“I am someplace on the Atlantic Ocean, where I don’t know. It all looks the same to me. This won’t be mailed until we reach wherever we are going so you will know I got there safely. We don’t know where we are going or when we will get there.”
In early November of 1944, my father shipped out of New York on a boat that the British had captured from the Vichy French called The Louis Pasteur. It was designed to hold 400 passengers but there were 7,000 troops on board. Many of the men, including my father, got seasick. The Sergeant Major, whose last name by pure coincidence was also Hester, thought that this was hilarious. He wandered past them all and pretended to throw up, howling with laughter the whole time. My father decided that the Sergeant Major was too stupid to get sick, himself. My father was 21 and he had been on active duty, training back in the US, for about 18 months.
As I write this, Michael and I are in an airport lounge waiting to board a flight to Brussels. Our plan is to spend a week or two exploring the Ardennes region where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. I am curious to see the places that he saw. I know that a lot of it will be much changed now since it’s been over seventy-five years since he was there. Still, there may still be echoes bouncing through some of the valleys and maybe a ghost or two wandering around inside an old building.
My grandparents had the remarkable presence of mind to save all the letters that my dad wrote home from the time he enlisted in the army in June of 1942 right up through his homecoming after the war just in time for Christmas in 1945. He wrote them very long, chatty letters several times a week. At the time, of course, he had very little idea about the bigger historical picture of what he was participating in. Many of his letters sound like nothing more than a boy who’s writing home from summer camp complaining about the food, the long hours of activities, the mean counselors, and the other rowdy kids. At first, anyway.
He was beyond excited about seeing some of the places that he’d only dreamt about before. When the ship finally docked, he wrote home, “Well I arrived safely somewhere in England. I think that I’m going to like it here…. The children are all over the place. They swarm around the soldiers, run along the streets with us, and try to slip in the barracks. They all want American coins, candy and chewing gum. They are constantly asking, “Got any gum, chum?” The way they talk with their accents is enough to keep you in hysterics… The Bobbies look like all the pictures I ever saw of them, but I was still amazed to see them in the flesh… It is about eight o’clock here now making it almost time you all are getting out of school over there. That makes it seem like a long way from home. I wouldn’t have missed this experience for the world.”
Many veterans will not talk about their experiences in combat. Period. It doesn’t matter the war the effects of the trauma seem to be much the same for everyone who participated. As awful as things got for the soldiers in Europe, it seems like they were even worse in the Pacific. My dad’s war stories, I’ve come to realize, were selective. My sister and I grew up on them. As soon as we were old enough to understand speech, we started hearing them. His buddy Smith is almost as indelible a character in my mind as Piglet is from Winnie the Pooh. From what we could tell, they’d had a blast.
We used to watch a television comedy series called Hogan’s Heroes that was set in a German prisoner of war camp. It was on in reruns every afternoon. In each episode, Colonel Hogan and a gang of feisty American soldiers did their best to outwit the bumbling Nazi Sergeant Schultz and the far more imposing but still easily duped Colonel Klink who ran the camp. Merriment and hijinks aplenty. They all looked well fed and healthy and seemed to be having the time of their lives.
Not long before he died and he was bed-ridden, my dad started telling some of his stories to Michael who was a fresh audience. My sister and I had long gotten to the point where we’d roll our eyes back into our heads when he started in on the good old days back in Europe. Probably because he knew he didn’t have very much time left; he went much deeper into what had really happened with Michael than he ever had with us. Suddenly, there were much darker edges to what he remembered. As I read through his letters and recollections now, I realize that there were far more of those darker parts than he had ever let on. Even as he was trying to put it all down on paper, though, it doesn’t always feel like he’s telling the whole story.
I had forgotten all about Hogan’s Heroes until I wrote that last paragraph. Looking at the show now, the first thing that comes to mind of course is, what the hell were they thinking? The writers of the show were sued by the two writers of the film Stalag 17, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, who claimed that their story had been appropriated for the series. Both Bevan and Trzcinski had been POWs in the war. It doesn’t look like the series writers ever served in the armed forces. One of them, certainly, was too young at the time. Hogan’s Heroes premiered in 1965, twenty years after the war had ended. Even so, it seems to me that “too soon” might be an appropriate response to creating a comedy out of that story.
The 87th Infantry Division set sail for England on November 4, 1944. They docked in Liverpool on November 13th. About two weeks later they crossed the Channel into France and by December 7th they were in the Saar region of Germany where they experienced battle for the first time as part of General Patton’s 3rd Army. The Germans launched their surprise attack in the Ardennes on December 16th. The 87th joined in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge on Christmas Eve. Germany collapsed and surrendered less than five months later, on May 7, 1945. Exactly two months after that on July 7th, my father was shipped back to the United States. His whole time in Europe only lasted eight months, but he would talk about it for the next 66 years.
After the war, he finished his last year of college at VPI and eventually got a job writing for a magazine called Chemical and Engineering News in Chicago. Within a few years, their European correspondent quit, and they asked my father if he’d like the gig. He jumped at the chance to go back and moved to England. While he was there, he met my mother, they got married, and they ended up living in various places in Europe, including, for a while, Brussels. My mother says they were in Brussels for about ten months but can’t remember where their apartment was.
When I was at Columbia during my sophomore year, I was walking across campus, when I happened to see a notice stuck to a board that said there would be a meeting to discuss studying abroad for Juniors. From that moment, I was desperate to go even before I knew what it was all about. I got the materials and information together and tried to figure out how best to sell the idea to Dad. With a whole slew of arguments ready to plead my case, I brought it up but even before I needed to use any of them, he agreed. I think that he was more excited about the prospect of my year abroad if that’s possible than I was.
Dad never lost his love of Europe. Honestly, neither have I. The year I spent over there in college was life-changing. Many of the friends I made over there are good friends of mine to this day even if we only occasionally see each other. That shared experience bonded us all indelibly. Of course, what Dad saw and lived through over there couldn’t have been more different from what I did, but our mutual love of the place was something we always agreed upon.
Since my year there at school, I’ve been all over the European continent. I spent months on end in England. I had some truly wonderful months in Amsterdam putting up Jersey Boys. We did an event in Berlin for a few days that’s made me want to go back ever since. Every time I was sent over to check on the show in the Netherlands or in London, I would add on a few days somewhere else, like Copenhagen, Barcelona or Provence, or Normandy. I went to Brussels on one of those trips and a group of us took a great overnight trip to Brugges. With all that traveling though, I’ve never been to any of the places where my father fought. This will all be new territory.
Digging through my father’s life all seems like new territory, too. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. As my father said on the ship coming over, “We don’t know where we are going or when we will get there.” Like him, I’m always up for an adventure.
Gosh, I wish my parents would share their life experiences like Al has. This is truly fascinating, Richard. Enjoy Brussels xx
and so it begins.....