Daniel Chester was born in February 1925 in Lakewood, Ohio, went through grammar and high school there, and lived in a home of good "common folk" who believed in discipline. In the summertime, he worked with his father, who hauled building supplies. His mother, an Italian immigrant, took in laundry, in addition to working in a bakery. On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, the family was listening to the radio in their living room when programming was interrupted for the announcement. Chester doesn't believe the average American knew much about the military situation at the time. He was drafted on the same day he graduated from high school, and two weeks later he went for a physical and induction in Columbus, Ohio. Two weeks after that he was on his way to 16 weeks of boot camp at Camp Croft, South Carolina. Chester had never before shot a gun, and feels the officers did the best they could to prepare the young recruits for battle. Because of his strict upbringing, he had no trouble adapting to military life. After a short furlough, he was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland, then to New York to board the HMS Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted into a troop ship, for a perilous transport to Scotland. He traveled by train to Winchester, England, where in November 1943 he was assigned to the 9th Infantry Division [Annotator's Note: Chester was assigned to Company F, 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division]. Nevertheless, Chester does not feel the soldiers realized what they were up against until Germany sent V1s and V2s [Annotator's Note: a pulse-jet cruise missile and a liquid fueled ballistic missile respectively] over to England. He saw the destruction those rockets caused while on leave in London, where they were bivouacked in the subway tunnels, and was ready to fight.

When the invasion [Annotator's Note: the invasion of Normandy, France] took place on 6 June 1944, Daniel Chester recalls that German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was not in the battle area. Chester had been sent from Winchester to Boscombe in Bournemouth, England, where his company [Annotator's Note: Company F, 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division] did little more than "hang around" for four days. On D-Day, Chester said there were ships and planes covering all the area he could see. He thought the military coordination effort was phenomenal, and that General Dwight Eisenhower's decision to proceed was genius. Chester's division moved on 10 June, and he remembers being a "walking army," with hand grenades and bandoliers hanging all over him. When he was ready to step off the Higgins boat [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel, or LCVP] someone checked the water depth, which registered at 12 feet. The boat's flap [Annotator's Note: bow ramp] was lifted and they moved closer to the beach. Chester was dressed in winter apparel, and those garments, in combination with the salt water, chaffed his legs. Chester's group walked ashore about a mile to the combat zone. Many of the American tanks didn't make it ashore, but Chester witnessed German tanks "having a heyday." From six in the morning to six in the evening, the Americans and the Germans fought each other, after which Chester said he would dig a slit trench, put his raincoat on the bottom, and cover it with his blanket. Each trench accommodated two soldiers, and the second man's raincoat and blanket were spread over the top of the pair to protect them from the dew and the shrapnel. He remembers getting acclimated to being in the same clothing for long periods of time, and having an unpleasant odor. Chester notes that the soldiers were not trained for the fighting they did in the hedgerows of Normandy. On one occasion when he was a forward scout, a buddy warned him in time for him to turn and just miss machine gun fire that tore his jacket, put a hole in his scapular and removed his dog tags. In the latter part of June, Chester's unit came under a barrage and he was wounded for the first time. The Germans were shelling, and he took a piece of shrapnel in the jaw. Medics at the aid station [Annotator's Note: an installation for the first aid care and treatment of the sick and wounded] patched him up, and that evening he and two other soldiers went to find their unit, a difficult task in the dark and without a password. By mid-morning the next day, Chester was able to find his outfit.

When Daniel Chester reported back to his commanding officer, he was reassigned to the 3rd Battalion [Annotator's Note: 3rd Battalion, 60th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division], 3rd Platoon, and continued the fight up left side of the Cherbourg Peninsula. Along the way, they captured a Jewish concentration camp. Chester marveled at the construction of the German emplacements, and thought the German fighting ability and equipment was outstanding. Chester's unit turned south and was on its way to St. Lo, where Patton's [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutetant General George S. Patton] Third Army was supposed to relieve them. But while patrolling a crossroad in July [Annotator's Note: July 1944], he experienced another German barrage that killed the soldiers on either side of him, and peppered both his arms and both his legs with shrapnel. He was loaded on a jeep where he passed out and was brought to surgery. Soon he was put on a landing craft to cross the English Channel and ended up in an amputee ward of a hospital in Wales. He remembers the hospital wards being canvassed to find soldiers fit enough to join the Battle of the Bulge. They tested Chester by putting a needle in the bottom of his foot. He couldn't feel it, and he was disqualified for further battle service. Today he has a drop foot on his left side because the surgeons couldn't attach the nerves together.

To return to the United States, Daniel Chester was once again transported on the HMS Queen Elizabeth, which by this time had been refitted as a hospital ship. He landed in New York and was put into Halloran Hospital [Annotator's Note: Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island, New York] for a period of time, then moved to Nichols General Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky for neurological and orthopedic treatment. There, he remained for over a year, with intermittent opportunities to go home. Chester felt he got the best medical treatment available, and remarks that during his stay, Jimmy Durante performed for the patients there. In August 1946, Chester was discharged. He moved from part-time to full-time work in the lab at Archer Daniels Midland Company where he worked for over 20 years and from which he retired as a sales manager. Chester doesn't feel it possible for today's Americans to understand what his generation went through during the years of the war. He feels the movie "Band of Brothers" does the best job of depicting what war is like, but even that portrayal cannot fully replicate the experience. He visited The National WWII Museum, and was amazed to learn how close America came to losing the war, and was impressed with how well the museum's curators portrayed the situation.