WAR SERVICE NEWS.
(Acting on the suggestions of friends and relatives of men and women in the armed services, The Globe-Post will henceforth run most news items about those in uniform under the above heading. Send in YOUR service news. Give the boys (and girls) in uniform credit for what they’re doing, and don’t let them be forgotten just because they’re far from home.)
Lieut. Bill Arendt, who has been on duty at a camp in Alabama, has been ordered to Camp Carson, Colo., and managed to get a couple of days leave in the home of his parents in LeMars this week.
Source: LeMars Globe-Post, July 22, 1943
NEWS of the BOYS in the SERVICE
Lt. Wm. F. (Bill) Arendt is now somewhere in England. Mr. and Mrs. Billy Arendt received a letter from him last week telling them of his safe arrival somewhere in England. He wrote that they had a very smooth crossing.
Source: LeMars Semi-Weekly Sentinel, July 25, 1944
SOLDIERS NEWS
Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Arendt have received another letter from their son, Lieut. Arendt, reporting satisfactory progress in the hospital from wounds received in battle in France. He writes that he has received the Purple Heart decoration, and that he is sending the decoration, as well as the bullet and fragments of his own pistol which were dug out of his hand by Army surgeons, home to his parents.
Source: LeMars Globe- Post, September 25, 1944
LE MARS MAN IS WOUNDED TWICE
Lt. William F. Arendt Now Billeting Officer at Leave Centerville, S.D.
With United States Forces in Belgium.—Second Lt. William F. Arendt of LeMars, Ia., formerly a platoon leader in the 116th infantry regiment of the 29th division, is now billeting officer of the channel base action’s leave center in Brussels.
Lt. Arendt recently was reclassified as a limited assignment officer after he recovered from his second wound received as a result of enemy action.
He received his first wound while crossing a hedgerow in the Brest peninsula with his captain. They encountered a German soldier who sot the captain in the chest. Lt. Arendt fired at the nazi with his revolver, his pistol going off simultaneously with the enemy soldier’s second shot. The German was sounded seriously and Lt. Arendt’s hand was injured when the nazi’s rifle bullet shattered his revolver.
Lt. Arendt was wounded again last winter, this time in the leg, while he was leading his rifle platoon in an attack against a German position in the Ruhr. He was hospitalized in England, where he received a cluster to the Purple Heart awarded for his first wound.
Following his complete recovery and discharge from the hospital, Lt. Arendt was assigned to duty with the leave center. He helps to arrange hotel billeting accommodations for thousands of combat troop passing through the Belgian capital.
A Northwestern University journalism student before he entered the Army in October, 1942, Lt. Arendt was commissioned after he completed an infantry C. C. S. course at Fort Benning, Ga., in April, 1942.
His parents, Mr. and Mrs. William G. Arendt, live in LeMars.
Source: The Sioux City Journal, April 15, 1945
***Further Research:
William Fuller “Bill” Arendt was born Oct. 8, 1920 to William Grover and Edith Fuller Arendt. He died Sept. 27, 2002 in Omaha, NE.
Source: ancestry.com
