I was regimental duty officer on December 6^th 1941, the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  The next morning the Japs woke up the whole post.

Jap submarines bombarded the Santa Barbara coast. We were 50 miles inland and we went into full scale alert. I spent the night on the parade ground, guarding the area with a light machine gun under a 6X6 truck and without ammunition. We were told that the ammunition would be issued later.

When I first reported in to the 508^th as a 1^st Lieutenant at Camp Blanding, the 2^nd Battalion was commanded by Captain Louis Mendez. Camp Blanding was built on a swamp.

I remember the first officers meeting he called, when he handed me a pencil and told me talk about the pencil for 5 minutes.

On D-DAY 6^th June 1944, I landed in a field and gathered approximately 80 men and then we met up with Colonel Shanley's group which he had around 120 men on the outskirts of a town called Picauville.

Colonel Shanley and Major Shields Warren decided that Picauville was too heavily defended so they contacted Colonel Lindquist by radio who told them to move to Hill 30 and hold it. Hill 30 was the high ground in the area, and from it they could control a major road junction and the causeway across the Merderet River.

On D-DAY, the 200 man force was split into two columns with Colonel Shanley leading the left column and Major Warren leading the right column. Lt George Miles and I were to bring up the rear.

On the way to Hill 30, George and I went behind some tree’s to relieve ourselves when a shot was fired and George was hit in the groin.

A medic checked him out and said it was too serious a wound to move him, and it might be fatal if he was moved.

So the medic injected a shot of morphine into him to ease the pain, and he was left there with two canteens of water.

After 2 days of heavy fighting around Hill 30 we recovered Lt George Miles.

George survived the war.