 |
| Thanks to Wiki |
My dad, who is 90, spent his youth fighting in WWII. He was in the Battle of the Bulge. His 12nd Infanty Division was in Maxey, Swift (Texas), Redball, Holland, Siegfiedline, Roer, Rhine, Elbe, Bavaria, Havre and Kilmer.
Dad never, never talks about this, and when the neighbor, who was at the Italian front went to Europe with his wife (he is now 93 and she is 85), they asked my parents to go. Dad did not want to go.
We need to remember what all these veterans did for us.
We need to honor our vets.
I know few details, like Dad and his group eating eggs for two weeks at Fort Swift, as the food had not come down yet.
Or how, he went for a walk and ended up in the women's nurses' corp camp and they almost kidnapped him.
Or how, he was in charge of men who had to bury all the dead bodies of all the Jews in every little village between the French border and Berlin, as the people, even though they knew the war had been lost, were burning the last, few remaining Jews alive.
In 1965, at the twentieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, my dad told me that he and his men (he was in charge) would see smoke coming out of a barn and they knew that the villagers had burned the last few Jews. He and his men buried the burnt corpses, most of which were found huddled by the barn doors, trying to get out.
They died in the flames.
This happened over and over again on the route to Berlin. This is one reason why my dad does not talk about the war.
Here is one of the incidents from wiki-but it was not the only one.
On 15 April the division discovered a war crime in Gardelegen. About 1,200 prisoners were herded into the empty barn measuring approximately a hundred by fifty feet on the outskirts of the town. The barn was then burned down, killing those inside. About 1,016 people were killed. The division commander ordered that the civilian population be forced to view the site and to disinter and rebury the victims in a new cemetery. After digging the graves and burying the bodies, they erected a cross or a Star of David over each grave and enclosed the site with a white fence. [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/102nd_Infantry_Division_(United_States)
Remember all the vets in your prayers today, please.
Here is the link to the Battle of the Bulge. My dad was on the North Shoulder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge