Melbourne Sanford Courtney was born near Cynthiana, Kentucky in 1925. He lived on a family farm, and his memory of growing up during the Great Depression [Annotator's Note: The Great Depression, a global economic depression that lasted from 1929 through 1945] was that his family had plenty of food, but no money. His home did not have electricity until Courtney was in his teens. He was in high school when the war broke out and turned 18 in February 1943. He volunteered for service and was allowed to graduate high school. He went into the military in November 1943, and trained at Camp Blanding, Florida [Annotator's Note: Camp Blanding, Clay County, Florida]. After using a seven day pass [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time] to go home, he continued to Camp Patrick Henry in Virginia [Annotator's Note: Camp Patrick Henry, Warwick, Virginia], and from there he boarded a Liberty ship [Annotator's Note: a class of quickly produced cargo ship] and went overseas. The convoy zig-zagged [Annotator's Note: a naval anti-submarine maneuver] across the Atlantic [Annotator's Note: Atlantic Ocean], the Mediterranean and the Tyrrhenian Seas. It took 29 days for Courtney to reach his destination. While the convoy was in the Mediterranean, it was attacked by the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force]. The Germans stopped a tanker but did not hit Courtney's ship. There were about 500 men on his vessel, some of them playing blackjack [Annotator's Note: a playing card game] when the attack occurred. Those men got religious, but next day, they went back to playing blackjack. At the same time as the aerial attack, there were submarines prowling under the convoy. Courtney remembers his ship dropping depth charges [Annotator's Note: also called a depth bomb; an anti-submarine explosive munition resembling a metal barrel or drum]. That is where the war started for him. The convoy ended up at Naples, Italy, and Courtney was sent to a replacement depot. There he met Ralph Brickner [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling] who became his best friend. Courtney was a rifleman but didn't have a weapon until he reached the replacement depot. The guns had been packed in paraffin. The soldiers had to clean them up and put them together.

At Anzio [Annotator's Note: Anzio, Italy], Melbourne Sanford Courtney was assigned to the 45th Infantry Division. He was taken there by jeep at night, and got acquainted with other members of his unit, including his platoon leader, Lieutenant Flowers [Annotator's Note: unable to further identify]. Courtney became part of Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment [Annotator's Note: Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division]. He knew nothing about Anzio before he arrived, and Company B was on the front lines. He arrived several days before the actual breakout in late May [Annotator's Note: May 1944]. The morale of the men who had been there for before him was good. They just wanted to get the war over and get back home. Courtney was part of the breakout, but he does not recall anything about the event. He doesn't remember anything before the battalion arrived on a hill outside of Rome [Annotator's Note: Rome, Italy]. Wherever they were, they always dug in. But the Germans didn't defend Rome and he was there for only two days, at most. He believes that he was in Rome on 4 June 1944, and they knew nothing about the Normandy invasion on the sixth [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944]. The sky was full of planes. Courtney's friend, Ralph Brickner [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling] was Catholic and was very impressed with Pope Pius XII [Annotator's Note: born Eugenio Maria Guiseppe Giovanni Pacelli, head of Catholic Church, 1939 to 1958]. So was Courtney, in spite of what he calls bad publicity about the situation with the Jewish people. The pope blessed a rosary [Annotator's Note: a string of beads used in The Holy Rosary, a form of devotion in the Catholic Church] which Courtney has on display in his home today. In Rome, Courtney walked by the Colosseum [Annotator's Note: The Colosseum, Rome, Italy], and other attractions, but wasn't there long enough to get any real impression. The city had not been damaged like some of the other towns in Italy that had been torn all to pieces. From Rome, he went to Salerno [Annotator's Note: Salerno, Italy], where he started training for the invasion of Southern France [Annotator's Note: Operation Dragoon, Provence, Southern France, 15 August 1944]. It was late June or early July, and Courtney had his first experience with seasickness while on maneuvers on a Higgins boat [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel or LCVP; also known as the Higgins boat]. Courtney remembers training to detonate a torpedo to blow through a huge wall [Annotator's Note: the Mediterranean Wall, known as the Südwall (South Wall) in German, coastal fortifications built by German along Southern France] that the Germans had built along the Riviera [Annotator's Note: French Riviera, France]. Fortunately, the Navy had breached the wall before they arrived.

For the invasion [Annotator's Note: Operation Dragoon, Provence, Southern France, 15 August 1944], Melbourne Sanford Courtney landed at a place called Sainte Maxime [Annotator's Note: Sainte Maxime, France]. He returned to that beach in 1989 and found some of the emplacements still there. The battalion [Annotator's Note: Courtney was a member of Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] got off the beach just as quickly as they could, after having arrived on an LCI [Annotator's Note: Landing Craft, Infantry]. There was concern about stepping into a shell hole and drowning. At the time, he could not swim, but Courtney thought he could handle all of that. Before they landed, there was a lot of Navy bombardment, and his postwar research showed there were over 500 ships involved in the invasion. Three divisions landed in Southern France on the same day. There was not a lot of German resistance, and as far as Courtney can remember, there were only about 15 guys killed. The German wall [Annotator's Note: the Mediterranean Wall, known as the Südwall (South Wall) in German, coastal fortifications built by German along southern France] they encountered was about 40 yards from the seacoast. Their main objective was to get a foothold on the beach, but they went inland quickly, without digging in the first night. There was some resistance in almost every little town, and the crossroads were usually protected. Eventually, they ran out of water. Courtney carried two canteens and used his water sparingly. They had K rations [Annotator's Note: individual daily combat food ration consisting of three boxed meals] but Courtney doesn't remember eating much. There was never a hot meal. There were snipers, and a lot of machine guns. Courtney particularly remembers the burp of the German semi-automatic weapons [Annotator's Note: German MP-40, or Maschinenpistole 40, 9mm submachine gun] sounding out during the night. Initially, the enemy would defend, then move back. The Germans' main line of resistance ended up in Vosges Mountains in the area of Alsace-Lorraine [Annotator's Note: a region in France]. Courtney's division eventually went to Grenoble [Annotator's Note: Grenoble, France] and dug in on the edge of town. He remembers the FFI, the Free French [Annotator's Note: French Forces of the Interior or Forces françaises de l'Intérieur; French resistance fighters in the later stages of World War 2], were pretty active, and one day they all loaded up in a charcoal burning car to go out and look for the Germans. They came back pretty quickly because they found them. [Annotator's Note: Courtney chuckles.] One of the most difficult things they did was crossing the rivers. He remembers the Doubs River [Annotator's Note: in eastern France] being one of three rivers he crossed, and that the Moselle [Annotator's Note: Moselle River, France] was the most difficult. His company crossed the Moselle River at night, in a rowboat [Annotator's Note: in the Chatel (Châtel) area of France, 21 to 22 September 1944]. Once across, they came under heavy bombardment from mortar shells, and machine gun fire. Courtney does not recall how they got out of it. He said his memory fails him about a lot of close up combat.

When Melbourne Sanford Courtney 's company [Annotator's Note: Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] landed in Southern France [Annotator's Note: during Operation Dragoon, at Sainte Maxime, France, 15 August 1944], they numbered 200. When they crossed the Moselle River [Annotator's Note: in the Chatel (Châtel) area of France, 21 to 22 September 1944] they numbered 38. Courtney was wounded on the 17 October [Annotator's Note 17 October 1944]. His platoon sergeant, and several more from his company are buried in the American Cemetery in Epinal, France. Courtney found the graves when he revisited the area. Poncho Martinez, who had been with the men since Anzio [Annotator's Note: Anzio, Italy], was killed. He was a pretty good softball player. Their platoon leader, Lieutenant Flowers, survived the war, and went on to teach at the University of Alabama [Annotator's Note: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama] postwar. Courtney had nothing but respect for him. In France, they continued from one small town to another, and eventually ended up in Granville [Annotator's Note: Granville, France]. As they approached the town, they found the Germans across the road from them. The Americans were lobbing hand grenades over at them and the Germans were doing the same. His unit had to pull out and went back in the next morning. They always attacked early in the mornings. He does not remember ever sleeping all night. American artillery was shelling day and night. As they approached, one of the Americans' small tanks was going through a land mine area and was stymied by an exploding mine. The guy in it had his legs blown off. The Germans had fallen back into the town. Courtney took part in heavy house-to-house fighting, all along one road, about a mile long. They had tanks at that particular time, and the tanks literally blew some of the houses away. Surprisingly, the Germans survived that, and they had to go into the ruined houses to get them out. It was one of the most difficult things he has ever done. He is sure there were wounded in his platoon. There was a German machine gun posted on a hill, and when moving from one building to another, machine gun fire dug up the ground around Courtney. He fell down but was unharmed. When they moved out, he left behind his pack, with his chewing gum in it. Several days later, he had to come back the same way, and found his pack, complete with his all important chewing gum. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Courtney if he shot any Germans while going house-to-house.] Courtney will not talk about that at all. He encountered two Germans manning a machine gun in a doorway. Courtney kicked over the machine gun, and with a buddy, took the two men prisoner. Courtney's buddy, a big guy, kicked them all the way down the street. He believes the Germans they encountered in the town were in their mid-twenties and were seasoned soldiers.

Outside of Granville, [Annotator's Note: Granville, France], Melbourne Sanford Courtney and his unit [Annotator's Note: Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] finally got the high ground up on a ridge of the Vosges Mountains [Annotator's Note: in eastern France]. He and his friend started digging in. In the afternoon, they heard a tank in the distance. The two men thought it was one of theirs, but when it pulled up, they could see it belonged to the enemy. Fire from the tank hit the tree where Courtney and his buddy were taking cover, stunning Courtney. He got the distinct impression the tank was aiming at him, and when he ran, the tank followed him down the hill. Bullets were flying all around him. When he got to the bottom of the hill, he ran into a tree limb and he fell to the ground. The tank turned and went in a different direction. A soldier from another company disabled it with a bazooka [Annotator's Note: portable anti-tank rocket launcher weapon], and as the Germans got out of the tank, the soldier killed all of them. Courtney did not know the name of that officer for years and years, but after he read the history of the 179th, he finally learned the guy's name was Reynald Hall [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling]. They met at a reunion, and the officer, who had become a doctor, clearly remembered the incident. It was only a few days afterward that Courtney was gravely wounded. On 17 October 1944, early in the morning after a night of heavy rain, his foxhole was muddy. Courtney had left his position temporarily and was on his way back when a German shell landed close by. It tore up the side of his chest, ribs and lung, barely missing the vital parts. When he came to, he couldn't focus his eyes, and every time he breathed, blood sprayed out. He partially recovered his senses, and his best friend, Ralph Brickner [Annotator's Note: phonetic spelling], carried him to an ambulance. He was taken to a field hospital, and lay on a stretcher until long after dark, waiting for a surgeon to remove the shrapnel. There was only one helper and the doctor, so Courtney got off his stretcher and mounted the operating table. For a long time, he kept the piece of shrapnel they removed from his body. Courtney was put on a cot in a tent among other wounded, and his wounds became infected. His temperature rose to 106 degrees, and he heard the doctor say, if they could get his temperature down, he might live. He was kept next to two wounded Germans, one of whom was happy to be a prisoner. Courtney was flown to Marseilles, France, hospitalized, and had several operations there. He remembers that during one procedure he came to while they were sewing him up, and they gave him a little more ether. He believes the penicillin shots he was given every four hours until he got back to the United States saved his life. He spent 19 days on a hospital ship and arrived in Long Island [Annotator's Note: Long Island, New York], where he was taken to a veterans' hospital. From there he was moved by train to Fitzsimons Hospital [Annotator's Note: Fitzsimons Army Hospital; now Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver Colorado] in Denver, Colorado, where he stayed until his release on 26 July 1945.

Melbourne Sanford Courtney had a lot of experience in combat in his one year of war. His unit [Annotator's Note: Company B, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division] fought all over the hills of the Vosges Mountains [Annotator's Note: in eastern France], which the Germans really defended. The area repeatedly changed hands between the Germans and the Americans. We [Annotator's Note: the Americans] didn't win all the battles, but we won the war. Often, the Americans weren't in a position to win, and had to pull back and get in better shape to counterattack. By then, the Germans were defending their homeland. Once he was released from the hospital on 26 July 1945 [Annotator's Note: after being wounded in battle], he went home. He was still recuperating but made himself use his shoulder and arm. The war gave him the opportunity to go to college using the G.I. Bill. The war changed him. He became an adult. Just before going to college, he married. Courtney said he would do it again and defend America until the bitter end.