Memorial Day 2020
On July 18th, 1944 Frank Cleary, my Dad, landed at Utah beach 30 days after D Day. He was an artillery forward observer in General Patton’s 3rd army. He had never been instructed what a forward observer did and was scared. Before he went out on his first assignment, Dad was standing up looking out from inside his tank, General Patten walked up, looked right at him and said, “Your job is to take Brest” and then walked down the line inspecting the rest of the battalion. On August 24, 1944 he was transferred to the 212th Artillery Battalion. He was asked to volunteer for the position of an air forward scout. The 212th had taken many causalities and the man he was replacing had died in the line of duty. Frank was a very devout Catholic and knew he had already made it through hard fighting without a scratch. He said to me once “I was saving someone else’s life because I knew I’d be OK.” He was part of an eight-man crew. Two pilots, two observers, a sergeant and three enlisted men. The enlisted men were mechanics and cooks. The sergeant’s job was to find a new place for the planes land every day. They were ahead of the main army and on their own. They would go up in the air in the morning and call in artillery strikes on the enemy positions. On December 11, 1944, five days before the Battle of the Bulge, the division was being shelled heavily so they quickly jumped in their planes and went up looking for targets. He and his pilot, Lou Blumberg knew the general direction where the enemy shells were coming from. Every time they would get within visual range the shelling would stop. They decided to keep flying lower and lower over the enemy until someone fired on them, as he put it “We were hoping some enlisted man would get nervous and take a shot at us”. The plane they were in was a light, cloth covered airplane and one rifle bullet could take them down. Finally, a German solder did fire on them, they pulled up and called in the artillery strike. For he and his pilot’s bravery they were awarded the Silver Star for valor. The Silver Star Medal is the United States Armed Forces third-highest personal decoration for valor in combat. The Silver Star Medal is awarded to members of the United States Armed Forces for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.
