My father passed away last Nov. He didn’t talk about his military service. His discharge papers didn’t give much info and his military records were destroyed by the fire.

I did find he attended the 1943-60 FA OCS class at Ft. Sills. His discharge papers indicated he saw action at Po Valley and that he arrived in Italy a couple weeks before that. He was in charge of a Sound and Flash unit. While taking a vacation in Europe in Cortina d’Ampezzo , he seemed to know the area and said that his unit had been near. The only other comment he made about his service was of him driving north and seeing all the German prisoners going south.

I read that the 328th Field Artillery division headed towards Cortina d’Ampezzo after the war and they dealt with the German POWs.

I will be in the National Archives (College Park) in May. I was going to see what reports my father might have sent in to headquarters as a way of figuring what unit he was with. From there, back track his service to his Ft. Sills FA OCS class. What sort of reports would he have filed?

Howdy DJV and welcome to the forum. Here is a link for more info I dug up. Perhaps you may see something here. BTW, what was your father's name?

328th Field Artillery Battalion

The 328th Field Artillery Battalion is one of the 3 artillery units that made up the artillery support of the 85th Custer Division. The 328th Field Artillery(or FA) Battalion trained at Camp Shelby, MS and entered combat in May 1944 with the Custer Division. They participated in capture of Rome, attack of the Gothic Line, heavy fighting in the Appenine Mountains, crossing of the Po River and drive to the Alps.

The 85th Division consisted of 328th, 329th, 403rd and 910th FA Battalions. A typical Battalion consisted of 3 batteries, each containing four 105mm howitzers and one battery of 155mm howitzers. Each battery was sighted in together and could fire at same targets simultaneously after initial ranging shot. In July of 1944, two additional guns were added to the battery. Later, a Tank Destroyer battalion, operating self-propelled artillery, became designated as Battery "D" of 328th FA Battalion.

Also, generally, one artillery battalion was assigned to one infantry regiment and one battery was assigned to a specific infantry battalion (or 4 infantry companies). Thus, 328th FA was assigned to support the 337th Infantry Regiment and Battery B was assigned to support 2nd Battalion of that Regiment. However, due to the fluidity of the battle command, this changed a lot as the groups rotated through reserve status.

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American by birth, TEXAN by the grace of GOD!

Here are some photos my father took during his FA OCS class.

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I just got back from Washington DC. I spent a morning at College Park. They have some really good military researcher there to help if you have specific details. For my father, we just know he was at Po Valley in the field artillery.


So I didn’t find anything. I did copy some field artillery photos from Po Valley.
Here is my YouTube channel. I turned the Po Valley photos into a YouTube photo montage.

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US Torture and Atrocities (It really supports our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
US Military Doing Good Deeds (Supports our troops everywhere else in the world.)

I posted the pictures I copied from the PO Valley campaign on Flickr.
The pictures can be seen WWII History: PO River campaign - a set on Flickr

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US Torture and Atrocities (It really supports our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
US Military Doing Good Deeds (Supports our troops everywhere else in the world.)