I was an ordinary infantry soldier who served my country in World War II, a time of national peril. When I was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1946, at the convenience of the government, I put that period behind me and returned to civilian life. I wanted to forget those days but no matter how I tried, I could not completely erase all those memories.

    After two years, I found and married the little girl who had once lived on my street. She had grown into a beautiful young woman. We had a family of three girls and one boy. As the years went by, the children would ask about my wartime experiences. How could I answer their questions? I could not brag about being a great warrior or hero. I would not describe the life of a dogface in the front line where teenage buddies were wounded and killed every day. Instead, I tried to tell about the funny experiences that unexpectedly humanized the tragedy of war. Although this satisfied their curiosity, temporarily, they still wanted to hear more, but I did not want to go back to that period in my life.

    What made me decide to dig into the past and bring up the times that I wanted to forget? It may have been the reunions of the 100^th Infantry Division where I met the young boys who were becoming old men. They still felt undiminished affection for their fellow comrades in arms. It may have been the trip back to the battlefields in France and Germany where I could almost see the ghosts of lost foxhole buddies. In the American Military Cemetery at Epinal, I bowed my head and could not hold back a tear at the grave of each lost soul I once knew. It was then that I asked myself, "Should I write the stories of our old company?" I thought of all that I could remember and it seemed as though I had amnesia. I had so thoroughly wiped away those memories that I sometimes questioned whether I had actually been there. It was then that I was challenged to go back to those days and write about what happened to those who served in our company during the war.

    I did not keep a diary. No one I knew kept a diary. When you are not sure if you are going see the next sunrise, the idea of writing notes in a diary is of no importance. Besides, the Army advised that you should not keep records in case you are captured, wounded or killed and fall into the hands of the enemy. Your diary could be a source of information that might endanger the lives of the men in your unit. As a practical matter, you had to carry everything that was essential and that did not include a pad of paper and a pencil. That paper and pencil had to be protected inside dirty clothing through the cruelest weather conditions. A pencil was the sole handwriting instrument in those days and a bayonet was a pencil sharpener. Ballpoint pens were not available then.

    The beginning of 1944 was a period of reorganization in the U.S. Army. The war in Europe had changed from air and sea battles to a land battle. The Luftwaffe was on the defensive and the seas were now controlled by the Allied navies. Ground forces were needed for the invasion of the Continent after the campaign in North Africa. Some infantry divisions in the U.S. were stripped of troops that were sent to Europe as replacements.

    The 100^th Infantry Division sent 3,675 men as replacements between April and September 1944. From activation on 14 November 1942 until embarkation in October 1944, replacements from the division totaled 14,787 enlisted men and 1,460 officers. At one time, it was feared that the 100^th would be just a training division and never be sent into combat but that changed.

    During the spring and summer of 1944, it was brought up to full strength as a fighting force with soldiers from other units. Enlisted men and officers came from deactivated anti-aircraft units; bright young men came from the cancelled Army Specialist Training Program (ASTP); cadets came from the Army Air Corps training program; and others came from stateside coast artillery, ordnance, and other units from as far away as the Aleutian Islands.

    On 1 November 1944, in the fastest deployment in U.S. military history of an entire infantry division, the 3rd platoon of Love Company was the first rifle unit to move into the front line to relieve troops of the 45th Infantry Division. We were the last for roll call, last in a parade, last to board the ship, but first to disembark and first to enter combat.

    We dug foxholes that had three men in each one. As night fell, we could see flashes in the sky followed by the boom of cannon fire. It was an uneasy feeling being in a hole in the ground with two other soldiers peering into the blackness, tensely listening to all the eerie and strange sounds that come in the night. Was it some enemy movement? It could be an enemy patrol. There might be an assault on our front or maybe an attack from the flank. No green soldier at the front sleeps soundly that first night.

    Al Lapa remembers being assigned to an old French Army dugout from World War I with John Bolin and Angelo Argiris where there was about two inches of water covering half of the bottom. It rained all night and the log roof leaked, and none of them got much sleep. Toward morning, Bolin and Lapa thought they heard noises in front of their position and challenged, "Who goes there?" When they received no reply, Bolin fired his BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and Lapa joined in with his M1 rifle. Then the whole platoon started firing, but there was no return fire. Daylight revealed just shredded branches. I suspect that some rabbit or other animal made the noises that brought on the fusillade. We soon learned to attune our hearing to most of the strange sounds that are part of the forest world at night.

    On 3 November 1944 we moved up to relieve a rifle company of the 45th Infantry Division that was in danger of being surrounded. They were pinned down by small arms fire from the German line. As we were passing through, some of the soldiers of the 45th smirked and thought that we were very green. That was true. We did not know anything at all about what lay ahead. We carried full field packs that contained much equipment that we later learned we did not need. Nevertheless, they were happy to see us and to get much needed relief.

    Ahead of us were the wooded slopes of the lower Vosges Mountains that the enemy was defending stubbornly. As we advanced, we were immediately subjected to the same intense small arms fire from the enemy. They were dug into camouflaged defensive positions and were firing machine guns that spewed bullets at twice the rate of ours. These "burp" guns fired l,600 rounds per minute against our 900 rounds per minute. They also had rapid-fire machine pistols that were called "Schmiessers," bolt-action Mauser rifles, and concussion hand grenades shaped like oversized eggs that they threw at us. We fired back with our semi-automatic Garand M1 rifles and BAR automatic rifles. We had some support from our .30 caliber light and heavy machine guns, which are not mobile weapons. They cannot be used in a close infantry attack with their tripod mounts, ammunition belts, and extra barrels to replace burned-out ones. They each require a gunner and an ammunition bearer to operate, which makes them most useful for defense against an enemy attack or for cover during an infantry advance.

    Meanwhile, all around us, the smell of gunsmoke filled the air and the noise of gunfire was deafening. I lay behind a tree with my 1903 sniper’s rifle trying to see something to aim at. Nearby I could hear an M1 rifle going full blast. Eight rounds were fired and the ammunition clip flew out of the cartridge chamber. Another clip of eight rounds was thrown in and they were fired. At this point I yelled to Lapa, "Hey! Skull! What are you firing at?" He yelled back, "I don’t know, but I am going to scare the hell out of them!"

    Then I heard someone yell, "MEDIC! MEDIC! I’M HIT!" At that same moment, I heard and felt the crack of a rifle bullet fly right by my head. Instinctively, I looked up into a tree directly in front of me about 50 yards away and saw a puff of smoke. Though I could not see anyone, I aimed my sniper’s rifle at that spot and fired each of the five rounds in my rifle. Each time I fired, I had to pull back the bolt, eject the spent cartridge shell, and push the bolt forward to insert a new round into the chamber. My rifle gave me and my shoulder a powerful jolt each time I fired a round and the smoke from the muzzle kept me from seeing if I had hit anything.

    Now I had to reload my bolt-action rifle. Because of the telescopic sight mounted over the breech opening, I could not feed the clip of five rounds at one time. I had to take each round off the clip and load one at a time. As I was doing this, the firing all around me kept up at a furious pace. Suddenly, I heard a voice almost in a whisper say, "Nicht schiessen!" I looked to my right, and there was a German soldier no more than six feet away, staring me in the face! "Nicht schiessen? Don’t shoot?" I wondered! My rifle was not even loaded! He could have easily shot me or bayoneted me before I could have defended myself!

    Somehow, I was more surprised than frightened as I stared at him. I pointed with my rifle for him to move down the hill to the rear of our line. I held my rifle on him and crawled back down the hill after him. He was frightened and trembled as he walked in front of me with his hands on his head. When I searched him, he became agitated because he thought I wanted to take the bread he had in his pocket! It turned out that he had no weapon, grenade or ammunition.

    As he was marching off into the 45th Infantry Division area, one of their men said to me, "Let’s see how big a hole you can put in his back." That struck me as insane, because I could have been dead just a few minutes before. Besides, if we shot every enemy soldier who wanted to surrender, none ever would. The result would be a total disaster with more dead soldiers on both sides. The stories of the killing of prisoners of war on the Russian Front were heard on our front. Nevertheless, the war was over for that German, but not for me. From that moment on, I knew I had received a gift of time that I prayed would last until the end of the war.

    I rejoined my platoon and continued the fire fight. The Germans were routed, and we pushed through to new positions beyond the woods. Later, 1st Lt. Park Ashbrook, our company executive officer, told me I had hit the sniper in the tree. When I said that I hadn’t seen anything when I was firing, he said he saw him fall to the ground. Then it came to me that the sniper fire had stopped after I had shot those five rounds into the tree. (Frank Hancock of M Company, which is a heavy machine gun and mortar company, recalls that he had followed us on this attack and found a dead German soldier who had been killed by a bullet wound in his chest. (Perhaps, he had been the enemy sniper.)