U.S. ARMY Walter G. LaPointe It didn’t take long for Walter G. LaPointe to understand the risks of being a U.S. Army infantry scout as Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army began its push into Germany in 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. “Observer scouts worked in two-person teams, taking pictures and making sketches of where things were,” said LaPointe, soon to be 81 and now living in Surry. “But my partner was killed pretty much on the first day, so I operated by myself. “My job was to figure out who was where and to direct artillery fire by radio, which wasn’t very functional, or by field telephone. I was usually ahead of my infantry unit, the men and the tanks, by three or four miles. I carried K-rations or I would eat whatever I could steal off the countryside. I lived like a hobo and slept in a hole.” LaPointe and his scouting partner were hunkered down in side-by-side foxholes in Belgium, ducking German artillery fire. “We had a field telescope set up between us, and a shell landed right in his foxhole. It was the concussion that killed him; there was not a mark on him. It knocked me silly, but I was able to move around. “We were good, good friends who had worked together since the beginning of training. We were just children in war.” That he was. Having grown up in Orrington, LaPointe was only 17 when he enlisted in July of 1943, having recently graduated from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. “I joined an Army specialized training program that was supposed to be for future engineers in the Army,” he said. “I studied engineering for one semester at the University of Maine. Then the war got hot, and they sent me to Fort Benning in Georgia, where I went through infantry training.” By early summer 1944, his 87th Infantry Division of the 3rd Battalion of the 347th Regiment was sent to central England. “About three months after D-Day, we were sent across to the continent, where we went on line against the Germans at Metz,” a city in northeastern France near the German border. “When we crossed into Germany, we got clobbered. It was just like pictures of the Civil War: long lines of men being cut down by cannons. “The Germans were waiting for us with an armored infantry division they had brought in from the Russian front. With four battalions we had about 12,000 men, and we lost a couple of thousand men in one day. It wasn’t a fun day, I’ll tell you.” LaPointe soon found himself immersed in the Battle of the Bulge as Patton pushed farther east into Germany. Crossing into Germany from Belgium at Sauerfeld, his unit made its way to the Rhine River and eventually to Frankfurt, which had been bombed flat. “All that was left was city hall and a cathedral, which the planes had tried to avoid,” he said. “We moved southeast to the Czech border, where we stopped. There were three or four German divisions fleeing out of Russia and surrendering to us. “The guys who were regular army and who came from Bavaria were given a horse and sent home. It was early May and about as late as you could plant a crop and expect to get a harvest. The Germans were starving, and they had to get home and plant a crop to avoid famine.” After the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, LaPointe was shipped back to Fort Benning. After the Japanese surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, he was reassigned to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, where he oversaw barracks that housed new recruits. When he was discharged in April of 1946 he held the rank of private first class. Once back in Maine, he re-enrolled at the University of Maine, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in organic chemistry, another in modern languages. After graduating in 1950, he went back to Europe as a civilian, helping to train Czechs and Poles recruited to be border guards for the newly created Republic of Germany. A subsequent assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development would take him to Vietnam, where he served as an adviser to the Vietnamese police between 1958 and 1964. He later worked in the Congo and in Rwanda. LaPointe retired in 1973. Today, he volunteers at the Cole Museum in Bangor, where he discusses his World War II experiences with schoolchildren. He is also a member of two Ellsworth-based veterans groups, VFW Post 109 and American Legion Post 63. — Tom Walsh