America in WWII - (Page 13) A I WAS THERE ing an awful mess of body parts. We built mine barriers upstream across the river to stop the mines, and set up .50-caliber guns in case a mine got past the barriers. We continued to work our way up the Italian boot performing an assortment of duties and motor movements, witnessing along the way the bombing of the Abbey at Monte Cassino and joining up with the forces that landed at Anzio [both in February 1944]. On June 6, 1944, we bridged the Tiber River near Rome. It was a certainty the Germans didn’t have all their 88 artillery at the Normandy landings [which occurred that day], as we caught a pounding at the bridge site on the Tiber that day. We pushed as far north as Sienna, Italy, where we received orders that turned us around and headed us back south to Naples. We joined up with Companies B and H&S of the 85th which had just arrived from the States via North Africa. Our time in Italy was coming to an end as the unified 85th boarded LSTs to ship out for Southern France. For our performance in Italy, Company A of the 85th Engineer Heavy Ponton Battalion was awarded the 5th Army Meritorious Unit Citation “for service in the face of serious obstacles.” The company was given a beautiful wooden inlaid plaque and we all took turns posing with our award. The LST trip to France was an adventure as the sea was as rough as I’d ever seen. My brother Mel, who had been a cook for a time at Belvoir, was called up to help cook meals since most of the cooks on board ship had become very seasick. There were plenty of seasick soldiers on that LST and the head quickly became a sloshing river of vomit which flowed from one side to the other as the big boat rolled in the heavy seas…. We landed at Nice, France, on September 9, 1944, and moved up the Rhone River Valley to Lyon. While there we had rest camp and a funny incident took place when one night my twin brother Mel and I both had dates lined up with French girls in Lyon. I became ill and decided not to go and stayed in camp, but Mel kept his date. While they were dancing my date saw Mel and thought it was me with another girl. She came up to Mel and was pinching him and giving him “what for” in French. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong until it dawned on him that this girl must have been my date and thought he was me. He tried to explain to her in his best French that he was my twin brother. But she either didn’t understand him or just didn’t believe any of it…. We continued to move north through France performing engineering duties in support of the Allied push toward the German border. Along the way we lost several engineers to drowning accidents during bridge work. On one of these occasions Sgt. “Bulldog” Jones was assigned to collect the personal effects of one of the dead boys. Sgt. Jones was a Regular Army soldier, and we all looked up to him and thought he was tough as nails. But while he collected the drowned engineer’s belongings, the sergeant wept like a baby…. We stopped at Lunéville, France, and stayed in an old factory for some time as the Battle of the Bulge [in Belgium’s Ardennes forest in December 1944] brought a halt to the allied advance toward the German border. During this time Mel and I received a letter from our kid brother Donald, who had just come over with the 70th Infantry Division. He had managed to track us down and was going to be passing through Lunéville with the 70th. We were excited about the possibility of OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 13
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