This is Posted on behalf of Old Hickory by Slipdigit. I think that y'all will like this one, it is fairly humerous.


Old Hickory.

I want to talk to you today a little bit about a cavalry reconnaissance troop and an infantry division in World War II. We were a small unit and there were 16,000 men in a division, we were part of a division. We had 149 enlisted men and 6 officers. The six officers were a captain, who was the commanding officer, a 1st Lieutenant was the executive officer, 3 platoon officers and one officer who was officer of the day and took care of things around headquarters.

We were highly mobile, we had 44 vehicles, 13 armored cars, 5 half tracks, two 2 ½ ton trucks and 24 jeeps. We had a lot of fire power. Our armored cars had a 37mm cannon on them with a .30 caliber machine gun and a .50 caliber machine on a ring mount and 5 half tracks and 2 GMC trucks also had .50 calibers on ring mounts.

We left Tennessee and spent the night in Ft Knox, Ky and went on to Atterbury, Indiana the next day. In November, 1943, we started getting ready to go overseas. We went to the firing range and did what we needed to do there. We had a huge Thanksgiving celebration that day and after that we did more of what we needed to do before we went overseas. We turned in our vehicles.

During Christmas, they let half of us go home for Christmas and half of us go home for New Years.

We came back after that and about ready to go overseas. One incidence happened, that I always remembered: One of the guys that went home for Christmas to New Years. Who, I’m not sure. He packed 8 pts of moonshine, home made corn whiskey, in his suitcase and brought it back. He kept it until the night before we were going to get on the train to go overseas. Of course, everybody in that barracks got high off of that. Until this day, they couldn’t figure out how they got that much stuff in there to drink that night. Nobody talked, nobody told.

We got on a train and headed north, we went to Boston, Ma. We got ready to get on a ship to go overseas. We were at Camp Miles Standish. When a group of young men gets a chance to go to town, they’ll go. Some of them went down to Boston Commons and [of] course got in trouble down there. There was a fight or something and the commanding officer had to go down there and get us. [He had to] Get everybody out of the stockade and bring us back. And they decided that Camp Miles Standish [needed to be] cleaned up, [so] they put us out there. They knew that we could drive vehicles[, to haul garage to the dump].

It was real cold at Miles Standish and while we were cleaning up and loading stuff on the back of trucks and taking it to the dump and doing all that stuff, someone for some reason or another, lit a fire in the back of the truck, [while it was driving around in town]. There was quite a chase with the truck and MPs and a fire truck coming also. They got the fire put out at the dump and decided that they did not need our help anymore! They told us then to stay at Camp Miles Standish “until we can get rid of you.”

Bye for now.