Colonel Donovan P. Yuell, at left
(The perspective distorts his height but can't diminish his stature.)

So many queries regarding Colonel Donovan P. Yuell have been directed by search engines to this site, it would seem to beseem Private First Class Wendell H. Hall, Serial No. 19153139, Sir! to be helpful and accommodating and upload this email response to one of the requests for information.

Subject: Donovan P. Yuell
Date: Thursday, 26 January 2006 15:54:22 -0600
From: Wendell Hall info@nuspel.org

This is no doubt as straight as the story can be told. After all, this great grandfather has retold it... well, yes... two or three times.... How in World War II he stood side by side with Colonel Donovan P. Yuell on a sub-zero December 1944 morning in an abandoned Alsatian house overlooking a broad snow-covered valley not far from the approaches to the Maginot Line. Not an occasion for idle thoughts, but stiffly standing there as if at attention, Hall numbly only managed to focus on and wonder about the whereabouts of the renowned colonel's riding crop, without which he never for a moment appeared before the troops, dutifully flicking it now and again against his highly shined-up boots.

Rising to the unique, once in his lifetime occasion, shoulder to shoulder, side by side with greatness, private (first class) Great Grandfather quite rightly felt miffed when Colonel Yuell failed to graciously hand along his binoculars for a look-see so that PFC Great Grandfather, could also survey the situation and co-cogitate with the colonel our next move against the boches (a French term derived from tête de caboche, cabbage or kraut head—an etymology which Great Grandfather could only speculate about at the time since he had had only high school Spanish back then and you could ask for a better clue from a brother... er sister... Romance Language to boche than Spanish repollo or col, as in coleslaw). For somewhere out there beyond the range of Great Grandfather's government issue wire-framed eyeglasses the boches no doubt were preparing to shell the hel- (Great Grandpa doesn't curse) out of the two of them if they had been aware of their whereabouts and what one of them, at least, or perhaps both was or were cogitating.

"What was Great Grandfather doing there?" you might very well ask. Well, first of all, he got to that house first... the unforeseeable consequences of war, hard at work as usual, seeing to it in this instance that he, Great Grandfather, would have the sense to combat frostbite by coming upon and entering into that house. How was he to know that the colonel would come driving up (that is driven up by his fearless driver) right up to the very front of the front? Colonel Donovan P. Yuell was a courageous son of a whatever aspersion the troops were casting on their own sex back then. You never saw any other colonel or even a general right up there. And that’s a fact.

Great Grandfather would have had a fire burning to give the colonel a warm reception except that at the first sign of smoke the boche 88s, the most accurate and feared artillery of the war, would have given him a really warm one, blowing the house and him to bits of thither and yon. And that wasn’t the last time Great Grandfather saw the indomitable colonel up close. Which was when he (the colonel) drove by in a liberated Mercedes-Benz staff car, or rather, was driven by by his fearless driver. That was near Innsbruck, Austria and they had come a long, long way. Great Grandfather failed to note whether Yuell was flicking his highly shined-up boots with his riding crop, his focus being entirely on how grand the colonel looked in that grandest of all boche vehicles.

The meta tag for this page reads as follows: Private First Class Wendell H. Hall had the opportunity to observe Colonel Donovan P. Yuell from the beginning of his basic training in Texas (411th Infantry Regiment, 103rd Infantry Division) until the end of World War II. The colonel had extraordinary success in establishing great esprit de corps in his regiment and was highly admired by all. He had certain little foibles which the troops hugely enjoyed and, on occasion, jocularly mimicked.