Letters from George

George served with Company B, 49th Engineer Combat Battalion — a unit later nicknamed the "Ghost Battalion," because so little of its story was ever widely told. Combat engineers were the soldiers who cleared the mines, blew and built the bridges, opened the roads, and held ground when they had to — going in early and staying late.

The 49th was activated on August 25, 1942 at Camp Carson, Colorado, and trained in the thin air of the Rockies — exactly where George's letters begin. After shipping overseas it staged in England through the spring of 1944, and on D-Day, June 6, 1944, landed on Utah Beach, clearing obstacles and mines, seizing and holding key points, building bridges, and helping cut-off airborne troops. From there it fought across Cherbourg and Northern France, the Hürtgen Forest, the Ardennes (the Battle of the Bulge), the Rhineland and the Cologne plain, and the Ruhr Pocket, much of it under VII Corps. It earned campaign credit for Normandy and the Rhineland with the assault "arrowhead" — the very device on George's campaign ribbon — and was inactivated in November 1945.

George's own letters trace that same road, from Camp Carson to Germany at war's end. His Purple Heart, for wounds received around the Rhineland fighting in early 1945, is the personal mark of it. Follow his path below.

Unit history compiled from public records (see sources at the bottom of the home page); George's place and dates are drawn from the letters themselves and are noted as approximate where he didn't write a date.