LIMA — Allen Frazee didn’t have much time to be a kid.
The 87-year-old who served in World War II graduated high school on June 6 and went into U.S. Army on June 14.
“It was my friends and my relatives that drafted me,” he said, laughing. “It’s always great to hear your friends and neighbors selected you as a serviceman.”
From there, he went to Fort Worth, Texas, and completed basic training and six weeks of infantry training.
One memorable person he met during the war: Bed Check Charlie.
“We called him ‘Bed Check Charlie.’ Every morning, he’d come right around 9 o’clock,” he said, laughing. “He would fire a couple rounds and act like he’s diving around us. He would be making bomb threats.”
He said one thing he remembers vividly was the enemy blowing up bridges that the tanks would try to get across.
“We’d have to rebuild them,” he said. “We were just lucky to get across them when we could. That was a lot of action that I saw.”
His official title?
“Doughboy,” he said, laughing.
Though he didn’t ever see the front line, he said he went through Germany and saw a lot of the remains of the villages.
“We saw a lot of towns that we went through, like Cologne, they were all bombed out good,” he said. “We found [Gen. George] Patton’s army across Germany and we moved pretty fast. We kept on moving most of the time.”
And move they did. One particular story he remembered was when troops had to retreat.
“One night, we had to retreat because they were telling us they were on the way back to where we were at. I’m telling you we got out of there in no time flat,” he said. “We had practically just got there and started unpacking when they notified us that we had to hurry up and repack and get out.”
Frazee said he came home in June 1946 and was married two years later in June 1948.
“Sixty-four and a half years,” he said, smiling. “I can’t complain. The years go by pretty fast. With four children, they keep you busy enough. I’ve had a great life.”
Frazee is also a past post commander for Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1275 in Lima.
