John Walker: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts

John Walker is a member of the “Greatest Generation.” The term, popularized by famed newsman and author Tom Brokaw, refers to Americans who were raised during the Great Depression and fought World War II from home and on the front lines. In his book, The Greatest Generation (1998) Brokaw wrote "this is the greatest generation any society has produced."

Like most veterans his age, Walker didn’t become a solider to seek fame or fortune. He went off to defend his country simply because it was the right thing to do.

As a mortar gunner and later sergeant squad leader of a 60-millimeter mortar squad, 21-year-old Walker and the other young soldiers in his squad were shipped to Europe among three company rifle platoons in their efforts to defeat the Germans. (Note: As part of his duties, Walker carried the 45-pound, 60 millimeter mortar, which looks like a tripod cannon).

Fifty-three years after the war ended, at the urging of his five children, Walker committed his remembrances of his three years of service to paper. Using 134 letters he wrote home to his family from the front lines, he created a 73-page bound book that chronicles some of the most memorable events, beginning when he entered the army in February 1943 through fierce battles he survived in France and Germany, until his discharge from the army in March 1946. The photos Walker includes in his memoirs show a handsome, bespectacled youth in uniform smiling from the door of a boxcar on his way to Camp Phillip Morris in France; aboard the U.S.S. Anderson; on leave in Nice; and with a fellow sergeant holding the “good news headline” in the Stars and Stripes Army newspaper that boldly declared “Hitler Dead.”

After years of silence about his wartime experiences, Walker finally rejoined other war veterans and began talking aloud of his service. These days, he is sometimes called upon to speak to schoolchildren, and revels in helping youngsters understand what it was really like to be a soldier during World War II, from the clothes he wore, to the cold he endured, to the showers he was fortunate to take every six weeks or so.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941, Walker was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Well aware that he would be drafted, he tried to enlist in the Navy, but was refused for poor eyesight. He ended up enlisting as a private in the Army and graduated a semester early, on his birthday—January 31, 1943. He went home to New York City and was called to active duty three weeks later.

For several months, Walker was rapidly processed through several camps and infantry replacement training centers, including Camp Upton in Long Island; Camp Croft near Spartansburg, SC; through Signal Corp School at Camp Crowder, MO; Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) training at Grinnell College in Iowa, and North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo.

The story that follows details some of Walker’s experiences and is primarily told as a narrative in his own words, written from an oral interview with him and his wife at their home on September 15, 2008. Definitions appear in italics.
In March 1944, John Walker became part of the Rainbow Division, based in Oklahoma. (The Rainbow Division’s name was granted by Chief of Staff MacArthur during World War I. Activated at Camp Mills, NY, in 1917 by taking national guard units from all over the U.S., MacArthur met the new troops at Camp Mills in New York and noted that the make up of the division covered the country like a rainbow. )

During the ensuing months, until he was shipped overseas, he was “in the field,” crawling through the woods, firing weapons, and learning to carefully read maps.

In November 1944, Walker and about 9,000 men (three infantry regiments of 3,000 soldiers each) were shipped from Manhattan, NY, to Marseilles, France. The journey took two weeks and when they debarked on December 9, recalls Walker, “we realized how badly the Marseilles Harbor had been shot up” as the Germans retreated.

After 10 days near Marseilles, Walker’s unit was called upon to help aid the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans started attacking through Luxembourg. Americans needed infantrymen in a hurry so we shipped north, said Walker. (In December 1944, Adolph Hitler launched German troops against Allied lines in the Ardennes Mountains that extend through Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Hitler planned to drive through Antwerp to destroy the British and U.S. troops north of there. When storms grounded Allied aircraft, the Germans moved in quickly. However, a few U.S. units moved north which enabled the British to send reserves to secure the front lines as General Patton's Army hit the south. Once the weather cleared, the Germans were hit from all sides. Their attack resulted “in a large bulge in the Allied lines.” The Americans suffered great casualties; but the Germans’ loss was far worse. By the end of January 1945, American units had retaken all of the ground they had lost, and Germany’s defeat was imminent.)

For four days, Walker and his fellow soldiers were crammed into “40 and 8’s box cars,” slept on the floor and ate K rations (pre-packaged or canned food), rode through the Rhone River Valley to the front lines, and debarked at Bensdorf. (The French called these box cars 40 and 8’s because they were big enough to hold 40 men or 8 horses.)

When the men arrived in Bensdorf, they got out of the cars and stared. The town had been mostly destroyed during heavy fighting a few weeks before. That night, they marched to a nearby old, abandoned factory. After bedding down on the concrete floor, they watched the artillery flashes until they fell asleep.

The following day, Christmas Eve, Walker and his unit stayed in Bensdorf, picking through the debris in the town. They returned, that night, to the old factory. Less than an hour later, they received orders to move out. In the dark and bitter cold, “open trucks came and we loaded up. We got lost and drove around Alsace all night until our driver got us where we had to go—to the big Maginot Line Fortress Von Bismarck. They spent Christmas Day awaiting orders, in total darkness, “in the bowels of” the big French fort. On December 26, they marched to Obershaffelsheim and then, a few days and many miles later, to Duppigheim.

On New Year’s Day, Walker and his squad rode in DUKWs (amphibious vehicles used by the Army to transport troops) to the front lines at the French Maginot Fortress Schwartzkoff on the Rhine River where “my squad manned a 50-caliber machine gun zeroed in on the German front line across the river. We could see them running from pillbox to pillbox (bunkers), but didn’t shoot.”

Then, they spent a week in three little towns, pulling guard duty outside of a house or around road systems outside of the town. “There were rumors of Germans parachutists in our area; but, we never found any. There was always a threat that the Germans would cross the Rhine River. There were a lot of our regiment guarding it, but we were very thinly spread. German patrols could cross the river and we wouldn’t even know it.” Normal defense usually deploys each man about five to 10 yards apart along the front so that the men are in contact. Because these troops were holding such a large area—30 miles of front—they only had enough men to be 100 yards apart. Many of the men had been pulled north, like a great big gate, to fight the Battle of the Bulge; so, we had to fill in the front where the 3rd Army had been before Patton pulled them out.”

On January 3rd, the soldiers marched 10 miles to Feggersheim, then rode in DUKWs to Hermerswiller. By January 7th, they were in Hoffen. The next day, they marched a half mile to Leiterswiller “where we took up defensive positions facing heavy fighting taking place a mile way in Hatten and Rittershofen.”

From January 9th to January 20th, “we took a fearful battering from German artillery, mortars, and tank fire,” says Walker.

With very little time to reflect about his first time in battle, Walker and his fellow soldiers moved again and again. It was “very touch and go because the Germans were pushing [our] way with two armored divisions,” trying to capture the two small French Alsatian towns. If captured, these towns would have opened the path for a big German advance. In mid-January, there was tremendous pressure upon thin American lines and for a couple weeks, my company was in a defensive position. We dug fox holes and positioned ourselves to look a mile away and see the heavy battle. We had to be careful getting out of the foxholes and walking around or the Germans would send artillery our way.

On January 19th , we got orders that we were going to retreat. That night, in darkness and a snowstorm, we pulled out of the lines. We were forced to withdraw 15 miles, finally re-established a defense line along and behind the Moder River in the Haguenau-Schweighausen area of Alsace.

Several days later, on the night of January 24th, the Germans launched a heavy attack against our regiment, and after an hour of two or fighting along the Moder River line, they broke through E&F Companies. At about 9 o’clock, I was pulling guard duty at my company CP and got orders to go back to my platoon. We were pulling out to go find some 700 German paratroopers who had broken through. Our job was to find and stop them.

Amidst another snowstorm, we sallied forth from Ohlungen…[until the] Germans ambushed us in a large field. As we crossed the field, off to the right, I heard a rifle shot. I immediately hit the snow-covered ground. I was carrying the mortar and no sooner did my body hit the ground, than the red and green tracer bullets started flying everywhere. They must have had 12 machine guns and they just kept shooting at us for three to four hours as we lay there in the snow. We were trapped, pinned down on the field by German fire, and many were killed and wounded. Initially, there was so much fire that we couldn’t do anything but lay there and pray.

Occasionally the Germans shot up flares to light up the whole field so they could see where to shoot. Soon my squad leader and I set up our mortar and returned fire on the Germans. The rest of our company also fired on the Germans. Later, we decided to withdraw from the field. One guy in our squad left his ammo and deserted. He just bugged off. We never saw him again. So then, there were just four of us. We finally withdrew from the field, retreated to Ohlungen, regrouped with our company, and went back out at daybreak to establish a line of defense along the Ohlungen-Schweighausen Road.

We dug in [as best we could]; but, the ground was so frozen that it was solid, like concrete. As we lay along the road and looked into the woods, 150 yards away, we could see activity and the paratroopers digging in. Occasionally, fire went back and forth.

Our company commander sent two scouts out toward the German line. They got about halfway across the field and the Germans opened fire on them. They both went down. Later, we sent out two men with a white flag toward the German line. Two Germans came out with a white flag and they talked out there and looked at our scouts laying there in the snow and agreed that the wounded soldier could be evacuated. One man was not wounded so he had to stay where he was. They authorized the “meat wagon,” an Army ambulance, to come out. They put [the wounded soldier] in the meat wagon, left the field, and then the fire fight started again [with the other man still on the ground].

Then, two tanks came from our side firing their cannons and machine guns at the German position. We advanced behind the tanks, capturing and killing a lot of the paratroopers and driving the paratroopers out of the woods.

The following day, another U.S. division—The 101st Airborne—came to relieve us and we were sent back for some rest. Our company had six killed, 15 wounded, and six missing in that 24-hour battle. For that battle (our regiment was stretched out about 3 miles), and our outstanding defense, our 222nd regiment was awarded the presidential unit citation.”

For their period of rest, the soldiers were sent to Einville, “a typical little French country town, muddy and dirty with big piles of manure in the streets. We were there for three weeks so we could rest and get some decent food rather than the K rations we were living on, get replacements for our losses, and get more training. We marched during the day and trained. It was a respite, a chance to catch our breath.


On February 15, we were trucked into the northern Vosges Mountains of Alsace. We dug in there for a month, [and] were in primarily a defensive position, sending combat patrols into the German lines to kill or capture Germans. On March 15th, we jumped off in a major attack on the German lines and spent the next two weeks advancing through the mountains, through the German Siegfried Line, and then, in tucks, across the Rhine River, on March 31st,on a pontoon bridge. The mountains were so steep and rugged that trucks could hardly get there. We got most of our supplies during the attack phase of the campaign by mule back.

On Easter Sunday, April 1st, a sunny, mild day, we started moving south toward Wurzberg. We stopped for a rest period in a woods. I remember these pine trees; we were at the edge of the woods; when, all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose. All this firing is coming down through the trees. We all hit the ground. I hear the roar of a German jetfighter. He’d spotted us and he was strafing. All these bullets were coming through the trees and hitting the ground all around us. It scared the living daylights out of us. The firing came first, then the jet noise followed. The jet (Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe, German for swallow) was one of very few that the Germans had in any quantity. He swung around and made another pass over us and strafed us again, then took off. None of the guys in my immediate area were hit. I don’t know how we lucked out of that. So, we picked up our stuff and continued on our way. We had to get to Wurzberg. This city had been firebombed by the British two weeks before we got there. I remember looking across the Main River; all I could see were destroyed buildings. It had once been this quaint, old medieval city and now its streets were filled with rubble.

To get across the river, we had to get into rowboats. A German machine gunner was shooting at us from 200 yards down river, and the river was flowing right to left, toward the machine gunner; so, we had to row [upstream] like mad to get across the river. [Once] across the river and out [of the boat], we got up against warehouses and waited for orders to advance into the city proper. We spent three days fighting in Wurzberg because the Germans defended quite strongly.

On that first night, [our] mortar section—three guns—stopped its advance at this church that had been hit by bombs. We were a couple of mortar squads sitting there, eating our K rations in this church yard that had a red brick wall around it. We lined up against this brick wall, which was about waist high, and designated guard routine. Everyone would have one hour on guard duty and would stay awake.

It was raining and the [rain drops were] pattering down on our steel helmets. At about 4 a.m., my assistant gunner was on guard. He was sitting next to me, against the wall. He was awake as the rest of us were dozing. He saw someone come out of the church basement. The light was poor so it looked like a dark shadow; but, he saw this individual pick his way across the church yard left to right. So, he yells halt. This German fires his weapon at us and a bullet hits the wall above our heads. My assistant gunner fires. His gun jams so he ejects [the casing] and fires three more rounds. The German goes down. He’s hit. He’s lying there 60 feet or so from us in the dark and he’s crying out in German. [Now] we’re all wide awake—we were as soon as the gunner yelled halt—and we’re whispering very quietly, what are we going to do? So, we decide to get up at a certain moment as a skirmish line and start shooting at everything. We can’t tell in the semi-darkness what it is so we get up and start firing and we kill him.

He turned out to have a rifle and a couple of hand grenades, we called them potato mashers because they had wooden stick on the end, flares, a flare gun, and candy. We took his candy. When we went through his belongings and pockets, I felt sad because we saw a picture of a woman and kids in his wallet.

We spent three days picking our way through the rubble in Wurzberg before we drove the Germans completely out of the city.

From there, we went on to Schweinfurt, (the capital of ball bearing manufacturing, which had been severely bombed for two years by the U.S.A.F.) We ran into fighting along the way—we never knew if the Germans would decide to defend a town or not. One day, as we were marching along in open formation along the Main River, a German 88 battery opened on us and began firing anti-aircraft shells. They were exploding 60 feet above us in the air. There were these big black clouds in the air and guys were getting wounded as the shrapnel came down.

Our orders were to keep moving forward, to take a side road to get away from anti-aircraft fire. My platoon sergeant said to go back up the road we were just on, to where the battalion vehicles were (the jeeps and so on). I got in the first jeep and we came roaring up to where we had to make a left turn; I hopped out and just at that time, the battery opened up on us with 88s and shells burst overhead. The next jeep would come up and I’d direct him where to go, then hit the dirt. I could see when the guns were fired and see the flash; and I knew when I saw the flash and shells that it would be over [me in] two to three seconds so I’d hit the deck. I thought I‘d had it that time…the shrapnel was all around me. But, once the last vehicle came up, I [stood] up and took off, the firing stopped, and later, I caught up with my company.

When we got down to Furth/Nuremburg , we had to cross this long bridge; but, they’d blown out one part of the roadbed. So we crossed on a large intact pipe under the roadbed. Then, the fighting ended in Furth. The guys requisitioned cars and rode around. I remember guys driving a German fire truck and doing crazy things like that. A lot of DPs (displaced persons) were there. They’d been brought by Germans to work in factories. There was this big clothing factory and all these DPs wanted to get in and get some clothes. One of the guys shot the lock off and the DPs poured in there and we said, come on in. We helped them get all clothes could carry.

From Furth, we kept heading south, through Bavaria and the Danube River. We’d occasionally run into a fire fight but not too many.

In one town, we went down a long narrow street, in company, in column, The Germans at the other end opened up with twin 20 mm anti aircraft cannons. They were firing down the street. There were explosive shells. We all hit the ditches right away (there were ditches on either side) We never knew the types of things we might run into.

Though it might seem that way, there was not always constant fighting. There was a lot of plodding along, marching, going through little towns. If we approached a town not being defended, the German citizens would put out white sheets to signify they would not fight.

We finally got to Dachau on April 29th and most of us didn’t know what Dachau was. I knew it was a concentration camp but I didn’t know what that meant. It was a messy situation because there were 33,000 [inmates] there and they were walking skeletons. The Germans had worked and starved the inmates and many had diseases, such as typhus. The Germans had given them diseases, experimented with them. The camp smelled terrible.

At Dachau, there was this whole string of box cars outside, crammed with dead prisoners. The doors of the box cars were open and dead bodies were lying in there. They’d been brought from other concentration camps farther up in Germany, in Poland, and the Germans had been evacuating them, to get away from the Russians. These people hadn’t been fed in days and as they’d moved so slowly across Germany, in bad weather; so, when they got there most of them were dead and the rest of them were probably shot so they wouldn’t get out. We found one man alive out of 1,500 in box cars. It was terrible.

In Dachau itself, it was a terrible scene. I couldn’t believe what I saw. But, the Germans surrendered pretty much without a fight. The SS there guarding the camp were killed by inmates; or, if they made any resistance, were killed by American troops.

The next day, the Americans wanted to help, to give the [prisoners] food, all that stuff, and the Red Cross came to treat them. Our GIs wanted to give them food, regular food, but they couldn’t. The prisoners would eat it and it’d make them sick.

The Germans would mislead the prisoners. Right on those wrought iron entrance gates was [the inscription] Arbeit Macht Frei. Work makes you free. What baloney.

The night of April 29th, our squad stayed right by the camp, in a little house. The following morning, we rode on tanks right next to the fences. Hundreds of the prisoners were at the fences waving to us and shouting in all different languages. We threw our K rations to them and then went on to liberate Munich.

We stayed overnight in Munich, and the following day went south toward the Alps. It was May 1, and we marched out in a snowstorm. For the next week, the war was practically over. There was no real fighting. Germans were surrendering by the thousands.

We’d see whole contingents of German troops; but, they were surrendering. We would not pay attention to them. We’d wave at them and they’d go toward our rear and be taken as prisoners.

That last week, there was so much marching. We’d go into little towns; we’d search the houses, attics to basements, to see if German soldiers were hiding. They’d do that during the last days of the war. In one little town, we collected 35 prisoners who had been hiding; some in uniform; some out. We could tell easily if they’d been in service.

When we’d stop in these little villages, we’d sleep; but, we had to have guards. We’d set up with two machine guns and if you were the guard on machine gun duty, you had to man it all night. We’d capture the town never knowing what they were going to do.

As soon as it was daylight, we’d get up, grab our K ration, and be on the road again toward the next town. We never did get a heck of a lot of sleep.

The war ended May 8th and within a week, we went into the Austrian Tyrol Valley by truck. What a gorgeous country, 7,000-foot mountains on the north and south sides of the valley. We bounced from town to town for another eight weeks, to show people that troops were around. We pulled road blocks because lots of Germans were hiding in the mountains; they’d come down and surrender. Our division picked up a lot of high German muckity mucks who’d tried to escape by going into the mountains.

I finally left in February 1946 for home. When the war ended, my company, Company G was 10-15 miles from Austria and the Alps. That’s what the Allies were so fearful of—that the Germans were going to get into the Alps, their “Alpine Redoubt” and prolong the war. We were afraid the Germans were planning to defend the Alps and that they’d withdraw into the Alps and it would be one heck of a job to get them out of there.

During Walker’s four months of combat, his company of 190 men, Company G, 30 men [were] killed, 100 more wounded. Walker considers himself lucky. I saw companies who had 190 and they ended up with 25 or 30 men because all of the others were killed or wounded. He himself was never injured, despite lots of close calls.

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Once out of the service, Walker completed graduate school at Columbia University and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in counter intelligence. He was called back into service for the Korean war and served about 18 months as an instructor at Fort Holabird in Baltimore (which closed in the 1970’s). He eventually retired from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel.

For more information about the Rainbow Division, visit http://www.rainbowvets.org/.

John Walker: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts