Chapter 31. War Weary

Writing V-mail home seems easy, but some that my mother saved refreshes my memory of how difficult it was.  “Dear Mom and Pop, Everything’s wonderful.  I’m well and healthy.  Too busy to write to-night.  Write later, Love, Nanny.”  In our sleeping room it was too cold and no table; all day long there was not a minute.  After the last guy left, the Shanty would look promising, but often we were in blackout by then.

In early 1945, the Stars and Stripes greeted us with news that the Russian army to our East was making remarkable headway.  It was comforting indeed to have their help.  Still we sensed the competition: we had to beat them to Berlin!  Couldn’t let them have that glory and advantage.  Occasionally we let ourselves think of going back home.

Meanwhile there were rumors of trouble in a pocket still held by the Germans fairly close to the boundary of our Alsace and Belgium—in the heavily forested Ardennes.  But our Third Army could be counted on, we all felt in our bones.  Up there an unexpected attack by Germans didn’t worry us much when it started about a week before Christmas.

We Red Cross workers had other more immediate problems:  shortage of Red Cross supplies. We were running out of cigarettes and were almost completely out of gum.   For New Year’s we had barely managed to leave one stick of gum on the bedside stand of each of the 1000 patients.   

But news became darker in early January.  The US Forces had been surprised by the severity of the German fighting as well as by the German attack itself.  Deep snows had buried the battlefield and days of overcast skies kept our airplanes from providing cover for the miserably cold troops.  For the 95^th it became positively scary to see our German prisoners each morning as they arrived at our hospital grounds.  For the first time the whole hundred-plus of them started to goose step in strict march-time, singing loudly as they paraded around the corner from their nearby quarters.  Some of the individual workers displayed self-confidence almost to the point of cockiness as they worked practically beside us.

We didn’t hear many details about the fighting in Bastogne in Belgium.  “What were those prisoners hearing from their side?” we wondered.

And soon we knew!  Our US troops by the hundreds started arriving by ambulances half frozen to death, miserable with their swollen frost-bitten feet.  Already full, the hospital jammed 500 army cots in the halls and for many weeks the 95^th (and I suppose each of the other nearby general hospitals) had 1500 patients, many of them unable to put weight on those miserable feet.  Healing took a very long time.

Until late January we were not sure of the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge, as it came to be known.  It got its name from the bulge that the Germans put into the Allied line of advancement.  The Battle of the Bulge, in terms of troop loss, turned out to be the worst battle of the armed forces in all of World War II.