A State of the Union discrepancy

Dachau -- Getty Images

   About 25 years ago, while I was writing my first book, "Tanks for the Memories," about my father's tank battalion, the 712th, in World War II, I turned on the television and saw a news segment about a book and documentary about a tank battalion in World War II.
   "Damn," I thought, "somebody already wrote my book!"
   As it turned out, that wasn't quite the case.
   The book was called "The Liberators," and it was about the 761st Tank Battalion, the first and only all black tank battalion in World War II. It was about how the men of the 761st really were fighting a war on two fronts, against the Germans in Europe and against the racism in the Army and back home. And the latter was more despicable than the former.
   The film was a shoo-in for the Academy Award for best documentary. The producers even brought I think two of the African American veterans to Buchenwald, where they were reunited with a Buchenwald survivor. Was the scene emotional? You bet.
   Only as the Academy Awards approached, there began to be ripples of doubt about its accuracy, especially among veterans of the 6th Armored Division, which is credited with liberating Buchenwald. I remember very clearly one of the African American veterans going on record as saying the 761st didn't liberate Buchenwald (it did liberate a concentration camp called Gunskirchen, and the unit deserves every bit of credit for that). The producers countered this claim by saying the veteran who made it had a piece of shrapnel go through his helmet and maybe it scrambled his memory. The reason that argument struck me is because the first time my father was wounded, a piece of shrapnel went through his helmet and thankfully failed to penetrate his skull.
   Eventually, the producers admitted to "massaging" the facts because Dachau was a much more recognizable (read that: salable) name than Gunskirchen. The documentary was pulled from the Oscars, and a few months later I was able to buy a coffee table type book called "The Liberators" at Barnes & Noble for two or three dollars.
   A year or two later, while I was visiting my brother in Minneapolis, he mentioned that there was a 6th Armored Division reunion going on in town, so I went over to the hotel just to hang out. What I learned was that the veterans of the 6th were livid over the documentary because it implied that another unit had liberated Buchenwald.
   Which brings me to the State of the Union address this week. Trump introduced three D-Day veterans and said that one of them, Herman Zeitchik, went on the take part in the liberation of Dachau. He then introduced a Dachau survivor and said the veteran may have been his liberator, or words to that effect.
   Now, the usual fact checkers were pretty busy, so I did a little fact checking myself.
   Zeitchik was a sergeant in the 4th Infantry Division, which landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The unit credited with liberating Dachau is the 45th Infantry Division. However, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the 4th Infantry Division liberated a subcamp of Dachau called Haunstetten, which was a labor camp for an airplane factory.
   Maybe I'm picking nits. I'm not a Holocaust expert and there probably aren't many 45th Infantry Division World War II veterans left, so I don't know if they would have been offended by the speech. If I were rating the statement on one of those truth-o-meters I'd probably give it a "mostly true." But it's been my experience that the accuracy of anything to do with the liberation of the camps in particular, and military history in general, is important.

Liberators: Fighting on two fronts in World War II

A cemetery Christmas

Dutch History teacher Wiel Goertzen at the grave of Ed Forrest.

   At my office Christmas party, I mentioned to my colleague Bob Montgomery, an avid historian in the city of Bristol, Connecticut, that I’d like to give a talk at the Bristol Public Library. He asked me if I wanted to talk about my books. I said, “No, I’d like to talk about cemeteries.”

   I proceeded to tell him three stories about graves, and I was telling him a fourth when our publisher, Michael Schroeder, happened by and said, “Leave it to Aaron to talk about cemeteries at a Christmas party.”

   “Actually,” I said, “these stories are kind of uplifting.” I pointed out that the grave in the fourth story, that of an unknown German pilot, an “unbekannte flieger,” as it were, was marked by a propeller blade from the Messerschmitt 109 in which he crashed, and that a lady in the village cemetery at Heimboldshausen kept it decorated with dried flower arrangements even though she didn’t know his name. “Isn’t that kind of uplifting?” I asked. He wasn’t impressed.

The grave of the "unbekannte flieger" who, after my visit to Heimboldshausen, with the help of German historian Walter Hassenpflug, was identified as Erwin Bunk.

   But I’m getting ahead of myself. Bob said he always found cemetery stories interesting, as any historian would, so I told him that one of the stories I’d like to talk about was about Johnny Daum.

   In 1994, with the 50th anniversary of D-Day approaching, the newspaper I worked for at the time asked me to find some local D-Day veterans. So I wrote to Stephen Ambrose at the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans and asked for recommendations. He sent me a list of about a dozen.

   One of them was Ed Boccafogli, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne Division. Ed told of an incident that occurred before he boarded the plane to fly across the English Channel. There was a young paratrooper named Johnny Daum, and being that Ed was a little older and more rugged, he took Johnny under his wing. Johnny was about 19 years old, a good looking kid, tow-headed. Ed noticed Johnny staring off into space, and asked him if everything was okay.

   Johnny said matter of factly, “I’m gonna die tomorrow.”

I can still hear Ed quoting himself, ” ‘Ey, Johnny,'” he said, “‘some of us will, some of us won’t, you ain’t gonna be one of ’em.'”

   “Sure enough,” Ed said, “he was one of the first ones killed.”

   When I launched my web site tankbooks.com in 1997, I posted my full interview with Ed. Eventually the transcript of the interview was re-posted on the web site of the 508th Parachute Infantry Division, Ed’s unit, and the anecdote about Johnny Daum’s premonition was picked up in a book titled “The Americans at Normandy,” by John McManus.

   Meanwhile, in Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, a fellow named Tom Stumpner grew up knowing he had an Uncle Bud who was killed during the war. That was all he knew, as his mother would never talk about her brother.
    “Band of Brothers” was released in 2001. I don’t know when Tom saw it, probably not too long thereafter, and he suddenly remembered that his Uncle Bud was a paratrooper. His mother wouldn’t talk about it, but Tom’s interest in D-Day was piqued.

   Then his mother took ill. When she was near death, she gave Tom a box, I don’t know if it was a cigar box or a cardboard box, but in it were letters, snapshots, and other memorabilia from Uncle Bud. It was then he learned Bud wasn’t really his uncle’s name. His uncle’s name was John Daum.

   He didn’t know much beyond what was in the letters. But then he bought “The Americans at Normandy” and discovered the anecdote about Johnny Daum’s premonition. And then, I don’t know if he googled John Daum or Ed Boccafogli, but he discovered my interview on the paratroopers’ web site. He emailed the site and said he wanted to fill out his uncle’s story, and he sent them copies of the letters and snapshots his mother left him.

The American cemetery in Normandy. Photo by Mary Kay Bosshart.

   Fast forward to 2011. Mary Kay Bosshart, who writes a blog called “Out and About With Mary Kay,” took a tour of the American cemetery in Normandy. The tour guide stopped at one grave and told a story.

   In 2007, the guide said, another tour guide found a letter propped up against the cross marking the grave at which they were stopped. The grave was that of John Daum.

   The tour guide in 2011 gave Mary Kay a copy of the letter, which she posted on her blog.

Le 1 november 2007
Dear John,
    We don’t know each other, we know nothing of each other’s lives and even so, I feel I owe you so much. I know nothing of you or so little.
    I don’t know what were your tastes, your hobbies, your favorite music or if you had a girlfriend back home. I don’t know what you loved in life, your too short life.
    John, you’ve been buried here for over 60 years, in this land of France that saw your last days. These last days where you fought for the liberation of a country, a whole continent and a civilization. When I found your picture, I started thinking a lot about you, your face, your pink cheeks, almost the face of a child. Your smile tells me you must have been mischievous, cheerful and full of life.
    Then I felt a deep sorrow because I know that on that day of June 6 th, 1944, when you jumped into the cold black night on the Normandy beach, you must have been terrified. Terrified before the unknown, terrified at the thought of never seeing your family again, of loosing your army companions, of being alone, of death itself. Nevertheless, you survived that historic night and fought for two long days, before you fell on June 8 th.
    I wonder how were the last moments of your life, with who you were. From the bottom of my heart, I hope that you were not alone. Because I know that your comrade-in-arms must have done everything to protect you, reassure you and comfort you.
    I read the letters that were addressed to your parents when you passed away and realized that you were very much appreciated by your army companions.
    Before I leave John, I would like to tell you how much I am aware that your ultimate sacrifice and the one of thousand of men like you has allowed me and all of us, to live in a land of freedom and peace.
    For all of this, I am sincerely grateful. So, I promise you that every time I will travel to Normandy, I will come visit you to honor your memory. I will lay my hand on your white cross, so that you are not alone in the dark anymore. I will keep your memory alive in my heart and I will never forget what you have done for me, for our liberty, for all of us.
    See you soon and may god bless you.

Yvan ----
Belgique

 

   Fascinated by the letter and wanting to know more about Johnny Daum, Mary Kay asked at the cemetery office if they could put her in touch with Yvan, and she asked the web master of the 508th PIR site if she could contact Tom.

   Today, Mary Kay, Tom and Yvan are great friends. Tom has been over to Normandy several times with members of his family, and has even learned a great deal more about his uncle’s experiences and the circumstances surrounding his death.

Out And About With Mary Kay: The John Daum post

   The second story is about a Gold Star mother. It was told to me in 1999 by Erlyn Jensen, who was 12 years old when her brother Bill, who was 19, went into the service. Bill became a major in the 445th Bomb Group and was killed on Sept. 27, 1944.
   Erlyn's mother took Bill's loss very hard. Her two daughters encouraged her to join the Gold Star Mothers, which she did, and that seemed to help considerably. Then one day a family friend who Erlyn said wished to remain anonymous gave her mother an all expenses paid trip to France so she could visit her son's grave in the Lorraine American Cemetery at St. Avold.
    When she told the support group about the upcoming trip, one of the other Gold Star Mothers said, “Mrs. Mohr, I’ll never be able to go to St. Avold. If I give you ten dollars, would you buy some flowers and place them on my son’s grave?”

   “Oh, I’d be delighted to,” Erlyn’s mother said, or words to that effect.

   Now, this was a pretty emotional moment in the story and as often happens, I was getting choked up. Erlyn said, “If you’re gonna cry now, just you wait.”

   Erlyn’s mother went to France and visited the cemetery at St. Avold. She checked in at the office and a guide took her to her son’s grave. He gave her a whistle and said to blow it when she was ready to leave, and he would come and get her.

The Lorraine American Cemetery at St. Avold, France.

    She spent as much time as she needed, and then blew the whistle. When the guide returned, she showed him a piece of paper with the number of the other Gold Star Mother’s son’s grave.

The guide looked at the paper and said, “Mrs. Mohr, he’s buried right across the walkway from your son!” So she was able to come home and tell the other Gold Star Mother that your son and my son are neighbors.

   Over the years I’ve posted a lot of stories and transcripts from my interviews. On June 3, 2010, I received the following email:

Dear sir,
    My name is William Goertzen and I’m a teacher at a college for 12 till 17 year olds. I teach History and each year we spent about 10 weeks on World War Two. One of our fieldtrips is to Margraten, an American Burial site for soldiers killed in action; our school adopted the grave of one of these soldiers. With our classes we visit the grave once or twice a year, we pray for this man and we put some flowers at his grave in order to honor him and all those who died for the freedom of Europe and the Netherlands.
    Since October 2007 i have seen searching for information on Edward L. Forrest, 1Lt of the 712 th Tank Batallion. All I know is that he was killed in action on 3rd April 1945 and his ASN = O1017955. Now our idea is to make a wall inside the school with information and photos of Ed Forrest, so the War becomes ‘touchable’ for our pupils; it becomes more ‘real’ if they can look at and read about this lieutenant. We also hope to honor this particular soldier by creating this wall in our school, at
a place where pupils pass every hour/lesson.
    My problem is that I cannot seem to get any further on the internet. All trails lead to dead ends. I’ve sent forms with requests to the Department of the Army Administration section in Virginia, I’ve filled in a form of the NARA in Missouri, but no news yet. A mister Paul Wilson of North Carolina helped me on my way; Aparently Ed Forrest lived in Stockbridge, Berkshire County, MA., but all my internet searches lead to dead ends.
   In all of your interviews with veterans of 712th TB, I only once came across the name of 1LT Ed Forrest, mentioned by one of the veterans.
    Perhaps You could help me on my way, so I could learn more about his death but especially about the man behind the name; he also has or had family; I’d like to obtain information and pictures in order to make my remembrance wall and to use it in order to point out to 12 till 17 year olds that WW2 must never be forgotten.
    I hope to hear from you very soon and I would like to thank you already for reading my mail.
Yours sincerely
William Goertzen, teacher at Carbooncollege in the Netherlands.

   I didn’t know how to say “mother lode” in Dutch, but that is what Wiel had struck. Although my father’s time in combat was barely long enough to get a cup of coffee and two Purple Hearts, he managed to bond with a fellow lieutenant, Ed Forrest, who was killed near the very end of the war. As I recorded and preserved the stories of the veterans of my father’s battalion, I always asked veterans of my father's company about Ed Forrest. As Ed was an original member of the battalion while my father was a replacement, I heard many more stories about Ed than about my dad.

   And then in 1995, I decided to see if I could find Ed’s family. Within a couple of phone calls, I was on the line with Ed’s brother, Elmer Forrest. I went up to Lee, Massachusetts, and interviewed Elmer. I subsequently interviewed Dorothy Cooney, who had a secret romance with Ed and never married. I learned Ed had a falling out with his father and moved in with an Episcopalian minister when he was 14, and that the minister left a diary which I was able to read at the Stockbridge Library.

   Elmer Forrest had passed away, but I was able to put Wiel in touch with David Forrest, Elmer’s son, and David sent him a family photograph, which, along with some material I sent, was placed in a display case in the school.

The Ed Forrest display at Carbooncollege in the Netherlands.

   There you have it: three stories about cemeteries, each uplifting in its own special way, and each of which I had a role, however small, in preserving. If you’d like to know more about Johnny Daum, please visit the web site of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

   If you’d like to read or hear more, please explore the pages of my new web site, aaronelson.com, and check out the great prices in my eBay store.

Man Overboard: The Sequel

Lou Putnoky

   Lou Putnoky called me on Saturday afternoon. Lou is 92 years old, maybe 91. A Coast Guard veteran of World War II, he was a radio operator on the USS Bayfield, the flagship of the Utah Beach invasion fleet. He is not in the best of health, having had at least two serious heart attacks, and is living with his daughter since his wife passed away a few years ago.
   Lou gets sentimental, or nostalgic, and calls me from time to time. We have this routine, somewhere between Abbott and Costello and Hillary and Donald. He thanks me profusely for all I've done to preserve veterans' stories, and I remind him that all I've done is flip the switch on a tape recorder, and there would be nothing to preserve if it weren't for veterans like himself. Nothing will ever convince him that I'm not one of the greatest contributors to preserving the history of World War II, and nothing will ever convince me that he isn't one of the greatest storytellers to come out of the war, although his voice these days is not as strong and compelling as it used to be.
   In 1994 I wrote to Stephen Ambrose and asked if he could provide me with the names of any D-Day veterans living in New Jersey that I could interview for a special section the newspaper I worked for was planning to do in conjunction with the 50th anniversary. He sent me a list, but Lou's name wasn't on it.  One of the men on the list, Dr. Vincent del Guidice, who had been a  pharmacist's mate on the USS Bayfield, suggested that if I wanted stories I should call his old shipmate Lou.
   Which I did. Lou's wife, Olga, answered the phone and I told her I'd like to interview her husband about his experiences on D-Day. Before she called Lou to the phone, she said I should make sure to ask him about one particular story, because it was one he almost never talked about.
   That story is included in my book "A Mile in Their Shoes" and in my audiobook "The D-Day Tapes,"  but here it is in Lou's own words, if you don't mind listening to an audio file of it. This is an audiobook blog, after all.

Man Overboard

   That was recorded in 1994. Lou went on to tell many other stories in that three-hour interview and we've kept in touch over the years. I was able to bring him to an event at the Yogi Berra Museum one day so he could get his picture taken with Yogi, with whom he served on the Bayfield. In that very first interview he made excuses for Berra never attending a Bayfield reunion, Yogi was busy with other obligations and all that. At the time I had no idea how much it would have meant to the veterans if Yogi had made an appearance at a reunion.
   Usually Lou calls on days of significance to veterans, like Memorial Day or Veterans Day, or the anniversary of D-Day, when he gets especially sentimental. So I wasn't expecting him to call this weekend, but I was glad I was at home. Sometimes he leaves rambling, sentimental messages on my answering machine.
   His voice was weak, and he said there was a second part to the story about the "man overboard," which was the title I gave to his interview in "A Mile in Their Shoes." Then he told me the story. When he finished, I put my phone on speaker, flicked the "on" switch of my digital voice recorder, and made him tell me the story again.
   Following is a transcript. There were a couple of places where I couldn't make out a word, so bear with me if something doesn't quite make sense.

"

   Aaron, I called you just to thank you for your articles about all the fine servicemen that you've written about, and the one that you wrote me about was the Duffy situation where he fell off the battleship Nevada and we helped search for him but we couldn't find him. So then I reported back to our flagship, and they're all waiting for us, they thought that we'd got in serious trouble.
   "No," I says, "we were delayed because the Nevada had a man overboard and they wanted us to make two turns around the ship and said sorry, we couldn't find him, and we dashed back here because we were late." And what happened, as I was talking to the officers, I see a radio man, a friend of mine, about 15 or 20 feet away. I say "Sparks, the next time you talk to the Nevada, ask them who it is and where he's from." And everybody looked at me real crazy, and then I even felt embarrassed. And what happened was, I was just so embarrassed about it, with all the shooting going on I says how in the hell can I ask, it seemed like a stupid question.
   What happened was, after I don't know how many weeks later, when we were out in the Pacific, Sparks -- wait, [I'm getting ahead of myself]. That evening, Sparks was eating, and he says, "Hey, Lou, the Nevada called and I was talking to them and I asked them where the guy was from that went overboard and they couldn't find him. And they told me he's from New Jersey. A town by the name of Carteret. And his name was John Duffy." And I said, "Oh, my god, I went to grade school with him," and I said "I know his parents." And we made the sign of the cross, and we said a little prayer, a silent prayer between us. And we continued to eat, but both of our eyes welled up a little bit." But it's, that happens.
   And then so many weeks later, I find out that, as we were coming back from chow we were going out to the Pacific to invade Iwo Jima, and I was coming back from chow and I looked ahead of me and it was about 5 o'clock in the evening, and I see Sparks going, and I just wanted to talk to him again, so I had a little bit of a problem trying to catch up to him, and finally I got to the end of the corridor and I opened the hatch, and there's a good 50-foot opening over the Number 3 hold before you come to the aft five-inch gun, and all of a sudden, nobody's out there. Sparks disappeared. And I looked. I looked. And I don't know what, something made me, believe me, it had to be the man upstairs, He says take a fast look, and I looked, the deck was wet, and there's a section where there's no lip, the side of the ship where we lower the ship's crew and the cargo nets, and I saw a little bit of a skid mark. I said that skid mark, it had to be Sparks' shoes as he slid right through there when the ship rolled to the opposite side, and I yelled "Man overboard! Man overboard!" Because I was convinced, I didn't see him fall overboard but I was convinced he went overboard, because he couldn't have disappeared any other way because believe me, I knew every inch of that ship. And then I ran back to the after lookout and I told him, "Report to the bridge man overboard." We were doing 23 knots, we were trying to outrun, we could outrun a sub at 23 knots so that's what we were doing. It took a few minutes and I ran back to the after room where we have all the garbage for the day and four guys were standing there shooting the bull, and I says, "Give me a hand, we have a man overboard, I've got word from the OD [officer of the day], I lied, I could have got in serious trouble, but the good Lord told me I should do this. I said, "Throw all the garbage overboard," because I wanted, if they did send a boat out, they could follow the garbage trail and verify the position, that they're close by. And sure enough, we did find him, and Sparks told me afterwards when I spoke to him, and I never told him, I never used the term "I saved your life," I was just glad to see him. And he was glad to see me. I could have gotten in serious trouble but I didn't care. I said, "Somebody up there wanted you to live. So I don't know how good a family you have but let me tell you the good Lord was on your side." Make sure that you find a wife and have children because He went way out of his way to get you," and I remember him telling me that was the first time he really was convinced that the Earth is round because when he fell, he saw our ship just disappear, and that ship is 40 feet above his head. "And as I was in the water I saw the ship just going down, I saw the name of the ship, USS Bayfield, PA33, and just going down as if it was sinking, going right over the horizon. I just can't get over that."
   And now all of a sudden, we never directly approached each other to say, our paths didn't, we just didn't run into each other aboard ship we were so busy fighting the damn war, we forgot to thank each other. I wanted to thank him just for being there and making me feel good whenever I felt, God came down and said I helped save this man's life. And it's a grand feeling. All I know is by his nickname Sparks. I don't know his real name. Maybe somebody will read it in a book and they'll be able to get in touch with me."

Lou Putnoky in 1992

A Mile in Their Shoes at Amazon.com

 

The D-Day Tapes on eBay 

Lou and Yogi Berra

A child in London - 1940

Margie Hoffman    This is a guest post. On Friday, I've been invited to speak to the fifth-grade class at Hunter College Elementary School, my alma mater. I thought it might be a good idea to read the pupils a story from my original web site, tankbooks.com. I launched the site in 1997, and the following year I received an email from Margie Hoffman, asking if I would like to post a story she wrote on my site. She also sent a follow-up story which is on the site. I've lost touch with Margie, so, while the essence of the story may be old hat to my handful of British Twitter followers (okay, maybe it's two handfuls), if anyone knows of Margie's whereabouts could they please get in touch with me? A Child in London -- 1940 Margaret Hoffman  ©1998, 2009 Margaret Hoffman This was written by Margie Hoffman, who was a toddler in London during the Blitz.    My war started when I was about three months old. My Dad had been called up into the army and my mother had been living in a small apartment in East London. The German planes had already been flying over London and dropping bombs, mainly at night. After one raid, my mother took me in the pram, to post a letter to my Dad to tell him that we were all right. While she was away, an undetected land mine exploded and the apartment was just brick dust so she returned to her father’s house in the dock area of London.    This was an unfortunate move because the next thing the Germans bombed was the dock. They bombed it by day and night until even the water burned with the contents of the warehouses tumbling into the water. My grandfather had forbidden all his "children" -- all of whom were grown up with families – to go into the large warehouse down the road because he said it was a death trap. It’s funny what you do, though, to escape from noise and to get away from the scream of bombs. People crammed into the large warehouse, someone brought in a piano and local teachers and others organized singing to take people’s minds off the bombs. The warehouse received a direct hit and over 200 people were killed by blast. Others died not directly as a result of the bomb hitting them but they were crushed to death by the huge, heavy walls of the warehouse.     Apparently we were three days and three nights in an underground shelter in Granddad’s garden. Crowded together, the family were not too pleased when the local police knocked on the door and made them take in two more people who had been a mile away from their home when the air raid began, especially as they were none too clean. After the dawn broke and everyone crawled out of the shelter, we were not only covered in dust but covered in fleas from our two uninvited guests!     Granddad said if we stayed where we were we would not survive another round of bombing like that. He had already bought a small plot of land in Essex and built what he called a wooden holiday home there – it was not so much a holiday home as it was a two-roomed shed! But the garden was pleasant to look at, which was a good thing as we ended up with eight of us living in the wooden house and the men camped in a tent in the garden.    Eventually we sorted ourselves out. Poor Mum had to live with her mother-in-law, who was hardly a sweet-tempered person, Dad’s mother, although born in England, had Irish parents and she was prone to be bad-tempered and a bit of a drama queen. She made matters worse by telling Mum all the bad news of the war, and her prediction of what was going to happen.    Mum moved out and rented a small bungalow, which got us away from Nan but made it more difficult for Mum when the air raids started. By this time she had had another baby and when the siren went, my Granddad Hickman (who was kind, sweet and gentle – how on earth did he choose my grandmother for a wife?) would come round and carry me to the big underground shelter in his house, while Mum would carry the baby.    The shelter was called an Anderson Shelter and was built half in the ground and half on top. The top half had curved, corrugated iron sheets, and you piled lots of earth on it and hoped for the best. It tended to be damp, and if it rained you all had to lift your feet up because the water seeped in from underneath. Grandmother Hickman had chosen the house just after the war started because of the large garden and peaceful neighborhood; unfortunately she failed to notice it was quite near the railway lines and in a direct line with the Shell Oil Refinery five miles away. Consequently, Germans coming in to bomb the oil refinery would miss and others would continue to have a go at the railway. I don’t know how old I was when we sat there listening to German planes coming over the shelter on their way to London and we then had to stay there until they came back. Of course if they missed their target they would jettison their bombs before they were over the Thames Estuary.     One day my uncle was home on leave. He was only 19, an aircraft engineer, and he was stationed in some quiet backwater. He was fascinated by the planes and my grandmother was having hysterics. "Come inside the shelter! They will see you." Uncle was a fidget and wanted to see the planes coming back so he made us all a cup of tea and we sat there until the familiar drone came nearer and nearer. Suddenly I realized, he didn’t know about the railway lines! I didn’t say anything; everybody else was getting ready with their hands over their ears when suddenly four bombs cascaded on to the railway lines now gleaming in the moonlight. It was so near the whole shelter lifted up and then went down. My uncle dived in head-first in a state of shock and our tea went everywhere.     At one stage we used to go to sleep with our clothes on. We wore what was called a siren suit, which was kind of like a child’s stretch pyjamas so that we could get into the air raid shelter quickly and not get cold.     One night we went to bed at about 8 p.m. – we were cold and coal was rationed and bed was the warmest place. I slept with my mother and she would read in bed. It must have been winter because it was dark – we had thick lined curtains so that the light would not show through and in a raid you just kept the lights off anyway. Suddenly the air raid siren went; I was half asleep but my mother was up and into the back room for my baby sister (I say to her now, "I don’t know why she chose you first to get into the shelter.").     By the time it was my turn large lumps of jagged shrapnel were clattering on the top of the shelter and the ground, my sister was crying, and my mother was frantic to get me, but I didn’t care: I was warm and probably tired anyway. Suddenly the railway lines got hit again, the house shook , two windows broke, then my mother came rushing in. In the explosion the vibration had shaken open the wardrobe door, my mother walked straight into it and walked around holding her head. I laughed and laughed! It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film. She was so mad, she clouted me round the head and said, "See if you think that’s funny."    We rushed into the shelter, she a nervous wreck and nursing her head and my sister screaming. Suddenly I looked up and saw in the sky a long object with fire coming out of the back of it, but really quite close. "Isn’t that wonderful?" I said.     "Yes, so wonderful, that is what is going to kill us all if you don’t get inside." The V1 was certainly a marvel of German technology but we all knew that as long as you heard the engine you were safe; once it cut out, its descent was rapid and it could take out six houses. -----     My children asked me what our food was like – pathetic is the answer. We grew potatoes and tomatoes, picked berries and swapped things with neighbours. We were rationed so severely that even now I don’t eat meat as my ration had to go to my sister who used to be ill with asthma.    After the war when we came off ration, I had gotten used to not eating meat so I never bothered. For a family of three we would have four ounces of meat a week – two if it had been a difficult time for the supply boats coming in. England as an island depended on overseas help for food. If the U boats were active we all went without as most of the food went to our army. Two eggs a week or else that dreadful egg powder.     I always thought our food rationing was pretty dreadful until I met my husband who was a child in Holland during the war and who really knew what starvation meant.    As for our little family, Dad survived D-Day and went on with the Middlesex Regiment through France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and through great good fortune came back to us. How did the war affect him? Well, he couldn’t stand noise, we never had the radio on very loud, he would never listen to a memorial service. He would never go swimming. Years later I learned on D-Day he was dropped too far out and the vehicle he was driving was nearly submerged; he negotiated debris, burning vehicles and bodies to get his crew onto Sword Beach and then off into Normandy.     While his officers were having a meeting near him, mortar fire sped over the trees killing them all in front of his eyes. His confidence never returned; he could never make a decision and was left with stomach ailments that plagued his life. He looked after us both when my mother was ill immediately after the war and our bedtime stories were Operation Overlord and the time he just avoided a mine in France. We knew all the generals and battle plans. We often spoke of old battles but he would never return to France with me. He died of a heart attack at age 69 but his wartime stories are etched in my mind forever. Margaret Hoffman  Priceless. (Well, actually it's $19.95 at amazon) Please subscribe to the Oral History Audiobooks email newsletter to keep up with the latest developments and specials. Web Form Generator

The Angel of Bastogne

Renee Lemaire

   With Memorial Day and June 6th just around the corner, I've added a thirteenth interview to my collection "The D-Day Dozen: Conversations With Veterans of the Longest Day, the Huertgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge."
   The interview is with Dr. John T. "Jack" Prior, whom I met while I was teaching journalism during a one-semester fellowship at Syracuse University in 2005.
   The book is currently available for Kindle and will soon be available in a print edition.
   It also includes a new preface.

Preface to the D-Day Dozen: Conversations With Veterans of the Longest Day, the Huertgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge

   “You’d think we were going on a three-day pass,” Chuck Hurlbut said. “Guys start shaving, combing their hair. One guy’s putting on cologne. I and a lot of my buddies had a goatee, so we spent several minutes making sure that was just right.”

   The men of the 299^th Combat Engineer Battalion were not going on a three-day pass. They were getting ready to be sent down the cargo netting draped over the side of the Princess Maude, a converted channel steamer, into landing crafts destined for Omaha Beach in the predawn hours of June 6, 1944.

   Hurlbut, a young Pfc. from upstate Auburn, New York, took out some photographs of his family and looked at them. And he re-read General Eisenhower’s letter to the troops, the one that begins “You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.”

   “I’m looking at this stuff,” Hurlbut said, “and my buddy comes up behind me. He had on the ugliest, gaudiest, most outlandish necktie I ever saw in my life, and he was going to wear it on D-Day. We chuckled a bit, and we thought about all the things we went through, and what we’re gonna go through together. We planned a trip, what we’re gonna do when we hit Paris.”

   Jack Prior was a 28-year-old battalion surgeon in the 10^th Armored Division. When the Battle of the Bulge broke out, he was in Noville, Luxembourg, about five miles northeast of Bastogne.

   “It was like an old-time Western,” he said when I interviewed him in Manlius, New York, in 2005. “They were fighting in the streets. All of a sudden I began to see head wounds, I saw belly wounds, chest wounds, lots of fractures. We were overwhelmed with casualties. I began sending them back, but all of a sudden we had no transportation. My halftrack was hit, so I had no way to get people back to the hospital. And the casualties kept increasing. They blew the second story off the building. We were crawling on the floor to treat the patients.”

   Soon the 101^st Airborne Division arrived in trucks, rather than by parachute, and they were able to get Dr. Prior and his staff, along with the wounded, into Bastogne.

   Prior set up an aid station in a garage, but was unable to heat it during the brutal cold of the European winter.

   “I kept getting casualties,” he said, “so I went to a three-story building. I had maybe 80 patients. I took two buildings. In one building I had the most severely injured cases, and in the other I had the walking wounded, the fractures, and the psycho cases, which we called combat fatigue in those days. And at this time, I’ve told the story many times, two Belgian nurses appeared. They were in their twenties, and they asked if they could help. And I want to tell you, we needed help. They were welcomed. One was Renee Lemaire, and the other was Augusta Chiwy.”

   “My dear good Ewald,” the letter begins, “It is Friday morning, half past eight. I want to hurry and write you a nice letter. I received your dear letter yesterday and was very happy to hear from you my love, and to have heard what you did Easter Day. But now I know that you have seen the great lovers on the screen and yet you didn’t mention a bit about love in your letter. What do you do in your visits to the movies? Do you sleep while the picture is on? With whom do you usually go out, or do you go out alone? Dear Ewald, when you write, please don’t complain about your food openly. Just because your officers receive better food than you do, remember, you’re the dumb one when you start to get hotheaded. Therefore, my sweetheart, don’t write about these matters openly. ...”

   The letter was found in a German gun emplacement during a trip to Cherbourg by the captain of the USS Butler, a destroyer that took part in the D-Day invasion. It was translated by a member of the Butler’s crew and a copy was given to Felix Podolak of Garfield, New Jersey, one of the veterans I interviewed in 1994.

   As the C-47 carrying 18 members of Company I of the 101^st Airborne Division’s 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment droned toward the coast of Normandy, Pfc. Leonard Goodgal looked out the open door. “I could see the coast,” he said as we sat in the Heritage Diner in Hackensack, N.J., where we talked for more than two hours amid the clinking of coffee cups one afternoon in 1994. “It was a beautiful night. We went over the coast. All of a sudden, Christ, all hell broke loose. There was anti-aircraft fire, and fire. We could see it on the ground, in the air. And the plane got hit. It got hit in the tail and went into a dive. I just stood there hanging onto my static line thinking I was gonna get killed. And it pulled out.”

   The plane was hit again, and one of its wings was on fire. Goodgal was one of only four men to make it out of the plane before it plummeted to the ground and crashed. Two of the four men  landed on top of the cliffs. Of those two, one was captured and spent ten months as a prisoner of war; the other, a lieutenant, was injured but eventually made it back to the 101^st and was evacuated. Goodgal and Raymond Crouch of Richmond, Virginia, landed in the water.

   “I started to swim, but when I stood up I was in less than a foot of water,” Goodgal said. “The other guy was calling me, he was saying ‘Is that you, Sam?’ Samuel is my middle name. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’

   “He said, ‘Where are we at?’

   “I said ‘I hope this is the White Cliffs of Dover,’ because I saw those cliffs.”

   Goodgal and Crouch were not at the White Cliffs of Dover. They were at the base of Pointe du Hoc.

   All night long, Goodgal recalled, “the bombers were dropping 2,000-pound bombs on the cliffs. And the Navy was shelling the cliffs.”

   As dawn began to break, he said, “we see these boats coming along the cliffs. I said, ‘Hey, maybe they’ll come in and get us.’”

   Leonard Lomell, a sergeant at the time, was in one of those boats, which were full of Rangers whose mission was to scale the 80-foot cliffs and silence the big guns that were supposed to be on the top, but which were actually some distance inland.

   As the Rangers began climbing the ropes that they fired to the top of the cliffs with grappling hooks, with Germans shooting down at them and tossing hand grenades over the side, they were joined by Goodgal and Crouch, who would fight with the Rangers for the next three days until the battle stabilized and they were able to look for their own unit. Lomell, meanwhile, and a fellow sergeant would lead a patrol that discovered four large coastal artillery guns, which they were able to sabotage with superheated thermite grenades while the gun crews were receiving instructions at the far edge of the field.

   Subsequently wounded, Lomell was in the hospital when he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military honor. Goodgal said he had a hand-written note from the Rangers’ commander, James Rudder, recommending him for a Silver Star, but when he found his unit, his officer tore it up and asked him where the hell he’d been. In retrospect, Goodgal said, he couldn’t blame the officer because his company suffered heavy casualties in the first few days of the invasion.

   As Chuck Hurlbut stepped out of the landing craft, he took his rifle, aimed it at a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach, and fired. It was the only shot he fired all day. He grabbed a rope attached to a rubber raft filled with explosives and began pulling it toward the beach. The explosives were to be used to demolish obstacles. As he pulled, the raft seemed to get heavier. He looked around, and saw three bodies on the raft, two of which he recognized as members of his company. He resumed pulling when suddenly there was an explosion that knocked him senseless. The raft had taken a direct hit. When he came to, probably no more than a few moments later, he saw a badly wounded member of his company, Joe Milkovic, laying on the beach, at risk of being overtaken by the incoming tide. Milkovic was bigger and heavier than Hurlbut, so he planted his feet in the sand, grabbed the wounded man by the shoulders – engineers know these things, after all – and pushed himself backward with his feet. He was making slow progress when he saw a tank on the beach. A tanker jumped off and helped him pull the wounded man to the relative safety of a dune.

   These are some of the people you’ll meet in the pages of this book as they tell their stories to me. Some of them you may be familiar with. Leonard Lomell was interviewed by Tom Brokaw in “The Greatest Generation.” Chuck Hurlbut was interviewed by Dan Rather for a documentary on CBS about D-Day. The Belgian nurse Renee Lemaire was portrayed in “Band of Brothers,” although in the mini-series she has a romantic attachment to a medic in the 101^st Airborne Division when in actuality she was in the aid station of the 10^th Armored Division, and she was already engaged. In an account of his experiences in Bastogne, Dr. Prior describes how when supplies were dropped by parachute, Renee would leave her duties and run into the back yard hoping to retrieve a parachute so she could use the silk to make her wedding dress, only to find that a soldier had beaten her to the prize. On Christmas Eve of 1944, a German plane bombed the building in which the two nurses were tending to the most severely wounded patients. Augusta Chiwy was blown through the plate glass of a window in the kitchen and survived. Renee ran into the basement and the building collapsed around her. After finding her body, Dr. Prior wrapped it in the white parachute she had hoped to use for a wedding dress.

   “I’ve made the dune now,” Hurlbut said. “I’m in one piece. And then you sit there and you look at all the chaos and the devastation. Guys floating in the surf, dead, wounded. The wounded screaming. And you’re sitting in the dune and you’re looking back at it, out into the water, and there are ships burning, smoking. This must be the day of doom, Armageddon. If this is war, I don’t like it. All the beautiful plans we had made and practiced, all gone for naught. All confused, chaos. This is not the way it was supposed to be, so you had no way of coping with it. This isn’t the way we trained, or scheduled. So that affected you. You didn’t know what to do. You had no leaders, no nothing. Just pure chaos. And then you see all these dead guys, buddies. That’s hard to cope with, the first time, to see death. I don’t care who you are. And when you’re a close personal friend, boy, it hurts. You thought you were tough, brave and gung-ho, boy, it gets you.

   “I said to myself, ‘I’m all alone now,’ at the dune. We may have been the first ones to have reached that far. There was nobody around. I had a hell of a time getting a medic for Joe. They were all out in the distance.

   “A lot of guys would be okay, then they’d see a wounded buddy, they’d run down in the tide, they’d get it. So once I got the medic and I felt he was taken care of, I said this is no good, I’ve got to try to find some of my people.

   “While I’m sitting there, about 60 yards away comes a guy staggering along the beach, staggering, foundering. His backpack is tattered, his clothes are in shreds. One arm is dangling. He turns and half his head is blown away. And something told me I know that guy, something about his stature, his walk, I know this guy. And he turned toward me and looked at me, and through all that gore and all that tattered clothing, I saw the tie.

   “I don’t think he knew who I was or anything. I wanted to cry out to him; I couldn’t. I didn’t have any voice. I was frozen. I couldn’t move out. He just staggered away.

   “Aw, Jesus. I never wanted to be a soldier. It was the last thing in my life I would have wanted to be. But like I told you, Pearl Harbor changed my opinion. It was a lot of fun, these exercises, these hikes. Hey, a great bunch of guys, having fun. I didn’t know what being a soldier was until that day.”

Order "The D-Day Dozen" for Kindle for only $2.99

- - -



Priceless. (Well, actually it's $19.95 at amazon)

Please subscribe to the Oral History Audiobooks email newsletter to keep up with the latest developments and specials.

Web Form Generator