PRESIDIO OF MONTEREY, Calif. - World War II veteran Emanuel "Manny" Avila hadn't even finished high school when he was inducted into the Army in 1944 and sent to train in Monterey. The Army wanted him to join the horse cavalry but he requested the mechanized cavalry instead because according to him "in the horse cavalry the horse comes first and Soldier second and it's much easier to replace a Soldier."
On Oct. 22 volunteers from the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and Presidio of Monterey had the opportunity to lend a hand to Avila and the local community by participating in service projects as part of the nationwide Make A Difference Day.
An Oct. 28 Monterey Military News article told about the service project, but Avila's story, like so many other veterans, went beyond the Oct. 22 event. Avila is part of a dwindling number of World War II veterans. According to Veterans Affairs, as of September 2009 the projected number of living World War veterans was 2,272,000 and an estimated 850 of those veterans die every day. That's more than 300,000 World War II veterans with unique stories about their service who die each year.
One Presidio Soldier who has been touched by the legacy of the "greatest generation" is Spc. Jacob Summers from Company A, 229th Military Intelligence Battalion. He was one of 36 military volunteers who spent Make A Difference Day working at Avila's house.
"One of the reasons I joined the Army is because of the World War II generation that stood up and did what they had to do at the time," Summers said. "Nowadays, there are less and less of them left, so I think it is very cool to not only get a chance to talk to somebody like Manny, but also give back to them."
For the veteran Avila, his World War II experience started in luxury, traveling across the Atlantic with other Soldiers on the famous RMS Queen Mary and being dropped in northern Scotland. But, after an overnight train ride to Southampton, he spent three days waiting out rough seas in the English Channel aboard a naval vessel called an LST, a landing ship used to transport vehicles, cargo, and troops directly onto shore.
"The LSTs were like a cork with grating on the upper deck that lets all the water pour in," recalled Avila. "We spent the whole time with our raincoats on."
"I ended up in the 9th Armored Division in France and from there we went to Luxembourg where we were spread out over 175 miles because it's all forest and we didn't figure the Germans would come through there," Avila recounted. "But that is exactly what the Germans did."
"It was early morning and still dark," Avila described. "I was on KP (kitchen patrol) and I was going to wake up the other guys when I heard the German tanks. So I thought to myself 'I'm not going on KP, I'm going to tell my platoon sergeant that the tanks are here and maybe I ought to go wake up the old man (ranking officer), too.' That's when the German offensive started."
"In the spring, we came to the Ludendorff Bridge where the Germans were going to make their last stand. They had rigged it up with explosives, but the wiring wasn't right, so our infantry took it over. And then for three days military vehicles arrived for as far as the eye could see because that was the only military crossing. Then the engineers came and put up a pontoon bridge so they could get more troops across and we ended up going across on the pontoon bridge. From there it was pretty much all downhill and straight through to Berlin."
After the war, Manny settled in Pacific Grove where his family had recently moved to from Modesto, Calif. He joined the Army Reserve and re-enrolled in school, graduating from Pacific Grove High School in 1947. He has been living in his current Seaside residence since 1980.
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