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MILITARY AWARD WWII PURPLE HEART AND COMBAT INFANTRYMAN BADGE; Japan
Schwartz news article in New Guinea fighting situation ana conditions. Source email WAGS-SIGS convenor TRANSCRIPT War Department, Bureau of Public Relations, PRESS BRANCH, Tel. RE6700. Brs. 3425 and 4860 SIS Release SF 67 LETTER AS FOLLOWS:--Wearing the Purple Heart, a Distinguished Unit Badge and the Combat Infantryman Badge, awarded for exemplary conduct in action against the enemy, Private first class Theodore F Schwartz, 23, of 1718 Chestnut Street, Granite City, Illinois, has returned to the United States after 30 months in the SW Pacific. Private Schwartz, who was a rifleman in an assault company of the 32D Infantry Division, was wounded at Buna when a Japanese mortar shell struck only eight years from him, killing his buddy. “A piece of steel got me in the neck” the Illinois Infantryman said. ‘The shell’s concussion knocked by rifle out of my hand and hurled it several years away from me. I walked over and picked up my rifle and fired the rest of my ammunition at Jap snipers before I went to find a medical aid man to get my wound treated.” Expert medical attention rendered Private First Class Schwartz “as good as new” in a few days, he said. He returned to the front lines, where, near the climax of the Buna campaign, he had another narrow escape when he W.A. caught in an artillery barrage. “Shells kept ‘straddling’ me” he said. ‘First they’d hit on one side of me then on the other and I kept wondering when the Japs would zero in on me and blow me up. Its a funny thing. I had been scared a lot of times, and any solder who tells you that he never was scared is just kidding, but this time I wasn’t nervous. I just lay there in Kunai grass waiting, and then the barrage lifted and I found I was still all in one piece, I wasn’t even sweating.” Reticent about his own feats, Private Schwartz was eloquent in his comment on the heroism of his buddies.
“For instance” he said, “take a corporal in my platoon who wiped out a Jap machinegun nest with nothing but a rifle. He had used up all his grenades killing Japs trying to infiltrate into our lines, and when we were pinned down by the Nip machinegun, her charged it.” “It wasn’t a fanatical, suicide charge, like the Japs make sometimes. He went forward calmly and deliberately and he seemed to be thinking out and measuring very move he made. He would crawl and few yards, fire, hit the dirt, roll-on and crawl forward again. (More)… but not provided to Researcher Lorna McLean
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