Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505080028
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Fifty years have gone by since they accomplished that mission. The lives they came home to were routine by comparison: marriage, children, jobs, houses. Now the world has changed, and the memories of what they did during World War II are fading.
Yet their stories are too profound to be forgotten. These are the veterans we heard from - or about - when we asked our readers for World War II stories from the European Theater, in observance of the 50th anniversary of V-E "Victory in Europe" Day.
`You'd be lying or a fool if you weren't afraid'
"You'd be lying or a fool if you weren't afraid," Claude Burton said. "It's either kill or die."
Burton was a 20-year-old field artilleryman who participated in most of the major campaigns in Northern Europe. The memories of being pushed backward during the Battle of Bulge are still too vivid in his mind. It was difficult for him to watch a recent television documentary on that dismal winter, when bodies were frozen in the snow, stacked like cordwood.
"Everybody thought the war was already over" when the Germans counterattacked at Bastogne, he said. Instead, he was in combat constantly until the war ended five months later.
When the end came, Burton was near the Ruhr River. He watched as the defeated army marched by, with old men and young boys in line with the regular soldiers. "Awfullest-looking bunch of people I ever saw," he said of the bedraggled lot.
Now 73 and a retired foundry worker living near Walton, Burton says he's still startled by sudden, loud noises.
`You don't want to try and dwell on things too much'
Having been sent back from the front, A.B. Broyles' unit already had organized a dance in a German castle when they heard news of the surrender. "Schnapps, cognac - you name it - it flowed that night, buddy," he laughed.
Broyles, an explosives expert, needed the comfort. Locating and clearing out minefields was part of his job, which was particularly difficult in the snowy European winter of 1944-45.
He recalls being strafed, bombed and shelled. "You'd be sitting there watching them go by. Some of them sounded like a train," said Broyles, 69, of Vicker.
His eyes beheld horrible sights: battlefield dead, torn bodies. "You don't want to try and dwell on things too much. I've had a lot of trouble down through the years trying to forget it. But there's no hopes of it," he said.
"I had a religious upbringing, and there's a whole lot of consolation in it."
`I always managed somehow not to get hit'
Rolling through Europe at the German's heels, driving a truck hauling troops and supplies for the quartermaster corps, John St.Clair traveled 100 miles some days and none at all on others. During the Battle of the Bulge, he went backward.
He saw towns leveled to rubble and civilians living in hovels dug out below the debris.
One day, bullets pierced the five-gallon gasoline cans on the side of St.Clair's truck. Enemy soldiers were firing at him from beneath a bridge.
"I tossed a hand grenade out the window toward the bridge. That put a stop to it," he said, adding: "I always managed somehow not to get hit."
A retired truck driver and resident of Lafayette, St.Clair, 77, said he gained a new appreciation for the German people when he was stationed in Berlin after the war ended.
"Fine a people as you ever met. They were glad to see us. They said, 'We feel safe now.'''
`A lot of shells went by me. None had my name on it'
As a forward observer, or scout, for an artillery unit, Marcus L. Davis was at the front frequently as the Allies pushed through Northern Europe. Near the Rhine River, he got too far ahead of his unit and found himself cut off behind enemy lines.
Rifle in hand, he approached a dwelling. "The door opened, and a pleasant-looking German woman appeared. She spoke good English. She told me she lived alone with her two children and a pet goat. Her husband had been killed on the Russian front," he said.
The woman told Davis to hide in a water tower behind her house. "For about two weeks, this kind woman brought me food after dark, until my unit caught up with me," said Davis, a 75-year-old retired government auditor from Christiansburg.
The eldest of nine children, Davis served with three of his brothers. "It was a dangerous job. A lot of shells went by me. None had my name on it."
`We were just herded here and herded there'
Working at a hospital about 10 miles outside Paris, Margaret Doud and her colleagues hopped in an Army truck and headed for town after they heard about the German surrender.
The City of Lights was illuminated again. "Everybody was dancing in the cobblestone streets and celebrating. It was a joyous time," she recalled.
Doud, a nursing school graduate from North Carolina, was a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps. At an evacuation hospital in England, she tended to GIs wounded on D-Day by bullets and shrapnel. "They still had the grease on them from the oil in the water [off Normandy beach]," she said.
Three months later, she, too, jumped off a troop carrier and waded onto that beach, moving toward the front with her field hospital detachment. "We didn't have to do much thinking. We were just herded here and herded there. We just did what we had to do."
Of the soldiers, Doud of Radford, said: "They were all really nice young men. The cream of the crop. They really appreciated what we did for them. They were glad to see an American woman."
`These people weren't lucky enough to be gassed'
"We were pressing through southeast Germany. There was a patch of woods with a barbed-wire fence running through it. We cut through, and that's when we found the camp," recalled Robert A. Wiatt.
His infantry unit had unknowingly liberated a work camp, filled with gaunt inmates who looked like skeletons in striped prison garb. "They were worked and starved to death," Wiatt said. "These people weren't lucky enough to be gassed."
He saw the remains of an SS guard beaten by enraged prisoners who had enough strength to wield a shovel. He'll also never forget the camp's death stench.
A paratrooper from Hampton, Wiatt got word of the German surrender when his unit was near Berchtesgaden, site of Adolf Hitler's mountain hideaway. There, in celebration, Wiatt and his mates liberated the Fuehrer's wine cellar.
"We had quite a time with it," smiled Wiatt, now 69, who is retired and living near Ellett.
`I was a skeleton. I lost a lot of good buddies'
Donald R. Dowdy also recalls being an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge - cold, unwashed, huddling in a foxhole. "Nothing but mud and snow. We never got a hot meal. I lost 40 pounds. I was a skeleton. I lost a lot of good buddies."
Yet he asserts: "I was no hero, just like all the rest of the GIs. We all did our part."
Dowdy, 73, of Christiansburg, had made it into Czechoslovakia when the war ended. "The colonel said, 'Boys, I think this is it. I think the war is over.''' Nearby were Russian troops, who staged a ballet in the Americans' honor.
He came back home with a nervous condition. "For years, I dreamed about it. After I got saved, most of that disappeared."
"The Lord was looking out for me. I give all credit to him. He got me back," said Dowdy, a retired maintenance supervisor. "I didn't deserve it any better than anyone else."
`The end of the war was more dramatic over here'
John B. Roller Jr., already by V-E Day the recipient of three Silver Stars for gallantry and two Purple Hearts for wounds, greeted the surrender in stride. "The end of the war was more dramatic over here than over there. There was no big bang-bang," he said.
A lieutenant with an armored unit, Roller found his way to Buchenwald a week after the infamous concentration camp was freed.
There, he photographed the ovens where thousands of murdered Jews were cremated, piles of human bones and the wooden dormitory racks where the inmates slept, jammed together in cubicles.
Revisionists who claim the Holocaust never occurred mystify Roller, 74. "I've got the pictures to show them," he said.
A retired florist and longtime member of Pearisburg's Town Council, Roller has donated more than 18 gallons of blood to the Red Cross over the years because, he said, he saw the importance of blood when he held the plasma bag for a wounded GI.
`All that shelling, it had to have an effect on me'
As an MP stationed at the Army 12th Corps headquarters, Theron Phillips saw a lot of military brass. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower once walked between Phillips and another soldier as he entered a building. "He stopped and spoke. Made you feel like you were a person," Phillips recalled.
Phillips also saw "Old Blood and Guts," Gen. George Patton, occasionally. "I didn't care that much about him. He wanted everybody out of his way."
Wearing his characteristic pearl-handled pistols, Patton would walk his dog past Phillips' post. "You could tell how things were going for him." On good days, Patton hummed. On bad days, he beat his dog, Phillips said.
Near war's end, Phillips was ordered to round up some fleeing officers from a German concentration camp. "We found some in a wooded area. I wasn't about to shoot one of them. But I felt like it - if you'd seen what they done."
Still driving a truck at age 72, Phillips says thunderstorms that pass his Floyd County farm still make him uneasy. "All that shelling, it had to have an effect on me."
`An 18-year-old boy ain't got no business on the front line'
"You might go over there at age 18, and in a few weeks, you're 25," said Burley Quesenberry. "An 18-year-old boy ain't got no business on the front line."
Yet that's how it went for him as an infantry soldier fighting in Germany. "It sure makes your heart run fast," said the 69-year-old retired foundry worker from Floyd County.
When the surrender was announced, Quesenberry celebrated by emptying his rifle clip into the top of a tree, which prompted the nervous Germans living nearby to dive for cover.
In the town, German citizens dressed in black would walk solemnly to church clutching pictures of husbands, sons and brothers who died in the German army. He also saw a procession of German soldiers who marched through a field to discard their weapons in a large pile.
LIke many other soldiers, Quesenberry assumed his war was not over yet, with the Japanese still fighting in the Pacific. "I was going," he said, and he had been shipped back stateside on his way to Japan.
"Thank goodness they dropped that bomb."
by CNB