Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 8, 1995 TAG: 9504110052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HOT SPRINGS LENGTH: Medium
Fifty years ago today, Johnny Gazzola was lying face down, motionless against the cool soil of a German farm field, wondering if he would ever see his native Bath County again.
Earlier, Gazzola had seen his buddy, Henry Lloyd of Darlington, S.C., machine-gunned to death a few yards in front of him.
His only chance to avoid Lloyd's fate, Gazzola thought, was to play dead. It was the beginning of a long ordeal.
Gazzola had been on the battlefields of Europe for only three months.
He was drafted into the Army in 1944 after flunking two courses during his senior year at Bath County's Valley High. He still was 18 when, in January 1945 as the Battle of the Bulge was drawing to a close, he joined Company E of the 84th Infantry Division's 333rd Infantry Regiment in Belgium.
The 84th Division, nicknamed the Railsplitters, was not activated until after World War II began and saw its first combat in November 1944. Future noteworthies Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes and West Virginia Gov. Arch Moore were among the division's soldiers.
When the division crossed the Roer River in early February, Gazzola was there. Other river crossings, including that of the Rhine, followed. The division, moving quickly through North-Central Germany, crossed the Weser River with the 5th Armored Division and was moving on Hanover when the young private got his chance to audition for a corpse.
His role with the E Company's second platoon was that of scout. A scout's job was to move forward, ahead of the platoon, to look for the enemy. It was a job that Gazzola later came to realize amounted to posing essentially as cannon fodder.
He had acted as first scout as the platoon moved through three small villages. As they approached another, Lloyd, who was behind Gazzola as second scout, asked him to trade places, saying Gazzola was moving too slowly.
Early in the morning of April 8, as Lloyd and Gazzola - about 50 yards behind - moved into the field outside the town, Germans in hidden machine-gun nests opened up. Gazzola could see the tracer streaks and puffs of smoke as bullets tore into Lloyd's body. "He hollered, 'I'm hit, Gazzola; I'm dying,''' the Bath Countian recalled with a catch in his voice.
Gazzola said he was scared. He figured his only chance to live was to play dead, so he fell to the ground with his steel helmet rolling to his side. He lay there out in the open, waiting for his platoon, which didn't know he was alive, to rescue him.
He did a lot of thinking about his family and friends back home while he lay there, Gazzola said. "I figured, 'Well, if I have to go, I'll go with some good thoughts.''' He even dozed for a while, he said.
Around eight hours after Lloyd was shot, the platoon decided the only way to get around the machine gun nest was to go through it. The men put their rifles on their hips and moved forward, firing rapidly until the Germans were routed out, he said.
That's when one of the soldiers noticed Gazzola was not dead, and yelled to the rest of the platoon, "Hey, Bazooka's alive." Bazooka was Gazzola's Army nickname.
He had another close call later that night after the platoon had entered the village of Weetzen and German artillery opened up, striking a tank near him. His war ended April 25, after his unit reached the Elbe River and linked up with Russian allies on the other side. The division stayed in Germany after the war as part of the army of occupation and he helped police Nuremberg during the war trials there.
Gazzola was awarded the Bronze Star for warning the rest of his platoon about the German machine-gun emplacement before he fell down to play dead.
"Basically, it was a pretty good war for me," he says now. "I survived it and got my GI Bill out of it."
Gazzola returned home after the war, finished high school and attended college with his GI benefits. He taught school in Bath County and coached sports. Golfer J.C. Snead was on his eighth-grade basketball team.
In 1961, Gazzola went to work as a publicist and public relations man for The Homestead, where his father had worked and he had caddied as a boy. He retired last year as the resort's public relations chief.
He's now finishing up a four-year term on the Bath County Board of Supervisors, having already served 16 years on the School Board. His wife, Opal, is head of the county's Social Services Department.
Gazzola, who turns 69 this month, still is with The Homestead. The resort's new owners, Club Resorts, asked him to stay on as a part-time curator of history. He talked about his wartime experiences in a new library he helped create off the hotel's main lobby, which doubles as a game room and resort museum.
by CNB