WWII Veteran Tours Gen. Lee Airborne Museum

By Emily Weaver
Dunn Daily Record

The General William C. Lee Airborne Museum hosted special guests on Wednesday, Jan. 10 when a retired member of “Patton’s Army,” a war history buff and a great-nephew of the late Lee’s wife came to get a closer look inside the U.S. Airborne father’s former home.

The blue eyes of 97-year-old J.T. Knott Jr. sparkled under the brim of a World War II Veteran cap as he weaved his way around the exhibits in a motorized chair. He paused a moment to examine the uniforms and the rifles on display. He studied the maps, letters and photographs. The World War II, he knew, happened almost 80 years ago, but some of those memories are as fresh as yesterday.

“I was a late comer. I was 18 years old, drafted into the U.S. Army, sent to Camp Croft, South Carolina, and had 16 weeks of infantry training,” he said. 

Camp Croft was an infantry replacement training center for the Army Ground Forces, Fourth Service Command.

After that, Knott was sent “direct to the front lines as a replacement. I didn’t go as a unit,” he said. “I went as an individual to replace dead soldiers.”

Knott trained as a rifleman for the Army’s 94th Division of the Fourth Service Command, but war demanded more.

“I was sent to the front line in the back end of a 6-by-6 truck at night,” he said. “I got there and they said we’re short a machine gunnist so they gave me a machine gun.”

That was in January 1945.

“I was in big woods and one time the Germans were throwing artillery shells at us and they were exploding in the top of the trees and splinters were coming down, killing the boys,” he said. “… It all happened in a hurry so you don’t have time to take cover and lay down on the ground.” 

Knott and another soldier, he’d never met before, crossed their feet together, in the woods. The unnamed soldier faced one direction. Knott faced another. They were both looking for an advancing enemy.

“If he saw anybody, he was going to kick me. If I saw anybody, I was going to kick him,” Knott said.

But the enemy didn’t come from the ground.

Artillery shells popped overhead. Enemy fire ripped the watch from Knott’s arm, shredding it to pieces, but Knott was left without a scratch. 

“The boy that I had my feet locked with never moved. It killed him,” Knott said.

The soldier died of a concussion from the exploding shell.

Knott won’t forget that. He can’t forget that. 

Certain parts of the war are lost in a fog, but not that one and not another memory that is etched in his mind with haunting detail.

“We were pinned down by sniper fire. I had my machine gun set up on the top of a ridge and I was down below it. I had a man that was right beside me that had been in combat since June 6,” he said. 

The man carried, in his pocket, orders sending him home the very next day.

“He knew what was going on, I didn’t. He had experience, I didn’t have any,” Knott said. “And he said, ‘Knott? I believe I know where that sniper is.’” 

The man raised his head just a few inches to look over the ridge and the sniper’s bullet struck him in the forehead.

“And I can see his helmet going over and over and over about 10 feet in the air. That picture, I cannot get out of my mind. It just won’t go away,” Knott said. “That same day, snipers shot the rear sight off of my machine gun. I just happened to not have my head up there (at the time).”

Knott was wounded by shrapnel in a rain of artillery fire in the woods in March, 1945. 

“A piece of shrapnel went in my leg and I went back to Paris,” he said. 

He stayed in the hospital in Paris through the end of the war. His injury was enough to get him out of the infantry, but Knott stayed on in Europe helping the U.S. Army in other ways until he received his orders to go home.

He came home and married the woman, who wrote to him on the front lines — as long as he wrote her, first. They were married 64 years, three months and four days. 

“Every day was precious,” he said.

Knott toured the Lee museum with his friend and history buff, Dr. Bill Atkinson, and Marshall Carroll, the great-nephew of the late Dava Lee, wife of the late Gen. William C. Lee.