Posted on March 24, 2013 by Denise Goolsby
U.S. Army veteran Andy Allen was an 18-year-old sophomore at Syracuse University — enrolled in the school of journalism — when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
“I semi-volunteered in June of 1942,” he said, laughing.
He spent 13 weeks in the armored officer training program at Fort Knox, near Louisville, Ky., where he received his commission as a 2nd lieutenant.
“They were going to put me in the tanks,” he said. “I was shipped to Camp Polk in Louisiana and assigned to the 7th Armored Division.”
After participating in maneuvers in Louisiana, “They thought we were going to be fighting in North Africa so they shipped us out to the California desert to train to fight Mr. Rommel (Erwin Rommel, known as ‘The Desert Fox,’ was a German field marshal).
“Ten miles east of Palen, out by the Coxcomb and Chocolate Mountains — past Desert Center. It was hot. It was really brutal. We spent three months out there. The day we left the desert it was 118 degrees!”
Allen was sent to England with the division’s advance party in March 1944.
The 7th Armored Division arrived in May — prior to D-Day (June 6, 1944) — and was stationed in the Kandahar Barracks near Portsmouth on the Southern coast of England.
By the time the division hit Omaha and Utah beaches in Normandy, France in mid-August, the battle had already moved inland.
The division was assigned to Gen. George Patton’s Third Army.
“The fighting started during the St. Lo breakthrough,” he said. “Then we drove across France.
“Gen. Patton divided troops into a series of combat teams that moved towards Paris. We were one of the spearhead divisions. There was no one in front of us except bad guys.”
Andy Allen
Read more: http://military.blogs.mydesert.com/
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