Published May 31, 2004
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20040531/NEWS/405310332/0/search

Instead of graduating, Thompson trained for war

By Jennie Jones Giles
Sixty years ago Allied soldiers had finally broken through the beachhead at Anzio, after five months of bitter fighting, and were moving toward Rome. Henderson County native Clarence S. Thompson was joining the Fifth Army as a replacement for one of the 2,800 Americans killed during the fighting at Anzio. By June 4, 1944, the soldiers had liberated Rome.
Thompson was one of many young men who turned 18 before the date of high school graduation. Instead of marching down the aisle with his classmates at the former Flat Rock High School, he was training to fight the enemy in World War II.
“I went in service in October 1943,” the 78-year-old Thompson said. “They drafted me before I could finish.”

The Italian Campaign

The young man, who grew up in the Barker Heights community, traveled from Fort Jackson, S.C., to an Army camp outside Dallas, to join the 36th Infantry Division. The 36th Texas Division was formed from a Texas-Oklahoma National Guard unit. After training and a week at home, he was sent to Fort Meade, Md.
“They got us up early, about 2 or 3 a.m., and told us to pack our bags,” he said. “We were put on a train to Newport News, Va. They backed the train right up to the boat. The Red Cross gave us coffee and doughnuts, then we were sent below deck. We didn’t get to come up until the next day and then we couldn’t see land anywhere.”
Within seven days Thompson was in North Africa, at Oran, Algeria. For two weeks the soldiers trained in the desert terrain of the Atlas Mountains.
“We were put on a ship to Italy,” Thompson said. “We landed in Naples and were put in as replacements with the 36th Texas Division.”
The rifleman joined the 143rd Infantry Regiment as the soldiers began the 33-mile push toward Rome. After the liberation of Rome, they pursued the German 10th and 14th armies northward. In mid-June, near the town of Grosseto, they ran into a storm of machine gun fire and hard fighting.
“The ground was so hard we could only dig a hole about knee-deep,” Thompson said. “A shell came in and I made a dive and rolled. I got wounded in the left arm and was flown back to Naples. They took the shrapnel out of my arm just in time to go back to Salerno and train for the invasion of southern France.”

Southern France

Thompson’s unit was in the first wave that landed on “Green Beach” at San Raphael on the French Riviera. Operation Anvil had begun. It was Aug. 15, 1944. The small, rocky beach was 250 yards wide, 100 feet deep and flanked by quarries. The Germans were firing heavy artillery from the heights above the beach.
“We got off the beaches in two days,” he said.
The soldiers, now a part of the Seventh Army, began the march up the Rhone River Valley in a series of foot marches and truck shuttles.
“We rode tanks, trucks, jeeps, anything we could get on,” he said. “Every so often we would have to fight our way through, then we would get back on again.”
Eleven days after the beach landing, Thompson was 200 miles from the landing point on the mountain of Montelimar overlooking the Rhone River. It was during this battle, with the Germans firing a 280mm-railway gun up the mountain from the valley that his appendix burst.
“They took me to a field hospital and operated on me in a tent,” he said. “Then I was flown back to Naples, Italy.”
Thompson returned to the battlefield in time to join the fight in the Vosges Mountains. It was late October and snow was falling.
“We were in foxholes 24 hours a day,” he said. “There were no houses. Once in a while we would get a good sleep, but shells were falling all the time.”
They ate C and K rations and D bars.
“We had a good mess sergeant,” he said. “If he could get a jeep to us, he’d drive hot food up.”
The Germans had placed land mines and booby traps on the only road through the mountains. The terrain was rugged and heavily wooded.
“We had to cut trees down so the tanks could get up,” he said.
Once, during an attack on a mountain, one of Thompson’s buddies, a staff sergeant, got hit by machine gun fire.
“He fell down in front of me,” he said. “He came back in January limping. Another one of my good friends got hit in the helmet and it ricocheted off the back of the helmet. He was all right. Eventually, he got killed.”
The soldiers had been on the attack seven days and seven nights when they arrived in the town of Ostheim.
“We were on this side street firing and the Germans were on the other side,” he said. “A wounded German was in the street and our medic went to help. A German sniper killed him.”
Christmas was spent in the town of Strasbourg.
By New Year’s Eve, the Germans were planning another attack. The American soldiers continued the fight through knee-deep snow.
“I went out on patrol one night and at the edge of the tree line, a German came out of the woods,” he said. “He said there were more in a house. There were five of us. I hollered for them to come out. Finally, I tossed a hand grenade and they all came out then. There were four soldiers and a captain.”
Thompson led night raiding parties, also.
“We would go out and see if we could get behind the enemy lines and then fire all our ammunition,” he said. “Then we had to try and get back without getting shot.”
Thompson was a sergeant in charge of a 12-man squad in rifle company F.
“They would holler ‘Clarence’ any time there was a need to take a patrol out at night,” he said. “There were two other Thompsons, one from West Virginia and one from Missouri. When you go out at night like that, you don’t know what you’re going to run into.”
Off the main road, the ground was swampy with irrigation ditches and the January temperature was cold.
“We went up on a railroad embankment and a German machine gun opened fire,” he said. “I had to get into the irrigation ditch and for the next day or two it was snowing.”
Thompson said they began making reconnaissance patrols in white parkas.
“While we were attacking, the snow melted,” he said. “Now we were in water knee deep.”
At one point in the battles, tanks were sent to clear a town. While the tanks were in the town, the Germans returned and captured the American tanks.
“We were in the Bowden Woods,” he said. “We saw our tanks in the field and they began shooting at us. It was Germans in American tanks. The Air Force came in and bombed.”
For 96 hours, day and night, the company was shelled by the Germans.
“Then they came across the field shooting at us with rifles,” he said. “We finally got those tanks back.”
The snow was averaging 12 inches on the ground and it was warfare on a 24-hour basis. A sudden thaw melted the snow and the rivers and canals began overflowing.
The soldiers continued the fight as they advanced. By March 24, they were at the Rhine River in Germany.

Germany and home

“We would go from town to town checking weapons and stuff,” he said.
Thompson passed through Festung Landsberg, the prison where Hitler spent 14 months writing Mein Kampf. The prison housed 1,400 inmates from all nations, including political and criminal prisoners.
“I saw bodies stacked in boxcars,” he said. “They were stacked in the yard, too.
“We traveled south to the edge of the Austrian Alps,” Thompson said. “They were going to send us up in those mountains. They were still snow-capped. Then the war was over. We took in the German 13th Corps coming out of the Alps. From sunup to sundown, they came down in a steady flow. And we had been told there weren’t many soldiers up there.”
Thompson returned home in time for Thanksgiving 1945. After finding no jobs, he re-enlisted. He was discharged in November 1946. Thompson received a Purple Heart and was awarded the Bronze Star.
In 1948, he met his wife, Lois Fisher, at a square dance. They will have been married 55 years June 2 and have lived in the same house in Hendersonville for 50 years. They have one son, Wayne.
For 15 years, he was a salesman for the General Baking Co. and retired from General Electric in 1988. Thompson is a member of Calvary Baptist Church and a lifetime member of the Hedrick-Rhodes Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5206.