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My first impression, if you'd like, was I was walking up to where we were supposed to be fighting was a German tank that was still smoking and draped over the manhole or whatever they have in a tank was a dead German soldier and that, I was impressed. I was impressed with how very wasteful war was and at that point I said to myself - maybe I was trying for insurance of some sort - but I promised at that time to myself that I'd spend the rest of my life trying to help people help themselves trying to work FOR civilization rather than against it which war seems to do very effectively.

So you were carrying a mortar? What else did you carry?
when you were in combat.
You can't carry a whole mortar, you carry it in sections. So I carried one of them, one of the sections.

You were working as part of a team.
We were in combat. Very interesting. Well you carried a carbine which is a small rifle. I was an expert in carbine mortar pistol rifle. Boy I was an expert all right. But what was bothering me was that they were trying to shoot me. I didn't think that was friendly at all and I was not used to that. We were in the hedgerow area. Hedgerows were what we, oh, might call an acre or so perhaps surrounded by this huge row of trees that had been growing there for hundreds of years and hedges whatever have you so you had to go up and over a hedgerow into the next pasture or area and over and up into the next and up and over. The Germans of course enjoyed these hedgerows a lot more than I wished they did because they were watching you come over the hedgerow and then they'd shootcha. It's quite an experience.

Coming over the hedgerow meaning like you had bushes you were climbing over?
Yea well you had to go up over this mound of old dirt, fence, rock fence, bushes fence, up and over about five feet up and five feet down

You couldn't get through it you had to go over it.
Well, later on they devised some sort of tactic where they equipped, they put sort of plows on the tanks and they went through hedgerows after that, they realized that was the way to do it instead of up and over.

But they hadn't realized it when you were there.
Seems not.

Now to use an example, one time I'd just gotten over a hedgerow , I was on the other side and I hear this terrible noise comin up over the top of the hedgerow and it was a tank. So I quickly got to the very inside, shall we say, of the hedgerow and the tractors went over my head. My rifle was out in front of me and that got ruined. It was a bum experience, but we were very happy to see the tanks at that time because they could scare the people at the other other end whereas I with my measly rifle and so forth could not.

How could you get yourself to go forward in such a situation? I think anybody who hasn't been in combat wonders that.
Well it's safer to go forward than it is to go backward.

Because you'd get...?
I dunno what would happen, I didn't go backward.

Did anybody like freeze or not move?
They may have, but I wasn't going to be bothered with it.

Did you actually fire your mortar?
Oh yes, quite a bit.

What'd you have to do?: You have to stop and set this thing up...?
Yup and we did that

Who decided when you did that? You kept going forward when they told you to and then you stopped...?
Might be your platoon leader someone like that sort.

At any rate we were out of ammunition at one time they sent me back for ammunition. I went back to get ammunition. Ammunition are a bunch of small shells that fit into the mortar. At any rate, back I went and I got the shells, came back and my platoon was all gone they'd been hit by a shell.

They died?
Yea.

Oh my.
Which, [laughs at my reaction] well after about a month of this sort of stuff...

This happened frequently?
Well not always, that was the only time that happened with my platoon, thank goodness, at any rate came..

These were people you knew
Well yea, I had slept with them. They were good people
At any rate that was the way that happened

Do you remember anybody specifically in Normandy?
By name? No, I was actually in combat about a month that's all.

That's a long time.
Yea a batch of time which I didn't enjoy.

Well I was interested because of the TV show that Marian and I saw where he stopped making friends after so many of them died. Did you think that was going on?
Maybe [fussing with pipe]

Because as you describe this, you sound very very isolated
Well, it was [?]

...I have a friend who was president of Skidmore College who smoked a pipe and he said, if you can't find an answer, you light your pipe. That takes you some time....
[lights pipe]

Yea you did everything you could to help them. I can remember going into a very dangerous area to pull a guy out who was really really frightened and doing that and as I look back that was a rather foolish thing to do [laughs] but I did and he was all right. I don't know if he ever became a good soldier or not but he was really frightened. I wasn't particularly brave myself you should know that, and I don't particularly think anybody else was. You just did what you had to do and that was that. When you got to any place, you dug a hole as quickly as you could and got into it. So that's...

So you carried a shovel too.
You betcha you carried a shovel. You'd be surprised how many people learned how to shovel in a hurry! Wow. But it was very nice. Nice and cozy, being down there with the worms and the spiders and everything else. A shell, unless it was a direct hit, wouldn't hurt you. That's where we were.

Any rate we were there for a bit and kept trying to go forward. But then we had what was known as a the br...

We didn't have any knowledge of what the master plan was, who was doing what, or where we were, except we did get word that we were not far from a place called St. Lo. I saw a picture of St. Lo a couple a weeks ago and it's a big city. I didn't realize it was a big city . It may have been much smaller at that time and I'm sure we made it a lot smaller than that.

In combat. It's a silly question, but I think you'll get the idea of what I'm asking... did it follow a schedule.. was there more combat in the daytime or the nighttime... did you was there any rhythm to when things happened.. I mean a month of or even a week of constant fighting wouldn't be possible... when did you sleep that sort of thing?
You slept when you could. We would go out on night patrols to try to figure out where the soldiers were but of course I didn't have to do that too much. That's a very dangerous mission and I had hay fever at the time. One of the things you've got to look out for is making noise when you're on the night patrol so they didn't want to have me go out there because if I sneezed...

So here you are in combat sneezing all the time..
So I never went out on patrol out looking for Germans so that was the way that was. But we really had very little knowledge of where we were. One of the big things was the "breakthrough" and I got injured on the "breakthrough"

The breakthrough was when we "broke" out of the Carentham(???) peninsula which I didn't even know by name in those days, at this place called St. Lo. It was preceded by a tremendous bombing by the Air Force and what have you and most of the bombs seemed to work pretty well except that one of them killed a General McNair who was right near me and I didn't realize this but they were very close to us. They only bombed the Germans but by mistake, they bombed our area. And then came the breakthrough and away we went.
We thought pretty fast, went a couple of fields ahead. That's where I got hit.

So when you got hit. Did you know it was coming? What were feelings at the time?
I felt hit [laughs].

Oh here we are in this field. We came over a hedgerow and we're in this field, we're making our way up to where we knew the Germans were and we were then hit by a batch of what's know as 88's. (-?-) was a field weapon and I was lying rather low and an 88 came nearby and the shells got me, hit me in the neck and the arm and someone says "hey I'm wounded". So I decided to go back. That's what you do in a deal like that. You go back until you get to the medical people. So I started walking back.

... bleeding quite a bit at this point
Oh yea. I didn't want to take another guy, we had medics, a medic was attached to all companies, so I headed back . I said no I don't want a medic, so I was going back further and further and headed for the ambulances or what have you and suddenly I became very weak. 'Cause I'd lost a lot of blood. So I dropped into a handy dandy foxhole that was there and son of a gun the medic had been following me back. He didn't go back with me. So luckily he had been and we went on back a little further and there was an ambulance. I got in the ambulance and after that I really felt good about everything because they were trying to save my life rather than trying to get rid of it. I think there were four or five of us stacked in the ambulance. First thing you know I was in a field hospital.
It was a huge tent in which they were operating on us. I remember talking with the surgeon at the time and I come to find out he'd graduated from the University of Rochester. U of R was our main enemy at Hobart when I went to Hobart. So we had an interesting discussion before I went out. It was my first experience with uh...

ether?
No what's the other stuff. Where they give you a needle and you're out of business

sodium pentathol
sodium pentathol. The one thing I do remember was that I had a very nice beard when I went into the operation and when I came out of the operation, no beard and I was on my way to England. Would you believe, that quickly!

And the other thing I remembered was in the airplane and one of the nurses there said she was Wrong-Way Corrigan's sister.
Now for you younger folk Wrong-Way Corrigan was a guy who flew to England in his airplane trying to imitate Lindburg and they said "How come you did this?" and he said "Well, I got lost, I was going the wrong way, I thought I was going to Chicago or someplace" And Wrong-way Corrigan was kind of a hero for periods of time.

Was she telling you she was his sister because she was telling you you were flying to Moscow...
I was just so grateful I was on the plane I wasn't able to delve into her intentions or what have you but it was exceedingly nice flying in this airplane going in the right way this time.

Had you done a lot of flying before then?
Nope I'd been in a plane once before then.

So then the plane landed and you went to where?
So we wound up in a place near Cirencester, England which was the headquarters for most of the hospital stuff and the headquarters building and area was all devoted towards hospital type work and wound up in a very nice quonset type hut with a whole bunch of other guys all of whom were I guess seriously wounded. I enjoyed being there very much.

Did you have any further operations ?
No, not after I got to England, because this Rochester surgeon had said "Don't let anybody ever touch that arm again" because I had a compound conulated fracture complete of the left ulna and that included the ulna nerve which went to my fingers and to this day I cannot put all my left hand fingers together and as a result I have a pension by the way. That's a pleasant thing too. So a lot of good things came out of this war for me. That's for sure.

He tried to graft some skin from my leg onto my arm but the graft didn't take.

I remember when I was a kid you talked about having a cast and what happened when you took it off.
Well my left arm had atrophied to a great extent so all I had was this - That bothered me...

You said you fainted..
No I felt faint. My left arm was just a stick which was very interesting.

You thought that was the way it was going to stay?
No, I knew what was supposed to happen, but I was so shocked by the looks to the thing.

How long was that?
Well, that was the States. But before I got back to the states I had some adventures in England.

Well let's hear about the adventures in England.
All right. Before I got into the service we had a neighbor who lived up the street from us in Ardsley NY who had come from Bermuda. She was a member of the Trott family. One of the young ladies in the family had come to visit with the family in Ardsley NY and I had talked with her and she had said, "Well if you ever get to England you can look up Pamela Branford a friend of mine from Bermuda." So I thought that was a good idea. I wrote the address down and here I had come to England and what do you think. At my age to meet a young lady would be quite a privilege. However I had lost the address book and didn't know where she was. However somehow or other I learned that where she was was not far from the village or town of Stroud and which to find out was not far from Serechester where I was a patient. So in an effort to get in touch with her, I put an ad in the Stroud paper, and put "American soldier friend of Fran Trot looking for Pamela" So I put the ad in the paper, sent them some money and told them to please put the ad in the paper and whatever money was left over to send me a subscription for however long. So as a result the ad did show up in the paper and I received a subscription for a couple of years after that.

Nevertheless while I was in the hospital a very attractive young lady and her father showed up one day with a nice big cake they had made. So I was the one guy in the whole blinking outfit that had a visitor, let alone an attractive young lady and shared the cake, of course, with everyone. So I was sort of a privileged character even though I was was only a private at the time.

So as my arm and neck got better, I was granted some time off to go see these folks and one of the nurses at the hospital lent me her bicycle. So I remember cycling to Stroud, up and down hills which was an experience.
One of the experiences was I wasn't used to hand brakes on bicycles and and I had only one hand that would operate properly. But I had a very enjoyable time. And I had a later excursion to Bath and danced in the famous Pump Room in Bath. I enjoyed my hospital experience. I had several other experiences in the hospital.

Dancing like ballroom dancing?
Yea, well they operated a USO in the Pump Room which is like a casino or a dance hall or a big gymnasium or something. I visited it twenty or some years later.

I thought you were trained in ballroom dancing..
Another experience was we were visited by a lady called Mrs. Dougdale. Mrs. Dougdale invited me to come and have tea with her and come to find out she lived in the mansion in town in Serenchester, big mansion. I went to see her. Knocked on the back door cause I was used to going to back doors and the butler came and advised me I should come to the front door which I did.

[laugh] They wouldn't just let you in, they make you go to the front door.
Right and so to the front door I went and as I was going in the front door the hounds, a group of gentry came riding in with the hounds as in fox and hounds and they were all bedecked in whatever. So I had had tea and it was most pleasant.

And one of my complaints was that there was no ice cream, So Mrs. Dougdale said "I have a refrigerator" (which was unusual) so if your mother can send you the ice cream powder or whatever it is, then I'll make some ice cream for you or one of my servants will. And that happened. That was a great experience.

Speaking of folks back at home. When did they find out what happened to you? How soon did you notify them and what did you say to them?
I think I've probably got the letter here someplace. And I wrote to them and said. But my mother knew something was wrong because I put the stamp on the wrong side of the envelope. And my writing wasn't so good. So anyway they had the letter and they knew that I had been wounded in action. What I said, I don't know.

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