By Stephen Enzweiler
Special to NKyTribune
November is the month of the veteran. During these weeks, we remember the service of our veterans to the nation in its many periods of war and peace. Poppies will decorate lapels, prayers and services will be offered, and eyes inevitably will gaze upward at the statued memorials that speak to us of our military past. Veterans will be recognized in schools and colleges, in churches and in parades, at businesses, airports, on Public Television and even by local restaurants.
Pvt. Harold Matson in 1943. (Photo courtesy of Harold Matson
Despite all the books written about the “greatest generation” and their times, there are still stories to be discovered, largely unknown except to the estimated 3,200 WWII veterans still living in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area. On a recent visit to one such veteran – 91-year- old Harold “Mat” Matson, memories of his war against Hitler are as fresh as if they happened just yesterday. Seated in his comfortable easy chair, he gazes quietly out the spacious back window of his daughter’s Springfield Township home at the sunlit autumn leaves – and remembers.
“I never thought much about the military until I went in,” he recalled. “The only military I had a feeling for was at Pearl Harbor, and my feeling then was I went in with a motive of revenge.” It was August of 1943 and he was attending the University of Illinois, when he received his draft notice. He had turned 18 just nine months earlier. Within weeks, Matson found himself on a train heading south to basic training at Camp Swift, Texas. While there, he was assigned to Company B, 86th Chemical Mortar Battalion (CMB), and on April 25th he departed New York with the 86th on “The New Amsterdam”, a former Dutch luxury liner bound for Greenock, Scotland.
From there, another train carried the battalion south to Port Sunlight near Liverpool. “Port Sunlight welcomed us with open arms,” he remembered, smiling broadly. “The town was full of women! Women hung out of windows and were throwing flowers to us and wanting to embrace us. I said to the driver transporting us, ‘we’re coming into a paradise!” For the 19-year old Matson, it became even more of a paradise after all battalion personnel were billeted in private homes with British families as their hosts; aside from a roll call each morning, Matson and his battalion mates had most of each day to themselves.
Then came June 6, 1944.
“I heard about it from Sgt. Copper, who had a girlfriend in Port Sunlight. He was on the phone to her when she said, ‘just a minute, Churchill’s on the radio saying the invasion has begun.’ My reaction to it was, now we finally get to do something!” Matson soon found himself on the move once more as the 86th departed Port Sunlight and headed south toward the English Channel. They camped one night on the hill at Stonehenge, then headed on to Southampton, where convoys waited to take them to the Normandy coast.
Harold Matson today. (Photo by Stephen Enzweiler)
“After they established a beachhead [on the Normandy beaches], that was our time to come in,” he explained. “Then my experience with war began.” According to Matson, it was standard procedure to break up a battalion’s companies and transport each one across the channel on a different ship. On June 28, 1944, Matson and Company B sped across the cold, choppy waters of the English Channel toward the French coast on “The James A. Farrell,” an aluminum transport ship of the kind that “had a reputation for splitting in two if torpedoed.”
“We were in a convoy with about a hundred other ships,” Matson said. “I was sitting there with a fella I didn’t even know, just chatting . . . and I looked up and I said, hey, there’s a ship over there and it’s smoking.” Matson had barely finished his sentence, when he looked to his right and saw another ship on fire. Soon, a klaxon horn sounded that indicated a German U-boat was in the area. “We passed several other ships, when we had an explosion on our ship! It was a dynamic explosion, and fortunately I was still on deck. I went up in the air about four feet and came down on my backpack. I was unconscious and didn’t know it for some time, because when I came to, the stern of our ship was under water . . . we were sinking, and they were bringing troops caught down below, some conscious, some hurt, a few were dead. But they were all covered with diesel oil . . . the tanks had exploded down there. I immediately jumped up to see if I could help.”
Matson was surprised to discover that the ship’s crew had abandoned the ship, taken the lifeboats and were gone! But rescue came unexpectedly, when an empty LST transport returning from the Normandy beaches stopped and pulled survivors off the ship and out of the water. They were taken back to Southampton to rest and re-equip, and within weeks, Matson and Company B found themselves headed back across the English Channel to rejoin the rest of the 86th Chemical Mortar Battalion. Now he knew the dirty work was about to begin.
A Company B ‘mortar squad’ poses for the camera somewhere in France. (86th CMB Memorial Assn.)
The mission of the 86th Chemical Mortar Battalion was to provide fire support for the advancing U.S. Infantry. Matson was assigned as a gunner in a squad of four men operating the battalion’s main weapon – the 4.2 M2 mortar. “My job was to pull the safety pin and drop the mortar shell into the barrel,” he said, motioning with his hands just how it was done. The 4.2 mortar was a lethal weapon of high accuracy that fired high explosive, phosphorus, incendiary and smoke marker shells. Within months, they had pushed the Germans back across Belgium toward the Rhine. The Battle of the Bulge was about to begin.
“We’d been in the Hurtgen Forest for 30 days,” Matson remembered, “waiting for Patton to come up from Aachen with some tanks. We moved out of the forest and into the town of Hurtgen, which was controlled by the Germans. In Hurtgen, we set up our guns in the back yard of a home and waited for orders to fire, which came the first day after we got there. It was early afternoon and artillery fire was going overhead both ways . . . and this explosion happened right near me! It was strange, I didn’t hear it coming. I was pretty hard hit . . . the concussion drove me backwards into the gun pit.” Matson’s next memory was waking up to voices asking if everybody was alright. “So, I got out of the pit, took one step and my leg collapsed.”
Looking down, Matson saw his right leg below the knee completely out of the joint, pointing awkwardly backwards. “I had the good fortune to have a squad leader who had been an Eagle Scout and he said, ‘I can fix it! Now you two men hold him down and I’ll put that leg back where it belongs.’ And you know, he did it! He grabbed hold of the lower leg and he pulled it backwards til he could slip it into the [knee] joint.” In pain and with his right leg badly swollen, Matson spent that night in the basement of a house; but by morning it was clear his days fighting the Germans were over.
“They [the battalion] were going to move up and they couldn’t take me with them, so they took me back to an aid station. I was cussin’ like a sailor.” Matson eventually fully recovered use of his leg, and after a series of army hospitals, he was discharged from the army. He returned to Champaign, Illinois, married the pretty daughter of a car dealership owner, settled down and lived a quiet life.
“Veterans Day is one of the holidays on which I get emotional,” Harold Matson finally confided. He gazed again out the window at the autumn colors in the fading evening light. “Veterans Day means a lot to me,” he went on to say. “My thoughts go to those who didn’t come back. They were 19, 20 years old. They didn’t come back. They were friends of mine and they died over there, and those are the things I think about on Veterans Day.”
Stephen Enzweiler is a writer and journalist. He has been a columnist for the Kentucky Enquirer, the Oxford Citizen, and was a senior editor at Y’all Magazine. He is the author of Oxford in the Civil War: Battle for a Vanquished Land (2010) and is a retired Air Force veteran.
An 86th CMB mortar squad in action. (86th CMB Memorial Assn.)
Winter in Belgium in the weeks before the Battle of the Bulge. (86th CMB Memorial Assn.)
