By Jack White
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— Excerpt —
But the 9th Division didn’t linger on the beach. They began fighting their way through occupied France, and George was lightly wounded on July 18. They sent him to a hospital in England. He met a woman there named Rita Campbell, a member of the British Royal Corp of Signals.
Three weeks later, when it was time for George to leave, Rita asked for something to remember him by. He offered her a kiss. She said that would be nice and gave George his first kiss. She also gave him what I originally thought were two epaulets from her uniform. I’m now fairly certain these were pins from her cap. Eventually those pins ended up in the gray box in the museum, closed up and forgotten.
With Rita’s kiss on his mind, George crossed the Channel back from England into France. He returned to the 39th Infantry just in time to go into battle against powerful, entrenched German forces.
First Northern France. Then Belgium. And finally, into Germany on September of 1944, when the 39th were among the first to cross into the what the Germans called the “fatherland.”
On September 14, they captured Roetgen, the first German city to fall to allied forces. Next, they headed into Germany’s Hurtgen Forest, where the fighting was particularly ferocious. It would take the rest of September, all of October, and into November to make it through.
George missed all that. Shortly after entering the woods, on September 16, he was blown off his feet by German artillery. And there he lay. Maybe no one saw him. More likely they thought he was dead. And there was a fight on, and no time collect up the dead.
They found him later, motionless on a patch of forest dirt, sprawled out with lots of other dead Americans. Except George wasn’t dead.
— End of Excerpt —
