Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:03 | The 80th Division made contact with the 101st Airborne outside Bastogne. "What took you guys so long," was the first question, although posed a bit more colorfully. Medic Fred Moston saw a landscape littered with dead men and horses and wrecked tanks. The Battle of the Bulge had been the greatest battle ever fought by the American Army. He got in on the action when, upset on finding a dead comrade, he grabbed a gun and charged the enemy.
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His mother didn't mince any words. Fred Moston and his friends were talking on the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor when she told them, "You're all going to die." "She was Irish," he explained. The young draftee stood in a field in North Carolina with about two thousand other men. They were divided, so many for infantry, so many for the artillery, etc. He was in the last group left and he could not believe what he was destined for.
He was humping through basic infantry training when Fred Moston got a chance to apply for the Air Corps and was accepted. He went from boot camp to the University of Tennessee. Talk about a change! Good food, girls, but of course that couldn't last and the Air Corps decided to send those men back to the Army. He was soon sailing to Europe on the Queen Mary.
He was sent as a replacement into Le Havre where he boarded a train and headed for the front. Medic Fred Moston left the train at a stop, like most of the men. They were looking for wine, he was looking for an outhouse. When he returned, the train was gone. Rescued by a Colonel in a command car, he went into combat that day as a litter bearer.
It was on George Patton's mad dash to bail out the Allied Forces at the Battle of the Bulge, that Fred Moston saw his first jet aircraft. The German prototype made the P-51's look like they were standing still. In Luxembourg, he slept in a royal bed one night and on another night, he was sleeping on the ground in the snow when a German patrol passed right by him.
Medic Fred Moston was helping a sick man back to the rear when he crossed a field after spotting the unit he was looking for on the other side. He found out how lucky he was. "Doc, that field is mined!" He has some observations about the quality of the German weapons versus our own, and he relates how he came to have a gun shoved in his face by an American sergeant.
It was a probe, crossing the Rhine at night to gauge the enemy force on the other side. Medic Fred Moston was plucked from his unit and sent with this team and it was a good thing for them. They took heavy machine gun fire and he was one of the ones hit. Despite that, he managed to organize the group and get them to shelter. Years later, his account of this incident corrected the official Army record.
Fred Moston had two souvenirs under his shirt when he went on the operating table. He never saw them again. During his recovery, he met a wounded German prisoner who caused him to realize an important truth about the enemy. He also met Frenchy, a baker who was a real wheeler and dealer.
When Fred Moston returned home from the European Theater, the first thing he did was go looking for his dog. The news was not good. Then he found out his job was gone and, for a while, it was just the local bar with the other veterans, who were suddenly distinct from everyone else. He was successful in college and became a history teacher. His take on the Greatest Generation is that it was someone else.
