When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Allen A. Rasmussen decided to join the military. He figured he had a good shot at becoming a pilot—after all, he was 19 years old, six feet tall and in good shape. But he encountered a setback at his induction physical in Los Angeles. He was colorblind. There would be no flight school for him.
Eventually, Rasmussen, now 89 and living at The Terraces at San Joaquin Gardens in Fresno, Calif., found another way to serve. He even helped liberate two German concentration camps.
For a year and a half after his discouraging eye test, Rasmussen worked the graveyard shift at an aircraft factory. Finally, he managed to get released from that job and sign up with the Army. He went through basic training, married the beautiful young woman he’d been seeing, and went off to Fort Benning, Ga.
The Army wanted him to become a rifleman, but he said to himself, “I don’t think I want to shoot people,” and signed up as a medic instead. After intensive training, he took a train to New York harbor and a troop ship to France, then found himself in a big field full of tents southeast of Paris.
“Very few people have a conception of combat,” he says. “We were on the ground. They were shooting at us, we were shooting at them. There were guns going off everywhere, all the time.”
He was scared, but also pragmatic. “Guys were getting wounded, and it was my job to patch them up.” He recalls, “From day to day we didn’t know where the heck we were. We didn’t know much about what we’d be doing.”
He was an avid reader and knew the Nazis had been imprisoning and killing people in concentration camps. Still, there was no way to prepare for what he saw there.
“There were dead people in piles. There were living people who were skin and bones. We gave them our C-rations, cigarettes, chocolate, whatever we had.”
A whole division went in, he recalls. “There weren’t just Jewish people there, there were gypsies, prisoners of war, people they’d brought in from other countries as slaves. They were speaking Polish, Russian, you name it. Guys were crying, tough guys. One guy tried to give them C-rations, which came in cans, and they started pounding them on rocks to get them open.”
His unit was in the camps only briefly, but the memories stay with him. So do others.
As his unit approached a small German city one morning, an advance vehicle was attacked and three men were killed. Fifty feet away from Rasmussen, a lieutenant stood up and raised his arm. Just as he said, “Let’s go, fellas,” he was shot in the shoulder. Rasmussen did his best to help him and sent him back to the field hospital, but the lieutenant didn’t make it.
Then Rasmussen himself got seriously ill with jaundice—his eyes yellow, blood in his urine. The over-extended doctor he was serving with refused to let him go to the field hospital until Rasmussen encountered a man he considers his angel; another doctor, who convinced Rasmussen’s superior that he needed treatment immediately.
The hospital in Paris seemed miraculously clean and safe after five months of dirt, mud, blood and rain. While there, he got some welcome news—his wife was expecting a baby. When he was discharged back to the front, he went to exchange some money and the man at the desk said, “Rasmussen? Where did I see that name?” He went through the papers on his desk and came up with a cablegram.
“You have a son,” he told Rasmussen. “Your wife and your son are doing well.”
He wouldn’t see the boy for nearly a year, when he was discharged from the service and rang a familiar doorbell back in Los Angeles. Rasmussen went on to have what he calls “a fantastic life,” teaching industrial arts and raising three children with his wife, to whom he has now been married 67 years. But even back home in California, he had one more encounter with the war.
When he went, as required, to the job board, the woman there asked for his discharge papers. “71st Infantry Division,” she read. “66th Regiment. Second Battalion.”
“Yes.”
She asked if he knew a lieutenant in that battalion who had died. She gave his name. Then she turned around the photograph standing on her desk. It was the man Rasmussen had tried so hard to save.
“He was my son,” the woman said.
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This article appeared in the November 2011 issue of ABHOW Words.
