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FS: Well, I guess by way of background, the general for the 36th Division was a fellow named General Dahlquist, and he was really gung-ho. He was one of Eisenhower's favorites, several classes below him or something, I don't know. But anyway, and he was, he was ready to make a name for himself, and so he, he would push his troops hard, and they were, it's a good outfit. He would push them hard. And this particular battalion was ordered to take a series of ridges that approached St. Die. And of course they were overextended. The units beside them could not push because of the terrain, so they got overextended, and the Germans recognized it and immediately combined and cut them off. The other, other elements of the 36th attempted to get into them for three days and were repelled. So in the meantime, the 442nd was also on line, or elements of the 442nd were on line. Our battalion, the 3rd Battalion, had been pulled off line for rest, we'd been in combat, in combat for several days, a couple weeks. And so they pulled us off line and we were sitting at a little crossroad there at one little town, little crossroads. And said, "Okay, you've got five days' rest, you gotta take a shower and get some clean clothes, and you're going to get a hot meal. And this was in the afternoon. That morning at two o'clock they came through, and they roused us and they said, "We're moving out." And, well, a grunt, a GI Joe doesn't know anything. All he does is when somebody says, "Jump," you say, "How high?"

And so we rode out, and usually you wait for three or four hours until somebody decides we ought to... within thirty minutes or an hour we were moving out. It was absolutely pitch dark, could not see. What we did was we hung on to the pack in front of us and we walked up this, it seemed interminable. Finally, we climbed up this, first of all, it was a corduroy road and then it turned to mud. And so you would, you'd just hang one and if somebody fell down, you'd hear 'em curse, and the line would stop and then you'd start again. But we, finally, when it broke light, there was, there was started small arm fire, and then along with the small arm fire came artillery. And I don't know how far we marched that morning, or where, finally where we stopped. But we stopped, we just could not move any farther. Fire, the small arms fire and the artillery fire got so bad we could not move. And so we did this for about four days. We'd move a hundred yards, losing men, artillery coming in. And finally... but every morning, the general would come up there and jab us, and I'd see him up there arguing with the, our battalion commander to get him to move. And argument, from my viewpoint I could see this, and there were, I thought it was gonna end up in fisticuffs because our colonel obviously was saying, "We cannot move until you give us more artillery support or something. But every day, we would, we'd move a hundred yards or 150 yards. Finally, and we were gradually losing men from the artillery, small arms fire. The general came up the next to the last morning and he had his aide de camp with him. All of a sudden there was this burst of machine gun fire, and somebody said, "Hey, the general's aide got killed." And then of course the general came back and he was bloodied, but he never, he didn't come up again anyway. The story came up later that the aide de camp to the general was Wells Lewis, he was Sinclair Lewis' son.

And anyway, so we finally, I think our battalion commander recognized that we're losing men at such a, at such a rate that we would never be able to push again. So he, he rallied us. He stood along that trail and he said, "Okay, we're gonna go." And I can see him down there now, great big guy, six-four, six-five, wearing an officer's trenchcoat. And the rest of us grunts were laying on the ground looking up. And this is where I told you I saw my friend Gordon dead. But he's waving, standing there waving his, had his pistol in his hand and waving his arms and saying, "Let's go, let's go, let's go." And there was this major -- well, major, but this fire and movement thing going on, shoot, move, shoot move. So when I got up to run I got hit by shrapnel, but I wasn't badly hurt, so I kept going. But the guy who was responsible for that, that battle, being prosecuted was Colonel Purcell, because he stood down there before God and all the people and I thought, "Geez, somebody's gonna pick him off," but they didn't. He was a great officer. Finally you moved and moved a little bit at a time, and all of a sudden, the fire, battle was over. And I described that it was, I don't know what time it was, but it was just absolutely dead silent. Pretty soon these guys filtered back through it, but that was the battle. We, I don't know how many guys we lost right there on that hill, but we, there weren't many of us left.

The battle was over, and these guys came back. And the few of us that were left were ordered to attack further, to move up and occupy this hill. And there were so few of us at that point that every morning, we'd get up and fire a few rounds and claw back on our, our slit trenches and wait, and finally they pulled us off. But I can remember they pulled the trucks in and the whole company got into the back of one big truck. That was all that was left.

[Interruption]

FS: They, the Allies, the American, was making an effort to capture St. Die, which is north and east of where our present, of where our lines were. And they were, their general was eager to complete the task. So he pushed his troops too hard and the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Texas Division was cut off in the Vosges Mountains, in the hills north of Bruyeres. They attempted to rescue them with their own troops and failed. They were driven back by the Germans who had established a really elaborate strongpoint. Our, our regiment, the 442nd, was ordered to the front after a relatively short period of rest and we were instructed to rescue that, the "Lost Battalion." They had already been cut off for three days, and so we fought for, we fought for four to five days, moving only yards at a time. And finally, on the fifth day, we broke through at tremendous cost to our regiment. We had more than six hundred casualties, and we rescued two hundred Texans. It was considered one of the major battles of World War II. The battle itself is commemorated by a painting in the Pentagon, and it was considered by the War Department as one of the major battles in all of the wars that the United States has fought. As a result of that, our regiment, the 442nd, was given at least two presidential citations. One of the men in our company, part of the action, was given, granted posthumously, got a Congressional Medal of Honor. But it, I see it as a turning point as far as the 442nd was concerned. We were, we were already an outstanding, combat unit, and were able to kick butt as far as the Germans were concerned. But in this particular battle, as I see it, we were Americans rescuing Americans. I think that, that was really the key to what the 442nd represented.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.