ALBERT S. HESTER
I was in the
87th Infantry Division, as were two other of our members. I was in
Headquarters Battery of the 912th Field Artillery Battalion in a
liaison section that stayed with the Second Battalion of the 347th
Infantry Regiment when we were in the line. The section consisted of five
enlisted men and a captain. The captain worked with the Infantry Battalion
commander, Lt. Col. Bodmer, to provide artillery support. The captain also had
charge of the forward observers, who were supposed to be lieutenants but were
as often as not enlisted men, who came from our gun batteries and stayed with
the rifle companies in the infantry battalion.
The
rest of us provided communication for .the captain and the forward observers.
If were not moving much we had telephone communication. If not we had a radio.
We had to lay the phone wire, usually on the ground, sometimes along a fence,
or when it had to cross a road from house to house high enough so that the
aerial of a tank would not break it, or dug into the ground deep enough so a
tank would not crush it. We had two jeeps, one with a trailer, to carry the
spools of phone wire, and all the other paraphernalia we needed.
One
thing I would like to say is that I realize that compared to the experiences of
a rifleman in the infantry we had a very good deal. Being at the infantry
battalion put us at least a couple of miles in front of the rest of our
artillery battalion, but we were usually with the infantry battalion commander.
We occasionally were right with the riflemen, but most of the time we were
further back. We usually slept under roof, or a part of one, in a house or a
barn. We also could do a lot of our moving in the jeeps, where we could also
keep our stuff. We were lucky and none of us were killed. The captain got a
purple heart for a scratch from a small shell fragment that hit his foot. One
of our guys got a foot blown off from a land mine. He was tying a phone wire
around a tree trunk, which fortunately protected most of the rest of his body from
the explosion. He was evacuated quickly, and as he wrote us later, had his foot
amputated and covered with a cast, and he was then flown back to the US, where
they amputated another two inches of bone.
I
was never hurt. The closest call I had was when I was carrying the radio, which
was a big heavy metal box designed for mounting on a jeep, not be strapped on
your back. It had a handle like a suitcase. I was running across a field that
was receiving mortar fire from the Germans. The captain and my buddy, Ted
Smith, whose official job was a jeep driver, were already across the field
standing in the porch of a little stone building that for some reason was not
getting any of the mortar fire. As I was running towards them I must have heard
a mortar shell coming in close. They say you cannot hear an artillery shell
that is going to get you but mortar shells carne in more slowly and I must of
heard this one. I hit the dirt just as it went off very close. It rained a lot
of dirt clods on me. I lay there a second and when I looked up, I thought
something had damaged my eyes. Everything was blurred. It turned out to be
because I had knocked my glasses off, along with my helmet. I got up and ran
for the porch and made it.
Smith
told me later that when I hit the dirt and the mortar shell exploded the
captain had said: "Hester's been hit. Get the radio!" I didn't like
that when I heard it, but he was, of course, doing exactly what he should have.
The last time I ran into the captain was at a
division reunion a few years ago. I said to him, "Captain, if you had had
a cell phone then you could have done the job all by yourself and the rest of
us could have gone home!"