Raymond R. Guyovich
Age: 85
Born: June 27, 1924
Hometown: Chicago, Ill.
Residence: Rancho Mirage
Military branch: U.S. Army; 1st Army; 28th Infantry Division
Years served: Jan. 10, 1943-June 19, 1945
Rank: Staff sergeant
Family: Wife Donna; three children, Diane Guyovich of Palmdale, Debra Guyovich of Palmdale and Tom Guyovich of Las Vegas; 6 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren.
About this series
Staff writer Denise Goolsby will profile desert veterans from World War II through the end of 2010 — the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Contact her at (760) 778-4587 or via e-mail at denise.goolsby@thedesertsun.com
Coming tomorrow
U.S. Army Air Corps veteran Stormy Sult of Rancho Mirage
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at www.mydesert.com/WWII
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U.S. Army infantryman Raymond Guyovich suffered injuries to his face, arm and chest when a shell from a German tank exploded at the edge of the Hürtgen Forest, at the Belgium-Germany border, on Nov. 5, 1944.
“It was about 4:30 (p.m.). I looked at the sky and the dark clouds above. I was real dizzy from the loss of blood. I thought, ‘Well, this is it,'” he recalled.
Guyovich, a member of the 28th Infantry Division, first entered combat during the Battle of St. Lo in France.
By the time his division arrived, the area was torn apart after Allied troops bombed and blasted through the city during its initial attacks.
“We thought, ‘Man, this is going to be a piece of cake,'” he said. “But those damn Germans were hiding in the debris under the concrete.”
The soldiers rooted out and killed the enemy using flame throwers and hand grenades.
“We lost a lot, a lot, a lot of guys,” Guyovich said.
St. Lo was the first time Guyovich pulled the trigger and killed someone.
“For many of us, it was the first time,” he said. “It just made us sick to our stomach with fear.”
After breaking through at St. Lo, the division marched through Paris at the end of August, 1944, during the liberation of the French city.
“We went right on through — we didn't get a chance to stay,” he said. “The Germans took off. There was a lot of fighting through Luxembourg and Belgium. It was tough going.”
By that time, only two or three men remained from Guyovich's original 36-man platoon. The others had either been killed or injured.
In one incident, “mortar came in from 40 feet away and blew a guy's leg off,” he said. “He was screaming like hell. Two of us crawled over to him.”
They got a tourniquet on the soldier's leg — it had been blown off beneath the knee — carried him off the battlefield and laid him on the back of a tank that would carry him to an aid station.
The man started screaming again. He didn't want to leave without his leg.
Guyovich crawled back to retrieve the soldier's severed limb. He picked it up and placed it next to him on the tank.
As winter approached, the division settled in on the edge of the Hürtgen Forest — just months before the Germans broke through the Allied front lines, triggering the Battle of the Bulge.
“The Germans were doing a probing action along the whole west line, looking for the weakest link,” he said. “Apparently, we were the weakest point. They just ran all over us.
“We strung C-ration cans around the pine trees with telephone wire,” he said. “At night, it was so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We put the cans together and if they rattled,” we'd shoot in that direction.
“There were two men to a foxhole and this one night the cans rattled and 10 of us opened up (fired),” he said.
In the morning, they discovered they'd killed a big cow that ran into the cans about 30 feet away from their foxholes.
“We didn't have overcoats, we didn't have gloves, we didn't have scarves,” he said. “The Germans had better gloves, better clothes, better shoes. We lost 15 percent of our company to trench foot.
“Trench foot is caused when your feet are continually wet,” he said. “I always seemed to carry an extra pair of socks in my sack.”
At the edge of the Hürtgen Forest, the men had dug in on someone's farmland. About a half-mile away — across a ravine — a group of Germans made their way down the opposite slope and were trying to hide behind a crashed P-47 fighter plane that sat at the bottom of the ravine.
“I brought three of my guys down the slope,” Guyovich said. “There was a (German) tank in the wooded area. It fired the first round and knocked all three of us down.”
Guyovich helped pulled one of the men back that had been knocked down.
The tank kept firing.
Guyovich got hit with shrapnel in the face, arm and chest.
“My arm was opened up all the way to the bone,” he said, pointing to the inside of his left arm under his armpit.
Guyovich still has a piece of shrapnel, about the size of a half dollar, lodged into the lower part of his left lung.
Flakes of shrapnel hit his face, sliding under his left eye across the top of his cheek bone — a small piece can still be felt near the corner of his eye.
His captain and three corpsman got to Guyovich, laid him on an overcoat and the men carried him off the battlefield.
He was treated at the battalion aid station, and later at the division aid station, where he was given morphine to ease the pain. He was sent back to England, treated and eventually shipped back to the states on the Queen Mary. Aboard the luxury ship were 4,000 wounded men and 8,000 8th Air Force men who were being rotated to the Pacific theater of war.
Guyovich spent nearly eight months in hospitals recovering from his battle injuries.
