I’ve been in a mood to write about my father lately.
He died about 20 years ago. His memorial service was on the day of the 9-11 attack on New York City. We were caught in such a swirl of new emotions that it’s been difficult to think about his death without pondering the changes America has gone through since then.
I am responsible for the family tree research, so I ended up with a lot of his collected papers. At one point, I wrote a booklet of about 20 pages to explain how he spent his World War II years – from his induction just days after his high school graduation, to his anti-aircraft training in California, to his confrontation with Panzers during the Battle of the Bulge, to his six months as an Occupation soldier after the German army surrendered.
I did a lot of reading to come up with the booklet because Dad never spoke much about his military service. I’ve found that this is true of a lot of World War II veterans. They did what they were told, and if they were fortunate to come home alive, they didn’t burden their families or friends with the bad memories.
His unit of the 143rd Gun Battalion had trained for more than a year to shoot down enemy airplanes. His job, as I understand it, was to use radar and radio communications from observers to help adjust the targeting.
He and his crew were ready for action in June 1944 but they were not part of the D-Day invasion. When they crossed the English Channel two months later, most of the German air force had been destroyed so his crew had new requirements. They had to adjust to shooting at targets on the ground. During the harrowing Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, some of these big guns were tilted toward level to fire point-blank at the approaching Panzers.
It amazes me that he was just 19 years old when they were doing this.
Fifty-seven years later, after he had received the bad news about his colon cancer, he let some stories slip while we sat on the back porch of his home in Warren Township. They weren’t stories about bravery or hand-to-hand combat. He talked mainly about oddities that he remembered. One such story started with, out of the blue, a statement, “I’ve always wondered why the Panzers were still smoking when we were driving up the Autobahn.”
There were a lot of elements to that story, and I’m not here to tell them today. I’m more interested in something that happened to him soon after the war ended.
The U.S. military had to figure out how to bring 7.6 million soldiers, sailors and other personnel home. The fairest thing to do was to sequence the demobilization so men and women who had been abroad the longest came home first. It was only fair that he ended up behind the D-Day guys, so that’s why Dad spent those extra peaceful months in Europe.
By the time he returned to his family in Lima, Ohio, America already had welcomed home millions of people just like him. The return of all those GIs set loose a pent-up demand for a normal but better life. There was a flurry of marriages and childbirths. These new families needed jobs, homes and cars.
Also, the GI Bill entitled returning servicemen to college or vocational school tuition and expenses. Men who had grown up limiting their destinies to farming or factory work now had a chance to aim a little higher.
Dad had earned those benefits but his delay in returning to Lima put him at the back of the line. He and my mother married, moved into a cramped apartment and began planning for their future. With his exposure to electronics in the gun battalion, Dad hoped to get into a school that would train him to become an electronics engineer.
He was a natural. He could look at a power tool or kitchen gadget and see in his mind where the wires should run and what each part would do.
The exact school he needed was just up the road from Lima in Fort Wayne, Ind. He and Mom took a bus over there so he could enroll. But when they got there, they discovered the school was filled and he would have to wait a year or more to join the next class.
As they walked away, Dad ran into an Army buddy named Claude, who told him that there were openings just around the corner at Fort Wayne Business College. That’s how my father became a bookkeeper instead of an engineer.
He ended up running an office at a small foundry in Mishawaka. He enjoyed the work, which paid him more than enough to buy a small farm out on Old Cleveland Road. He used his tinkering skills there in his spare time, fixing farm equipment, home appliances or any gadget that broke.
Every few years, he would completely dismantle his Ford diesel tractor, clean all the parts and put it back together. Imagine that. I have trouble keeping track of my reading glasses.
I’ve been thinking about this, in part, because of conversations I’ve had with people about the pandemic – about missed proms and graduations, about disrupted sports seasons. Their kids worked so hard but their school year was ruined. So unfair.
I can’t judge, but it makes me think about all the things Dad saw before his 20th birthday and how it never got him to the front of that line at the Fort Wayne tech school.
This didn’t beat him. I’m guessing it was because he recognized that you rarely get everything you think you’ve earned. Keep moving. Something’s ahead. It’ll be good.
In any case, I never heard him complain about missing out. Maybe he kept those words to himself, like he did with his war stories. But it’s more likely he was grateful for all he had. He didn’t think about the things he missed.