UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

The bandages the dentist put on me with the ointment set up like concrete. The doctor slit ’em down the side, told me to hold on to the head o’ the bed, an’ ripped ’em off an’ took half the skin on my legs with ’em.

So scratch Mills for a while. But on the plus side, sort of, Staff Sergeant Jack Pullman, who had organized the Platoon before Pearl Harbor when he was twenty, got a battlefield commission as second lieutenant and was made platoon leader in place of the wounded Farley. An honor and sort of an embarrassment for Lieutenant Pullman, but where it counted he remained one of us.

Delmar Griffith was jumped to the new platoon staff sergeant, Corporal Mickey Smith to buck sergeant and Mullenax and Trubia to corporal, and a few new guys came in, including a couple of doozies.

Bob “Dynamite” Thatcher was a wiry runt from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who claimed not to have found enough excitement as a rifleman in A Company and volunteered for the Third Battalion Rangers, an impromptu commando-type outfit organized in Sicily. After around 115 patrols, mostly in the mountains, they transferred him to us for a rest. I sized him up in my journal as “a blond shrimp with a goofy little turned-up nose, a wispy blond mustache that took 110 days to grow, and twinkling eyes. He imitates playing a fiddle when somebody gets corny, will follow the leader anywhere, and is fearless even when afraid. Above Venafro he had his overcoat completely blown off him by a smoke shell and wasn’t scratched.”

Bob Winburn, Bob “Dynamite” Thatcher and Griff (Courtesy of Lester Gerencer)