T.O. man served our country in World War II

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers REWARDED FOR SERVICE—Clyde Crew, 83, a WW II Army veteran, displays his Purple Heart medal. In 1943, Clyde Crew turned 18 years old and he joined the service.

His widowed mother cried. Edith Crew didn't want her only son to leave their home in Salem, Ohio, to go to war. Clyde Crew's father had died when he was 14, and his mother and two sisters were all he had.

"My mother didn't want me to go, but I had to go, and I did," Crew said.

World War II was being waged in Europe, Africa and in the Pacific, and soldiers were needed so badly that Crew completed a shortened basic training in Alabama before being shipped off to the war.

He was a private first class in the Army's 45th Division when he arrived in Africa. Before long, he was serving in Italy, where he fought Germans on the Anzio beachhead.

"The Germans could see us. They bombed and shelled us. I wore the same clothes for three months," Crew said.

When he turned 19, he received some bad news from home—his mother had died.

"I wanted to go home for her funeral, but I had to stay and fight," Crew said. There's no emergency leave when the country is at war.

His voice still fills with sorrow as he recalls how much he wanted to be with his family during that difficult time.

But his country needed him. Soon it was D-Day, and he and the men he describes as "the other boys" were on a small boat off the coast of France.

"They dropped us off, and we had to wade to the beach. We were fighting with everything we had," he said.

He also fought in the bloody Battle of the Bulge, he said.

"It rained and snowed like heck," Crew said.

The soldiers dug foxholes and had to stay in them all day. There were two men to a foxhole.

"If we had to go to the bathroom, we'd do it in the hole. That's just the way it was," he said.

They filled the bottom of the fox hole with sapling trees to make a grate, so when they slept, they wouldn't get as wet, he said.

"The Germans would throw shells in the holes and kill us right away," he said.

Once, while in the hole, he and a fellow soldier heard steps coming toward them. They were sure it was German soldiers.

"We were so scared. We thought we were going to die," he said.

As the sound came closer, they could hardly breathe.

"Then we looked up, and there was a cow looking down into the hole at us.

"We were so relieved to see that cow," he said.

They lived off of K-rations that included cigarettes.

"That food didn't taste very good," he said.

While serving, Crew was wounded by shrapnel. He received a Purple Heart, but when he got home, his medal had disappeared, he said.

Recently, he was pleased because, after much effort, he received a replacement medal.

"I was happy to get my Purple Heart. I earned it, and I wanted to have it," Crew said.

Crew ended the war in the "Hitler hotel" in Munich, Germany, he said.

When he returned to Ohio, he put his gun down, determined to never fight again. After he was laid off from a factory job, he came to California at the beckoning of an aunt and found a job the first day he arrived in the Golden State, he said.

"I worked for a candy factory," he said.

Now he's retired and lives in Thousand Oaks.