Honoring the Men of the 362nd

Pvt. Egon Josef Salmon

HQ Company, 2nd Battalion · later HQ Company, 1st Battalion, 362nd Infantry
Born 4 June 1924, Rheydt, Germany · Died 7 September 2022

Egon Salmon's road to the 362nd Infantry was unlike almost any other man's in the regiment. He was born in Germany to a Jewish family. After the rise of the Nazis—his father arrested during Kristallnacht and briefly sent to Dachau—the family fled. In May 1939, Egon, then fourteen, sailed with his mother and sister aboard the MS St. Louis, the ship of refugees famously turned away from Cuba and the United States and forced back to Europe. They found refuge in Belgium and finally reached the United States in April 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded Belgium, settling on Staten Island.

Just a few years later, Egon was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent back across the Atlantic to fight the regime that had driven his family out. He joined the 362nd Infantry in Italy in September 1944, serving in the Headquarters Companies of the 2nd and then the 1st Battalion through the mountain fighting of that winter and spring. After the war concluded, Egon was transferred to the Military Intelligence Services in Austria to serve as a translator for those interrogating many of the highest ranked Nazis who had been captured.

His complete service record, assembled from discharge papers, V-Mail, morning reports, and family documents, is part of this project's research files.

S/Sgt. Clarence Mervin Carlos

Company B, 1st Battalion, 362nd Infantry
Born 23 February 1922, San Francisco, California · Died 22 June 1998

Clarence Carlos grew up in San Francisco, the son of Antone and Mary Carlos. At Balboa High School he led the soccer team and was coxswain of the crew team, and after graduating he worked in the Oakland shipyards as an acetylene burner before entering the Army on 24 November 1942. He served in Company B as an expert rifleman and later as the company's Operations NCO, rising to Staff Sergeant.

On 20 September 1944, in the regiment's assault on the Gothic Line below Mount Gazzaro, he was wounded by an artillery shell, suffering a concussion and shrapnel wounds to the left side of his head. Company B's morning report for that day records the shelling that wounded him, and the report for 30 October records his return: after barely a month in the hospital he rejoined the company at Marradi and served through the push into the Po Valley. His awards include the Purple Heart, the Good Conduct Medal, and the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbon with three battle stars, one for each of his campaigns: Rome-Arno, North Apennines, and Po Valley. He spent his final months in uniform recovering from jaundice at the convalescent hospital at Camp Lockett, California, and was honorably discharged on 27 October 1945.

After the war he worked for twenty years as a tile contractor in Walnut Creek, California, then began a second life as a commercial fisherman out of Lummi Island, Washington, fishing the Pacific Northwest and Naknek, Alaska. He later settled in Carmen, Idaho, on the Salmon River. He died of cardiac arrest on 22 June 1998, at 76, on a fishing trip to Naknek with his son and grandson, and his ashes were scattered in the Salmon River. He is enrolled in the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor.

Profile and photo contributed by Nicole Ostermeier, from his service records and obituaries.

Pvt. Wesley Vietti Karna

Company F, 362nd Infantry
Born August 1922, Painesdale, Michigan · Killed in action 24 September 1944

Wesley Karna left the copper-mining town of Painesdale, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, in early 1944, bound for Italy. He reached Company F as a replacement only days before the regiment's assault on the Gothic Line. He was killed near the Futa Pass on 24 September 1944, one month past his 22nd birthday, most likely by an artillery strike on his position; his company came off the line for good within hours of his death. His name appears in Company F's morning report for that day, preserved in this archive. His mother, Ida, was notified in October. She could barely speak of him afterward, and his body came home to Michigan in 1948.

Nearly eighty years later, Wesley's story resurfaced in the same woods where he fell. Manuel Noferini of Gotica Toscana, an Italian association that preserves the memory of the Gothic Line fighting, found a canteen cup in a foxhole near the Futa Pass with "KARNA" scratched into the bottom. The find led back to his family in Michigan. In 2023 they traveled to Tuscany, helped place a memorial stone on the spot where the cup was found, and carried the cup home. A stretch of highway running from his hometown toward the cemetery where he is buried is now named the Private Wesley Vietti Karna Memorial Highway.

Profile and photos contributed by Brad Uren, Wesley's great-nephew, from Army records and the family's research.