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  Fletcher B. Cox

  Donald A. Fuesler

  Francis X. Hoelscher

  Charles R. Hughes

  Richard E. Hunton

  Hugh F. Ingalls

  Andrew Miller

  Seymour L. Schnuer

  Edward D. Snell

Richard E. Hunton
Company "I", 378th Infantry Regiment

  I was drafted on October 9^th, 1943, while I was working at the United States Naval Observatory as an instrument maker.  Because of my sensitive position I was deferred for six months.  Finally, the deferments ran out about April 1944.  I was inducted into active service at Fort Meade, Maryland.  From there I went to Camp Blanding, Florida, where I took my basic training for the next seventeen weeks.  Basic training was extremely vigorous.  I started out in a heavy weapons company, but fortunately after two or three weeks of that I was transferred to an intelligence and reconnaissance company.  That was a lot easier than lugging around machine guns and mortars all the time. 

  After a month or two in the new company the captain came along and told us that there were more riflemen being killed than I and R so they made us riflemen.  It was real encouraging to hear that.  They were recruiting more cannon fodder.  After several more months of vigorous training, which included what was supposed to be a 25-mile march but ended up being a 30-mile march.

  Anyway, we finally made it through basic training and went home for a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation before we were taken Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. We stayed there a week or ten days before we finally were taken down to New York City about the 2^nd of November of 1944.  We loaded onto the Queen Mary and were put down into the bowels of the ship.  It took us about four or five days to get to Europe since we were zigzagging about every five miles to keep from being blown up by submarines.

  We landed at Greenock, Scotland, a small town about twenty miles west of Glasgow.  We made it to Le Harve, France where we got off the boat using rope ladders.  We used these ladders to board a landing craft of some sort.  By this time it was pitch dark and we got into the landing craft and headed for the beach.  We got off the boat onto the beach and immediately got out of there.  We walked through Le Harve, France, which was still smoking and burning from a previous shelling.  From there we loaded some trucks and then 40 and 8 railroad cars.  Those are the dinky little box cars that could hold forty men or eight horses, but we had forty-two men. We traveled all the way from Le Harve, France all the way up to a little peninsula called Givet, France, just about two miles from the Belgium border with a stop about t every ten .  

  There were a lot of funny things that happened along the way, even though it was extremely uncomfortable.  Meals were C-rations.  We had three kinds then: beans, hash and stew, but they were all cold and tasted just about alike.  Very unpalatable.  We took trucks from Givet and went down into Nancy and Verdun and some of those other World War I places that were famous during that time.  We got down to a little place called Boinville-sur-Nied, and joined the 95^th Division.  That was on November the 24^th or 25^th, 1944, and I finally joined I Company, 378^th at a little town called Niedervisse, France a day or two later.  We started walking up through several little towns that I can’t think of the names of.  I remember lying along the sides of a battered little road were a number of horses and cows, ripped and bleeding as a result of the previous day's fierce fighting.  Many had been completely disemboweled by nearly direct mortar and artillery hits.  One day about this time we started getting enemy fire.  Our company commander said we had gone over to Kreutzwald, which is right on the German border, but there wasn’t supposed to be any German soldiers there.  We were there just to reconnoiter the place, but all of a sudden we started to get shot at from every angle, so we got out of there.  We kept moving up over the next several days to a place called Falck and Dalem.

  We went up and liberated some other towns north of Falck and Dalem until finally about November 30^th we came to a large hill called the Sauberg.  This hill was supposed to be very important to the defense of the Saar River, which was only about four miles away.  We had a terrific fight going up that hill.  When we got to the top there was a dense fog, you couldn’t see ten feet in front of you.  We almost starved to death because we couldn’t find the chow truck, well maybe not starved, but we were pretty hungry.  Late at night, about eleven o’clock or so, the company commander said dig a fox hole and get in it, we’re going to spend the night. So we got out our tools and started chopping on that stuff, but it was nothing but frozen rocks.  We just had to sleep out on the open ground under half of a tent shelter while the Germans bombarded this hill with artillery all during the night.  You can imagine how uncomfortable it was to just lie there and hear these shells coming and landing twenty-five or thirty feet from you.  Every time one would land rocks would shower down and land on top of you.  It was really a hairy night.  As interesting as that is, I have a friend who lives in Neuforweiler, Germany, which is about three miles across the German border.  My friend has a friend that lives up near Berlin, by the name of Rolf Grünewald.  One day they were talking and the 95^th Infantry Division came up.  Because of me my friend began to compare notes with Rolf and it turned out that he was a nineteen year old, the same age I was, German soldier that was shooting a machinegun at us while we were shooting at him.

  There was a huge tank trap just over the top of this hill.  We had to figure out a way across this trap.  Somehow we managed to cross this tank trap the next day, December 1^st, 1944.  We moved from there into, and liberated, this little town called Altforweiler.  As we were liberating this town we started to get bombarded with mortars as we reached the far side.  They had sirens on them so if the thing didn’t hit you it would still scare the daylights out of you. We called them “screemin’ meemies”. It wasn’t long until one landed about fifteen feet from me and knocked my squad leader Sergeant LaChance and me out.  I came to and I was lying there in the middle of the road dying and bleeding to death and hollering for a medic, but all I heard was, “Hold your horses, you aren’t the only one!”

  They finally dragged me into an old barn across the street where they were all standing around congratulating me because I was going to get to go home.  I was about half killed, but I was so happy about it because I would be going home.  I had a severe compound fracture of the right arm so they put sulfa powder and a splint on it and wrapped me up and gave me a half-grain of morphine.  I was still able to walk so they told me to go back up the street to the company headquarters and they’ll tell me what to do.  I was walking up the side walk, which were pretty close to the houses, when all of a sudden a huge crash landed about three or four feet in front of me.  It just so happened that a mortar shell had hit the tile roof of the house, all the houses had tile roofs over there, and the entire roof fell off about three feet in front of me.  Two more steps and I would have had it!

  I finally got up to the company headquarters.  My squad leader who was in real bad shape was lying there screaming and begging for somebody to kill him and put him out of his misery.   I thought he was going to die, but a few years ago I found him alive and well and living in Florida.  After it got dark an aid man started walking me back from the front lines to where I could get on a jeep.  They finally got me onto a jeep and drove me back to a field hospital where they put a better splint on my arm.

  I was taken to the 187^th General Hospital near Tidworth, England.  This hospital was comprised of semi-cylindrical shaped Quonset huts.  I was put in ward number seventy-three. I started getting penicillin shots every four hours, day and night, had a new cast put on, x-rays taken and what not.  I was getting to feel pretty good about this time and matter of fact I was made ward assistant cook.  I would go in and make pancakes and scrambled eggs left handed until somebody complained about my cooking.  I said, “Well, if you don’t like it I’m going to quit then!”  The very next day they came to me and said the fellow who took your place is worse, we want you back.  So I went back as the ward cook.  There was one fellow in our ward that was right pitiful.  He had shot himself in the foot to get out of combat and nobody would speak to him at all.  He was totally shunned and just pitiful.  Anyhow, I guess he deserved it.

  We were eventually taken from there to a hospital in Bath, England.  Of course we were walking wounded so they put us in tents in back of the hospital.  It was the middle of December and of course it was really cold.

  I finally got out of the General Hospital and went back to Southampton.  It was about the middle of February 1945, when we got on an old Victory Ship. It took about twelve or fourteen days to get back and we landed at Newport News in Norfolk, Virginia.

  From Newport News we were taken to Camp Pickett, VA to the general hospital there.  They removed my big old cast and put a hanging cast on.  I was there about five months, but finally the time came for discharge.  I ran up to get my discharge papers on August the 6^th,  and went back to my home in Washington D.C.  I got on a street car there to go out to my house and I heard all these people talking about this bomb that had been dropped over in Japan that had destroyed an entire city.  I said, “No that couldn’t be, because I have been in the Army and I know they don’t have such a thing.”  Of course they did, but they just forgot to tell me.  Anyway this has allowed me to claim responsibility for winning the war.  The story I always tell is that when my commanding officer found out I was being discharged he said, “Oh my, how are we going to win the war without Hunton?”  He said he didn’t know, but he called President Truman and told him and the president said, “I guess the only thing we can do now is drop the bomb to make up for losing Hunton.”  So they dropped it and we won the war. 

On the right : Picture of Richard E. Hunton taken in May 1945. You can see that he's always wounded.

I want to thank Richard E. Hunton for the use of his photographs and documents.