Soldiering Sojourn

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

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Dad the Grad

Dad was graduated from high school — the only one among his mother’s seven children to do so — in June of 1942. At that time, war had already been raging in Europe for nearly two years. By the end of that year, “their war” was our war and every young, able-bodied man was either enlisting in the military or awaiting notice from the draft board. His older brother, Frank, had gone before him, enlisted or drafted, I know not which. Guido, too. Dad had spent the summers of his youth caddying at a local golf course — the birth of his love for the game — and likely did the same the summer after graduation. It's this kind of dot-connecting I never thought to do with Dad while he was alive.

 

Drafted

Judging by his induction date (red circles in accompanying image) indicated on his discharge document, Dad’s draft notice came probably in the last week of January or the first week of February, as inductees usually had approximately two weeks to report to their nearest induction center.

The Army did its business quite differently from the way it’s done today. Draftees stayed the first several months in regional camps relatively close to their home cities, receiving the very basic of training to prepare them for life in the military before they were assigned to units and then shipped to that unit’s training camp where they received the serious training for the missions with which they would be entrusted in the combat in which they were to be tested.

(Full disclosure: Though I had been under the impression that the unit documented here — Battery A — was Dad's, you will note that his discharge papers show he was actually in Headquarters Battery. While he was not in Battery A depicted in the diary, and his unit’s experiences might have been slightly different (I really dropped the ball on research in this department!), the places and events definitely were in his experience; as part of the 129th AAA Bn, they went everywhere together. As to the diary, Dad had given me a document consisting of several photocopied pages stapled together. I transcribed the document into a word processing app as it appeared on the page. Some years later, when I began to look for the towns on Google Maps, I realized the diarist had likely guessed at the spelling of some of them as he wrote his journal entry after the fact, or had written down a place name rather than the name of the town they were in, so I had to make educated guesses as to where some of these places were, and then edited the document likewise.)

Fort Bliss

The diarist wasn’t much for words, so his telling of their time in most places is cursory at best. Throughout this journal I will make every attempt to fill in details with information I have found in support of his words.

Fort Bliss is a US Army base headquartered in El Paso, Texas, but commands a training center which sprawls over 965,000 acres across large swaths of Texas and New Mexico, the largest military installation in the US. In operation since the mid-19th Century, it has been the training ground for hundreds of thousands of soldiers for every conflict in which the United States has been involved. Classroom instruction on the weapons of war — specifically, in Dad's case, weapons designed to knock planes out of the sky — took place on the main base, but field training and practice firing the guns took place 50 miles northeast of the main base, out in the desert at Camp Orogrande.

Great color can be found in Bob Gallagher’s World War II story, linked in the "Reading List" in the side bar. Gallagher, a few years older than Dad and from just a few miles north of him on the south side of Chicago, shares an experience that, though in an entirely different unit than Dad's, runs practically parallel to Dad’s (even bivouacked in the same town in Luxembourg for a while!), and tells in wonderful, if not harrowing, detail of the first weeks after induction, the long train ride — in Gallagher’s case, west to California — and anti-aircraft artillery training in the desert, as well as on to the rest of his time in the war. Read his story to find the grittier details of the type of journey Dad and his fellows endured on their way to war. 

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