch chief in the civil engineering division. His outside passion for flying led him to the Civil Air Patrol as a civilian pilot and he flew search and rescue missions for over the Sierra Nevada mountains for the Air Force for 18 years in the 60s and 70s. He was squadron commander of Mather AFB cap for 32 years. I hope our presentation will give you an eyewitness account of one of the Army's most brutal battles. I hope you will focus on his company commander Captain George L. Kinsey. I challenged the cadets at West Point to be the kind of leaders who would be remembered 72 years later. On this 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack I will be giving an account of the forgotten battle in the European theater in a town called Wells, Germany. While these events may have little in common, both of them were disasters from lack of military intelligence which resulted in great loss of life. On Pearl Harbor Day I was a 16 year old boy growing up at West Point. My father had been stationed there as officer in charge of the music programs. Before that time he had been stationed at Fort Shafter on Oahu so Pearl Harbor was a real place to me and I took the attack personally. This slide shows my family home at Quarters 11 West Point on my three day pass from Fort Dix just before shipping overseas August 1944. Living there at West Point was a wonderful life for any child. I am forever grateful to have grown up there and for the army life. When we gave this talk to the cadets at West Point last month I felt like I was closing a circle. We gave our talk in a classroom at the converted horseback riding hall. I started there learning how to ride horseback in that very building 75 years ago and I was back there again honored to be briefing the future officers of our country's military. Just before I graduated from high school I had scored high enough on the Army and Navy specialized college program tests to be in the Navy program which I selected. I rushed home to proudly announce the news which I had expected would be received with much rejoicing. My mom however looked more stricken than I had ever seen her with a flush face and flashing eyes. She said, not the Navy. She had been a resolute army wife for 20 years so I changed my selection to the Army college program which Colonel Burns will discuss next. In World War II if a high school senior scored well enough on the equivalent of the ASVAB he might be given the option of going to OCS and becoming a lieutenant. However if he scored high enough he could join the ASTP, the Army specialized training program and go to college with the E1 stipend and become an engineer, linguist or something the Army felt it might have need for. Resta's 102nd Infantry Division was partly the product of politics leading up to the 1944 presidential reelection year. At the end of 1943 Congress decided rather than start drafting fathers the military would pull the 110,000 students out of the ASTP program and put them in infantry divisions. The 102nd Division was composed of the 405th, 406th and 407th regiments along with ancillary troops making up an infantry division of about 16,000 men. Half of its troops came from the ASTP program. The other half the cadre were from the Army Organized Reserve in Missouri and Arkansas. They were called the Ozark Division. The 102nd was in combat for 196 days without a break in Holland, Germany and yet for Francis Resta's regiment the 407th one day November 30th 1944 was the worst. On that day the 407th suffered 57% casualties assaulting the Siegfried line in western Germany. In our talk today we will focus on November 30th battle and will follow one scared barely 19-year-old young soldier throughout the day of battle. After you have heard this talk perhaps you will understand what would haunt this soldier enough to write the book The Combat Soldier and PTSD. The 102nd was the first U.S. division to go to France without first stopping in England for training. When they arrived in Normandy the Ozark men were briefed that their 9th Army under General Bradley would be an occupation army. The media were promising the war would be over by Christmas in 1944. Captain Kinsey was CO of the 407th B Company to which Resta belonged. Captain Kinsey thought that although the German Army had turned tailed and abandoned all of France they would be more stubborn when they fought for their homeland. He didn't believe the war was almost over and sensed that the unit would see combat. Captain Kinsey instituted a special training to keep Company B fit while waiting in Normandy. Company B only of the 407th Regiment was formed up daily for 10 mile hikes with light packs and weapons through the beautiful Normandy countryside. Seeing the destruction on the beaches gave the men an introduction to the immense power of combat not unlike a terrible hurricane. As B Company left each morning for training missions and past billets of sister units of the 407th Regiment they got a lot of cat calls. B Company heroes from the units sitting around their tents playing cards and sleeping. B Company responded with a song that one of the men had made up in the states. The men sang it lustily on hikes and at beer drinking parties. It went something like this to an Irish ballad. Oh, where Captain Kinsey's raiders were the rapers of the night. We're dirty sons of bitches and we'd rather f*** than fight. Oh, flim flam god damn, who the hell are we? We're rough and ready fighting men of good ol' Company B. Captain Kinsey really liked that song. We sang it over and over. I'm uncomfortable singing that sexist song now. But the song helped make us believe that we were invincible and indestructible. Without such false confidence built up in endless training exercises and briefings, we would not have had the courage to face the insanity of combat. Gailen Kirkin was the 102nd Division's introduction to the German Siegfried Line. It had 18,000 bunkers and firing points and ran 400 miles from Switzerland to the Baltic Sea. These fortifications were much more massive than the thin line faced on D-Day. The five foot thick reinforced concrete bunkers were in pervious to artillery fire and two camouflage for the Air Force bombing. No offshore Navy guns could reach them. The line also included massive lines of anti-tank stumps and deep ditches which made allied tanks unusable and mines were everywhere. The fortifications were often miles in depth, each one protected by one or several others behind it and more behind those and so on creating horrendous killing fields. Without tanks to support them in no artillery or bombing to help, the only option was to throw wave after wave of just infantry soldiers against the protected machine guns and canning, losing thousands in each assault. The Rhineland Campaign cost 200,000 allied casualties to breach the Siegfried Line and cross the Rhine River, similar to Operation Overlord D-Day and the Breakout which claimed allied casualties of 210,000. Captain Kinsey was always looking for opportunities to improve his company's fighting capability. After Resta's B Company was sent forward to Geilenkirk in Germany, Captain Kinsey learned that a nearby ammo dump had been hit by German artillery and was starting to burn and was about to blow up. He decided it would be a good idea to appropriate some extra weapons. He grabbed three men close by including Resta and they jumped in Kinsey's Jeep and raced to the burning quadrangle. They quickly almost insanely foraged for jeeps, browning automatic rifles, 30 caliber machine guns, some machine guns and ammunition. Then they raced out with four jeeps loaded with equipment just as the ammo began to blow up around them. According to Resta, this action added to Captain Kinsey's mystique and B Company is not really being mortal. With the scrounged equipment plus the 50 caliber machine guns scavenged from tanks knocked out on the Cologne plane, Captain Kinsey reorganized B Company with Resta's mortar section becoming a mobile assault section directly under him. This section was equipped with Jeep mounted 50 caliber machine guns and with mortars carried in the jeeps. Resta's mortar section was armed with 45 caliber Thompson some machine guns or M3 grease guns. With this new firepower, B Company felt they were even more invincible as they prepared for their attack on welts. The attack on welts began for us the day before we jumped off preparing our equipment, getting extra ammunition for our 60 millimeter mortars, our personal weapons, extra hand grenades, a couple days food ration, cigarettes and so on. Anilis Arturi was coming in day and night so we were living in our foxholes and firing our mortars daily. One night in Gernschweiler I was out of my hole and was handed a message to take to Captain Kinsey. He was up in a church steeple watching the Arturi show. After I brought him the message I just, he just started talking to me, didn't excuse me to leave. Kinsey was ecstatic and excited watching the Arturi duels going on. He exclaimed how beautiful it was with the German rounds screaming into our areas, sometimes very close and the American Arturi wishing overhead going out in answer. I was nervous up there high above the ground and exposed as we were. I was much more comfortable in a foxhole or a mortar firing hole but I guess he needed someone to share what he felt was being fully alive, the excitement of danger and the power of the Arturi. He asked me what I thought of it all. I thought he was crazy but with an almost worshipful respect for him I said it's great. In the briefing for the attack on welts we were told only a few machine gun nests were facing us and that it would be an easy fight. None of us had heard of the Siegfried line fortification so we had no idea what we were actually facing. The plan was to start after midnight and just walk halfway across the beat field in the dark, dig in to wait for morning. It was emphasized that we not make any noise while crossing the field and we're not to return any German fire that might come at us. At daybreak we jumped off from our slit trenches on signal after the Arturi provided a smoke screen. Then our 105mm Arturi were to pace the town approaches and fortifications until they were called to stop as we got near. As my platoon prepared to move out that night we fired one more batch of harassing 60mm mortar fire at welts as we had done every night for a week to let the Germans know nothing different was happening. The machine gun section quietly moved out with our platoon sergeant, master sergeant, slaymaker leading away about a 100 in the morning. We felt euphoric to be such a part of such a great event. The mortar section was attached to Captain Kinsey as a mini assault platoon with our new submachine guns. However, at the last minute we were ordered to also carry our mortars and ammo instead of putting them in the jeeps. Apparently Kinsey had changed his mind about whether the noisy jeeps that night were really such a good idea. As we moved out in the dark across the beat fields we came under sporadic light machine gun and rifle fire. The Germans knew we were moving and the occasional tracer rounds lit up the night with an eerie sort of glow. We couldn't see the few guys who were getting hit but we heard an occasional yell. Somewhere in that crossing I jumped into a large artillery blast hole when an overhead artillery ground burst nearby and scared me senseless. It was just a reflex but then I wanted to stay. I remember trying to somehow force my body to melt into the dirt, watching the guys walking past the hole like shadows in the dim light. I had mixed feelings and thoughts of being afraid and a coward. I think my fear of being alone, not with my squad, my buddies, won out and I suddenly realized I had quit and was a coward. I was hiding. I felt overwhelming guilt, got up and ran hard to catch up with my platoon. I remember how heavy my equipment and backpack load was as I ran in the dark across the uneven beat field, trying to hold everything close so as not to make noise. Later as we hiked across the field, a tracer round zip between my mortar gunner, Bacchia Milano and me. We both grabbed for each other, thinking the other was hit but neither were. We were supposed to be sneaking out there under cover of darkness but it was now obvious that our jump off was no longer a surprise. Still no change in orders came down. When we were signaled to stop, we started digging in as quietly as possible. Some of the tracer fires seemed to be coming from the left which puzzled us. It all should have been coming from the woods and welts directly ahead. Eventually the Germans apparently could see nothing to shoot at so it was quiet for the next few hours before jump off and we dozed in our slit trenches. At daybreak I took this picture of a mortar barrel as it lay next to the slit trench ahead of me. The photo shows the edges of many slit trenches going off into the distance. It's the only combat picture of mine that survived that day. The jump off of daylight was delayed because there was no smoke screen. We finally were called to jump off anyway. The smoke screen, our artillery rounds finally started but it was mostly in the woods in front of us where we were supposed to be going. However the Germans were zeroing in on us from the left and there was no smoke to hide in. We all just got up as ordered and started forward. It was the most moving sight in the war for me to see the entire regiment and a multi-layered line off to the right moving forward together. It gave me the feeling that we were absolutely invincible. But that feeling only lasted a few moments. Some of us pondered why the heavy machine gun and our artillery fire seemed to be coming from our left not in front. We also realized that the fire was, we soon realized that the fire was from Tiger tanks of what I learned later was the 10th SS Panzer Division which was not supposed to be there. We were being cut down from grazing 88 cannon and heavy machine gun fire from the side of our line of attack which gave them maximum killing effect. Ben and Hoyt, one of my best friends who had never seen his newborn son was killed in front of me, his head blown off and I just stared for a moment at his body, hopping down as I passed. Staff Sergeant Hitt, our mortar section leader, was cut in two right at his waist with what must have been tank heavy machine gun fire. The top half looked at me as I passed. It seemed his eyes followed mine but he may have been already dead. Our weapons between officer Lieutenant Martin went down. We had been trained not to stop for anyone who fell. Our medics job was to take care of the wounded but if you stopped for someone then two more were down instead of one and you'd be an unmoving easy target in a killing field. How we were trained to be so uncaring I have no idea. There was so much confusion with so many men going down that we were putting on frozen our tracks, stop cold. We lay down in the beat field and some were trying to get a foxhole started. Our own artillery was firing over our heads into welts but didn't seem aware of the tanks firing at us off to the north. We were pinned down in the beat field with the 88 fire going clop-clop-clop through the beats and men. The German Tigers were firing solid anti-tank rounds. The confusion and devastation was numbing with guys sort of jerking up out of the beat like ragdolls when they were hit by an 88 round except ragdolls don't scream. We all knew we couldn't stay out there in the beat fields. We were all hugging the ground until Blackie Milano got up in crazy frustration and screaming started to charge across the beat field towards the rise into town. We all normally got up and followed and we'd been trained to never, to all stay together. Blackie had the 60 millimeter mortar tripod and I had the barrel and Kane had the base plate and the others behind us carried the ammo so if anyone was missing it would put the mortar out of action. As we dumbly got up it seemed the whole of beat company followed us into a ridiculous charge across the beat field. We finally got across the beat field and into the woods and started up the rise toward welts. As we worked our way into the woods we started taking casualties from our own beat company, D company battalion, heavy weapons fire, 81 millimeter mortar and heavy water-cooled machine guns were theirs. They originally had been firing over our heads into the woods but as the terrain rose and we moved higher their fire was hitting us. More men were going down. Once during the attack in those woods I was admiring the firing pattern of the deep companies 81 millimeter mortars landing amongst us traversing almost perfectly. The explosions marked regularly up to us over us and then on past us with evenly spacing. I was trying to take a picture when one round landed right in front of me blowing me six feet back into a haystack. Now I was unscathed but the photo op was ruined. In the middle of that chaos Captain Kinsey signaled from across the clearing for the mortars to fire flares. He was desperate to try anything to signal D company's heavy weapons and the artillery to stop firing. He couldn't communicate because our walkie talkies and backpack radios were all knocked out or the men dead. Every mortar man were confused why he would want flares in the daytime. So I ran across the clearing to Kinsey and jumped into the depression he was in to verify that he wanted flares. He was very angry and yelled at me, yes, do it. I quickly ran back across the clearing and we rushed to set up two mortars and fire flares but they disappeared in the smoke above us. We had no effect to stop D company fire coming in and more guys were going down. We were taking German fire from the Tiger tanks and the pillboxes as well. Months later my squad leader Sergeant Hapman told me a German machine gun had been firing all around me trying to hit me but mostly behind me as I ran across the clearing. He told me he put me in for a bronze star but the medals don't always get down to company level. I don't think it was heroic anyway since I didn't know they were shooting at me and what's heroic about just running across the clearing. Thinking about it later I've never been able to imagine how the D company men could just keep pumping all that fire power into the rise before wells and never look at where the fire was going. Not even one man and if the officers who weren't busy firing anything weren't looking and neither what the hell were they doing. My at one point as we carefully tried to work our way uphill I saw a German out in the woods trying to surrender with his hands raised in his helmet gone. I remember screening for someone to give me a weapon I don't know what had happened to my in the confusion of combat you don't think very well or remember everything that's going on you aren't really making decisions you just react as you're trained to and in our training I didn't carry a submachine gun. I finally got back my weapon or maybe I had it all along but the German had already been shot I couldn't see him anymore after my screaming spell. My job as mortar gunner made combat feel the time sort of mechanical only our squadron leader could see through field glasses the Germans were trying to kill as we fired our mortars and he observed and sometimes told us what was happening. We sometimes heard about kills from returning patrols who had seen Germans blown up by our barrages that left us with a weird kind of frustration. We were supposed to be killing Germans but never really knew if or how many it wasn't a hands-on kind of killing like the riflemen and machine gunners in the company we're doing. So we weren't sure we were pulling our weight in the basic denomination of killing Germans. As we got to the outskirt of welts at the top of the rise our 105 artillery which had been firing over our heads now was landing on us in addition to the German 88s. I don't know how the Germans could stand our 105s which they endured throughout the European campaigns it numbed us into confusion and inaction. We huddled in the first buildings we came to which were being blown down around us. The Germans were still using solid rounds we just kept going through the buildings we'd listen to the clock clock clock trying to figure out if it was coming toward our building but at least we had buildings and walls to hide behind if we could figure out what direction all the artillery fire was not coming from. I think my beat company was the first into welts while most of the battalion was probably still pinned down out in the beat fields. We didn't see anyone for hours I doubt the command section had any idea we made it into welts. Master Sergeant Slaymaker now leading the assault platoon into welts signaled us to move into cover and he went on with the light machine guns to set up a defensive perimeter on the other side of welts our objective. The mortar men who made it that far went into one house we were not only shell shocked but leaderless so we bunched together like a bunch of dumb recruits. We'd been trained not to touch anything anywhere not even dead German bodies because booby traps were everywhere but when my squad entered the kitchen one of the guys just walked up to the stove and opened the store. It must have been some kind of mindless curiosity the stove was booby trapped with a teller mine a teller anti-tank mine the size of a large dinner plate and about four inches thick designed to blow the treads off tanks or demolish light vehicles. It exploded about 11 a.m. that awful November 30th morning. I was lucky to be shielded by one of the ammo bearers who had been standing between me and the stove so I only got hit with shrapnel that went between his legs. He was killed instantly and he and I were blown into an amour like closet me face first and I remember screaming and trying to push the dead guy on my back away from me. I couldn't even recognize the dead guy bleeding all over me. I recall having a sensation in that closet that I was dead and then an elevator going down to hell and I remember yelling no, no, no. I had originally thought only my squad had been in that kitchen but learned later that the remnants of all three mortar squads were there. Two men were killed and the rest of us all wounded. The company mortar section was no more until I got the guy off me and tried to stand up. I didn't know I was wounded with 13 pieces of shrapnel in my left leg. I finally realized that I was hit and not dead and my leg was starting to really hurt. The most amazing feeling came over me a confusion, confusing mixture of anger and denial, absolute incredulity that it could happen to me, fear that I was hurt bad and the hopeless feeling wondering what was going to become of me. I'd like to quote a passage from James Jones' extraordinary book, World War II, about the different attitude everyone seems to have for the wounded. Jones writes, quote, something strange seems to happen when a man is hit. There is almost an alchemic change in him and in others relationship to him. Assuming he isn't killed outright and is only wounded, it is as though he has passed through some veil isolating him and has entered some realm where others the unwounded cannot follow. He has become a different person and the others treat him differently. Perhaps we think some of their bad luck might rub off on us too. In any case, while they are treated by their comrades as tenderly and as humanly possible and everything is done for them that can be, they are looked at with a sort of commingled distaste, guilt and irritation and when they finally are moved out of the area everybody heaves a sort of silent sigh of relief without looking anybody else in the eyes. The wounded themselves seem to acquiesce to this attitude as though they are half-ashamed for having been hurt in the first place and feel now that they can only be a drag and wait on their outfit, end quote. In the kitchen with the wall blown out I could see everything going on in the town square. In spite of our tourist shelling all around us two guys went out with the Zookas to force two of our regimental light steward tanks to give up their first aid kits which included morphing before they were allowed to pass. They were running from the German tanks entering town from the north. The situation was understandable. It would be suicide for a steward tank to try to take on a tiger. I got a shot of morphing and others in the basement did too. My pain drifted mostly away but I felt forgotten. Guys kept carrying the wounded into the basement. I don't know how many died down there in the cellar but occasionally one was brought up and put out in the square. One guy, Seberman came running through the house with no mouth and blood streaming from the hole where his mouth had been after a solid 88 round apparently went through the building he was in and just took his mouth and part of his jaw with it as it went on through the buildings. I think he was trying to scream but the sound was weirdly guttural like he was joking. Others got him quieted and moved down into the basement. I imagine the basement was quite a scene of terror with so many wounded guys crowded there with no help in sight. They probably fed on each other's despair so perhaps I was lucky to be up in the kitchen after all. Led by Master Sergeant Slaymaker, machine gun elements from B Company finally got to their objective, the roar river side of town and set up defensive positions. However, one of their own P-47 fighter bombers started to bomb and strafe them and the remnants had to evacuate their positions and go back into the town. That happened because the front line marker panels apparently hadn't had been left behind in Guarana Swiler. One of the unknown heroic jobs in World War II was putting down and taking up of these large brightly colored plastic panels which designated for our pilots where the front lines were. Anything on the German side of the panels was fair game for killing. The Air Force pilots saw all the activity we were making on the German side of the marker panels, assumed we were German and did what they were supposed to. A few bombs hit near the town square and it was strafed once and I thought I should get down in the basement but was too scared and ashamed to ask for anything. When I got back to B Company after my stay in the hospital in England I learned that one of our B Company guys named White used one of our Jeep Mounted 50s to shoot back at the B-47 strafing us and one flew away trailing smoke. White was recommended for a Silver Star posthumously, however the different official version of his award is shown on the slide. In that blown apart house in Welts we learned that Captain Kenzie had been killed earlier and it seemed the war was lost. It was an emotional blow to many of us. We were told that he was trying to clean out a German machine gun nest and having run out of grenades was trying to throw German stick grenades but one blew up in his face. Knowing that Kenzie also was killed made it seem like the end of everything. I truly wanted to die as I lay there on that kitchen floor. During the day when elements of the 406 Regiment finally came into town and fought their way out of town into the positions which had been our objectives our own artillery and air force bombing had finally stopped and only the German artillery was coming in. Somehow everything seemed quiet and organized and we wondered when we would be able to get out. The 406 guys seemed to be from a different army. They were alert and organized, moved out quickly and efficiently while we still felt numb, spaced out, beaten, useless. When they all floated us in a dark driveway at the 406 Regimental Age Station no one knew where the 407th station was. Everything seemed tense and crazy again. A continuing stream of wounded, sometimes pretty vocal, were moved into the age station to be worked on until I alone was left outside in the alley. I didn't know that I was to be evacuated to a field hospital for my more serious wounds and lay on the litter in that dark driveway at the age station for what seemed like ours. I was shaking from the cold and maybe shock or both, yet the worst part was not knowing why I wasn't being cared for. I felt abandoned and useless and left out there to die. However eventually my wounds got a loose field dressing and I was taken by Jeep to the field hospital in Maestricht, Holland hours away. In that Dutch hospital I was prepped for leg computation below the knee. I was drifting under the anesthesia. I listened to a Dutch doctor arguing with the army doctors insisting he could probe for the pieces of shrapnel and save my leg. But the army doctors were insisting that there wasn't time and there was too much internal damage to the bone, tendons, nerves and so on. Just as I was going unconscious the Dutch doctor raised his voice and almost shouted his protest, I'm tired of assisting in bad decisions and my hospital, he yelled. When I came out of the anesthesia a nurse was slapping me because I was screaming about losing my leg. She told me to feel the leg and that it was there. I finally did as she insisted and was dumbfounded to realize that I still had my leg. Years later after discharge I tried to find out through army records the name of the Dutch doctor who would save my leg but could find no record. After Maestricht I was trucked back to the 16th General Hospital a series of tents outside Lage Belgium. We listened to V1 German bus bombs going over continually to targets in Lage or maybe England once a V1 hit one of the tents in the hospital not far from ours killing several of the wounded soldiers and wounding nurses. I felt helpless not being able to get up to help them. To me those nurses in such forward areas were two heroes of World War II. After that V1 hit I was in a state of suspended waiting wondering why I was changing hospitals but I didn't ask anyone. I didn't realize that each move was to a level of hospitalization farther from the front at each level the decision perhaps had been made that they couldn't handle my case and then I'd be sent back farther in the hierarchy of the medical support system or perhaps the combination of frostbitten feet and serious wounds slayed on me for England from the beginning but no one told me to me it seemed more like a suspended judgment where I still might lose my leg so I was worried of everything happening to me and didn't believe anything anyone told me. After a couple of days or so in the Lage Tent Hospital I was entrained to Paris for an airlift to England. As I was being pulled out of the ambulance at the hospital in Paris I was shocked into fury to see that the men carrying the stretcher were German soldiers still in uniform. As I had been trying to kill German soldiers on site the past two months without any conscious thought I lunged at the one at my head upsetting the treasurer and I fell to the ground. The German prisoner whom I had tried to get at was crying as he was led away. While the American medic G.I. sued me and got me quieted down I was told later at that hospital that the German prisoners knew that if they dropped a wounded American G.I. they would be taken out behind the hospital and shot. I felt better back in 1944 knowing that. After perhaps a day or two in the Paris Hospital I was taken to an airport and loaded into a seat 54 aircraft for the flight to England. I was on the top row with the curve the hull curving over my face. The plane seemed to drone on forever and I floated in and out of sleep. There were a couple of nurses with us and I remember that they seemed so tired and spaced out like we had been in combat. After three months in the hospital at South Hampton England getting the best nursing care in the world I can attest. I finally was declared ready to go back into combat. I remember being very depressed at the thought of going back knowing I'd survived one impossible day of wealth and a month of combat before that but how many more could I get away with. I knew that some of the old-timers like the Big Red One the First Infantry Division who had been fighting since 1942 in Africa and although were few left getting into the Rhineland Campaign the lucky ones had been wounded numerous times and returned to the Big One. Lucky not to be dead. When I left England they sent me to the replacement depot of Giver France on the Belgian border. It was in a wonderful old castle high atop a cliff overlooking a river which was the Belgian France border. We learned that because of the earlier German bulge attacks decimated the green ASDP 104th and 106th divisions we would not get back to our own units but instead would be sent to those divisions. We couldn't believe that we were being treated like new replacements to be shoved in anywhere needed and not get back to our buddies. As noted in Stephen Ambrose remarkable book that citizen soldiers the US Army's replacement policy of keeping battle depleted units online and sending new men up and feeding them into the front lines was not practiced by all armies. The Russians had the same piecemeal replacement policy as the Americans but the British and Germans withdrew beat up units out of combat reinforcement with new men and equipment good food and rest and gave them all training together to feel connected and cohesive. The American flow of untrained recruits to depleted combat units resulted in veterans treating the replacements as expendable and placing them on point for patrols. They were often left to learn for themselves how to survive. Stephen Ambrose quote it was to the obvious benefit the old boys to help the new kids but nevertheless the veterans tried to avoid replacements for one thing the new men tend to draw a fire because they bunched up and talk too much or lit cigarettes at night. For another the old man just didn't want to make friends with guys who were expected to die soon end quote. So you can understand why a few of us from the 102nd decided to go AWOL and try to get back to our own companies. Leaving the repo depot as it was called then was easy because it was little accountability for presence you know no morning roll call and no guards of course. We packed our duffel bags slung them over our shoulders and just walked out. We hitched rides and luckily didn't run across any officers who would have asked what GIs with duffel bags were doing hitchhiking across Belgium. Going north and east we finally made it to a British unit online. The British were cooperative enough to feed us and to assign one of the Brent gun carriers to show show for us to our units. For a few hours we accidentally crossed behind the German lines but the Brent gun carrier guys realized our predicament and got us safely back to our across our own lines. We eventually found where our units were. I hitchhiked on a two and a half ton army truck back to the 102nd division area and finally found company B dug in at Creffold on the Rhine where they had moved only 20 miles from where I had left them going through the secret line. The new B company commander I didn't know him or he me was amused at my A wall and assured me that he would make sure it never got in my personnel file at core headquarters and that's the fact. The 102nd division was in combat for another three months after rest or return to his company shelling German positions across the Rhine running endless patrols and enduring constant day and night artillery duels mostly sitting them out in foxholes. There were occasional casualties but rest I was lucky not to be one again. The 102nd crossed the Rhine at Vessel in March 1945 and fought very light action across northern Germany neither side wanting to do much fighting. They met the Russians at the Elbe River northwest of Berlin and after VE Day went into occupation duty for 10 long months in central and southern Germany before finally being allowed to return home. Any questions? According to Stephen Ambrose there was at that time in December and January 44-45 along this line the Siegfried line and the Hurtgen for us is that how you pronounce that. There was 1.3 million total troops both sides did ever ever seem to you that there was that many? Oh no you know we often didn't even know where we were we weren't privy to maps or discussions about strategy or tactics so you know we told to take that town so we did and that's that's all we knew. We knew the names well St. Gallen-Kirchen and Gernschweiler and Puffendorf and Emondorf and so on but we didn't know where they were. We had no idea that there were 30 divisions and five armies along the German border trying to get through the Siegfried line. That was an enormous undertaking. The the allies were kind of surprised at how easy it was to get across France and Belgium and so they weren't really prepared for fighting through a Siegfried line. They had no time to do anything except as we said throw men against pill boxes. Any other questions? I'm sorry? How is it? It's great. It's been really hardly any problem. Actually my right knee is is more of a problem and I hurt that after an occupation which as Colonel Bern said was ten months we were in occupation. The combat troops didn't get to go home first but my right knee was hurt playing touch football with the guys in B company and that gave me a lot of problems. I'm sorry? You showed a slide with the steward take and the Tigers. Were there any Shermans? Oh yeah there were Shermans but the Shermans weren't really a match for the Tigers anyway until the end of the war when the Shermans finally got the 90 millimeter cannon that the tank destroyers had before that. The Shermans had with a 75. And the stewards were attached to infantry divisions as scout tanks. They didn't have combined arms armor so unless an armor. The Tigers were awesome. They were invincible. And what were they in infantry? How did the Germans use the Tigers? Stewards? I think the Germans were using more rather than using arm and division together. They'd combine but units in those days were together mostly but even an armored unit would have infantry attached to it as well. The German response to any attack was to counterattack with their Panzer divisions so they they used them and and sometimes men Germans rode on them and we learned that I read and so Patton's tanks did the same thing and we learned that they were very mobile. That way you could move a whole army just with the tanks. So the the Tigers though were something you don't want to know. Again I'll refer to Ambrose book that he mentions more than once that officers very rarely were on the front line. That's very true. One little short story when we were in Bergen to just over the border into German Germany from Holland. We were doing a kind of a holding action. The patrols were going out every night but and the Mortarmen had a fire day and night but there wasn't much combat going on and we were eating pretty well. We had a kitchen that we were using to cook animals that we found pork and beef and chickens and the our battalion command heard about it and came down to visit us. They wanted to get some good food and so we hated them. We put on a real good show for them. They were doing all the military stuff of asking us where our posts were and you know where our mortar holes were and all that and they asked where is your ammunition stored and we told them in the basement of the building that they were in. They didn't even finish that bite. They just got up and left. We never saw them after that. The only officers we saw of course were our company commander and our platoon leaders. We never saw regimental or division. Ambrose did mention one British general who visited the 102nd and was appalled to learn that nobody ever went up to the front lines to see what the troops were being faced with but that they were sending them what they were sending them to do. He also was appalled that we got no hot food. The British apparently got hot meals even in the middle of combat and he couldn't believe that we were using rations and whatever we might find. I wanted you to share your coming home story since it was very delayed. It wasn't parades. They're coming home the train station. I got roles in Grand Central Station. I was trying to sleep on a on a stairway you know in combat you have no place to sleep and no toilet facilities sometimes no food and so you sort of slept when you could. Often you were too tired to get much sleep but occasionally you'd have a space that you could get you know five or six hours. So it was nothing for me to go to sleep on the stairway but I didn't realize that there was a guy who picked pocketed me. He rolled me over grabbed my wallet and ran as I woke up and I chased him but there's just so many people there that I lost him in the crowd. I had no ticket to go home and no money and no ID and there was a USO station there booth there in the Grand Central Station and they bought me another ticket and fed me and so I got home. Any other? You mentioned that it was a German trying to surrender and ended up being shot. Was it a let's take no prisoners policy? Wasn't a policy we were just trained. You got to realize that combat is an insanity that no human being would want to do and so they had to train us. They trained us not only how to kill but to want to kill and it's you know the Russian street of the Germans the same way the Germans killed 27 million Russians and when the Russians we met on the Elbe River if the German was alive you shot him it's that simple and we had that attitude trained into us also. What day-to-day was so horrible for you what kept you going day after day? I don't know I really don't you know when I think back what we were asked to do to go against pill boxes I don't know why we did we just did we were told to so we did. I don't have any any patriotic reason to give you I'm sorry. Yes Carol. Wasn't the camaraderie and sort of body system maybe dead? Oh yes the I think I think the bottom line on the things like the the brotherhood of combat veterans is that you learn what has to be done and you see a guy that needs help you help him he doesn't have to call and ask for anything and you're you operate as a unit that way everybody is part of the unit everybody's helping everybody else and you know that if you don't keep him alive he can't keep you alive so it's more than a camaraderie it's a kind of love that you know doesn't have anything to do with sex but it is a love a deep deep love that you have for your fellow buddies when they're killed it's it's many years to get old get past feeling grieving about it. You said you never knew exactly where you were because you didn't look at maps you ever go back later after the war and take a look at see Matt and face your no no I've sort of wanted to but I really don't want to you know it's there's too much there's too many memories that I don't really want and most of my division is buried in the guard leg and I'm sorry in the Margaret and hospital Margaret and cemetery in Holland and I've always wanted to go there and find the big company. I will add there's a video on YouTube returned to welts Google that of one of the veterans who did return and the pictures of the field were of the actual field pulled from that video. Given your experiences do you have any opinions on the way the war the war to this portrayed in the media afterwards in the films? I'm sorry. Do you have any opinions about how the war was portrayed afterwards in the films and the media? Most of them of course are artificial but there's been a few good ones. The big red one with Lee Marvin in it is one of the best I think it goes from the big red one in Africa through all of the big red ones combat and it's with one squad actually just three guys that are surviving and Lee Marvin is the sergeant and to me it portrayed very succinctly the endlessness of combat. It gave you the feeling that we had of you know you just go on and on and on you don't know what's going to happen and those guys had it for four years that's that's just not we shouldn't do that to human beings. See others you know most of the books and movies and the brothers I understand is good finding Private Ryan. I thought had a lot of realism in it but I didn't really like the movie. I don't know why I just didn't know Fury was the first one to cover the armored version. Did you go through the Normandy beaches when you arrived? No we landed at shareboard in August. Oh prior to? No after. Oh after? In Beijing was July of January June 6th and we were there on the beaches our Captain Kinsey took us hiking on the beaches because he wanted us to see and soon enough after DJ that everything was still pretty much disrupted and they had taken the dead away but most of the damaged equipment was still there. What was the typical age of your buddies? How old were they? I'm sorry? How old were your buddies? I still do. How old were your buddies? What was the average age? Well almost all of the ASDP guys which was half of the division were my age. I was 19 at Welts and the older guys from the Cadry that started the 102nd Division failed maneuvers which is sort of a final exam before they're sent overseas. We understood that the command section had failed the troops were pretty well trained and what they did was take half of the men from the 102nd Division sent them overseas for replacements after D-Day and the other half stayed and that Cadry were the ones that trained us ASDP guys so half of the men roughly were ASDP and half were Cadry. The Cadry were a bit older they were mostly uneducated but they were great men. I will add an ASDP was a 50-50 chance if you got sent over like Joseph Heller as an individual replacement with just basic training no fitting in with men and just thrown at the front and a lot of those guys didn't last more than a week. Francis was in one of the expansion divisions if you're going to be going to the front that was the lucky half that actually got a train with the unit in the states before they went over and said just it was very similar to Vietnam. There's a lot of parallels as far as individual guys rotating in towards the end of the war there. Because the division had not had a final maneuvers you know a final exam before we went over we were first attached by each regiment in 102nd Division was attached to a different unit. We were attached to the 29th Infantry Division and that would give our command section some experience and then we finally got all together for the attack on Gile and Kirk. You have this extra slide I was just wondering about another part of your talk. The talk has been used in different forms this was given to my medical unit back in 2014 it was a different talk at the time focusing on more the combat stress elements and I had to put up the comparative casualties just to give an idea of the intensity of the war compared to the current operations we've been in. And Sergeant Bergdahl has been found since then. Are there any other questions? I could talk all night and I want to point out that I had therapy starting with in 1990. I didn't tell my kids or my wife at the time that I had even been in the war. Most combat veterans do not want to talk about it can't talk about it. After all the therapy I've had for all these decades I can talk about it and so I want to. I want people to hear what it was like because most combat veterans you're not going to get anything out of them. They can't really talk because it's such a different world. There's just no way to explain it. Before you had therapy were you able to talk about it then? No, I didn't talk to anybody about it. I didn't tell my kids. My son was really surprised. He was about 12 I think when I started therapy and he learned that I had been a combat veteran. Ambrose's book is one that the citizen soldiers by Stephen Ambrose If you want to see what war was really like read some of his stuff. His citizen soldiers has two halves. The first half is the D-Day invasion. The second half was the Rhineland campaign that I was in. And that book is very real, very real. He talks about all the things that hit a person. The medals and ribbons, what do they mean to you? Well, I'm proud. This is a bronze star. This is a purple heart. And these are the service medals. This, of course, is a division patch. And this is the Civil Air Patrol wings, pilot wings. Actually, I'm most proud of the CIB Combat Energy Badge because only infantry can wear it. Even Marines can't. They have another one that's similar. But theirs came out after, so there's a second class. I will say I pointed out to the Gadets, the bronze stars, somewhat unique in that his unit who was in battle that day was given the bronze stars, I think, in the 1970s. Everybody that was in combat November 30 at Welts was issued a bronze star. So I don't know of any other unit that was so awarded. We also got a unit citation that I haven't worn there, which was also for Welts. Welts was a bad time. Well, I guess that's about it, unless we have someone new that wants to ask a question. I think transition back into civilian life. You're transition back into civilian life. How did that go for you? Well, that's kind of an interesting question. Most veterans that came home felt very much honored and they were told over and over that they were heroes and all that. But I had experience more like the Vietnam veterans where I was an officer's son, but I was a sergeant when I got home. And you know, 15 million troops came home and there weren't enough clothes for 15 million people to buy. So it took quite a while for all of the tailors and seamstresses to make suits for everybody. So I was in my uniform for quite a bit. One time I was walking at home at West Point in the academic area and ran into a previous school buddy of mine, Lee Parmley. And he and I, you know, we hugged him and we're talking animatedly and so on. An officer beckoned Lee over across the street and I could see that Lee was being really chewed out. And so Lee came back across and said, I gotta go. I said, it looked like he was chewing you out. And he said, yeah, loitering between classes. And a couple of nights later, I walk up Parmley, Lee's younger brother and my younger brother, Rodney, had talked about that incident. And Rodney said something about how tough it was for Lee. All of the demerits he got from seeing me. And he'd be walking that area the way the West Point cadets had to if they got demerits. He'd be walking for months. And I said, for loitering between classes? He said no for talking to an enlisted man. And that was the kind of feelings that I got. And also he came back ten months after the war it's over because of the occupation duties. And so every story's already been told. All the parades are over. Everybody's getting on and he's just coming back that much later. Versus. We kind of contrasted. I was IED, hit my Humvee. Ten days later I'm back to school night at Cesar Chavez. It was just the opposite. So that's kind of why I was reaching out to him because I wasn't really... Going home was all we ever thought about. The war was over. We were citizen soldiers. We'd been in to win the war and now we want to go home. And of course we couldn't. You got to realize there were 13 million troops overseas and you can't take them all home very rapidly. So they had a point system which those with the most medals got to go home. First the Navy had their own transportation. They went home. The Air Force had points for flying over a battle zone. My division had just three battles and an Air Force guy would have 20 or 30 battle stars and that was three points each. So the medals didn't get down to the unit. You know, when you're in combat who's going to come talk to you or write about you or bring a medal? It just didn't happen in the Rhineland campaign. We never saw a USO. We were never relieved. We never went back to rest and so there was just no occasion for anybody to give us a medal. But in combat you had to kill people and you were living in luck and dirt and you weren't eating and probably cussing or whatever and then you come home to West Point where everybody has some behavioral norms. How did you transition from such a dark experience? Well, I think the only answer to that was that I didn't except that my dad talked to me. He'd come home early from work and all the rest of the day and evening and every weekend for the six months before I went to college he talked to me and talked to me and talked to me. And that I think sort of reoccultured me and made me a human being. I kept some contact with my buddies but they were all kind of lost souls. Big Jim O'Brien had been in the company for all 196 days that the company was online and he never had a break. He wasn't lucky, he didn't get wounded. So he was really screwed up. And all of them were and I just, I hate to say it but I started not wanting to see them anymore because they were screwed up and I wasn't. At least, mostly I wasn't. You buried it so that you could go on and sort of get married and have a family. Oh yeah, I went to college and I've had a good life. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you.