Bookends

I was browsing through a folder of photos for my author web site when one of them stood out. It’s a photo of the second of two plaques on the 712th Tank Battalion monument in the Memorial Garden at the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

The plaque contains the names, in alphabetical order, of 50 of the 100 members of the battalion who were killed during World War II.

What struck me immediately was that the first and last names on the plaque were like bookends: Lt. Wallace Lippincott, Jr.; and Pfc. Billy Paige Wolfe.

I could go through the panel and tell you a story about many of the names engraved on it, and those I don’t recognize you can probably find mentioned in “A Tank Gunner’s Story,” by the late Louis Gruntz, Jr., who traveled his father’s combat route with his dad and recorded many stories of B Company. And there are some names that are a mystery, like Doye Smith, whose great-nephew Brian Smith knows only the date and location of his great-uncle’s death but has searched fruitlessly for further details.

But back to Wally Lippincott and Billy Wolfe. These are two of the tankers whose stories, along with that of Ed Forrest, whose name is on the first of the two plaques, have meant the most to me.

Wally Lippincott was killed at Sonlez, Luxembourg, on January 14, 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was killed along with his tank driver, Quentin “Pine Valley” Bynum, whose name is on the other plaque, and his loader, Frank Shagonabe.

One day I received an email from Chris Bynum, who inherited his uncle Quentin’s dogtags. I went out to Springfield, Missouri, and interviewed Chris’s dad, James Bynum, Pine Valley’s brother. The tankers who remembered Pine Valley assumed that that was the town he was from, but there is no Pine Valley in the Ozarks where he grew up. There is, however, a resort town named Pine Valley in the mountains around San Diego near where they trained, so it was likely he had a girlfriend there during his days in the horse cavalry.

Frank Shagonabe was a Native American. I never met any of his kin but there was a deeply moving article in the Muskegon Chronicle in 2009.

A few years ago Vern Schmidt, a veteran of the 90th Infantry Division, returned from Europe with a canteen. His friend Norbert Morbe, a militaria collector, found the canteen in the woods in Belgium. It had Lieutenant Lippincott’s name etched into its side. He asked Vern to try and locate Lippincott’s family. I was able to put Vern in touch with Ted Nobles, Wally Lippincott’s great-nephew, and with the help of the Philadelphia Inquirer we were able to locate Elizabeth Pitner, Wally’s widow, who had remarried and was 92 years old.

The other bookend is Billy Wolfe. In 1992 I interviewed Maxine Wolfe Zirkle and Madalene Wolfe Litten, twin sisters who were 16 years old when their brother Billy, who was 18, was killed. Their mother, who never knew the circumstances of Billy’s death, saved everything from his short life, including an essay he wrote in high school.

Pfc. Billy P. Wolfe

“If I were to be blind today,I would want to go off by myself in the mountains, climb to the highest cliff, and look out across the valley at the towns, farms and farmhouses.

“I would want to see the squirrels running and leaping from one walnut tree to another, and the birds flying.

“I would like to see the deer run and jump swiftly and gracefully and leap across the fences, and lie in a tree that leans across the water and watch bass laying under the rocks and dart out after a fly.

“I would go through the house from one room to the other picturing each piece of furniture, every corner and everything, in my mind.

“I would like to see all my sisters, brother and parents together as we were, and picture each as they look for future reference.”

I’ll go through the other names on this and the other plaque at a later date, but each of these bookends could inspire a book by itself.

widows and siblings

Elizabeth and Wally Lippincott, 1944

   One of the most moving scenes in the movie "We Were Soldiers," adapted from the book "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" by Joe Galloway and Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, about the battle of Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, is the scene of a taxi driver at Fort Benning delivering a telegram at Fort Benning to the wrong address.

   Fifty-eight thousand young Americans were killed in Vietnam, and more than 400,000 died in World War II. Add the number of Russians, Germans, other nationalities, civilians, and the figures boggle the mind. Every one of those 400,000 and all those others had a mother, a father, many had brothers, sisters, some had children. My sister Arleen had a friend from childhood whose father, several years ago, was in his nineties. "You should talk to him," my sister said. So I paid him a visit and asked about his brother. He declined to talk about him. All these years later the pain was still intense. 

   Tom Stumpner of Eagle Lake, Wisconsin, had an uncle who was killed in the war. He only knew him as "Uncle Bud." His mother would never talk about her brother. When she was near the end of her life, she gave Tom a chest with all of "Uncle Bud's" memorabilia: snapshots, letters, papers. Only then did Tom learn his uncle's real name, John Daum. Tom sent copies of the letters and photos to the web site of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, John's outfit, which posted them online as a way of keeping John's memory alive.

    Over the years, I've interviewed a number of women who lost their husband in World War II, as well as brothers and sisters who lost a sibling. I've taken eight of those conversations and turned them into my newest audiobook, "Widows and Siblings." 

   To say there is anything universal in eight conversations out of hundreds of thousands that could have been conducted would be a mistake. Even the eight differ greatly in their circumstances and the types of stories that are told. Although it would be safe to say that each of the deaths in combat deeply affected many people. That goes for victims of gun violence today, all you have to do is read news accounts. 

   And while there are moments of deep poignancy in the conversations, there are also moments of great humor. Like the time Erlyn Jensen was talking about a trip her mother took to see her son's grave in the cemetery at St. Avold, France. I got all choked up at one point in the story and Erlyn said, "If you're gonna cry now, just you wait!" I've always been touched by the humor in that warning. 

   Erlyn and Sarah Schaen Naugher, whose husband was killed in the same air battle as Erlyn's brother, were being stand-offish to each other at the 2008 reunion of the Kassel Mission Memorial Association. Sarah felt it was worse to lose a husband in the war than it was to lose a brother, but try telling that to someone who was 14 years old and whose big brother was her hero when he was killed. The two women have since made up and are great friends. 

   These are the people you'll meet in "Widows and Siblings": 

  

    James Bynum: James' older brother, Quentin "Pine Valley" Bynum, was the tank driver who gave my father a lift to the front in Normandy, and who later was killed during the Battle of the Bulge, 

  

   Elizabeth Pitner: Elizabeth and Wally Lippincott were married for only eight months, five of which he was overseas before he was killed at Bras, Luxembourg, on 14 January 1945. Mrs. Pitner remarried, but she never got over Wally and said she believed he would have wanted her to remarry.  

Elmer Forrest

   Elmer Forrest: The only name I remembered from my father's stories was that of Ed Forrest, a fellow lieutenant who was killed. Ed was from Stockbridge, Mass., so one day in 1994 I called information and asked if there were any Forrests in Stockbridge. I got the phone numbers of three Forrests in Lee, a neighboring town. Elmer was the first one I called. I asked if he was related to an Ed Forrest who was killed in World War II. After a moment's silence, he said, "He was my brother."

   Myron Kiballa: Myron had just gotten out of the hospital after being wounded in Italy when he learned in a letter from his family that his brother Jerry had been killed in Normandy. "It was like I was in the twilight zone," he recalled. "That was the worst letter I ever got." 

  

   Maxine Wolfe Zirkle and Madeline Wolfe Litten: The identical twin Wolfe sisters were 16 years old when their brother Billy Wolfe, 18, was killed in Pfaffenheck, Germany, on 16 March 1945. 

  

   Sarah Schaen Naugher: Sarah's husband, pilot Jim Schaen, was killed on the Kassel Mission of 27 September 1944. 

  

   Erlyn Jensen: Erlyn's brother Bill, who was known to the 445th Bomb Group as Major Don McCoy, was the command pilot on the Kassel Mission when his plane was shot down. 

  

   Kay Brainard Hutchins: Kay had one brother who was a prisoner of war and another who was missing in action, so she joined the Red Cross and went overseas as an air club hostess. Her brother Bill survived the war but Newell Brainard, a co-pilot on the ill-fated Kassel Mission, did not. 

   Some of these interviews are included in other sets, but this is the first time they've been together in one group, and several of the CDs are not in other sets.

   Check out my eBay listing for "Widows and Siblings" 

The telegram scene from "We Were Soldiers":

Aunt Libby and the Canteen

Elizabeth "Libby" Lippincott Pitner with Lt. Wallace Lippincott Jr.'s canteen.

In 1971 I spent nine months in Paris. A buddy of mine from college was there, too. He was going to be the next Hemingway and I was going to be the next Fitzgerald. It didn't work out that way, but I have no regrets. Whenever my friend got upset with a Frenchman, he'd say "My uncle liberated you!"

While I was in Paris I courted a young woman of a different nationality. Wanting to appear worldly I suggested that we go to the Louvre. So we're walking from gallery to gallery and there are all these famous paintings. All of a sudden there I am standing face to face with the Mona Lisa.

"Wow," I said. "It's much smaller than I imagined."

"Oh, you Americans," the young lady said. "You think everything is as big as Texas."

For our next date, hoping to rehabilitate my knowledge of art, I suggested we go to the Rodin Museum.

We walk through the first gallery and out into the yard, and there in front of us is a working model of the Thinker. It's only about two feet tall. And I thought, gee, that's much smaller than I imagined it would be. I didn't say a word.

Which brings me to earlier this month, when I drove from New Britain to Canonsburg, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh, to see an artifact from World War II, which I imagined would be much bigger than it actually was. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last December, I called Vern Schmidt, a veteran of the 90th Infantry Division who's in one of my books. I needed some information about his brother, who was a prisoner of war, for another project I was working on. We talked for half an hour and I was about to hang up when Vern said "By the way..."

By the way, Vern and his wife had been to Europe where they have a friend named Norbert Morbe. Norbert is an avid collector of World War II artifacts. You can find him on Facebook, where his page is like a virtual museum. A few years ago he found a canteen in the woods with a name, "Lippincott, Wal," and a serial number etched into its side. Lieutenant Wallace Lippincott was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, but Norbert's efforts to find anyone in his family so he could return the canteen proved fruitless. So he asked Vern to take the canteen home to Fresno, Calif., and see what he could find. He, too, wasn't having any luck.

Lieutenant Lippincott's Canteen

 My father didn't know Lieutenant Lippincott, but they were both in A Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. I had researched the incident in which Lippincott and two members of his crew were killed on Jan. 14, 1945, near Sonlez, Luxembourg.

Lippincott's widow married a Navy veteran and became Libby Pitner; hence the difficulty in locating her. About ten years ago the lieutenant's  great-nephew, Ted Nobles, was researching his family's genealogy and  contacted me. I sent him some information. I still had his email, but it was no longer active. Then I found Ted on Facebook.

Vern sent Ted the canteen. Columnist Dan Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer covered the story -- the Lippincotts had lived in Swarthmore, Pa. -- and Ted said he met Mrs. Pitner many years ago but didn't remember her last name or even know if she was still alive. At the end of the article, he said, "Aunt Libby, where are you."

Libby Pitner had three children by her second marriage, to Craton Pitner, who has since passed away. The day the article came out, she answered the telephone and heard "Grandma, you're on the front page of the Inquirer."

Ted Nobles planned to drive the canteen out to his great Aunt Libby, but the harsh winter and car trouble kept him from making the trip from Delaware, so he finally FedExed it. Vern Schmidt decided to fly from Fresno to Pittsburgh so he could meet Aunt Libby and see her with the canteen, so I agreed to drive out and meet them as well.

I met Mrs. Pitner in the lobby of the assisted living facility where she lives, and we went up to her room to talk. There on the bed was what seemed to me to be a pretty small box, about the size an iPad or a hardcover book might come in.

"That's the canteen?" I said. "I imagined it would be bigger."

Nevertheless, there was no putting a size on the amount of closure touching the canteen brought to Elizabeth Pitner. She and Wally were only married for 11 months, but she never got over his loss. She had never received any of his effects.

Libby and I talked for almost four hours. She had an album with photos from their courtship and marriage -- they spent their honeymoon in Atlantic City during a nor'easter that tore the canvas top off their Fort Phaeton. She attended a reunion of the tank battalion in 1998, when the unit's monument was dedicated, containing her husband's name and those of 97 others who were killed in action -- two more have since been added. Sam MacFarland, who was her husband's platoon sergeant, sent her a blow-up of a photo showing Wally's head sticking out of his hatch. The picture was taken in Bavigne, Luxembourg, a few days before he was killed.

 

Lt. Wallace Lippincott, Jr. (top)

 

Lt. Lippincott's tank (front) going into the Battle of the Bulge.

She also kept every letter Wally wrote, and read to me from a few of them, removing them randomly from their envelopes. Wally was a Quaker, and in the letters he addressed her as "thee." I wondered if he spoke that way with his crew, but I doubt it.

"Today I saw a peculiar sight," he wrote from England, "and that was two white English girls walking down the street with two Negroes. There is no racial discrimination whatsoever over here, and the blacks are accepted. Some of the Southern officers almost blow their tops when they see this, but all have been warned by higher command to do nothing about it."

"By the way," the letter concluded, "happy 11th anniversary."

"Only 11 months," Libby interjected.

"And just think, soon it will be one year," the letter continued. "I sure wish I could be home for it. Never before have I been homesick, but I sure have a case of it for thee now. Hoping to see thee soon. Lots of love and kisses, thy husband, Wallace."

In a letter dated Jan. 6, 1945, Wally wrote: "It is a good feeling to know that we are building up a little nest egg in the bank for after the war. I can think of no greater pleasure than that of buying a place of our own and going round furnishing the house.. Dreams such as these make this mess seem worthwhile. If I didn't have something to come home to, this war would seem pointless to me. I suppose that is a selfish attitude to take but I almost consider it a personal fight against those who have deprived me of doing the things a man deserves most: having a home and a family to provide for. ... Lots of love and kisses, thy loving husband Wallace."

Wally was killed eight days later. "That may be a letter I got after he died," Libby said.

Libby had another photo which is prominent in the battalion's history. It shows tank driver Bob "Big Andy" Anderson, a farmboy from Illinois,  butchering a cow and handing out steaks.

My ears almost popped out of my head when Libby read a passage from a letter written Jan. 4.

"Another day has gone by without much of importance happening," Wally wrote, "with the exception that I am so full of steak I can hardly maneuver."

Big Andy butchers a cow.

(An earlier post about Lieutenant Lippincott's canteen)

Lieutenant Lippincott's Canteen: A Christmas Reunion

Lt. Wallace Lippincott Jr.'s canteen

"By the way."

I was on the phone with Vern Schmidt, a World War II veteran who lives in Fresno, California, for about a half-hour a couple of weeks ago and was about to hang up when he said "By the way."

By the way, what?

By the way, Vern said, on his last visit to Europe, his friend Norbert Morbe, who lives in Luxembourg and is an avid collector of World War II artifacts, gave him a canteen. The canteen had a name scratched onto it, "Lt. Wal. Lippincott, 712 Tank Bn.," along with a serial number and what appears to be the word "Sauer Kraut." Norbert knew that Lt. Wallace Lippincott Jr. was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and asked Vern to try and locate his family so the canteen could be returned. Vern had no luck searching the Internet. Did I know of a way of contacting the family?

Fifteen years ago I tried to locate Lieutenant Lippincott's family. I found a record of a donation made in his memory to the University of Delaware by his widow, who remarried and had a different last name. At the time I contacted the university's alumni association, they contacted the widow and she sent me a photo which I've since misplaced. I've long since lost touch with her.

By the way, did I mention I'm an email pack rat? Five years later Ted Nobles contacted me and said he was Lieutenant Lippincott's great-nephew and was working on a family genealogy. I sent him copies of some of the interviews I did with veterans of Lippincott's platoon. But Ted had moved and changed his email since then. Then I found him on Facebook.

I put Ted in touch with Vern, they had a long talk, and Ted said he was thrilled about the discovery. Vern sent him the canteen, and Ted planned to surprise his family with it on Christmas Day.

From left, Ted Nobles, Michelle Nobles Rutter, Lt. Lippincott's great-niece, and her son Oliver.

This photo arrived on Christmas Day, along with a note from Lieutenant Lippincott's great-niece.
The photo shows "my brother Ted, myself and my younger son Oliver," she wrote. "I am the first child born unto our mother Martha Wallace Zeallor who was the niece of Wallace Jr. My brother Ted is the second child . Martha Wallace Lippincott was my grandmother and only sister to Wallace Jr. As you know our mother and grandmother have passed and this gift is so appreciated. I was just talking about Wallace last night and then my brother shows up at my house to give me the news about the canteen. I got goose bumps and it was a great feeling to have glided my fingers across the etching of his name he engraved himself in the battle. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."
 Now look at who's getting goose bumps.
 Incidentally, my father and Lieutenant Lippincott were both replacements in A Company of the 712th Tank Battalion, and although they never met, they had a connection. My dad, Lt. Maurice Elson, joined the 712th in Normandy. He told his sergeant, Jule Braatz, that he trained as an infantry officer and knew little about tanks but it showed up on his "MOS," or service qualifications, because he attended a tank demonstration. Braatz gave my father a tour of the tank and told him to be careful getting down. My dad jumped off the tank, twisted his ankle, and wound up in an aid station. His platoon was sent on a mission without him.

The next day he hitched a ride to the front in the bog, or bow gunner's seat, of a tank in another platoon. When the platoon stopped, he got out of the tank and was wounded by shrapnel.

Braatz told me this story at the first reunion I attended, in 1987. He said the story was second hand because the driver my father hitched a ride with, Quentin "Pine Valley" Bynum, was later killed.

Lieutenant Lippincott joined the battalion a couple of weeks before the Battle of the Bulge. His driver the day he was killed was Pine Valley Bynum. Bynum and the tank's loader, Pfc. Frank Shagonabe, also were killed.

Two of the tank's crew members escaped unscathed, physically at least. Roy R. La Pish, whose nickname was Frenchie, of Pottstown, Pa., stayed in the Army after the war. His name can be found on the Vietnam Wall. For Hilton Chiasson of Thibodeau, La., that was the fifth tank he had knocked out, according to Phil Eckhart, another member of the platoon. Chiasson was so shaken that he was relieved of having to serve in a tank. One day I tried to look him up and I reached his widow, who said in a thick Cajun accent that her husband never spoke about the war.

Shagonabe was a Native American from northern Michigan. In an event eerily similar to the return of the canteen to Lippincott's family, an article appeared in the Muskegon Chronicle a few years ago. It told how Shagonabe's effects were sent to his employer because no family member could be found, but eventually someone was able to locate Shagonabe's half-brother. The article had wonderful photos of the reunion. The half-brother, Harlin Shagonabe, has since passed away.
 

Lt. Wallace Lippincott on the left in the lead tank, Bavigne, Luxembourg, going up into the Battle of the Bulge, a few days before he was killed. This tank was knocked out two days before he was killed. Lippincott was awarded the Silver Star for returning to the tank and putting out the fire. He was killed on Jan. 14, 1945, in Sonlez, Luxembourg.

Memorial Day 2013: Pine Valley Bynum

Quentin "Pine Valley" Bynum

   My fellow Stuyvesant High School alum Mitch Corrado asked if he could post a brief excerpt from "The Armored Fist" on his Facebook status. I told him I'd be honored.
   The selection he chose was about the reaction of Quentin "Pine Valley" Bynum's father to his son's death in combat.
   This got me to thinking about Quentin Bynum with Memorial Day only a couple of days away, not that I don't think about him often. At the very first reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion I went to, in 1987, I met Jule Braatz, the sergeant to whom my father, a replacement lieutenant, reported, and Braatz told me a story about Bynum giving my dad a lift to the front in the "bog," or bow gunner's seat, of his tank.
   The story was third hand, Braatz said, because Bynum was later killed. So Bynum had told Braatz and Braatz was relating the story to me. That seems like it would be secondhand, whereas me relating the story now would be third hand.
   Upon arriving at the front, late in July of 1944, Bynum's platoon came to a halt and my father, to the best of my knowledge, wanted to get out of the tank to look for the platoon to which he was assigned, which Braatz, the platoon sergeant, had led into the battle.
   Bynum told Braatz he urged my dad not to get out of the tank because there was still artillery or mortar shells coming in, but my father insisted on getting out of the tank and was wounded almost right away. He never did find the platoon, and Braatz would later receive a battlefield commission. My father would not return until November.
   Shortly after launching my original web site, tankbooks.com, I received an email from Chris Bynum, Quentin's nephew. Chris inherited his uncle's dogtags and grew up with Quentin as his hero. I emailed Chris back and asked if any of Quentin's siblings were still alive. As a result, I went to Springfield, Missouri, and interviewed James Bynum, who was about five years younger than Quentin.
   When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a detective, and when I did grow up and started working for a newspaper, I wanted to be an investigative reporter. Neither of those things happened, but I seem to have always had that "follow the evidence, connect the dots" instinct, not that I  was very good at connecting the dots in game books when I was a kid.
   Which brings me back to Quentin Bynum, and an image I'll never get out of my head but that I didn't include in the book because I never was able to corroborate it. If a movie is ever made based on "The Armored Fist," I'll suggest basing a scene on this particular image; or if "The Armored Fist" were fiction, there's no doubt it would be the climax of a chapter. But the two people who could corroborate the image -- the two crew members, that is, who survived the incident in which Bynum was killed -- are deceased. Still, a couple of the facts support the possibility that the image might have been real.
   One of the first stories James Bynum told me was about how his brother Quentin died when he was an infant. James said Quentin had diphtheria, although it occurred around the time of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 so it might have been the flu, but either way, the doctor pronounced Quentin dead. Quentin's mother, however, who had, according to James, "the mouth of a muleskinner," refused to let the doctor leave, so he suggested "warming the baby by the fire of the cookstove," and Quentin came back to life.
   James surmised that during Quentin's brief brush with death as an infant, he may have suffered from a lack of oxygen to the brain, resulting in a diminished mental capacity. James' evidence of this was that Quentin grew up loving to do chores on the farm and eventually dropped out of school, whereas his older brothers, and James too, all favored intellectual pursuits.
   Because he enjoyed farm work so much, Quentin became especially strong. James described how one winter when Quentin was walking home from school with James and one of his sisters, both of the younger children were crying from the cold, and Quentin picked them both up and carried them the rest of the way home. Another time Quentin challenged his older brother Hugh to a contest to see which one could pull a sprayer -- a feat best managed by a team of Clydesdales -- the farthest. Quentin took one side and Hugh the other. James didn't remember who won, but it illustrated the extent to which Quentin's strength had developed.
   My research, such as it is, is not linear. I interviewed James Bynum in 1997. I interviewed Dess Tibbitts, who, like Quentin Bynum, was a tank driver in A Company, in 1995. I interviewed Bob "Big Andy" Anderson in 1993. (Bynum was killed on Jan. 14, 1945, in the Battle of the Bulge, along with two members of his five-man crew, Lt. Wallace Lippincott Jr. and Frank Shagonabe.)

   Big Andy, who, like Bynum, was a farmboy, was talking about food when he mentioned Pine Valley.
   "On the front of these tanks we'd put a plank," he said, "and then we'd put things up there. And we had eggs, you could fry eggs. Then in the chimneys of a lot of places you'd find hams hanging up in there. And then of course a lot of people would catch chickens and kill them and cook themselves a meal.
   "Generally when you were up on the line all you got to eat was what we called C rations, but when you got back for a ten-day rest you'd do most anything. There was one time a bunch of us guys was having fun; we'd throw these hand grenades in the creek, they'd go off under water and we'd get fish. Then we got crazy enough we were taking and unscrewing the cap and knocking all the powder out, and then we'd pull the pin and toss them over to somebody. They wouldn't go off. I did that to one kid whose name was Bynum. I said, 'Here, Quentin Bynum,' well, I didn't have all the powder off so the thing exploded. It didn't have strength enough, but that made us quit doing that stuff. He could have got hit in the face."
   Two years after my interview with Big Andy, I mentioned this to Dess Tibbitts.
   "Big Andy said one day he and Pine Valley were playing catch with hand grenades that they would take the powder out of," I said.
   "Yeah," Tibbitts said, "and he forgot to get all the powder out of one. One time old Pine got after him with a pitchfork and I think Pine would have stuck that pitchfork in him if he'd have caught old Andy. They got plum mad down there one time fighting in the cavalry. Pine had a hell of a temper, you didn't want to fool with him.
   "I felt sorry for poor old Pine," Tibbitts said, "because when we got ready to go to tank school they took all us tank drivers and sent us to Fort Knox for three months of tank training, and poor old Pine didn't get to go and I didn't find out till afterwards that he couldn't pass the IQ. They never sent him. And he resented it. Even when we went overseas he resented it. He just hated the fact that we went to school and he hadn't. Him and I were the best of friends before we went to school, and when I came back I tried to bring back the friendship again. And I wondered what the problem was, and this was the problem. They wouldn't send him to school because he didn't have IQ enough. He wasn't too well educated. But he was a hell of a tank driver and a good one."
   Big Andy was in the first platoon, whereas Bynum was in the second platoon of A Company. When I interviewed him in 1993, Anderson described hearing on the radio the exchange preceding Bynum's death.
   "This Lippincott," Andy said, referring to Lieutenant Wallace Lippincott, "I heard it all over the intercom. They were in this forest, and the Germans were laying artillery, and the shrapnel was coming down and hitting the tank. And this Lippincott said, 'Abandon tank.'
   "And Bynum said, 'No, Lieutenant, that's just shrapnel. Just sit still.'
   "'I said abandon tank.'"
   And they all abandoned tank but one man, his name was Shagonabe, he was an Indian, he stayed in the tank, and he's the only live boy out of that crew [actually, Shagonabe was killed, and two other crew members, Hilton Chiasson and Roy R. La Pish, survived]. Bynum -- I don't know why Bynum obeyed -- but this Lippincott, if he would have listened to an older man [that is, someone who'd been in combat for a much longer time, as Bynum had], they all might have been alive today."
   The next time I would hear about the incident in which Bynum was killed, all five members of the crew would be killed. It wasn't until I interviewed Charles Voorhis, who gave me a firsthand account of the engagement, that, except for the one haunting image, I got a much clearer picture of what actually happened, and learned that two of the five crew members survived.
   On Jan. 14, 1945, in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, Voorhis said, "we had just three tanks" operable in the five-tank platoon, "MacFarland's [Voorhis was Sam MacFarland's driver], Lippincott's tank and another tank in the second section. We were at a farmhouse and we got orders that the infantry wanted us to go over the top of a hill. From where we were at we saw a German tank about every day come down, but they couldn't see us because of the building, and we'd try to get the tank out there to shoot at him, but by the time you turned that motor over, 52 revolutions to get all the oil pumped out, he'd be gone.
   So we started out. The lieutenant was in the lead, MacFarland in the middle and the other tank behind us. We get over the crest of the hill, and there's a big woods, and MacFarland says, 'I can see the sun shining on faces over in the woods.'
   "And Lippincott says, 'Put a round over the heads. See if you draw fire.'
   "We put a round over their heads. Nothing happened. So we went on out to this farmhouse where the infantry was, and they said they didn't order any tanks. So he starts back again, now Lippincott's in the rear tank," because they were going in reverse.
   "Now we have to go up over this hill. Those old Wright radial engines, low gear was it going up a hill. So I'm going up there, and they put a round in and hit the tank in front of us. All it did was bust his track on one side. He was still able to navigate. We went up over the hill. The next round dug up snow between our tank and his tank. MacFarland said, 'Get out of here, Charlie.' So I started up over the hill, too. That left the lieutenant's tank behind.
   'We get to the top of the hill, and the lieutenant and his crew come by us on foot. Their tank took a hit. And we get down behind this building again, and here's his tank up there, smoke coming out of it, and all the guns are pointing right at us. So the gunner went back up, he's gonna pull the fire extinguisher, there's one right behind the driver. He got up on the side of the tank away from where the Germans were and leaned down in there to try to pull the extinguisher, and another round came in and took the top out of the 76-millimeter tube right above his head. So he got off, went around to the rear of the tank, pulled the extinguisher there, and the fire went out. What it was, there was an armor-piercing shell that went into the oil pan on the motor, and the phosphorous had set the oil on fire, and nothing else was burning yet.
   "That put the lieutenant's tank out of commission. He got another one and the next day, they wait until dusk, the infantry liked to wait until almost dark to pull an attack.
   "They waited until almost dusk, and then they pulled us out on the skyline, and the Germans opened up on us. MacFarland's tank was one of the old M4A1s, and the gun was worn out on it. When you tried to put a round in the chamber it would wobble, it had been used so much. So we got a pulled round, and we had to back up where they can't hit us, so the gunner could get out and run a ramrod through and clear the gun. And when we backed up, we could see Lippincott's tank. They were firing armor piercing rounds at it and they weren't hitting the tank. They were going over the top of it. So Mac, he called Lippincott on the radio and he said, 'They're firing AP at you.' That's the reason he gave the order to abandon tank when they took a hit.
   "They were hit with high-explosive, and like you said, the driver told him to sit still, it wasn't armor-piercing. But anyway, when they took the hit, he told them to abandon tank. Four guys got out. Three on one side, and one guy on the other. And just as they got out, they took another high-explosive hit, and it killed three of them. The other guy, we didn't know what happened to him."
   The crew of Quentin Bynum's tank that day comprised Lieutenant Lippincott, from Swarthmore, Pa.; Bynum, from Stonefort, Illinois, Frank Shagonabe, from Muskegon, Mich., Hilton Chiasson, from Thibodeaux, Louisiana; and Roy R. La Pish, from Pottsville, Pa.
   For Chiasson, that was the fifth tank he had knocked out. La Pish remained in the Army after the war and was killed in Vietnam.
   "Two or three days later," Big Andy said, "they asked me if I'd go back and identify Bynum. I would just say you could recognize the man. He was full of shrapnel, and laying in the snow."
   There sure are a lot of Chiassons in Thibodoux, Louisiana, but I was able to reach the widow of Hilton Chiasson. In a thick Cajun accent, she said her husband, whose nickname, naturally, was Frenchy, never spoke about the war. In 2009 an  article appeared in the Muskegon Chronicle about Frank Shagonabe. Frank's half-brother, Harlan Shagonabe, has since passed away.
   This is the passage from my book "The Armored Fist" that my friend Mitch Corrado posted on his Facebook status:
        
         "Your brother was killed in action. Do you need to go home?'
         'I don't have any money, Sir.'

'We'll take care of that.'
  We were trying to comfort our mother, and ignoring our father. He'd been an old cavalryman, himself. He took me back to catch the train and we were standing on the platform. We could hear the train way down in the distance, so I knew it was time to say goodbye.
 I said, 'Dad, take care of Mom, she's taking this very hard. And it's going to be rough on her.' And I looked over at him. And my father never cried. He never patted us. Now, me, I'm a crier. And I'm a hugger. I get that from my mom. And I looked over at him and I thought to myself, 'My G-d, how stupid can you be? Quentin was his son and he's hurting.' And I opened my arms and he walked into them, and we stood there and cried. That's the only time I ever saw my father cry.'"

   And then there's that image I was never able to verify, and can't recall who told it to me, but I know it was related by one of the veterans. As with so many things that occurred in the history of the 712th Tank Battalion, or any unit for that matter, eyewitness accounts differ, sometimes vividly, and secondhand accounts are sometimes distorted.
   But when James Bynum described his brother's strength, I recalled hearing one account in which, after abandoning the tank, a round came in and wounded both Lieutenant Lippincott and Frank Shagonabe. Whether Bynum was wounded as well I couldn't say, but whoever told me the story said that Bynum picked one of the wounded men up with each arm and was carrying them when another round came in and killed them all.

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Lieutenant Lippincott's canteen finds its way back to his family, 65 years later

The Armored Fist at Amazon.com