FLOYD R. MCDONALD
Age: 91
Born: Dec. 13, 1918
Hometown: Dixie, Wash.
Residence: Cathedral City
Military branch: U.S. Army; 1st Armored Division
Years served: 1941-1945
Rank: T/5 corporal
Family: Wife Hannah Christina (deceased); one child, Maria Grago of Cathedral City; two grandchildren; two 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. Navy veteran Don Sateren of Indio.
LEARN MORE: Read about other Coachella Valley residents who served in World War II at mydesert.com/wwii.
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When U.S. Army veteran Floyd McDonald volunteered for military service in 1941, he anticipated he'd be in for a short period of time.
“It was in the days you went in for a year,” he said.
McDonald joined months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but once the U.S. formally entered the war, his enlistment was extended indefinitely.
McDonald had already been training with the 1st Armored Division in Fort Knox, Ky., where, as a member of the tank corps, he drove a three-quarter-ton truck, “A weapons carrier,” he said.
The men moved on from Ft. Knox to Camp Polk to participate in the Louisiana Maneuvers in September 1941.
“We learned to set up tents,” he said, describing one of the many aspects of their combat training. “We even had mosquito nets. But it wasn't the mosquitos that got us, it was the chiggers that came up from the ground and crawled into your skin. They were terrible. There was no way to fight them.”
McDonald had hundreds of bites all over his body, which made for a miserable training experience.
“We went on our trip — came up through Carolina then back to Fort Knox. It was Dec. 7 when we were on the last lap to Fort Knox.”
When the division returned, they began preparing for overseas deployment.
In April 1942, “We went by trucks up to Fort Dix, N.J. and boarded the Queen Mary,” he said.
“It took 5
The division arrived in Northern Ireland on May 16, 1942, and trained there until moving to England on Oct. 29, 1942.
“I was in the MPs (Military Police) of the 1st Armored Division,” McDonald said.
In England, the men ate poorly, as supplies and food deliveries had been severely cut off by the Germans in the early years of the war.
“We had mostly mutton stew and brown bread. No fruit. They saved all the oranges for the children of Britain.”
“We shipped out of Liverpool to Oran, (Algeria) on the coast of North Africa,” he said. “It was on a Canadian boat. It was the first time we got white buns. Big white buns all the way across.”
In the week it took to get from England to Africa in a convoy, the men kept a constant lookout for German U-boats — but they never saw any — fortunately, he said.
In French Morocco, the peddlers were out in force, hawking their wares to American troops.
“They'd come in with a whole armload of new watches — jeweled watches. They knew we didn't have much money,” so the items were priced accordingly. “I sent one to my mother — a jeweled watch.
“We set up our camp one time near the Sahara Desert,” McDonald said. “The wind would blow the sand. The sand would drift like snow up on our tents. We had no water facilities. We looked for a clean area of sand to bathe. A white sand bath really cleaned your skin.”
From there, “We moved back to Algiers and we were going to Tunisia (and) that's when the fighting started.”
There were several infantry units in the division, who were fighting in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.
“(German Field Marshal Erwin) Rommel's tank corps was coming up they captured 12 men out of our unit that were on a scouting trip and immediately sent them to Germany,” McDonald said.
The German forces in Tunisia surrendered in early May 1943.
The division was reorganized in French Morocco, and began arriving in Naples, Italy in late October 1943.
“We had collected many German prisoners in Tunisia,” he said. “We had a long way to take them. We were always afraid of getting shots from the Germans.
“We picked them up in a truck and took them to Algiers and Morocco. They were all happy because they were going to the U.S.,” to POW camps.
In January 1944, the division was part of an Allied amphibious landing in the area of Anzio, Italy.
On Anzio beachhead, an Allied Piper Cub observation plane took a direct hit from a German air-burst gun.
“I saw it go down,” he said. “It was the closest we came to being hit — when we were going into Anzio on the boat.”
Off the boat and on the beach, the men came under fire from heavy guns.
“The shells — they were big shells,” McDonald said. “When we landed, they had aircraft dropping bombs. They came over one time before we got to Anzio — low-flying in front of us. In the road, on a crossroad, one of our jeeps was there and they bombed it. Pieces flew everywhere. Our priest grabbed a white mattress cover and went around picking up pieces of bodies. That was the ghastliest thing.”
He said the men tried to recover what they could of the remains of their fellow soldiers.
“They would pick up an arm, a leg, a bone, whatever they could get,” he said.
