Somerville’s Peter Fantasia, now living in Reading, Massachusetts at the Artis Senior Living, vividly described to me how he got captured near Rodalbe, France. While serving with Lima Company, of the 3rd Battalion, of the 104th Regiment, of the 26th Infantry Division, the “Yankee Division” as an Army Medic, he was tending to two wounded American soldiers, an NCO and an Officer, when a German Infantryman with the 11th Panzer Division cornered the three Americans in their fox hole.

Peter said to the wounded American sergeant “I’ll dive right, you shot him”, to that the German soldier replied, in an American Southern drawl, “I would not do that if I were you”. The three American soldiers had the misfortune of being captured by a German soldier who was raised in Arkansas.