Harper Harvey Coleman was born in April 1922 in Newburg, Pennsylvania near Gettysburg [Annotator's Note: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania]. He lived on a farm. His parents lost the farm during the Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945] so his father went to work at the Letterkenny Army Depot [Annotator's Note: Letterkenny Township, Pennsylvania]. Coleman worked on the farm until he graduated from school. He then worked for a furniture factory before he got drafted. He did his basic training at Camp Atterbury, Indiana [Annotator's Note: in Edinburgh, Indiana] with the 83rd Division [Annotator's Note: 83rd Infantry Division] which had just been activated [Annotator's Note: 15 August 1942]. He was there about a year. He left to fill in the 4th Division [Annotator's Note: 4th Infantry Division] which was in Florida [Annotator's Note: in September 1943]. Coleman was a heavy machine gunner on the .30 caliber, water-cooled [Annotator's Note: Browning M1917 .30 caliber water cooled heavy machine gun], for his entire time in the service. The gun weighed around 35 pounds and the tripod was 36 or 37 pounds. He did amphibious training on the Gulf of Mexico at Camp Carrabelle, Florida [Annotator's Note: in Big Bend, Florida]. It was demanding. He trained there for two or three months. They left sometime in January [Annotator's Note: January 1944] to Fort Jackson [Annotator's Note: in Columbia, South Carolina] to go overseas. They left New York [Annotator's Note: New York, New York] in a convoy 18 January 1944. They were dropping the bombs [Annotator's Note: also called a depth bomb; an anti-submarine explosive munition resembling a metal barrel or drum] the whole way across. There were ships as far as you could see. The convoy zig-zagged [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver] the whole time. Going out of New York, nobody was allowed on top. Coleman had guard duty, so he was up there. He always had a pistol and had a carbine [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1 semi-automatic carbine] at times. Machine gunners only carried .45s [Annotator's Note: .45 caliber M1911 semi-automatic pistol]. They landed in England near Plymouth [Annotator's Note: on 26 January 1944]. They trained the whole time. They did fake landings on Slapton Sands [Annotator's Note: Exercise Tiger, or Operation Tiger, rehearsal for invasion of Normandy, Slapton Sands, Devon, England, April 1944]. They never knew if it was the real thing or not. They went well, but if you read about Slapton Sands, it is a different story. German submarines [Annotator's Note: E-boats; Allied designation for German fast attack craft, Schnellboot, or S-Boot] sunk three landing craft [Annotator's Note: on 28 April 1944]. 700-plus 4th Division [Annotator's Note: 4th Infantry Division] people were lost in the channel [Annotator's Note: the English Channel]. Coleman never knew until much later what had happened. The landing craft were fairly close together. Coleman was not very far from there. It was never mentioned. [Annotator's Note: A female voice off camera says it was not released by the government until after the war.] Coleman read about it in articles. It was Top Secret information. There were no civilians in the area at all. That was the last training exercise. The next time was for real.

Harper Harvey Coleman did not think much about the delay for the weather [Annotator's Note: the 5 June 1944 delay for D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. It did not mean much. Coleman was on the first wave in the second row of boats on 6 June. They let them off in waist-deep water. General Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: US Army Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, III] was the only one on the beach pushing them on through. They did not linger on the beach. There was artillery and small arms fire. The man behind Coleman was hit. Coleman found out years later that the man lay on the beach all day. He was alive, he survived, and made the Army a career. Coleman and his unit [Annotator's Note: 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] took a left turn up the beach. The land behind was flooded. They went into a little town. They had landed about a mile from where they were supposed to. There were mines and obstacles there. The land mines were all marked and pretty avoidable but guys did hit some. There was a big bunker there that was not manned. They went into Pouppeville [Annotator's Note: Pouppeville, France] by a road. That is where he saw his first German laying in the street. There were no villagers. They ran into the paratroopers that had landed. They went inland. Their objective was Cherbourg [Annotator's Note: Cherbourg, France]. It took weeks to get there through the hedgerows [Annotator's Note: man-made earthen walls that surround a field that are often overgrown with impenetrable vegetation]. The fighting was tough and very slow. They had to go one hedgerow at a time. They had heavy casualties. His gun crew had one kill and one hit. Only two of his squad did not make it to Cherbourg. His Company in the 8th did not fight at Cherbourg as they were reserves. They got their first showers and hot meals there. They only stayed two or three days and were trucked back to Saint Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô, France] just before the big bombing there [Annotator's Note: Operation Cobra, Saint-Lô, France, 25 to 31 July 1944].

Harper Harvey Coleman was at Saint Lo [Annotator's Note: Saint-Lô, France] and dug in along a road that was supposed to be the mark [Annotator's Note: for the bombing that was to happen on 25 July 1944]. The day of the bombing, the dust began to blow, and the Air Force could not see where they were dropping their bombs. Some of the men were hurt, but Coleman was dug in. After the bombing stopped, they [Annotator's Note: 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] moved. The bombing did not last very long but it destroyed Saint Lo. There were a lot of Germans killed. It was a slaughter. There was not much resistance until later on. Coleman did not see much of POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war]. There were a few in the Hurtgen Forest [Annotator's Note: Battle of Hürtgen Forest, 19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945, Hürtgen, Staatsforst (state forest), Germany]. After Saint Lo, was Paris [Annotator's Note: Liberation of Paris, Paris, France, 19 to 25 August 1944]. They would ride a few hours, have a firefight, the Germans would take off, they would catch them the next day, and it would happen again all the way to Paris. If the Germans did not get away, they were dead. When they got to Paris, they stopped and stayed in a park. They were waiting for a French Armored Division that was to take Paris. The French did not clean Paris out. Coleman heard from Ruggles [Annotator's Note: US Army Major General John Frank Ruggles] firsthand that De Gaulle [Annotator's Note: French Army General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle; later President of France] and his people, and the mayor had a big party and did nothing to finish cleaning the city. There was a big argument and then the 22nd Infantry, 4th Division [Annotator's Note: 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] finished cleaning Paris and by night they were gone. Ruggles said the 4th Division has a bad name with the French. The 28th Division [Annotator's Note: 28th Infantry Division] had the parade, but they were not the first ones there. The 4th was. They were only there one day. They went into the Siegfried Line [Annotator's Note: a series of defensive fortifications roughly paralleling the Franco-German border built by Germany in the 1930s] and then went into Luxembourg and Belgium. After that was the Hurtgen Forest.

[Annotator's Note: There is a tape break, and the clip starts with Harper Harvey Coleman mid-sentence.] An 88 [Annotator's Note: German 88mm, multi-purpose artillery] hit the dirt under his gun [Annotator's Note: Browning M1917 .30 caliber water cooled heavy machine gun]. He had burp guns [Annotator's Note: MP 40, Maschinenpistole 40, German submachine gun] lay fire different times. There were some close ones. He got a cut across the leg from an artillery fragment once in the hedgerows [Annotator's Note: man-made earthen walls that surround a field that are often overgrown with impenetrable vegetation]. [Annotator's Note: A telephone rings at 0:27:34.000.] At another place, there was a German bunker that started waving a white flag to surrender. An officer took two or three men to go get them. The Germans mowed them down. To this day Coleman does not know why he did that. Those guys did not become prisoners. Somewhere in there, Jimmy Ayers [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling] got hit. There was a sniper behind them. The officer beside Coleman went down like a wet dish rag. The shot went right over Coleman's gun. Jimmy was from Richmond [Annotator's Note: Richmond, Virginia] and survived a little while. He was on an evac plane [Annotator's Note: evacuation airplane] that crash-landed in England. Jimmy was killed in the crash. They [Annotator's Note: 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] took out the sniper. Those are some of the close ones. There was not much to the Siegfried Line [Annotator's Note: a series of defensive fortifications roughly paralleling the Franco-German border built by Germany in the 1930s]. They fought their way through there then stopped to wait for supplies. They went into the Hurtgen Forest [Annotator's Note: Battle of Hürtgen Forest, 19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945, Hürtgen, Staatsforst (state forest), Germany] after that. Coleman was a machine gunner [Annotator's Note: on a Browning M1917 .30 caliber water cooled heavy machine gun]. [Annotator's Note: Coleman describes how the machine gunners worked.] They had moved fast from Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] and ran out of everything. There was always artillery coming in. An advantage of being on the front lines, is that the artillery went over you. The weather was not too bad in September [Annotator's Note: September 1944] or October [Annotator's Note: October 1944]. Once they got into the Hurtgen Forest they got rain and then snow.

Harper Harvey Coleman and his unit [Annotator's Note: 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] had it touch and go the whole way [Annotator's Note: during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, 19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945, Hürtgen, Staatsforst (state forest), Germany]. If they made 50 yards a day, they were lucky. They set their machine guns [Annotator's Note: Browning M1917 .30 caliber water cooled heavy machine gun] up at night on the line. Coleman was only there for a couple of weeks. He was in the hospital by 17 November [Annotator's Note: 17 November 1944] with a messed-up arm. He returned to the unit at Christmas [Annotator's Note: 25 December 1944]. The fighting was tree by tree. The artillery was coming in all the time with tree bursts. The German fire was accurate. They knew their country. They did not dig in their machine gun. They used logs to hide it some. The whole thing was slow all the way through. There were always airstrikes. The fighter planes were right there all the time. Coleman was with the 2nd Battalion the whole time. They relieved the 28th Division [Annotator's Note: 28th Infantry Division] who had taken a beating. They did that at night as the 28th was coming back. He had an uncle in that Division. The 4th took a beating too later on. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer relates his reading on the battle to Coleman.] The artillery would explode in the tops of the tree and it would shatter. Minefields were all over the place. You do not know until somebody got hurt. Some soldiers got into one while the unit had some German prisoners. The Germans were told to go into the field and bring the soldiers out. The Germans said "no" but were forced to. They brought the men out. Before they had gotten up in there, a German soldier was lying in a ditch saying "wasser" [Annotator's Note: German term for water]. The lieutenant with Coleman said "wasser hell" and shot the German in the head. Coleman says this should be edited out, but that happened more than people realize. He feels that he should not even have told that story. It was cold, snowy, and muddy there. The resupply kept up, but at night they would go back to get a hot meal. Sometimes that was a mile or two. They would bring ammo back to the front. Mines were all over the place. That was just part of the job.

Harper Harvey Coleman got a swollen arm from a tree burst and was sent back to England [Annotator's Note: 17 November 1944]. He does not recall saying he was chopping wood. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer says mistakes happen. Unclear as to what is meant by this.] He was in the hospital from mid-November to Christmas [Annotator's Note: 25 December 1944]. When he returned, his squad [Annotator's Note: Coleman was a member of a Browning M1917 .30 caliber water cooled heavy machine gun crew in 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division] had disappeared, and he became a replacement. At the end of January [Annotator's Note: January 1945], he got frozen feet. This was in Belgium, near the German border. They were still moving for the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945]. Coleman got as far as the Our River. He had to take his shoes and then was out of there pretty quick. When he came back up, he was on a 40 and eight [Annotator's Note: 40 and eight refers European railroad boxcars which could accommodate 40 standing men or eight standing horses] from Le Havre [Annotator's Note: Le Havre, France]. They stole wood and made a fire in the boxcar. It burned a hole in the floor. The guys that Coleman knew had all been killed when he got back. He was still on the .30 caliber but was now not the gunner. It was the same battalion, but nobody he knew. He never did relate to them. He was just another replacement. After six weeks, he was put out permanently. Before that, they were lucky if they went a mile in a day. It was cold and snowing and a mess. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer talks about the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest, 19 September 1944 to 10 February 1945, Hürtgen, Staatsforst (state forest), Germany.] It was dark then. Somebody always came up who knew how to guide them at night. They would get their meals and ammo for the next day and take them back to the line. Trench foot [Annotator's Note: immersion foot syndrome] put him in the hospital, and he was discharged from Fort Butner [Annotator's Note: in Butner, North Carolina] in September 1945. The war did not change him that he knows of. He did not use the G.I. Bill. He worked in Federal Service for 35 years. He carried disability [Annotator's Note: he was labeled as being partially disabled by the United States government for injuries he had sustained during the war] so he had pretty easy jobs. World War 2 was just a job that had to be done. The war changed the world for a while. Then there was Korea [Annotator's Note: Korean War, 1950 to 1953] and then Vietnam [Annotator's Note: Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, 1 November 1955 to 30 April 1975]. It did not last long. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Coleman what he thinks the significance is of having The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.] He thinks it is good thing and is needed. It is the only way people remember a lot of it. He hopes the interview is edited.