While still recovering, he was assigned as an infantry instructor until restored to full service in June 1944. Injured in a rock-climbing exercise at Camp Hale, Colorado, in October, he remained hospitalized until the end of the year. He was then reassigned five months later as company commander of E Company, 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment of the newly formed 10th Mountain Division. In March 1943, Flynn was promoted to first lieutenant in the regiment’s antitank company. Following a short romance, they wed on September 13, 1942. After OCS, he was assigned to the 353rd Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division, at Camp Carson, Colorado. In October 1937, he joined the 165th Infantry Regiment, 27th Infantry Division (New York National Guard), which three years later,would become one of the first National Guard units “federalized” and placed on active duty more than a year prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.Īfter the United States entered the war, Sergeant Flynn applied for and was accepted for Officers Candidate School. Thomas graduated from high school in June 1937, having studied French and achieving fluency in German that he would find useful a few years later. and Josephine Engfer Flynn, a working-class family living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Thomas Joseph Flynn was born on August 21, 1920, the fourth child of Richard E. This was not where Flynn, commanding K Company, 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, had envisioned himself being just a few weeks earlier. The sound of explosions and shrapnel hitting the side of the boxcar was deafening and terrifying. A number of boxcars were hit, sending shock waves and shrapnel throughout the rail yard. First Lieutenant Tom Flynn and his fellow POWs remained locked inside their boxcar prison on a Frankfurt railroad siding on Christmas Eve, 1944, as air raid sirens wailed and bombs exploded throughout the city.

707th tank battalion battle bulge