Frank Soboleski
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Army
Frank Soboleski served in World War II in the European Theater. He served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper in 1944-45.
He saw combat in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Mr. Soboleski was born in 1925 in a rural area near International Fall, Minnesota.
Source: Minnesota Historical Society, Minnesota’s Greatest Generation project. A portion of the information concerning Mr. Soboleski is included below. For a complete oral history interview with Mr. Soboleski, we encourage you to visit http://stories.mnhs.org/mgg/resources/artifac....
------- Frank Soboleski, born in 1925, grew up on the family farm outside of International Falls. He spent plenty of time out of doors as a young person, and is sure that, as a soldier, this experience served him well. An Army paratrooper during 1944-45, he saw heavy combat in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.
“I felt my life as a hunter and a trapper had a lot to do with my survival. Because you’d be walking in the woods with a rifle, and an animal’s smart; they’re on their home ground. Just like the Germans—they were there before we were. They were well settled, dug in, waiting for us to come. It’s the same thing, you just hear a flicker of something, you just freeze and get down and go around and find them. All that came to my mind when I was over there. That flashed back from when I was a kid, hunting rabbits and then deer. You’ve got to think like they do, in their world. . . . Most of that comes from when you’re a kid, and you’re chasing wild game. If they can see you out in the open, they’re not going to be there when you get where they were. That’ll be it—that’s where they were. But you can go behind these bushes, get upwind from them. That’s the way it was over there.”
An excerpt from Thomas Saylor’s book Remembering the Good War: Minnesota’s Greatest Generation.
