The Path is Found!

With the help of our good folks at the Research Desk in Lamson Learning Commons at Plymouth State University, I identified in January a book with a title that promised to deliver exactly the sort of information needed to carry out our planned mission in honor of my wife Shirley Kimball McDougall's late father.

That title was 13th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, April 1942 - March 1946.  Its author was listed as Larry Hough.

I ordered this book under the Inter-Library Loan (ILLiad) program, but found that the book exists in only three libraries, and is not circulated by them.  So, earlier this month, on our way to Florida, Shirl, son Alex and I drove to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, visited the U. S. Army Heritage and Education Center library, and found the book.

The book was written in 1979 by Cpl. Larry Hough based on the oral and documentary history provided to him by surviving members of the battalion.  It describes in considerable detail the unit's World War II activity.  It follows them from their founding as a unit and early training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and to Fort Dix, New Jersey, among other training camps.  It describes their crossing on a troopship to England.  It accounts their experiences in England, and with their English hosts, as they were preparing for the D-Day invasion, which turned out to be in Normandy.  It tells of their channel-crossing from Southampton, and their unopposed landing at Utah Beach on June 7, 1944.  It includes an account of all their attachments to infantry and field artillery units from the battles on the Cotentin Peninsula to the breakout from the Normandy beachhead, to their campaign across France and Belgium, and past the Siegfried line into Germany.  And then came the last great Nazi offensive, known as The Battle of the Bulge, which brought the unit back southwest and again into Belgium late in December or 1944.

American forces cross the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen (Wikipedia.)

Finally, the book tells of the unit's role in the Battle of Remagen in March, 1945, and of their rapid advance across Germnay in support of the 1st Infantry Division in VII Corps, following their crossing of the River Rhine on a pontoon bridge erected by the Army Engineers at Remagen, Germany.

In short, that book is exactly what we had hoped to find.  My eyes actually teared-up as I went through it at the Carlisle library.   I had hoped to be able to find such a detailed guide for our upcoming trip to honor my children's wonderful, gentle, soft-spoken, kind-hearted grandfather, who had served our country so faithfully in that terrible time, almost 70 years ago. 

For a substantial fee, the library has made us a copy of this book, which includes maps of all the unit's tactical campigns.  Alex, Shirl and I now know where we must go to visit the villages her father saw.  We have only to go and see, and if I have my way, seek out folks in their eighties, with whom to share a beer, or a glass of wine, and their memories of a time long ago, but still of profound importance.

RIP, 1st Lt. Basil Kimball.  Your family all love, remember, and respect you.

Romanian Language Learned in Facebook

Turnul de Stefan, in Baia Mare, Romania

(Photo source: the FB page Learn Romanian Online)

If you have an interest in improving your Romanian, I urge you to request access to the closed Facebook page, Learn Romanian Online [https://www.facebook.com/groups/learnromanianonline/].  The page is hosted by a man named Jason Lancaster, and supported by experts such as Dora Mihoc of Sibiu, Romania, presently a Ph. D. candidate in linguistics at Harvard University, and by Ilinca Toderean of Cluj, a teacher of Romanian to foreigners, and a graduate of Babes-Bolyai University.

Learn Romanian Online is my latest haunt in Facebook outside of my own home page, and my best hope of improving significantly my understanding of Romanian grammar prior to my next planned visit to Romania, in late May.

Certainty Stimulates!

My Fulbright application for this coming fall failed in the final phase, funding.

Da, da, da, da, life goes on!

On our way to Florida, Shirl, Alex and I stopped at the library of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle. Pennsylvania, last week, and found a book entitled 13th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, April 1942 - March 1946, by Cpl. Larry Hough.  It was all we had hoped for, a chronicle of Basil Kimball's unit in WWII, from their landing at Utah Beach until VE Day, when they met with their Ukranian Army allies at the Czechoslovakian border.  We now have a path to follow as we carry out our plan for next month, as described in an earlier post.

I have been invited to Cluj-Napoca, Romania for a conference early in June, so I may change plans and take part, and while at UBB/FSEGA also present some of what my Fulbright project was about to their faculty members.  Perhaps my FSEGA colleagues and I we can accomplish privately much of what would have been done under the auspices of the Fulbright program, had my grant come through.

A wonderful Romanian colleague and friend of ours will be visiting us in New Hampshire in mid-June.

I shall be attending the Annual Conference of the ACBSP in Chicago late in June.

I shall not be retiring this June, but instead shall be teaching again in the fall at Plymouth State University.

Shirl, our son Alex, and I are presently in Orlando at the home of our son Jamie and his family, wife Amy and our granddaughter Brynn. 

Yesterday, we were in Miami at the home of son Brian and his family, wife Nika and our grandson Moses.

If losing out on the Fulbright grant is going to be a "downer" for me, I have yet to feel its first hint!