Category Archives: World War II

For Yoshi, who never came back

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Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, California history, History, Uncategorized, World War II

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This photograph was taken on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on the day Executive Order 9066 was executed and these friends were separated.

There’s a good chance they never saw each other again.

When the buses came to take our Arroyo Grande, California, neighbors away on April 30, 1942, many of them—less than half—came back. I grew up here, and I don’t recognize many of the surnames in the old high school yearbooks.


One woman told me this: On the day the buses came to the high school parking lot, her mother saw a line of high-school girls, some Japanese, some not, walking up Crown Hill, walking up toward their high school, holding hands and sobbing.

Arroyo Grande’s Japanese-Americans went first to the Tulare County Fairgrounds, where they slept in livestock stalls, and then to the Rivers Camp in Arizona, where the temperature was at or above 109 degrees for twenty of their first thirty days there.

I interviewed a remarkable woman named Jean a few weeks ago. She is 94, is briskly intelligent, articulate and gracious. Her father owned the meat market on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in the 1940 census, and when his Japanese-American customers, farmers, came in to settle up before the buses came, he refused to take their money. “You keep it,” he told them. “You’re going to need it.”

When they came home three years later, he extended them easy credit until they could begin to bring in crops again. Jean showed me her father’s business ledgers, so I have no reason to doubt it when she told me that every one of those farmers paid her father back. In full.

This is Jean as a high-school freshman. The doll, with her handmade kimono, came to Jean from Gila River in gratitude for her family’s friendship. For their loyalty.

At ninety-four, that loyalty runs in Jean as deeply as it ever has. One of her best high-school friends was named Yoshi. I can find a photo of the two together in second grade. I found a photo, too, of two second-grade boys in the Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926. They would die, about twelve minutes apart, on USS Arizona.

Yoshi’s brother became a war hero. He won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant when he went behind Japanese lines in China to rescue a downed American flier.

Yoshi’s brother brought that flier in and made him safe. Jean never saw Yoshi again and, because of April 30, 1942, there is a part of her that can never feel safe.

The war, at its outset for America, killed two of our sailors. It would claim many more local young men, killing them in Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal and on the beach at Tarawa. It would kill a young paratrooper in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It would kill, with a sniper’s bullet, a tank-destoyer crewman on the German frontier three days before his first child, a son, was born.

The war killed neither Jean nor Yoshi. They remain its casualties, nonetheless.

We had to stop the interview for a moment. In remembering her friend, Jean was fighting hard to stop the tears. One escaped. That moment taught me so much history, and with such intensity, that I almost couldn’t bear it.

Classmates, Shipmates

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I was browsing an early 1980s version of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the South County Historical Society journal, and I found this photograph of the Arroyo Grande Grammar School second grade in 1926-27.

The two boys who are circled are Wayne Morgan (top) and, in the front row, Jack Scruggs. Wayne’s father, Elmer, was a partner-owner of the Ford agency, today’s Doc Burnstein’s Ice Cream Parlor. Jack’s father had lost his farm earlier in the 1920s; at the time the class photo was taken, he worked with an oil prospecting company exploring the Huasna Valley.

That’s Wayne in the front, in a photo taken during this Ford Model A’s nationwide tour in 1931 (the car, fully restored, is owned by a Michigan car collector).

Nine years later, Wayne would join the Navy.

By the time Wayne Morgan graduated from eighth grade, Jack Scruggs’s family had moved to Long Beach. Both boys were musicians–Wayne played violin in Mr. Chapek’s orchestra (he was also an avid Boy Scout), but Jack would make music his career.

In 1940, Jack joined the Navy.

 

Jack is circled in this photo taken on November 22, 1941, during a Battle of the Bands competition among the ships of the Pacific Fleet. Jack was a trombonist in Navy Band 22–the band of USS Arizona.

So there’s a very good chance that the one-time classmates had a reunion on the great ship.

The tragic part of the story, of course, is that both were killed on Arizona. The concussion from a near-miss killed Jack just before 8 a.m. as the band was preparing to play the National Anthem during the colors ceremony. Wayne died about ten minutes later, when the ship blew up. So were all of Jack’s bandmates, killed at their action stations in the Number Two gun turret, just inboard from where the fatal bomb struck.

A few weeks before the attack, Jack had played “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for Rear Adm. Isaac Kidd’s wife–Kidd flew his flag on Arizona. All that was found of him after the attack was his Annapolis class ring, fused to a bulkhead.

 


Jack’s body was recovered; he came home to Long Beach. Wayne rests with his shipmates.

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I knew both were from Arroyo Grande, population 1,090 in 1940. I thought it extraordinary that two young men from such a small town wound up serving on the same ship. I had no idea that they were in the same grammar school class. 

Sometimes even the smallest footnotes in history tell compelling stories.

 

Old lives that give life

02 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Uncategorized, World War II

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GI’s from Al’s generation on the eve of D-Day.

My friend and former AGHS history student Eddie Matthews and I talked recently about the seemingly contradictory nature of friendships. They don’t always depend on length or frequency of contact. Sometimes someone comes into your life just a few times and Eddie’s point, over our coffees, was that even a casual friendship like that can still evolve into one of the most meaningful friendships of your life.

That’s just the case with another friend, Al Findley Jr, of Los Osos, once a B-24 Liberator radioman who survived having two of his aircrew’s bombers shot down during World War II. The second time, he lost four of the most meaningful friends of his life.

Radioman-gunner Albert Lee Findley

Findley next to his B-24.

Al died on April 28, at 96. His time had come. He’d had a long and extremely successful Air Force career and then became fascinated with antiques and that would become his retirement avocation. He retired to a beautiful place, Los Osos, and he left behind many friends.

I only met and talked to Al maybe four or five times. He was one of my sources for a book called Central Coast Aviators in World War II. But I count him as one of the best friends of my life. And so I miss him.

That’s what happens when you write books. In fact, the people you write about don’t even have to be alive to become close to you and important to you.

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Two friends, Gregory and Findley, at the Estrella Warbirds Museum.

In old newspapers, I’ve been able to follow some local World War II servicemen throughout the course of their lives. Others left letters that were funny or poignant or even enchanting. Many were killed in action, but they became–not friends, exactly–to be honest, these soldiers from my parents’ generation became my sons.

In the 1930s, American social critics condemned that generation’s teens as self-centered, pleasure-seeking and lazy.

There’s just the slightest chance that those critics were right.

But then 400,000 of those young Americans died. That’s 400,000 military men and women. In 1942, as our industrial production surged, more Americans died in factory accidents than on the battlefield.

So I am so very proud to have known a World War II veteran who had no business living beyond his twenty-second birthday. And then he had the audacity to not just live such a long life, but to become a joyful person whose optimism was contagious.

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A B-24 trails smoke after a flak hit.

By contrast, much of my research begins in cemeteries. But that’s where you start to forget about death and instead begin to reconstruct lives. I write history to give lives back to the town and to the county where I grew up. I believe that old lives have the capacity to inspire us—in fact, they have the capacity to give life.

I’ve found old lives in yellowed newspapers and on tombstones, in copies of service jackets and in rifle company casualty reports. I found one in a copy of the telegram informing a Corbett Canyon farmer and his wife that their twenty-year-old had died five weeks before on Iwo Jima. I’ve found, in encounters even more fleeting than the ones Eddie and I discussed, my surrogate sons and daughters.

One of them died late last month.

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Waist gunners, Eighth Air Force, World War II>

Jim Gregory lives in Arroyo Grande. He taught history at Mission Prep and Arroyo Grande High School for thirty years. Eddie Matthews, an editor at Parthian Books, earned his doctorate in creative writing at the University of Swansea, Wales. Dr. Matthews teaches writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Dad and the German Major

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in American History, Arroyo Grande, Family history, History, World War II

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I’ll be sending two copies of the book World War II Arroyo Grande to young active-duty soldiers. This makes me a happy new/old writer: one reason I wrote the book, I think, was to reintroduce the World War II generation to my generation and to my students, and I’ve always had a soft spot for students who’ve gone into the service. I’m also very happy that I’ll be sending a copy to Judith, a favorite student who achieved the highest grade ever in my U.S. History classes. Judith is from Germany. She loved learning American history.

The photo is of my father when he was a young man on active duty in 1944. I’ve told Judith this story, but once the war had ended in the spring of 1945, Europe went hungry–the Continent’s infrastructure had been obliterated by ground combat and by the Allied air campaign. The footage of German kids eating out of garbage cans in 1945, in the long months before the Marshall Plan, always stunned my students. In the meantime, thousands of POW’s in our care died of hunger or of opportunistic diseases because civilians got first priority for food, and there never was enough.

A Wehrmacht major, who outranked my father, then a U.S. Army captain on occupation duty, somehow latched onto him and for a few weeks became his personal bodyservant: the German officer cooked for him, cleaned his quarters, washed and pressed his uniforms, the works.

He did that because Dad was a Quartermaster officer and so had access to food. (A year before, my father repaid an English family’s kindness to him with a bag of oranges. The mother’s British reserve crumbled. She wept. Her family hadn’t seen oranges in five years.) The young German officer wanted to live: his pride meant nothing when compared to the wife and children he wanted in his arms again once he was cashiered. My father was his ticket home.

In summer, he would begin the long walk home along roads choked with refugees and gaunt, tired soldiers. Dad never learned what happened to him but hoped, in talking about him years later, that the German major had lived a long and happy life. What started as a relationship of expedience had begun to edge into a friendship. Perhaps, very faintly in the recesses of my imagination, there was the unspoken thought that my student Judith was the major’s great-granddaughter. I owed it to this soldier to be the best teacher I could be for her.

The tough American soldiers of Easy Company–-the “Band of Brothers”–-liked the English, for the most part, loved the Dutch, but, like my father, felt most at home with Germans.

It does make you wish that British Pvt. William Tandey had shot Hitler in 1918, when he had the man in his sights at Marcoing. We could have done without Clemenceau as well, I guess, in his 1918-19 incarnation, but a younger Clemenceau had done great good for France and for the revolutionary ideals of tolerance and of the equality that citizenship confers.

These are ideals that Hitler despised because, of course, they included Jews, like Alfred Dreyfus. Clemenceau had been one of Dreyfus’s most adamant defenders. Dreyfus was a good French soldier, but the older Clemenceau dominated the drafting of a foolish, vindictive peace treaty dictated, in his mind, by a generation of good French soldiers whose bones littered the nation’s soil. Even today, farmers in northern France, in turning over fields there, find the bones of boys their harrow blades.

A generation after that war, there were more good soldiers, good young men on both sides who in a better world should never have been enemies. But they didn’t live in a better world; theirs had been penetrated by evil.

Americans had fought a war in the face of great evil once before. There was a lull in a Civil War campaign that gave a Union army band, its vast audience in bivouac, time enough for a concert. Confederates on a nearby hillside were listening. One of them called “Yank! Play one of ours!” So the band played “Dixie,” and at the song’s conclusion, both sides erupted, thousands cheering, tossing their caps in the air. They embraced a vivid moment when they were at peace together, before the close-quarters murder so characteristic of that war—and, sadly, so necessary for its resolution—resumed.

Similarly, once their war was over, a German soldier reached across the divide to make a necessary peace with my father. I hope my book will allow two young soldiers today to reach across the divide that time imposes to meet other young soldiers, including some who died such a long time ago. In a small way, it gives them life again.

Walt Whitman may have articulated this idea best in what I think is one of his finest poems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Time and distance avail not, Whitman wrote. They are irrelevant. Indeed, when you read the poem you have the uncanny sense that Whitman is reading with you, just over your shoulder, or that you’re leaning on the ferry’s rail, together with the old man, the harbor’s breeze in his whiskers.

In the same way, we are all of us on the road together in the journeys of our lives. I think that sometimes, without recognizing them, we walk alongside our ancestors, and among them is the German major who yearns for home.

Swing Kids

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in American History, Film and Popular Culture, World War II

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Whatever else I’ve said about the World War II generation–how sad but inevitable, our Sixties falling-out–there’s one more bit of praise: great music, and these young people could dance, a social rite mine left behind.

I put this together, part of a cycle of slide presentations, just in case they’re needed for whenever the book signing will be. Don’t want bored folks.

We open with a smidge of Andrews Sisters, a little silly, and then three Glenn Miller hits: the silky, evocative “Moonlight Serenade,” and then two go-to-war rousers, “St. Louis Blues March” and “American Patrol.” I wonder where Dad was when he first heard these songs? He still remembered “Bluebirds Over (the White Cliffs of Dover”) and, of course, “Der Fuhrer’s Face.” And maybe a French tune or two better left in French.

 

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Pep Talk

17 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in American History, California history, History, The Great Depression, Uncategorized, World War II, Writing

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I have never been shy about writing fan letters, so I wrote one to the UC  Davis prof who’s written a terrific new book, Right Out of California, about political, economic and social conflict in 1930s California.

I also am a shameless little man, so I included the Domingo Martinez piece from the Arroyo Grande book and told her I was looking at writing about the 30s, too.

She emailed back later yesterday:

I’m so glad to hear that my book was relevant to you. I’m also very interested to learn about your own work. The central coast has some great stories from the interwar years to tell; and it seems, from the sample you provided me, that you’re the right person to tell them.

That’s nice. That’s not the clincher, though. My big sister, Roberta, wants me to write it, too.

So I guess I will.

What’s making me dawdle, before I pitch the book idea, is knowing how miserly the pay is. For each $21.99 copy of the World War II book, over a year’s work, I get about $1.50. And I’ve done the research, the writing, located 70+ images from all over the world, some which required me to buy usage rights, and I’ve done a good deal of the marketing.

So I feel like your basic oppressed proletarian.

The other factor: The sheer magnitude of the subject is daunting. World War II, as large-scale as it was, was chronologically compressed and its events already so familiar, so it was much more manageable.

So I think I’ll expand the scope of this book to include the 1920s. That sounds counterintuitive, but I realized that I don’t have the talent or the graduate assistants for a narrative history. What I can do is to generate a thematic overview of the interwar years, to tell good stories well. Themes might include Prohibition and crime; politics, Mr. Hearst, contrasted with the poor; the collapse of farm prices and that impact; daily life, especially of young people; dissidents and dropouts; the New Deal’s impact; the coming of the war.

I’ve got to expand the locale as well, so we’ll include material from Northern Santa Barbara County, even a little from Taft, from San Simeon, of course–but the bulk of the book would come from the area between San Luis Obispo and Nipomo.

[What’s hardest to come by, and what I hunger for, are statistical data that’ll give a snapshot of the Central Coast–everything from foreclosures to crop prices, housing starts to high school dropout rates. Those are hard to find.]

So it would be The Interwar Years on California’s Central Coast or something like that. Or maybe Pete’s Dragon.

Now I’ve got to generate a proposal and go back to my two most important secondary sources and organize the margin notes I’ve taken. I also need to read again David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear.

Not a good day to feel under the weather.

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From Here to Eternity

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Film and Popular Culture, History, World War II

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Montgomery Clift, as Prewitt, and Burt Lancaster, as Warden, share a bottle in the middle of the road.

From Here to Eternity was on television again last night and I watched it again; in fact, it may be catching up to John Ford’s The Searchers and Milos Forman’s Amadeus as among those films I’ve watched the most.

James Jones’s novel was brilliant and compelling, and Hollywood managed to make a film, an Academy-Award winner, that was just as good. It’s one of the most satisfying films for me to watch, which doesn’t mean it has happy endings: instead, everything that must happen to the major characters eventually happens. You don’t even necessarily root for them because you know full well that they’re all condemned, in some way, by forces too powerful for them to master and too complex for them to articulate, so any cheerleading is futile. But you genuinely admire them: this is my favorite Burt Lancaster film (Elmer Gantry is a close second) and what his Top Sergeant Warden shares with the defiant Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt is an incredible integrity and, in the end, a fierce devotion to The Company that will cost Prewitt his life.

 

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The kiss: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.

Of course, the most famous, and most parodied, scene in the film is the kiss in the surf between Warden and Karen Holmes, the frustrated, defeated wife of Capt. Holmes, the company commander so insistent on returning Pvt. Prewitt to the boxing ring. Holmes deserves everything he gets–one of the most enjoyable scenes is watching him get his just reward at the hands of Schofield Barracks’ C.O.–and it is Warden who gives Deborah Kerr’s Karen Holmes, if only briefly, the passion and the hope that you want her to have. She’s not a bad person–she’s made, in her marriage to a weak man, a bad choice. She knows it, which makes her decision at the film’s end noble, heroic, and tragic. She has integrity enough to match Warden’s.

This is the film, of course, that revived Frank Sinatra’s career, and he is terrific as Maggio. He has both a Brooklyn toughness and a kind of lost-puppy vulnerability and–that word again–his foolhardy integrity in standing up to the sadistic stockade sergeant, Fatso Judson, seems to be something that Maggio is compelled to do. It’s his destiny. When he finally does go to the stockade, where he’s beyond Prewitt’s protection, it’s a death sentence, and when he describes how he dies while in Prewitt’s arms, it’s a superb piece of acting.

So is the drunk scene between Lancaster’s Warden and Clift’s Prewitt. It is so arresting because it is so funny–you wonder if the two really were lit when they filmed it–but it’s also so revelatory because nowhere in the film, even with Karen Holmes, is Warden so tender and compassionate as he is with the company troublemaker, Prewitt. It’s this scene, and one shortly after, where bugler Prewitt plays two stanzas of the purest, most evocative version of “Taps” ever recorded, that makes the two protagonists’ devotion to The Company and to The Army so understandable.

 

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Warden intercedes to protect Pvt. Maggio (right, Frank Sinatra) from stockade Sgt. “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine).

The film also has a compelling fight, though tame stuff by the standards of today’s gore, between the hapless Prewitt and a sadistic noncom, Sgt. Galovich, who proceeds to beat Prewitt to a pulp. Prewitt, who refuses to box for The Company, won’t fight back. When he finally does, with a flurry of body blows, you want to cheer, and when the tide begins to turn against Galovich, you don’t want the inept Capt. Holmes to stop it. You want Galovich obliterated. But when Holmes does finally step in, late, it’s the captain who’s the victim, because the fight has been witnessed by two of his superiors at Schofield who decide to investigate Holmes’s feckless command of The Company.

It’s Warden who is the real company commander. As a master of red tape, an almost clairvoyant anticipator of The Company’s crises and needs, contemptuous of weakness in his subordinate noncoms and even more contemptuous of all officers, especially his C.O., Warden is the perfect bureaucrat. Until Pearl Harbor. Then you see the Top Kick rise to the occasion and become the one man in The Company who keeps his head, giving rapid-fire and perfect orders to his men (“Make a pot–no, a barrel!– of coffee!” he snaps to the company cook.), then climbing to a barracks rooftop to bring down an attacking airplane with a .30-caliber machine gun. He becomes a warrior. Part of me doubts that Warden would survive the war, because so many good leaders like him would be weeded out by attrition as we learned to fight in places like Guadalcanal or North Africa, places with unforgiving learning curves. The war would cheat us of our Wardens.

 

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Lorene, Maggio and Prewitt at the bar of The Congress Club.

The only careless element in a terrific ensemble cast is, to me, Pvt. Prewitt’s love interest: Donna Reed’s character, Lorene, a working girl at The Congress Club, a bar/brothel that Schofield’s GI’s frequent. It’s as if the scriptwriters and director Fred Zinnemann can’t quite decide what to do with her. They’ve got to fly a prostitute under the radar of 1950s film standards, so she winds up coming off as more of an undergrad at a Midwestern university instead of a Honolulu bargirl. Her earnest, intellectual roommate has their house full of books. So she is unconvincing, which I don’t think is Reed’s fault: she’s a victim of the one bit of indecision and timidity in a film that is otherwise so honest.(To be honest, Reed may be a victim of my own Baby Boomage and her housewife/mother role from The Donna Reed Show, but Borgnine’s malevolent Fatso is sublime; he transcends his turn in McHale’s Navy.)

But Reed earns redemption as an actress in the film’s denouement, when she speaks of Prewitt as a war hero and you realize that Lorene, with her fantasy of making enough at The Congress Club to build herself and her mother a little home in Oregon, is and always has been gently unhinged. Nothing good will come of Lorene: she will drift away, like the leis the women toss onto the ocean’s surface from the rail of their steamer bound for the States. Only one character will never drift away and will always have a home, and that’s Top Sergeant Warden.

 

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Top Kick Warden takes command, December 7.

 

The Gularte Boys, 1944

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in American History, California history, World War II

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When you meet someone like Johnny Silva, you say to yourself, “this has to be the best and kindest man I have ever met. Nobody can be like that.” But then you meet Johnny’s wife, Annie Gularte Silva, and you find that somebody can. And when you remember what their kids were like when you were growing up with them, you realize that these things are not coincidences: your life has been blessed.

The last time the Gularte children were together, 1944. Frank, in uniform, in front of his mother, would be killed in action in November 1944. Just above him is Manuel, who would serve as an artilleryman and survive the war. Joe and Tony, at left, would run the family farm during the war; Mrs. Clara Gularte is flanked by her six daughters: Mary, Edwina, Clara, Rose, Annie, and Barbara. Photo courtesy Annie Gularte Silva.

The last time the Gularte children were together, 1944. Frank, in uniform, in front of his mother, would be killed in action in November 1944. Just above him is Manuel, who would serve as an artilleryman and survive the war. Joe and Tony, at left, would run the family farm during the war; Mrs. Clara Gularte is flanked by her six daughters: Mary, Edwina, Clara, Rose, Annie, and Barbara. Photo courtesy Annie Gularte Silva.

…The Americans’ breakout from Normandy, after claustrophobic weeks in the death traps of the hedgerows, must have been a jubilant one, but the 607th would encounter another death trap whose brutality sobered them. The Americans, under Omar Bradley, and the British and Canadians, under Bernard Law Montgomery, had the chance to encircle the entire German Army in Normandy. They would fail, and thousands of Germans would escape, battle-weary, some of them now barefoot, running for their lives along narrow roads and cattle trails through what became known as the Falaise Gap. American artillery units found them there–artillery spotters were nearly incoherent because there were so many targets to call in on their field radios–and the slaughter they inflicted was horrific. Seventy years later, one of the 607th’s soldiers, Frank Kunz, remembered the results in an interview with his hometown newspaper: “ Christ help me. There were 6 to 8 inches of bodies and horses ground up on the road. There was nothing you could do. You had to drive through it.” People, Kunz added, don’t understand what war is.

Patton’s chase would end in September on the Moselle River at the old Roman garrison town of Metz. It would take him two months to break down German resistance and Gularte’s 607th, now attached to the 95th Infantry Division, fought in several actions around the city. In one of them, a company of the unit was credited with firing the first Third Army shells into Germany, aimed at a church steeple in the town of Perl.

By November 23, the battalion was fighting along the river, six miles south of Metz. The Moselle, beautiful, calm, and, in summer, a soft blue, might have made Gularte homesick if he’d had the opportunity to see it then, and in peace. The river’s surface is punctuated by ringlets as trout nose up to feed, and on summer nights, with their long twilight hours, little French boys do what little boys in the Arroyo Grande Valley do—they go fishing.

But with winter descending in 1944, it’s along the Moselle where the unit saw one of its finest hours: Company C, unsupported by infantry, was charged with holding a little town, Falck. By now, the 607th had made the important transition from a towed to a self-propelled unit. Their main anti tank weapon was a robust 90mm gun—with its armor-piercing shell, it was a match for the German 88—mounted on a tank chassis. This was the M36. C Company, commanded by 1st Lt. George King, came under mortar and artillery fire, then repeated infantry assaults from the woods, still dense around the town today. The enemy wanted Falck back, but they would not get it. Smith’s tank destroyers and their crews alone would turn them back in their repeated assaults, and the young officer would earn a Silver Star for his leadership that day: November 27, 1944.

“Old Faithful,” a tank destroyer, with members of Frank Gularte’s 607th TD Battalion.

That was Frank Gularte’s last full day of life. On the 28th, the 607th was ordered to take another town, Merten. Everything that could go wrong did. The infantry that was to support the big M36s never materialized. The 3rd Platoon of Company C took on Merten by itself: the first M36 to advance down the road was fired on, returned fire but then, in moving around a tank barrier, got mired in the mud and so was easily destroyed by a German anti-tank crew. The next destroyer turned back, the third tumbled into a ditch and enemy fire set it ablaze, and the fourth had its gun jam. When it turned to return to Falck, this last destroyer, too, became bogged down in the mud. Somewhere in the melee, a German sniper took the life of the young man who would never see his son. Frank Jr. was born five days after the sniper fired the shot that killed his father. Frank’s wife, Sally, would have gotten the terrible War Department telegram a few days after that.

The squad leader/writer, Sgt. Gantter, wrote in his memoirs of a young man in his company who carried, from his arrival in France to the German frontier, a box of cigars to share once he had word of the birth of his first child. Gantter liked the young man: he was earnest, friendly, and desperate for word from home. But mail was slow—Gantter would be sharing Christmas cookies with his fellow dogfaces in March—so the young soldier eventually gave up the waiting and gave out his cigars when the due date had safely come and gone. Gularte must have been waiting anxiously for word from home, as well—receiving it would be a joyful distraction from the filth, the cold, the constant, dull exhaustion—and it would be a sign, too, that there was a new reason to survive the war, a new reason to get himself home.

Many at home, and in the front lines in Europe, as well, according to Gantter, hoped the war would be over by Christmas. The chase across France had given both false hopes. It would instead be a hard Christmas, hard in the Ardennes, with the onslaught of Nordwind, the great German offensive; hard, too for the Gularte family: on Wednesday, December 13, Father Thomas Morahan celebrated a Mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Frank’s memory.

Even then, the war would not leave the family alone: four days later, Frank’s brother, Manuel, and his 965th Field Artillery Battalion began a desperate fight around St. Vith, Belgium, in support of the Seventh Armored Division, charged with holding the town in the face of the massive German offensive that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The Americans would lose the town to the Germans, but the 965th’s heavy guns—155 mm cannons—would be one of the factors that would make them pay dearly for it, wrecking, in the process, the enemy’s timetable. The Seventh Armored abandoned St. Vith, but only after holding on for a full four days past the German target date, December 17, for its seizure.

That was the day that the 101st Airborne Division arrived to take up defensive positions in and around Bastogne. Their stubborn resistance in holding this town, in the rear of the German advance, was another decisive factor that prevented the Bulge from becoming the breakthrough that Hitler so desperately wanted: the German drive to the west lost momentum as thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were thrown into the attack on Bastogne. There, among the tough and battle-wise Americans—some of their foxholes are faintly visible today– was a young sergeant from Arroyo Grande, Arthur C. Youman. December 17 was his twenty-third birthday.