Hi Old Hickory. Pleasure to read your post. Thank you for sharing.

We live close to St Jean de Daye in Normandy and drive through the village daily, rebuilt, it's hard for us to imagine what you went through, but we thank you and your comrades.

Just north of St Jean de Daye, a house was used as some sort of field hospital/medical centre after the landings. Do you have any recollection of such a place? We are told it was taken from the Germans (most likely SS) by the allies.

Kindest regards and our very best wishes.

Thank you Slipdigit for the transcribe and Great Respect to Old Hickory, both for what he did back then, and for sharing his memories. If he revisited England he would find many changes but also much the same. We still like to visit the pub but the beer chillers mean we no longer drink warm beer and Coors,Miller and Budwieser are readily available, as is roast chicken and beef steaks. Perhaps I can give a little in return.

Lady Astor's place is Hever Castle, it is beautiful with large grounds. I have visited it and you can see it now at www.HeverCastle.com.

Chickster is more problematic. Time can play games with places.

Chester is a large town in the region of Liverpool but further than 15 miles. It has lots of black and white timbered buildings.Perhaps he can remember those, mind you they are all over the place.
Chichester is in the southwest of England not far from Southamton the port of embarkation for Oldhickory on his way to conquer Europe.Pre Invasion this area was a mass of troops and equipment. I hope to visit this area again in two weeks time.

It would be likely that OldHickory may have visited both of these towns.

Slough is now a very large town with easy motorway and rail access to London.

Windsor Castle is home to H.M Queen Elizabeth a place full of tourists and the hill is still there.

Kind Regard..richard s. a resident of Herefordshire, England and probably another place OldHickory passed through on his travels.

Field Hospital and rhs,

Thanks for your comments and I will pass them on to Old Hickory, probably tonight.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

www.30thinfantry.org

Found this site while digging around. It may help to place Old Hickorys memories in context for those who, like me , have only read lightweight books about D Day.
MS Word files wont open for me but I'm working on that.
Still looking for more information on their stay in England. Gives me a reason for surfing the web in the hope I can find a few gold nuggets.

Regards ...richard s.

Looks like FieldHospital beat me to the site. Good One.

I talked to Mr. Sanford a few minutes ago. He said he also carried a Belgian made .32 cal pistol. He still has it. I am going to try to go over to his house and see if I can get a picture of it to post so that someone can identify it. He said they also carried several M1 Garands in the halftrack if they needed to shoot at something at a distance, but they mainly used the .50 cal. He said the carbine worked well in close in places, like hedgerows and woods.

There were 5 men on that track and who ever sat in the front right seat, manned the .50 cal. They also had a box of fragmentation grenades in the center of the halftrack that they used as needed. The track pulled a trailer, where they had some stronger grenades they used to blow tracks off of tanks and what not. Also, they carred C-4 in the trailer to blow trees in and out of roads.

They were often well in front of the infantry, especially in the drive across France. At night, they would form up the vehicles in a horseshoe or circle and string wire with grenades attached to them. He said they preferred to use grenades at night when defending the encampment, as gunfire would tend to give his position away-the grenade was silent and left no tailtell sign of where it came from.


He said they were. there were 10 men firing at the car and they counted 200 bullets

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

I extended your thanks to him, as I have done for everyone else.

He says he remembers the hospital, although he never actually saw it. He was told where it was in case they needed it. He said he thought that there was a church nearby the hospital that was used as collection station for US soldiers who had been killed. He did see that and said the courtyard was filled with bodies, with almost the entire yard covered. He thought that they were mostly 30ID men.

He said that St Jean was the first real battle he was involved in. He said it was the first Sunday after they got on the continent, not counting the Sunday they spent getting off the beach. That would the date June 18, 1944. They were defending the town when the Germans attacked, he think with no tanks support. Division sent infantry and tanks to counterattack form each side, with US tanks coming in from the right. But in his opinion, it was the artillery that actually drove the Germans back. He said that the artillery fire was something else to behold.

He said the houses there in the area were a lot different that what he was used to. The walls were made of dried mud, rocks and sticks, with 2-3 foot thick thatched roofs and a dirt floor. The family lived upstairs and they cooked downstairs. The kitchen and the barn occupying this floor. He said he remembers many times seeing women cooking with cows poking their heads through the kitchen window.

He commented on the huge number of dead cows in the area. He said the smell was overwhelming at times. He know he had to be hard on the farmers to lose their livestock, and he is pretty sure that he killed a cow or two at night, when they would walk into the brush near where they were encamped.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

You've gotten his interest up now. He has been going on his memory. He has a "yearbook" of sorts that was published a few years after the war. He is going to see if he can find the towns in the book.

Thanks a bunch for your interest!

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

Old Hickory remembers the construction of the houses well. Still standing and still lived in. Tiled roof now though.

The church for St Jean de Daye is near the town square. Not sure if same one?

May I ask: What div of the 30th did Old Hickory serve in? rank? age then? do you have a pic of yourself at that time, which you could post here? Apol if these answered and I have missed them.

From another angle: does Old Hickory remember anything about a large manor house/small chateau which was used as some sort of HQ by the Germans? It's position would have had value to both sides. This property was again just north of St Jean de Daye, set back off the road. Maybe Old Hickory didn't come in to St Jean de Daye from that direction, coming instead from the direction of St Fromond after crossing the Vire river?

For Old Hickory, I've attached 2 (then and now) pics of St Jean de Daye town square, and one of the war memorial.

1: 26th July 1944
2: Same view, pic taken by me yesterday - 8th June 2009
3: War Memorial, pic taken by me yesterday - 8th June 2009

Kindest regards and thank you.

Attached Images

	26Juillet1944StJeandeDaye.jpg (98.0 KB, 16 views)
	StJeanDeDaye8Juin2009.jpg (99.1 KB, 15 views)
	StJeanDeDaye2009Memorial.jpg (77.0 KB, 14 views)

I called Old Hickory after you posted the pics. I will be printing them out for him to see. When I get a chance, maybe this week or weekend, I will go by his house. He has offered his book and I will scan an good pics in it, plus take a pic of the Belgian pistol.

Old Hickory was in the 30th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Mechanized of the 30th Infantry Division. They were a company-sized formation that was attached directly to the Divisional HQ and functioned as the eyes and ears of the commanding general. They were fully mobile, and expected to function independently. They had halftracks, trucks, jeeps, and M8 & M20 armored cars. He was assigned to a halftrack. They were very often the most forward elements of the divisions; he said that several times in the dash across France, that they ran off of their maps.

He was a staff sergeant for most the time he was in Europe.


I'll see when I talk to him if I can get a pic of him from back then. He mentioned that in his book, there is a picture of him and his friends somewhere in France, but you could not tell much of the pic. I'll get a scan of it.

He said that he is happy y'all are enjoying his story. Doing this is helping him to remember things that he has not thought of in a long time. Our eventual goal is to copy this off and save it for his grandchildren and for this I am glad we can help him.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

Posted by Slipdigit for Old Hickory.

It was decided that we would form a task force to go across northern France. General Harrison commanded every task force we’d been on and he commanded this one. It took us seventy-two hours to go from Normandy to Belgium.

That was one of the saddest days that I had while I was over there. We were chasing the Germans, they were trying to retreat. They had a lot of horse drawn artillery they were trying to get out of France back to Germany. There were dead horses, dead Germans, dead everything. We went by one place where, over a mile, where the German armor was bumper to bumper. Our Air Force had destroyed that armor. Gen Eisenhower said that you could not walk down there without stepping on a dead German.

When we went in that evening, I stood up in the back of the halftrack and as far as I could, there was nothing but fires burning. We were moving and didn’t stop. I thought to myself, “What in the world?” There was more destruction that I ever thought there’d be. We went on through northern France, capturing Germans along the way, turning them over to the free French.

We went into Belgium on the 2nd day of September. We went inside a crossroads and lost 6 men. There was a German anti-aircraft outfit with 20mm cannons. They fired direct fire. They killed 3 men, Lt. Hallman, Sgt Scott and a man of lower rank. Sgt Scott was the best soldier I’ve ever known. They wounded 3 men, the Commanding Officer, and two other men. Out of the 149 enlisted men and 6 officers, we had 135 total. We were short.

By that time, there was no gasoline. The infantry had been brought up there on trucks. They didn’t have gasoline to haul them, but they had gasoline for the recon.

In the meantime, we had captured a German payroll. It was 3 suitcases full of money. We put a suitcase in 3 different vehicles, because we thought one would get hit and burn, which it did and we lost one suit case of the money. All of this money was thousand franc notes that were worth about $22.

I needed a haircut badly. We’d stopped in a small village in Belgium and I was sitting there when I said that I was going to get this lady to give me a haircut. I went in there and got a haircut. When I got through, I gave her that 1000 franc note and she like to have fainted. She tried to give me change and I told her to keep it. I thought sure that she was going to faint.


One night during this time, we were going through there we stopped at a crossroads where there was a pretty good sized café. They were cooking eggs for us. At eleven o’clock, they said they had to close up. They had orders they had to close up. Somebody said, “Why don’t we buy the thing?”

We asked them how much they’d take for it that night. We worked out some kind of a deal and we paid them off. We spent the night and they cooked for us all night. The next day, we gave it back to them but we took everything out of that café that we wanted, most of it something to drink.

__________________
30th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Mechanized
30th Infantry Division

30th Recon were certainly the quiet men when it came to recounting their history.Trawling the web for them is hard work.
I have found a site contaning a mimeographed copy of the "Recon Beacon" 20th ,Febuary'43 Camp Blanding, Fla which I hope is of interest.

www.oldhickory30th.com

I am learning a lot about US Recon. Please say if you find my digging intrusive.I tend to get carried away when I find something this interesting.

I have just checked my link and there is a whole lot more to it . I will get the hang of this computer lark one day.

On the above mentioned site look for Reports. On the first page you will find the Recon Beacon and 30th Recon ThanksGiving Menu 1943, Camp Atterbury. Indiana.
If you look at the list Tech. Grade V you will find the name Sandford, XXXXXX.
Should this be our member Old Hickory I will be cock-a-hoop. (My stomach is doing flip flops with excitement).Then again he may already be aware this site and its contents.

That is indeed him. I edited your post to take out his first name (plus the surname is misspelled, so I left it.

Thanks so much for finding that. I think that I will contact that site owner.

I've tried to call him all day, but he has not anwered the phone.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

Slip, in regards to saving the stories for his grand children, i know the cost may not be something he would want to do, but you should see maybe about getting his stories bound. maybe a local book store would know where you could get it done, where i used to live we had a book press nearby but like i said i dont know how rates are.

__________________
You were a rotten pilot when we flew in Russia you're flying a desk now but you're still a rotten pilot!

I took a look at the church at St Jean de Daye this morning. It is in the middle of the town, next to the sqaure as shown on the pictures I posted, above. An old Norman church, I think it is very likely to be the one mentioned by Old Hickory. There is indeed a sort of courtyard area to the front. Quite a large space. There are no other churches except for those in the other village/town centres, so I believe it to be the same one, and therefore would have been the collection station for US soldiers who had been killed as mentioned by Old Hickory. It is not near the temp hospital though, which was situated a little more outside the town (which makes sense).

I tried to get a photo of the church for Old Hickory but the sun was behind the spire so it was just one large silhouette. Will try again another day and post it here.

Well done rhs for finding that info on the other site. My research is purely to find out the history of a local property here, but it is nice to put a name and hopefully one day a face to someone who passed this way.

And thanks to slipdigit and old hickory for doing the post in the first place, it turns out two regiments of the 30th actually camped up right by the place I am researching. So much to tell.... but that is another story......

Regards.

Old Hickory, I've found this, I think you may be thinking of these:

COMMAND POSTS 1944:

22 Feb: Liverpool - Lancashire, England
24 Feb: Chichester (Chichester Barracks) - Sussex, England
01 Apr: Chesham - Buckinghamshire, England

Should be easy enough now for Slipdigit to find on the map. Chichester would also put you in the vicinity of Hever Castle.

In France, was Old Hickory at Montmartin en Graignes too?

Regards.

"Near" may be relative. That hospital may have been the only on in area at that time, so it could have been "near" the church.
I look forward to seeing it and showing Old Hickory.
Yes, that was great and Old Hickory and I appreciate it.
Did you mean two regiments?

I'll bet it was the Chichester Barracks. I'll have a look at his book soon, maybe tomorrow, as I am off of work. I'll bet it will clear a lot of this up.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

Posted for Old Hickory by Slipdigit.


I want to talk a little bit tonight about how it was in Normandy. Most of the houses, other than the ones in the towns, and there wasn’t very many towns in Normandy, were country living. The barn and the house was all one building.

All the buildings had walls made out of sticks and mud. The floor of the house was dirt. There were no wooden floors or anything in the house. Many times you’d see a cow with its head sticking in the kitchen window. They had a kitchen down stairs. What they sat on in the kitchen was split logs with pegs driven in them. They must have used them for hundreds of years. That’s the way the living conditions were. They had the hay upstairs and that’s also where they slept. I don’t know what kind of beds they had, I never did see those. It was something that we weren’t used to.

It was apple and milk country. There were apples and cows everywhere. The only modern things there were the milking machines. They crushed the apples and made juice and put it into big barrels, 8-10 ft high and 15 ft long. They drank apple cider all during the year. The French don’t drink much water. They even had barrels hanging up in a tree when they were working. They raised wheat and some kind of hay.

They worked hard with the dairy. The artillery killed so many cows, horses and other animals. It was so bad at times that you could hardly stay there because of the smell. The Americans and Germans would have a truce so that the French could bury their animals.

Both sides were losing people everyday. And we weren’t advancing worth anything. Finally, when that guy put the metal teeth on the front of the tank, they could knock a hole in the hedges. We could advance a little bit better, but we still weren’t advancing much. St. Lo was the biggest city that fell [to us].

One day, somebody told us that we got some prisoners and to pick them up and bring them in. We went out there late in the afternoon. One American was standing there. We asked him where the prisoners were. He had made them cover each other up with wheat, where the French had cut the wheat. He told them that he‘d better not see any straw moving. That was a pretty good idea for a single man who had 7 prisoners.

About the middle of July, Gen Bradley came up with the idea called “Cobra”, where he was going to get the 8th Air Force to bomb us out of Normandy. On the 23rd of July they sent 8000 planes. Our clothes shook from the bombs for almost three hours. Some of the bombs fell short and killed and injured some of my division. They said the wind changed and they dropped the bombs in the wrong place.

The bombing went on and on, plane after plane. After it was over, the infantry tried to knock a hole in the German line. It took the rest of the day to fill the holes with bulldozers that the planes had made, so we could advance. That’s when a lot of people said that it was Bradley’s secret weapon. He turned loose Gen Patton with a brand new army through the line that the 1st army had knocked a hole in.

About the 1st of August, they called us out of the line. We got a bath and new clothes. I remember we went back to a wheat field and a chaplain came and we had a worship service there. I remember part of what he said. He said, “There’s not a person in the sound of my voice that doesn’t believe in God or you would not be here.” He said, “One of these days this war is going to be over and many of you are going home. Just remember one thing that your faith is as good as anybody’s. Go home and practice it.”

We also had a singer to came and sing for us. It could have been in this same field. The singer was
Jane Froman. She was real good. She sang the songs that were popular then: “I’ll Walk Alone”, “The Bluebirds Flew over the White Cliffs of Dover” and a lot of American songs. She sang for about 2 hours. She had been injured in a plane crash in the Azores. She was getting over that, but she still came and entertained the troops and we never forgot her.

We enjoyed the 5 days we were off and then went to the Battle of Mortain where we lost so many people. Even before the Battle of Mortain, my division had lost over 500 men.

__________________
30th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Mechanized
30th Infantry Division

I am doing research on my father-in-law's service in WWII. He served in the Company A, 120th Infantry, 30th ID. I have a short audio of him being interviewed by his grandson. He passed away eight years ago. I am reading through hundreds of letters he wrote to his wife all through his basic training all the way through April 1945. I am transcribing the letters by date. It is fascinating.

This thread is of great interest to me. I can't wait until the next post. This is a history that cannot be forgotten.

Thank you, Old Hickory for your service and for taking the time to put your experiences here for us to see.

All the best.

d1carter

d1carter

I am researching the history of a property here in Normandy: the 120th Infantry (30th ID) 'camped' up there in July 1944. I am researching this in more detail and have more info but it is a little off topic for Old Hickory (?) If so, maybe you could reply to my thread on this site with the info you have on your father in law and his action with Company A around this time? I think we may be able to help each other a little.

Regards.

Field Hospital:
Thanks and I have read your posts. They are very fascinating. I am sorry, my father-in-law was suffering from scarlet fever and in the hospital during that time. He finally joined the 30th ID sometime in September, 1944. He got scarlet fever on the troop ship over to Great Britain and was in a hospital for over a month.
All the best.

d1carter

It looks certain that the HQ was located at Chichester Barracks. I often visited there in the 1970's for training as a member of the Royal Military Police ( Territorials) abit like your National Guard. The Barracks appear to have closed down and are now being redeveloped as new housing. Swords and ploughshares come to mind.

I would like to find out where the encampments where around Chichester but not much information has been kept about that part. Most likely has been built on by now.

Looking forward to the next instalment. Regards Richard s.

Posted for Old Hickory by Slipdigit

We went on then. Ten days later [14 September] we went into Holland, to Maastricht, the beautiful old city of Maastricht. The Germans were trying to wire a bridge to blow it up. The Holland people told us about it and we captured them before they could blow the bridge. We went around Holland, around to Heerlen, Holland. We stopped in Heerlen, Holland one afternoon. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were going to stay there almost 2 months.

I’ll pick up now in Heerlen, Holland. We had no kitchen and we were trying to prepare our meal. I looked up and coming across the field was a beautiful young lady and a little boy. They came to where we were and they were hungry. They ate with us. After they ate, the young lady took me by the hand and said, “Come.”

I went home with her. She lived a little ways from there. I found out then that she was 16 years old and married. She introduced me to her mother-in-law. I spent as much time as I could with that family for the next 6 months, until we crossed the Rhine River. Every chance I’d get, I’d come back to see them. I became real good friends with the family. This girl was named Philamina Duster, but they said I named her Meg. I don’t remember doing it. The mother-in-law was so good to me. She’d see me coming and she’d come running and called me her American Bebe. She took me in and I really enjoyed that family.



Here is a photo of Megie Duster made in Sept 1944

Most of the time we went out on patrols because we didn’t have much gasoline. We patrolled the area nearby. When we finally got gasoline, we took the city of Kerkrade. Half of it is Germany and half of it is in Holland. The Germans made 30,000 of the citizens go out in the road to slow us up. It was still in the winter time and it you got off the road, you’d mire up in the mud. The Germans knew we wouldn’t shoot the Holland people, but just before we got there, the Holland people got off the road and lay down in the mud and we were able to get through.

We went to end of Siegfried Line The pill boxes, the dragon teeth and some of the engineers figured out that rather than trying to blow the dragon teeth to build a bridge over them. They built a bridge over the dragon teeth.

We’d take the pill boxes and weld the steel doors up or pile up a big pile of dirt with a tank with a dozer on it against the door where they could look out and they couldn’t shoot anybody. And they’d leave the Germans in there. Just before Thanksgiving, the 119th Infantry took pill boxes one day and that night they were relieved by the 102nd division, who were brand new, they’d just gotten there.

The next day the Germans took the pill boxes back. On Thanksgiving Day, they sent the noncommissioned officers from the 119th Infantry down to work with the regimen of the 102nd Division. They took it back and that time they kept it. I think the 102nd became a good division after that.

The first big city of any size was Aachen. We had a hard fight for Aachen. We finally took Aachen. We kept on plundering around and taking cities. The worst torn up place I’ve ever seen was a little ole place in Germany called Ulish [Jülich?]. There wasn’t a building standing more that 6 or 8 or 10 feet high at the most.

One little town there was a fight for everything you got. One little town [we fought over] changed hands 5 times. Old Hickory had it last. I forgot the name of the town, but we stayed there.

The Germans had a time of day when they wouldn’t throw in any artillery so the German people could go and pick up supplies they needed during that time. I was standing in the door of a house one day and saw an old German woman walking down the street. Just about the time she got even with me, her panties fell off. She bent down, stepped out of them, picked them up, wadded them up and stuck them under her arm and gave me the dirtiest look I’ve ever had in my life and walked on down the street. I don’t know why you remember things like that, but you do.

Other cities fell and we crossed several streams and went on trying to get to the Rhine River. We were pulled out of the line on or close to December the first. We were pulled back to Heerlen, Holland. We lived in a coal mine and it had hot showers and everything. They told us that we wouldn’t have anything to do until New Years. The Holland people were giving us a party every night and we were really living it up. I’ll leave it at that.

Thank you and goodnight.

This is the last installment I have for right now. Old Hickory has sent more recollections to his friend to transcribe. As soon as she finishes, she will email it to me and I will start posting again - Slipdigit

__________________
30th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop, Mechanized
30th Infantry Division

Old Hickory got another set of 30th Division eyes to look at his memories and he has helped us with the names in England and few other changes. I'll be changing the rest of them tonight and will annotating the changes here as I make them. Some errors were transcription errors, some were the result of how time plays tricks all of our memories.


Changes:
Post # 10 Camp B [at] Landon, FL to Camp Blandon, FL
Post # 10 Atabury to Atterbury
Post # 16 Chickester to Chichester
Post # 16 Tidwell to Tidworth
Post # 16 Added USS in front of John Ericsson
Post # 16 Changed 15-20 miles to 150 miles
Post # 22 Changed 2nd Division to 1st Division

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

One of the "...other set of eyes" that Old Hickory asked to look at this thread is Frank W. Towers, who was a 1st Lieutenant in the 120th Infantry Regiment. He is the author of this webpage Welcome to the 30th Infantry Division Web Site.

Please look at when you get a chance.

Mr. Towers' personal story is here http://www.30thinfantry.org/history/career_fwt.pdf.

It is a good, well done paper.

I spoke with Old Hickory today at church. He has sent the next collection of memories to the transcriber, who will send them to me to publish here. Does that make me a publisher, David?

I will be going over to his house this week to make pics, etc.

Anyway, more is to come.

__________________
Best Regards,
JW

As promised I've taken a photo of the church at St Jean de Daye. It appears that the top of the spire has been rebuilt (at the time I took the photo I couldn't find anyone to chat to and ask in more detail about this). The rest of building seems to be original. Will be interested to read Old Hickory's recollections of it.

Attached Images

Eglise_StJeanDeDayJune09.jpg (150.7 KB, 53 views)