Two More Wounds

I was injured again in Holland. I was bringing ammunition and rations into one of our guns that was in an outpost, it was isolated by itself more or less. And we had to do it at night because it was in the dyke area of Holland and the Germans had it pretty well covered. All the dykes out in front of us, but they couldn’t bring their guns down to bare on account of the, dykes were about nine feet high, ten feet high. Actually there was roads on top of them, they were ... But that evening I was taking them in and I was just taking the box of rations off the carrier when I woke up I was in a ditch. Apparently a shell had exploded on the other side of the carrier and the concussion blew me into the ditch. And I had injured my back, lower back and I went back to the hospital didn’t stay there. I left, they didn’t know what they wanted to do with me. If you didn’t have an open wound, you were just more or less sit around and wait. So I just left and came back again. This was in Germany now, it was all farmland. We stopped, the Essex went through us. They went up to this highway that the army wanted. It was an important highway and they wanted that. They took the highway just at dark. The Germans came back at them pretty heavy. Heavy tanks, lots of troops, drove them off the highway and back to us. We were given the word to go. Two of our companies had been sent over to support and on my way over, ran over a landmine. They were dragging me back up to the hospital again so. This time I had injury, I was totally deaf for a whole week, couldn’t hear a thing and I crushed two discs in the back of my neck. And I didn’t stand around the hospital then long either, I was back out again and gone, but that was just about the end of the war.