A Soldier Strips the Romance Out of Life at War

YOUR own words,

"But I can tell you are a sober bunch, serious, single-minded, humorless: obviously my attempt at counterpoint fell on unreceptive eyes."

 

Oscar's description of warfare is fresh, immediate and real. He's right - books and motion pictures rarely get it right. When they do, it's often hard to watch - witness the first 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan." I'll be curious to see how the latest crop of World War II movies work. I was skeptical when I heard Tom Cruise was going to play a German officer in VALKYRIE. But I thought the trailer was pretty cool and from what I hear the story is based on the facts surrounding the attempt on Hitler's life in '44. Peter Jackson is planning to remake the British war film The Dam Busters - digital effects will allow him access to World War II aircraft that don't exist anymore. We have the tools to make it real - I just hope the filmmakers don't lose themselves in the digital world. After all, that's real blood that soldiers bleed, not the type of stuff they manufacture in Hollywood.

 

Death march:
WWII soldier recalls time as a prisoner of war

By JEFF WILKINSON - jwilkinson@thestate.com

Gerry Melendez/gmelendez@thestate.com


Thomas Grove of West Columbia was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II.


ABOUT THIS SERIES


It was Jan. 5, 1945, and Pvt. Thomas E. Grove watched in horror as the massive German Panther tank slowly raised its long 88-mm cannon toward him.
Grove was manning a 30-caliber machine gun in the second-story window of a brick house in Bonnerue, Belgium. It was the third house he had retreated to during the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last-ditch push against the Allied invasion.
He braced himself for the shot.
“Death was inevitable for me,” said Grove, now of West Columbia. “Shooting that tank with a 30 would be like throwing rubber balls at it. I thought, ‘This is it.’”
Grove, 83, is one of about 100 veterans who will be on the inaugural Honor Flight to the nation’s capital Nov. 15 to visit the National World War II Memorial.
The first flight is full. But local organizers hope to raise $300,000 to charter a total of six flights to take 600 veterans to Washington for free over the next year or so.
Grove is lucky to be going.
The shell from the Panther tank burst through the wall below him, wounding or killing most of Grove’s platoon and peppering him with debris.
He and the survivors retreated to an inner room. Outside, there was a cacophony of small-arms fire, artillery blasts and German voices. Grove and the rest of the men from Company D, 345th Regiment, 87th U.S. Infantry Division, were surrounded.
“All hell had broken loose,” Grove said. “There was fire everywhere. Artillery dropping everywhere — ours, theirs — to the side, the back. All over the place.”
Soon, German infantrymen stormed the house.
“They burst in, told us in English to put our hands above our heads. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m a prisoner of war.’”
CAPTURED
Grove’s path began as so many others when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
He was a senior in high school when he heard the news Dec. 7, 1941, listening with his parents and four brothers and sisters at home in Hollidaysburg, Pa.
“I was 16 years old and mad and angry and floored,” he said.
Grove joined the Army on his 18th birthday, Jan. 16, 1943.
“We were going to win the war, a bunch of kids,” he said.
Grove was trained as a machine gunner and saw action in Alaska in the Aleutian Islands before being attached to the 87th Division, making final preparations to go to Europe at Fort Jackson.
The division shipped to France in October 1944, four months after D-Day, and was a spearhead in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army counterattack against the “bulge” in the Allied lines caused by the German offensive.
Grove fought constantly until his capture in January 1945.
Combat “was terrible and miserable, and I hated it,” he said. “And I hated the Germans.”
His hate would grow.
German soldiers stripped many of the U.S. soldiers of their shoes “and marched us for days through the snow. It was a death march.”
“If anyone fell out of line, the Germans would shoot them or beat them mercilessly with their rifles,” Grove said. “That will get you back in line quick.”
In addition to the cold and the beatings, the rations were bleak — mostly frozen turnips dug from fields along the side of the road.
After marching more than 120 miles, the prisoners arrived at Stalag 12-A in Limburg, Germany, near Frankfurt — a factory-like building used as a holding facility.
“Our bed was an armload of straw on a cobblestone floor.”
After a few weeks, the 86 men were loaded into boxcars designed to hold 40.
“It was a space the size of a one-car garage, just not as wide,” he said. “You couldn’t sit or stretch out. It was too miserable to verbalize.”
Men defecated in their helmets and urinated on the floor.
“Or just went in your pants,” Grove said. “And we all were sick and had diarrhea. That was the most hellish spot in my captivity.”
After a few days — Grove can’t remember how many — the train arrived in Bad Orb, Germany, and Stalag 9-B.
The men were unloaded into wooden barracks, ringed by barbed wire and guard towers.
“Then they pretty much left us alone,” he said. “Our bodies were so weakened we could hardly move.”
Grove estimates his weight dropped from about 155 pounds to less than 100.
“Our ration was a little piece of black German bread and one cup of watery soup a day. It was supposed to be potato soup, but we never saw a potato. All we thought of was food. Not women or anything like that. Just food.”
The lone memento Grove has from his captivity is a small black notebook with three pages. Each page describes fantasy meals.
“I would have eaten out of a garbage can,” Grove said.
Then, on Easter 1945, the men heard artillery fire in the distance. The next day, the regular German soldiers disappeared. The day after that, the remaining guards, old German men mostly, brought in extra rations. Then, they too disappeared.
Soon, the prisoners heard the rattle and roar of tanks — U.S. tanks, breaking into the prison.
“We kissed those tanks like they were beautiful blonde girls.”
RETURN
Grove returned to the United States and became a traveling salesman, “doing all those things a traveling salesman was supposed to do — and more,” Grove said. “We tried to forget about the war, but the war never left us.”
Two years later, in 1947, Grove had a conversion, remembering the words of a chaplain who accompanied the troops that liberated his prison camp.
“He said, ‘You all made a lot of promises (to God), and he expects you to keep them,’” Grove said. “I had lived it up like fury. But when I came to my senses, I came to know the Lord.”
Grove went to Bible college in Rhode Island and spent his working life as a hospital chaplain in Kansas City and Pittsburgh.
He married his wife, Kay, in 1968, after his first wife, Dorothy, died from cancer in 1965.
They moved to Columbia in 1989 so Grove could take clinical pastoral training at then-Richland Memorial Hospital.
In 1998, the couple took a trip to Bonnerue, visiting the house where Grove was captured and the prison where he was held.
“It was a wonderful experience,” Kay Grove said. “It really helped him.”
Today, a scrap of wallpaper from the Bonnerue house, a splintered board from the prison and other mementoes of the trip are framed and on the wall of Grove’s study. They are talismans that pushed back the nightmares he suffered for decades.
“That trip, 1998,” he said, “is when the war ended for me.”

The State | 10/13/2008 | Death march:<br />WWII soldier recalls time as a prisoner of war

 

I agree Jeff . Thanks

 

"War veteran
Gerald, aged 87, from Berkshire was shot in both ankles in 1941, fighting the Vichy French in Syria, and had to lose his right leg.
"I was shot through both legs with what was, I think, a very heavy calibre machine gun bullet.
"It entered my left leg, made a neat hole through the middle of the tibia, came out of that leg with a very much bigger exit wound and when it hit my right leg it really mashed the bone.
"I was taken prisoner by the Vichy French and my right leg was amputated, but they did a great job on my left leg and managed to save it," said Gerald.
But the wound was unstable and has caused him a number of problems over the years.
Repeated problems
Shortly before the end of the war Gerald was accepted for a post in the Colonial Service, which ran the British colonies and protectorates, the doctor there warned him that he faced a life-time of problems.
"He said - 'the treatment for that is bandage-and-a-damn'.
"When I asked what he meant he said: "Bandage the wound every day and curse it every evening!"
Gerald suffered a number of wound infections over the following years, but the most serious was a bone infection in 2004, when there were fears he could lose his leg.

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-today/27004-i-faced-losing-my-other-leg.html

 

Strip away the romance, peel away the patriotism, remove the death, suffering and misery and what do you get?

The one true, legacy of WW II: the so-called Theater of the Absurd.

"Theater of the Absurd came about as a reaction to World War II. It took the basis of existential philosophy and combined it with dramatic elements to create a style of theatre which presented a world which can not be logically explained, life is in one word, ABSURD."

Nothing romantic about WWII, but it did usher in the profound realization of the fundamental absurdity of the human condition.

Anti-Romanticism, actually.
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In the October/November issue of World War II magazine there is an excellent article by the title of "The End of the 'Good War' ' by Robert R. Mackey. It gives some good examples of what the war could do to the men who fought it at the end of the war. What seeing the things the Nazis had done and the average soldiers reactions to it and what they did.

 

Heres the link to the article,

http://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-the-good-war-germany-april-1945.htm

 

Words of Reassurance from a Brutal Front

By Andrew Carroll

From the July 2008 issue: Words of Reassurance from a Brutal Front
Just two months after the Battle of Guadalcanal, twenty-five-year-old Arthur W. Hodan, a sergeant in the 23rd Infantry Division, handwrote a sixteen-page eyewitness account of his regiment’s fight to take Hill 27. Hodan had the letter smuggled home to his parents in Cicero, Illinois; in it, he describes in vivid detail what he and his men endured in a campaign that claimed some eight thousand American lives but marked a turning point in the war. (Line breaks and minor punctuation have been added to the letter for clarity’s sake.)
April 11, 1943
Dearest Mom & Dad:
Hello, Sweetheart, here is your little soldier boy again and Moms, I am really feeling fine and getting fatter everyday….
Dad, I suppose you are anxious to hear how I was wounded. Well I shall tell you….
When we were at the base of [Hill 27], word came back that the first platoon was on the hill and there was no Japs up there so we continued on up. We were half way up when all hell broke loose….
Moms I didn’t worry about myself all I was worried about was my boys, all the time I was up there I never dug a hole for myself. I was running from one gun to another keeping the boys on their toes. All during this time our boys were dropping. The Japs were on the right giving the first platoon hell they were caught halfway down the hill. Lt. Siesel was on top of the hill with the artillery captain who was directing the artillery by phone. They were sure throwing plenty of shells.
The first one hit was Corp. Olihaff from Milwaukee. He was trying to crawl up to a Jap machine gun and had his ear shot off. Then Corp. Bickwermer was hit in the chest and then all you could hear was Lt. Siesel calling for a litter and aid man every other second, the boys sure were dropping. Platoon Sarg. Greico went out to get one of his boys who was shot in the tummy and while he was carrying him out he was shot in the ass and it came out in front fracturing his pelvis. The boy he was carrying was dead. Marty Jayce was his name. Sarg. Smola was killed and they couldn’t get him; so was Beirboth and Grok and many others. Sarg. Bilest was wounded and while getting him out on the stretcher they hit him again and killed him. Big Boy Richards walked into a machine gun which made a mess of him and his buddy Whity….
Moms I was at the machine on the knoll watching Harry Dolan rolling some rocks down around him for protection when he slumped over on his face, he was hit and hit bad. Sgt. Hodgen and Ben Walker took a stretcher and ran out there for him, they threw him on the stretcher and dirt was flying all around them, they got Dolan back and he was shot through the lung missing his heart by a half inch. He is okay today, thank God, they gave him three blood transfusions out there in the field.
By this time the Japs circled through the jungle and were now on our left. They were dropping mortar shells all around the top of the hill. The third mortar squad which was on top of the hill was firing away, that was my old squad. Well they, the Japs, landed a mortar shell right in their lap hitting all the boys but Henry Donahue, the lucky Irishman. Baumhardt, La Cross, and Barrett were each hit in the arm. Theohalt was hit in the neck and Stanford had his glasses broken and was hit in the face.
You should have seen them coming down from the top of the hill hell bent for election. Then Conrayes and Sams mortar squad started to fire and I told myself to stay the hell away from them as Japs started to drop mortar shells around them. Moms, a shot rang out just about twenty yards from us and Corp Metzner slumped over the machine gun just a few feet from me, he was hit through the head. Red Painter the assistant gunner pulled him off the gun and swung the gun around and spotted the Jap in a tree and he cut the Jap and the tree right in half, even that couldn’t pay for Metzner. He was my no. 1 corp, a grand boy.
While Red was firing I jumped up and ran to the top of the hill right in between the 1st and 2nd mortar squads and called down to the aid station for a stretcher and aid man to get Metzner out when wham zam I got hit but didn’t know where as I couldn’t hear the explosion. All I could remember is that I was standing pretty dam straight and I felt as if I dived off a diving board and landed flat on my back. Boy did it sting.
I stood there about five seconds and then it dawned on me that I had better get the hell out of there and in a hurry. My face felt as though the left side was gone. I took off down the hill towards the aid station about thirty yards away. I got halfway when Ben Wallas grabbed me…. He told me a mortar shell landed about two and a half yards in back of me. I was hit by shrapnel but none of it went through me, it was all in me. Ha ha the scrap iron kid.
I asked Ben where I was hit and he said you got a piece in the right hand, one in the back, one in the left arm, a piece in both thighs, a piece in the left cheek, and a piece in the shoulder. Ha ha they didn’t miss a thing. Ben put on the sulfa nulamide and bandaged me up and gave me the sulfa pills and he took me to the aid station on the back side of the hill where they gave me a shot of morphine to stop the pain.
I sat down next to Sgt. Grens and smoked cigarettes and drank water. I asked him how he felt, he said his legs are paralyzed. We were kidding and laughing with Baunhardt, Theobalt, Barret, La Cross, Stanford, and others, we were glad our fighting was over for awhile.
We were all laying down in the jungle about thirty yards from the top of the hill where the boys were giving the Japs hell. The medical officer told us we could not get out until tomorrow and here it was three o’clock in the afternoon. I just dreaded the thought of spending a night in the jungle being surrounded. One feels so helpless.
Corp. Bickwermer was sitting up right near me when he took one deep breath and slumped over dead, God bless him. Sgt. Motel was brought down, a mortar shell landed along side of his hole, and he was shell-shocked. They had to hold him on the ground because every time a shell went off he screamed and wanted to get up and run, poor kid….
This all happened Jan. 2. That evening just after dark the Japs made two bayonet charges up the hill in front of my machine guns and the boys gave them hell. They bayoneted two of the boys from the second platoon, Gety and Little Eddie Drygowski who was made Corp a short time before. Eddie was one of the boys I brought back to Chicago on my New Years furlough….
Gety lived one hour. He pleaded with the boys to shoot him, God he suffered. Eddie was dead. There is six boys in the first platoon out of about fifty.
I didn’t think I would be alive when morning came. It was hell. I sure was glad to see the sun come up. The captain told us if the boys who think they can walk out the way we came in, we could start at one o’clock in the afternoon or there would be aid men to help us, so I said to myself I’ll be damned if I spend another night here in the jungle….We were shot at all the way out by snipers. Boy was I glad when we arrived in the hospital at the airport….
I was there two days then put aboard a ship for the Herberdies and on board ship they operated and took the piece out of my shoulder. I stayed in Cub one hospital in the Herberdies for about seven days, then boarded the hospital ship the Solas and sailed to Auckland, New Zealand….
I was sent to 39th General hospital here in Auckland, that is our army hospital. Here they operated on my face, they say I can have plastic surgery done in a year or so. Ha ha don’t worry, it isn’t much of a scar and it doesn’t hurt my good looks in any way ha ha….
Moms a New Zealand boy is taking this letter to America with him as he is going to complete his flying training there…. Moms I shall be going to the Fiji Islands soon as our company has been sent there in fact the whole American Division is there now. They have received replacements there for the boys who were killed….
So Moms please don’t worry. I still have shrapnel in the back and both thighs but it has healed up in me so they don’t have to take it out ha ha. To see me you wouldn’t know I was hit ha ha I feel great….
May God Bless you all
Your loving son
Arthur

http://www.historynet.com/words-of-reassurance-from-a-brutal-front.htm

 

Its really different to read things about the war in a person's own words.

 

"Sadashige Imanishi's voice falters as he recalls the piles of weapons left behind by dead Japanese soldiers in the jungles of New Guinea.
"That was the first time I thought of them and realized how cruel the war was," Imanishi, a member of the 144th regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army, says before asking the camera to stop filming.
Imanishi, who died last year at the age of 91, plays a central role in a new documentary that for the first time tells of the savage fighting between Japanese and Australian forces during World War II from both perspectives.
"Beyond Kokoda" features a collection of personal experiences, candidly shared by the men who battled each other and the adverse conditions of the Kokoda Track and northern beaches of New Guinea.
Using national archive footage and battle re-enactments, the documentary offers a balanced depiction of the bloody seven-month campaign that saw 6,500 Japanese soldiers killed on the Kokoda Track and 7,200 killed on the northern beaches.
Japan fared badly in the fighting, with the main 144th regiment from Kochi Prefecture seeing less than 3 percent of its members return home.
As veteran Masao Horie says in the documentary, "Java is heaven, Burma is hell, New Guinea is where no one comes back alive."
Australia lost 625 men on the Kokoda Track and 2,500 during the relentless fighting of the beaches campaign.
Soldiers from Japan's South Sea Detachment first landed on the north coast of New Guinea on July 21, 1942, intent on marching across the Owen Stanley Ranges to capture Port Moresby and strategically isolate Australia from America."

 

This WWI Poem says it all for me (I have x'd out the naughty word for our younger readers):

A Man of Few Words

Black eyed Corporal Farrell
was a man of few words other
than the usual Anglo-Saxons
sprinkled around the barrack rooms
and camps. he had no words
for the ragged shrapnel slicing
through his knee-caps but
used his morphia and that was that.
We sat side by side in the sun,
for "Lightning never strikes twice
in the same place" I had said.
Side by side wishing the frank
sharp crack and slap of shrapnel
would cease and leave us be.
He might have dreamt of England
and some soft hospital bed. I don't
know, and we just waited. And then
a sniper's bullet holed his head.
He looked at me reproachfully and barked
"xxxx!"
Melville Hardiment

​

 

Thanks for the addition.

 

​

__________________

 

"Hodan had the letter smuggled home to his parents in Cicero, Illinois;"

I wonder why he had to have it smuggled home?

 

A former POW remembers the horrors of WWII

Photo by Susan C. Moeller
​

Joe Mandese, here with his great-granddaughter, Julianna Frahm, was captured by Nazis during World War II in northern Africa, then transferred to a German prison camp in Italy. Eventually, Mandese escaped to the Italian countryside and reunited with American troops.
By Susan C. Moeller
Senior Reporter

The second installment in a two-part series

LYNDHURST (Sept. 18, 2008) — If war is hell, then war’s captives must be likened to prisoners of hell.
So it would seem for Lyndhurst resident Joseph Mandese, who endured a German prison camp during World War II. The memories still cause him to yell in terror when he remembers his capture and prolonged stay behind enemy lines.
Approaching 90 years old, Joe, who has lived in the township for 30 years, sits with his wife, Ann, close at hand, and a small, old-fashioned suitcase of memories on his lap. His face is lined, but not ancient.
Details about his captivity emerge slowly; some not at all. Mandese’s wartime experience spanned two continents; its aftermath, a lifetime.
Ann fields some of the questions. She’s torn between a desire for people to know her husband’s story and a desire to protect him from some of his most harrowing recollections. She emphasizes the severity of her husband’s situation by pointing out that he weighed 95 pounds after his ordeal.
Joe was drafted into the Army in his early 20s in 1942. Eventually, his four other brothers would take part in the war as well.
Joe was assigned to the Army’s 1st Armored Division and eventually landed in Tunisia, part of WWII’s northern Africa theater. The same year he was drafted, Joe was taken captive. “I was captured by Gen. Rommel, the Desert Fox,” he said.
Joe and eight other captives were transferred to a prison camp in Italy, run by Germans. “I wouldn’t wish my experience to a dog,” Joe said.
Ann said that the guards threw rice on the ground for the prisoners to eat. Dead bodies were left in the camp to be moved by other prisoners.
In September 1943, Mandese and four others escaped the camp. They spent the next few months — almost a year — on the run, assisted by Italian families who helped to shelter and feed them.
The Enrico Cardinale family kept Mandese alive with food. He still has their picture. The Cardinales were certainly taking a chance when they helped Mandese — the Germans dropped pamphlets threatening anyone who helped soldiers. “I didn’t sleep in their house,” Mandese said. “I slept in the open for a year. … It was cold, very cold.”
Back in the United States, Mandese’s family had been told that he was dead. They were shocked when they got word that he had survived.
When Mandese received news that it was safe to leave his Italian hideout, he set out to find the Americans. He came first to a Polish division of the British Army. They transported him to Foggia, Italy, where he met up with the American 12th Airforce. It was the 4th of July.
With a nod to the emotional difficulties he had endured since his imprisonment, Joe wonders aloud how his wife could put up with him.
She doesn’t miss a beat, dismissing the comment with a quick, “There’s nothing to leave. You were fighting for our country.”
The brutality of the war isn’t something one forgets. Joe and others like him certainly haven’t. “They relive it,” Ann said. “They relive it.”

http://www.leadernewspapers.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8239&new_topic=18

 

LOL Thats what I get for writing so late at nite. I forgot. Duh!