D-Day happened 80 years ago this week. I’m probably not alone in remembering it by watching “Band of Brothers,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and “The Longest Day.”
My father-in-law, Henry, remembered D-Day from a hard perspective. On June 6, 1944, Henry was locked up in Stalag XVII-B in Krems, Austria. That day, he and his pals were locked in a barracks that housed 200 men (the whole prison camp held 5,000 prisoners of war), and they were huddled around a jury-rigged radio made of tin cans, shoe string, and a crystal stolen from the Stalag guards.
They listened to reports of the D-Day landings at Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches in Normandy. With tears in their eyes. They knew their own liberation day would come, just because, as General Eisenhower ordered on D-Day, “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”
Henry had been imprisoned in Stalag XVII-B as a POW since the previous January, when he had been shot down with his friends in a massive B-17 attack on an aircraft and munitions factory in Oscherlieben, Austria.
His best friend, Captain Bob Hallden, was killed instantly by machine-gun fire from a Messerschmitt Bf 109 that shot off the entire tail of Henry’s B-17. Henry and his friends hurtled to earth, and parachuted down near Kirchlengern, Germany.
To his dying day, Henry could never remember getting his chute on and pulling the ripcord. He thinks his guardian angel did. I think he was right.
The first thing Henry remembered when he came to, on that January day, was seeing a ring of pitchfork spikes surrounding him, brandished by German farmers who had been brainwashed by a demagogue into believing that American democracy was filthy with “lesser races” and liberalism. Then he became sharply aware of his ankles; both had broken from his fall. Then he heard the cries of his other good friend, navigator Lieutenant Limon, who was being beaten mercilessly just for being a Jew.
Henry was not an obedient POW, much like his later hero and fellow POW John McCain. An American soldier was expected to resist the enemy, even as a POW. And like McCain, Henry took this maxim to heart. After he was beaten during interrogation, Henry left the room limping, but with a one-finger salute. When he was asked by a Nazi prison guard how to say “Good morning” in English when he slammed open the barracks door at 4 a.m. to roust out the prisoners for roll-call, Henry smiled and said, in German, “Ja, ich werde es dir sagen.” (“Sure, I’ll tell you.”)
Then Henry patiently told “Schultzy” (his pet name for the guard), just how to say “Good morning” in English as only a Nazi should: “Howdy! I’m an SOB!” Though not with just the letters.
The only bathroom arrangements were open-pit latrines, beside the double barbed wire fences and the machine gun nests of the guards. Red Cross deliveries from home were always censored, always pilfered. Henry’s mother (my wife’s “babcha”) sent him a large sausage for Christmas in 1944. By the time Henry got it, it had been sliced down to half, and had turned green from spoilage. He carefully cut off the green part, then sliced the rest so thin that each of his barracks mates could get a portion.
This was American democracy, and the humble piety of a Polish immigrant, at work on a dark Christmas toward the end of World War II.
On 8 April 1945, Henry and 4,000 other POWs from Stalag XVII-B began an 18-day march of 281 miles to Braunau, Austria, where they would be incarcerated with thousands of Russian POWs. When they arrived, they had to build huts out of pine trees, as there was no room in the barracks.
Mercifully, the camp was liberated on May 3, 1945 by the American 13th Armored Division. Henry and the other now ex-POWs climbed aboard C-47 air transports to France on May 9, 1945.
Behind the bar in my house’s FROG (i.e., “family room over garage”), I have hung, beside a model of a B-17 that Henry put together in the ‘80s, a large shadow-box frame that contains his many medals. One is a golden caterpillar with ruby eyes — which signifies an airman who had jumped out of a burning plane. Besides this medal frame is a black and white picture of Henry in a Florida bar with two other ex-POWs, newly arrived from de-briefing in France.
In those days, liberated ex-POWs were given steak dinners every day and unlimited rations of beer and cigarettes “to fatten them up” after such long deprivation. It was a bad idea, but the Army Air Force meant well.
I looked at those three faces right before my D-Day viewing of “Band of Brothers.” Those guys hadn’t a clue they would be re-living the Messerschmitt machine gun fire tearing their B17 apart, their capture and torture and incarceration by Nazis, their forced march, the death of their friends — for the rest of their lives.
Someone famous once called POWs like Henry “a bunch of losers.” And he was right: Henry was a “loser.” A loser indeed, because he lost, in World War II, the ability to sleep through the night without suffering another flashback trauma.
When I see people turning their American flags upside-down because of distress, I’ll tell you what distress really is. It’s Henry watching his best friend getting torn in half in the cockpit on a January day, thousands of feet over Austria, over and over again. And his family having to hear his heartbreaking cries, night after night after night, for decades.
About 10 years ago, before his decline into full-on dementia, I asked Henry if it was worth it, if he’d do it all over again. He didn’t hesitate.
American democracy, freedom for all, equal justice under the law and civil rights for all, for immigrant families like his and for all Americans, was what he would fight for. All over again.
At the end of “Saving Private Ryan,” remember what Captain Miller said, in his dying breath, to the soldier that he and his company had suffered so much to rescue. “James, earn this! Earn it!”
And that’s exactly what Henry — and all true and brave U.S. and Allied soldiers, defenders of Western democracy — say to you and me today.
We are not worthy of them. “The eyes of the world are upon you.”
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