Vernon Brantley was born in Sturgis, Kentucky in September 1924. He moved to South Bend, Indiana with his family looking for work. His father worked for Bendix [Annotator's Note: Bendix Corporation]. During the Great Depression, you had to move where the work was. His father was able to work steadily from about 1941 on. Some people in the country knew we were heading to war and started gearing up for it. Brantley had one younger sister. Brantley was 17 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He heard it as he walked out of church. He finished high school but was too young to go in the service. He went to work as an apprentice in a shop that was part of the war industry. At 18, he went to work for Studebaker Aviation. He could have gotten deferments for the work there. Studebaker was working around the clock producing engines for 17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber]. He did not take deferments. His boss was upset he did not take the deferments as he needed experienced personnel. [Annotator's Note: Brantley tells the testing methods in great detail.] This was in 1943. Brantley felt he would be a great asset to go right into the service. He took a test and scored well. He was sent to the University of Alabama [Annotator’s Note: in Tuscaloosa, Alabama] for more testing then to City College of New York [Annotator's Note: in New York, New York], followed by Pratt Institute [Annotator's Note: Brooklyn, New York]. He was then sent to Camp Polk, Louisiana for maneuvers [Annotator's Note: now Fort Polk, Vernon Parish, Louisiana]. He went from a life of luxury to one of survival in a pup tent.

Vernon Brantley was at Camp Polk, Louisiana [Annotator's Note: now Fort Polk, Vernon Parish, Louisiana] for maneuvers with the Army. He went through basic infantry training there. They would dig foxholes and then have to fill them in. This was February [Annotator's Note: February 1944] and they were in wool clothing. They were there for about seven weeks and then went to Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky. He was born near there and got to spend the weekends with his grandparents. He decided to get married and live with his grandparents. Six weeks later, he was sent overseas. He was assigned to the 289th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division. He was a jeep driver, pioneer, and topographical draftsman. A pioneer was an engineer without a title. He would make tank barricades out of fallen trees, acted as infantry, acted as a scout, swept for mines, operating beyond the front lines but able to return to a somewhat safe place. As a draftsman, he would make maps of where they laid mines for the troops coming behind them. They would just blow a path through the German mines.

Vernon Brantley went to Europe on a British ship manned by sailors of all nationalities. They got two meals a day. The officers got tables with linen cloths and silverware, but they just got slop. It took 17 days to cross the Atlantic. They had several submarine scares. Their bunks were five deep, a metal frame with canvas. You just hoped the guy above you did not get seasick. They went into Liverpool [Annotator's Note: Liverpool, England] and the ship started listing. It later sank at the dock. They moved up to Wales [Annotator's Note: Wales, Great Britain]. They would go into Swansea [Annotator's Note: City and County of Swansea, Wales, Great Britain] and get fish and chips when they got leave [Annotator's Note: an authorized absence for a short period of time]. The local girls loved them, but the boys resented them. They were good, hard-working people, but they resented the colored troops. That town had been bombed with incendiary bombs, but it was mostly undisturbed. They were too far away from the buzz bombs [Annotator's Note: V-1 pulse jet flying bomb, German name: Vengeance Weapon 1; Allied names: buzz bomb, doodlebug] and V2s [Annotator's Note: German Vergeltungswaffe, or Retribution Weapon 2, ballistic missile]. They went into France in December [Annotator's Note: December 1944]. They went from Rouen [Annotator's Note: Rouen, France] to Aachen [Annotator's Note: Aachen, Germany] in a short period of time. They did not get much recognition because they were a phantom division that Eisenhower [Annotator's Note: General of the Army Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force; 34th President of the United States] created. When the breakout at the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] happened, they came back in small groups and not as a Division. He was assigned to the combat teams outside of Bastogne [Annotator's Note: Bastogne, Belgium].

Vernon Brantley was in Aachen, Germany when the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] broke out. Nothing was standing but the German women were cleaning up. On Christmas Eve, they started the counterattack and were assigned to take the town of Grandmenil [Annotator's Note: Grandmenil, Belgium]. They were driven back out of there as they had gone in inadequately prepared. American units were escaping and coming through. Seven tanks came out of Grandmenil lead by an American tank. It was German soldiers in the American tank. That tank was disabled, but the other German tanks ran over people and vehicles. That blunted their attack. They took the town the next day and stayed there for two weeks. The second night they put out 600 mines with help from the infantry. The next morning the boxes with the mines were perfect targets for the Germans. They did not know about wind chill factor. They would have frozen to death if they had known how cold it really was. Very few had winter equipment. Brantley was wounded on 5 January. He did not suffer frostbite, but it caused heavy casualties.

Vernon Brantley got a call that a German tank had been bypassed. He took a crew of four and some anti-tank mines and went around to the front. A guy jumped out of a foxhole and stopped them from continuing on. The Germans then lobbed a shell at them. The snow was heavy, and a nice white cloud enveloped him. Their jeep was blown off the road and Brantley was pinned under it. He broke some ribs, punctured a lung, and was paralyzed from his neck down. He was bleeding from his nose and ears. They carried him to an aid station. The tank overran the aid station he had been taken to that night. There is no record of this happening to him and no record of his having been in the hospital. This is a problem with the VA [Annotator's Note: Department of Veterans Affairs] as they say it did not happen. They thought he was going to die so he did not get much attention. He was missing in action for six weeks. He got moved around on a litter until he could walk and talk. His voice box was ruptured. The human body is stronger than you realize. Some guys in combat get a minor cut and drop dead; some guys get blown nearly in two and fight on and survive. He did not really get much medical attention. He was evacuated back to Leige, Belgium and put in a bombed out building. He had a lot to live for.

After six weeks in a hospital, Vernon Brantley was put in a replacement unit. He missed out on the Colmar expedition [Annotator's Note: Colmar Pocket, area in Alsace, France held by German 19th Army from November 1944 to February 1945]. He rejoined them [Annotator's Note: 289th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division] on the Maas River in Holland. He had been listed as missing in action. While he was gone, his replacement was killed by what appeared to be a friendly airplane, a Spitfire [Annotator's Note: British Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft] with British markings. They went into Germany and were mostly on the advance then. The Russians were putting a lot of pressure on the other side. They were capturing Germans rather easily, as they did not want to be overtaken by the Russians. The Germans were mostly good people. You take the weapons from the bad people and you find that they held a lot of control over the good people. Brantley was in the Westphalia mountains when the war ended. The people were more average. The countryside had not been destroyed. The people welcomed them but there was no great celebration. The big job was still ahead of them. They had heard all of the stories of how tenacious the Japanese could be. Most Germans were eager to surrender when they ran out of ammo.

[Annotator's Note: Vernon Brantley and the 289th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division were in Germany when the war ended but knew he would be going to Japan.] They knew the job had to be done and they would be the ones to do it. If they had to take it [Annotator's Note: Japan] island by island, they would have it rough. The Japanese would have fought until the last man. It was a relief that the war was over in Europe. Brantley was in Germany redeploying the different slave laborers to Russia. They did not want to go because the Russians saw them as traitors and collaborators. Brantley was just so tired, mentally and physically, he was happy and relieved when the war in the Pacific was over. If it had not been for the atomic bomb, [Annotator's Note: nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 6 and 9 August 1945] he would have died on one of the islands. It saved more Japanese lives than American lives because we would have won one way or another. It was a blessing to both nations.

Vernon Brantley had communicated with his wife 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] almost every night when he was in Europe. He decided to go to college. He had an uncle in Columbia, South Carolina. He got employment and went to night school. Jobs were six days a week and he had a second job. It proved to be too much and he did not get his degree. The G.I. Bill was a wonderful thing and it brought a change to the Southern states which were still being affected by the Civil War [Annotator's Note: American Civil War]. It was tough on some of them for the first few years. The G.I. Bill gave them a leg up and made the United States competitive with other nations. He is humbled [Annotator's Note: by the recent appreciation of his service]. For 20 or 30 years, most did not even say they were veterans, let alone tell their children about it. They saw the guys coming back from Vietnam and were treated so poorly. They fought a dirty war, but they were ordered to do that. They have been betrayed and he feels an obligation to them today.