By Cass Rains, Staff Writer
Enid News and Eagle
ENID —
When World War II broke out, Thomas “Tom” David LaMunyon was 17 and in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Watonga.
He was back home in Ringwood, where he had two friends a couple of years older than him who had plans to join the Coast Guard. LaMunyon went with them to the recruiter’s office and once their paperwork was done, the recruiter turned to him and said, “How about you?”
“I wasn’t 18 yet,” LaMunyon said. The recruiter told LaMunyon to fill out the paperwork and get his father’s signature so he could join. So LaMunyon filled out the paperwork and presented it to his father.
“He was on the ‘hell no’ list,” LaMunyon said, “My older sister said, ‘Dad, you might as well let him go where he wants to because he’s going to have to go sometime.’”
LaMunyon went to a notary public with his father, who before he signed the papers looked at him and said, “Son, I’m doing this against my better judgment.”
LaMunyon’s friends were waiting for him in the car to go to Oklahoma City to be inducted, but with his father’s words fresh in his mind, he told the two he wasn’t going with them.
“They said, ‘I don’t blame you,’” LaMunyon said. “‘You go down with us and drive the car back.’”
When he turned 18, LaMunyon said he went to enlist in the Coast Guard again, but it was full. So was the Navy, and the Marines. LaMunyon said everyone told him to go to the Army — he’d be sure to get in — but he waited for them to call for him.
“So I went home and waited for the Army to draft me, and they sure did,” he said. “I went in January of 1943 and was in about two months shy of three years. In October of 1945, I got out.”
Enlisted man
In his nearly three years of service with the Army, LaMunyon traversed most of Western Europe, serving in five major battles with a mortar team, receiving two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for his service in the Army’s 137th Infantry Regiment.
During basic training, LaMunyon criss-crossed the United States, going from Fort Sill to Camp San Luis Obispo in California. He went to another camp in Alabama before going on maneuvers in Tennessee and North Carolina and ending up at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, where he’d ship out.
The entire division was shipping out from Camp Kilmer in three ships, and LaMunyon was aboard the S.S. Thomas H. Berry.
“They took us by train, and it was darker than Hades, and we were carrying our duffle bags in a single line down some rough ground,” he said. “They got us in a great big holding area, shut the doors all down and then they turned the lights on. They opened another door and there was the ship in there.”
It was a “blackout operation,” LaMunyon recalls. “There was no light on the Statue of Liberty. I thought I could see the statue when I shipped out, but I wasn’t positive.”
As the men marched into the ship and closed up the side, LaMunyon said he watched closely because they were right at the water line.
“They sealed all that up and put the beds back,” he said. “There were guys sleeping right next to that door. I looked a couple of times to make sure there were no leaks.”
It took 14 days for the ships to make it across the Atlantic, escorted by destroyers that sometimes would launch depth charges off their sterns.
“There wasn’t nothing we can do,” LaMunyon said. “Sometimes you’d hear sirens go off, and they were out kicking back depth charges off the back of them.”
The ships went in a zig-zag pattern to dodge German submarines searching for them, effectively doubling the length of the trip. LaMunyon’s regiment was stationed in Newquay, England. It wasn’t long before LaMunyon and his regiment were crossing over to Normandy.
“Fortunately, we were in invasion reserve, thank God,” he said.
The invasion team made it inland about 15 miles before LaMunyon’s regiment landed Normandy Beach. He said he thought it was about 30 days before they were put in.
“Back then I didn’t even know what day it was,” he said. “You didn’t have a calendar or watches with dates on them.”
Carrying full packs in rough seas, the men boarded a Higgins boats and prepared to go ashore.
“We went out into water about up to your waist, carrying a full pack,” he said. “Guys unloading equipment from other ships yelled ‘Keep left.’ Those guys who went left, went plum out of sight.”
A hole near the beach soaked those men who followed the orders being barked at them, so LaMunyon decied to go right.
“There was a lot of that kind of stuff in the Army,” he said. “We had to march, soaking wet, about 15 miles that day. The next day, we entered battle.”
Battle baptism
“We referred to it as a ‘baptism of fire,’ and it was,” LaMunyon said. “All hell broke loose.”
The regimental commander had his troops in the approach march toward a German machine gun dug into a hedgerow.
“He got shot, the artillery observer got shot and another liaison officer got killed,” LaMunyon said. “Our company runner that was with the colonel, he got killed. That’s when I started digging in.”
LaMunyon, who was in charge of a section of mortars, called in for fire on the machine gun nest and got it knocked out, but his first battle wasn’t over.
“There was fire coming from all directions, and all sides of us,” he said. “Then they’d holler and get in another field. So you’d have to cross another hedgerow and get into another field, then we’d get shelled there.”
The shelling continued until a soldier figured out how the Germans were finding their position.
“The soldier noticed from a house back down the road an old Frenchman came out, looked around and pretty soon we were getting shelled,” he said. “They took some guys into the house and that S.O.B. had a radio and he was sending messages to the Germans about where we were and they put an artillery barrage on us.”
After seeing a few battles, LaMunyon said his attitude as a solider began to change.
“When we first went in, we wouldn’t think about sleeping in a house or barn — I mean, you’d dig a hole, and that’s where you were,” he said. “As time went on, you would go in a house if it was two-story and had a roof. Then we’d use a house as long as it had a roof on it.
“At first, I swore I’d dig a solid trench all the way to Berlin.”
Wounds and awards
LaMunyon participated in five major battles during his time in the European Theater. His regiment saw Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland, Ardennes and Central Europe. The men saw battle at St. Lo, Metz and near Bastogne.
“I was wounded two different times. Got two Purple Hearts,” LaMunyon said. “I didn’t have any of those toes-to-the-sun injuries.”
For all the training he underwent, LaMunyon said there was never talk of medals or awards.
“All the training and everything, there was never word of Purple Heart or a Bronze Star,” he said. “For some reason it was never brought up. I guess the reason was, I never thought of it, they didn’t want anyone worrying they were going to get hit or killed or anything.”
His first wound came just a few days into Normandy as he and his mortar section were advancing toward their next target and walked into fire from a “burp gun.”
“The men started to stay to the ground and I grabbed them and told them to get the hell out of here and run through the next hedgerow,” he said. “He cut down on me again and he nipped a finger, and fortunately didn’t get a bone or anything. I kept the men running, and when I got them through the hedgerow I started back to find him, but some guys threw me to the ground.”
The men told LaMunyon: “You ain’t going.” The wound was bandaged and treated with sulfa powder.
“After a few days, it looked really gross,” he said. “When doc was doctoring me one time, the captain came by and asked, ‘What happened to you?’”
LaMunyon told him about being shot a few days earlier, and he was sent to the aid station. When the doctor there asked him what happened, LaMunyon told him about the gunner.
“He said, ‘Tell me again how that happened’ and I got mad,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been down here if Capt. Baker hadn’t sent me. The doctor turned to the T/5 working in the aid station and said, ‘Give him a Purple Heart,’ and I was flabbergasted.
“I figured if you got a Purple Heart you got it posthumously and had to be dead,” he said. “To get a Purple Heart, the enemy had to bring blood to you.”
LaMunyon’s next Purple Heart came while fighting in a frozen forest, trying to take a much-needed break from the bleak weather and soak up some sun. A shell fell behind him and he took some shrapnel.
“I got hit in the right shoulder, right below my shoulder blade,” he said. “Boy, it was hot and burning. There was a big hole in my coat. I took the second coat off and the holes kept getting bigger. There was no blood.”
LaMunyon got his clothes off so others could examine his wound and went to the aid station. The hot shrapnel had seared the wound closed.
“I got in there and the old boy probed around in my back and picked out a little piece and put some iodine on it and a small bandage and said, ‘You’re good. Here’s a Purple Heart,” he said. “That never did seem right to me. To have a Purple Heart for something like a flesh wound, something not that serious. Then a man loses a leg, or dies, and gets a Purple Heart. I never did feel that was right.”
LaMunyon also was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for service beyond the call of duty.
“We’d rooted the Germans out of place and they were counterattacking us, and I happened to be up as a forward observer at that time,” he said.
The Germans were in a valley, which artillery could not hit — but mortars could.
“The mortar platoon pooled everybody together and put up three guns to fire on those particular targets and used all the men in the platoon to break open ammo,” he said. “We shot about 3,500 rounds through those three guns beating back the counterattacks.”
LaMunyon said communications kept getting cut off because of German artillery fire cutting the wires to their sound-powered phones.
“You’d drive the Germans back, then I’d have to go back down the wire and find where my breaks were and splice the line back together,” he said. “Capt. Miller, of A Company, got hit real bad and we didn’t have a stretcher with us.”
The attack relented, but LaMunyon said they still had the wounded captain to care for.
“We cut down poles and carried him on a shelter half,” he said. “It practically took four men to get it done. Every time I found a wire broken again, I’d fix the wire.”
LaMunyon said none of the men thought they were going to be relieved, but found out differently when they carried the captain back to the aid station.
Memories of the general
LaMunyon served under one of the most famous generals of the Second World War, Gen. George S. Patton.
“I’ve seen him drive by, and you’d cuss him out,” LaMunyon said. “It was our blood and his guts, ‘Old Blood and Guts,’ that’s the name we had on him.”
LaMunyon was there for one of the famous scenes depicted in the move “Patton,” where the general stopped to direct tanks through a muddy crossing in France.
“He got out there directing traffic, and I seen that,” he said. “I seen him directing traffic.”
Although he never had any direct contact with the general, LaMunyon did know a man in his regiment that did.
“We had a kid in our outfit that never wrote home,” he said. “All the time over there, he never wrote home.”
The private’s mother began to worry when she never heard from her son, and soon contacted Washington D.C.
“Washington found out where the prvate was located and contacted Patton, who sent a director order for him to be brought back to Patton’s headquarters,” LaMunyon said. “Patton had him in his office and lectured to him,” he said. The general told the soldier, “You sit down, right over there is paper and pen, you write you mother and write her every week. If you don’t the next time you come here it won’t be pleasant.”
LaMunyon said the lecture worked: “He wrote to his mother from then on.”
LaMunyon recalled his closest contact with the famed general was as his mortar team advanced into he town they’d just taken. The town had a church steeple that hadn’t been hit — steeples often were destroyed because they were good spots for observers and snipers — and not knowing if the Allies held that part of the town, LaMunyon looked for a place to go in case of a shelling.
“I’m looking, and I’m trying to think where and I going to go if there’s a shell,” He said. “I heard air horns. I jumped, and it was Patton with two Jeeps going to the front.”
Another close call
“The Germans were getting so short of people fighting two fronts, they had what they called a Hitler Youth,” LaMunyon said. “One of those Hitler Youth just about got me.”
LaMunyon was with the mortars and couldn’t get his forward observer to contact him or call him back. There was a lull in the fire, and he went over a hill into a village to find out what happened.
“There was a guy lying down by a hedgerow behind the town and he was waving and hollering something,” he said. “I stopped and had my right foot forward and cupped my ear. I heard a rifle report, and so help me God, the bullet hit the ground so close it kicked dirt onto the right toe of my boot.
“If I hadn’t stopped to cup my ear he would had me in my leg.”
Soldiers cleared the village and surrounding area and found a group of Hitler Youth and rounded them up. LaMunyon doesn’t believe it was a true German soldier, or a sniper: “If it was a sniper, he would have gotten me. Those guys didn’t miss.”
A great send-off
“After the battle of Bastogne was over, the war was soon over and we went into occupation,” LaMunyon said. “Soon after Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, we came home.”
LaMunyon docked in Massachusetts and loaded on train cars with other soldiers.
“Leaving the railhead, all those trains blew their whistles,” he said. “Every engineer in that whole yard, as we were pulling away, they blew their whistles.”
But LaMunyon said he never did get to see the Statue of Liberty.
