Kenneth R. Madsen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, February 5 - 8, 2001: Saving the legacy tape no. 178 to 182

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ET R.MADSEN plain that. WIN: Well, this was then about the 17th or 18th of December? KEN: Yes. rua 20 WIN: That's when the Battle of the Bulge started. Were there any indications that you would have to move out of there because of the threat of the Germans coming? KEN: That was the next thing I was going to mention, because the doctor said, "When I finish my rounds, I'm going to come back and talk to you about what happened up there." And almost immediately another doctor came through and he walked down the aisle and he'd point at a patient, a GI, and all he said was, "You go." He walked down and pointed to several of them. I guess I should say several of "us" because he pointed at me and he said, "You go." Almost instantly there were litter bearers at almost every bedside that he had talked to. We were taken out and loaded into ambulances and we started west toward Paris. And if there were any speed laws then they were all broken, but about twenty minutes after we left all the ambulances pulled off to the side of the road, I guess to take a break, and to take a deep breath after how fast they had been driving. Anyway, at that point we were told that the hospital I was in came under enemy fire. It was less than twenty minutes later that the hospital was captured. All the medical staff, the nurses and everybody stayed back with the wounded. And the original instructions were that ambulatory-and I was far from being ambulatory, but they cheated just a little bit. In fact, everybody that was awake really. So, in less than a half hour after I woke up I was out of the hospital and headed toward Paris. And, as I say, the hospital was captured. The doctor that operated on me that wanted to come back and talk to me-I never got to talk to 53