For a time in World War II, Robert Mott seemed to have the luck a soldier dreams of. Every time a major battle started, he happened to be somewhere else.
D-Day? His ship from the States was delayed until the night of the invasion.
Market Garden? His unit got transferred to a new division shortly before the drop into Holland.
The Battle of the Bulge? Well ....
“Luck runs out,” Mott said.
Mott spoke about his wartime experiences Thursday night in “Recollections of the ‘Good’ War,” the latest installment of the World War II Roundtable at Emporia State University’s Memorial Union. The roundtable series began in 2002 and has featured a variety of speakers on different aspects of the war.
At the time of the war, military service seemed to run in the Mott family. In addition to Mott himself, three of his sisters were in uniform during WWII: one in a codebreaking unit, one with the WACs in Britain and France and one as a technician 4th class in Utah. Naturally, a newspaper reporter wrote about the family — and inadvertently “enlisted” his mom in a headline.
“They had my 52-year-old mother going into the service,” Mott chuckled, drawing a few laughs from the audience in the Kanza Room.
Mott’s own service began when he joined the Kansas National Guard — specifically Emporia’s own Company B, 137th Infantry, 35th Division — on Flag Day, 1939. It meant a few extra bucks in exchange for some weekend training, not a bad trade for a young student at Kansas State Teacher College (now ESU). In addition he knew a few members of the company before going in and he liked what he saw.
“I realized there were many young men like myself there for whom I had great respect,” Mott said. “I thought if it was good for them, it might be good for me.”
The company was called into federal service in 1940, committing the men to a year of active-duty training. For most, it seemed to be a way of marking time until that day in December 1941 when they would all be released to normal life again.
Instead, Pearl Harbor happened first. Mott had traveled to Memphis with Tom Tholen and a few other friends in the company to relax a little, only to hear about the Japanese sneak attack from the first hotel clerk they met.
“We probably didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” Mott said. “But we hightailed it back to base.”
Then came training and more training. Mott qualified to become an officer and then to become a paratrooper. At one point in North Carolina, he was asked to help train 100 replacement paratroopers, mostly oddballs and problem cases that other company commanders didn’t want to deal with. After four weeks of training, the men seemed ready to go and Mott joined them on the train to Maryland, from where they would be shipped overseas.
The train, however, had an unexpected four-hour layover in Washington, D.C. And one of the men came to Mott with an unusual request.
“He said ‘Lieutenant, we know we’re going overseas,’” Mott recalled. “’And we know that this is the last time we’ll probably have the opportunity to have leave for a while. How about giving us four hours to spend however we want to spend it and then we’ll come back at the appointed hour?’”
The audience at ESU, which included a number of veterans, broke up laughing.
“I said OK,” Mott continued. The laughter grew louder.
At the time, a second lieutenant who was with Mott couldn’t believe it either. You’ve made a mistake, he told Mott. You’ll never see half of those men again.
“I thought, ‘Oh, boy, this is my worst decision ever,’” Mott said. Then he paused.
“They all came back,” he continued. A few thoughtful hums arose from the audience as the point hit home. The training had stuck.
Mott himself went on to New York. He should have shipped out in late May but a delay kept him home a bit longer. He was sitting at an exceptionally boring New York Giants -Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game when word came that the Allies had begun to invade Europe.
“Behind the three of us was a Navy officer who said ‘God, boys, don’t you wish we were over there with them?’” Mott said. “And I thought, ‘No. I’m glad to be here watching this rather dull baseball game.”
As it turned out, it was a false alarm. The game was June 4, but Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had postponed the D-Day invasions until June 6 due to weather. The same night that D-Day began, Mott was finally shipped to Britain.
Then came more waiting, along with examples of how the Army broke its own rules. By Army doctrine, paratroopers were supposed to make their landings, reconnect with the nearest Army unit and immediately get pulled out of the action. But after both D-Day and Market Garden, Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s ambitious plan to retake three bridges in the Netherlands that barely failed, paratroopers were left in the field for as long as 60 days.
Mott’s turn came in late December of 1944, when he was sent to France in time for the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last major offensive of the war. Gambling that he could split the Allies and capture Antwerp, Adolf Hitler had his troops attempt a push through the Ardennes forest. American lines bent but didn’t break.
The winter weather may have been a deadlier enemy than the Germans. Mott read accounts of frostbite, exposure and illness caused by fighting in Europe’s coldest winter since 1919.
A friend of Tholen’s in the audience said he remembered hearing how troops would dig a foxhole and cover it over with a door to stay warm. True, Mott said, but that was beyond his own capabilities.
“I tried to dig in,” he said. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t budge that earth. I said ‘To heck with it, I’m not even going to try,’ so I just slept on the ground.”
Mott remained in the combat zone for a month. At one point, his feet began to swell up and turn black. But he didn’t think to have it looked at — at least, not until Jan. 23 or 24 when a British unit traveling with his abruptly stopped at 4 p.m. to have a tea break.
“A thought went through my mind,” Mott said. “I thought ‘OK, if the British can stop for tea at 4 in the afternoon, I can go to an aid station to have someone look at my feet.’”
To his mortification, the aid station ordered him evacuated at once, first to Britain and then back to the States. By late 1945, he had been released from service. Mott had been five points short of the 76 he needed, until an Army doctor cited him for a Purple Heart after seeing the frostbite damage to Mott’s feet. To this day, Mott still doesn’t feel he deserves the award.
“Do you have any regrets for not toughing it out with your feet?” an audience member asked.
“Yes, I do,” Mott said. “Absolutely. You bet. I always had a feeling of guilt for walking away that day.”
Today, he said, many Americans seem to be walking away from the idea of military service itself. He recommended a book, “AWOL” by Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, on how military service is no longer considered an automatic part of citizenship and how that hurts the country.
“I’m not trying to make a political statement.” Mott said. “I’m just saying there’s a concern.”