page_title: Robert Lee Gilbertson
section_title: Gil's stories of World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Lee Gilbertson / Early life / Gil's stories of World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Gil at Silver spur bar; picture by Meredith Blackwell
context_page_description: Robert Lee Gilbertson was a distinguished American mycologist and educator. He was a faculty member at University of Arizona for 26 years until his retirement from teaching in 1995; he was a Professor Emeritus at U of A until his death on October 26, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona. 2011. He held concurrent positions as Plant Pathologist, Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arizona for a project Research on wood-rotting fungi and other fungi associated with southwestern plants and was collaborator and consultant with Center for Forest Mycology Research, US Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin.
context_section_description: On December 13, 1984 Gil wrote about how he earned the Purple Heart.
  … 40 years ago today I was a 19 year old combat infantryman in C. F, 309th Inf.
  Regt., 78th Inf. Division, participating in an attack on the German Wehrmacht in the
  Hürtgen Forest in the Ardennes. Freezing cold -- snow covering everything -- in the
  pre-dawn darkness a flare fired from the German lines suddenly lit up the area and
  revealed my company moving down a road – mortar shells and 88 shells began to fall
  in our midst almost immediately. My friends started dropping all around me – several
  killed instantly, others fatally wounded. I felt a blow on my left leg like someone
  had hit me with a baseball bat. I hit the ground and crawled off the road into a low
  spot. I realized I had dropped the spare barrel for my machine gun and crawled back
  out on the road and retrieved it. The company commander (Captain Brey – later killed
  instantly) came up and told us to go with him and he would deploy us in the woods. 
  We went in and established our line and came under machine gun fire and mortar fire
  and more of our company were killed. The captain told us to dig in and I started to
  dig a foxhole in the frozen ground but by this time my leg really hurt and I
  couldn’t stand on it and my boot was full of blood. I crawled over to Captain Brey
  and told him I had been hit in the leg and he told me to go back to the battalion
  aid station, which was several hundred yards back near the area where I was wounded
  in the first place. I had to crawl on my stomach the whole way as the area was under
  heavy fire but I made it. The medic at the battalion cut off my boot and bandaged my
  leg and gave me some sulfa pills. Then they put me in a jeep with some other wounded
  guys – a couple of stretchers and the jeep tore off at high speed for the regimental
  aid station under artillery fire most of the way. We finally made it to the aid
  station set up in a house and there were a couple of surgeons there working on the
  most severely wounded. There were quite a few bodies there and numerous guys with
  severe head or chest wounds and obviously dying. I was put in an ambulance with
  several others and taken to a railhead where hospital trains were taking the wounded
  back into France. I don’t remember too much about that except a nurse came around
  every few hours and gave me a shot of penicillin (pretty new stuff then) and we
  finally arrived at Paris where we were taken to a large hospital. A chaplain came
  around one day with a copy of general orders awarding a bunch of us the Purple
  Heart. I still have my copy. After a week some of us were flown over to England in
  DC-3s. I remember all the air force crew had parachutes but none of us wounded had
  one. I asked one of the crew what we did if the Luftwaffe shot us down. He said
  “tough shit buddy.”  Fortunately, we made it and when I arrived at the hospital in
  England I was pretty sure that I had probably survived the war. When I look back and
  realize how close I came to death at the age of 19 it doesn’t seem possible that I
  
  actually went through that experience and am alive and well today.
  On Friday October 25, 1985, he again remembered the war when he wrote about a trip
  to Europe when he worked at Kew and went sightseeing in London. 
  “On the way to
  Trafalgar Square we [Gil and Pat] stopped at the site of the War Room in the Cabinet
  Building along St. James Park and toured the restored War Museum –very fascinating
  to me since I was there at that time and lived through a lot of the history myself.”
  He remarked that his bad feet, perhaps never recovered from the war, suffered from
  the long walks of sightseeing. On his 72nd birthday (15 January 1997), Gil
  reflected, “I’m glad to be here when I look back to when I was 19 in the Hürtgen
  
  Forest in December 1944 and didn’t know if I would even get to be 20.”
caption: Gilbertson at Silver spur bar
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