Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 27, 1993 TAG: 9304270346
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE: PEARISBURG LENGTH: Long
All were company-rank officers in the Second Armored Division in World War II. They called the Second "Hell on Wheels," a nickname associated with Gen. George Patton's Third Army as it roared across Europe.
John B. Roller Jr. of Pearisburg is on the left in the snapshot, his presence indicated by an arrow pointing to him and the notation, "ME." He is the only one of the five tankers in the picture who came home from the war.
Roller, now 72, came back with three Silver Stars for gallantry in combat and two Purple Hearts for wounds the gallantry got him - Silver Stars not being easy to get.
Roller said recently that he was offering his war pictures and his stories about the way it was then because it all might be lost somehow, now that half a century has passed.
"I feel that 50 years of history is about to pass on to a new generation that might not appreciate it," Roller wrote in offering his photo and memories to this newspaper.
In the apartment over the florist business that Roller and his wife Fay ran for years before retiring, the pictures were spread on the kitchen table, and the memories started to dance.
Theirs was a generation born to big-band music, to the menace of Germany and Japan, to a sense of not knowing about tomorrow, to pure patriotism and to songs with wistful lyrics that mirrored their time.
There was a song titled "I'll Walk Alone," and it could have been written about John and Fay Roller - married on Christmas Day in 1941, 18 days after Pearl Harbor.
While her husband went overseas to serve in North Africa, Sicily and the invasion of Europe, Fay Roller taught the second and third grades in a Wise County mining town.
She worried when the letters didn't come and possibly put the thought of a telegram from Washington out of her mind - that awful telegram that began: "The War Department regrets to inform you . . . "
Big bands. When they went to the 1941 ring dance at VPI - then a military school, primarily, with about 50 women students - the band was Tommy Dorsey's. Buddy Rich was on the drums. The vocalists were Connie Francis and Frank Sinatra - later Old Blue Eyes but then a skinny kid whose crooning tended to make teen-age females faint or act very wild.
On May 30, 1942, John B. Roller Jr. graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant. Incredibly, both he and his father, who had been an officer in World War I, reported to Fort Story at the same time.
His father stayed stateside. Roller joined the Second Armored Division.
Roller Jr., who served 37 years on Town Council here, has remembered one part of his war with peacetime blood. He has donated 18 gallons to the Red Cross because, he said, he saw the importance of blood when he held the plasma bag for a soldier as both were evacuated in a GI ambulance.
To preserve the truth about those often-dreadful times, Roller has his photographs of a visit to Buchenwald, a week after the infamous Nazi concentration camp was liberated.
This was the camp that gave the world the incredible, barbaric legend of "The Bitch of Buchenwald" - Ilsa Koch, the wife of the camp commandant, who made lamp shades of human skin.
There, Roller photographed the rather elaborate entrance gate, the ovens where thousands of murdered Jews were cremated, a pile of human bones heaped precisely and a graveyard, also done neatly, of other human bones.
Revisionists who say the Holocaust never happened wouldn't last long in John Roller's kitchen because he has a pretty good argument against them.
"I've got the pictures to show them," he said.
The humor helped
His children had Roller's medals framed, which didn't displease him, but the emphasis in the kitchen that morning was on the memories he had dictated to his wife - memories that he hopes will preserve the times 50 years ago.
Many of the reminiscences are funny, maybe because humor helps get men through wars.
There was George Patton, for example, profanely telling the troops: "I just want you goddammed men of the Second Armored Division to know that I love every bone in your heads."
There was the private in Roller's outfit - the "sad sack" that every outfit had, which meant the joke was often on him.
When the outfit had been overseas 14 months, the private got a letter from home saying he was the father of an 8-pound boy. "He was the happiest soldier in Europe," Roller said. "The rest of us laughed."
Twelve months later there was a another birth announcement, and they laughed. But when it came time to go home after the war ended, Roller and others became acquainted with the "point system."
Under this arrangement, veterans were given points for medals, battle stars, length of service. The higher the point total, the nearer home. One hundred points was a good number at first.
It was then that Roller and others found that the private's two children were worth 12 points apiece, an enormous advantage over the childless GIs. He got out a month before anybody else.
In his postwar book, "Back Home," Bill Mauldin, the enlisted man who became as famous for his cartoons as Patton did for his military tactics, saw the same humor in the situation.
In one cartoon, Mauldin has Willie, an infantryman who survived the war in Europe along with his pal, Joe, dressed in civilian clothes. Willie has shaved and he is kneeling, hands outstretched, before a reluctant child.
Willie is saying: "Come to Daddy, ya wonderful little 12-point rascal."
Not all of the recollections are happy.
One of the four officers who didn't make it was killed by an eerie ricochet that came through the floor of his tank. "You have to feel it had his name on it," Roller said.
Another was killed by a sniper when he raised his head two inches out of the tank turret. The others burned to death.
Roller remembers returning to duty after a wound, asking about several officers and hearing the litany: "They got killed."
Roller got his first Silver Star and his first Purple Heart on Aug. 4, 1944, near Vire, France. Allied forces were breaking out of the Normandy beachhead and starting their race across Europe.
A Sherman tank had been knocked out by German fire, and the badly wounded commander was lying across the top. Roller, a first lieutenant and platoon commander, ran to the tank under fire and carried the wounded officer to safety.
Roller was wounded by shrapnel as he continued to help evacuate wounded men.
On Nov. 17, 1944, Roller won his second Silver Star. His tank was hit by an armor-piercing shell.
After Roller and other crewmen left the tank, he saw that the driver and the assistant driver were still inside. Despite artillery, tank and small-arms fire, Roller tried to get them out. The driver died. Roller got another Purple Heart.
Roller recalled this as particularly rough action. His tank was hit and he was blown about 20 feet away. For a while, he thought he was blind, but when he took off his glasses, he found he was covered with oil.
As Roller tried to get the unconscious assistant driver out of the tank, a German 88 millimeter shell passed through the driver's body and between Roller's legs, wounding him with shrapnel in this hands and legs.
Roller returned to duty in time to see Allied troops linking up to end the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest - the last major German offensive of the war.
The third Silver Star came near the end of the war in Europe, as the Hell on Wheels division - after racing from the Rhine to the Elbe River in Germany - was cleaning up Magdeburg. Again, it was a matter of going to the wounded under heavy fire.
Cameras for conquerors
Roller's memories, like those of most tankers who fought in Europe, include the German Tiger and Mark V tanks, so heavily armored that American shells were sometimes fired in vain.
And in the kitchen, nearly 50 years later, you can hear the stories the men who fought with the Hell on Wheels division tell at reunions.
Roller would tell about the day in Germany when there was no gunfire and they circled the tanks and he went for a walk in a town.
A woman came out of her house and handed him a camera. Then, another citizen did the same thing. By the time Roller got back to the tank park, "I must have had 20 cameras hanging from each arm."
Roller didn't know it, but rumor, that terrible companion of war, had convinced the townspeople that the Americans wouldn't harm them if they gave up their cameras.
He picked out a Leica and shared the others with the company.
There was the captain in North Africa, who finally had enough of the way the French ran railroads - which meant that the engineer stopped each morning for a leisurely breakfast.
Roller and his company were traveling in something less than style in the French 40 and 8 boxcars - which meant these cars could carry eight cows or 40 men. They had K-rations for breakfast.
One morning, the captain followed the engineer to breakfast and pulled his .45-caliber sidearm to hurry up his progress. The French were upset, Roller said, and the captain was still trying to explain his actions to them at the end of the war.
And the recollection of American soldiers who sold so many cheap watches to Russian soldiers at very high prices that "it was hard to find out what time it was because there were not too many watches around."
And then, there was loyalty, like Roller's tank driver, badly wounded and left behind in Europe, who showed up at Roller's florist shop in Pearisburg after the war.
He had driven hundreds of miles to Wise County to find out about Roller, and then another 150 to Pearisburg. "We had quite a reunion," Roller said.
There are more memories than these, but maybe these will do to make sure that Roller's times and the men who made them don't slip away.
by CNB