On that Christmas Day Company I, First Platoon, was very hard hit. My good friend Oliver Coghill was on my right and a buddy named Palko was next to him. Both were killed, and I could hear Lieutenant Lawson calling for his mother.
– Excerpt from the written account of the combat experiences of my uncle, Darrell Burdette Searls, former infantry soldier in Company I of the 290th Regiment of the 75th Division, United States Army, 1944-1945
For many Americans, Memorial Day is just another excuse for a three day weekend where people can party with family or friends, grill hamburgers and hot dogs or barbecue, and drink the alcoholic beverage of their choice. But it wasn’t created for that purpose, at least not originally. Memorial Day began as a somber remembrance following the Civil War, and it was started not by any government but by a group of Union Army veterans of that horrendous conflict.
Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country.
The point of this observance was, in the words of General Logan, to …
[I]nvite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”
Today, unfortunately that intial purpose has long been forgotten. It’s become just another opportunity for Americans to take time off, go on vacation and, above all else, shop.
Not that politicians haven’t made gestures to remind us of what they wish to emphasize about the holiday. As the official Memorial Day page for US Department of Veterans Affairs informs us, in 2000 Congress passed a bill signed into law by then President Clinton, The National Moment of Remembrance Act, “[t]o ensure the sacrifices of America ’s fallen heroes are never forgotten.”
The millions of soldiers who were slaughtered and died in those wars, in our prevailing culture of nationalism and uber-patriotism, have been posthumously transformed into glorious heroes. Their deaths are spoken of with almost an god-like reverence, as courageous warriors who sacrificed themselves to preserve our freedoms, thus stripping them of their very humanity.
Lost in all of the empty platitudes in all the public remarks and commemorations by our political leaders is any mention of why the wars that took their lives were fought in the first place.
Even more profoundly, they rarely mention what wars do to people. Any realistic depiction of war’s horrors, and the the damage and harm it causes to individuals, families, communities and entire nations is pushed aside and ignored. Anyone who dares to contradict the prevailing patriotic narrative about America’s wars is shunned, told to shut up, or labeled an American hating traitor.
But what war does to the bodies and minds of our vets, should be at the heart of any remembrance or observance. War is not a glorious adventure in which heroes selflessly sacrifice themselves for our country. For most vets, it’s a terrible nightmarish reality in which, as the saying goes, the living often envy the dead.
I have no personal experience of war, but my oldest uncle, Darrell Searls, now deceased, saw combat in WWII. Specifically, he fought in the “Battle of the Bulge, oft described as the “greatest battle in American military history.” Certainly in terms casualties suffered by American soldiers, and particularly deaths, it ranks right up there with the “greatest” of all American battles.
I knew him as a great storyteller, and his friends and colleagues remember him as a noted raconteur, always ready with a witty joke or amusing anecdote. Yet, during all the time I knew him, the one life experience he did not discuss was the story of his service in WWII. Only late in his life was my aunt, a former editor, able to convince him to write about his time as a combat soldier. His wartime memoir of that time in his life tells a true story of what it is like to be one of the men and women our leaders send off to fight in our wars.
His Army division, the 75th, was the least experienced and youngest unit in the US Army in 1944. It was nicknamed the Diaper Division because of its youth. Many of its soldiers were literally 17 and 18 year-old kids straight off the farms of the Midwest. They arrived in LaHavre, France on December 13, 1944, three days before the German Army launched its last great offensive of the war against American forces in the Ardennes Forest. The American commanders were caught completely off guard. It was arguably the worst intelligence failure of the war, as undermanned American units guarding that part of the Allied line were quickly overrun by a concentrated force of Panzer divisions.
While my uncle and his platoon camped in misery in the rain and mud at an assembly are in northwest France, the German Army’s advance continued unabated, helped in large part by bad weather that kept American warplanes grounded. Out of desperation the 75th Division was committed to the Battle of the Bulge to support the flank of the 23rd Armored Division on December 20th.
Almost all of the soldiers in the 75th Division had no combat experience, including many of their officers. The parts of it I’ve chosen to include here cover the 47 days thereafter until he was removed from combat duty. I’ve italicized the official US army archived morning reports for his platoon whenever he cites them. His first day of actual combat came on Christmas day, 1944. What follows are brief excerpts directly taken from his memoir:
December 25:
Finally on Christmas Day, as we approached the little crossroads of Werpin, we made contact. […] As we got up onto the road, we came under German machine gun fire … Once across the road, we were out of the field of fire and could proceed up the wooded hill that was our objective. Three tanks on the road gave us covering fire, but their shells bursting in the trees on the hill sounded like firecrackers and were not very reassuring. For concealment, we went through a barn and out a back door, where the battalion commander patted each man on the back as we went through. Three days later, he was relieved and hospitalized with combat fatigue. The stress of sending men to their deaths was too much for him. […]
We could hear bullets snapping around us, but other than the two prisoners, I didn’t see any Germans until we crested the hill and I saw a group running away in the distance. The range was fairly long; but firing several rounds at the departing runners, I could see my tracer bullets flying among them. They all went down, either because I hit them or for cover. I don’t know which, and I don’t want to know.
On that Christmas Day Company I, First Platoon, was very hard hit. My good friend Oliver Coghill was on my right and a buddy named Palko was next to him. Both were killed, and I could hear Lieutenant Lawson calling for his mother. Sergeant Bay was also killed, but not before he apparently wiped out a major position of a German machine gun unit that was probably responsible for our casualties.
My impression was that casualties were much worse than the report indicated. It appeared to me that only about a dozen of us were left, and I was the ranking soldier as a Pfc. I gathered up the survivors, and we continued along the ridge; but the Germans had left. We came upon one German body; and I ordered a young private to “stick it” with his bayonet, an action we had been trained to do to be sure that the person was dead. The boy was reluctant to do so but followed my order, and the resulting crunch suggested that the man had been dead for some time.
December 26-31:
The next morning a captain found us and directed us to go back down the hill and to connect up with our outfit. He warned us that we would see a lot of dead guys on the way. He was right. L Company had been making a frontal assault across an open field at the base of the hill we were to take and had suffered terrible casualties.
Moving through their positions was an almost otherworldly experience, like visiting a wax museum and viewing subjects frozen in time. One particular tableau is with me to this day. The morning was bright and sunny, with a slight breeze. As we filed past one group of bodies, we could see that one GI with a head injury was lying on his back, propped against a log, and that a medic bending over him had started to bandage the wound when he too was hit. The ends of the bandage were streaming out in the breeze.
During the next few days our company dug in along the ridge line we had secured on the crest of a hill under trees looking out over an open field. […] The Germans attempted one attack but were decimated by a tremendous barrage.
Just before the attack, I was working on improving my foxhole, which at the time was about waist deep. I had placed my cartridge belt, trench knife, and canteen on the rim above and in front of the foxhole. Suddenly a shell landed 50 yards out to my right.
I crouched in my hole as 3 more shells exploded almost simultaneously right above me. I looked up to see that the trees had been blasted away; and where I had been in shade, sunlight now streamed into my hole. The handle of my trench knife had been severed, and my helmet was split from the top to the bottom rim. […]
By the time my uncle was removed from active duty for “combat fatigue” in the first week of February, 1945, all of his “friends and acquaintances” were either dead or had been wounded so severely they had been removed from combat duty. My uncle was fortunate. He survived and was never sent back into combat after receiving his diagnosis (today’s military uses a different name for it: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, but its all the same thing).
Studs Terkel famously titled his book of interviews of WWII veterans “The Good War.” My uncle’s memoir, however, that no war is good, though some may be necessary. The plain fact of the matter is that the only good thing about WWII was when the fighting stopped. As my uncle once said to me in a self-revealing moment of understatement, “War isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” And I left out many of the worst things from his memoir to which he bore witness: shootings of captured German POWs by US troops, accounts of self-inflicted wounds used by members of his company to escape combat, and the constant terror and fear he endured. The brief excerpts above are bad enough.
Today, I honor my uncle’s memory, and his courage in writing honestly about the reality of modern warfare. There was nothing glorious about the war he described. It must have been very painful to dredge up the memories of his many friends and comrades and even enemies whose deaths he witnessed, but I am grateful that he did.
Many people who never witness war up close and personal, including many stay-at-home Generals and Political Leaders, speak with patriotic fervor of the honor and glory and sacrifice of the members of our armed forces, but their words ring hollow to me. All wars, even a war of necessity, constitute the worst activity in which human beings can engage.
Both the leaders of Nazi Germany and Japan started WWII as a war of aggression. Before it ended tens of millions of combatants and civilians died, often in atrocities: the terror bombing of cities in England, Germany and Japan; the genocidal mass murder of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other groups deemed sub-human; and lest we forget the first use of atomic weapons against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Under international law, wars of aggression long ago were outlawed and are considered war crimes. After the end of WWII, leading Nazis and Japanese militarists were rightly indicted and judged guilty for initiating a war of aggression. Defeating those murderous regimes was necessary, but that didn’t make it a “good war.”
Sadly, it is now our government that is engaging in numerous wars of aggression. Yet, none of our current or former political or military leaders have been indicted for starting and continuing these wars of aggression, nor are they ever likely to face an international tribunal to adjudicate their responsibility for those war crimes.
Today, somewhere in the world, US soldiers are participating in armed conflicts, whether as part of a special ops unit, pilots dropping bombs on the innocent and guilty alike, or soldiers who remotely control aerial drones of which President Obama has made such great use since he became Commander-in-Chief of our nation’s armed forces.
My daughter’s boyfriend is a member of the NY National Guard, part of the US Army Reserves. A day doesn’t go by when I do not consider the possibility that he very well may be sent off to fight in some faraway country against people who pose no real danger to the national security of the United States.
On Memorial Day we should remember those who fought and died in our wars, but not for the purpose of glorifying their sacrifice as mythical heroes. Instead, their deaths should be a reminder to us that war is the cause of horrific slaughter. It ruins so many other lives it touches, both among combatants and civilians alike. War destroys everything and everyone it touches.
The observances of Memorial Day should be a lesson to us not to treat war and armed conflict as mere geopolitical games between great powers, but as a real and terrible act that should only be taken as a last resort, and only when the lives of our people and the security of our nation is truly in imminent danger.
That’s not the lesson most politicians, elected officials and all those who profit from our nation’s wars want us to take away when we remember our war dead. But those deaths should remind us that war kills people indiscriminately and without mercy. Those who it kills are lost to their loved ones forever. Their deaths leave a void that can never be filled.
War is the darkest stain in the history of humanity. When you take the time to reflect upon what it means to remember our nations’ war dead this weekend, and also I would add, to reflect upon all our surviving war veterans, many who live with debilitating mental and physical ailments, reflect on that.
Thank you for reading,
Steven D
Denise Oliver Velez, DailyKos: The Memorial Day history forgot: The Martyrs of the Race Course recounts one of the first Decoration Day celebrations, one which occurred shortly after the US Army captured Charleston SC.
The South Carolina Troops of the Confederate Army used a popular race course as a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War. Like most prisoner-of-war camps disease killed a large number of the POWs.
When Charleston held the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition in 1901 and 1902, they turned the old racecourse into a “worlds fair” ground. After the exposition, the City of Charleston took some of the structures from the exposition as structures for a new park, Hampton Park, named after the Red Shirt politician who restored “home rule” to South Carolina, Wade Hampton.
My first memories of Hampton Park are not as a solemn place but where Charleston had its zoo. That fell on hard times and closed in the 1970s.
Thanks to recent historical work, its connection to one of the first Decoration Days has been returned.
It was likely the spontaneous response to the presence of so many US Army troops in Charleston and the complete departure of the Charleston slaveowners’ families in advance of the troops’ arrival.
Thanks for a moving tribute to the veterans of the “Good War”.
Well it’s a tribute and reflection on the service for all veterans. As your quotation marks indicate, there are no “good wars” only wars a country is forced to fight to defend itself from an imminent threat, and wars of aggression where political leaders choose to send others “to fight and die for their country” as they lie tends to go.
Thanks TD
Thank you for this Steven.
On this day I first remember my brother Brian. he served 19 years both Active and reserve duty, he had deployed in 2000 in support of the Kosovo and was killed on duty about six months after his return.
I remember my dad, a Korean War veteran, whom I know carried unseen scars from that war. I also remember my Uncle Joe who also served there.
I think of Major Thomas Zeugner, a state side commander of mine who was killed in Desert Storm, we served there is different units.
I think of my daughter serving at Ft Wainwright in Fairbanks Alaska right now,
On this day in 2006 I wrote this in response of somebody rah rahing the war in Iraq;
I stood in the desert after the end of combat in 1991 and looked around at the death and destruction that we had done to so many of Saddam’s troops, one scene still haunts me.
It was where a low ranking enlisted soldier had been captured by an Iraqi republican guards officer and senior enlisted, they shot the soldier in the back of the head, and almost immediately were killed by some sort of US cluster bomb.
I thought it was ironic that they killed a man for trying to escape the Hell that is war but ended up being killed almost in the same moment. I thought it was poetic justice until I remembered Pvt Eddie Slovic from WW2, something changed that day.
I started seeing the ghost images of the “enemy” in their fighting positions, the caves they dug in the ground to escape the bombing by the US Air Force.
The bomb craters next to tanks where they died, I could imagine in my mind the horror they must have felt, being bombed from the air, but if they tried to get away, they would end up shot.
As bad as the pics of Abu Ghraib look, the horror is much greater because the camera never was focused in the interrogation chambers, where the real horrors are done.
I have no patience for the chicken-hawks who shill for others to go into these corners of Hell so they can be safe in their minds, because that is where their fear lives.
The real damage does not show, it’s hard to help somebody who was not there the true horror of that hell on earth.
My father was a disabled veteran due to war injuries during the WWII North African campaign. On the way to reinforce troops at Kasserine Pass, the Germans surprised them since their tanks were not properly camouflaged. Luckily, he was taken POW and German doctors saved his life. He and another buddy were the only ones in their tank who made it out alive. After 18 months of eating turnips, my dad was exchanged for a German POW and underwent extensive therapy since he had to learn to walk again. Glorifying war, watching war movies, and eating turnips were not allowed in our household. Before dad passed, each Memorial Day he and my mom would put little American flags on veterans’ graves to honor those who served.
We should also remember that the German troops in that battle included many German school boys drafted into the war or volunteered to “repel the alien invasion of the Motherland”. Which side is right or wrong is for the politicians and historians. To the “enemy” soldiers, their side was right. They too were fighting for their country.
I too, had uncles in the WWII ETO including one at Bastogne.
Good for you to mention the German boys drafted into the war. My dad never bad-mouthed the Germans because he knew it was the fault of the politicians who led their own people into the hell of war. He was in a POW camp that imprisoned mostly British troops and he said because the Brits and the Germans had many commonalities, the U.S. prisoners received better treatment.
I shared an apartment for most of my undergrad days with a German-born guy who’d been 13 years old when his family had emigrated to the US. My dad, like his, had been born in 1929. In 1945, as the end of the war approached, my dad was in high school in LA, while Martin’s dad was in uniform, one of the teens and old men pressed into military service for the defense of Berlin.
Lovely piece. Congrats.
I like to pause on Memorial Day to reflect on the causes for which American leaders have split both American blood and that of others. It’s not at all uplifting, and seems like the opposite of consoling. And for me, that’s the point.
I have some pretty serious pacifist roots, and I’m still not entirely clear on why pacifism isn’t far more popular.
Thank you, Steven, particularly for posting such moving segments from your uncle’s diary.
Thanks. Technically it was his memoir but it does read in diary form so I understand the confusion.
A very worthwhile alternative view of “The Good War”:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/losing-the-war-lee-sandlin-essay/Content?oid=892891
“Whenever people talk about the meaning of history somebody brings up that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II couldn’t be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened….
Besides, even if we did want to follow Santayana’s advice and remember the war, how could we do it? Too much of its detail and complexity is already gone, even at this narrow distance. As Thomas Browne wrote, “There is no antidote to the opium of time.” The work of erasure goes on all around us, incessantly and inexorably; a million silent losses are obliterating the war. There are anecdotes people don’t tell anymore, movies nobody rents, archives no scholar investigates. There are warehouses of secret wartime documents still scattered in nondescript factory districts all over the world–stacks of debriefings from some nameless Pacific island that 50 years ago was swallowed up in an artillery barrage. No one will ever unearth them all and produce a final accounting of the war–any more than the world will finally achieve justice for the war’s innumerable, officially sanctioned crimes. Oblivion has always been the most trustworthy guardian of classified files.
But there is another and simpler reason the war has been forgotten: people wanted to forget it. It had gone on for so many years, had destroyed so much, had killed so many–most U.S. casualties were in the final year of fighting. When it came to an end, people were glad to be rid of everything about it. That was what surprised commentators about the public reaction in America and Europe when the news broke that Germany and then Japan had at last surrendered. In the wild celebrations that followed nobody crowed, “Our enemies are destroyed.” Nobody even yelled, “We’ve won.” What they all said instead was, “The war is over.”
Today’s address by the President:
Oh yeah, and this motherfucker, a wonderful representative of the journalistic motherfuckers who aided and abetted the Iraq clusterfuck:
“I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
…
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”
You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”
Friedman lives in an alternate reality. If he wanted to protect our open society, he should have signed up and gone door to door from Basra to Baghdad. Friedman talks tough, but his words are cowardly. Charlie Rose doesn’t impress me either.
I’m less gobsmacked by Friedman’s faux toughness which hides his cowardice. I’m more astonished by his blind, arrogant immorality, all of which led him to complete acceptance and support for our futile, counterproductive major military actions in the Middle East.
That he and other journalists maintain their jobs and have not been made to walk away in shame after their W. Bush cheerleading is the most thorough indictment of the fourth estate imaginable.
And is the only thing that makes a Trump presidency remotely possible.
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A co-worker prepared a memoir of a relative who was taken POW at the Battle of the Bulge, but didn’t talk about it until near the end of his life decades later. The relative was interned in a POW camp not far from Dresden and witnessed the firebombing of that city. Long story short, the POWs were more or less starved by (hungry) German soldiers stealing their meager rations. The POWs who survived were evacuated to Czechoslovakia, and after the German surrender, were told by their guards, hey, the Soviet Army is approaching, go find them because we’re throwing away our uniforms and getting the hell out of here. The Soviets helped out the US soldiers, then put them on a westbound train to link up with the US Army.
Many years ago I built a house for a staunch republican. At lunch the conversation got around to Reagan’s trip to Bitburg. Suddenly the owner started talking, and things got real quiet. Turns out he went ashore on DDay, and fought the whole way across Europe and into Germany, and virtually none of the soliders in his unit he landed with made it until the end, except him. He got very emotional, and said he would never forgive Reagan.
Anyone interested in WWll should read up on how the US handled platoons and such. There was no relief, as people were killed and injured replacements were ‘plugged’ in. That meant they always had a mix of veterans and rookies. Not many vets bothered with the rookies, nor made friends, because they were quickly killed or injured. The only other country to use this system was the Soviets. Every other country would pull units out, put replacements in, and retrain them together as a unit.
1945 is now 70 years ago. This whole generation is almost completely gone. Some of them were pretty much the toughest people you will ever meet.
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