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Pfc Emmett L. Tomlinson enlisted on 11 December 1942 from Boise, Idaho.
Uncle Sam's "greeting" reached Emmett Tomlinson in Twin Falls near the onset of Idaho's 1942 winter. Despite the orders for Mutt to report for a pre-induction physical, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Jeanette, felt confident he wouldn't have to go. After all; they'd been married more than three years, and Mutt was almost thirty-five. So they would stay on in Twin Falls and Mutt would continue in his job as steward at the Elks Club. But when the bus brought Mutt and the others back from their physicals, Jeanette learned that wasn't in the cards. Mutt passed the physical. Mutt left for Camp Hoze in early December. After the Division moved up to Camp Claiborne, Jeanette followed her husband to Louisiana.
With the division scheduled to leave Claiborne on 4 September, the men were restricted to the post. But Jeanette Tomlinson's husband managed to slip away briefly. "The last night before the boys were shipped out," she recalls, "Mutt sneaked home for about an hour. They were on alert, but he could climb over the back gate and walk to our stack. That was the advantage of living as we did. That night he tried to tell me that he wouldn't make it home. But I wouldn't listen. I was sure he would come home."
Jeanette wrote to Mutt every day, but no letters came from overseas until after the first of December. The press and radio were her lifeline to Europe. The one evening the news came. When I saw the article, '84th Division attacks at Geilenkirchen, 'those headlines jumped to a foot high.
Then Mutt's letters began to arrive. Each letter I got I was thankful he was still alive, still able to write me.
K Company spent the night of the 27th in Beeck, a few miles south of Hardt and Hehler. The next morning they moving toward Hardt. As the platoon moved forward they were hit from both sides with machine gun and rifle fire. The squads ran for cover behind sugar-beet mounds. The men took cover in a corner of a garden behind a row of fence pots. The machine gun fire was so heavy it cut several of those pots right in two. The pots dangled there from the wire just inches above our heads. That's were Mutt Tomlinson got killed.
The picture is together with James Clark, who is buried on the Ardennes Cemetery on Plot D, Row 12, Grave 40.