‘Country Boy’ supervised gun repair during Battle of the Bulge.

By Petra Chesner Schlatter, BucksLocalNews.com


At 91, U.S. Army Master Sgt. Creed Palmer has a strong memory of being part of the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent Battle of the Bulge. By the time WWII ended, Palmer had reached the rank of master sergeant.

“I was in the ordinance company,” Palmer said, sitting at his kitchen table in Wrightstown Township. The Middletown Grange Fairgrounds back up to his small white house on Worthington Mill Road.

He is in good health. Surprisingly, he still helps to mow the yard.

Originally from North Carolina, Palmer graduated from the ninth grade. He and a friend, who was part Cherokee Native American, literally hitchhiked north, ending up at Bowman’s Tower in Washington Crossing, where his friend’s uncle lived. He was a full-blood Cherokee.

Palmer, who once was a hired farmhand at a nearby farm, had a book written about him: “The Life Story of a Country Boy.”

Being a farmhand, he worked to pay for food. “I made enough to eat,” he said.
“I went in the service,” Palmer said. “I figured that was better.”

In 1941, Palmer and his future brother-in-law, Leon Worthington, drove to Ft. Dix to enlist.
Getting to Europe was a long road for Palmer. From Ft. Dix, he was sent to points throughout the country for training. He went to Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri and Arizona. They were tested in 20 degrees below zero and 120-degree heat.

He would take responsibility of 50 men, heading up a group who repaired guns. That meant working on everything from rifles to canons. His men worked on .50-calibre machine guns.
“I had charge of all the guns that needed to be fired,” Palmer said.

“We did everything on the big guns (cannons),” he noted. “We stripped them all the way down and then put everything back together. We tested, fired it and it went back into position. We pulled it with a big truck.”

Palmer remembered how he had to sign a paper, taking responsibility for repairing the guns. “That was my job,” he said. “We had to certify the weapon was done. If it wasn’t, I’d get in trouble.”

The trip overseas to Europe was long, with ships of men packed like sardines. The hammocks were hung one on top of each other. They slept in shifts. When he would later return home by ship, he had learned that sleeping on deck was the way to go.

“We landed in Ireland,” Palmer said. They went to little towns where they trained for six months. They went into the mountains and approached foxholes. “You’d crawl and they were shooting machine guns over you,” he recalled. “You literally had to keep down.

“We went from there to Normandy,” he said. “The Germans had everything fortified. The Americans had to establish a beachhead to make sure the Germans were back far enough to make sure the troops could get in.”

“We went in the second day of the invasion of Normandy,” Palmer continued. “That’s how we got started. We established the beachhead and kept right on going. We stopped once. We wound up in Le Havre. We stayed there two to three weeks. We cleared out Le Havre of Germans.

“Once we got them out, we traveled a lot of time,” he said. “We went up through France up into Luxembourg. We traveled from there and went into Germany. We were riding in vehicles and walking.”

The Germans bypassed Palmer’s company. “They went right by,” he said. “Some of their troops went around our flank. That’s when they had the Battle of the Bulge. We were surrounded for three days. Finally, our troops cleared us.”

They headed to the Rhine River. “After we crossed the river — that was it. The war was over,” he said.

“We came back and went into France and they said, ‘You can go home,’” Palmer said.
What stands out in his mind is how many of the towns were leveled in France. “They didn’t touch any churches,” he said of the Germans.

“The people (the French) were nice,” he said. “The people were glad we got there.”

Watching the German surrender was quite a sight to see, according to Palmer. “We just crossed the Rhine River,” he said. “All the German vehicles came. They surrendered. Seeing all the guys coming – they were glad to give up.”

Palmer said he felt great, too. “I can get out of here now,” he remembered thinking. He was discharged in 1945.

Upon returning home, Palmer worked for General Motors. Next, he was a clerk at the Newtown Hardware House on South State Street in Newtown, where he worked for three decades.
In town, Palmer gained a reputation for being able to fix anything that was brought into the store.