Until The Final Gun
by
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"Thanks to God we have been kept safe so far. Often I’ve just taken a ride because the truck was going that way and to get away from this spot. You see them coming in, clean equipment, rifles in the air just the way we did when we came in. We laugh and think, "Well, it’s some new recruits." We got the same laugh when the others saw us on our first day. Always have we been told that they’d welcome the A.A. and be tickled pink when it rolled in as the beach-head was secured. That night the boys all along the road were all smiles and cheers, even holding up the familiar two fingers like the English victory sign to cheer us on." So Christmas Eve at A-Battery was far from a silent or holy night. The only holiday illumination they had was artillery fire flashing through the trees as they brought down an enemy plane. The Germans were now sixty miles inside Belgium, the hospital at Bastogne had lost twenty patients in a bomb raid, and on the front, men were sharing packages from home and shaking hands in case there was no tomorrow. Patton, with a 45 automatic outside his weathered coat and another tucked at his waist, toured all over the place in an open jeep to visit eight command posts. Seeing shells streaking through the sky, he murmured something about "Noel, Noel," and giving the Nazis Hell. He prayed frequently, but fought like the very Devil. "So many of our group seemed to have birthdays, anniversaries, three years in the service, anything to celebrate they had to toast it. The only drink I had was the one they wanted to drink to you as being the sweetest and prettiest girl in the world. That’s the only way they could get to me, so they pulled that one. Who could help but fall for it? It really made my eyes water, the most powerful drink made, I do believe. One dope poured some on the ground and threw a match to it. It burned like gasoline."
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About the Book
Just after Pearl Harbor a
soldier “stepped out the door to work” for family, country, and God. The job took him from a dairy barn in
Tennessee to the ovens of Dachau. Along
the way he wore his young wife’s picture upside-down on his dog tags so he
could see her face.
In a blacked-out
anti-aircraft trailer, drinking coffee through the night to stay awake until
radar signaled “Enemy planes,” he wrote letters describing how the 411th
AAA Gun Battalion got seasick on the Queen Elizabeth, followed paratroopers
into Normandy, fought off the Luftwaffe at the breakout, helped to liberate
Paris at a fire-storm at the Seine, defended the bridge over which Patton went
north to Bastogne, guarded his headquarters in Luxembourg and Germany, and at
war’s end at the Czech border were sent to de-louse and shepherd the pitiful
survivors of Hitler’s first death camp.
“Until the Final Gun”, their battalion motto, lends a title to their
story of loyalty, fear, loneliness, compassion, and G.I. humor as day by
endless day ordinary decent Americans bravely helped to make history.
About the Author
Norma Rogers drifted into World War II without
realizing it. In 1939, she and other
members of the Vassar choir entertained Norwegian royalty, guests of the
Roosevelts at Hyde Park. In 1940 she
heard Hungarian refugee Bela Bartok in recital in the college chapel. In 1941 her graduating class included a
student who had escaped from the Nazis.
Yet at the time Germany – certainly Japan – seemed a world away. Not until August 1945 did she recognize the
significance of the cyclotron her physics class had viewed in a dark basement
at Columbia University.
During the war she served as newscaster and disk
jockey at Radio Station WMFD in Wilmington, North Carolina, near the Army camp
her husband had left for duty overseas.
Selections from his wartime letters are preserved in the archives of
Florida State University, the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans, the University
of Tennessee, and Andrew Carroll’s Legacy Project in Washington DC.
The author’s academic and teaching career ranges
from the Rome of Julius Caesar to the England of John Sherman, seventeenth
century Scholar and Cambridge Platonist.
She lives in Tennessee in the area her husband’s ancestors settled in
1837.