In 1944, now 91 year old Julian “Sarge” Sargentini was then part of the “Bulgebusters”. Here Sarge remembers the first time he experienced the horrors of war. Along with witnessing the death of many of his fellow friends he broke his pelvis after the explosion of a mine.
When was your first taste of it? When was the first moment where you realized, hey I could get killed out here?
That was in the Soy-Hotton area, it was Christmas we went into fighting right around Christmas right there we were in the lines during Christmas, I remember it was just out of Soy that I was in my first blow up. Somebody stepped on a mine or what happened we don’t know but the anyway there was about 8 engineers that were killed that night you know so and before that our unit had been in combat and we lost quite a few men. Ill never know just how many but we knew that we had lost a lot of them and we stood out in the snow with our dark uniforms we didn’t have camouflage like the Germans did, they had white uniforms and we didn’t, we stood out like stumps out there in the field in the white field, so we were good targets.
And this is what would become known as the Battle Of The Bulge. This is about a week into that and the 75th was called in as part of that so you mention that incident and I you know not to get gory or harp on it but just so people understand what you went through so this at night time, and pretty close to you a mine goes off and it kills 8 guys.
I was blown up in the same thing and I suffered a broken pelvis bone at the time and that was about the extent of my injury on that one right there.
So you must have been pretty close to this mine that went off.
We were I don’t know just how close it was but I remember the guys laying around and when the lieutenant right there he crawled over and he says are you hurt soldier? And I said no, he says, I don’t think I am you know because I was deaf but I could make him out and he said and I said no I’m not because I could move and he says ok help me, so we drag a few carcasses out of the way and took some over to the, by that time the medics had set up a temporary station and we took some boys over there so anyway that was my first taste of real getting into the action.
Well you say that’s your first taste I mean that’s a smack in the face. Now and you’re describing it I just want to be clear this mine explosion it knocked you from your feet into the snow?
Yes it, well it knocked me up against the wall. And I don’t know just how I hit the wall but the my back and I think it was a sharp box or something because there was a lot of crates laying around between the wall and the crates and I hit something and it hit my back end anyway that was my first taste of it.
READ: Listen to the sad memory of Joseph Robertson “Killing this Soldier was the saddest memory of my life“
