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Show North Africa Campaign Related By Utah Soldier Personal Account Of Battlefront Given Lt. Robert Springmeyer With Armed Forces ' In North Africa, Tells Of Experiences In One Of Major Battles of Present Conflict A personal account of the battlefront in North Africa, and the conditions under which our men are fighting, is given in a most interesting manner by Lt. Robert Springmeyer in a letter let-ter to his wife, the former Venice Whiting. We believe the letter, so well written, would be of great interest to Herald readers and therefore received permission to publish it in part, as follows: North Africa, May 22, 1943. Now the story can be told. When I left the Third Division and went up to the front for battle bat-tle training, I was attached to the Ninth Division for the month When I arrived at the front area, the Ninth was located in the area east of Gafsa and El Guettar. The country there is very similar to that around the salt flats in Utah. The valley floors were flat and barren, and the mountains rose abruptly into high, rugged, rocky ridges. El Guettar was just a small village of Arab mud houses clustered around an oasis. Everything Ev-erything down there was dry nnd dusty. It was terrible country for (Continued on page eight) use their artillery. Of course, our artillery is plenty good. As testimony, testi-mony, I can remember one hill east of Sedjenane on which we saw about 200 Germans who had been killed by our artillery. Many of them were still in their holes with a blanket over them, killed instantly in their sleep. Most of the work at Sedjenane at first was repairing and making roads. Later most of the time was spent on removing German mine fields and clearing out "booby traps." There were plenty of both in this sector. This work is unnerving un-nerving because the slightest slip will send you to "Kingdom Come." I left the Ninth Division and returned to the Third a few days before the breakthrough came and they pushed on to Matner. The fighting at Sedjenane was bitter and tough, but when the Germans realized that they were defeated, they pulled out and left just as they had at El Guettar. The Italians Ital-ians are poor fighters and usually are happy to surrender when pressed, but the Germans are good fighters and go to the very end. The Germans don't know that they're losing the war yet, and their spirit is good, so don't think that Africa's falling is a signal for a quick finish. I wish it were, but the Germans aren't halfway beaten beat-en yet. "As you probably already know, I started to go back to the Third Division by train. As things happened hap-pened after about five days on the train I met the Third Division going go-ing up where I had just come from. So I hopped off the train and joined the company. We then slowly moved up toward the front, ready to go in the line whenever we were needed. The Third Division Divi-sion was in the II Corps reserve. The end came too soon; we weren't needed after all. "The fight was still on in the Cape Bon peninsula when we moved up just south of Bizerte and started cleaning up. The hills had to be combed for enemy guns, ammunition, etc. All the mine fields and booby traps had to be removed, that was our job. You WORTH AFRICA...' (Continued from page one) fighting. Many is the time then and later that I felt truly sorry for the poor doughboys. (Infantry.) (Infan-try.) It was impossible to launch Jerry had all of the high ground up ahead. The armored outfits tried such an assault. The cry for them was "Gabes or Bust." Well, on the first try it was the latter. To drive Jerry from the hills took the infantry, and was a slow, dirty dir-ty job. Imagine the doughboys inching their way forward in the gullies at the bottoms of the mountains, digging fox holes in the almost solid rock to get under cover from the extremely accurate enemy artillery and mortar fire. On one occasion I crossed a ridge on foot, going to an advance command com-mand post on a mine, field reconnaissance. recon-naissance. Lying there on the top was a man dead with a gaping hole where his stomach had been. I later found out that a few minutes min-utes before I came along this man had been walking over the ridge as I did. The Germans felt a little lit-tle playful, so they shot an 88 mm. cannon at him. This gun is usually used to penetrate the armor plate of tanks, etc. So much for the general condition condi-tion at El Guettar. The main job of the engineer company to which I was attached was clearing mine fields and repairing roads from enemy bombings. For about the first week I was there at El Guettar, Guet-tar, enemy air activity was pretty darn heavy. They would bother us all day and keep us awake most of the night. They would drop small demolition bombs and straff in the daytime, and at night they would come over, drop parachute flares and drop personnel or demolition de-molition bombs at will. These personnel per-sonnel bombs were of several varieties, vari-eties, but most of them were the "butterfly" bombs. They would repeat re-peat the bombing, sometimes two or three times at night. It was very nerve-wreaking, especially when you could hear the bomb fragments whine over your head. We were also kept busy blowing up German unexploded or "dud" bombs. Toward the end of this action we went in as infantry, this battalion bat-talion to which I was attached. We moved in to the low hills at the end of the valley east of El Guettar to guard against an impending im-pending German Panzer attack. A day later we moved up at night should have seen the salvage dump after a few days' work. They were piled high with captured cap-tured enemy stuff. Prisoners were still coming in. In fact, two walked through our camp one night and went on to headquarters company before they" could find anyone to surrender to. One thing I noticed was that practically all of the German officers spoke excellent ex-cellent English. I had an opportunity oppor-tunity to get into Bizerte. There was nothing left of the city. I couldn't find one building that hadn't been hit by one of our bombs. From what I hear Tunis is quite different. Nothing in the city there is damaged, just the docks, etc., have been hit. "All my love, "Bob." to replace one of the infantry battalions. bat-talions. This is the very front lines, and we moved up under the heaviest barrage Jerry had ever laid down in this sector. The next morning our artillery laid down a tremendous barrage on the Germans, Ger-mans, but they weren't there. They had changed their minds and run in the early morning. Since the way was then clear for the armored forces, they rolled on and made the much awaited juncture junc-ture with the Eighth Army on the road to Gabes. This was the end of the action in this sector. The next day after, the outfit moved back to rest for a couple of days before going up north. I went into the hospital to get the infection infec-tion in my finger cleared up. I caught up with the outfit again just before the big II Corps push toward Mateur started. The Ninth Division had just moved into in-to position in the hill mass east of Sedjenane. When I say hill mass, I mean everything was hills and mountains. All the country up north there near the sea was green. The mountains were rocky and covered mostly with thick brush. The hills and valleys were either cultivated or covered with cork forests. There had been a lot of fighting in this territory. On the roadsides around Sedjenane were many British and German graves. These graves, as always, were marked with a cross or a helmet. This had been the battlefield battle-field of the British First Army. The stench of death was everywhere, every-where, just as it had been in the hills and gullies and around the minefields at El Guettar. I wish I could describe this odor. Smelling this once is enough to make any one hate war. "The village of Sedjenane, as the other villages in; the vicinity, was an empty hollow ruin. The roadsides road-sides were pockmarked with bomb craters sometimes twenty or thirty thir-ty feet across and ten or twelve feet deep. Ruined trucks and tanks were scattered about here as they had been at El Guettar. The charred twisted masses of metal were grim reminders that someone had died there. When I arrived at the company all was quiet except for the occasional bark and rumble of the usual artillery ar-tillery duel. Enemy air activity here was nothing to what it had been at El Guettar. Nothing to say that first night when I had arrived ar-rived at Ninth Division headquarters headquar-ters and was awaiting further orders. or-ders. The bombers came over four times inside of an hour. It was just getting dark. For the first couple of raids I dove for a fox hole. I was a little surprised when a colonel jumped in this one foxhole on top of me. How did I know it was his hole? For the last raid I stood and watched and it was a beautiful sight. The streams of tracer bullets from our guns light up the sky like a 4th of July celebration. I saw one German bomber very clearly through an opening in the palm trees. It was a big four-motored bomber and was swinging close in very low toward us. It dropped two bombs very close and threw dirt our way. I kept watching and saw the tail gunner in the plane frantically shooting back as our fifty caliber machine guns found their mark. That plane jetsoned its bombload and crashed about two miles away. Then there was the time at El Guetter when I saw three Spitfires sneak through the German fighters, play hide and seek in the clouds and finally down in flames, another German four-motored bomber. That was a beautiful sight. The Germans didn't have enough planes left to trouble us at all up at Sedjenane. "Well, to get back to the story. My first morning up there with the company, Jerry started shelling shell-ing a mosque about 400 yards to our left. I found that he did that every morning to get his range for the day's shooting. One over, one short, and then, wham! One right in, and he was ready to start throwing those artillery shells at any target. Later that morning that one gun made me take cover under a little concrete bridge to get out of the fire. While I was there one shell landed and blew one side of the concrete bridge railing off up there about ten feet away. I must give the Germans Ger-mans credit, they know how to |