The Star Spangled Banner

Bill Platto, middle, and his National Guard Army buddies were part of parade in Putte, Belgium in 1985. The troop they were a part of helped to liberate the town in 1944. Contributed photo gone from home and families for more than four years. Battery C and Battery B spent three years in Europe on battlefields, leaving the U.S. on Aug. 1, 1942.

In 1985, when a group of them went back to Putte, Belgium, the city they had liberated during WWII, the townspeople held a parade in their honor. These men – many of them from Alexandria originally – felt like heroes. Platto remembers one of the townspeople who had witnessed the liberation telling him that their children and their children’s children, and on and on, would always know what the men had done for Putte, Belgium.

Another way the Battery C and Battery B men were heroes has to do with their record of surviving the 159 days under constant fire and shrapnel bombings and strafing by German bombers. B Battery had the highest percentage of hitting German Buzz-bombers – 85% accuracy.

Douglas County has a wealth of history within the walls of the Douglas County Historical Society – the Battery C/Battery B donation of memorabilia is a very important addition for the public to view, according to Platto’s family. Bill Platto of Alexandria pictured while serving in the National Guard Army. He joined the military in February 1941 and got out in the summer of 1945. Platto was a 1940 Alexandria graduate. He passed away in 2010. Contributed photo

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there, O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

“The Star Spangled Banner” Francis Scott Key (1814)