World War II unfolds through letters of M Company

World War II unfolds through letters of M Company

By BURT HUBBARD

Like clockwork, the “round robin” begins its journey near Syracuse, N.Y., and crisscrosses the country with stops in Virginia, Ohio and Minnesota before landing in Rockledge, Fla.

In each of the 11 destinations, a man anticipates every six months the arrival of the “robin”, the fat packet of letters that keeps them connected.

They are the veterans of M Company, 309th Infantry of the famed 78th Lightning Division in World War II.

The men now range in age from 78 to 88. They write the observations of old men, of ills that come with age, but also of vacations they take and the latest escapades of their grandchildren.

And, of course, they write about the war.

It was almost 60 years ago, that the mostly 18- and 19-year olds were thrust into Germany in the dead of winter against three powerful German armies grimly trying to change the course of World War II.

Their first day of combat was the opening salvo of the Battle of the Bulge. The next 128 days took the soldiers of M Company through some of the most intense and desperate battles of the war.

My father, Burritt Hubbard, was one of them.

Like the other 10 veterans in his letter writing group, he rarely talked about his time in Europe fighting Nazis.

As a boy growing up in northeast Ohio, I occasionally risked sneaking into my parents’ bedroom closet and taking down the box that held my father’s Bronze Star and German Luger.

Many years later, when I was 38, he sent me, my brother and my sister a column written by a member of his company describing the cruel deaths of four soldiers.

Attached was a short note from my father. “As you know, I don’t talk a whole lot about my World War II experience,” he wrote.

The anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge was occasionally marked by a newspaper clip from the Cleveland Plain Dealer or the News Herald.

We accepted his silence about the war.

But that was about to change.

During a visit to Ohio last year, my father asked almost as an aside if I wanted to read letters from fellow World War II veterans, men who’d served in his company.

He retrieved a folder thick with letters – some written in cursive, some typed, some printed – dating back to 1992.

I sat down in an easy chair and began reading. Soon, I was oblivious to the conversation around me as World War II unfolded through the eyes of the 11 men in M Company.

The images of soldiers blown to pieces, the close brushes with death, and weather so cold that bodies remained frozen in place for months intermingled with poignant memories of fallen comrades and humorous encounters with enemy soldiers.

They were at Kesternich when German troops drove them out of town in what some historians called the bloodiest single battle of the war, where entire platoons disappeared.

They captured the Schwammenauel Dam across the Roer River under a steady barrage of gunfire and mortar attacks, opening Germany’s heartland to U.S. troops.

They were among the first to cross the Remagen Bridge with its gaping holes above the swirling Rhine.

When it was over, they returned home as heroes and went their separate ways. They finished school, raised families and started careers.

And, like my father, they kept family and friends in the dark about what really happened during those 128 days.

“Instead of dwelling on all the blood and guts we all witnessed, I prefer to remember the pineapple upside-down cake with whipped powdered milk topping.” – Bill Cassell, March 20, 1992.

That letter kicked off the round robin.

The round robin began in 1992 following a chance telephone conversation between fellow M Company soldiers Bill Cassell in upstate New York and Russell Anderson in northern Pennslyvania.

They came up with a plan to find other members of their company and exchange letters on a regular schedule.

The unspoken horrors of war were about to get a voice.

In the letters, a picture emerges of a generation that spent its childhood in the Great Depression and its latter teens and early 20s fighting a world war. With 1,000 World War II veterans dying daily, this generation – these eyewitnesses to a staggering history – is fast disappearing.

“Scared? You’re darned right I was scared,” Cassell wrote in his original letter to Anderson.

Anderson then wrote his letter, “I still retain a whole bunch of pictures in my brain.”

He then sent both letters to the next person, Ed Stuart, a retired Minnesota educator. “I suppose we wonder how others see us or perceive us. As men, especially combat soldiers we were supposed to be tough, never cry,” Stuart wrote.

The early round-robin letters unleashed war recollections, particularly that initial battle in Germany.

“On the first day of battle I remember a long line of troops highlighted against the white snow and snaking its way along until the first shot was heard. Then the men fell silently to their right like a carefully programmed dance group.” – Everett Taylor.

On Dec. 13, 1944, at 3.a.m, the members of M company, a heavy weapons unit, got their first taste of battle in the Heurtgen Forest, woods so dense they couldn’t distinguish where the treetops ended and the night sky began.

Within hours they would run into German troops amassing to counter attack the Americans.

They toted machine guns and mortars and backpack-size radios as they trudged through fog, drizzle and snow drifts from the worst winter storm in 100 years. Ahead of them lay the German Siegfried Line guarded by gigantic cement “dragon teeth” and pillboxes hiding machine guns. Soldiers were told not to drink any liquids after 3 p.m. so they wouldn’t have to urinate in sub-zero conditions in the middle of the night.

The images of that first day jump off the pages of the letters.

As they began their march, in silence in the middle of the night, Stuart, the 28-year-old Minnesotan, wrote about seeing one of their drivers, Joe Lenhart, 6-foot-6 and muscular, standing by the side of the road to Lammersdorf. He was crying.

“I’ll never forget that,” Stuart wrote.

Another member of the round robin, Lt. Chuck Bolen, a 21-year-old Mississippian, remembered chastising a young private to keep his helmet on.

“Two days later he didn’t have a head,” Bolen recalled.

Cassell lay in a ditch along the road when another soldier fell on top of him, shot through the head.

“I wiped his brains off the side of my face,” he wrote. “How do you communicate the sound of someone blowing bubbles in his own blood 8 or 10 inches from your face.”

Taylor, thought he was a sure goner after a colonel picked him to run across an open, snow-covered field in front of German troops, near Kesternich.

“I guess he looked around for the most expendable soldier and decided I was it,” wrote Taylor, a retired teacher and principal now living in Florida.

As he dragged wire to re-establish communications with headquarters, a machine gun “cut snow to pieces a few feet from where I crawled on my belly.”

He made it across the field unscathed and was later awarded the Bronze Star.

Within hours of those first shots, Cliff Thompson, the platoon commander was wounded in the knee by sniper fire.

Fellow round-robin members, Cassell and Stuart left him in a shallow foxhole and Thompson recalls their promise to come back for him.

“I still remember the voices saying ‘Wait awhile, we’ll be back to get you.”

They never did in the confusion and fighting. He remained pinned down all day.

“Every time I raised my head the least bit another shot would be fired.”

At nightfall, Thompson limped back through a minefield until he came upon a couple of scouts in a jeep.

His war was over.

Almost 50 years later, Stuart found Thompson, through the 78th Division magazine, living in Minnetonka, Minn., about 35 miles away from his own Stillwater, Minn., home.

In December 1993, Thompson picked up the phone and heard a voice proclaim, “this is Ed Stuart,” Thompson wrote.

They later met half way in a coffee shop. Thompson joined the round robin.

They had their platoon leader back.

And there were the poignant moments.

After the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge had passed, Stuart wrote about watching the television specials on the epic battle.

He sat in his chair in front of the television set, tears streaming down his face as he flashed back to Christmas Day 1944 in a church in Roetgen.

“I sat in the pew with my M-1 between my legs, my steel helmet on and I was wearing a gas mask. When we began to sing Christmas hymns, I cried.

“It was just too much.”

That same winter Cassell was sitting on a pile of rubble in the Heurtgen Forest in an area called the barracks, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Cassell had initially been assigned to the 8th Division while back in the States, but transferred to the 78th Division before arriving in Germany.

The 8th Division was decimated in ferocious fighting in late 1944 in the forest where Cassell sat.

As Cassell ate his sandwich, he looked down and there on the ground was a torn blue and gold patch from an 8th Division uniform

“So, I just said ‘Sorry buddy,’ and moved three feet away and continued to gulp down my sandwich,” he wrote.

From the letters sprang tales straight out of a Bill Mauldin Willie and Joe cartoon.

Like Alva Ludlum.

Ludlum, from Conway, S.C., was a private in M Company who Ed Stuart befriended. Ludlum was illiterate and Stuart read him the letters sent by Ludlum’s wife, Marie.

Then it came time for Stuart to write a letter on Ludlum’s behalf.

‘”I would say Alva what shall I tell Marie?’ His answer was always the same. ‘You’re married, you know what to say.'”

“So, I’d write the letter, read it to him and he’d always say ‘That’s fine.'”

Or take the time Bill Cassell and Everett Taylor shared a foxhole in the forest.

In the distance, they saw a burly German soldier running toward them, Taylor recalled in a 2002 letter.

They raised their rifles. As he got closer, they heard him screaming something incomprehensible. He had his hands up and a wild look in his eyes.

“He kept coming and we looked at each other and asked shall we shoot him? Neither of us did and he kept right on dancing past us to the rear.”

Another letter described the unarmed company medic, Aldori Pilon, disappearing into the woods to take a leak and returning with four German prisoners of war.

And there is Mississippian Bolen’s tale of the capture of a German captain just before the end of the war.

The captain was agitated and loudly muttering something in German, Bolen recalled. Bolen called over a private, Morton Dorenfeld, who spoke German and happened to be Jewish.

Bolen asked what the captain was saying. Dorenfeld told him that the German demanded to surrender to someone of an equal or higher rank and not to a lieutenant.

“You tell him that not only is he going to surrender to me, but he’s being interrogated by a Jew.”

The German went ballistic.

“I almost had to shoot that captain,” Bolen remembered.

I came to realize that the letters were more than just vivid, firsthand descriptions of one of the defining moments in world history.

The letters allowed 11 men to open up about the horrors of what they had seen, the fear that they had felt, the guilt over surviving while so many of their friends and fellow soldiers had not.

And finally, for the first time, I began to understand my father’s silence about an epic battle that began to unfold almost this time of year, six decades ago.