Chapter 32. Turning Point

Little did we realize in Bar-le-Duc at the time that we were so near the very Battle which years later would be considered the turning point of World War II.

Over one million men fought in the Battle of the Bulge.  Killed, wounded and captured were 100,000 Germans and 81,000 Americans.  Included in the American count were 19,000 who were killed and 23,554 who were captured.  Our Bastogne survivors at the 95^th were part of the 42,554 wounded, most with badly frozen feet.

Each side lost 800 tanks.  The Germans lost 1000 aircraft.  The heavy reduction in human and equipment accelerated Hitler’s final defeat and resulted in an early end to the war in Europe.  Officially the Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945.  * reported on Google in History of Battles of WWII.

Life went on very much as usual for the 95^th.  The German prisoners became more congenial.  Patients and hospital workers relaxed and started again paying attention to where our troops were in relation to the Russian troops in the race to beat each other into Berlin.  Many of the patients were going crazy for cigarettes or some form of tobacco.  Quite a few patients knew that the Red Cross had loads of pipe tobacco because they had known pipe smokers who had counted on the Red Cross for their supply.

Then word got around that the one item plentiful in Bar-le-Duc tobacco stores was dirt-cheap pipes.  We had been troubled by being unable to do anything about matching the supply and demand.  We were aware that the typical soldier had money to spend and not much chance to spend it.

A firm principle drummed into us Red Cross trainees before leaving the US was that we must never accept money for anything.  Ever since WWI, the Red Cross had been damaged by rumors that the Red Cross got rich from charity donations by selling its food or supplies.

After the clamoring from so many guys suffering tobacco withdrawal symptoms, we decided it was irrational, inhuman and selfish not to accept the few coins from each GI to go into town and buy him a pipe which he had begged us to buy.  And that we did.

Never will it be known whether our pipe-needing patients mentioned the money “charged them” by Red Cross in Bar-le-Duc, possibly damaging the Red Cross image.  But we gals felt that we had done our duty to those warriors by lessening their pain.