My Dad - a proud member of the Greatest Generation

Dad was drafted into the Army on November 18, 1943. He was 26 years old, and had been married for 4 years. I was exactly one year old. He went through 4 months of basic infantry training, and became a Rifleman and Light Mortar Crewman. He was assigned to a "Replacement Battalion" of the 83^rd Infantry Division. These were the men who were sent to units to replace soldiers killed or wounded in action. His first assignment – participating in the Normandy Invasion of France in June 1944. He arrived with the third wave of soldiers who stormed the beaches, climbed the cliffs, and fought the Germans in the hedgerows. Forty years later Dad and Mom vacationed in Europe and visited Normandy. Dad told me afterwards that he couldn’t believe that they really were able to do what they did. He said looking down on the cliffs it seemed impossible for the men to have scaled them and fight through the extremely thick hedgerows – with German soldiers shooting at them all the time.

Dad shared with me an experience his unit had at a beautiful Monastery beside the sea in Northern France. The Americans had surrounded some 200 Germans who were in the Monastery. It would have been relatively simple to storm the Monastery and kill or capture the Germans. But it would have likely caused great damage to the Monastery, so the commander decided to simply "starve them out." Two weeks later the Germans waved a white flag of surrender.

Dad told me about the horrific damage the allied air strikes caused to cities that the Germans were occupying. One city in particular stood out in his memory. Dad said that virtually every single building was leveled – except for the church in the middle of the city, which somehow miraculously was untouched by the bombs.

The Germans were defeated but during the fighting shrapnel from an exploding mortar pierced Dad’s neck – right next to the jugular vein. He was evacuated to London to recover. The shrapnel was so close to the jugular vein that the doctors left it in his neck. It remained there the rest of Dad’s life. Returning to duty in early 1945, Dad rejoined his unit with the objective of taking Berlin. The German army was all but defeated, and the Americans could have easily marched into Berlin. But they were ordered to stay where they were, 30 miles outside the city, as President Roosevelt had decided to allow the Russians to take Berlin from the East.

Dad was called on several times as a translator of German prisoners. Dad’s unit liberated a number of German POW concentration camps. When Germany surrendered, the GI’s were ordered to prepare to be transferred to the Pacific to participate in the invasion of Japan. Fortunately, Japan surrendered before the invasion, following the dropping of Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dad was discharged from the Army on December 4, 1945. He had been on active duty 2 years and 16 days. He returned home to Wayne, New Jersey, built the home that we lived in for 50 years, raised his family, and rarely talked about those 2 years and 16 days.

During the war Dad, of course, wrote many letters home to Mom. After Dad died Jack discovered a small box in Dad’s closet that contained many of those letters. No one knew of their existence. Here is a sample from the 51 letters that Dad wrote to Mom in April, May, and June 1945.

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