June 1944

L.J. Hurst

1944

     My grandfather joined the Army on June 21, 1944. He served in the 134th Infantry, Company G in General George S. Patton's Third Army in France and Belgium. He was warded the Purple Heart for wounds he received during the Battle of the Bulge inside Germany in the early morning hours of January 1, 1945.  He also received the American Service Medal and European African Middle Eastern Service Medal with two Bronze Service Stars.  

    He didn't make a habit of discussing what happened to him during the war, but one summer afternoon when I was ten years old we talked about it. The conversation started because I heard my mother say something about the scar on his face. Honestly, I had never noticed that he had a scar, or at least never recognized that the star shaped mark on his cheek was a scar.  The two of us were rocking in the glider on the front porch when I asked him about how he'd gotten it. He told me that he was in the Army during WWII and he'd been sent on a ship overseas to fight in France.  He said that it was very cold over there which meant he and his buddies spent most of their time trying to stay warm.  The night he was wounded he was in a foxhole in the woods. He told me that he had just fallen asleep when there was an explosion and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the face. He spent almost three days lying in the foxhole before anyone came to help him.  He said that if it hadn't been so cold outside he would have bled to death and if his friend hadn't been in the foxhole with him he would have frozen to death. His friend died before they were rescued.  Even at ten I understood that him telling me this story was a big deal. 

    As for leaving to enlist in the Army on June 21st - that was my grandparents' wedding anniversary and rather than tell my grandmother that he'd enlisted, he let her believe that he'd finally been drafted. He once told my mother that part of the reason he enlisted is that he was working in Knoxville delivering ice and someone called him a draft dodger and asked him why he wasn't serving his country. He spent the summer and fall of 1944 training at Fort McClellan and Fort Meade.  On November 25th, he boarded a transport ship and sailed for Europe.  He wrote in a letter that he didn't know where he was going but it must be someplace cold because they'd given everybody heavy underwear and a heavy coat.  He arrived in Marseille on December 8th and by December 25th he was in the town of Metz. Sometime after he was wounded, he wrote in the pocket diary that on December 28th he was sent to the front lines "where they beat off three counter attacks and took a small town and then dug in on a hill overlooking that town".  At some point on the night of December 31st/January 1st he was hit and then he spent three days trapped behind enemy lines.  The injuries to his face and jaw were severe and he rarely talked about what happened to during the war.  Other than that one afternoon on the front porch I don't ever remember hearing him talk about being in the military. He did write it down though and my hope is that all these years later he wouldn't mind that I'm doing the same thing.