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GOP
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Up today is B.B. in Newtown, PA:
I'd like to share what I know about my dad's wartime experiences. He was reluctant to speak about them, but over the years a few things leaked out, and those things help me understand why he sometimes appeared a little different.
I know that in preparation for D-Day, my dad was stationed on the English coast. I believe he was part of the 833rd Engineering Battalion. One evening, he told his sergeant that he wanted to go into town to visit his grandmother. He didn't have a grandmother in England. His grandmother was a Russian immigrant living with his parents back in Philadelphia. I am sure he had a date with a young English lady. Later that night, he returned to find his barracks had been bombed and the men on either side of his bunk killed. His little fib saved his life.
My dad's construction battalion tended to arrive at locations shortly after battles ended. While marching through France soon after D-Day, he bent over to tie his shoe. At that moment, a sniper fired accurately and struck the soldier on the other side of my dad, killing the poor man. Had my father not bent over at that instant, he would have been killed. Twice in a short period of time, through the random quirkiness of fate, he escaped death. That concentrates the mind! He did say his group found the sniper, who most definitely did not survive the encounter.
My father said he entered a concentration camp soon after it was liberated. He didn't know which one, he never knew where his company was moved to, but he witnessed the horrors we all know took place at such locations, and which he could not put in words. I have the sense he tried to purge his eyes of what he saw. Growing up, he told me, his hero-worshiping son, "If I'd known before what I knew then, there'd be a lot fewer Germans alive today!" I suspect that was nothing more than a bit of soldiery bravado, but I really don't know. Honestly, I'm uncomfortable quoting what he told me in the 1960's in the much different world of 2026, but that is what he said.
Starting in his fifties, my dad suffered from an auto-immune diseases that left his lungs asthmatic and him dependent on prednisone. Multiple times he was hospitalized near death and survived. In his late eighties, he admitted he was on borrowed time. We buried him on his 88th birthday in 2010. I wonder today whether he was referring to his deteriorating health or the near misses of his youth.
Two quick, amusing anecdotes: He said it was common knowledge that anytime you saw a line of soldiers, it meant a chow line. When he encountered a queue in a small French village, he and a couple of pals lined up but were disappointed when they discovered it was not a makeshift cafeteria, but a brothel. He did not tell me whether he was so disappointed that he got out of line.
After V-E day, he was part of a group that was guarding a large German house. In marches a heavyset German prisoner accompanied by several American officers. My dad and his squad were not told who the obviously important German was. This estate was a way station and the following day, the prisoner left. After the incident, my father asked his commanding officer who the German was. He was told it was Hermann Goering. "Goering," my father responded, "if I had known it was Goering, I'd have shot him." His commanding officer replied, "And that is why we didn't tell you."
Thanks, B.B. (Z)