We rode horses, mine was called "Eye’s Delight", a beautiful bay mare. She was a very aggressive jumper, and she taught me to sit far forward in the saddle because she jumped long. One time she fell short of a brush jump 4 feet tall—and I beat her to the next jump! On many occasions we won blue ribbons in jumping shows and played polo together. I was number 1 position (also called forward) and I played polo the way I played football, very aggressively. After my time at Fort Myer I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

There, I had a regular course of training followed by advanced equitation. There were 63 officers, in three riding sections of 21 men each. I was issued a cow pony and he was trained to be on his haunches, but I had to get the horse to keep his head forward and respond to leg commands. He was called "Big Train". This class lasted until January 1940. The previous summer I had been on a polo team in Colorado Springs playing against civilian teams. September 3^rd was the last game of our season, and it was on the same day as the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. This marks the beginning of World War Two.

In February at the end of my class I was assigned to the polo team as junior officer. It was my job to exercise the horses. The Army was still segregated, and the groom was from an all-black enlisted unit as the army was still segregated then. My groom would walk the team’s horses while I’d gallop them in short spurts to practice rapid changes in direction. When everything works out in polo, its lots of fun.

By 1942 the Army got rid of all horse units except for packhorses. After a predetermined amount of time in the service you were moved up a grade, so in 1943 I was made a 1^st Lieutenant. One time I got a muscle spasm from the twisting and turning in polo, and fainted. I went to the hospital and rested, and got back to riding. After two episodes,  the doctor said that I had to choose whether I wanted to ride or walk, so I had to quit riding altogether!

I went on to be placed in a battalion with 7 other officers. I took a one-month class with instruction on beginning a new unit. I went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina and took over the 592^nd Battalion. Their howitzers could shoot nine miles, and could fire over hills by firing at a high angle. I started this unit with new 18-year-old recruits and trained with them for one year. Then I went to maneuvers in Tennessee for one month, then onto a fort in Indianapolis. There, they took all the privates and sent them overseas as replacements for units already overseas, and gave us all new soldiers and officers. We demanded a lot of them and really shaped them up.  In 1943 officers were being promoted rapidly and I had made Lieutenant Colonel by the time I was 30.

In September of 1944 (after D-day, the Normandy Invasion) we were ordered to England and we sent our howitzers and trucks in advance. Then we went to a camp south of Boston and took our 3 Infantry and light Artillery units with us to England. In October we sailed for five or six days from Boston to Liverpool, England with three infantry and light artillery units.   We then went from Liverpool to Gloucester and from there to Southampton. Then we took and LST, which stands for Landing Ship Tank (which has doors that open in the front and back) across the English Channel to Le Havre, France on the Seine River. We went up the river Seine for four days. It was December by this time and the days were short. We went 60 miles and stopped at Luxembourg on the tenth. We were caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, which began on December 16.

There were three regiments holding the Sigfried line, and at one point we ran out of gas near the Luxembourg line where the Germans got a chance to reform. When they attacked on the 16^th, we couldn’t see well because of the fog so a forward observer saw Germans walking towards him on either side of a road. He tried to shoot at them but got shot himself and was captured. Then, fortunately, he was liberated by some Americans who had been sleeping as the Germans soldiers passed by them in the fog. Sometimes it was hard to see what you were looking for under these conditions.

What was a typical day like during the war? During early December before the Battle of the Bulge it would have been living in a little occupied German village with 25 people or so. We started the day with breakfast and visited with one another. Our unit had come over with a cargo of office supplies but not much ammunition. The ammo dumps were situated behind us. The Artillerymen had their own guns and stoves, even a telephone for each member. At 3:30 we would eat dinner and then they would give you rations. They were good at estimating how much food we needed—we drew our rations for each day one at a time. How much combat did I see? I saw very little combat, on the afternoon of the 16^th.

We had left England on November 30^th so I missed a payday. Then on the 10^th of December they settled up with us and had payday but the Germans nearly stole my payroll! One of my men was taking pay over to another group and when they found out that the Battle of the Bulge had broken out they backtracked and ran right into a German tank.   They ran to a house where everyone hid upstairs.  On guy threw a hand grenade at the tank.  The tank fired on them blowing a hole right through the first floor of the house. No-one was hurt but the payroll was never stolen.

We saw German "Buzzbombs" which were small, self-contained planes fired on England from France in the months before the Battle of the Bulge. The battle lasted from December 16 to January 30^th, and our forces reacted and pushed the Germans back to Germany. President Roosevelt died on the 17^th of April around the time of the battle of Remagen which was on the 21^st. My division was ordered back to Germany to be prisoner of war guards around Heidelburg where there were 10,000 Germans in an enclosure that had tents and a mess in it. We ended up have more than 100,000 German prisoners there.

We traveled 15-18 miles a day by horse, the most we ever traveled in one day was 50 miles, but usually our groups was very slow moving. There were 100 horses in a battery and they needed continual care. The Germans had a lot of horses, too, and they could go as much as 35 miles a day. You can do so much more with a truck, load-wise. We had a lot of horses and mule drawn infantry and artillery. The officers were all mounted, so in peacetime polo was just a good pastime for those of us in the military. It was easier to get a truck than a horse in the 1930s. In the early 20s they still had horse drawn fire wagons but by the late 20s you seldom saw a horse-drawn wagon of any type. The Army was slow to make the move to trucks due to the cost. By 1934-5 there were 100,000 enlisted men and 10,000 officers in the American Army, but during wartime there were 12 million men in the service, 10% of them officers!

By the end of the war in 1946, a US Constabulary had been established with Major General Harman, a group of brigade commanders with various regiments and squadrons of between 37-40,000 men. The went to take over for the divisions sent home to maintain occupied Germany.