This web site photo collection describes the war experiences of my father, William Waddington, who passed away in 2012, from kidney failure. In the years before his death, we worked on adding notes to these photos, and the comments on these pages are mostly his own.
He was born on September 4, 1924 in Seattle, Washington and was drafted into the U.S. Army on the day after he graduated from Franklin High School in June of 1943. During the war, he served as a rifleman in an infantry platoon in C company of the the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 12th Armored Division, which fought in southern front in France and Germany in World War II as part of the Seventh Army and the French First Army.
He served as an infantry soldier in World War II, and saw action in France. He was wounded twice, and recieved the bronze star for bravery under fire.
The photographs are from his personal photo album, which he put together in 1946 from the photographs he collected during the war.
The photographic record of his time in the service is sporadic. There are large gaps in the record, depending on whether or not a camera and or film was available, or allowed. The first part of the album show his pre-war days playing high school baseball, and then there are a number of photos of Army training in Texas. He took no pictures when he was in Europe during combat, but fortunately salvaged a single roll of film (one of many rolls that were unfortunately never recovered) from a half track driver, Donald Conkling, which my father processed after the war. This series of photographs show the platoon in France, just prior to its tragic first action in January 1945. According to my father, the use of a camera during combat and in Europe was prohibited by the Army, but some soldiers, such as Donald Conkling, somehow were able to get around the restriction, for which we are now thankful.
The same cast of characters can be followed in the photographs from the early days in Texas through to the occupation. Some were wounded or lost their lives, and do not appear in the later occupation photographs. A few are still alive and were in contact with my father before he died. I do not know if any have survived him.
His closest friends during the war were those in his mortar squad. There were eight men in his squad, and these included Sergeant Joe Kulak, Phil Colunga, Bill Otto, Al Molan, Phil Copus, Charles ("Chuck") Allendoerfer, John Tedrowe, and William Waddington. In addition, he was close friends with Al Schaefer, who was in a rifle squad in the same platoon. Al lost his life during the battle of Herrlisheim, and for whom my father wrote a poem remembering him.
The battle of Herrlisheim is a little known battle that occurred in Alsace, France in January of 1945. Herrlisheim is a small town in Alsace ( see map). A number of "green" American divisions, including the 12th Armored Division, first saw combat in this offensive, and with tragic losses. While Patton and the 3rd Army were driving east in the Ardennes in northern France, the German Army under Himmler secretly moved veteran divisions to the south to the Strasbourg area as part of operation 'Nordwind", with the hope of breaking through the new and thinly deployed American divisions. The Germans formed a bridgehead across the Rhine at Gambsheim and Herrlisheim, just northeast of Strasbourg in December, 1944. Not expecting to meet a strong German defense, the 12th Division was ordered to take the town of Herrlisheim. It was here that the 43rd Tank Battalion was entirely wiped out, and here that my father's company suffered greater than 80% casualties. In his own squad alone, of 8 men, 6 were wounded during the first day of action.
His poem "Fifty Years" describes the fifth day of the battle.
The web site is organized in chronological order, as he originally pasted them into the album. The photographs are numbered by the album page number , and then the picture number. For example, Photo 003-01 refers to the first photograph on the third album page. If there are photographs that are of interest to you, I would be glad to email you a higher resolution version (see first page for email address).
This is a typical album page, showing the relative size of the photographs.
TO GO TO THE FIRST PAGE OF THE ALBUM
TO GO TO THE ALBUM PAGE INDEX TO VIEW THE PHOTOGRAPHS AND PAGES