Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
3:29 | Raised by his grandparents in Washington DC and drafted after high school, Bob Royce refused to marry his girlfriend before he left for Europe because he didn't want to come home to a wife if he was maimed. He didn't get maimed and she married someone else, but, in a way, she helped him to be successful after the war.
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Draftee Bob Royce went to Army boot camp in Grenada, Mississippi and his eyes were opened to the reality of life in the rural South during the 1940's. Looking past that to his training, he only worried about the heat. At his next stop in Charleston, he nearly lost the car his family loaned him to the Atlantic tide.
On the way to Europe, Bud Royce was berthed all the way down at the bottom of the ship, which prompted a morbid observation. After nearly burning down his billet in England, he left for Le Havre, where he managed to anger a French farmer, who compared Americans unfavorably to Germans.
Bob Royce recounts several offbeat incidents that occurred when his unit was pushing into Germany from France. Little things like, which way are those shells coming from? You call that a haircut? And, what do you do with a room full of drunks?
When his buddy George Farris was hit by a sniper, Bob Royce and two others started back to battalion headquarters to get help. They had to hit the ground when the same sniper targeted them. Royce decided to get up and run for it. After he secured aid and was returning to the front, the sniper struck again.
Bob Royce shows off the helmet he was wearing when a German sniper put a hole through it and knocked him flat on his face. He was miraculously unharmed and continued the mission to evacuate a wounded friend. For that, he was awarded a Silver Star, which he is also proud to display.
The Germans were surrendering in droves and Bob Royce made friends with an enemy prisoner who spoke good English. The defeated German soldier gave him a good luck charm because he might need it in the Pacific. The officers were held in a different building and they arrived in fancy convertibles. That gave the young Americans an idea.
When Bob Royce came home from the European campaign, he was the youngest acting 1st Sergeant in the division. He sent the company's men to bases near their homes for discharge and then he was told he had six more months to serve. He knew that was wrong and he began an enlisted man's quest for redress. All this was a lesson for future life.
