SAN ANTONIO — By the end of World War II, more than 16 million Americans had served in the military. Today, 1.7 million of those veterans are alive.
And for 95-year-old Army veteran Harry Spaulding, Veterans Day brings back many memories.
“We had just captured the city of Metz,” Spaulding said. That was in 1944, and Spaulding said he remembers his 26 river crossings, some in the snow and through barbed wire, like it was yesterday.
“We had gloves on and we held our hands like this side-by-side and tried to bend that wire it was so tight if you cut it you could hear a thing for 20 miles,” said Spaulding.
During one of those crossings, Spaulding said, “a German 88[mm] shell cracked above us in the trees and you could hear all that shrapnel coming down through the trees,” One man in his unit was hit by the shrapnel and still had it in his leg before he died 60 years later.
“With Patton every other word was a cuss word,” Spaulding recalled of his experience with General George Patton. “He said we are going to chase them blankety-blank so far, so fast, they aren’t going to have time to eat, and let alone go to the can take a blankety-blank.”
He also talked about his flight home to the United States four years after his 12-month draft was supposed to be over. “We landed in the U.S. on the 20th day of August, 1945. The day I turned 26,” Spaulding said.
He even kept a log of each leg of the 45-hour flight in this book he keeps by his side, along with other souvenirs from his time in World War II, including a German officer’s dress knife, his plane ticket home, and many pictures he took himself.
Spaulding also said when most people retire, he feels they’re giving up on life. But with him just five years short of 100, he’s showing no sign of slowing down.
