We Who Are Alive and Remain Read Online Free PDF Page B

most of my high school experiences at a Catholic school, DePaul Academy, a high school attached to DePaul University.
    Out of ninety graduates from DePaul, four or five were already in the service by the time we graduated. I enrolled in Marquette University in mechanical engineering the summer of 1942, then went to university that September. Before the semester was out, Congress lowered the draft to include all eighteen-year-olds (the upper limit was age thirty-seven), and we knew that we would all be drafted if we didn’t enlist. I chose to enlist. I stayed in university until the end of the semester; then, rather than start another semester, I dropped out and worked for a couple months. This proved to be a good decision, because all the guys that I was in class with were all on the same train going to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a few months later.
    When I dropped out of university to work for a few months, I had no job skills to speak of, but you could get a job just about anywhere right then because the country was revving up for the war. My mother worked in the accounting department of a foundry, so I got a job there, working in a factory that made metal castings. Everybody on the crew was Hispanic. No one spoke English. I worked there to get myself toughened up. I worked a different shift than my mother, so we didn’t commute together. Every morning I rode an hour and fifteen minutes on a streetcar to be at work by 6:30 A.M. I worked manually all day. When I came into the service it was really a breeze for a while. Getting up early didn’t mean a thing to me, and most of the physical training early on was not that difficult.
    My call came up in March 1943. By that time some of the classmates who had dropped out of the school when the war started were already overseas. Those early draftees got yanked into combat early. One of the reasons I had enlisted when I did was so I could select my branch of service. I figured since I had studied mechanical engineering I should go into the Army Corps of Engineers, so that’s where I went at first. I shortly found out that it didn’t involve much mechanical engineering and was mostly construction, deactivating mines, building bridges and roads, not what I wanted.

Forrest Guth
    We grew up near Allentown, in rural Pennsylvania. During the Depression we didn’t have much money, but we had good parents who always provided for us. In his earlier years my father was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. Then he worked as a station agent for the Redding Railroad. They closed during the Depression, and he worked in a cement mill. Then he went back on the railroad. My mother worked in a clothing factory. They were hardworking people, Pennsylvania Germans. We had four children in my family, three boys and a girl. One of my brothers went into the navy. My sister was a nurse. My other brother was the smart one and became superintendent of a cement firm—it was a defense industry position, and he didn’t go to war.
    My parents never gave us kids money to buy things. If you wanted something, you had to work for it and save up. I worked for other farmers harvesting potatoes and earned enough money to buy a bicycle. Being poor was actually a good experience because it taught me how to improvise. I learned how to make things and be mechanically inclined. If I needed a part for my bike I couldn’t go to a hardware store and pick it up. But we had a dump close by so I’d go there and look around. We found enough wood at the dump to build a little boat. It was helpful to learn all that. Later on in the service I became the armorer for the guys. I could repair and modify weapons. When we came back to England from Normandy I altered a few carbines for the guys. Sometimes I fixed their rifles. In combat you didn’t have much to do because there are always lots of weapons around that aren’t being used anymore. So it’s easy to resupply then.
    Out in the country our school went up to eighth grade.