U.S. ARMY

Roger Gatcomb

Roger Gatcomb laughs now as he recalls his first encounter with a World War II legend: U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton. Gatcomb wasn’t laughing then. “The first time I laid eyes on Patton was during training maneuvers somewhere in Louisiana,” says Gatcomb, 87. “As truck drivers, we’d been trained to plug the road with our trucks as soon as we encountered the enemy. So, when we heard these tanks coming, that’s what we did.

“That lead tank came up and there was Patton, his head sticking up in the turret. He shouted: ‘Move that goddamn truck off the road or I’ll come right over it!’ “We weren’t supposed to move it, but we did.” That chance encounter happened two years before Gatcomb would be assigned to Patton’s Third Army Headquarters as a driver and courier. Over the course of that assignment, the Hancock native would follow Patton onto the Normandy beaches of France and well into battle in Germany.

During much of the time Gatcomb spent near the front, he worked as a combat courier. Traveling by Jeep with a well-armed guard, he ferried aerial reconnaissance photos from  rear-position landing strips to the brass on the front for use in targeting enemy encampments. “Nine times out of 10, we didn’t get started until quite late in the afternoon,” he recalls. “Of course there were no headlights, and I never really knew where I was. “Patton’s Third Army was really moving fast. They would send us to a unit and, by the time we got there, they had moved and we had to find them. It was really interesting.”

Gatcomb was 23 when he was drafted in 1941. He was working then for the town of Hancock, maintaining roads. “I was the second one to be drafted out of Hancock,” he said. “It wasn’t a surprise. I was young and single. When I went in, we got $21 a month. But at the time I felt I should be doing it, pay or not. “It was four and a half years of my life that I wouldn’t give up for any other experience.”

Gatcomb’s first overseas post was in Iceland. For nearly two years, he drove trucks used to offload supplies from ships docked at the fjord at Akureyri and from planes arriving into Reykjavik. From there he was reassigned to a unit in England. “England was a fortress,” he said. “There seemed to be an airplane parked under every tree. And the English people were all comedians, but tougher than nails. I liked England awfully well.”

England proved to be the calm before the storm. Soon Gatcomb was crossing the English Channel to France, arriving at Normandy just weeks after the carnage of D-Day. He’ll never forget, he said, getting into a landing craft at Normandy. “That was my worst experience because I’ve always had a fear of heights,” he said. “We had to go over the side of the troop ship on a rope ladder or a cargo net.” Once safely ashore, Gatcomb found his truck on the beach and bedded down for his first night in France the same way he always had on maneuvers.

“When we parked for the night I always slept on the canvas cover over the body of my truck,” he said. “It made a nice canvas cot. Well that night there were (German) planes flying over, and the anti-aircraft fire started. When it did, I jumped down off the top of the truck and into a hedgerow.” In the dark he hadn’t realized his “hedgerow” was an open-pit latrine. “Boy, was I a mess,” he said. “And I didn’t smell too good, neither.”

After his work as a combat courier, Gatcomb ran a Third Army motor pool. As the war wound down, he was transferred from Germany to Bordeaux, France. From there he was sent home.

At age 27, on August 5, 1945, Gatcomb was discharged, eventually returning to Hancock where he met his bride, Sylvia Ober. When she died in 1997, the couple had been married just short of 50 years.

Gatcomb now keeps his dog tags, decorations and uniform insignia in a cigar box, the same one he carried with him through Europe. Now tattered and held together with a leather shoelace, it’s an album, of sorts, for the few black-and-white wartime photos he’s preserved. His favorite isn’t a photo of himself, or his motor pool buddies, posed before a P-38 fighter stripped of guns and retrofit with cameras for recon missions. It’s a portrait of a stern-faced general, autographed by Patton himself.

“I saw that Patton movie, drove to Bangor,” he said, thinking back 35 years. “It was pretty interesting and, you know, I’m pretty sure that was the last movie my wife and I ever went to see.”

— Jessica Collin