Travis tells WWII story

By GINA KINSLOW
Glasgow Daily Times

November 08, 2008 03:43 pm

— Joe Lane Travis brought several photos to share with members of the Edmund Rogers Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution meeting last week.
They were photos he had taken while serving with A Battery of the Kentucky National Guard’s 1/623rd FA in Korea under the command of James T. Pace, also of Glasgow.
In one of the photos was Pace standing in a snow-covered field. Behind him were Heartbreak and Bloody ridges.
“I took these photographs of them but I had no idea that was what they were when I was taking them,” said Travis, a Glasgow attorney. “It was many years later, when I sat down and looked at one of these maps that I determined, ‘My God that’s Heartbreak Ridge and Bloody Ridge and I didn’t even know it.’”
The Battle of Heartbreak Ridge was a major battle during the Korean War that occurred between Sept. 13 and Oct. 15, 1951. It followed another major battle, the Battle of Bloody Ridge, by only a few weeks. Both sites were in North Korea.
Travis was not at Heartbreak Ridge when it was captured by United Nation’s troops, but he was nearby.
“We shot on them a lot,” he said.
Travis doesn’t talk much about his personal experiences during the Korean War.
“I talk about what everyone else did, because everyone else did more than I did,” he said.
Travis went to Korea as chief of a cannon section, but is a bit humble in talking about his tour of duty during the war.
“I was an artilleryman. When you talk about war, there is so much difference between being in an airplane, or being an artilleryman, or being a tanker, or being an infantryman,” he said. “The ultimate soldier is the rifleman. I didn’t carry a rifle. I fired a cannon, and my battalion in the Korean War fired almost 170,000 rounds at the Communists. Each bullet weighed 96 pounds.”
Travis and Pace knew each other before they deployed to Korea.
“I first new (Pace) in the National Guard before Korea,” said Travis. “I probably knew him from 1948 on.”
Travis describes Pace as being “one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known.”
Pace is equally complimentary.
“As a young man just out of high school, he was the best soldier that I was ever around,” Pace said, adding Travis went on to prove what a good soldier he could be by attending officer’s training school and later retiring from the National Guard as commander of an artillery unit with the rank of lieutenant colonel. “He was a good soldier.”
After his tour of duty during the Korean War, Travis returned to Glasgow as a second lieutenant and set out to reorganize Battery A of the National Guard’s 1/623rd FA in 1953. He was 21.
A year later, he attended artillery school at Fort Sill, Okla. because “I didn’t have anything else to do.”
“I went out there for the first part of 1954, and in the fall of 1954 I enrolled in the University of Kentucky Law School,” he said.
He wanted to go to law school because he believed it would help him land his dream job — a position as an agent with the FBI.
But he didn’t become an FBI agent. Instead, he got married.
“And that changes everything,” he said with a smile. “It’s not the same when you’re in there married and being single like I was earlier. It’s too hard on families. You move too much and there are too many things going on.”
After law school, Travis returned to the National Guard in 1957. In 1958, he enlisted in the Army as a judge advocate and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell.
A judge advocate is responsible for trying court marshals.
“They prosecute them and they defend them and they advise the command they are with on legal matters,” he said. “Like I used to advise the commanding general of the 101st on making a loan to build a bowling alley at Fort Campbell.”
Travis was at Fort Campbell for eight months before he decided to end his military career.
“I decided there wasn’t any future in it,” he said. “The peace time in the Army is so different from war time. In war time, it’s hustle and bustle, getting ready to go. You’re going off to war. In peace time, it’s kind of boring to tell you the truth. So, I decided to come back and practice law here.”
On hand to hear her dad speak was Travis’ daughter, Holly.
“I never get tired of listening to him,” she said. “It’s just a pleasure to listen to him and to witness other people listening to him and getting as much out of as I do. I learn something new about my father every time I hear him speak.”
While Travis was the guest speaker, he, Pace and other area veterans who fought during World War II, Korean, Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars were recognized during the DAR meeting.

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