Read Online Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation - Free Book Online

the family residence by opening a small laundry. Wesley, a bright young man, had hoped to go to college, but it was out of the question in those difficult times.
    He went to work in a printing company, and when the war broke out his boss offered to get him a deferment, but Wesley’s buddies were all signing up and he wanted to volunteer as well. He was assigned to the officers’ training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and after ninety days he was a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne.
    â€œI was apprehensive,” he says, “being the only Oriental in the 82nd. I think the 82nd was apprehensive too; I wasn’t assigned right away. I guess they thought Orientals couldn’t be leaders. I didn’t make an issue of it. I was born and raised in this country and I didn’t think I was any different.” Asian complexions were real burdens for American citizens when their country was at war with Japan; too many of their fellow citizens made no distinction between the enemy and the Asian Americans in their midst. In the end, the Army did recognize Wesley Ko’s qualities and installed him as a platoon leader in a new outfit: the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment.
    It was the daredevil and dangerous new way to transport troops, including Dr. Van Gorder and his medical unit, when D-Day was launched. A pilot and a copilot steered the glider to what was a controlled crash landing in difficult terrain, ferrying thirteen troops and their equipment at a time.
    In the spring of 1942 Ko and his outfit sailed for North Africa, for more training sessions in the demanding conditions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. “It was very, very hot,” he recalls, “a hundred twenty degrees. We had to run for twenty minutes with our packs, then walk twenty minutes. At one point the whole regiment had dysentery. We lost more men training in Africa than in our first combat.”
    It was the beginning of a three-year ordeal for Wesley Ko. After training in Africa he was almost constantly in combat—first in Sicily on Mount Saint Angelo de Cava, then during the occupation of Naples with steady shelling from Germany’s big guns. After Italy, it was more hard-core training, this time in Ireland and England, for the Normandy invasion. Ko was promoted to first lieutenant and given command of a mortar platoon.
    On June 7, D-Day plus one, he was in a flight of 250 gliders headed for the north coast of France, where the fighting was very heavy. “When we arrived over Normandy,” he says, “we started receiving machine-gun fire. We sat on our flak jackets to give us a little more protection, we were flying so low.”
    Ko was well trained. “I just didn’t think of the danger,” he says now. “I guess I was too young, too naive. But it turns out we lost twenty percent of our gliders—they never got into battle. They were either shot down or made a bad landing.”
    As soon as Ko scrambled from his glider, he was in the thick of the fighting. His regiment began fighting its way from village to village, losing many men along the way. Ko had some very close calls in the hellish ten days following D-Day. “I was standing next to one of the operations officers when he was shot and killed. I remember another time taking my binoculars from their case and shrapnel had blown out a lens.” Another time, “for the river crossing, the engineers had set up a bridge and we just ran across. We received tremendous fire but you had to keep pushing forward. Different fellows were hit and you had to keep jumping over their bodies.”

    Wesley Ko

    Wesley Ko and grandchild
    After thirty-three days straight of combat without replacements, Ko’s battalion of 600 men had lost more than half, 323. And it was just the beginning of the drive for Berlin. Holland and the Battle of the Bulge lay ahead.
    In the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, that desperate but ultimately doomed