Words
“Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.”
Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier ( a German infantryman on the Eastern Front during WW2 )
In researching Jack’s military career I found three very direct resources that outline his service history. Included below are three sections, Jack’s Letters, excerpts from the Battalion History and excerpts from the Division History. The following chart might help you better understand how the military structure works for Division’s, Battalion’s and Companies. It also will help when you navigate the military maps to understand what Corps and Field Army he was assigned to in Normandy.
Thanks to the family history collections of Terri Lauerman and Jim Emme, we have seventeen original letters written by Jack.
One group of letters was written to Bill and Dee Emme ( Jack and my Dad’s brother and sister-in-law). The other group of letters were written to the Lindenfelds “Aunty, Uncle John and Joann”. Aunty is Mary Kieffer who was the sister of my grandmother Margaret Kieffer Emme. Mary married John Lindenfeld and they had one daughter Mary Joann ( who we knew as Sister Joann).
When you combine the two collections it covers from early on in Jack’s Basic Training in the States in May 1943 up to his last letter written on July 17th 1944 outside St. Lo in France, just a few weeks before he was killed in action.
Clearly Jack was a prolific letter writer. The conversations in these letters are chatty and personal and full of interesting family references. You won’t find a lot of military detail in these letters, but they helped immensely to establishing a timeline and to map Jack’s travels through the USA, England and France as he made his way to Normandy.
The letters are numbered in chronological order and if you click on any individual letter, it will open up into a larger window for easy reading.
If you take a look at the chart above regarding military structure, you will see that a Battalion is usually made up of three to five Companies. When the 28th Division landed in France, the Third Battalion was made of five Companies, Headquarters, I, M, L and K. Jack was assigned to L Company.
The Battalion History was put together after the war by members of the various Companies. It gives day for day recollections by these men, Company by Company. A warning…at times the language is coarse and content is graphic, but it gives you a very real sense of what Jack experienced during his service.
Jack was killed in action on August 7th. The Battalion History on that day for Company L describes a heroic action by a “Private Emmy”. It could be a different soldier or a misspelling, but it seems like too much of a coincidence for that entry not to be about Jack.
This Battalion History is stored digitally online at the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Digital Library. The original is a very large document, so the link below is an excerpt that is under 10 megs and covers just the days that Jack served.
Click on the image below to download the partial PDF file.
If you would like to download the entire 120 meg file you can find it by clicking the link below and downloading it from there.
What follows is an excerpt from the Division history for the 28th Division as copyrighted and published in 2005 by the Turner Publishing Company for The 28th Infantry Division Association. I have included five pages that cover the period from July 1941 to September 1944, to roughly overlap Jack’s time in service. While the Battalion History is very specific and detailed, the Division History is broader and places the 28th Division in the historical context. When you combine the information from Jack’s letters, the Battalion History and Division History you get a clear understanding of how Jack’s service fit into that context.
Click on an image below to open in a new window for easy reading.
