Onion Sammies

It’s always nice to have a little background on the men from Co B.  Here is a list of people that Venceslaus (Stan) W. Borucki loaned money to.  Chin is the second one on the list. 

Spoke with Co B 307th Abn Engr Bn (C) 82nd Abn Div Leslie V. Petersen May 6, 2005.  He was good friends with Foon.  They used to go across the street in Burbage England and get Beer and Onions and make Onion sandwiches.  Chin Foon was the man mentioned in the Enfin Libres! Book below.  The second man mentioned in the book is Horace Joseph who jumped behind Chin.

There were 5 Co B men buried at the Rauville Cemetery and there are medical records that rule out the other 4 men including of course Pvt Foon Chin.  The other three men were Pvts Paul D. Wheeler, Joseph H. Passmore and Karl T. Levermknight.  All three of those men jumped from a different plane and along with Chin who died of wounds in their stomachs and chest region.  That means that Horace was the man with the broken leg who bled to death.     

Just after the end of the War in Europe the Army put together the two Manifests showing what happened to each man on the two sticks.  Out of the 6 sticks dropped, 4 were dropped way too early and this showed what happened to a bad drop.

From the French Book Enfin Libres!

Hummingbird followed a few steps.  I joined the convoy and we were soon to penetrate in the cemetery where the gravedigger was digging the graves.  Already five bodies had been buried; the two new ones were descended carts and lying on the grass with touching precautions, as if one were afraid of doing to still suffer those beings whom death had forever liberated human suffering.

The drizzle redoubled, putting a still more funereal note at these funerals of soldiers, whose simplicity was reminiscent of those of Atala, without glass, without priest, without coffins, without other prayers that the thoughts of compassion and gratitude going from our hearts to these strangers, whose perishable bodies were going disappear forever under a foreign land, but who welcomed as the most generous of his martyrs and the best of his children.

The gravedigger having finished digging and exhausting the water that formed at the bottom of the tombs, a rectangular, yellowish lake.  Prepared to sink the bodies into the gaping holes in the walls glistening with moisture. The faces of the dead, a moment discovered, allowed me to notice that one of them belonged to an Asian, which was confirmed by the Chinese name engraved on the identity plate of the parachutist.

The other soldier did not wore no trace of bullet or stab, but a tourniquet he had made himself above the knee revealed the nature of the wound from which he had succumbed.  His parachute having presumably not working, or too late, he had fallen like a stone, hence its broken limb on landing. The, bone having punctured the flesh an abundant haemorrhage was resulted that the American had tried to stop by squeezing strongly, but to no avail, his thigh with his strip of bandage.

Legrand, Octave. Enfin Libres! (p. 162). P. Bellee. Edieur Coutances 1946