What longtime Mineola resident Eugene Raffetto remembers most vividly about his 185 days of continuous combat service in an artillery battalion of the U.S. Army 100th Infantry Division during the European campaign in World War II is the noise, and the terror.
During his combat service in Europe, served in B Battery of the 373rd Field Artillery Battalion, which boasted 12 155-millimeter howitzers. His primary duty was as a driver towing the big guns into position, but he frequently helped load the heavy shells into the howitzers.
“When we were in combat, sometimes we’d be firing 24 hours a day,” Raffetto recalled. “We all pitched in. Once we parked the tractor, we had nothing to do. So we pitched in.”
Being several miles behind the front lines didn’t mean the artillery units weren’t in danger.
“It was nerve-racking,” he said. “We were constantly strafed by German planes.”
These days, Raffetto, 91, does service for fellow senior citizens of two groups that meet in Mineola Village Hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
When he came home, he resumed the job he had at a supermarket in Brooklyn and met and married his wife, Lucille, later that same year. And he put the experience of combat behind him.
“I didn’t have anything to be afraid of any more,” Raffetto said.
He and his wife, Lucille, residents of Mineola for 63 years, have two sons and one daughter, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
After a career as a warehouse manager for two supermarket chains in the metropolitan area, he retired 20 years ago.
But he said he maintained his army connection, serving in the 77th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army Reserves for 27 years.
“It was a good life in the army,” he said.
But it was often far from easy.
The cross-Atlantic voyage the 100th division made on the way from New York to Marseilles in November 1944 was nerve-racking as the soldiers rode through a hurricane in the North Atlantic.
“Everybody was getting sick,” said Raffetto, who recalled the anxiety they shared about anticipating combat.
After riding through the hurricane, Raffetto remembers the division disembarked and marched 12 miles through pouring rain to its first bivouac point.
He said he remembers the terror of combat, including a 50-mile retreat in the face of German assault during one campaign.
“We were scared. We were running. We didn’t want to be captured,” Raffetto said.
And he said he remembers his deep sadness at the death of best friend, Murray Simon, during their first week of combat. He had attended his friend’s wedding two weeks before the division embarked for France. Simon, an artillery spotter, took a short cut driving back from his forward position, hoping for a letter from his wife, when his jeep struck a land mine and he was killed.
“We had to write his wife to explain what happened. How do you tell someone about something like that? We didn’t know what to say,” he said.
The 100th Division established a strong combat record as it progressed through the Vosges Mountains in northeast France. In March of 1945, it achieved its objective of seizing the difficult objective of Bitche, a town that was part of the heavily fortified Maginot line, earning the division the nickname, “Sons of Bitche.”
The division fought one of the last major battles of the European campaign in an assault across the Neckar River in April 1945 to seize the German city of Heilbronn. It was during that campaign the Raffetto said the Germans seized an American airfield, capturing a number of U.S. fighter planes.
“And several days later, we were being strafed by our own planes,” he said, recalling the confusion it caused.
He doesn’t have a very clear recollection of the end of the European campaign, V-E Day, on May 8 after the Nazis officially capitulated to the Allies.
“The only thing I remember about it is, we went into a German bar and grill and got drunk,” he said.
At the end of the fighting, Raffetto was more than ready to go home. But he had 54 points – one for each week of combat duty – one point short of what the army required. So he spent several months guarding German POWs during the occupation.
“We policed the town. We sat there until February,” he said.
