I did a taped interview with Sheldon Freschi on
Saturday May 12, 2012. I went to his house on Eagle Street around
9:00 a.m. and Sheldon, at the age of 91, was working in his green house where he grows vegetable plants and other types of plants then sells them to D’Angelo’s Farm in Dumont. He also gives some away to friends. I had spoken to him before at D’Angelo’s Farm- where I work part time- about someday coming by and doing an interview and he had said fine. It was a very nice day and Sheldon said “why don’t we sit right here” so he pulled up a couple of folding chairs and that’s where I taped the interview...in his backyard, in the green house; behind the house he grew up in and has lived in for 91 years.
Sheldon Freschi told me he went to the New Milford Middle School and then went to, and graduated from Hackensack High School in 1939. I asked him if he knew Teresa Martin and he said yes, she was his math teacher. According to Sheldon, Teresa Martin who he said lived in Bogota, NJ was the Vice Principal of the New Milford Middle School and Bert Gibbs was the Principal at the time, which would have been around 1935. I asked Sheldon if he had received any letters from Teresa Martin when he was overseas and he said he had retrieved one letter.
I asked Sheldon if he had gotten drafted and he replied “I got drafted up at Massachusetts, I was going to college up there. Massachusetts State for Horticulture. Today, the college is the University of Massachusetts, then it was Massachusetts State. I think they changed the name sometime during the 1950’s. I got drafted and went to Camp Devens in Massachusetts.” I asked Sheldon what he was in training for before going overseas and he said, “I was a medic,” and so I asked him how he got selected to be a medic. “Because of my hand,” which he showed me was crippled from birth, but you would never know it by how he uses it. “I was a B1 because of it”. A B1 is a rating for non-combat service, if needed, which Sheldon continued to explain, “When they had this draft there was some states that didn't have enough of 1A rated men to meet their quota for service. If I had come home from college to register, I probably would have never gotten drafted, but because I registered up there in Massachusetts. They didn’t have enough 1A men to meet their quota, so they had to draft B1 men. Of course, that is non-combative. I registered up there because I was going to college and didn’t want to bother coming home to register. If I had come home, I probably would not have gotten drafted. A lot of the guys doing what I did were from New England states because they had a hard time meeting their quotas for 1A servicemen.”
I asked Sheldon where did he leave for overseas and he said, “I left for overseas from New York on board the Queen Elizabeth with 20,000 soldiers on board. We landed in Scotland and then we went to England. We were in a small town outside of Coventry, not far from Birmingham England. I spent about a half year state side and the other three years over there in England and I came home in ‘46. I was trained to work in the Surgical end of it. I assisted the doctors in the operating room.” What type of setup was it there? “It was a hospital building and the soldiers would be flown in, or they would come by truck or train."
Would they go back to combat from your hospital?, I asked, “if they were able to, yes.” I asked him if he had ever done a surgery in an emergency and he replied “No, no, we only supplied the doctor with the instruments needed. We would give hypodermic needles and stuff like that, but not operate. I would work in the wards where the patients were also.”
Was your town ever bombed, “We had some Buzz bombs; most of the time they were shooting at Birmingham because that was where England had factories and the bombs would occasionally land by us. A lot of them were sent to London to bomb London. As long as you heard the noise, you were OK, but as soon as the noise stopped, you knew it was going to drop. They were used a lot at the beginning of the war, but towards the end, not much. The Germans had a lot of stuff over there, they were good soldiers.”
Sheldon Freschi said he never met anyone from town or the area who he knew while in England at the hospital. I asked him if the hospital was notified of an up coming battle and he said they were never told of anything before hand, but they knew where they came from once they got to the hospital after the battle. Sheldon said the hospital staff was made up of mostly people from a big hospital in Chicago, but he could not recall the name.
How was your trip back after wars end?, I asked, “You won’t believe this, I went over on the Queen Elizabeth and I came back on the Queen Mary. When we went over on the Queen Elizabeth, we were mixed in with the Paratroopers and a lot of infantry, a lot more men going there. We had a little less people on the ride back probably around 15,000 men. I don’t know exactly, but there was probably 4,000 less coming home. Jimmy Stewart the actor was on our ship coming home. His outfit was with us, and he was on the ship, but I never saw him, but he was on the ship. We landed in New York and then I was sent back to Camp Devins by train.”
I asked him if he had any other memorable thoughts on his service and Sheldon Freschi said “Yes, while we were in England our unit made up a ball team and we had a good ball team. Probably half the guys had played in the minor leagues. We would go on Saturdays to different towns nearby and play games. They would wheel some of the patients out to watch the games. It was fun. Our outfit was the 297th and that’s the outfit all the guys in the baseball photo are from. The hospital would have been called the ‘297th hospital’, I believe and we could take care of about a hundred patients at a time.”
Armand Allesandrini lived across the street from you did you know him?, I asked, “Yes, he was my cousin and he volunteered for the Marines. He had enough points to come home after fighting in Saipan but he did not want to leave his outfit and so he stayed in and on the last island
(Iwo Jima), he got killed. He was a person like that if you knew him. His father was a sculptor, a great sculptor, he did a lot of work for John Jacob Aster. He was real eccentric. He was married and had a family but he lived his own life.”
Did you know other guys who served, “oh yes, Riechelt and
Dennis Lacey, his father was head of the Teamster’s Union in New York in the 1950’s and 60’s, I think. He was a nice guy.” I knew Jimmy Lacey very well. I played golf with him and he drank himself to death later in life. His wife left him and then he drank himself to death well after the war.
We ended our conversation talking about the men from New Milford who had served, and as I thought of what he was saying, I could not help but think of Armand Allesandrini, his cousin, requesting to stay in service so he could be with his outfit, and then getting killed in action on Iwo Jima and here Sheldon and I are talking 87 years later.
All that was sacrificed….Let us never forget...
Written by
Bob Meli
June 4, 2012