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Bob Holster
Bob Holster was drafted and served in the 9th Armored
Division as a radio operator. Holster saw combat in
Europe and was transferred home to prepare for the
invasion of Japan.

Where and when did you enlist?

I didnt enlist. I was drafted some time prior to September third. There was a whole contingent of us from
Marathon County sent to Milwaukee Medical Center. We were given a physical prior to the time we went
down; the guys who passed their physicals were in the army and they went from there. A lot of guys had
already sold their cars and quit their jobs, and when they failed the physical, they were able to go home to
try picking up the pieces. What they did was institute a thirty-day furlough. You were actually in the service,
but you were sent home for thirty days to get your affairs in order, and then report back to Ft. Sheridan,
Illinois for deployment to wherever you were supposed to go. We reported to Ft. Sheridan on the third of
October, and most of us were sent to Camp Funston, which was part of Ft. Riley in Kansas. It was a
temporary camp that was built for World War II. We were put in the 9th Armored Division. After aptitude
tests and interviews and everything, they decided where we were going. SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters
Allied Expeditionary Force] was at the top and that was Eisenhower. There were four armies in Europe. We
were in the First Army. There were corps, and I dont know how many, but we were in the fifth Corps at the
time of the Battle of the Bulge. I believe we were in three different corps. A division, as far as our division
was concerned, is between 20 and 25 thousand men. We were in the 9th Armored Division. An armored
division is split up into three combat commands. They are actually equal components of the division, in that
there were three of everything. Our CCA [Combat Command A] had
the third Field Artillery Battalion, the 60th Infantry Battalion, and
the 19th Tank Battalion. We were an armored division, so we had a
lot of tanks. Company A, Ninth Armored Engineer Battalion was
my unit. Then we had a medical detachment, a signal detachment,
and other miscellaneous things. When we were overseas, we had a
tank destroyer battalion attached to us. Each combat command
almost operated as its own little army. Our main function, if we
were operating as an armored division, was a fast striking force. You
spearhead, you drive in without regard for what is on your side, and
you drive a wedge in, and if you meet resistance, you stop and take
care of it. If it is too great, you stop and hold, and foot soldiers,
infantry, come in and clean out the town, and then you would go again. You would pass right through them.
In the engineer battalion, there were three line companies. Each combat command had a line company, and
then we had a headquarters company that serviced the battalion as a whole. In our A company, there was a
headquarters platoon, which had maintenance for the vehicles and equipment, engineering equipment,

2008 D.C. Everest Area Schools Publications

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kitchen section (which fed us and kept us with food), supply (which kept us in shoes and jackets and
mittens and whatever we needed), and communications; I was assigned to the communications section.
I was a radio operator. That was my original assignment. I was in that unit until the ninth of March, 1945,
and then I changed positions. My position was a Radio Operator, and we used Morse Code. We had a set
that had quite a range, and it was all transmitted in Morse Code. We had a key that snapped onto our leg
and that was the way we worked. Everything was sent in code. It was encoded into five letter groups and
we had an encoding machine. Every day we were
here were
given an indication of how best to set that machine
up. Any message of clear text was fed into the
enlistments, but as
machine. You pull the handle down, and, letter-byletter, it converted the clear text into five letter far as the group I went
groups, and it came out like a postage stamp with
glue on the back and you stuck it on the message
board and then you transmitted. That is what the
receiving station got; they decoded the message into clear text, and that is the way messages were
transmitted. We also had FM sets; they were short range. Our CW
sets, which we transmitted Morse Code on, would send a signal
that would travel and bounce off the ionosphere and down, and it
was long range. The FM set, at least the sets we had, were straight
line, and if you were behind a hill or something it didnt get
through. It was a relatively short range. That is how I fit into the
9th Armored Division.

Did you want to go into the army?

I dont know. There were enlistments, but as far as the group I
went in with, nobody was gung-ho about going in. We knew that
was what we had to do. Strangely, everybody was thinking that
they had some problem that would keep them out, and about
halfway through the physical, that whole attitude changed and everybody wanted so badly to pass the
physical. It is something I cant explain, but I know it
happened.
Where in Europe were you stationed?
We were in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, Rhineland,
which was in the vicinity of the Rhine River, and Eastern
Europe. We had three battle stars that we wore on our
campaign ribbon.
How many years were you in the military?
I served-from my time of induction to discharge-just over
three years. I was overseas for one year.
During the time overseas, did you see combat?
Oh yes, when I was overseas I was in combat. We arrived in Luxembourg, which was the line then, and
quiet at the time. We were put in to hold the line, but there was very little activity until December 16th,
1944, and thats when the roof fell in.

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What was an average day like?

During the war? It is hard to say, and hard to remember. It was not like being in camp. In camp, there is
training. Bugles called reveille in the morning, and the people walked through the barracks to see if
everybody was awake. Everybody lined up on the company street, and everybody had to be accounted
for. Squad leaders reported to their squads, and platoon leaders reported their platoons to the company
commander. Then you went back in the barracks, and
pretty soon there was chow call and you went and ate.
t [the war] was not like
After that, you went out on various training, whether
being in camp. In camp,
it was rifle, machine gun, anti-tank gun, or engineer
equipment. We were combat engineers, and our there is training.
functions included demolitions, explosives, blowing
things up, removing enemy explosives, laying
minefields, and mapping them. One of our duties was removing enemy mines, and it took a lot of
training. You didnt want them to blow up in your face. Most of them were booby-trapped. A mine would
have a paddle placed in the ground, and then the mine was set on top of that, and the mine was flush with
the ground. When a heavy object ran over that mine, it would detonate. If somebody tried to pick the mine
up and take it out, the little charge underneath would detonate, and of course, the mine would blow up in
your face. There were all sorts of devices to make removal
difficult. There were anti-personnel mines with small antenna or
little wires that set off the charge. The mine would bounce in the
air and then explode, and the shrapnel would injure people.

What was the hardest part of being in the war?

I was a radio operator, and I was on a communications crew.
Our responsibility was the radios. We were not pushed into the
forward elements, but we were held back a little way from the
front because they were not interested in exposing our
equipment to destruction. The line platoons were responsible for
clearing mines and roadblocks. The infantry was responsible for
flushing people out of buildings, driving them out of foxholes, and the shooting part of the war. We stayed
behind the infantry except in the Bulge, where we were used like infantry. We went on patrol, made
drives, cleaned out towns and so on. We functioned as infantry because they were so short on personnel.
In the communications center, we didnt get into that, but we
were subject to artillery fire, and that is unnerving when the
shells are dropping around you. We had pulled into a wooded
area, and the first thing we did was get out and dig some holes.
I had a buddy who was a radio operator and we dug a hole and
threw some brush on top because, in a wooded area, some of the
shells hit trees. Then you would be showered with shrapnel.
Instead of hitting the ground and exploding, the shell would hit
the tree and explode in the air and the shrapnel came down. If
you were in a hole, you were vulnerable unless you had
something covering it. We served shifts on the radio, and during
the night, our half-track had to be buttoned up, because our radio
had lights and sound. This way, there could be no light showing. If a message came in, you tried to

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minimize the noise. During our first shelling, there was no question to
what it was. It was a German 88. I came out from the half-track and dove on the ground. I then had to
come back to the half-track to get back on the radio because there was a message coming in. The
Germans had another rocket launcher called the Nebelwefer; We called them screaming meemies.
They loaded those tubes with rockets and they had a wire connection to the back, and they fired them
electronically. That propellant charge, like an artillery shell, would send the rocket toward the target. One
time I was riding in a jeep, with all of our belongings
in back, and we pulled our belongings out every night
ou never forget the
and a big piece of shrapnel fell out. We dont know
smell and the bodies
how it got there. When the Nebelwefer exploded,
there wasnt a lot piled up. We didn t stay
of shrapnel, but
there was a
tremendous
explosion. You felt like your brain was going to be pushed out of
your head. In Europe, they had a lot of tiled roofs, and the
concussion was so bad that it cracked the tiles and they would slide
off the roof and fall on the ground. One night I was on the radio and
we were in a town near a castle and our lines were thin. We were
sitting on the front line and when the Germans started their attack,
we took the brunt of the attack. The artillery began to fire at the
targets and the shells were crossing our half-track and I didnt know
what was going on.

Do you remember any important messages you received?

No. It was pretty routine stuff as far as we were concerned. I was
not on the radio shift the first day, but it was pretty eventful. We
had to code the casualty lists to be sent back to headquarters. It
was hard to hear names of people you had been associated with
for two years. We lost 40% of our company. Our infantry
battalion, the companies and the tanks were the front line and
there was a river between the Germans and the Americans. When
the battle started, they bottled up some of our men and tanks in
the attack. They were to assemble at a road junction, but by morning, mortar shells were dropping and
the attack never got organized.
Do you know anything about the concentration camps?
Yes, we liberated Buchenwald. The first one that we liberated was
a Polish POW camp at Linburg. You never forget the smell of the
bodies piled up. Our boys saw it and we didnt stay very long. The
infantry division behind us stayed longer.
Is there any story that you would like to share with us?
I said before that my main assignment was a radio operator. The
whole European theater was short of officers, and we were
supposed to have an executive officer that was supposed to travel

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with our combat command. The headquarters was in a half-track and the commanding colonel and other
officers traveled in that half-track, and when darkness approached, they very seldom drove in the dark.
Then each unit would post their own security. In other words, an armored unit spearheading the advance
would go down to a designated road, and if they did not meet any opposition, they would keep on driving.
There were all kinds of things that could happen. The enemy would put up roadblocks, and would defend
some spots that were defendable. An armored outfit would try to clean it out. Tanks would be in the lead,
and infantry boys rode on the tanks. We had a couple of squads riding on the tanks right with them. If
they ran into something that needed attention, our boys were right there. Our outfit got the only intact
bridge over the Rhine River. The infantry went over knowing that the bridge was wired with explosives.
Nobody knew why it hadnt been blown up, but we had two engineers that shot the cables in half. They
managed to take the bridge and get a bridgehead started on the other side. An amphibious crossing across
the Rhine would have been costly in the terms of lives. The enemy was on the other side sitting on the
bank shooting at you. Anyway, we got across the bridge. I was assigned to combat command
headquarters at this time, and our combat command was the last unit fighting in Europe. We were stopped
on the seventh of May, 1945, and my jeep was directly behind the command half-track, and they called
me up and I was ordered to run from the point of the column and tell them to stop fighting, the war was
over. We would drive down roads that werent secure and we had been over the roads several times, but
we had to provide security and services to platoons that defended us and provided security.
What kind of reception did you get when you came home?
Well, we actually came back early. We came back in August of 1945. A group of us out of our company
and battalion were transferred to the Fouth Infantry Division and sent back to the states. We were put in
the Fourth Infantry with a 30-day furlough and told to report to the west coast. Our orders would be
coming and we were slated to participate in the invasion of Japan. Thank God for the atomic bomb. I am
convinced that I would not be here if it wasnt for that bomb.

Holster, Bob

2008 D.C. Everest Area Schools Publications