Close Calls
Kenneth E. Griffiths faced his share of close calls in World War II.
The 93-year-old East Butler resident served as a U.S. Army medic in France and Germany — chasing tanks in his Jeep, nearly being killed by artillery shells and narrowly avoiding capture by German soldiers.
He got through it all with no more than a mark on his index finger. It began when he was drafted just after high school.
“I'll tell you, when you're 18, 21 years old, that's pretty young to be out from home,” he said.
Born in 1925, Griffiths was 18 when he joined the service, taking a bus to Baltimore, and then heading to Texas for training in 1943.
“One guy along said, 'Oh, I think were going to be in the medics.' He worked for an undertaker, so he figured he'd be in the medics,” Griffiths said. “He was right.”
Griffiths and his fellow recruits began working in hospitals and Army medical centers, learning everything they could about how to treat injuries and illnesses on the battlefield.
He said one day an officer put him in a foxhole and drove a tank over his head.Griffiths soon shipped to Europe, where he'd spend much of the war assigned to a tank battalion. It was his job to follow the tanks in his Jeep, treating and transporting any wounded.“It was a hard thing traveling behind those tanks,” he said.On his first day of battle, Griffiths saw his sergeant killed a few yards away and others would follow.While he was never seriously injured, Griffiths said he faced several close calls.He recalled one day the group he was with captured a German soldier. The man was injured and groaning, and it fell to Griffiths to take him back to their outfit for treatment.So, he and a friend put the German on their Jeep and headed back to their outfit. Somewhere along the way, however, Griffiths took a wrong turn and ended up in enemy territory.“I look on this haystack. My, there were a lot of German soldiers on it,” Griffiths said. “I said to my buddy here, 'Oh my, we better stop.'”The Germans came down to meet them, and found an officer who spoke English.“He came down and said, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I have one of your soldiers here, taking him back to our place,'” Griffiths said. “Well, he wanted me to keep on going and take him to their place. I said 'No, I can't do that.'”Eventually, Griffiths decided it was time to leave, and the Germans let them go along with the soldier with them.“That was quite the experience,” Griffiths said. “I felt the Lord delivered me. They could've taken me ... said, 'You gotta go with us.'”Griffiths said this occurred near the end of the war. By then, he was a corporal.Another time, Griffiths recalled going into a house when an artillery barrage began. He took shelter in the basement with the residents, and when he came out found the driver's seat of his vehicle torn by shrapnel from the bombs.“If I'd have been in there, I'd have been hit,” he said.Griffiths served across France and Germany in battles, including the Battle of the Bulge.At times, he said they would be given time off to rest and travel the cities and countryside in France and Italy.After the war, Griffiths got a job at a refinery in Petrolia, where he worked for 44 years.He remembers he arrived back in Pittsburgh on April Fools' Day in 1945.“I was gone for about 28 months,” he said. “But when I came back, I had a job to go to.”There, he and his wife raised their daughter, Sandra.Griffiths retired a few decades ago and has since been volunteering with Gideon International, an organization that distributes free Bibles.He also spends time at the American Legion and solves no small amount of puzzles.
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