WWII Sergeant Jake Meyer sat down with us to reminisce on a violent encounter with an anti-tank mine that left him paralyzed from the waist down and placed in a body cast before being shipped back home. The following is the story of Sergeant Meyer’s incredible survival.
P-38 fighter pilots saved the lives of Sergeant Elliott Jacob “Jake” Meyer and his crew on a hot August day in World War II.
As a part of the 759th Light Tank Battalion, Jake and his fellow soldiers were a part of General Patton’s drive toward Berlin in the summer of 1944. The battalion had landed on the shores of France on June 16, just 10 days after D-Day.
On their August 1 mission, Jake told his driver to move to the center of the road because they were in mine country. “I had no more than told him that when we hit a tank mine,” he said. The mine held nine pounds of TNT and decimated the left side of the tank.
Germans shot at the debilitated tank, making escape impossible for the stranded soldiers. Thankfully, P-38 fighters responded to the radio distress call and provided air support. This allowed the four-man crew to scramble out of the top hatch and run back to the base.
They were immediately issued a new tank and prepared to move out. After waiting for German attackers to be pushed back from the camp, Jake’s tank advanced again just two days later.
On August 4, they received orders to capture a German forward observer. As the tank rolled toward the house where the shooter was hiding in a grove of trees, it hit two tank mines. The tank caught on fire and caused ammunition inside the hull to detonate. The grenades strapped to Jake’s belt exploded and tore off part of his left thigh and his right heel.
One of the crew members grabbed a fire extinguisher and stopped the fire from setting off additional weapons. The men crawled or were dragged to safety and lay on the ground for several hours. Jake was paralyzed from the waist down. Later in the afternoon, two American infantrymen transporting a German prisoner of war arrived.
“They told him he had to carry me back to the camp, but he didn’t want to,” Jake said. “After one of the soldiers hit him in the rear end with his bayonet, he changed his mind. They hung me on his back and he carried me for probably half a mile.
“Then they put me on a litter and strapped two of us to the hood of the Jeep. There were two others strapped to the back. That was some ride,” he said.
Being paralyzed from the grenade blast saved Jake from the worst of the pain in transport. During that ride, his injured elbow was the most painful.
There were so many wounded soldiers at the tent hospital that Jake was only given pain medication for the next three days. When the doctors could finally examine and x-ray him, gangrene had set in on his elbow. His back was broken in three places and his right heel was gone.
Penicillin has just come out in 1944, and Jake claims it saved his life. “I took 127 shots of penicillin there, one every three hours from the time they started. The left cheek of my rearend looked like a pin cushion. Then they had to go to using my shoulder.”
After the infection was stabilized, Jake was transported across the English Channel on an aircraft to Swindon, England, where he was placed in a body cast—just plaster on bare skin. The cast extended from over his shoulder to his upper thighs, so when feeling began to return to his toes about two weeks after the injury, all he could do was lie there and tingle.
After two months of treatment, the sergeant was shipped back to the starts on a two-week cross-Atlantic ride. “There were six of us litter patients on that hospital ship. We hit some awful, awful water on the way, and the captain said he had to practice putting us down on a rubber raft. So they put the six of us on a rubber raft and lowered us into the water. I told there other boys, who didn’t have a full-body cast, that if a shark got a hold of me, it was going to think I was a pretty tough lunch.
“We were out there about an hour or two, then they winched us back up and put us back in our ship beds.” Jake estimated that the waves were at least 30 feet as they could hear the propeller of the ship go completely out of the water when the swells waned.
The general who greeted the ship at the base in Charleston, SC instructed the litter carriers to put the patients’ toes on the ground so they could feel American soil once again. Then he proceeded to pin purple hearts on the men who had so selflessly sacrificed their well-being for the sake of their country.
Finally, at the end of January 1945, Jake’s body was released from his cast. “They took the electric saw up either side of it, and when they cut it loose, I fell forward on the dang floor. Those boys didn’t think to support me, and I was just like a jelly bean.”
“They were scared to death, thought they’d ruined me, so they put the back half of the cast on the floor and rolled me over in it. Then they taped it back together.” Jake was just glad to see that his body was still there, although most of his hair stuck to the plaster of Paris they had used for the cast.
Jake then began physical therapy and returned to his farm in Missouri. He married and had three sons, one of whom was a career military man. Today, his grandson continues the family military tradition as a Navy fighter pilot. Jake still lives on the farm and rides his horse nearly every day.
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