Talking with 82-year-old Jasper resident Edward Forrest, you might not guess this gentle man was once a warrior. But 20th-Century Iliad, World War II, included Forrest as a cannoneer.
Drafted at 18 out of the north Georgia mountains, Forrest reported to the induction station. An official asked him which armed forces branch he preferred.
"Give me the Navy," Forrest requested.
"You're not big enough to carry a seabag," he was told.
"I weighed 108 pounds is what I weighed," Forrest said. "They put me in the artillery carrying 95-pound shells."
Assigned to the Army (Battery B, 20th Field Artillery Battalion of the 4th Infantry Division) Forrest served a 155 millimeter Howitzer as a member of a gun crew.
The heavy but portable 155 had a thick-walled barrel with two barrel-like cylinders paralleling the cannon above and below. The upper cylinder held hydraulic fluid; the lower a spring. Those absorbed the recoil when the cannon fired, Forrest explained.
Unlike the smaller 105 Howitzer, loads for the 155 were not prepackaged. The projectile loaded into the 155 by hand with a separate gunpowder charge packed in behind. The powder came in white cotton, draw-string bags with round "pads" or cakes of gunpowder stacked several to a sack, Forrest said.
An officer dictated how many cakes to load. Sometimes you opened the sack, and removed a cake or two, Forrest said. Then you drew the string and placed sack and all behind the projectile in the cannon chamber.
"It all depended on what distance you were shooting," he explained. "The range of the gun was 16,500 yards. I think that runs about 11 miles. But we shot it clear out of the book. If need be, we'd try to put 'em on out there."
Working a gun, cannoneers stacked projectiles to one side, powder sacks to the other, Forrest said. Explosive projectiles were designed not to explode unless fused.
"We put fuses in before we'd fire 'em," Forrest said. "When we had 'em stacked up there, they wouldn't have fuses in them, in case they got hit. [Otherwise] they'd be exploding all over the place."
"We got hit one time from the German artillery," Forrest remembers. "It blew up our powder and all that. We had a pretty good explosion around there."
The blast wounded two of Forrest's gun crew. Calls for a medic brought an aid to treat the wounded while the rest of the crew scrambled to move equipment away from the fire ignited by the German shell. "You know they make a big flash when they go off," Forrest said. Flames overran the stack of American projectiles. "The shells got white hot, but they didn't explode," Forrest said.
His baptism of fire came just beyond the beach at Normandy, five days after initial Allied landings there on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Disembarking from a landing craft, Forrest saw piles of helmets and dog tags mounded on the sand. "There still was a few corpses floating in the water there," he recalls.
Forrest hit the beach without a cannon. The gun he would man was already ashore, he explained. "We were replacements," he said. "They lost some men, so they sent us in to replace some they'd lost."
"When I first went up on the beach up there, you didn't dare even leave the gun, 'cause they [the Germans] were firing like crazy. You could go to sleep standing up by the wheel, 'cause there at the start, we had to put a lot of shrapnel out there. We were backing up the infantry. It was the 8th, 12th and 22nd Infantry. We supported them."
Ashore at Utah Beach, the 4th Infantry Division (that included Forrest's battery) turned west to take the French harbor of Cherbourg from the land side. This done, they turned back east in the campaign for Paris. Originally part of the 1st Army, the 4th Division was joined to Patton's 3rd Army on the push to Paris.
Forrest does not recall ever seeing Patton. "He didn't come around us much," Forrest said. "He stayed up there in the front with the tanks and stuff. He was probably a good general, but a lot of people didn't like him," Forrest said. "If the infantry moved, he moved us. We stayed within four or five miles from the front line so we could really put 'em over there."
Trailing Patton, Forrest's battery drug their four Howitzers to Paris, through Belgium and into Germany. A tracked vehicle pulled each cannon. These "tractors" were tanks without turrets. Open-topped, they had benches down both sides of the interior for a seven-man gun crew. The driver steered behind a windshield.
The battery also included a half-track with four .50 caliber machine guns turret-mounted for control by one anti-aircraft gunner.
"A kitchen on a truck came with us," Forrest said. "We had a cook to cook us meals. We thought we were in 7th heaven then. We had been eating those C-rations so long. We were tired of them."
Patton's forward momentum continued until about Christmas 1944 and the Battle of the Bulge.
“We were moving,” Forrest said. “We were pushing them. They turned around and pushed back and then overran us actually. They surrounded us. We sat there about a week.
“We didn't do anything [so their hazardous position would not be revealed to the enemy, he explained]. But when we started again we got a good workout. They [American reinforcements] broke through the German line, and that split 'em, and we could let loose again.”
In the brutal cold and deep snow of the Bulge, numbers of American infantrymen lost their feet to frostbite.
"We got snowed on quite a bit in Germany," Forrest said. "I think it snowed over there all the time."
Forrest said he and a friend, Mitchel Shupe of Kentucky, cooperated on their field accommodations.
"Me and him, we always watched out for each other. We always dug a foxhole big enough for two. And that frozen ground is hard to dig a foxhole in," Forrest said. He and Shupe put straw, raided from German haystacks, in the bottom of their bivouac to make it more comfortable, but there was no such thing as warm.
"You never could have a fire over there," Forrest said, "'cause if they saw that fire, they'd lay some artillery in there on you. Building a fire was a no-no. We stayed frozen. We'd just put on all the clothes we could get and hang in there."
Forrest's battery hung in there well across Germany. They had the Alps in view when the Germans surrendered, he said.
"That's when the officers started yelling that the war was over, which pleased us good. There was some pretty scary times in there," Forrest said. "You always thought somebody was looking at you over a rifle sight. You never knew."
"We were in five major battles," Forrest said. "Battle of the Bulge; Huertgen Forest; [three others with names he could not recall]. I got five battle stars out of the deal. We had some pretty stiff ones all the time. We didn't know which one was which."
Back to the United States for more training before deployment to the south Pacific, Forrest was just completing a 30-day furlough from his North Carolina base when Japan surrendered.
"I was in Atlanta on a bus to go back when they started screaming and yelling the war was over with Japan," Forrest said. "Everybody was happy then. If you had a uniform on, you couldn't buy a drink. Everybody was putting one in your hand."
The grim war was finished but never the images and memories for a soldier who experienced them firsthand. From the bound record of the 4th Infantry Division Artillery, a sort of soldier's annual, Forrest's head shot shows a stern, bespectacled 20-something who might pass for 30. "Yeah, you got serious over there in a hurry," he said.
Forrest saw arms and legs of American soldiers hanging from trees on the heights above the Normandy beachhead. Shell blasts created the display near D-Day paratroopers still dangling lifeless in their chutes.
Further ashore he saw gliders. Many of the winged plywood boxcars, meant to deliver American troops beyond the beaches, crashed and killed their passengers instead. "I saw one that landed in an orchard," Forrest said. "He just took it between two trees and took the wings right off it. I don't know how many came alive out of it."
"The Germans never picked up there dead," Forrest said. "They left 'em. If they picked any up, I never knew about it. We set up a gun once in a field. The muzzle blast blew the snow out of the way, and there was two dead ones right in front of the gun."
Asked if he would do it all again, Forrest answered directly.
"I'd rather not," he said. "I was a scared boy." |
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| Eighty-two year old Edward Forrest holds his soldier’s annual, the bound record of the 4th Infantry Division Artillery in World War II. |
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