02 Feb February 2, 1945

letter
from: Prairie Farmer radio station
to: Mrs. Alice Shonkwiler
Noteworthy: wounded in action copy

                   HEADQUARTERS
                 COMMUNICATION ZONE

            EUROPEAN THEATER OF OPERATIONS
                 UNITED STATES ARMY

RELEASE OF RECEIPT
NUMBER 59782

        CHICAGO SOLDIER WOUNDED IN GERMANY

CENSORED

    THE 187TH GENERAL HOSPITAL, ENGLAND  --- With an infantry unit assigned to
knock out enemy installations with electrically fired demolitions, Private
George W Shonkwiler, 34, of 11007 South Union Ave., Chicago Illinois, had
crawled up to an underground fort in Germany and planted a charge that blasted
the entrance shortly before he was wounded by shrapnel. He is now convalescing
at this United States Army general hospital in England.

  "He is well on the road to recovery," said his ward surgeon, Captain Wallace
P. Sheely of Gulfport, Mississippi.

  "We blew-up the entrance to that underground labyrinth which brought 102
Nazis scrambling out with their hands up," Pvt Shonkwiler related. "We turned
them over to guards and were moving to another objective when I was hit by
shrapnel."

  Under heavy shelling at the time and surrounded by snipers, Pvt Shonkwiler
was evacuated by the medics through a gauntlet of energy fire.

  "They backed a jeep up to a pill-box we had captured, loaded us on, and took
off like hell," he smiled. "We tore along those roads with stuff exploding
ahead, behind and beside us, but we made it."

  He has been awarded the Purple Heart.  His wife, Mrs Alice Shonkwiler, and
son, Ronald, three, reside at the Union Avenue address.

END