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Volume 12, Issue 49 - Feature #5819

WWII - 75th Infantry Division Booklet

My Dad was a Forward Observer with the Battalion Intelligence & Reconnaissance Squad for the 75th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 289th Headquarters Company (HQ 289 - 1st Bn). He left a penciled note that we found after he died in 2003 that read, "MOVE UP TO BELGIAN FRONT DEC 24. MAKE FIRST RECON CHRISTMAS EVE.", which of course referred to 12-24-44. It was Dad's job to get as close as possible to enemy lines (and sometimes behind them) to gather intelligence and then bring it back to his commanders to act upon. Life expectancy for guys in Dad's I&R squad, once behind enemy lines, was typically measured in seconds, not minutes. He was one of the lucky ones: he got to come home. He was wounded by a mortar shell in late February, 1945 in Holland, just over two months from his first contact with the enemy. Until the day he died at 78 in July of 2003, we could still count the individual stitch marks on my Dad's skin where long, raised, caterpillar-like scars along his side, back and legs traced where skilled British surgeons at a hospital back in England had made incisions to successfully extract Most of the bits of metal from his body. But, some of the shrapnel was embedded next to his spine and behind his kneecap, and the docs decided that those pieces were too risky to try to extract. These irretrievable fragments of the metal jacket of that German 88 shell that nearly took his life back in WWII remained in him on the day that Dad died. There is a British surgeon I wish I could thank for helping this hero to survive and become a father to four children, and grandfather to four more. I will always wonder whether Chris Consiglio's combat medic Dad (above) might have helped mine, afetr he was wounded.

Nathan Stewart Clark, Jr. - 2015-02-25 05:12:42

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