10-28-2009, 07:33 PM
My father was Major Charles Finley Lewis of the 344th Engineers throughout WWII. They were in North Africa by late 1942, in Sicily and Italy, and went into the southern part of France after DDay.
Their most famous exploit was rebuilding the bridge across the Rhone at Lyon in only eight hours--while ducking a sniper's bullets and contending with the carnival atmosphere of the good citizens of Lyon who insisted on riding their bikes back and forth across the new bridge.
At the end of the war they were in Germany---and rebuilt the streetcar system in Munich with the help of German engineers who were POWs.