From the Cavalry to Czechoslovakia

Dale Albee enlisted in the horse cavalry in 1938. Three years later, as a sergeant, he helped turn a trainload of 500 raw recruits, some of whom only saw a horse in the front of a milk wagon as they stumbled home from a bar, into skilled horsemen who could roll a Bull Durham cigarette at a gallop, or at least could come close. A year later the 11th Cavalry was sent to Fort Benning and mechanized as part of the 10th Armored Division. In 1943, the independent 712th Tank Battalion was broken out of the 10th Armored. The 712th landed in Normandy three weeks after D-Day and spent the next 311 days fighting alongside the 90th Infantry Division through Northern France, the Battle of the Bulge, the Siegfried Line, and into Czechoslovakia, along the way earning a reputation as the armored fist of the 90th. Albee, in a "light" 17-ton M5 Stuart tank, was with the battalion all the way, starting out as a platoon sergeant and earning a battlefield commission, along with two Purple Hearts. This blow-by-blow account of his combat across Europe was recorded by oral historian Aaron Elson, whose father, 2nd Lt. Maurice Elson, served in a different company of the 712th. Aaron attended a reunion of the battalion in 1987 and spent the next 20 years recording the stories of its veterans.