World War II Chronicle: February 17, 1944

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George Fielding Eliot column on page eight… Sports on page 12, featuring a Grantland Rice column and a report that Ohio State grid coach Paul Brown is seeking a Navy commission…

We Three Swedes

Oscar “Swede” Hagberg has been named coach for Navy’s football team this season. Hagberg played for the Midshipmen from 1928-1930, returning for three seasons as end coach. He was a sub skipper during the war, having already served in both the Atlantic and Pacific Theaters. Hagberg replaces John “Billick” Whelchel, who was Navy’s skipper for the past two seasons. Next year Whelchel will become captain of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco, taking over for Harvey “Swede” Overesch, who captained Navy’s football team in 1914 and until December 1943 was athletic director and Commandant of Midshipmen at Annapolis. Both Whelchel and Hagberg were assistants for Swede Larson when he coached Navy…

While we are on the subject, I just read that two of the members of the undefeated 1926 squad, Frank Wickhorst and Tom Hamilton, not only founded the Navy’s Pre-Flight Training Program together, but are now shipmates aboard the carrier USS Enterprise. Both Wickhorst, who was team captain, and Hamilton were All-Americans and are enshrined in college football’s hall of fame. Hamilton returned to Annapolis for a three-year tour as coach of the Midshipmen. Another star was fullback Henry H. Caldwell¹Caldwell earned second-team All-American honors in 1926, who is the commanding officer of Air Group 12 and earned a Navy Cross for leading a raid against Rabaul last year. Their coach was “Navy” Bill Ingram, a Marine Corps major when he passed away last year of a heart attack.

Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle

IN ITALY — Of the nearly 200 men who came overseas in the company I’m with now, only eight are left. In those eight men you will find everything a military man would like to have in a soldier.

They have all been in the Army nearly three years. They have been away from America two years. They have served in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, Algeria, Tunisia, and Italy. They have been at it so long they have become truly more soldier than civilian.

Their life consists wholly and only of war, for they are and always have been front-line infantrymen. They have survived because the fates have been kind to them, certainly, but also because they have become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.

None of them likes war. They all want to go home, but they have been at it so long they know how to take care of themselves and to lead others. Every company is built around a little group like them.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say these boys haven’t changed since they left America. Of course they have changed — they have had to. And yet when I sit and talk with them they seem just like ordinary humans back home.

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Take Sergt. Paul Allumbaugh, for instance. He’s an Iowa boy and a great soldier, yet so quiet, kind and good-natured you can’t imagine him ever killing anybody. He’s only 21, after all these years of fighting, and when shaved and cleaned up after battle he doesn’t look a bit older. At first, he looks too small to be a soldier, but then you realize how well built he is.

He is good-looking, and his face is the kind you instinctively like.

Sergeant Allumbaugh’s nickname is Tag. He has gone through the whole thing so far without a wound, although narrow escapes have been countless. He had one bullet scratch across his hand and another across a foot. These are not counted as wounds.

Tag served for three months in the British Commandos when volunteers were asked for out of his company in Scotland. He fought with them in Africa too, then came back with his buddies — and his relatives. At one time this outfit was practically the Allumbaugh family, with Tag and his brother and five cousins in it, all from Shenandoah, Ia. All seven of them are still alive, but their fates have been varied.

Tag’s brother Donald was captured a year ago and is still a German prisoner. Two cousins were captured also, but one of these has escaped. Of the remaining three, one is soon going home on rotation, one is in the engineers and one is still in this division.

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While my company was in its brief olive-grove bivouac, Tag was living in a captured German dugout with his close buddy, Sergt. William Knobbs of Keokuk, Ia. They had such a battle getting the place that they decided to live in it for a while.

Sergeant Knobbs’ nickname is Knobby, and he too has had some close shaves. Once a bullet went right through his helmet across the top of his head. It burned the hair off in a groove just as though you had shaved it, yet it never broke the skin.

Knobby said his wife has never known he has been in combat. Then he corrected himself. He said actually she did know, through friends but not from him. He has never once written her of any of his experiences or said he was in a battle.

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Some of the remarks the men recount in fun are pathetically revealing and touching. Take the thing Sergt. Jack Pierson said one day in battle. Jack Pierson is a wonderful guy. He was in the Commandos with Tag. He’s almost a Sergeant Quirt except that he’s good looking, smart and friendly. But he is tough. As the other men say, “Jack is really a rough man. He would be rough even back home.”

He comes from Sidney, Ia. He is older than most of the others. For many years he ran a pile-driver doing construction work along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. He calls himself a river rat. The boys here call him a “one-man army.” He has been wounded once.

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Jack is married and has three children. He has a girl 9, a boy 7, and then he has a Junior, who is going on 2 and whom Jack has never seen. Jack pretty much dotes on Junior, and everybody in the company knows about Junior and knows how badly Jack wants to see him.

Well, one day in battle they were having it tough. There were rifle fire, mortars and hand grenades all around, and soldiers on both sides getting knocked off like flies. Tag Allumbaugh was lying within shouting distance of where Jack was pinned down, and he yelled over:

“How you doin’, Jack?”

And then this man who was hard in peacetime and is hard in war called back a resigned answer that expresses in a general way every combat soldier’s pathetic reason for wanting to live and hating to die.

He called back — and he wasn’t joking — and he said:

“It don’t look like I’m gonna get to see Junior.”

Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 17 February 1944. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1944-02-17/ed-1/

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  Caldwell earned second-team All-American honors in 1926