It's one thing to laugh at your own jokes, which I've been guilty of more times than I care to admit. It's another to read for perhaps the hundredth time the preface to a book you wrote, and still get choked up. Such is the case with my preface to the Kindle edition of "Tanks for the Memories." So for anyone who hasn't read it ...
Preface (Tanks for the Memories, Kindle Edition)
When I was a child, I loved
listening to my father’s stories about the war. He made the act of getting
wounded sound funny. “I had never been in a battle,” he said, “so I stuck my
head up to see what was going on.”
Among other things, he
said, a bullet penetrated his helmet and some tissue paper wadded inside saved
his life.
He was wounded on July
28, 1944, in Normandy, and again on December 10, in Germany. I was born five
years later to the day, on December 10, 1949, the second of his five children.
Maurice Elson died of a
heart attack in 1980. In 1987 I found a newsletter addressed to him from the
712th Tank Battalion Association. It chronicled the ordinary, but hardly
mundane, lives of the battalion’s veterans. There were grandchildren, impending
retirements, visits, surgeries, recollections of battles fought and buddies
lost, and a reminder that nobody was growing any younger.
I wrote to the
newsletter’s editor, Ray Griffin of Aurora, Neb., informing him that my father
passed away and asking him to put a notice in the next newsletter saying that
if anyone remembered Lieutenant Elson would they please contact me.
Ray called Sam
MacFarland, a veteran of A Company. Sam wrote and said my father was in his company and while he
didn’t remember my dad, the battalion was having a reunion in Niagara Falls in
a couple of weeks. If I came, he would take me around and see what we could
find.
I went, and I met three
people – Jule Braatz, Charlie Vinson and Ellsworth Howard – who remembered my
dad. The stories I only vaguely remembered – a name here, a place there –
suddenly came back to life. Not only that, but because I was my father’s son,
and my father had been one of them, the veterans welcomed me as if I were a
part of a large, extended family.
I missed the 1988
reunion, at which the battalion’s monument was dedicated at Fort Knox, but I
went to the 1989 reunion with a tape recorder.
Some of the stories I
recorded over the next two decades are presented in this book. I never was in the military, and
have never been shot at, so except for some brief introductions and
explanations I chose to let the veterans tell their stories in their own words.
The stories are presented both chronologically and thematically, with a chapter
about food, for example, sandwiched between chapters about two different
battles.
The 712th Tank Battalion
landed in Normandy on June 28, 1944, three weeks after D-Day, and was on the
front lines in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia for 11
months. Although it was an independent tank battalion, it was attached almost
exclusively to the 90th “Texas-Oklahoma” Infantry Division, which suffered the
third-highest rate of casualties of any division in the European Theater of
Operations.
The 712th fought in the hedgerows of Normandy and the
breakout at St. Lo. It helped encircle the German 7th Army at the Falaise Gap.
It dashed across France with General George S. Patton’s vaunted 3rd Army. It
crossed a flooded Moselle River in November of 1944 and the Saar in December,
and the Moselle again and then the Rhine in March of 1945. It fought in the
Battle of the Bulge and the Siegfried Line. It guarded the treasures of the
Merkers Salt Mine and liberated the Flossenburg concentration camp.
Of the 1,235 men who
passed through the battalion’s ranks, 101 were killed in action. Its members
were awarded one Legion of Honor, three Distinguished Service Crosses, eight
Croixs de Guerre, 56 Silver Stars, 362 Bronze Stars, two Presidential Unit
Citations, and 498 Purple Hearts. And of the medals for valor, those were only
the incidents that were witnessed and properly written up.
As I am interviewing Bob
Hagerty in a hallway at the Harrisburg, Pa., Sheraton during the battalion’s
1992 reunion, one of the tankers’ wives emerges from the hospitality room, with
its well-stocked bar, and passes by. She leans toward the microphone and says a
little giddily, “Every year they fight the war all over again, and every year
it comes out the same.”
Now, as its youngest
surviving members approach 90, the battalion no longer holds reunions. But when
it did, for a few days twice a year, these
veterans did indeed fight the war all over again, clambering in Sherman
and Stuart tanks over fields and crossing rivers on pontoon bridges, sliding
precariously along ice-slicked mountain roads, and bringing back to life, for a
few flickering moments, the memories of buddies who are buried in the
cemeteries of France and Holland and Belgium, or whose remains were repatriated
into cemeteries all across America, or whose ashes remain in the fields and
orchards where they burned inside their tanks.
Shortly after I began writing
“Tanks for the Memories” nearly two decades ago, I visited the battalion’s
monument in the memorial garden of the Patton Museum. It was a sobering moment.
I had interviewed so many tankers and heard so many stories that I thought I
knew a lot about the history of the 712th. But when I started going through the
names on two bronze plaques of the battalion members killed in action, I
recognized less than half of them.
“Somebody should write a
book about an outfit that was on the front lines for what, 298 of the 311 days
it was in combat?” Andy Schiffler said when he called me in April of 1995. Andy
was on the toll-free phone line I used to market the first edition of this
book. He was unaware of the book, but saw the number in the newsletter and
wanted to update Paul Wannemacher, the battalion association secretary, on his
health.
Which wasn’t pretty. Andy
said he went into the hospital for cancer surgery. Two hours after he came home,
he said, his wife died. Then his doctors found a tumor in his head. They
operated, and he lost his sight. Eventually, 28 percent of the sight came back.
I couldn’t take much
more.
“What company were you
in?” I interrupted.
“D Company,” he said.
“Were you in the horse cavalry?”
“Oh, yesss.” He sounded
medicated, understandably. I asked him where he lived.
“Chicago.”
I asked if I could pay
him a visit.
“Sure,” he said. “Call
before you come, to make sure I’m still alive.”
When I visited him three
weeks later, we spoke for six hours over two days, on May 6 and 7, 1995. He
told me about the draft board that was convicted of taking bribes, and about
learning to drive a truck while working for a moonshiner during Prohibition. He
told me about the cavalry in the California desert, about the time Art Horn
fell off his horse and accidentally shot the animal in the neck (the horse
lived, but more about that later), about the light tank he drove in combat from
Normandy to Czechoslovakia, about the Silver Star he was awarded for racing out
under fire to his parked tank and driving it back to the house where his crew
was staying. And he told me about the member of his platoon who was killed by
friendly fire.
His son Andy Junior, who
is about my age, came over with one of his two teenage sons. Andy Junior
remarked that his father never told him a thing about the war.
In researching this book,
if you can call listening wide-eyed to a bunch of old men – old men, hell, I’m
almost as old now as they were when I started doing this – and women talk about
a time when they were young and adventurous, if you can consider that research,
I found that although some of the veterans were reluctant to talk, many opened
up and told stories that were so detailed they might have happened yesterday
instead of 45 to 60 years before.
Sometimes a veteran’s
wife sat in on an interview, and heard things she never heard before. Such was
the case with Joe Bernardino of Rochester, N.Y. I looked Joe up in 1994 because
he figured in a story told by Sam Cropanese: It was early in the morning and
Sam was outside his tank having coffee when an artillery shell suddenly burst
in the air and rained shrapnel on him and several infantrymen. Sam wound up in
a field hospital minus a piece of his jaw. Joe, who was inside the tank, was
wounded in the same barrage and wound up in the same field hospital. Sam’s face
was bandaged and his jaw wired shut, and Joe didn’t recognize him. Sam said
“Jw-Jw-tsm-Sm!” – loosely translated, “Joe, Joe, it’s me, Sam!”
Five decades later Joe
got choked up when he recalled how guilty he felt that it took him those few
moments to recognize Sam, because as crewmates in a tank they were closer than
brothers.
Sam and Joe were wounded
in the Falaise Gap, a significant event in the battalion's history when the
90th Infantry Division, to which the battalion was attached, took part in the
encirclement and destruction of a large part of the German 7th Army. While much
of the battalion was on a ridge firing into the valley in which the Germans
were trapped, the Sherman tanks of A Company were guarding a field through
which the Germans might try to escape. During the night, the tankers could hear
movement in the woods. Edmund Pilz, the driver of Sam and Joe’s tank, was
biting his fingernails. Joe told him to stop because it was making him nervous.
They had words, Joe recalled, and he decided he would apologize in the morning.
Shortly after 10 a.m., an
armor-piercing shell penetrated the tank in front of the driver's compartment,
killing Pilz instantly. Joe never got the chance to apologize.
"Those things stay
with you," he said.
Joe Bernardino died on
March 14, 1995, of pancreatic cancer. Otha Martin was going to send me the
names and positions of all of the crew members in each of the five tanks that
fought the 6th SS Mountain Division in the village of Pfaffenheck, Germany, on
March 16, 1945; however, just before Christmas in 1994, he died of a stroke
while working on his ranch in Macalester, Okla. Andy Schiffler died on March 5,
1996, barely 10 months after I interviewed him. Clifford Merrill, who served in
World War II, Korea and Vietnam and who upon being wounded in Normandy handed
his Thompson submachine gun to tank commander Morse Johnson and said “Take it
into Berlin,” died peacefully at his home in Fort Collins, Colo., on June 10,
2008. He was 94 years old.
To paraphrase Sam
MacFarland, who in 1987 introduced me to the 712th Tank Battalion and who died
of cancer the following year, time is succeeding where Adolph Hitler failed.
I don't know what it's
like to experience combat – the fear, the fatalism, the grief, the suspension
of morality, the numbness of feelings of which I've often been told. Nor have I
had any formal education as a historian. But I hope with this book to preserve
a chapter of history that was headed for a hundred different graves. It is a
chapter about young men who laughed and loved, who were cocky and feisty and
spirited, who drank hard and fought harder – and that, some of them would tell
you, was even before they met the enemy.
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