Memorial Day
May 25, 2020
(Documentation)
I spoke with Co B 307th Abn
Engr Bn (C) 82nd Abn Div Leslie V. Petersen May 6,
2005 .
He was best friends with Chin
Foon. They used to go across the street in Burbage
and get Beer and Onions and make Onion sandwiches.
Chin Foon was the man mentioned in the Enfin Libres!
Book below.
The other page with this is a
list of people that Venceslaus (Stan) W. Borucki
loaned money to
. Chin is the second one on the
list. It’s always nice to have a
little background on the men from Co B.
The other man mentioned in the
book is Horace Joseph who jumped behind
Chin. There
were 5 Co B men buried at the Rauville Cemetery and
there are medical records that rule out the other 4
men. That means that Horace was the man with the broken leg
who bled to death
.
From the French Book Enfin Libres!
Hummingbird
followed a few steps. I joined the convoy and we
were soon to penetrate in the cemetery where the
gravedigger was digging the graves. Already five
bodies had been buried; the two new ones were
descended carts and lying on the grass with touching
precautions, as if one were afraid of doing to still
suffer those beings whom death had forever liberated
human suffering.
The drizzle
redoubled, putting a still more funereal note at
these funerals of soldiers, whose simplicity was
reminiscent of those of Atala, without glass, without
priest, without coffins, without other prayers that
the thoughts of compassion and gratitude going from
our hearts to these strangers, whose perishable
bodies were going disappear forever under a foreign
land, but who welcomed as the most generous of his
martyrs and the best of his children.
The gravedigger
having finished digging and exhausting the water
that formed at the bottom of the tombs, a
rectangular, yellowish lake. Prepared to sink the
bodies into the gaping holes in the walls glistening
with moisture. The faces of the dead, a moment
discovered, allowed me to notice that one of them
belonged to an Asian, which was confirmed by the
Chinese name engraved on the identity plate of the
parachutist.
The other
soldier did not wore no trace of bullet or stab, but
a tourniquet he had made himself above the knee
revealed the nature of the wound from which he had
succumbed. His parachute having presumably not
working, or too late, he had fallen like a stone,
hence its broken limb on landing. The, bone having
punctured the flesh an abundant haemorrhage was
resulted that the American had tried to stop by
squeezing strongly, but to no avail, his thigh with
his strip of bandage.
Legrand, Octave. Enfin Libres!
(p. 162). P. Bellee. Edieur Coutances 1946
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