When William Buck joined the military in 1943, he was accepted into a special training program that would allow him to study four years at the Citadel before being commissioned as an officer.
But the program was scrapped when the military needed more manpower in Europe.
So instead of traveling to Charleston, S.C., for college lectures and officer training, the Columbus native made the short trip to Fort Benning for basic training. After graduation, he was temporarily assigned to a division in Louisiana, then given orders for Europe.
“We were replacements for people who had been shot, killed or wounded,” says Buck, now 84.
Next, he traveled to Great Britain on the Queen Elizabeth as one of about 15,000 members of the 104th Infantry Division.
After docking in Scotland, the division made its way toward the English Channel. Buck remembers it well.
“There were places where the Red Cross or the Salvation Army would serve us coffee and that was pleasant, but the mud … it was something else,” he says. “The transportation there was just inadequate.”
Buck says he encountered the enemy on several occasions.
“We got shelled and had our chance to do shellings and shootings,” he says.
By December of 1944, he found himself in Germany, preparing for a clash that would become legendary.
“We were there for the Battle of the Bulge,” Buck says. “There were Germans in American uniforms and you didn’t know whether to shoot these people or embrace them.”
He remembers a night in a fox hole, back-to-back with a friend from Alabama, trying to stay warm and trying to get some rest. The next day their unit crossed an open field and routed the Germans out.
Later, Buck and some fellow soldiers were exploring an aircraft factory in Dessau and found an oversized replica of Adolph Hitler’s head mounted on the wall. They pried it loose and tossed it out of a six-story window onto the concrete.
“Only the nose was blunted,” wrote Latimer Watson in a 1945 Ledger column, “so William, with an eye for souvenirs, took it along and sent it home.”
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