John Perschon, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, January 15, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 421

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JO P R HO R 1 20 2 I d ay Well if you have a ense of humor you can put up with anything. ' nd r all that s true. You've got to be able to laugh at yourself and laugh at thing t k pan n keel because if not you get ground to bits. And we were in the thick of battl . W had a heavy casualty rate because the division leader was a major general who was called George Hayes. We used to call him "Little Blood and Guts' after George Patton. He was just about as fierce as George Patton, just about as energetic, and I don't think he was quite as egotistical as George Patton. So we had the division commander, and we had an assistant division commander by the name of Duff, and he was a one-star general. And to our outfit, we had assigned to us a regiment of mule pack field artillery, and that had a general. So we had three generals in our outfit. The mule pack had the howitzers. And I can still sometimes hear the creaking of the leather as the mules would move up to our position at night, and then we would go ahead in the daytime, and then they'd shoot over our heads. And you could still hear that creaking of the leather as those mules would come up. When the war was over we gave the mules to Italy. We didn't bring any of them back. But that basically was my experience in the war. But we had a lot of, like I said, a lot of casualties. We did not use our skis, however, that year. It was the winter of '44-'45. There was not very much snow in Italy at the time. We did some mountain climbing up cliffs and such as that to surprise the enemy. And went through the Po Valley all the way up. We were chasing the Germans out of Italy, is what we were doing, capturing them. And at the end we captured them so fast that we just took their weapons away and had them walk to the rear on their own. We just couldn't- BEe: No place to keep them. 6