Wikipedia Commons climbing and skiing . It was very exciting , very rigorous , and a wonderful group of people .
I was there almost a year when they gave us a sort of questionnaire asking if anyone would like to learn languages . I signed up right away , but was told only one person from the division would be accepted .
Knowing my odds of acceptance were slim , I forgot all about it until one day the sergeant came up and said , “ Hey ! You got to get on the train this afternoon .”
“ Where ?” I asked .
I found out it was because I had been selected to go learn Turkish at the University of Indiana , but as I would discover , the program I was sent to participate in evolved over time . Our group first spent a couple of weeks at the University of Nebraska . From there , we went on to Indiana only to discover the language program was abolished . They needed cannon fodder , so we were told we ’ d be trained as engineers instead . The entire program , which was called Army Specialized Training Program ( a kind of junior Officer Candidate School ) was abolished just a couple of weeks after that . All of us were then sent to Camp Campbell in Kentucky to join the 20th Armored Division .
By that time it was the beginning of 1944 . We trained at Camp Campbell and sometimes at Fort Knox for a
couple of months . We were well trained and very much itching to join the war effort .
It seemed to take forever , but finally toward the end of that year we were sent up to Massachusetts to board our ships and begin our route to France . Our voyage officially began at the start of 1945 . It was a long convoy and we spent nearly three weeks zig-zagging
THE GATE AT THE JOURHAUS BUILDING THROUGH WHICH THE PRISONERS ’ CAMP WAS ENTERED . THE SLOGAN “ ARBEIT MACHT FREI ” TRANSLATES TO “ WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE .” FOR THE VAST MAJORITY , THE SLOGAN PROVED A DISGUSTING LIE .
to avoid Nazi submarines operating on our route , but we eventually landed in France in January , 1945 . Upon arrival , my group was taken by truck to Le Havre , France . As the only soldier who spoke French , I became the unofficial interpreter and got to know a French family who I remain in contact with today . The family had a young girl who is now grown and married . She hosted us when my wife and I took a trip back this summer . It ’ s a wonderful little village .
After waiting in this village for a while , we received orders to travel further in February . The village was liberated in that area by the Canadians , which made our travel easier in the beginning . As we progressed , we managed to liberate a quarter of Belgium and Holland without much resistance . We had a couple of short battles , but moved pretty quickly .
Our engineers ahead of us had just secured a bridge across the Rhine and so it was our turn to cross , and I ’ ll never forget that because we had these big tanks and we were wobbling all over the bridge . It was quite exciting .
Our strongest weapons were called M-7s . They were 105 mm howitzers sitting on top of Sherman tanks . It was a very awkward , unwieldy weapon . We had four of these in each battery of about 100 people , with four batteries in each company .
My job was to figure out where to shoot these big things . I did the math and figured out the trajectory . One person did it for all four M-7s in the battery . Sometimes we had spotter planes that would wire back to us and let us know what kind of adjustments needed to be made on the guns . That was my role .
When we crossed the Rhine , we were supposed to join 1st Army in the North , but traveled so fast they figured we ’ d meet up with the 3rd Army under Gen . George Patton instead . But as it happened , we kept moving rapidly , past
32 AMERICAN VALOR QUARTERLY