Memorial

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S/Sgt Dale A. Worthy enlisted in Kalamazoo, Michigan on 15 October 1942.

All three Battalions moved on toward Bad Schwalbach during the day. At 1930 the 2nd Battalion received a two hour pasting of 20mm fire. Then the 2nd platoon of Co. E, leading the 2nd Battalion, met with sniper fire. S/Sgt Dale M. Worthy organized a patrol to reconnoiter the ground in front of the platoon. Moving out into the dusk, Sgt Worthy's patrol flushed the Germans and were moving cautiously down a road when from a thick patch of pines on their left a potato masher was tossed into the middle of the patrol. Miraculously the men were blown into a ditch without injury. The Germans in the woods, realizing that their ambush had been betrayed, immediately opened up on the patrol with two 20mm flak guns and rifles, hitting, Worthy several times in the chest. The patrol saw and heard him grunt with pain but he remained standing in that curtain of fire and traded bullets with the hidden Germans not more than 40 feet away. Hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, the patrol crawled 400 yards through intense fire to give the exact location of the ambush to the forward observer of the artillery.