Earl Thomas Burgin was the oldest of Robert Cheek's sons still alive at
the outbreak of World War II and he was serving his second hitch in the Army.
Most of his first enlistment had been spent in Panama as a machine gunner in
an infantry outfit.
Earl recalls those days fondly, and tells stories of those early army days of
walking the width of Panama with mules carrying the guns. Earl laughingly recalls
that the mules were treated better than he and the other privates were. On long
marches, he had to readjust the mules' packs during breaks and make sure they
had water. Whether he got a chance to get water was not important.
Earl enjoyed
his experiences in Panama, but left the army to return home to Forest City, North Carolina.
Earl was still a private after three years, because the peacetime army did not
have a rapid promotion system. He got a job in the mill, because there were very few other
choices.
Earl was home for eighteen months, before he decided to re-enlist in 1940.
This time he ended up in the artillery. He would go to artillery school at
Fort Bragg, North Carolina. With promotions coming a little quicker in 1941,
he was made Sergeant and sent to Muscogee, Oklahoma to help set up Camp Gruber
for the stepped-up training the U.S. Army was currently undergoing.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, in December of 1941 and President
Roosevelt declared war on Germany and Japan, things began moving at a rapid pace.
With no special training, or appointment, Sergeant Burgin was soon picking up fresh
inductees at the train station in Muscogee and acting as a de facto drill sergeant.
In March of 1942 Earl would
travel from Camp Gruber to New York City to pick up a soldier who had gone
AWOL This would be the first of many experiences that Earl would have that
seem to come straight from a Hollywood movie script. Two Southern boys travel
to New York to take Pvt. Nove Demarco into custody and return him to camp
before they ship overseas. On the journey back they allowed the prisoner
to go unhandcuffed and the three stopped in juke-joints in St. Louis and
Kansas City to have a beer or two, along the way.
Earl's unit, the 339th Field Artillery Battalion, 88th Infantry Division,
left Camp Gruber for North Africa in the early part of 1943. The trip across
the Atlantic took 21 days, as the ship's convoy zigged and zagged through the
water to avoid German U-boats lurking in the depths. The 339th was too late
to play a part in the North African campaign, but just in time to prepare for
the invasion of mainland Italy. Earl recalls the troop ship taking them across
the Mediterranean being shared with some French troops and a large number of
Moroccans, perhaps as many as 5,000.
This coincides with the U.S. Army's Battle Campaigns series report. The 88th
makes its first appearance in the Rome-Arno publication, "With the addition of
two new American infantry divisions to the II Corps, the 85th and 88th, the
arrival of the IV Corps headquarters, and the addition of the 4th Moroccan
Mountain and French 1st Motorized Divisions to the FEC, Fifth Army strength
was over 350,276 by late April,". By Earl's account they arrived in
Naples in January.
The picture Earl paints of Italy is not one of a sunny Roman holiday. He
remembers the bitter cold. The one incident that stands out particularly vividly for
Earl was digging into the frozen ground along one of the winter lines. Sgt.
Burgin was sent with his squad of four guns and 16 men to dig in for a semi-permanent
position. The ground was as hard as concrete, so Sgt. Burgin, known
for his ability to make deals, was able to procure some dynamite. His C.O.
had expected the dig to take several weeks. Earl's squad was done
in less than four days with the first two gun positions. They had two weeks
to sit back and try to stay out of the cold.
Like many people who have been through the horrors of war it is the good
times that Earl remembers. He now admits that much of it was tough, but he
does not mention, for instance, the night of 15 May 1944. "By the early morning
hours of 16 May, the II Corps and FEC had broken the Gustav Line at several
points at the cost of 3,000 casualties, 1,100 in the 85th Division alone,"
(Rome-Arno, 19). Earl was in Rome the day before it was officially liberated.
The 88th kept pushing northward, even though the invasion of Normandy now made
the Italian campaign a secondary theater. The fighting in Italy, however, was
not secondary. For the true color of the battle, one must look to the Battle
Campaign series again.
The intensity of the combat of September and October 1944 had a detrimental
effect on the morale, readiness, and capability of the Allied forces in Italy.
The already critical manpower shortages in Fifth and Eighth Armies were becoming
so severe that their commanders predicted that if they continued to lose men
at the same rate, both armies would have to cease operations for lack of
replacements. Between 10 September and 26 October, II Corps' four divisions
had suffered over 15,000 casualties, with the U.S. 88th Division alone losing
over 5,000 men (Apennines 24).
Earl does recall one harrowing incident, in which a German shell set the
camouflage netting on the number 2 gun on fire. He left his position with
the number 1 gun and helped as the crew of number 2 frantically tried to put
out the fire on the boxes of explosives. One of his men was hit by a piece
of shrapnel the size of a silver dollar. It entered the man's lower abdomen.
Earl found the piece had come out the man's back, but had then stopped and
was resting in the man's shirt. Earl tried to calm the man telling him he
was the lucky recipient of a million dollar wound (one that sends you home,
but does not kill you.) All the while, Earl thought the man was sure to die.
Fortunately, he did not die. Unfortunately, the man's wound was worth
something less than a million dollars. He was back with the unit in three
weeks.
The son of R. C. and Nannie Bell Burgin
Earl made it through the 88th's record 602 days of continuous combat
and was awarded the Bronze Star for
"Meritorous Service and Leadership."
The next, short phase of the war Earl would act as a military policeman with the rest of the 339th F.A. Bn. in Bologna. Just as in a scene from "Kelly's Heroes" or some other Hollywood version of the war, Earl found himself guarding a warehouse full of bicycles, hundreds of thousands of bicycles that the Germans had confiscated from Italian citizens. Earl and some of his buddies managed to make a nice sum of money in the sale of bicycles.
Rank, medals awarded and length of time in the theater put Earl on the list of those first to go home. Before boarding ship for home he stopped to get a haircut from a local barber. When he paid the barber in lira, the barber gave him change in dollars. When Earl asked the barber if he could trade any other lira for dollars, the barber readily obliged, eager to get rid of dollars and accumulate some of his own currency. The barber must have lived to regret this trade, as the lira lost all value and dollars became the only valued currency.
Earl's troop ship back to the U.S. was the first to travel unescorted since the war began. It made the trip in seven days, one-third the time it had taken the 88th to come over. This ship did not have to zigzag to avoid German U-boats.
Within two days of his arrival in Norfolk, Earl was discharged and on his way home
to Forest City. Finding his wife Lou and daughter Judy in a new house, Earl quickly settled
into civilian life. He worked for a short while at the mill where Lou had
been working, but before long he applied for G.I. Bill money and went to electrician's
school in Chicago. Working as electrician on nuclear power plants and other large
sites, Earl and Lou moved to several different towns in the Midwest and back
East before coming home to a comfortable retirement in Forest City.