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Author's Note: (How and why this story came to be)
This is the story of my father, Private First Class Raymond James Oblinger, Sr., a veteran of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 104th Regiment, of the 26th Infantry Division. It is the story of his life and experiences during World War II.
Raymond James Oblinger died in the early morning of December 24, 1985, never having said much to his family about his WWII experiences. My mother, Helen Theresa Oblinger, died a year and a half later on June 23, 1987. Shortly after my father's death, I began to wonder just what he did experience in those days of WWII. I had only a few recollections of things he said about the war. He mentioned serving under General Patton and being part of the famed Red Ball Express in France. He also spoke once about using the butt of his rifle to break up the ice around his feet in the bottom of a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge. And he said that he was often called "Old Man" by the men he served with then.
In June of 1988, with only his Honorable Discharge in my hands, I began the long hard task of research in an effort to retrace his footsteps through World War II. History was not among my strongest subjects during my school years, nor did I ever consider myself to be a writer. But I felt the need to learn as much as I could about that time in Dad's life that he seldom talked about.
I had learned from older relatives that Dad was something of a wild and fun-loving type in his younger days. But the father that I knew was a kind and gentle man that loved life and all of God's creation.
This is not to say that he never had moments of anger or rage. Raymond was a firm disciplinarian, and disobedience to him usually brought on an encounter with "the strap." This was a belt that he folded in half and used to get his message across . . . and with great success, I might add.
But through the years, he seemed to have an unshakable faith in God that withstood hard times and tragedy.
Throughout rough financial times, periods of layoffs and unemployment, and the death of Ray and Helen's oldest son John Peter, Ray's faith in God never faltered.
I found myself compelled to learn what made him the kind of man he was. I believed that the answer to this could be found in the secrets that he kept from his family about his experiences in World War II.
It was a task that took me 12 years, at a cost of over $10,500. I have driven hundreds of miles on several occasions, and personally interviewed hundreds of WWII veterans. I have dug extensively into official military records and copied from old microfilmed Morning Reports until my eyeballs ached. I have read many books, documents, and other publications on WWII and the European Theater of Operation. And best of all, in the process, I have located and/or accounted for nearly every veteran of Ray's combat platoon in the 104th Infantry Regiment. I gained priceless information.
This quest for knowledge nearly cost me my family. I had so neglected my wife and daughter in this search for information, that she came close to divorcing me. But I still kept on; praying that God would guide the outcome of it. And He did.
Hundreds of books have been published on WWII. Libraries are bulging with written information on the histories of wars, battles, and campaigns. There are histories of Armies, Corps, Divisions, Regiments, and Battalions. Much has been published about famous war heroes of World War II, including Generals Dwight David Eisenhower, Omar Nelson Bradley, and George Smith Patton, Jr. But I found almost no written information about the life of the average GI replacement soldier in WWII. In the European Theater alone from D-Day (June 6, 1944) through V-E Day (May 8, 1945), some 1,070,000 replacements served. Of those, the 26th Infantry Division utilized over 15,700 of them to replenish combat losses.
Upon learning that Ray neither trained with, nor shipped overseas with the 26th Division or the 104th Regiment, but instead had become a replacement for other men killed or wounded, I knew that his life in "olive drab" had to be a lonely one. I then set out to learn why. And learn I did!
But the most valuable contribution to this story came from the personal recollections of the actual veterans of the Anti-Tank Platoon of Headquarters Company, First Battalion, 104th Infantry Regiment. I will forever be indebted to them.
It’s not just a story about one man’s WWII experience . . . It also tells of a man who turned to God in a cold, damp and lonely foxhole in France in October of 1944.