Clark Wilson
Infantryman ETO
Clark Wilson
Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army
1944–1978
Pvt. Clark Wilson
Germany, 1945
It was 1944 and I was afraid the war was going to be over before I got there.
I was born in 1925 in Anthony, Kansas. My daddy was a druggist and had a little drugstore. We moved to the western part of Kansas during the Dust Bowl and to Dallas in 1936. Daddy was always looking for greener pastures. We ended up in Huntsville where I graduated high school in 1943.
Back in those days people were ready to do what they were supposed to do to defend the country. I was 17 and my parents weren’t eager to sign off to let me go. I got one semester of college at Sam Houston and then I was drafted into the Army. It was 1944 and I was afraid the war was going to be over before I got there. We headed for North Carolina to Camp Butner. I was in a combat engineer battalion. We were cross-trained engineers and infantry. We built lots of different kinds of bridges across little rivers around there.
I left New York in October, 1944 for England and went to Scotland in December, building bridges. The Battle of the Bulge had started and we were slated to head to France on Christmas Day. On December 24th a submarine sank the Leopoldville, a Belgian troop ship, around Cherbourg and 700 people drowned. We weren’t going to the Battle of the Bulge; we were taking the place of the battalion that was lost. There were 65,000 German troops trapped in the Cotentin Peninsula, and they wanted us to block them from going to Germany.
On December 26, 1944 we went to the Saint-Nazaire area. We were there for a month and ran patrols at night watching for German submarines. In January we headed for Paris. We ended up in Cologne as direct support of the 82nd and 101st airborne trying to reduce the Ruhr Pocket where there were about 317,000 Germans. We built bridges on the Rhine River around Cologne. That’s where we lost the company commander who stepped on a mine and blew his leg off.
In April, 1945 we were in the little town of Frechen, Germany. They had us building bridges and doing road construction. Our unit didn’t see near as much combat as other units. In a way I was happy about it, but I also would have liked to have seen more of what was going on. After the war I was in the Army of Occupation near Frankfurt.
In April, 1946 I came back home. I stayed in the reserve and went to the University of Texas. I finished in 1952. I was commissioned in law enforcement because I was working on a master’s degree in political science. I ended up teaching elementary school. I had a brother in-law in the Army in Panama, and he said it was great. I taught in Houston for 6 years, then I went down to Panama in 1965 and taught elementary school. I loved it. I was still in the reserves but they gave me a deferment for college if I took ROTC. I didn’t have to go to Korea or Vietnam. I retired in 1978 from the reserves as a lieutenant colonel. I met my wife in Panama, and came back here in 1988.
My best duty was probably the German Occupation because I could do a lot of traveling. My worst day was on a night patrol. A guy carrying a radio on his back got shot. I had to help take care of him until he passed on. Fortunately, I never got shot. I’ve made it this far, and we’ll see how much farther I go. {05-03-2018 • San Antonio, TX}