John 'Jack' Moran WW2 Vet, Battle of the Bulge Survivor Shares His Story This Memorial Day 2024 🇺🇸

[appalachiablue]

- May 14, 2024, (2 min). Capital Concerts, PBS.
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- Westlake Village resident recalls Battle of the Bulge, 74 yrs ago, VCStar, Dec.19, 2018. Photos

Jack Moran holds a picture of himself at 19 somewhere in Germany. He fought in World War II and participated in the famous Battle of the Bulge. At 93 years old, he is still working as a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker in Westlake Village. 74 years after the Battle of the Bulge, retired U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jack Moran, now 93 and living in Westlake Village, knows how lucky he was to have survived the bloodiest battle for U.S. forces in World War II.

Of 42 soldiers in his platoon, only one other soldier along with Moran made it home. All these years later, his memories of that battle are still gruesome, as are some of the ones from the day he helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp two years later. The Wisconsin boy was just 17 when he enlisted in the Army in September of 1943...
https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2018/12/19/westlake-village-resident-recalls-battle-bulge-74-years-ago/2215407002/
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- John 'Jack' Moran, Service Record, Digital Collections, The National WW2 Museum. Ed.

- John Moran was born in Superior, Wisc. He had a great youth and enlisted in the Army at 17. He was then sent to the Univ. of Wisc. for engineering courses, followed by basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., then he was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division in S. Carolina. [Annotator's Note: Moran was assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 347th Infantry Regiment, 87th Infantry Division.]

Moran trained all summer of 1944 and then took the RMS Queen Elizabeth to Scotland. The unit trained more in Knutsford, England and then crossed a stormy English Channel to Le Havre, France before moving in inland. Moran's first action was in Nancy, France. He spent a week in the Saar Valley, Germany. It was very tough fighting against the German 11th Panzer Division's 88s [Annotator's Note: 88mm multi-purpose artillery], mortars, and machine guns.

Moran's unit suffered 96 killed and 113 wounded in first 6 days. The first morning, they crawled into foxholes of the people who had left. Dawn broke over farmland and they did not see anything dangerous. Once they started advancing, they lost 7 men in the first 15 seconds. Moran spent the next few days moving cautiously, digging in every time they stopped to be below ground level. The first 3 days they did not see any Germans but were getting cut down regardless because the Germans could see them.

He says that in warfare you have to move to make the enemy move. The 88s were hard to move so that is where they applied the most pressure. Obergailbach, France had a valley before Hill 360 which was their objective...
https://www.ww2online.org/view/john-jack-moran
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- Freezing Battle of the Bulge Combat and Crossing the Rhine River, John 'Jack' Moran, Ret. Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army. Recorded Nov. 5, 2022, (35 mins). American Veterans Center.
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Wiki, BATTLE OF THE BULGE, DEC 16, 1944 -JAN 25, 1945. The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II which took place from 16 Dec. 1944 to 25 Jan. 1945.
It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. The offensive was intended to stop Allied use of the Belgian port of Antwerp and to split the Allied lines, allowing the Germans to encircle and destroy each of the 4 Allied armies and force the western Allies to negotiate a peace treaty in the Axis powers' favor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge