Freedom's fighters

Forrest Guth stepped from the protection of an enclosed all-terrain vehicle and into the brisk November wind. Stretched out before him as far as he could see were 9,387 white headstones, in straight military rows.

The day was Nov. 5, 2008, at the U.S. military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, which overlooks the sandy expanse of Omaha Beach where so many of the men buried here fell.

At 87, Guth – a veteran of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division – was making his final visit to this hallowed ground to pay tribute to a fallen friend. 

Like Guth, Terence “Salty” Harris had been a member of the famous “Band of Brothers.” Except he jumped into France on D-Day, ahead of the rest of the division as a Pathfinder, assigned to light up the airborne unit’s drop zone. Whether or not he succeeded is uncertain; his body was recovered just a few days later, on June 18, 1944. 

“We were young, and we expected some people not to make it, so it wasn’t as much of a shock as it maybe should’ve been,” said Guth, standing by a white cross etched with Salty’s name. “But we did miss him. I still miss him.”

Nine months later, Guth himself made what paratroopers call the “final jump,” and now rests in Arlington National Cemetery. 

THIS MONTH, as the United States and the rest of the world observe the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, we honor the Americans buried at Normandy and in 14 other overseas cemeteries, as well as graveyards large and small nationwide.

Just as importantly, we pay tribute to those still among us. According to the National World War II Museum, of the approximately 855,000 surviving veterans of the war, we lose 492 each day. By 2020, 75th anniversary of the war’s end, there will be considerably fewer.

Between December 1941 and August 1945, 16 million Americans donned their nation’s uniform to serve both in combat and noncombat roles. It has been estimated that for each man on the front line, it took 12 behind the line to keep him fighting. The Merchant Marines – as well as sailors, soldiers, Coast Guardsmen and Marines serving with supply units or servicing war planes at far-flung air bases – were just as much a part of the final victory as the man toting an M1 or piloting a bomber or fighter.

On the home front, no less a vital role was played by the men and women who remained behind, manning the shops and factories for long hours while churning out the materials of war that ensured success in a global struggle that embroiled 22 nations and consumed an estimated 60 million lives. In the war years that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, we truly became a United States. For perhaps the first time, but hopefully not the last, the entire nation joined hands in a cause much larger than ourselves: freedom for the peoples of the world.

I had the good fortune to be with Forrest Guth that day at Colleville-sur-Mer, as he and I toured battle sites in France, Holland and Belgium where Guth saw action in 1944 and 1945. As a member of the postwar baby boom generation, I have always had a keen interest in military history. Further, as a journalist for a newspaper in Lancaster, Pa., for more than 20 years, I had the honor and opportunity to interview many veterans of nearly every modern conflict, from World War I to Afghanistan. I remain in awe of the sacrifices and hardships these men and women endured, and have worked to preserve many of their stories for posterity.

One need only visit a place like Colleville-sur-Mer to understand why, for it is a solemn but lovingly cared-for place that starkly reminds of the human cost of freedom. Of the 16 million who served, an estimated 405,000 died and 672,000 were wounded. As of January, a total of 73,515 U.S. personnel remain unaccounted for.

I knew and understood all this from my readings and research, but during my 2008 trip I came face to face with that grim reality.

Earlier in the day I had stood alone on Omaha Beach, not another person to be seen in any direction. The day was overcast and gray, and the cold, biting wind blowing in off the English Channel sent waves crashing onto the sand. To me, it fit the description of that day in 1944 when the Allied invasion armada sat off shore, its warships pounding German defenses as landing boats bulging with men and equipment bounced over the wave tops toward the beach. Gazing out at the channel from what was then called Dog White sector, I thought about how men of the 29th Division stormed ashore here, only to see comrades chopped down by German machine-gun and mortar fire pouring forth from stout defenses still visible in the tall bluffs behind me.

OMAHA BEACH was just one location where I took time to reflect on the accomplishments of the greatest generation. I stood in the square at Ste. Mere-Eglise, where men of the 82nd Airborne Division – helpless in their parachutes – drifted down amid German infantry only to be slaughtered while still in their harnesses. I stood in the fields of Holland where, on Sept. 17, 1944, thousands of airborne soldiers in parachutes and gliders descended during Operation Market Garden. I paused in the eerie silence of the woods outside Bastogne in Belgium, surrounded by the still-visible depressions of foxholes that men like Guth had chipped into the frozen earth that cold December. 

Standing amid those trees methodically planted in rows, the late William “Wild Bill” Guarnere told me how he could still hear those shells screaming in and men hollering for a medic. 

Next, I visited the basement office once occupied by Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe, who commanded the 101st during the battle. Seeing where he composed his famous “Nuts” reply to the German ultimatum for surrender, I thought of the courage of the soldiers who held the line against the Nazi onslaught. 

My efforts to memorialize their deeds seem feeble, however, compared to the remembrances of the men themselves.

Harold W. Billow was 21 when the Germans launched what would be known as the Battle of the Bulge on Dec. 16, 1944. A day later, he and his comrades of Battery B, 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were in a convoy of jeeps and trucks en route to the Belgian town of St. Vith when they ran head-on into tanks and half-tracks of Kampfgruppe Peiper at the crossroad village of Baugnez. Captured and herded into a field with 130 other men, Billow stood there helpless as he watched two of the SS troopers set up a pair of machine guns atop a tank. Then an officer rolled up in a staff car, stood and drew his pistol.

“He shot a guy to the right of me,” Billow says. “Then he shot a guy to my left.”

The officer yelled a command to the two Germans on the tank and “they opened up where all us guys were standing,” Billow recalls.

Like many others, he instinctively dropped to the snow-covered ground and played dead, barely breathing as Germans walked among the bodies and shot men in the head if there was any sign of life. As he lay there, Billow thought, “I hope I survive so I can tell people what they did to us.”

Billow made it home, but 87 of his comrades did not. While he remembers a “big celebration” with “people dancing and hugging” while he was in Manchester, England, when Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, his thoughts were more somber when Japan did the same on Aug. 14.

“I thought about how lucky I was to be alive,” Billow, 92, told me.

He says he’s still haunted by the events of that December day in 1944, and every year on the Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Veterans Day he puts 87 miniature U.S. flags on his lawn.

“I see it all as clearly as if it happened yesterday,” Billow says. “I think about those men every day of my life.”

AMONG THE MEN who returned home after the guns were silenced, remembrances are strongest of those who sacrificed all for victory.

Marlin “Whitey” Groft was an original member of the 1st Marine Raider Battalion, also known as Edson’s Raiders. Storming Tulagi in the Solomon Islands on Aug. 7, 1942, Whitey lost his best friend Kenneth Bowers, with whom he had sworn a blood oath just prior to hitting the beach.

During the fighting on Guadalcanal, Groft and about 800 other men – Raiders and the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion – stood their ground against more than 4,000 Japanese determined to retake the island. The result was a desperate battle that became known as the fight for Edson’s Ridge, or Bloody Ridge. Groft’s memories of that fight – of bayoneting men during hand-to-hand nighttime combat, and being forced to listen as a captured buddy was tortured to death within earshot – are still vivid.

After the dissolution of the Raiders in early 1944, Groft served with the 22nd Marines, where he saw combat on Okinawa. When the war ended, he was in Guam, preparing for the invasion of the Japanese home islands with thousands of other troops.

“We all thanked the Lord we were spared,” he says of news of the Japanese surrender. “Knowing I had, by the grace of God, survived, my thoughts again turned to my departed buddies, those lost from the time of our landing on Tulagi to the invasion of Okinawa.”

Guth, before he died, often said the same.

“The war stays with you,” he told me. “It never goes away, although the passing of years softens things. I think about the fellas, especially the ones we lost. A lot of them were good friends.”

Again, freedom isn’t free, a truth driven home to me on that visit to the cemetery at Normandy. Those silent rows of markers tell stories of personal sorrow and grief,  selfless courage, and devotion to duty, comrades and country.

To our good fortune, when challenges and danger have arisen, there have been courageous men and women willing to risk their lives and their futures to preserve our way of life for
future generations. Is there any better example than the greatest generation? Let us thank them, honor them and listen to them while they are still with us.

God bless them all.  

Larry Alexander is the author of “Shadows in the Jungle: The Alamo Scouts Behind Japanese Lines in World War II” (NAL).