Coyle High School graduation, Taunton, MA, 1943 and PFC O'Donnell
William J. O'Donnell was born in Taunton, Massachusetts on March 18, 1925. He attended Coyle High School, where he covered school sports for the Taunton Gazette. After graduating in 1943 Bill enlisted in the U.S. Army as a trainee in the Army Specialized Training Program at Brooklyn College.3
The trainees were under military discipline, wore regulation uniforms, stood formations such as reveille, and marched to classes and meals. The standard work week was 59 hours of "supervised activity," including a minimum of 24 hours classroom and lab work, 24 hours required study, 5 hours military instruction, and 6 hours physical instruction. The Colonel who ran the program told a Congressional committee that ASTP studies were more rigorous than those at West Point or the Naval Academy.4
The War Department unexpectedly ended the program on April 1, 1944 for 110,000 trainees, who mostly went to infantry, airborne, and armored divisions. Bill was first assigned to the 75th Infantry Division at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky, and then the 28th Infantry Division on the Belgian-German border as a replacement. He joined Company G, 2nd Battalion, 110th Infantry Regiment and served in combat in the Battle of Huertgen Forest in November 1944.3
Bill's battalion (2nd of the 110th, 2/110) is at the bottom left. The black rectangles are German pillboxes.The Battle of Hürtgen Forest (German: Schlacht im Hürtgenwald) was a series of fierce battles fought from 19 September to 16 December 1944 between American and German forces east of the Belgian–German border. It was the longest battle on German ground during World War II, and is the longest single battle the U.S. Army has ever fought. The Americans' initial tactical objectives were to take Schmidt and clear Monschau. In a second phase the Allies wanted to advance to the Rur River as part of Operation Queen.
Huertgen Forest tree bursts and G.I.'s of Company E, 110th Infantry near Raffelsbrand during the Second Attack on Schmidt.
This Company was in Bill's Battalion.
Bill once mentioned that he identified with the character Jim Layton, played by Marshall Thompson in the movie Battleground. Layton and a friend Hooper are fresh replacements assigned to different companies in 1944 Europe. Layton goes over to see his friend, only to find that he was killed hours before and no one knows his name. Later during German artillery shelling Layton forces his sergeant to say his name. On the way to his regiment, Bill's group of replacements was split at "O" and sent in different directions. Bill said the other group was never heard from again.
According to the official U.S. Army history, "Front-line troops fought through a large part of the winter inadequately clothed. Third Army reported in November [1944] that 60 percent of its troops lacked sweaters, 50 percent lacked a fourth blanket, and 20 percent lacked overshoes in the proper size. . . The lack of adequate footwear became inseparably associated with the precipitate rise in the incidence of trench foot which occurred in the second week of November. Trench foot eventually caused more than 46,000 men to be hospitalized and accounted for 9.25 percent of all the casualties suffered on the Continent. . . the loss of personnel from trench foot and frostbite already approximated the strength of three divisions in the 12th Army Group." 1
"The 28th Division, for example, jumped off on 2 November [1944] in the cold and mud of the Huertgen Forest with only ten to fifteen men per infantry company [10-15%] equipped with overshoes." 2 After eight days of combat without winter boots or overshoes, both of Bill's feet were severely frostbitten. He was evacuated through Liege, Belgium to the 100th General Hospital in Paris.6
Veterans and A Sea of Mud in the Huertgen Forest "I was flown back to the States via the Azores and Bermuda with a cast on each foot. The trip took thirty hours, many of them spent on the ground, and I was held in the hospital at Mitchel Field, New York for around ten days. There they only tried to keep me comfortable and watch for infection. I was flow to White Sulphur Springs on December 15, 1944 and remained there until July 7, 1945." 6The Greenbrier, a luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, became an internment center in December 1941 for 800 diplomats and citizens from hostile countries. These guests were repatriated by 1942, and the resort was taken by the U.S. Government under the War Powers Act. The Army turned the 650-room hotel into the 2,000-bed Ashford General Hospital. Bill had three operations, and eventually lost all the toes on his right foot and two on his left. The healing was slow because bone fragments kept working their way out.6
"Frostbite is a terrible thing. My case wasn't nearly as bad as one of my roommates, who had to have both feet amputated at the ankles. In spite of all this, we kidded around so much the doctors and nurses called ours the 'happy room'. We were cheerful and relieved to have survived combat. It was pretty soft living."The hospital staff had to keep a close watch over Bill and his roommates, who had a history of going AWOL into town on their wheelchairs for lunch, padding the chairs with cushions from the Colonel's sofa, and catching trout from the golf course stream to fry in their room.6
Bill next attended Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University) and graduated in 1950 with a journalism degree. His early career took him to the Syracuse University public information office in New York, the Spartanburg Herald newspaper in South Carolina, the Boeing Corporation in Wichita, Kansas, and American Aviation Publications in the Washington, D.C. area.3
He joined NASA in the early 1960s and his career there spanned the beginnings of manned spacecraft through the early years of the Space Shuttle program. After Apollo 13’s successful return in 1970, he accompanied astronauts Lovell, Haise and Swigert on a European goodwill tour, and later toured the Soviet Union with the crew of Apollo-Soyuz in 1975.
Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Apollo 13 Mission. L to R: Bill O'Donnell (Deputy Public Affairs Officer, Mission Information Director), Dr. Thomas O. Paine (NASA Administrator), Brian Duff (Public Affairs Officer). Taken after the landing mission had been aborted and the Apollo 13 crew were attempting to bring their crippled spacecraft home, 15 April 1970. Skylab Re-entry Award, 20 November 1979.
In 1973 Bill was awarded the Exceptional Service Medal, NASA’s second highest honor, for outstanding contributions to the Apollo program of Moon landings. In 1979 he received a Skylab Re-entry Team Award for his management of the public affairs effort surrounding the safe re-entry of the space station. Although some argued for secrecy on Skylab, Bill pushed to release details of the decaying orbital paths, and NASA mapped out a potential debris field that spanned 7,400 kilometers across the Indian Ocean and Australia. He retired in 1984.
Battle of the Bulge Exhibit, Wisconsin Veterans Museum
Later while touring the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Bill stopped at a Battle of the Bulge diorama. "That jeep's from my Regiment," he said, pointing at the bumper markings. "28th Division, 110th Infantry Regiment. I was evacuated before then; otherwise I might not have survived. The losses were terrible." After Huertgen the 28th Division had been sent for rest and recuperation behind the lines in the Ardennes, to what became the farthest German advance in the Battle of the Bulge.
Taunton native and World War II veteran William J. (Bill) O'Donnell died in Arlington, Virginia of cardiac arrest on April 6, 2011. He was 86.
Bill was married for 58 years to Linnie Hynds O’Donnell, who predeceased him in 2009. Together they had five children, Michael (Julie) of Chicago, Ill., Kathy Walsh (Kevin) of Madison, Wis., Anne Ball (David) of Charleston, S.C., Janet Lacey (John) of Arlington, Va., and Lucy Vlahakis (Matt) of Culver City, Calif. He is also survived by 11 grandchildren, his sister Rosalie Connors of Taunton and his brother Robert L. O’Donnell of Spring Hill, Fla. Another sister, Janet, predeceased him in 1943.3
Arlington National Cemetery
1 U.S Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations: Logistical Support of the Armies, Volume II: September 1944-May 1945, Roland G. Ruppenthal, OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF MILITARY HISTORY, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1959
2 U.S Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations: The Siegfried Line Campaign, Charles B. MacDonald, OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF MILITARY HISTORY, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, WASHINGTON, D.C., 1963
3 William J. O'Donnell, The Taunton Gazette, 4/22/11
4 "Army Specialized Training Program", Louis E. Keefer, retrieved 12/26/17
5 "Battle of Hürtgen Forest", Wikipedia, retrieved 12/26/17
6 Shangri-la for Wounded Soldiers, Louis E. Keefer, COTU Publishing, Reston, VA, 1995
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