Part 1

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Provided he remained in the 28th Field Artillery Battalion for the duration of his service (something which may be determined by accessing his records, as u/PimentoCheesehead stated above) your grandfather fought as a member of the 8th Infantry Division during the war. Each US Army infantry division contained four field artillery battalions as its complement of divisional artillery; three battalions were armed with 105mm howitzers and were utilized in direct support of the division’s three infantry regiments. The fourth battalion was armed with 155mm howitzers and provided general support to the entire division. The 28th Field Artillery Battalion was armed with 155mm howitzers, and would have fulfilled this role, firing to augment the fires of the other three battalions or firing on targets designated by the division artillery commander.

The 8th Division was a Regular Army formation activated at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, on 1 July 1940. The 28th FAB was initially activated as the 28th Field Artillery Regiment before being reorganized and reflagged in October as the 28th FAB; in June of 1941 it furnished cadres for the 43d, 45th, and 56th Field Artillery Battalions, all of which remained with the division and constituted the remainder of the division’s artillery complement. Beginning in September of 1941 the division participated in the Carolina Maneuvers; following the attack on Pearl Harbor it carried out coastal patrols from North Carolina to Florida. Returning to Fort Jackson in late March of 1942, it furnished cadres for the 77thand 80th Divisions as well as HQ Company, XII Corps, during the summer before participating in the Tennessee Maneuvers that fall. It spent the winter and early spring of 1943 at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and in March began six months of desert warfare training in Arizona.

The 8th Division moved to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in November of 1943. It went overseas the following month, arriving in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the second week of December following an uneventful trip across the Atlantic. The division pursued an intensive training program during its stay, focusing on small unit tactics and conducting one third of all its evolutions at night. The division was visited by General Eisenhower in April of 1944, and earned praise from Lt. General George Patton following a demonstration of an attack on a fortified position.

The division arrived in France on the 4th of July, landing over Omaha Beach and organizing inland at Montebourg. On 8 July, D+32, it went into the attack under the control of Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, which was fighting toward La Haye du Puits. With the 28th and 121st Infantry Regiments in the line the division attacked through the exhausted 82d Airborne Division, in the line since 6 June, and drove forward 1,000 yards against stiff resistance. Over the next six days the division slugged its way to the north bank of the Ay River, its first objective, where it halted on corps order. It held its positions for the next eleven days, a period over which division artillery did the bulk of the offensive action. Ordered to take to the offensive once again as part of Operation COBRA, the division spearheaded the VIII Corps attack on the right flank of the American line, crashing into the German 91st Division in an effort to hold the enemy in place while Major General J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps attempted to break through German lines. Successfully penetrating the front of the 91st Division, the 8th Division’s attack progressed well enough to allow the 79th and 90thDivisions to follow it through the hole and attack east and west. As the left wing of the German Seventh Army disintegrated in the face of COBRA the division took up the pursuit and drove down the coast, hooking into the Brittany peninsula and dispersing to accomplish several tasks at once during the second and third weeks of August. Remaining under the control of VIII Corps, the division played a primary role in the reduction of the port city of Brest before clearing the Crozon Peninsula, control of which influenced use of the port. Having successfully accomplished this mission (capturing Lt. Gen. Herman Ramcke, the commander of the Brest garrison in the process) the division moved to the Luxembourg-German border and took up defensive positions along the Our River.

The 8th Division remained in this quiet section of the line for the duration of October and the first two weeks of November. The third week of the month saw the division transferred to V Corps to replace the shattered 28th Division, which had nearly been destroyed in savage fighting around the town of Schmidt in the Hürtgen Forest. On 19 November 1944 the last elements of the division settled into the line, and two days later jumped off to seize the Hürtgen- Kleinhau ridge. The attack ran into a stalwart defense, leading Combat Command R of the 5th Armored Division to be committed on 25 November in an effort to increase the combat power of the attacking Americans. Finally, on 27 November, the division began to find success, and it seized Hürtgen the following day. The capture of Hürtgen precipitated further advances; CCR/5th AD was again committed, and over the next ten days the road net and atop the Hürtgen-Kleinhau and Brandenberg-Bergstein ridges was secured. Following the successful conclusion of these offensive actions the division remained in place, conducting limited attacks throughout December. It did not participate in the Battle of the Bulge, although it was transferred to VII and then XIX Corps as the boundaries of those commands were shifted to better manage the battle occurring to the south. The month of January passed without major action as the division held its position and limited offensive action to routine patrolling and harassment of the enemy to its front.

On 5 February the division returned to the control of VII Corps, and on 23 February it attacked across the Roer River as part of Operation GRENADE, driving over the river to seize the southern half of the city of Düren before continuing on to seize Eschweiler. It, along with the rest of VII Corps and indeed the entire First US Army, continued to advance, and on 7 March it reached the Rhine River south of Cologne, having fought its way through several fortified villages during the week prior. The following day it was placed in corps reserve and pulled off the line for six days before taking over 1st Division positions along the Rhine south of Cologne. On 22 March it relieved the 104th Division, assuming responsibility for the Rhine from just north of Cologne to the northern edge of Bonn. In the last days of the month the newly-arrived 86th Division took over the 8th Division’s sector, and the latter moved across the Rhine into positions held by the 1st Division along the south bank of the Sieg River.

The United States Government maintains military service records. You can find information at https://www.usa.gov/military-records on how to obtain copies of those records from the National Personnel Records Center, but you won't be able to do that any time soon. They've limited operations due to Covid-19. Genealogy and ancestry websites sometimes will have military records, but the best ones are pay services and there's no guarantee they will have any useful information.