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 95th 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 95th. 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.
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