Uncle Tom is fourth from the left standing
Looking back I see how much our family has grown and changed. We've all faced challenges and been blessed by God's goodness. What a blessing it has been to have had the strength and influence of so many good people in our lives.
Uncle Tom was one of the more quiet and reserved members of our family when it came to the family gatherings, but I learned over the years that he could be quite passionate when it came to sharing a belief or making a stand for something he felt strongly about. I can't say that he was warm and fuzzy, but I can say he was good, solid, reliable and steadfast.
I'm grateful for the time and effort Uncle Tom took to record his "Memories", "The Legend of Lessie Dee", and the "Long Haul." I appreciate that he shared his hard work with us. I feel like I know and better understand those he wrote about, including himself. Even his fiction captures the essence of those he wrote about. My roots run deeper and are better grounded thanks to him.
Our experiences help define us. To truly know a person it helps to know where they've been and how they got them from there to here. For some people there seems to be that defining moment or experience that forever overshadows who they are and what they become, for some, similar experiences magnify who they become and what they are able to do with their lives. Most of us are a constant work in progress living our lives by daily putting one foot in front of the other, trying to be and do the best we can in any given moment. We all have days we do better than others. To quote Uncle Tom "I learned that I could endure more than I had known that I could. I saw my own strength and my own weakness enough to agree with Pogo that, "We met the enemy, and he was us."
I took the opportunity to reread Uncle Tom's "Memories" in which he shared his experience in military service. I'm amazed at what he experienced and I can only imagine how the rest of his life was impacted by those 28 months.
Thanks Uncle Tom for showing us what it means to be a great patriot, husband, father, grandfather, uncle, educator, friend, neighbor and Christian. You fought the good fight, you finished the course and kept the faith. Now it's time to rest for awhile.
I'd like to share some of what he wrote in "Memories". If you haven't read his record or if it's been awhile I recommend that you read it. What he experienced needs to be appreciated and he deserves to be remembered as the hero he is. Grab your tissues and count your blessings.
I sit beside my lonely fire
and pray for wisdom yet:
for calmness to remember
or courage to forget.
- Aide
From Uncle Tom's Memories title page
Uncle Tom from page 1
I originally wrote this in 1985, primarily as a personal document for myself and my family. I rewrite it now as one who was neither hero nor villain, but a simple bit player in the epic drama of the twentieth century, World War Two, "The Big One." When I am no longer here, I hope that I have left a record to refute those who say, "It never happened ." or, "It happened, but the Americans were the dupes and tools of the war mongers ."
Me
But Uncle Tom, you are a hero and the record you left has not been ignored and even though I may have had to dust it's covers, your "Memories" have helped me remember and not forget. Your life was a witness to us of those who fought and sacrificed for the freedoms we enjoy today.
Uncle Tom from pages 6 and 7
We sailed from New York harbor on the Queen Elizabeth on August 4, 1944 and docked in Glasgow, Scotland five days later. We sailed without convoy and without destroyer escort because of the speed of the Queen Elizabeth which was capable of doing thirty-four knots, a speed in excess of that of a submarine. In addition, we changed direction every two to four minutes.
We sailed on one of the largest, fastest, most expensive ships in the world with about twenty thousand men on board. It carried our division, attached engineers, some Australian troops and about six British nurses. I never saw the Statue ofLiberty when I returned to New York later, but it was the last I saw of the United States as we left. As an afterthought, I must add that on the largest, fastest, most expensive ship in the world, I slept the first night in a crowded cabin, the second night on deck and the third night in a bath tub. Even the Queen Elizabeth was not built to accommodate that many men.
I played my first and last game of poker on the Queen Elizabeth and won twenty dollars without knowing what I was doing. Whether It was beginner's luck or whether I was being set up, I never knew. I remember that some of them did not believe that I had never played. To this day, I do not know spearheads from dogtracks when it comes to playing cards.
Me
Not quite the cruise we envision when we think of sailing on the Queen Elizabeth.
Uncle Tom from pages 9 and 10
One day the French moved up to join us. To get wood to shore up their trenches, they started to chop up the furniture. Charles Foley and I rescued some small pieces from the axes. There was a buffet or sideboard made of walnut or chestnut with elaborately carved doors and a shelf on top supported by a statuette of a Breton peasant woman on one end and a man on the other . Foley and I salvaged the statuettes and the doors. I tried to buy the man from him, and he tried to buy the woman from me. Neither of us would sell to the other because the money we had, French Occupational Francs, was virtually useless to us. We got everything we needed from the regular army issue of chocolate, chewing gum, razor blades, cigarettes, soap, etc.. The French civilians preferred chocolate, matches, and cigarettes to the money for the butter and eggs we bought from them. We made boxes, cutting the boards with bayonets from ammunition boxes and mailed the statuettes home, mine to Florida and his to Missouri.
I still have the little lady after fifty years.
Me
I wonder if I've seen that statuette and never stopped to think about it's history or significance.
Uncle Tom from page12
We left the line in Brittany on New Year's Day, 1945 and somewhere boarded the railroad cars for Germany. These were the same as the "forty and eight" cars made famous during World War I , and designated as capable of holding forty men or eight horses. Since World War II did not utilize too many horses, they held approximately forty men, or one platoon . There was no heat, no food service and no sanitary facilities. We were crowded into the cars without enough space for every one to lie down at one time. There was straw on the floor, cracks in the walls and snow on the roof of the cars as well as the ground outside. Toto, this sure was not Florida! There were rest breaks from time to time, but I do not remember any hot meals, although we were on the train for two or three days and for at least two nights.
Somewhere in northern France we disembarked from the train in bitter cold and loaded on the backs of GI trucks for a grueling sixteen hour ride. One hardened sergeant said, " I'll give them one more hour to get us wherever they are taking us. If we are not there by then, I am going to shoot myself. I can't take any more of this."
We must have gotten there in time because he did not shoot himself; he was with us in our glorious debacle later.
Uncle Tom from page14
I will always remember the beauty of the night. I had seen snow for the first time in my life only a few days earlier while we were on the train, and I was still amazed at it. The whole world looked clean and neat. The huge evergreens were shrouded with snow, and the reflected light from the snow on the ground made every thing stand out in silhouette. My first lesson in survival in the snow was a self-taught one. I learned not to wrap the cloth around my face. My breath caused the cloth to freeze to my flesh and smart when it was pulled away.
Me
I'm amazed when beauty can be recognized in the darkest of hours. It gives me hope and a desire to look for beauty in my own life.
Uncle Tom from page16 - How Uncle Tom injured his arm
Someone, I believe Captain Straub, called for supporting fire from our own cannon company of 105 millimeter howitzers who were providing the primary artillery support for our mission. Unfortunately, the coordinates were wrong, and the shells came in directly over us. They were designed as "treebursts" or designed to burst in the air at about tree height so that the shrapnel would either kill the Germans who did not have the protection of the trench that we had or would force them to withdraw. If they had burst fifty yards further away, they would have achieved their objective. As it was they burst in the air directly over our heads . I saw a lieutenant, I believe, from A company, take a direct hit, either from a shell from the cannon company or from a German mortar. One moment he was there; there was a burst of flame and black smoke, and he was gone.
When we realized that the shells were bursting directly over our heads, and that was more frightening than anything the Germans had done, we fell to the bottom of the trench and threw our arms over our helmets to hold them on. Marvin Lange, a really great Jewish kid was next to me and my head was burrowed down beside his leg with my right arm over the the back of my neck. A piece of shrapnel caught me in the elbow shattering it. Initially there was no pain. It was numb, but there was no severe pain. Immediately, Patrick, one of our two medics was there. He applied a tourniquet, sprinkled sulfanilamide powder on it and gave me a morphine injection. He put it in a sling but no splint. Still there was no pain. I suppose the morphine took over before the shock wore off.
Me
Uncle Tom was helped to a bunker where other wounded soldiers were gathered. Many froze and their numbers dwindled. He had buddies who tried to rescue him, but were ordered back to their own squad. They left Uncle Tom as comfortable as they could with cigarettes, chocolate and water. He was discovered by the Germans on January 21, 1945.
Uncle Tom from page18
There is a lot of emphasis on angels today . I do not think that there was that same emphasis in 1945. The word angel comes from the Greek word "angelos", and simply meant messenger or agent. In the ancient world the Roman emperor had his angeloi, and God had his. Sometimes the angels were human agents; sometimes they were divine. Those two German medics were my angels. I was suffering from blood loss, shock, hypothermia, and although I did not know it at the time, from gangrene. They saved my life. I do not know who they were, where they came from, nor where they went, but I know that without them I would have been dead in a few more hours. The strange thing is that I really did not care. I felt life slipping away, but I did not care.
Uncle Tom from page19
I was taken during the night to a field hospital somewhere in the basement of a house or large building. It was not a hospital. There was an operating room, or maybe more than one, with blankets on piles of straw in a large room. The ceiling was supported by rough stone columns, and there were perhaps a dozen or more of us lying on the blankets on the straw piles in the outer room, some German, some American.
When it became my turn to be taken into the operating room, I begged them not to amputate my arm. A German enlisted medical corpsman patted me on the shoulder compassionately and said, "We will have to do whatever is necessary," and he placed the ether cone over my nose.
When I regained consciousness, it was daylight. I was on the bottom stretcher of a German ambulance equipped with four stretchers, an upper and a lower on each side, with three wounded German soldiers. I think I knew, even before I opened my eyes, that my arm was gone, but that did not prepare me for the shock, when I opened my eyes and saw the crepe paper bandage over the short stump. If it is possible to be shocked by the turn of events without being surprised by them, that is what I experienced.
I was barely nineteen years old. I was no Charles Atlas, but I had been in better physical condition than at any time before or later in life, and no one is as conscious of his body as a nineteen year old male. I held an expert infantry badge, a combat infantry badge, and a sharpshooter's badge. Above all, I was an American soldier in a conquering army. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that it was my arm and not "I" that had been amputated and buried in a garbage pit somewhere in Germany.
The feeling was not so much the physical loss nor the inconvenience of learning how to do even the most mundane things with one hand. It was the psychic feeling of castration; the feeling that I had become less of a man, a thing. I have never overcome the feeling completely. The loss causes me to feel defensive, and, at times, offensive. It causes me to go on the attack rather than waiting to be attacked.
Uncle Tom from page 27
None of us had a change of clothing. I wore the same bloody combat jacket with the sleeve slashed out for two months until I was finally issued a British jacket. All of us had lice. They were on our bodies, in our clothing and in our bedding. Occasionally we were dusted with some kind of insect powder. As I remember, the most that this did was to excite the lice so that they all changed positions in a game of musical chairs.
Me
I can't imagine what that was like. Never changing clothes, never bathing, knowing you were covered with bugs and who knows what else. How often have we bathed more than once in a day, or changed an outfit because it got a speck or smudge of something on it?
Uncle Tom from pages 29 and 30
On the morning of April 19, tanks from the 4th Armored Division came crashing through the barbed wire, and we saw the first free Americans we had seen in three months. We were all delirious at the idea of being liberated, but actually it was another twenty-four hours before we were able to leave. There was still fighting, not only in the city but just a few feet from the hospital fence.
. . .
We could not believe that we were going to have another night in the compound, but we did. There was a difference, however, there was plenty of good, hot army cuisine prepared by the chefs of the 4th Armored Division. It was the same kind of food prepared by the same goldbricking army cooks that we had griped about a few months earlier, but it was an epicure's delight when we got it that night. We could not, however, eat as much as we had dreamed about.
The next day we were loaded on the backs of GI trucks and taken to an American field hospital about thirty miles away. It was only a collection of tents and we slept on folding canvas cots, but we were "home."
Before we left, I took some paper-back books and some Red Cross food to Pop, the jeltwebel who had been so considerate of us. I new that he was going to need it more than I would. Tears ran down the old man's cheeks when he told his "boys" good-bye.
Uncle Tom from page 31
After a few days of semi-quarantine, we were issued back pay and given passes to go out on the town. I visited all the traditional sights of Paris, the Eiffel tower, the Invalides, where Napoleon is buried with his son and his generals about him, Notre Dame Cathedral, where an enterprising Frenchman offered me dirty pictures on the steps of the cathedral, Pigalle, Montmarte, the Church of the Madeleine, the Louvre, and the Arc d' Triomphe. It was literally "Paris in the Spring" for a country boy who had been places he had never heard of and done things he had never dreamed of.
Uncle Tom from page 32
I was discharged as of September 27, 1945 and returned home two full months before my twentieth birthday. My military career had lasted barely twenty eight months, but they were the most significant months of my life. I know that the rest of my life, including my outlook on life and my view of myself was determined by the events of those months.
At the time, I never thought about anything of historical significance in what we did. I suppose that I thought of most of it as a kind of youthful challenge, a chance to prove myself to myself and to others. I certainly was not the strongest, nor the smartest, nor the best of my group at anything. I was, however, one of the most determined. There were times when I suppose mat i thought 'ot'most of it as a kind of youthful challenge, a chance to prove myself to myself and to others . I certainly was not the strongest, nor the smartest, nor the best of my group at anything. I was, however, one of the most determined. There were times when I kept going when I wanted to stop and did things I was afraid to do because I did not have the courage to be called a quitter nor a coward . There were times when my mouth got me in trouble. It still does! Because of sheer determination, I qualified as an expert rifleman, a sharpshooter and a combat infantryman.
In retrospect, it occurs to me that my peers and I participated in the most incredible adventure of all time and one that will never be repeated on the scale which we saw. If the legendary Trojan war "launched a thousand ships, and burned the topless towers of Illium," it does not compare in scope and grandeur to a single day of that episode of history known as "World War II," which saw the unleashing of four thousand ships and eleven thousand war planes on D day alone.
I learned many things. I learned that the Germans were not all ogres and demons. I learned that they were not all Nazis, and I learned that even all Nazis were not that bad. Pop, the feltwabel had been a Nazi. I learned that all Americans were not noble knights on white horses. I think I saw man's potential for good and for bad.
I learned that I could endure more than I had known that I could. I saw my own strength and my own weakness enough to agree with Pogo that, "We met the enemy, and he was us."
In the words of that eminent philosopher, Paul Dalrymple, "I would not have missed it for a million dollars, and I would not repeat it for five million."
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