in Normandy on D-Day +1.....from what he told me over the years, the combat engineers had it worse than the dog faces......they had to rebuild the infrastructual for the advancing Allies, so this meant that they would often be well ahead of the ground troops and had to fight off the Germans while at the same time repairing roads, bridges etc. And they were prime targets for obvious reasons.

He was a 1st Lt. when he got to England had sat in on mission briefings. They were told to expect 80-90% causalties in the first waves and under no circumstances were they to tell their men. Imagine the stress knowing that most of the men you were preparing for the invasion would be dead or wounded the first day. The officers suffered a disportionate number of causalties and he later got a field promotion to Captain.

He fought all the way across Europe, including the battle of the Budge, to just west of Berlin when the Germans surrendered. His battalion was in the 1st Army but were so decimated, they joined Patton's 3rd Army at the Budge. The one thing he remmebered vividly after all the years was how cold those fox holes were. A logistics snafu meant that most of the GIs had summer clothes.

I have his Battalion 'Yearbook', they he got right after the war and it had an org chart from the commaders down to the privates, along with asterisks next to the names of those kiled...and there were a huge number of asterisks.

My father was in his 60s before he could talk about the war, but he would never discuss the actual horrors that he saw. Mother said he was not the same 23 year old man that she married just before he shipped out.....is personality changed from outgoing, happy go lucky, to quiet and unable to show his feelings.

He passed away in 2005 at the ripe old age of 84.