This might have been my ambulance. While I was driving wounded patients near Enfidaville in April under enemy fire, a German 88mm shell landed under my ambulance, buried itself in the ground, and didn’t go off.

I probably owe my life to the forced workers in the munitions factories in Germany who may have been fixing the fuses of those 88mm shells, so that they failed to detonate. I like to think they were conscientiously opposed to the Nazi Regime.

Be that as it may, about half of the 88mm shells fired at us that month failed to detonate; so my ambulance is OK (shown in this photo right side up), and I am here to tell the tale.

Location: Near El Hamma, Tunisia.

With my field glasses I could see our position in the olive grove in the distance; I could look right down into my slit trench where I had been lying when they were shelling us. I shuddered to remember how scared I had been, like the little bird in the olive tree over my slit trench who had crapped on my head as enemy shells came screeching through the trees and crashing around us.