PRE COMBAT #3

From Liverpool, a troop train transported us to our destination, Swindon, an industrial railroad town west of London. We were fascinated by the trainmen’s’ language and the use of the word “bloody” which was their favorite cuss word. One little man with a cockney accent was running around with an empty cup in his hand looking for "a spot of coffee".

From Swindon we were transferred by truck to Camp Chisledon at Ogden-St.-George, a small village in Wiltshire. It had been a British army base therefore the quarters were of solid construction. They were heated by pot belly stoves in each room. I never realized that we were near Stonehenge, so unfortunately I never got to visit that archaeological site.

We held many training maneuvers in the steep hills of Wiltshire. The turf was difficult to walk on. Climbing the hills was a chore for the GIs with full packs and many also carrying mortars, radios, BARs, or machine guns. One day when our water rations were limited to one canteen per man for a training exercise, our cooks, with typical Army intelligence, supplied us with a box lunch that consisted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a piece of apple.

Not far from our camp was a British airfield from which every evening the bombers would take off to bomb Germany. I never knew whether they were Sterlings or Lancasters, but they were the ugliest planes I have ever seen

Our camp was also headquarters for the 18th Airborne Corps. One time they had flown in a plane from Portugal loaded with cases of brandy. Every officer received two bottles. For some reason many of them could not tolerate the brandy and I was able to collect additional bottles which I carried with me for several months stashed in my air force bed roll.

One day I and other officers went to London for a visit. We wanted to see the damage as a result of the bombings from the battle of Britain as well as the V1s and V2s. While there, a V1 “flying bomb" passed overhead put-putting away. We heard others so we decided that it would be advisable to cut short our visit and return to base. We also had training exercises to instruct the troops in street fighting in the bombed ruins of Plymouth.

During this time some brainy individual at Army headquarters thought it a good idea if we trained on the British Horsa glider which carried more men than ours. They were made of plywood and had been out of the open ever since the Normandy invasion. There were to be two separate groups of flights. We all want to get on the first flight and get this bother over with. Fortunately I lost in a drawing to be in the first group from Headquarters Co. to go. Their glider lost its tail in flight and all 30 men aboard were killed. I was sent down to identify the bodies. Many killed in the crash were my friends including my commanding officer and the section dentist.

When I reported back to the Lt. Col., the regimental executive officer (second in command of the regiment), he did not want to hear a word of the details. This was a West Point graduate who openly boasted that he was the lowest man in the worst class to graduate. It seems that his greatest skill was inspections because he always wore white gloves that could pick up any particle dirt. He excelled in checking the tops of door frames, as well as under counters for dust.

Unfortunately the replacement for the Major had been a Captain in the Rangers and was a gung-ho soldier and a SOB. The Dentist replacement was an older man.

One of our better recreations was to go to the officer’s club at a nearby hospital. There were large amounts of English brew available, warm of course. Once I had too much and was feeling no pain when we arrived back at our barracks. The Ambulance we were using was heated and that didn’t help. There were four steps leading up to the door. I can remember standing (?) at the bottom of those steps and laughing uncontrollably because I knew that I could never climb those steps. Somehow I did but I sure had a hangover the next day. That was one of the two times in my military life that I can remember being “stoned”.

A pleasant duty was to go to one of the General Hospitals in Devizes, near Marlborough, to check on our men who were there as patients. There was a large German POW camp near the Hospitals and once there was an attempted prison break. At one hospital the doctors told me that their pathologist came from Dunellen NJ. I never met him until after the war when he turned out to be Joe Gannon a Plainfield internist and hematologist. One of our men had been a patient in that hospital before being sent to the states for convalescence. He did not return to our outfit until the fighting was over.

When the Holland operation took place we had been in England for several months. We were on alert and several of our officers were sent to be with our airborne troops as combat observers. If the Brits did not have the habit of stopping at 4pm for tea, or had not been over cautious they could have joined with their forces that had been dropped at Arnheim and Neimegen. That would have opened up the Rhine crossings and the plains of Westphalia. Indeed the war would have been over sooner and many lives saved. We were on alert to go to the continent for combat service if the Rhine crossings were secured. Instead we remained in England training until Dec. 24th.

The German attack in the Ardennes was already in full force.