Robert Boyer was born in June 1925 in Hanover, Pennsylvania, the older of the two children in his family. He grew up during the Great Depression. His father was out of work for two full years. If it hadn't been for his grandparents, Boyer said they probably would have starved. Many families were in the same boat, and Boyer said kids fared better than adults because they were not worrying "where the next dollar came from." Classified as a "slow learner," he flunked third grade, because he was a perfectionist, and had difficulty completing his tests on time. He went on to prove his mental acuity by graduating college with honors. Boyer was listening to a football game on his grandfather's Atwater Kent radio when he heard the news of the attack on Pearl Habor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. His father's reaction was to say we'd go out in the Pacific, "and mop up the little yellow devils," but Boyer doesn't remember responding in any overt way. At 16, he worked in a drug store and began to worry that if he got drafted into the infantry he would become cannon fodder. When he reached 17, he attempted to enlist in the Navy, but learned he was colorblind, and ineligible. Within two weeks of his eighteenth birthday, he received "greetings from Uncle Sam." Boyer said the Army needed infantry replacements desperately, and he was immediately inducted. After a three-week furlough, his grandfather took him to the bus station in Hanover and he had an unemotional farewell as he began his journey to Fort Meade, Maryland.

Basic training for Robert Boyer was regimented, leaving little to chance. For 17 weeks he worked with the 57mm anti-tank gun, but he never got to be an anti-tank gunner. He also trained with a BAR [Annotator's Note: Browning Automatic Rifle] and said he had no preference between the two weapons, because in either case the soldier would have to be "out front." Boyer was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division [Annotator's Note: Company E, 2nd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division] and went to Anzio [Annotator's Note: Anzio, Italy]. He corresponded via V-mail [Annotator's Note: Victory Mail; postal system put into place during the war to drastically reduce the space needed to transport mail] with a friend who was sent to Cassino; and coincidentally on the same day that Boyer was blown off the back of a truck, his friend was killed in combat. [Annotator's Note: Boyer gets choked up and says he can't talk about it.] On the night he was injured, the truck he was riding in was struck by artillery fire. Eight others were killed but Boyer was lucky and landed on his steel helmet and escaped with a concussion. It was "dreadful," he said, and at first, he couldn't stand. Once he could stand, he had to have help to walk. He was taken to a hospital in Besancon, in the south of France and ultimately to Dijon, France. He was having nightmares, and had conversations with a psychiatrist. When he was considered recovered, he was reclassified for limited duty and sent to a replacement depot at Eton, near Paris, France, where he became friends with a soldier who had gone "around the bend." He was ultimately sent to work on the development site for a rest center in Nancy, France.

While he was in Nancy, France, Robert Boyer was the target of a shooting. He had been on guard duty, and afterward went to a little bistro up the street. On his way back, someone raised a window on the building across the way and took a shot at him. As a former infantryman, he hit the ground. Boyer said the Germans left people behind for harassment purposes. Now, it seems to him like an imagined scenario. While he worked in the rest facility, he spent most of his time seating the residents in the dining room. He had little or no contact with the resting soldiers, commenting that combat soldiers "don't have much to talk to each other about." When the Army moved, the facility was transferred along to Hessian, Luxembourg. In the rest of this clip, Boyer talks about training in southern France for combat. Prompted to talk more about his time there, Boyer said their main concentration was on training for the amphibious landings in Italy. He described two kinds of German personnel mines. First, the "Bouncing Betty" that would spring into the air and then explode. Second, a castrator mine that was like a nail on a charge, strong enough to penetrate into the abdomen of anybody who stepped on it. Boyer said that in their retreat, the Germans left a lot of material behind.

In describing what it was like to go into combat for the first time, Robert Boyer said he saw a comrade "go to pieces" psychologically. He found it alarming to pass a Special Forces soldier dead on the side of the road. As he started toward the front, he witnessed his first aerial burst [Annotator's Note: artillery round detonating in the air], and found it "disturbing," because he realized there was no way, even in a foxhole, to get away from the effects when one exploded. He remembered that he was carrying metal boxes of ammunition for the machine guns to the perimeter, and when they stopped for the night, he slept in a man made cave. The company [Annotator's Note: Company E, 2nd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division] was moving up the peninsula out of Anzio, stopping near Valmontone, Italy, a town the Americans had "pulverized." Boyer's company got to Rome the day before the Normandy landings [Annotator's Note: Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944], but Boyer said the soldiers were unaware of what was happening in the war except for their own maneuvers, and news of the invasion eventually reached them through hearsay. When he reached Rome, Boyer said he was living in a pup tent in a park halfway between the Coliseum and downtown Rome, and didn't "do anything there." The company pulled out after a little over a week. When his division left Rome, Boyer said they moved to a rural farm where they were training for about six weeks.

Backtracking to the time when he was outside of Valmontone, Italy, Robert Boyer recounted an incident when they [Annotator's Note: Boyer and his fellow soldiers of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division] took over slit trenches and an Allied tank destroyer pulled up behind them to shell the Germans. The Germans responded with something they called the Nebelwerfer [Annotator's Note: multi-barrelled rocket launcher; also known as the "screaming Mimi" because of the sound it made] that created a depression in the earth as big as a house. While taking cover on the edge of a crater, an explosion lifted Boyer off the ground and sent a piece of shrapnel glancing off his helmet. Boyer said it "scared the bejesus" out of him. Boyer noted that one of his buddies, a soldier of Italian descent, visited his grandparents in Naples while the division was in that area. Boyer regrets that he never knew what became of the people he served with in the war. Another memory that stands out is when he landed in southern France. While putting up a perimeter near a little town called Saint-Chamas, Boyer ran wires over a railroad track that had been unused for years. Not long after he put them down, a train came along and cut them. Boyer found out that the conductor was so thrilled about being liberated, that he took the train out for a joyride. Boyer spliced the wires and ran them under the rails.

When the war in Europe ended, Robert Boyer had already been in two theaters of operation, the Mediterranean and European, and didn't have to train for war in the Pacific. He was assigned to the storage and distribution section of the 53rd QM Base Depot [Annotator's Note: 53rd Quartermaster Base Depot] in suburban Nuremburg, Germany. Boyer described the Nazi-built Congress Hall that they used for storage that was so big that a narrow-gauge railway was set up within it to move goods in and out of inventory stored there. Boyer said he had enough points for discharge after two and a half years in the Army, and the process began with his assignment to an ordnance headquarters company. He had orders to drive from Nuremburg to Reims [Annotator's Note: Reims, France] with records that were going back to the United States. After that, he continued to Antwerp [Annotator's Note: Antwerp, Belgium] by train. Boyer elaborated on how cold the conditions were throughout this trip. It was a couple of weeks before he sailed to Boston Harbor [Annotator's Note: Boston, Massachusetts], arriving on Christmas Eve [Annotator's Note: 24 December 1945]. He had a "typical Army dinner" on Christmas afternoon, spent two days at Camp Myles Standish, and then departed for Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania by train. He said he had had enough regimentation and decided against continuing his career in the Army. He was discharged within two days of his arrival.

Robert Boyer used the G.I. Bill to buy a house and to get a bachelor's degree in psychology from Gettysburg College [Annotator's Note: in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania]. Later on, when he was involved with casework, he recognized that his career choice was unconsciously connected to "penitence." He was making up for shooting people. In reflection, he said his most memorable experience of the war was getting shot off the tailgate of a truck while convoying through Italy. He admitted that he enjoyed working with the QM Base Depot [Annotator's Note: 53rd Quartermaster Base Depot] at the end of the war, during which time he got promoted to T5 [Annotator's Note: Technician 5th Grade, the equivelent pay grade as a corporal]. Boyer said the war taught him discipline, a valuable lesson he wouldn't have learned any other way, and he thinks all kids should go through some kind of service "to teach them a little bit about life." As a history buff, Boyer feels it important for institutions like The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: in New Orleans, Louisiana] to reveal the history of the war.