Recalling a fateful day
For Roger Guernsey, Dec. 7, 1941, carries special significance
By Larry Meyer
Argus Observer
Friday, December 7, 2007 1:59 PM PST
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| Larry Meyer | ARgus Observer
Payette veteran Roger Guernsey shows off some of the memorabilia he has collected about World War II. Guernsey was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The attack eventually pushed Guernsey into the front lines of World War II where he served as an officer. |
PAYETTE — Roger Guernsey, 87, Payette, remembers exactly what he was doing when he heard the news the Japanese Imperial Navy had bombed Pearl Harbor.
What he couldn’t know, though, was the impact the attack would have on his future.
In December 1941, Guernsey was a forestry student at the University of Idaho. During the day he worked digging ditches at the school nursery and was scheduled to be the cook’s helper at a men’s cooperative where he lived while attending college that fateful December Sunday.
It was about 11 a.m., when he went into help in the kitchen, that he heard the news, he said.
Guernsey said he knew right away the country had entered a new era, one marked by risk and change and bloodshed.
“It was a wake-up call,” Guernsey said of the attack. “I knew we were in a peck of trouble.”
In college, Guernsey said he was already involved with the military.
“I was in ROTC,” Guernsey said. “I was in my second year.”
As America fell deeper into the world war, Guernsey said he opted to take advanced ROTC and eventually went into the Army and was sent to Officer Candidate School at Ft. Benning, Ga.
After he graduated from OCS, Guernsey said he was assigned to the 94th Infantry Division at Camp McCain, N.C.
When the division shipped out to Europe, the soldiers were put aboard the Queen Elizabeth I, Guernsey said.
“The Queens were faster than the U-boats. We crossed in five days,” he said.
After being reoutfitted in England, Guernsey and the unit he was with landed at Utah Beach, “D+ 94” and was given the assignment to keep guard of 50,000 or 60,000 Germans at U-boat ports along the French coast to make sure they did not cause any trouble.
“We were not allowed to attack,” Guernsey said.
But in December 1944, the Battle of the Bulge was underway and Guernsey was among the troops dispatched about 400 miles to shore up the southern flank of the bulge. The division, he said, was then given the assignment to break through the Siegfried Line to allow tanks from Gen. George Patton’s Third Army to go through to the Rhine River.
“We reached the Rhine before the armored divisions,” Guernsey said. “It was one wild ride. Germans were surrendering by the thousands.”
Although he was with a mortar platoon, which normally stayed behind the front lines, Guernsey said he often found himself to be out in front as a forward observer in a small group. Although he was never wounded, there were some very close calls.
Guernsey was in Dusseldorf, Germany, when the war in Europe ended and received his first command as part of the occupation army in Czechoslovakia, and would have come home at the end of that assignment except he missed by one the number of points needed to be sent home.
He was sent back to Germany where he was under the command of a Col. William Westmoreland, who would later direct the war in Vietnam. Although being a part the 94th Infantry Division of Patton’s Third Army, Guernsey said he never saw Patton, but met Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, when he was campaigning in Idaho for president. Guernsey was an Idaho State Forester, a position he held for 18 years.
Guernsey still has contact with 14 men he fought with in World War II and often speaks to students about the war so they know what happened.
“Some don’t know the U.S. was fighting,” he said.
