Leadbelly,,,I have a feeling that your Uncle and my Step Dad probably ran into each other..My step dad was a tank driver for Gen Patton from Southern Italy through Berlin and if you ever read anything about the "Red Ball Express" they were the truck drivers that fought long and hard to get supplies/ammo to the battalion when they had advanced into shooting distance of a Panzer Division in Germany and were 'sitting ducks', out of ammo and fuel, until the trucks arrived just in time for the battle, which we won...
Like your uncle, Pop never talked a lot about the war unless I asked specific questions...But we used to go to quite a few of the movies in the '50s that were made about it, including the one called "The Red Ball Express"...One time I asked him what the hardest part of the war he encountered and he replied that it was when they were advancing on a town where the German regular army had retreated and tied members of the Hitler Youth Corp to the roofs with barbed wire and left them with a machine gun to delay the Allied troops and he had to blow up the building with tank fire to allow the advance, knowing that there was likely a 12 year old kid on the receiving end...