Dad and the rest of his division didn’t have much time to regroup before the surprise attack by the Germans which began the Battle of the Bulge, an experience which haunted my father the rest of his life. The paratroopers of the 82nd were on rest and relaxation at Rheims, France after the grueling Market Garden episode. Little did they know that they would return to battle much sooner than they expected. Hitler was planning a counteroffensive against the Allied troops in Belgium and Luxembourg. On a snowy December 16, 1944, his plans came to fruition. He attacked along a thinly defended Siegfried Line, a remnant of World War I. The 82nd was quickly called back to action and arrived in Werbomont, Belgium on December 18, 1944. There was horrendous fighting, with the Germans at times surrounding my father’s regiment. However, dad was out of action from Christmas Day until January 8, 1945 with pneumonia and dysentery. When he returned to “C” company, he came back to a unit that was virtually wiped out. He later said that if he could have cried he would have gotten some of the pain and guilt out. Upon his return he realized that the company he came to know and love no longer existed. The 505 regiment, of which company “C” was a part, was down to under fifty per cent strength.
The remaining paratroopers were brought into the Belgian town of Theux in mid-January 1945 and put into the households of the local people in order to finally bathe and be well fed. Many of the troopers had gone almost a month without washing and had survived on cold rations. The warmth of the family that sheltered my father was a bright spot in a cold, bleak winter. At the end of January 1945, the 82nd was back in battle. In early February, the division arrived at a place that my father called Dante’s Inferno. It was the Huertgen Forest, a place where catastrophic losses had befallen the American Army in November of 1944. When dad and his fellow troopers came through the killing scene, the snow was slowly melting and the “Bloody Huertgen” was giving up its dead. Sprawled in the maze of trees were the corpses of hundreds of American soldiers, grotesque and rigid, just emerging from the deep snow under which they had been preserved all winter. The flesh of the bodies had rotted and was peeling from the skeleton. The majority of the dead were from the 28th Infantry Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard, the unit that had been decimated that previous November under heavy German attack. All told, the total casualty toll from the Huertgen was 24,000 dead, wounded, captured or missing. This all occurred in a battle that was considered a fiasco and passed unnoticed. It wasn’t unnoticed by my father; he said he had never witnessed such carnage. The odor was so overpowering to him, in his exhausted state he passed out and lay on the side of the road, not caring whether he lived or died. An unknown lieutenant pulled him a mile to an aid station, saving his life. Dad had pneumonia again and surely would have died from exposure in the cold forest. My father harkened back to this incident shortly before his 2005 death, saying that he hadn’t felt so bad physically and emotionally since the Bulge and Huertgen. Sixty years later and the horror of the winter of 1945 was still his reference point for death.
Dad continued stoically throughout the remainder of the war, finally crossing the Elbe River into Germany near the shattered city of Cologne in May 1944, shortly before the German surrender. He remained with his division in Germany until December 1944 when he returned to the United States to begin the rest of his life. He planned to marry the girl in Philadelphia who he had met in 1942 and wrote to during the long years of the war. But, that person coming home was no longer the carefree and happy boy with big dreams. He was a man who had been profoundly affected by combat. Paul Fussell, a noted writer and World War II European Theatre veteran, called being a combat infantryman an extreme experience that combines extreme fear with the repression of normal human sympathy to act undisturbed at horrible things. For the naturally compassionate, this is profoundly painful and it changes your life.
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