Research Articles
A collection of short articles written about the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate).
Which Company?
By Erik Brun, December 22, 2024
All of us who look through our 99ers artifacts and papers hit the same point of confusion, in my case, Dad was in C Company of the 99th, but I see in his papers that he was in Company L, of the 474th Infantry Regient!
Who is that!?!
Well, the answer is somewhat arcane, so here goes:
“C Company became L Company, when the battalion became the third battalion of the 474th.”
I hope this will help simplify and avoid confusion to new visitors, first time readers, when they find their 99th soldier’s unit mysteriously changed, but didn’t.
A standard infantry regiment in WWII had three battalions and named them by letters from A-M. Its 3rd Battalion had companies: I, (the skipped J) K, L and M, as the weapons company. Whe the 99th joined the the n ewly formed 474th’s regiment, they took the place of their 3rd Battalion, and needed to re-letter their company names accordingly when they arrivedived on 26 January 1945.
The plan for the 99th and an Infantry Regiment Combat Team (RCT) going to Norway goes back to October 1943, whenitbwss approved to FDR. By October 1944 they (SHEAF G-3) needed to decide who was really going in Task Force Nightlight to Norway by unit name.
They couldn’t take a regiment from a division in combat, and no Separate Regiments that did exist made sense. The creative solution and compromise was to use the American Vetrans First Special Service Force to cadre the new 474th Regiment and the 99th to be part of it, instead of attached to it.
The battalion kept the 99th designation deliberately, just as the Japanese-American 100th battalion did when they joined the 442nd RCT. The difference was that they had planned that the 1st Battalion of the 442nd would be left in the states to act as a training unit for segregated Nisei soldiers to provide replacemets to the Japanese American units. The 100th Infantry Battalion was overseas already. So when the 442nd joined the 100th Battalion in Italy, the 100th was able to take the place of the missing 1st Battalion and retain its number and its letters.
Had the 99th not been tied up in the Battle of the Bulge, I assume their orders would have moved them to Normandy Base Section, at Barniveile, at the same time as the Force, and I and willing to bet that they would have taken the place of the new Regiment’s 1st Battalion, preserving the 99th designation, and keeping the A-D companies they had.
Perhaps COL Walker, who formed the 474th, didn’t have that level of detail, or chose to start with A Company on 6 Jan 1945 because that was what he could do with the men he knew, and a vague promise of the 99th’s arrival sometime later was still to be seen.
Close reading of the SHAFE and 474th records may confirm this.