Stories about my Father 3

July 11, 2022

Just over a week before Christmas in 1944, the Germans launched an attack against the defending line of the Allies in the Ardennes region of Europe. The Ardennes is an area thick with trees on rolling hills dotted with ancient, little towns that stretches from the eastern side of Belgium into northern France and Luxembourg and on into Germany.

It was a surprise, last-ditch effort on the German’s part to win the war. Despite it being the scene of other major battles during World War I and just four years previously during the Battle of France, it was relatively undefended because everybody thought that the narrow, windy roads and densely forested areas would make battle there too difficult. The weather was also terrible. The ground was covered in deep snow, and it was freezing. There was plenty of intelligence suggesting that the Germans were starting to build up forces along the line, but at the moment, nobody paid much attention. The Allies were caught almost completely off guard.

By this time, near the eventual end of the war, Hitler had assumed control of the German army. His plan was to break through the Allies’ weak defenses, march straight through to the port city of Antwerp and, within a week, divide the Allied forces. With Antwerp taken and the opposing army split in half, they would then be easy to surround and destroy allowing the German army to then move back up to their northern front to repel the imminent attack from the Russians. It was a desperate plan with only a small chance of success, but by that time Hitler and his armies were out of options. This attack is called The Ardennes Offensive or more commonly, because of the shape of the front line, The Battle of the Bulge.

Just after Thanksgiving that year, my dad sailed from England with the rest of the 87th Infantry Division and landed in Le Havre, France. They ended up in Metz, France to the south of Luxembourg, and for a time, I don’t think they did much of anything except waiting.

The Germans had occupied a line of forts that had been built in earlier wars by the French. My father wrote, “One of them was named Jeanne d’Arc. You could see the silhouettes of the long flat forts in the low hills in the distance. The landscape with its bare trees in the sunless December days was sombre. It was depressing to realize that this area had been fought over so many times, going back at least to the German barbarians and the Romans.”

My dad was twenty-one years old and, aside from a visit or two to Kentucky and to the beach in North Carolina, until he started basic training, the furthest away he’d been from the small Virginia city of Lynchburg was the equally small Virginia city of Blacksburg about a hundred miles away, where he’d been going to college at VPI. He had no idea what was going on.

He knew what he was told. Over the course of that winter, there were times when he’d end up in a field office somewhere and there’d be a map on the wall indicating where the opposing forces were, but he lived on a steady diet of rumor and conflicting information. It wasn’t his job to know, it was his job to do as he was told.

On December 7, a little over a week after they got to Metz, they were then moved east to the front line in the Saar region of southern Germany.

Then they started fighting.

My father, at the time, was in a Liaison Section which consisted of five enlisted men, a sergeant, a radio operator, two jeep drivers, and a wire corporal. My dad was the wire corporal of his section. The Liaison Section’s job was to set up their radio in various places according to orders from headquarters. Radios only had a range of about five miles, so they had to be set up at intervals by different Sections to create a network.

At a reunion long after the war was over, my dad joked to his then captain, Hugo Giske, that if the cell phone had been invented that Giske could have done the whole job by himself and the rest of them could have gone home. As it was, the radio was so big and cumbersome that it couldn’t even be carried on someone’s back. If it wasn’t in its permanent position attached inside a jeep, it had to be lugged around in three separate cases including one that was the battery. This was, of course, before transistor boards were in use which led to the creation of our current very small cell phones. These radios relied on big electronic tubes which took up a lot of room.

When the section was sent out into the field, they’d be told what frequency to use and anyone on the same frequency could then hear what was being said. If they happened to hit on the right one, so could the Germans, so it was constantly changed. The radios couldn’t transmit and receive at the same time, so for clarity’s sake, when you were sending a message you’d say “over” when you were done speaking so the listener would know that they could then speak. When you got a message and understood it, you’d say, “roger,” which represented the letter “r” for “received.” When the whole conversation was over, you’d say, “roger and out,” and disconnect the radio.

Much preferable was using a mobile phone set-up which had unlimited range. You could also talk and hear at the same time and the lines were more secure. The mobile phones, however, were also very large and cumbersome and only worked if they were connected to the whole network with wires. This was my father’s job: laying the wires.

They would string the wires, which came in big two-foot-wide spools, along the side of roads, on fences, on trees, on anything really, that was there. If the wires had to go across a road, they’d sometimes be strung between the roofs of two houses across from each other so that they’d be high enough to clear the tops of trucks and tanks that would need to drive by. You could also bury them under the gravel of the road and have the vehicles drive over them, but there was always the danger that they’d break under the weight.

My father didn’t think that he knew enough about what he was doing to do the job effectively. While they were in Metz, he’d been taught how to splice wire together, but anything more complicated than that, he was clueless as to what to do.

A few weeks of being in Metz, after the initial attack, his division was sent below the bulge somewhat to the west of the main area of fighting. He spent Christmas, a week after everything had exploded, camping outside the town of Reims in France. Reims is a two-hour drive northeast from Paris and is the unofficial center of champagne production in France. Next time you pop a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, you’ll notice that the label says “A Reims France” on it.

While they were there, my twenty-one-year-old dad, who had now been in the middle of a war in a part of the world he’d never been in before for just a little over a month, went to his commanding officer, Captain Tupka, and asked to be demoted back to being a private because he didn’t feel that he had been trained properly to do the job he was doing. I don’t know that he told Tupka this, but he also couldn’t deal with being constantly ridden by Giske for not doing the job properly. Tupka told him to put his request in writing and eventually, dad was busted back down to private. I can only imagine what Tupka’s response was, but, according to my father, his immediate captain, Giske, was very annoyed with him. “I can’t really blame him for not wanting to put up with me,” said my eighty-something-year-old father in hindsight, but at the time I doubt he had the objectivity to feel that way.

Given where I am in my life, and given what I do, I find it much easier to put myself, in this instance, in the two captain’s shoes than I do in my father’s. The older I get, the younger the actors and crew I find myself working with, get. The divide only gets larger, the further away I age from where they are. Like both captains, I often find myself leading people who are just starting out.

When somebody that young comes up to you with a problem that seems ridiculous to everyone but them, you cannot, in most cases, give in to your immediate impulse which is to just shut them down and send them back out to do what you need them to do. As a leader, you need to think long-term. You need to help this young adult with a concern to learn how to function.

We had a cast and crew of people in St. Louis for The Karate Kid, many of whom are about the same age now as my dad was during the Battle of the Bulge. I am not going to say anything bad about any of them. If fact, I will say just the opposite. They were great people. They worked hard. They were fun to be around. I found them inspiring far more times than the times when I wanted to roll my eyes back into my head. We had issues come up, and I often found myself swallowing my first, second, and maybe even third responses to them. The only thing keeping them from fully functioning at a professional level is their current age. I know for a fact that I was no different at that age either.

My father was only thinking about himself when he asked to be taken off the job he was doing. I would wager that if it had been a couple of months further into combat, and he was given the same job, he would have figured it out. He said, “I think I could have learned what I needed to know soon enough but I decided that it was bad enough to be facing the dangers of combat without the extra burden of what I perceived to be constant riding by him (Giske).” Captain Tupka was probably wondering if this kid standing in front of him whining about his job had any f%$#ing idea that what they were doing was fighting to keep the entire world free from the tyranny of the Third Reich. Instead of responding with anything like that, however, what he said was, “Put your request in writing.”

Not everybody is suited to every job. My father describes one guy, “… a man in another of our three liaison sections had lost his head under fire. He ran around, exposing himself to enemy fire, and then headed for the rear. He told somebody that he knew everybody would consider him a damned coward, but he couldn’t help it. He was a tall rangy guy from the Southwestern US, not at all the stereotype of a man who would crack under fire.”

I thought about my father a lot while we were in St. Louis. What would our St. Louis crew do if they were suddenly thrust into the middle of a war? Like my father was, many of them are still living with their parents. There is not one of them, who I don’t think is going to succeed in life, but they are all just starting. The fact that they were there, working outside the box, already means that they have a bigger picture than most. They are figuring it out.

I think my father carried the shame of pulling out of his job as a wire corporal for the rest of his life. I wish I could tell him to cut himself some slack. You were twenty-one, dude. You can’t look back on what you did at twenty-one with eighty-five-year-old eyes and judge. God love the twenty-one-year-old Al Hester for marching into that office in the middle of the war to end all wars and asking to be given something easier to do. All you can do is laugh at the humanness of it.

My father survived the war and lived to the ripe old age of 88. Not all his friends did. The 87th Infantry Division suffered over 6,000 casualties during the battle. 1,500 people in the division, however, were awarded the Bronze Star for either heroic achievement, heroic service, meritorious service, or meritorious achievement in a combat zone, including Private Albert Sydney Hester.

He figured it out.