James Eugene Procarione

The unit James joined on 24 April 1944 was the radio intelligence company of the U.S. Third Army under General George S. Patton. It was activated 20 April 1942 at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, reached England on 29 January 1944, and landed on Utah Beach on 15 July 1944, following Patton's Third Army across France, through the Battle of the Bulge, and into Germany. Its traffic analysts identified German units from their radio traffic — the kind of information advantage that let Patton move so fast. An NSA cryptologic history of Army radio traffic analysis records where the 118th's own war ended — Stephankirchen, Bavaria, on 20 May 1945 — a village right beside Rosenheim, where the 3255th finished two days later; James's two units came to rest in the same corner of Bavaria. A full company history of this unit has been published (see Sources & Further Reading below).

In spring 1944 the Army built a series of small corps-level radio-intelligence companies — the 3253rd, 3254th, 3255th and 3256th Signal Service Companies — in England, drawn from the men of radio intelligence companies like the 118th. The Army's official lineage record dates the 3255th precisely: constituted 12 April 1944 and activated 6 May 1944 in England (inactivated 25 October 1945 in Germany). James's own records capture this happening: a 27 May 1944 Morning Report of the 118th shows a group (on detached service with the 129th Signal Radio Intelligence Company) being transferred to the 3255th Signal Service Company — the unit named on his discharge. The 3255th's wartime record lives on today: its lineage was carried forward into the modern 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, whose official campaign honors — Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe — are the same four campaigns on James's discharge. A 2023 Army University Press study of Patton's intelligence operations states the corps assignment in print: it lists the four corps companies built that spring — “the 3253rd SSC was assigned to XV Corps, 3254th SSC to VIII Corps, 3255th SSC to XII Corps, and 3256th SSC to XX Corps” — and explains that each company (8 officers and 120 enlisted men) supported its corps with communications-security monitoring and lower-echelon radio intelligence under the Third Army Signal Intelligence Service. Nall's Veterans History Project interview puts an enlisted voice on the same point: at Le Mans he remembered the men being told they were the 3255 Signal Service Company, attached to XII Corps, and that their real work was radio intelligence under a cover story. An NSA cryptologic history of Army radio traffic analysis settles the assignment in an official reference table of every Army signals-intelligence company in the European theater: it lists the 3255th — XII Corps, and records where the company's war ended — Rosenheim, Bavaria, on 22 May 1945, the same Bavarian town his comrade John Hunter's letters and the published 118th company history independently place the unit. The corps' complete official history states it in the corps' own voice: “The 3255th Sig Serv Co, a working partner of the 93d Sig Bn, was assigned to XII Corps by Third Army effective 6 May 44” — the day the unit was activated — and elsewhere credits it as the unit without which the corps “would have lost valuable intercepted intelligence.” Its appendices carry the company on every corps station list from England to V-E Day (radio code name “Habitant”, once even written “3255 Sig Serv Co RI”) and date the combat attachment: 6 September 1944 to 16 May 1945.

His discharge calls him a light truck driver (MOS 345) in the Signal Corps — true, but it undersells the company he kept. From April 1944 to the end of the war he served in tactical signals-intelligence units in the European campaign: first the 118th Radio Intelligence Company (Patton's Third Army's own), then the corps-level 3255th. He drove and supported a team whose mission was to intercept and read the enemy's radio traffic — carrying it across Northern France, the Ardennes, the Rhineland, and into the heart of Germany.

James's discharge lists his job as light truck driver (MOS 345). The company history shows what that meant day to day. The 118th was a small fleet on wheels — Jeeps, weapons carriers, and GMC 2½-ton trucks carrying the radios, the heavy PE-95 power generators on trailers, and the kitchen, headquarters and supply. Its radio-intercept and direction-finding teams set up ten to twenty miles out toward the front, and a driver was assigned to each one: he ran back to the company area for supplies and mail, ferried men back and forth, and pitched in on chow and camp work. That is the role James filled — the man who kept a signals-intelligence team supplied and moving as it leap-frogged across Europe.

The book traces the 118th from Camp Forrest, Tennessee to Vint Hill Farms, Virginia, across to England (arriving 30 January 1944), down to Dartford in Kent, then out through Seaton, Devon — which it left on 10 July 1944 for the Channel crossing, the same move James's own Morning Reports record (above). From Normandy it followed Patton's Third Army east across France, wintered in Luxembourg through the Battle of the Bulge, crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, and finished the war on occupation duty at Rosenheim in Bavaria — independently, the same waypoints the 3255th's own records and his comrades' letters describe. The history closes the way James's service did: nearly every man of the company was home for Christmas 1945.

We searched the whole book for James — by name and by service number — and read every one of its platoon rosters. He is not listed, and that takes nothing away from his record. The authors rebuilt those rosters decades later from memory — from questionnaires and interviews with the company's long-serving original members — and say so plainly. James came to the 118th as a late replacement in April 1944 and was moved on to the 3255th within about three months — too briefly to land on a list built from veterans' recollections. His own Army Morning Reports, found by his service number, place him in the company; the book tells us what life there was like.

• November 1944 — Lorraine, France. The company operated around Armaucourt and Gremecey, northeast of Nancy, running its wire lines into XII Corps as the Third Army ground toward the Saar.
• December 1944 — into Luxembourg (the Bulge). Its December report covers operations near Morhange and Sarralbe, France, and Kirchberg, Luxembourg — the company's own record, independently confirming Lt. Olds's account of pulling into Kirchberg on snowy 23 December 1944.
• February 1945 — Waldbillig, Luxembourg. The company was at Waldbillig, with XII Corps headquarters just up the road at Fels, as the front pushed toward the Siegfried Line and the Rhine.
• April 1945 — into Germany. Now operating inside Germany, on 21 April 1945 the company moved up to support the 90th Infantry Division at Langenzenn (near Nuremberg), tracking German panzer units toward the Czechoslovak border.
• May 1945 — Germany to V-E Day. Its final operational report covers operations in Germany through the war's end, as XII Corps drove to the Danube, Linz, and the edge of Czechoslovakia, meeting the Red Army at the surrender on 8–9 May 1945.

His discharge named the 3255th but said nothing of where it went. These signed company reports now trace his unit's path month by month through the otherwise-blank campaign year — the same towns Lt. Olds remembered and the same XII Corps route the corps history records — placing James's company, and its light-truck driver, in Lorraine in the fall of 1944, in Luxembourg for the Bulge, and across Germany to V-E Day.

In July 2026 the National Archives at College Park confirmed a discovery that reopens the whole campaign year: the 3255th Signal Service Company's own operational records survive intact. The 1973 fire that destroyed James's personnel file never touched these — that blaze consumed individual personnel records, while these are the unit's operational records, stored in a wholly separate archive — and between them they span almost exactly the months his burned file can no longer account for. Two files sit together in Record Group 407, the Adjutant General's World War II Operations Reports, in Box 18442 at Archives II in College Park, Maryland:

• The company Journal (file SGCO-3255-0.7) — the unit's running daily log, about 79 pages, opening on 6 May 1944, the day the 3255th was activated in England, and closing on 8 May 1945, V-E Day. Because it begins on the company's first day, it covers the late-May 1944 weeks when men of the 118th Signal Radio Intelligence Company — James among them — were transferred in and absorbed into the new company: the exact administrative moment that turned a 118th replacement into a 3255th soldier, and the seam his records have never crossed.
• The company Operations Report (file SGCO-3255-0.3) — about 140 pages covering 24 August 1944 to 12 May 1945, from the breakout and the race across France, through the Lorraine and Rhineland fighting and the Battle of the Bulge, across the Rhine, and on to the German surrender.

Together that is roughly 220 pages of the 3255th's own day-by-day account of the war — the single most promising un-read source left for placing James personally inside his discharge unit.

A company journal and operations report are written day by day, in the field. They record the unit's strength and station each day, the men who join, leave, are promoted, fall sick, or are detached, and what the company did — where it set up its radio work, whom it supported, and when it moved. That is the level of detail James's story loses after December 1944, where the digitized Morning Reports run out. These pages could answer the questions his burned file cannot: the day James's name first appears on the 3255th's own rolls, his promotion to Technician Fifth Grade, the paperwork of his transfer in from the 118th, his movements through the 1945 campaigns, and his processing to sail home in December 1945.

The lead came from the National Archives' Textual Reference staff, who located the two files and pointed to a digitized finding-aid index for the series — a set of catalog cards, scanned and browsable online. That index was pulled up and read directly: the 3255th's card (sitting one page apart from the neighboring 3254th and 3256th companies, which confirms it is the right unit) is the source of the precise dates and the hand-noted page counts above. The records themselves, though, are not digitized — they exist only on paper at College Park, and the series has no name index, so finding James in them means reading the pages one by one. The family is now arranging to obtain copies.

Olds's account lines up, point for point, with the Morning Reports we found for James's unit. He names the company's commanding officer as Captain Walter Drozdiak — and it is Drozdiak's signature that appears on the 3255th's own Morning Report of 9–10 June 1944. He describes the company being assembled at Eastbourne on the English south coast alongside a “host” unit, the 129th Radio Intelligence Company — the same 129th named in James's 27 May 1944 transfer record. And he states that the company was “assigned administratively to the XII Corps, a part of the Third Army commanded by General Manton S. Eddy” — independent, firsthand confirmation of the corps his unit served. From Utah Beach through Nancy, Luxembourg, the Rhine and into Germany, Olds traces the exact four campaigns stamped on James's discharge. His complete memoir, published online by his daughter Dorri Olds, is the closest thing we have to an account of James's own war.

Nall's interview puts the official records on the ground: a small radio-intelligence outfit moving with Patton's Third Army, using a cover identity while its intercept, direction-finding, and control teams tracked German radio traffic.

• ✓Unit and command, stated plainly. At Le Mans, Nall remembered the men being told they were the “3255 Signal Service Company, attached to XII Corps” (00:35:15–00:35:18).
• ✓How the work was organized. He describes three men assigned to the control hut, two direction finders, radio-truck intercept men, and a cover story that the men were doing radio repair if questioned (00:35:38–00:42:37).
• ✓The Normandy-to-Lorraine route. He places the unit at Utah Beach at 2200 hours on 12 August 1944, then moving past Saint-Lô to Le Mans, and later into Nancy at the end of September (00:29:07–00:35:18; 00:45:25–00:46:00).
• ✓Late-war company context. He mentions Lt. Bateman, places the company at Rosenheim, and recalls being sent to Corps headquarters for teletype duty after the shooting stopped (01:02:43–01:08:03).
• ✓Photos and map shown on camera. Starting about 01:24:11, Nall walks through unit photographs and identifies men including Paul Yeager, Sergeant Hunter, Ward, Dunn, Monahan, Kohler, and Nall himself. At 01:26:36 he shows the route map through Utah Beach, Saint-Lô, Bar-le-Duc, Nancy, Luxembourg/Bastogne, Frankfurt, and Neudorf.

John W. DeGrote, The 118th Signal Radio Intelligence Company, 1942–1946, Third US Army, World War II (self-published, 1998) — a full company history of the unit James joined in April 1944. It is a print book (not free online); copies are held by libraries including the Imperial War Museums and are catalogued on WorldCat and Open Library, with used copies through AbeBooks and Amazon.

A later, in-print edition drawn from the same material: Jeri Lynn Scott & John W. De Grote, World War II Perception and Reality: 118th Signal Radio Co Third US Army WWII (2018, ISBN 978-1-9830-8050-0) — available on Amazon as a paperback and Kindle e-book. A copy has now been obtained and read in full for this project; what it adds about James's company is drawn together above under “Inside His Company — From the Published History.”

• James E. Procarione, Honorable Discharge (WD AGO Form 53-55), recorded Vermillion County, Indiana, 17 Jan 1946.
• U.S. Army Morning Reports (WD AGO Form 1), NARA series 85713825, searched by service number 35 892 966 — Rolls 66, 460, 656, 596, 493, 736, 565.
• “Signal Units in the Normandy Campaign,” ibiblio.org/cizewski/signalcorps.
• U.S. Army Center of Military History: Signals Intelligence in World War II (CMH Pub 70-43) and the “Intelligence in the Field” lineage series.
• Spencer L. French, Not Just Lucky: How Patton's Third Army Adapted to Generate Information Advantage, 1944 (Art of War Papers, Army University Press / Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, 2023) — a free book-length study that names the 3255th Signal Service Company's assignment to XII Corps and reproduces a May 1944 photograph of the 118th Radio Intelligence Company at Dartford.
• D. French, “Gaining the Advantage: How Patton's Unique …,” Military Review, Army University Press, Mar–Apr 2022.
• U.S. Army Center of Military History, official Lineage and Honors sheet, “305th Military Intelligence Battalion” (history.army.mil) — the modern successor of the 3255th Signal Service Company; records the 3255th as constituted 12 April 1944 and activated 6 May 1944 in England.
• SRH-042, Third Army Radio Intelligence History in the Campaign of Western Europe (Signal Intelligence Service, Headquarters Third U.S. Army; wartime SECRET, since declassified by the National Security Agency) — contains the 3255th Signal Service Company's monthly operational reports (Nov 1944 – May 1945), each signed by Capt. W. M. Drozdiak, tracing James's company across Lorraine, Luxembourg, and Germany.
• American Signal Intelligence in Northwest Africa and Western Europe (United States Cryptologic History, Series IV, World War II, Vol. 1; National Security Agency) — the published operational history of the corps radio-intelligence companies, including the 3255th (code-name “Sombrero”) and its assignment to XII Corps.
• The Origination and Evolution of Radio Traffic Analysis: World War II (National Security Agency, Cryptologic Quarterly; declassified 16 June 2008, FOIA case 51505) — an NSA history whose Appendix tabulates every Army signals-intelligence company in the European theater with the corps it served and where its war ended; it lists the 3255th under XII Corps, “ended at Rosenheim, 22/5/1945,” and the 118th under Third U.S. Army, “ended Stephankirchen, 20/5,” and dates the 118th’s arrival in England to 11 January 1944.
• James L. Gilbert & John P. Finnegan, eds., U.S. Army Signals Intelligence in World War II: A Documentary History (Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1993) — reproduces portions of SRH-042 and the Third Army radio-intelligence record.
• Capt. David Mark Olds, WWII memoir (PDF, published by his daughter Dorri Olds) — a firsthand account by an officer of the 3255th Signal Service Company, James's discharge unit.
• New-York Historical Society, David Mark Olds World War II Collection (PR-287) — photographs (France 1944, Germany) and a “Journal of the 3255 Signal Service Company in Europe, 44/45.”
• Lt Col George Dyer, XII Corps: Spearhead of Patton's Third Army (XII Corps History Association, 1947) — the corps' official history; names the 3255th Signal Service Company as one of the two signal units running XII Corps headquarters' message and signal centers, dates its assignment (“effective 6 May 44”), and credits it with the corps' “intercepted intelligence.” The complete edition (Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library digital collection) adds the appendices: the corps' SECRET station lists carrying the 3255th — code name “Habitant” — from England to V-E Day, and the unit attachment record “6 Sep 44 – 16 May 45.”
• Carl K. Nall Collection, Library of Congress Veterans History Project (item afc2001001.38297; LOC video file) — a fellow Technician Five of the 3255th Signal Service Company, catalogued under “3255th Signal Service Company, XII Corps, 3rd Army.” The project transcript now identifies his direct unit confirmation at 00:35:15 and his photo/map discussion at about 01:24:11–01:28:09.