Basic Training at Camp Croft, South Carolina
I was inducted June 8th, 1943, with fourteen other young men from Waterville, Maine. This was quite an experience for an 18-year old from central Maine. For instance, learning how to handle weapons and dig foxholes in hard red clay, and then practicing how to run forward and fall flat into shooting position with a Browning automatic rifle, or execute bayonet thrusting into a target. But why was a skinny 6-footer assigned to carry the forty-pound sub-machine gun on long hikes, when husky men who were somewhat shorter, heavier and stronger carried merely the M-1 Garand rifle?
ASTP at Michigan State Normal College
I was selected for basic engineering training in this program of six months. Our rather small group of perhaps fifty men was housed in the large brick dormitory of this closed college in Ypsilanti, Michigan. We were given instruction in such topics as surveying and drafting. From September 1943 to March 1944, it presented an interesting interlude of learning.
Regimental formation at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin
We were here formed into combat units. During basic training, we were all at one point tested for auditory acuity, which resulted in my being placed in radio and telegraph training. I remember being awed by a much older soldier in my small group who could send and receive telegraph signals at an unbelievable speed. He had developed this skill while working for horse race tracks for a decade. So I was assigned to the 385th Infantry as a radio operator with Company G.
While we trained during the spring and summer, we bunked in long two-story barracks with gently sloping roofs and one central heater, each structure large enough to house one company of soldiers. (My barracks at Camp McCoy is pictured at the end of this article as displayed online.)
We saw many young fellows of my "tender" age, others who were of a rough sort, and some who seemed many years older and had just a couple of months prior had returned from military service in the north African campaign. We were a motley group; it was good experience for a young man from a small city who had led a sheltered life. While we were being formed and trained, one unit came back from their maneuvers in Northern Michigan, at a place they called Watersmeet, and we heard from them about the bitter cold as they trained for the experience of living outdoors and fighting during a winter in France.
In practice formation one morning, while drilling with our rifles, one soldier inadvertently fired a shot. It merely hit the ground a few feet from me and proved to be the closest to my being shot in the entire war.
Our full-time pre-combat training terminated here early November of 1944. (A picture of my buddy Roy Nelson at Camp McCoy is at the end of this article, online, as are others of a variety of people and places.)
Shipment via Camp Miles Standish, Mass., to England
We moved again by train, not being told where we were going. Yet it was to Camp Miles Standish in southeastern Massachusetts. There we spent a day or two being assembled. I was in Service Company as a radio and telegraph operator. We then moved to Boston harbor, and November 23rd went aboard the small troop ship - the "liberty ship" Sea Owl -- as part of a convoy to England. This ship was launched in Florida December 17, 1943, and was converted the next June to transport 2,156 troops across the Atlantic. We were escorted by a few naval ships for protection from German submarines. We landed in ten days at Southampton, and were moved at once to Bournemouth.
Movement from Bournemouth, England, through France to the front
Our unit was stationed in the Tollard Royal Hotel, an ocean-front hotel made famous two years later by serial-killer Neville George Clevely Heath, a British military captain. I do not remember whether we were there more than three weeks. The time flew! One day I was able to obtain a military pass and use a vehicle to drive up to London. I looked up a lawyer friend of my father, his office being in the Inner Temple. This man then wrote my father a note about having had a surprise visit from "David" - telling my surprised parents where I had been.
It was on the night of January 8th, 1945, that we were transported on LST #290, a naval craft, for us to land on a beach somewhere in Normandy. (I had no sense of where we landed, though the Division history says it was near Le Havre.) At once we moved inland over a dozen miles to set up a temporary camp in a very cold barren field. It snowed that night, and we had better have kept our boots inside our tents!
The next days we moved east by stages. I well remember sitting in the back of a Willys jeep while my driver, part of a lengthy train of vehicles, drove in the middle of the night through the huge city of Rheims. We soon learned that we were to help contain the Battle of the Bulge, to hold that southern flank in southern Luxembourg. On January 14th we moved forward to take a position near Champion (just outside Namur and west of Liege, Belgium). And ten days later our outfit moved some 80 miles south-southeast to a position in the fields just outside of Echternach, Luxembourg.
During that night-time drive through eastern France and into Belgium, sitting in the open jeep, with my radio equipment, I became very cold and developed frostbite in my toes, a condition which stayed with me for well over a month. For a week I had to sleep with my feet outside the sleeping bag to ease the pain which gradually went away.
From time to time we were able to send censored V-mail home to our folks, microfilmed for transmission from Europe. And occasionally we would receive a similar condensed photographic image of a letter from home. For some curious reason, I kept only one of these - a letter from Richard Crocker, a trumpet player who was my high school chum in Waterville, Maine, his letter received just days before he was shot down and killed over Yugoslavia while serving as an air force bomber tail gunner.
The weeks facing the Siegfried Line
For many days we were assembled between two other regiments, a few miles west of Echternach. The 417th Regiment was on our left flank, the 304th on our right. I remember some of us watched a barn in a large field as it was hit by German tracers and burned much of the night. It no longer provided shelter for men on either side who wanted to hide and snipe or infiltrate from there in no-mans-land. Echternach was once a picturesque town. The River Sauer flows past the town, surrounded by its medieval walls with towers. It was very badly damaged in World War II.
One night around the first of February, I was detailed to ride in a jeep with another noncom, from our holding place to a point nearer the front. It was very dark though the stars could be seen. We wound over dirt roads in rolling hills, with not a single light on the vehicle. Sometime around midnight we and our vehicle were suddenly jerked to the left, half off the road, the jeep then hanging somewhat over the side of a shallow cliff. It turned out that the Germans had strung a heavy wire on an angle across the lane so as to severely injure the neck of any GI driving that road. This having occurred in previous months, the Army had equipped our jeep with a strong four-foot V-shaped bar, with a short angle at the top, this addition to the jeep being welded to the front bumper on a slightly backward-slanting angle. It worked for us - thank goodness - though the rest of the drive was then very scary.
I was once driving a jeep back toward the capital city of Luxembourg on an empty paved road when an officer’s vehicle came heading toward the front. That was my only sight of General George S. Patton, Jr., sitting in the back of his open Dodge 3/4-ton command car. He commanded the Third Army of which the 76th
Infantry Division was part all during the European Campaign.
My mom mailed me a shoe box filled with a few items, one being a pair of black leather winter mittens. It reached my unit in Luxembourg. With my chilled hands trying to work outside, they were sure welcome. However, a few days later on a very cold day, I was foolish enough after hours outdoors, returning to camp, to place them on a hot stove, resulting in the leather hardening rather badly.
After breaking through the German line during February 7th to the 11th, we inched our way toward Trier, a German city on the banks of the Moselle River. I much later read the report by Vincent Sheen, war correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, dated March 3, 1945:- "The 76th has been performing its horseshoe maneuver since last Sunday [thereby capturing pockets of German soldiers], which involved two separate cleanups on Siegfried Line pillboxes and several forced marches. The most advanced elements have done 20 miles in the past two days and, when I left them, were on high ground overlooking Trier."
Later I heard that my father was using various news reports to track the 76th on his maps of Europe as we made progress. (He had served as a First Lieutenant in the Field Artillery during World War I, though he was never shipped to Europe.)
Sheen also reported "The 76th’s first action was crossing the Sauer River into the Siegfried Line at Echternach on 7 Feb., but at this time and for some time afterwards it was on the secret list because Germans did not yet know of its existence. Consequently its most formidable exploit which consisted of fighting a way through the thickest pillbox and mine area in the Siegfried Line was done anonymously."
At some bombed house in Trier, I found a small camera with a roll of film still in it. This was used over the next fortnight to take near two dozen snapshots. (A dozen very small images taken with this camera are at the end of this article online.) Also I picked up among the rubble a late-19th century history book published in France, green cloth cover with a broken spine, one which I kept as a souvenir and still have to this day.
The drive through Germany at forced pace
Getting to and across the Rhine was exhilarating after weeks facing the Siegfried Line and learning how crippling was the result of the break-through by the regiment on our left flank. On March 18th all units of the 76th Infantry Division, as well as the 901st Field Artillery, crossed the Moselle River. The next several weeks were again tough fighting.
On February 28th we drove early in the evening, well after dark, to the banks of the Rhine and crossed under flood lights at Boppard on a pontoon bridge the Corps of Engineers had built in just ten hours. (Shown below this article online is a picture taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps of the exact bridge the 385th crossed, preceding the tanks shown in the photograph.) The drive through Germany had begun successfully.
We raced roughly east, then northeast, then east. A typical news report back home is this from the Boston Post of April 2, 1945, "The 76th Infantry, cleaning out a pocket of German fanatics north of Frankfurt, overran fifteen villages and reached a point 15 miles south of Giessen." And the Baltimore Sun on April 9th printed: "A captured German Wehrmacht colonel shook his head, amazed, as he read the 76th Infantry Divisions’ daily news sheet, ONAWAY, describing the victories of the Allied armies in their rapid advance beyond the Rhine. ‘If this is so,’ he said, ‘the end of the war can only be a matter of days’." Yet we infantry did not know of most such actual events or reports of this sort which were published back home.
I remember going through Kaiserslautern, well north of Frankfurt, then up rather close just south of Kassel, and then to the outskirts of Chemnitz about April 21st. Along the way, I picked up two German maps, one of the region near Trier and the other stretching from Kassel to beyond Leipzig. As we moved I underlined on the second map some communities as I drove through:- Furgenhagey, Frielendorf, Guzhagen, Abterode Weidenhausen, Eschwege, Langensalza, Aschara, Grossfahner, Walchleben, Eckstadt, Camburg, Droytzig, Zechau Leesan, Altenburg, Mittweida and then the map ran out! I have it still as a souvenir.
During this phase of the campaign, the 76th was combined with the 6th Armored Division, forming "the spearhead of the Third Army drive which plunged across Germany to within ‘spitting’ distance of the Czechoslovakian border." (This is recorded on page 4 of "Notes on your outfit, prepared for distribution to reinforcements," a 6-page leaflet issued May 1st, 1945.) I saved the copy of this leaflet I’d been given, and my penciled note therein was that "The 385th was the lead element, and did we move!"
We outran some supplies. We did have enough gas for the vehicles. However, laying of telegraph wire was out of the question, and the Germans continued to jam the radio transmission, so our radio equipment was fairly useless. Food became short of supply, and thus it was a small treat to find hen or duck eggs, a cow to milk, sausages hanging in a barn, or occasionally some civilian with whom we could barter for a bit of fresh food. Overall, the supply trail and the military advance seemed to us to be very well managed.
Morale during this phase was much higher than during the days hunkered down and reconnoitering before attempting the breakout. Though my radio was functioning intermittently, I remember not one message that I sent or received. Thus does one’s memory, sixty years later, retain not much but oddities and trivia. The days were constantly busy, and interesting. Always moving forward, sometimes it seemed bewildering and yet we were moving east all the time. I would hear explosions, some rifle fire, however there was no conflict the came within yards of me.
Word trickled down from our officers about advances of our Division and nearby units, and occasionally some news of the war at large. As we approached the Russian army, we slowed abruptly and came to a halt. My unit was then, I believe, held in Hohenstein, perhaps ten miles west of Chemnitz. May 7th we were told to cease all firing at midnight.
I still kept my signal equipment ready. All during that dash across Europe I kept in my gear for ready reference the two manuals I had been issued in Wisconsin: the Basic Field Manual FM 24-12 as well as the Basic Field Manual FM 24-5 of Signal Communication.
The "Notes on your outfit, prepared for distribution to reinforcements" states on page 5: "When halted, your Division had made the deepest penetration into Germany of any allied troops." And my penciled marginal note records "led by the 385th."
The withdrawal and temporary station in Zwickau
Very soon we were pulled back to Zwickau, a city spanning the Mulde River. We waved to the Russian soldiers on the other side of the Mulde, though we never went even half way across the bridge.
My unit was placed in a Mercedes repair shop during May and June, 1945. It was there I taught myself to touch-type on a typewriter, a long-term benefit to me after my military service. And I swapped my week’s ration of a carton of cigarettes for a Belgian 45 pistol which an American junior officer thought a very fair trade for his "liberated" weapon. I never have smoked a cigarette since.
At this time I declared for military records that I held a "liberated" pistol, yet I failed to declare a miniature mid-19th century pistol, perhaps made of nickel. When I found a bullet to fit this tiny pistol, and when in a room on the third floor of an old house I decided to test fire this antique, some junior officer heard it and brought me before a Summary Court-Marshal for a warning - and the pistol was taken. Shortly after, curiously, I was promoted to the grade of T/5, and then to Staff Sergeant the following December.
Word came down in due course that our regiment would be sent to the Pacific Theater to join in the attack on Japan. Yet, almost immediately, word of the atomic bombs resulted in Japanese surrender, and our unit was told to await movement back to France to await shipment home once enough ships were available for that massive transportation.
Eventually we left Zwickau. July 11th, I joined hundreds who climbed on board empty railroad freight cars for the long and slow journey, ending four days later in Le Mans, France. It was there I became 21 years old.
Stationed in La Mans, France, awaiting deployment
For the next months or more, we were housed on the eastern edge of the city in a large housing complex which we all called "Pink City" because the exteriors were painted a salmon/pink hue. I was turned into a supply room manager with a good elderly German PW as my assistant.
Surprisingly, I found that one American soldier there was Reginald C. Ferland, from Waterville, Maine, who had been inducted on the very same day that I was! This period of time gave us a chance to relax and spend some evenings in the large downtown Red Cross Club where we went to play ping pong, dance, play cards, watch movies, and otherwise unwind and socialize. I also had time to read a few of the small paperback reprints in the large series of publications called Armed Services Edition, the one I remember most was the 1921 novel Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini.
There was in time a rest furlough for four or five days at Nice on the Riviera, reached by another long railroad ride sitting on the hardest of benches. I remember taking a bus trip to the hill village of Grasse (famous for its perfume) and by the stunning Cap d’Antibes on a dramatic promontory to the west of Nice. Also, I had the opportunity during those months to go via Paris to Spa, Belgium, and try out as a clarinetist and tenor saxophonist for the All-European dance orchestra. I did not expect to make it - and was not disappointed - yet the few hours in Paris were special, especially my visit to its Basilique Sacré-Coeur. I had a chance for a brief visit northward to the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, a remarkable place perched atop a small, rocky island in a shallow tidal bay. Those sights remain with me to this day. They were very striking to an impressionable young fellow from Maine.
Then on January 25th, 1946, it was another train ride to Antwerp so as to await a ship home. On February 25th, I boarded the S.S. Westminster Victory. With a huge contingent, it embarked the next day, and on March 7th we landed in Brooklyn, New York. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, we were all given final medical inspections, and immediately discharged. It was March 12th, 1946. I headed home to Maine.
Written November 2007
Captions for following pictures:
1) Joe Ditta on the 40 & 8 leaving from Naila, Germany, for redeployment
2) Corporal Joe "Brooklyn" Ditta of the 385th IR
3) David Weber (from Waterville Maine) with duck eggs for a meal
4) Daniel E. Beckett with one of our radio units
5) Eli Fant and Ray David relaxing after the end of the war
Captions for following pictures:
6) In the Siegfried Line, near Trier, Luxembourg
7) Medic Bud Barnes of the 385th IR
8) German plane downed near Altenburg, Germany
9) Near the Siegfried Line
10) Norman Rockwell of Headquarters Company 385th IR
Captions for following pictures:
11) German prisoners of war taken in western Germany in Siegfried Line
12) PWs taken in February of 1945
13) Seeking food as the 385th raced east of the Rhine
14) Service Company moving from Zwickau to Naila, Germany
15) David Weber resting in Falkenborg, Germany
Captions for following pictures:
16) Crossing of the Rhine at Boppard, 31 March 1945, on the bridge used by the 385th (photo by the US Signal Corps)
17) German gun emplacement with its personnel (photo found early 1945 left behind by German soldiers)
18) Camp McCoy barracks of Headquarters Company, 385th Infantry Regiment, April 1944
19) David C. Weber of Maine with Roy W. Nelson of Illinois, while training at Camp McCoy summer of 1944
20) Siegried Line fortification entrance, a picture found early 1945 when left behind by a German
21) David C. Weber at Jeep, during his combat training as a radio operator, Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, Summer of 1944
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