Prisoner 93144: The recollections of a P.O.W.

The skies were just beginning to darken on that cool September day as the patrol advanced across a wheat field that was located on the Luxembourg and Germany border. The year was 1944, and one of the two reconnaissance platoons that were attached to the U.S. First Army Infantry Division was on patrol. Welcome to World War II. Twenty-one-year-old Corporal Damon Taylor was one of five members that made up that platoon. Taylor, a machine gunner and radio operator, had earlier entered Europe through Normandy in the Battle of Saint-Lo and participated in the liberation of Paris. A reconnaissance outfit’s job is to survey a region and to obtain military information about the enemy. They then report that information back to the command post. Taylor’s patrol was now approximately three miles from camp as they settled into the edge of a forest located on the other side of a field. He, along with two others, slept as two of the soldiers kept watch.

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