Bedford WWII veteran remembers comrades on Memorial Day

Jim Wooten marks Memorial Day in a special way.

“I have a flag of my unit, the symbol that was on our shoulder patch,” said Wooten, 93. “I put it on my flag pole on Memorial Day and leave it up through the Fourth of July. I really do think of the guys on Memorial Day.”

Wooten served in both the Pacific and European theaters in World War II. A company clerk who never fired a weapon at the enemy, Wooten still confronted death on a regular basis.

“One of the hardest jobs I had was to identify the bodies, and check the dog tags,” he said. “I had to write the KIA’s [killed in action] in my reports.”

A corporal, Wooten served as a clerk for Company F, Second Battalion, 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division.

Wooten said he and his Company F buddies were trained to fight in cold weather and lofty elevations and were sent first to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. They saw no action there, but when they were called to Europe, the war took its toll.

By the time Wooten left Europe in August 1945, he said, “We had lost about 50 percent of our company.”

Wooten was a 20-year-old University of Oklahoma student — who happened to have learned typing and shorthand in high school — when he was drafted on Dec. 22, 1942. His clerical skills put him into a job where his service over the next three years never called on him to engage the enemy.

His deployment to the Aleutian Islands came after Japanese forces had been forced to abandon the only United States soil they ever occupied. His days were spent exploring tunnels the enemy had dug and listening to Tokyo Rose’s radio show.

Then, shortly after Christmas 1944, the 10th Mountain Division was sent to Italy to help defeat the remnants of Germany’s occupying forces, according to the Army brochure North Apennines 1944-1945.

Wooten’s company arrived in Naples in January 1945. There would be four more months of intense combat before Germany surrendered.

“Going from nothing happening [in the Aleutians] to being on the front line was a shock,” Wooten said. “Our first day in combat, two people in my company got killed. We also took a lot of prisoners.”

As Wooten watched German soldiers being marched to prisoner-of-war camps, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. These were all young men.”

Within a couple of months, the only thing the Germans wanted was out of Italy, Wooten said.

“The Germans were retreating faster than we could keep up with them,” Wooten said.

Tank battle with Germans

Wooten usually worked with the command officers at least 100 yards behind the front line. But one day he found himself carrying his company clerk “office” in an olive-drab rucksack over one shoulder, and a .30-caliber M-1 carbine on the other. He was walking through dense woods near the foothills of the Alps with a squad of Mountaineers, following a Sherman tank.

“It was April 17, 1945,” Wooten said. “Our tank encountered a German tank, and they both started firing. A dozen or so of us jumped into a bomb crater. The Germans had dug a trench on one side of the hole. I and two other guys crawled into it.”

That trench likely saved Wooten’s life, he said. One shell from the German tank exploded near the center of the pit, killing half a dozen of his buddies and critically wounding several more.

“A bunch of the guys were calling for a medic, and I knew we had only one,” Wooten said.

The company clerk could think of only one thing to do. He started running to headquarters, about a quarter-mile away, to get help.

The men in the German tank crew weren’t the only enemies in the forest, and Wooten could hear them shooting at him as he ran.

“We were in the woods, but there were lots of clearings, too,” Wooten said. “I’d run some, and then crawl some.”

By the time Wooten led reinforcements and medics back to the ambush site, “our tank had taken out the other one.”

Awarded Bronze Star

To honor Wooten’s bravery, his commanding officer nominated him for the Bronze Star.

The Bronze Star Medal “is awarded to any person who, after Dec. 6, 1941, while serving in any capacity with the Armed Forces of the United States, distinguishes himself or herself by heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” according to the American War Library.

Wooten was discharged Nov. 6, 1945, and went back to OU the next January to finish his degree.

He became an oil company accountant and worked in many places across the globe. He was in Dubai when he retired from Arco in 1985. He settled in Bedford in 1986 with his Fort Worth native wife, Marci, who died in 2008.

Like many of the warriors of his generation, Wooten doesn’t consider himself a hero.

“I never shot anyone, and I’m glad,” he said. “On the other hand, war is war, and you do what you have to do.”

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 4:44 PM with the headline "Bedford WWII veteran remembers comrades on Memorial Day."