Shelton C. Picard (D/33)

I enlisted in the military service in July, 1940, was shipped to Fort Benning, Georgia and assigned to the second Armored Division which was stationed at Fort Benning at that time, and partly in an area known as Harmony Church, which was Tent City. At that time the Army still had horse units, or mechanized artillery. They would use horses to tow the artillery pieces. I remained at Fort Benning until I was sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana, to form the Third Armored Division. We were about sixty or seventy who came from Fort Benning to Camp Polk, but when we arrived in Louisiana, Camp Polk was not completed, so we were stationed at Camp Beauregard, Alexandria, Louisiana, for approximately three or four months, awaiting the completion of Camp Polk. We were billeted in tents. I will never forget the day we were assigned two officers, Captain Lovelady, and a platoon leader, George T. Stallings. We remained at Beauregard for approximately three or four months and, when Camp Polk was completed, we motored by trucks (2'/2 ton trucks or whatever vehicle we had at that time) to take over Camp Polk.
I feel my life was spared on many occasions due to the efforts of Col. Lovelady. Whenever we would get new officers he would assign some of them to D Company and he would always tell me that he did not want me at the lead tank, at the head of the column because he said I was about the only one he had left to keep the Company going, and that he could depend on and who knew the operation of the Company. Therefore, I would remain back maybe a day or two. Then if officers would be wounded or killed I would have to take over again.
I would like to recount two separate actions that come to my mind every time I talk about the battles we had in Europe against the Germans. One of them was the objective Marburg, Germany. We were given this objective and told we would have to arrive at this objective within a certain period of time. For some reason, I had just been assigned one of the latest model tanks ... the General Patton tank ... it was a 90 mm with a 23' barrel with a muzzle break on the end. I think we were finally being assigned tanks that could match, not quite, but almost, the German tanks. We were told that we would have to take Marburg within a 24 hour period and it was approximately 100 miles away. The Germans had blown up a bridge across a small river and our engineers had to lay a pontoon across the river so we could make our way across. The tracks of this new type tank were too wide to cross on our normal pontoon bridges. Therefore, I had to detour quite a few miles away. Col. Lovelady gave me a coordinate on the map and told me to go in such and such a direction approximately so many miles, that there was a Unit which had taken a bridge intact there and crossed there, and eventually I could make my way to his Task Force, which I did.
I left early in the morning. It was foggy; it was a hard surface road and we were traveling as fast as we possibly could, but we knew it would take possibly three or four hours to make our way around to this bridge which was intact and then come back and join our Task Force. We were going down this road as fast as we could and finally my driver locked both of the levers and skidded down the pavement for forty or fifty feet and finally came to a halt. I looked up ahead, through the fog, and here was a 500 pound laying in the middle of the road. You could see the wires on each side and a foxhole on either side which I am sure at one time was occupied by Germans to detonate this bomb to try to stop our advance.

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