Get Outdoors! — Today’s Christian Living May 2025
May 4, 2025
May 9, 1945 — Phil meets General Eisenhower and is flown back to the U.S.
May 9, 2025On May 5, the 30th Regiment took Salzburg, Austria. On May 8, the Nazi surrender was ratified in Berlin and proclaimed as “Victory in Europe Day” or V-E Day.[1]
Phil was glad that the war was finally over for the courageous men he’d served with, but his joy was tempered by the stupendous losses within his regiment, which sustained 8,308 total casualties: 1,876 killed in action, 5,788 wounded in action, and 644 missing in action.
Few entire divisions in the Pacific or European Theaters of Operation, much less a single regiment, suffered as high a casualty rate as the 30th Infantry Regiment did.
They were the only U.S. Army regiment to participate in five separate divisional amphibious landings,[2] not including another two battalion-level D-Days on Sicily, which made seven in all for Phil’s 3rd Battalion.
The 30th Infantry became one of the most highly decorated regiments in the U.S. Army. Colonel McGarr wrote this to his surviving men:
We, whom God has spared, offer this, our record of achievement, half humbly, half proudly. Humbly, because we know the terrible price in life and limb our regiment paid for victory. Proudly, because we, as an Infantry Regiment in thirty-one months of almost continuous combat, never failed to take an assigned objective.
After 912 days of combat, the fighting men of the 30th continued to make their proud boast: “On countless battlefields, we have never yet failed to take our assigned objective! We never will!”[3]
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[1] Larimore, At First Light, 269.
[2] Fedala, French Morocco; Sicily; Salerno, Italy; Anzio, Italy; and southern France.
[3] Larimore, At First Light, 269-270.
Learn more about my book about my father’s heroics and exploits at Amazon’s First Light page here. You can also read more of my WWII blogs here as well!
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