Lloyd Jones

It turned out there was a one-shoe repairman for every company and D Company had been formed and deformed and reformed and taken apart again.  And they were on a new phase of rebuilding it because they were building up the regiment to go over to Italy and spin on to anybody except the higher echelon.

So long and the short of it I had to have a test and I passed my test and so on and I became the shoemaker for D Company.  And I can’t remember just when this happened, but I got transferred to B Company a while later.  And there’s, the company commander was a fellow by the name of Major Harold Snellgrove and I’m eternally grateful for him because the story went around and whether it was true or not that there was no place for a shoemaker in an infantry company.

But I guess after the First World War I guess infantry everybody rode horses, I don’t know.  But there was no horses in the Second World War and the fellow walking around wearing shoes and they all needed to be repaired.  And so when we went every day we went to our shoe repair shop and worked on shoes and the other guys, they would learn how to do battle.

So when the crunch came, we went into action.  It was at the discretion of our company commander what happened to us.  And Major Snellgrove thought I had made a heck of a good helper for the cooks.  So I became the cook’s helper while we were in, went into battle.  I will be eternally grateful to that man for all my life.

Our first action was in Ortona in Italy.  And Ortona was one hell of a battleground.  And they had pushed the Germans back a ways from Ortona and how far the actual front was from where our headquarters were I never did know.  But there was one guy, he was a fellow shoe repair fellow from C Company, Jimmy Hyde, he was about the same age as I was.  And we became pretty good friends and the morning after when the troops were coming out of the front line, there was my friend Jimmy Hyde.

I didn’t recognize him.  And that it just, I don’t know, just I can’t explain how I felt but I was awful glad it was him and not me.  And I never saw Jimmy again.  I felt that he was, whether it was too much for him and he couldn’t take it, he was shell-shocked when I saw him.  But I never seen him again.

I guess, before the war I had a tender spot in my heart for human beings and that sort of thing and the war kind of took that away.  I was, you got kind of callous and hard about the matter of death and so on.  You see people that were being, I remember one time in Italy, I forget where it was, but I never knew where I was in Italy because I didn’t know what my directions were.

And we were in this little town.  There’s some fellows there that were digging up two soldiers that had been buried there.  And they’d been buried for a while and it wasn’t a very nice site to see or smell.  But I kind of shrugged it off and go, “This is life.”