COM M U N I T Y
BY: BILL MOAKLEY
Not Forgotten
PRESENTED BY
CENTURIONCG.NET
F
Decorated WW II Vet Recalls One of War’s Deadliest Battles
or nearly 60 years, Paul Wilson never spoke of his experiences in World War II. The reason was simple.
“I was surrounded by death and dying,” Wilson explained solemnly. “I just didn’t want to remember it.” That changed one day as Wilson found himself asking his son if he’d ever told him about the war. “He said no,” Wilson recalled. “I said, ‘sit down, I’m going to tell you.’” Wilson had a lot to tell. In January 1944, the U.S. Army came calling on Wilson with a draft notice. In order to earn an extra $50 per month, he volunteered to be a paratrooper, and he was assigned to jump school at Fort Benning, Ga. Wilson’s first incursion into the war would not come from the sky, but by ground. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army punched a hole in the German front following their offensive in the Ardennes Forest, and that victory led to the Battle of the Bulge. When Wilson went into battle with the 17th Airborne Division, it was baptism by fire when he found himself in what became known as the Battle of Dead Man’s Ridge. 12 | November 2019
“Guys were dying all around me,” Wilson remembered. “We were under heavy fire, and we were running right up to a ridge where Germans were shooting.” Wilson took cover behind a small mound of dirt he found. He remembers a German artillery round passing close by his head. “I heard it whizz by,” Wilson said. “It was less than an inch away. I never saw it, but I heard it. If it had been an inch closer, I would have been dead.” Wilson used the mound for cover, and he was under constant fire until a mortar round landed nearby and created a large crater. He decided it was time to move his position. “I ran to the crater, and I was there for hours,” Wilson continued. “I kept using my bayonet to push my helmet up. Every time I did, I’d see dirt fly up. A German sniper must have been trained on me.” After a period, he stopped drawing fire, so Wilson made a run for safety. Along the way, he and another soldier brought an injured American soldier to an aid station. At the end of his first of day of fighting at the ridge, Wilson was one of only 16 survivors from his company, which started with 130 men.
