©2014, Aaron Elson
Retired Colonel Arnold L. Brown of Owensboro, Ky., was a company commander in the 90th Infantry Division.
I was born and raised in Ohio County, Kentucky, on a farm. I was a teenager back during the Depression years. I got tired of eating corn bread and molasses three times a day so I decided to go into the Army. I left home with 50 cents in my pocket and an eighth grade education. I went out in the bushes and waited until the first freight train came through, and when it slowed down I jumped inside one of these boxcars. It was dark inside, and there was a professional hobo in there. He said, "Where you goin’, sonny?" Like to scared me to death. But he turned out to be a very nice hobo, because he told me when and where to get off the train when I arrived in Louisville so that the security forces wouldn’t pick me up, otherwise I probably would never have made it into the Army.
I enlisted on March 18th, 1936. And it took me a year and 11 months to make Pfc. It wasn’t too long after that until I made corporal. So, I proceeded then and got to buck sergeant, served as platoon sergeant, and I was getting ready to leave the service. I’d already met my future wife. I was stationed at Rockford, Illinois. I was going to be separated from the Army in March of the following year, and I already had my job lined up as a machinist. In the military at that time a sergeant made $72 a month, so on my pay I certainly couldn’t afford a wife, so I’m planning on getting out. I was in a position where I could take a trade school, and I qualified and even had a job with a company lined up, so I didn’t want to wait, you know how it is, you’re young and full of energy, so we decided to get married. We got married on Thanksgiving Day, it was November the 20th, 1941. Well, you know what happened December the 7th, so I couldn’t get out. Well, now I’m stuck. So I applied for OCS.
Why did I apply for OCS? I suppose I have to tell it like it is. They had started calling in reserve officers, National Guard officers, now I don’t want to put any reflection on the individuals, they were educated, they were smart, but they knew very little about the military. And this one lieutenant, he was reading in the manual there, trying to learn something, he said, "I understand why we have officers and non-commissioned offers, but who are these ‘bar’ men?" Browning automatic rifles. I thought, "Good gosh, these people are gonna be leading me in combat?" So I applied for OCS. You had to make 110 on the Army General Classification test in those days to qualify, and they also required a high school education. They had a board of officers there to make these selections to OCS, so they observed me in my handling of my platoon, and they gave a waiver for me to go OCS.
At the time I got my orders to ship out as a replacement officer, I was working for the assistant division commander, and we were running rifle platoons through a live firing field problem and rating them on their qualification for combat.
When these platoons were going through these live firing problems, I had to rate them as to whether they were qualified for combat or not. If not, they had to go back and take some more training. I was able to rate all the platoons except one. And this platoon did everything wrong as far as issuing their orders and taking advantage of the camouflage, everything they did was wrong except one thing. They hit every target. So I went to the assistant division commander, a general, and asked him to help me make this decision. And he wasn’t much help, he’s still going to leave it up to me. And this is what I said: "Well, the cover of your own rifle fire is the best cover you can have, and when you’re killing enemy they’re not killing you. So how can I rate them unsatisfactory?"
He said, "Good."
This is what I was doing when I got orders on the 16th of June to ship out because of the high rate of casualties they were having in Normandy.
They put us on a troop ship, and we were in a convoy, and there were so many ships in this convoy that you could look in any direction and see ships almost going over the horizon.
We were out two days, and the ship that we were on was an old German ship that had been scuttled by the Germans in Africa or someplace and we had salvaged it. The convoy was taking a zigzag course, and they were making a turn to the left, and the steering mechanism of the ship went out. We couldn’t turn. And there was a tanker crossing in front of us and they put this ship in reverse, it was like it was jumping up and down to stop from hitting this tanker that’s filled with high-octane gas.
I’d hoped they’d turn around and take us back to repair the ship, because the convoy just went off and left us, but we were already at the point of no return. So they left us there and they left one destroyer there and he was circling us all the time while we were getting our repairs done, and occasionally he’d take off and drop a few depth charges.
We went to England. But I was only there a few days, because they were needing replacements bad. So they shipped me right on through and right up to the front lines, and it was so confused and everything I don’t even remember the exact date, but it was around the last of June and they assigned me to the 90th Infantry Division. They assigned me as company commander of Company G in the 358th Infantry Regiment. And this company had lost all their officers and 50 percent of their enlisted men during a prior engagement. My mission was to organize these replacements into this demoralized company and make an attack three days later. That was the most trying time I’ve had in my entire life. I thought, if there is a guardian angel, why, no one ever needed one any worse than I did with my responsibilities in this situation and the men that I was responsible for.
After the reorganization when we were moving up to the front we were under long range artillery fire. An artillery shell exploded nearby and a piece of shrapnel from this artillery shell struck a boy in the head. He couldn’t have been, well, somewhere between 18 and 21 years of age, and I can hear him today, his cry out and the way his voice trailed off as he dropped dead. He said, "Mooommm." It gave me the chills. That was my first casualty. He was one of the 405,399 to be killed in World War II, he became a statistic. He was a statistic to everyone except his mother and his other loved ones. And I’ve often wondered, how is the selection made? He hadn’t seen an enemy. He hadn’t fired any weapon. And he was my first casualty.
I want to go into my first major battle, and that was the battle of the Island of Seves. The regiment made two attacks on that island and were repulsed with heavy casualties. The regimental chaplain put up a white flag and started walking across toward the enemy lines. A German officer put up a white flag and they met out in no man’s land. They organized a truce. So they decided to pick up their casualties and get medical treatment for them. They came back and took the white flags down and we started making more casualties.
That was when I learned my first big lesson. After making the first attack and getting ready for the second attack, there was one sergeant, I couldn’t get him out of his foxhole to join us for this attack. He was squatted down in this foxhole below ground level, and he was frozen with fear. He was strictly out. He just wasn’t gonna do it. So after this next attack, which was also a failure, I went back to check on him. There he was, crouched down in that foxhole in the same position I’d last seen him. The only difference was, he had a hole in his steel helmet. For him to get killed like that it took a treeburst artillery shell, and a piece of shrapnel had to go straight down into that foxhole and hit him. So the lesson I learned was, if it’s your time you cannot hide. I decided that I may get it, but I’m gonna be doing my job when I do. If he had joined us in the attack, who knows? Of course, with the condition he was in he wouldn’t have been any help anyhow. Some people just could not take, the public doesn’t realize all the type of killing there is, and the ruthlessness of it. And there are just some men that couldn’t take it mentally, they just didn’t have something while other men that could take it, who knows why they could take it?
After all this, we’re going make another attack, just one rifle company, and they chose me to make this attack. I was beginning to wonder if the tactics are correct here. Because here’s a strongpoint three miles long, I was always taught that you attack the weak points, not the strongpoints. If you surround them, they’d fall without any casualties. And I thought first that this was wrong. Because now they’re going to order one rifle company to take an objective that the regiment had failed and one battalion surrendered half of their men on that island, now they’re going to send me over there? These are the thoughts that are going through my mind. But they promised me a smokescreen and an artillery preparation so that they could blind the enemy and make him keep his head down while we crossed this open field and that river we had to wade to get to this strongpoint.
I keep waiting for the smoke and the artillery and I never see it. The battalion commander ordered me to go anyhow. I questioned him on that. And these are his words, he said, "If we don’t get some men on that island, I’ll be relieved, the regimental commander will be relieved, you’ll be relieved."
I said, "Colonel, I think my responsibility goes a little deeper than that. I’m responsible for 150 men."
I don’t remember saying this but in my mind I knew that was what I felt.
He ordered us to go anyhow, so what am I gonna do? Take a chance of being court-martialed for disobeying an order to go on a hazardous duty? I couldn’t do that. I remembered the old infantry credo, it ended up I said, "Follow me!" I thought it would be sure death, but I had no choice.
So I got out about 50 yards, and the Germans opened up on us with machine guns, even some tank firing. So I looked back, and there are only three men following me. So I hit the ground. Now what the heck are me and three men gonna do? So I lay in a prone position, and one machine gun was cutting grass over my legs and I believe if he had searched down any lower he’d have cut the cheeks of my butt off, but he searched back and got one of the men that were following me.
And someone was firing at me with a burp gun, what we called a burp gun, it’s like our Thompson submachine gun, it wasn’t high-powered and it was firing at its maximum range. So they’re on line with me but they’re falling about three feet short. The bullets were bouncing, I could see them. I was holding my carbine, and I felt something roll across my hand, and I caught three of those bullets. Now who’s going to believe that you caught three bullets in combat? But I explained that they’d lost their strength, they were just bouncing. And after a while they stopped shooting, either they thought we were dead or they could see that we were no threat to take that island. So I told these two men to run back for cover. They dashed back. I should have got up and went with them, I can see the picture now, but I lay there until they hit cover. Then I got up, and these Germans probably jumped on their guns, they were ready for me, and I had three machine guns firing at me, so help me, like you see in a movie they ripped up the dirt on the right side, the left side, the bullets I could hear like hornets all around me. And I didn’t zigzag, I just took off as fast as I could dash, it was fifty yards, and I didn’t get a scratch. So I figure the guardian angel was working for me.
They had an investigation of that, they had me make out a report on the battalion commander’s action, and he got relieved of his command and so did the regimental commander.
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Arnold Brown is one of the veterans featured in "9 Lives"
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