Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

U.S. Army, 1943-1945
67
And, oh, incidentally, I applied for
Officer’s Candidate School while I was in the
company, but the company clerk, a fellow by
the name of Jones, came to me and told me,
he says, “You’ll never leave this company.”
And I said, “Why?”
He said, “Well, you’ve been accepted at
Officer’s Candidate School, but the company
commander stopped it.” That’s right.
He says, “You see, if a company commander
will go to the higher-ups and say, ‘This man
is too valuable to me,’ that stopped it right
there.” Sol never did get to Officer’s Candidate
School. I went before the Board and passed
the Board. I got the notice I had passed the
Board, and I’d be notified later. And I was
never notified. So you see, even politics in
the service.
As a matter of fact, there was another
fellow—this is documented fact because this
other fellow and myself, we also had applied
for the Army specialized training program,
which was college. And they would release
you from your active duty and go to college
and then become an officer also. And as
a matter of fact, this fellow and I are very
good friends right now. His name is Sam
Siegel; he’s an attorney in Long Beach area,
and all these facts can be attested to. I’m not
talking out of turn or anything, but these are
the things that actually happened. And I’m
not crying about it, don’t misunderstand,
because as I say my service experience was
very rewarding. I learned a lot, and I was very
conscientious about my job in the service,
and I think I did a good job, came out with
an honorable discharge. And I did get a medal
for achievement as I told you before.
So I went on through our stateside duties,
and then the division was finally called up
in October. But it was really called up in
September, and we had to get ready to ship
to a place called Camp Shanks, New York,
our port of embarkation, and from New York
we shipped overseas. And, well, we had our
Thanksgiving dinner in New York and then
we left. We had thirteen days going overseas.
We landed in Marseilles, France and from
Marseilles we went to our staging area. And
then we went off to the front lines. And we
spent a hundred and forty-three days on the
front lines.
It was quite interesting. The wartime
is very, very funny. It’s comical other than
you know that you’re in a position where
you might get killed. But there were a lot of
comical incidents overseas. Like, we were
in Marseilles, and we had a big staging area
up on [what] we called Windy Hill. And the
Germans would send bombers over at night
and of course, in the states everything was
blackout, this, that and the other thing. And
here on Windy Hill you had your big bonfires
and everything else going, and nobody paid
any attention to it whatsoever because the
bombers were going out and trying to bomb
the ships that were in the harbor that were
hauling fuel and stuff like that. They could
care less about the GI troops who were up
on the hill. Nobody paid any attention; the
bonfires just kept on going, and it was a
completely different situation than stateside.
And then, of course, we were all outfitted,
and we started moving up to the front lines.
And on our way up there we got caught on
the southern end of the Battle of the Bulge,
and we were completely surrounded for about
a week. This was just around Christmastime.
As a matter of fact, I recall it was very, very
cold, and we were amongst a group of people
that had 90-millimeter anti-aircraft guns,
and they had no shells to fire. And we dug
ourselves what we called six-man foxholes.
What we would do is dig the crust of the
earth so that we could put an anti-tank mine
in there and then blow the anti-tank mine up