Miles Meets wounded Ames Soldier on Italian Front
By Frank Miles
(Iowa Daily Press War Correspondent)
With the Fifth Army in Italy -- (IDPA) -- A postal team of three of which Sgt. Ronald Reynolds, of Council Bluffs, is a member, daily delivers mail to wounded and sick members of the 34th division in clearing stations, evacuation, general and convalescent hospitals in the division sector.
Twelve hospitals on the fifth army front are thus being served. The team jeeps 125 miles daily with an average load of 500 letters and 100 packages. It claims to be the only organization of the kind in the Mediterranean theater of operations.
Reynolds, a former British commando, was to return home on furlough soon.
Pvt. Bernard H. Bolte, Tripoli, had chopped wood to heat the shack he and his buddies occupied as headquarters for two days and would have spent several more at the job if a German shell had not landed on the uncut pile. The shell's explosion only made the wood of firewood size but added some from a side of the shack.
In another tent I met an Ames doughboy up and around, recovering from a shrapnel wound in his chest, feeding beer from a can to a Vermont comrade, who wore a white plaster cast over his head that made him look like Klu Kluxer. The New Englander was making coffee for fighting men on the front line. Some one put a lid on a can of water he had set on a stove to boil. As he tried to remove it an explosion scalded his face, hands and chest.
"This is a helluva note." said a Waterloo youth, who joined the Ames man and me, "my outfit is up there in action. I, after 29 months in service without a scratch from the enemy am load up here with a finger smashed by a falling rock.
A Mason City youth, who had been wounded, could not be interviewed.
Source: Ames Daily Tribune, December 14, 1944
