Francis Dahse joined the Army in January 1943. A member of the 71st Infantry of the 44th Division, he was in on the front lines in France when he was severely injured on Oct. 28, 1944.
“My legs were just about blown off,” said Dahse, 92, who was born and raised in Gresham, where he still lives. “We all got blasted.”
Dahse recalled digging a foxhole, covering it with branches, and then putting the dirt that they dug out on top of the branches.
“I said to my buddy this is no place to be,” Dahse said.
He was hit with shrapnel from an artillery shell. There is still a piece in his leg. Dahse said he was bleeding profusely while being carried away on a stretcher, eventually getting to a house where he was passed through a window.
“I started choking,” Dahse said. “I was running out of blood.”
At one stop, Dahse said, he and other soldiers were in stretchers in the dark and people would trip over them, causing them to scream in pain. He took the initiative to tell someone to get some light in there.
After rides in several planes and ambulances, he wound up in Naples, Italy, where the nurse told him there were 132 other soldiers there.
“You could hear guys screaming,” Dahse said.
His next stop was Casablanca. From there, he was flown to Florida and then transferred to Oklahoma. When he was sent to Cleveland, Ohio, he had plastic surgery. Skin was grafted from his arm to his legs, which were sewn together for six weeks while he was in a body cast.
After one year and 10 months in hospitals, doctors determined that nothing more could be done for him, and Dahse was honorably discharged in September 1946.
When Dahse returned home, he was determined to get out of bed.
“You got to move around,” he said. “You can’t lay in bed. I never was one to sit around.”
Dahse worked as a welder. He was married but couldn’t have children because of all the medications he had to take.
Among the many medals Dahse received were the Purple Heart and the French Medal of Honor, which he just received this year after the daughter of a former fellow soldier got it for him.
Dahse is a member of the Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion and Military Order of the Purple Heart.
He doesn’t have any bad feelings about the war and what happened to him.
“The injury from service, that’s natural,” Dahse said. “I ain’t the only one.”
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