The 83rd U.S. Infantry Division had been mobilized for World War I in September 1917. Its unit patch was a downward-pointing black triangle with the letters O-H-I-O stitched as an abstract gold monogram in the center. As the letters suggest, it had its origins as a mostly Ohio unit, although after the outbreak of World War II, there were boys from all over the nation in its ranks.
Its Great War nickname was Old Hickory, but in World War II it became known as the Thunderbolt Division. The 83rd trained for nearly two years before it saw its first combat. Its three infantry regiments were numbered 329, 330, and 331.
Along with the rest of the 14,000-man division, Frank Fauver, a telephone lineman with G Company, 329th Regiment, 83rd Infantry Division, crossed the English Channel and landed in Normandy, France, on June 23, 1944—two weeks after D-Day. It was the beginning of the 83rd Infantry Division’s entry in World War II’s European Theater of Operations. In 2013 Fauver spoke to WWII Quarterly. During these conversations Fauver remembered pieces of the past: the landing at Normandy, the battles for Brittany, central France, Luxembourg, then Germany’s Hürtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and the race to the Elbe. Time had dulled his memory somewhat, but the pain of war remained.
“I was with frontline telephone communications,” Fauver recalled. “My job was to lay and maintain the wires that were right up front. At first I was scared to death, then after so many days up there at the front, we kind of came to the conclusion that we’re not going to get out of this alive and we’re going to give them Germans all we got. Then we didn’t worry about dying because we knew we were gonna.
