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When Capt. Don Clark of State College, a company commander with the 112th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division now training at Camp Atterbury, Ind., first met a group of new selectees assigned to his unit, he figured they were all strangers to him.

But he had no idea that he once might have lost his life at the hands of one of them.

It all came about when Recruit John Day and Capt. Clark were swapping war stories and found out that they were “old friends.”

 The story begins in late September, 1944 when the American armies were pushing into German Territory and the final offensives of the European war were being planned.  

In the German city of Dueren the 121st Infantry Regiment had been halted in its drive by the flooded canal which separated the opposing forces.  On the American Side, a young lieutenant set up an observation post in a church steeple overlooking the German emplacements on the other side of the canal.

A newly-conscripted Wehrmacht machine-gunner who set up his weapon on the German side had the church steeple as one of his objectives on the American side.  Often the gunner turned his fire near the church.  But although he viewed the steeple with suspicion because he knew it might make a good lookout, for some reason he never fired directly on it.

Then as the advance into German territory continued, the lieutenant led a patrol which met with such heavy fire from the machine guns, that they had to remain hidden for two days.

After the war, the lieutenant returned to his home and joined the headquarters’ battery of the 200th Field Artillery at Bellefonte.

A pressman for the Nittany Printing and Publishing Company, Capt. Clark decided to rejoin the 28th with the outbreak of the Korean fighting and was put in command of Company H, the same company in which he had been a private ten years ago.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the machine-gunner was released from the Wehrmacht after the surrender.  He had been born in America in 1927 and could claim American citizenship, although he had lived with his grandparents in Germany since 1930.  When he got his nationality papers straightened out he came to live with his mother in Cheltenham, near Philadelphia.

He had done his best to forget about the war, but on Sept. 28, he was drafted into the Army and assigned to Company H.

That’s how the former lieutenant and the machine gunner got around to swapping stories and learned about their “close calls” in Dueren.

Capt. Clark says he is “proud to have Rct. Day” in his company, and Rct. Day, who likes the American Army very much, says that ”there is no one I’d rather accompany in combat than Capt. Clark.”   Taken verbatim from an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer: October 1950.

See the Biography of Don B. Clark elsewhere in this Virtual Museum for additional information about his military career.

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