Herman Phipps Hendershott, a lawyer by profession, joined the United States Army under the Selective Service Act as a Lieutenant, at the outbreak of hostilities in 1941. He was sent to the Quartermaster Replacement Training Center at Fort Warren (near Cheyenne), Wyoming, where he was an officer with Company 'C', 2nd Quartermaster Training Regiment, for two years. After being promoted to the rank of Captain in charge of an all-black bakery company, he was sent with his men to Britain in early 1944, where he memorably arrived by ship on the river Clyde and sailed into the port of Glasgow, Scotland. His company then traveled by black-out train to England, where they were encamped for a number of months on the Norfolk estate of an English aristocrat. The bakery company subsequently moved to Somerset in the west of England, where they learned to operate mobile bread bakery units, which had been invented in England. After the D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944, Hendershott and his men pitched their tents at an aviation base in Normandy, in northern France, where they baked thousands of loaves of bread every day, to feed the Allied troops, who were by then pushing the Germans out of France. Hendershott's bakery company spent a whole year living in their tents, in deep snow during the winter months, that winter of 1944-45 being the coldest in living memory. He recalled that German prisoners of war, who were being held nearby, dug holes in the ground in which they sunk their tents in order to keep warm, and succeeded in their endeavor. The ingenuity and energy of these German prisoners were much admired by Hendershott. Although he was not engaged in combat, Herman Hendershott vividly remembers Christmas Eve 1944, when German fighter planes attempted to bomb his bakery company and a nearby aviation base as well. The mobile bakery units survived without any damage, as did the bakers and their commander. Hendershott acquired a pet cat during his time in Normandy, which he had to leave behind when he departed the European Theater. He also made many friends in the local French community, including a doctor and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Prevost, whom he visited again in 1971 with his wife and eldest daughter. After the capitulation of the Germans (V-E Day) on 8 May 1945, Herman Hendershott was invited by the mayor of Boos, the little town near Rouen where he was stationed, to attend the ceremony in celebration of the end of hostilities, on 18 May 1945, as the local church and then at the local Monument to the Dead. Hendershott's eldest daughter has in her possession the invitation, hand-written in elegant calligraphy, addressed to 'monsieur le Capitaine, Base aviation, Boos'. Hendershott was discharged from active duty and returned to his family (by then he had three small daughters) and his law practice in Eugene, Oregon, in the United States, during the early autumn of 1945. Primary Source: image