For the summer and fall, the 607th—its main armament at this point was a three-inch gun, towed by a half-track or ¾ ton truck–sprinted across France under the command of perhaps the most famous American combat general: they were a part of George Patton’s Third Army, and so undoubtedly infused with Patton’s fighting spirit. Patton wanted his tanks and trucks infused, not just his men, and in his drive during the breakout from Normandy—the grand chase across France that Domingo Martinez would not live to see—the general wasn’t hesitant about sending details back to Omaha Beach to steal entire gasoline supply companies. My father, a Quartermaster officer in London, was responsible for sending those units to the beachhead.

Their absence one day led to what had to be the most extravagantly profane cross-Channel phone call ever placed. An irate divisional commander, his division immobilized on Omaha with his men lying on their backs looking for clouds shaped like Rita Hayworth, bellowed that Lt. Gregory would be Pvt. Gregory within 24 hours, and added that there wasn’t a foxhole in northern France deep enough to protect him from the enemy artillery bombardment that the general would be happy to arrange. My father got off the hook when the gasoline’s disappearance was traced to Third Army.