Thursday November 12, 2020

Thursday November 12, 2020 the day after Veterans day 2020 I had forgotten that yesterday was Veterans Day. My wife, Jackie, emailed me a site of Normandy Landing commemorations in June of this year. People were on the beach creating life-size stencils of dead soldiers on the beach sand. I flipped through the various website images; the old and the new. Some old images are now colorized and lend a realistic imagery to the great slaughter of June 6,1944, one day on a calendar of many similar bloody days. In 2004, THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History and Humor Journal published a veterans story about a Palmville son named Clifford Marvin Palm (1915-2004) my uncle, who had served as a Combat Engineer in the 36th Division, 141st Infantry, 111th Engineers.throughout the European Theater during World War II, from 1942-1945.

This is an excerpt of his story: “In September of 1944, the 36th Division launched its final amphibious assault, “Operation Anvil” (Also called Dragoon) along the French Riviera.https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2018/06/06/operation-dragoon-second-d-day-in-southern-france/ The Germans laid mine fields and booby-trapped buildings, object and streets with tripwires and explosives as they retreated ahead of US troops. It was the combat engineer’s job to locate and defuse these explosives so infantry soldiers and civilians wouldn’t stumble onto them and be killed. Clifford said that while most of the engineers who trained with him were conscientious about their duties, there were those who were too bold and brash to safely work with others. These men got themselves killed or severly injured by acting carelessly. Clifford talked about an incident about one engineer who would walk into rooms, kicking things, picking things up and throwing them about to look through them like he was in a store. “When that guy would show up, everybody would get out of his way to save themselves. They couldn’t tell him anything. One day he lifted the wrong board -- and was killed by a booby trap. “One time we had to take out a German pillbox. [A pillbox was a cylindrical-shaped concrete bunker set vertically into a hillside, with 20-inch vertical slots 180-degrees around the top half of the bunker, from where Germans fired heavy machine guns.] “We crawled up the hill below the pillbox as they were firing and started to place plastic explosives against the concrete. [Plastic explosives stuck on concrete like magnets stick to steel] Then we discovered we didn’t have enough fuse and I was sent back to our unit to get some more. "I came to a clearing in the woods and there was a pile of American soldiers who had just been killed. There was something about it that didn’t look right, so I got out of there fast, got back to my unit and got the fuse. I went back to the pillbox, going ‘way around where those bodies were. To this day, I regret not taking some of those dog tags with me, but you didn’t know what happened there and you just kept moving. We had a job to take out that pillbox. “Those bodies may have been booby-trapped or watched by a sniper hidden back in the trees; it might have been a set-up or trap.” Clifford was experienced enough by then to be suspicious. At one point, we had no leaders, they were all killed in the invasion. It wasn’t our job to join the infantry. We were to go ahead and open the way for them. We were all trained and knew what we had to do, and where we had to go. We were to meet at some buildings and rendezvous there. But a lot of engineers were killed because they didn’t use their heads, joining with the infantry. I thought it best to go alone than in big groups like that. I saw groups of our soldiers and wanted to go to them and join them just to talk, get news; I was so lonely, but I didn’t. (At this point Clifford became teary-eyed in this retelling. I may forget Veterans Day again some year. But never my late uncle Clifford Palm.