70 years later, our post-war world

At that time, 1945, my mother thought that we were too young, so it was several years later when I actually saw the photographs. They were small, and superimposed across the first one, in small capital letters, were the words “PRISONERS AT THE BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR GERMANY, APRIL 16, 1945.”

Eventually everyone saw such pictures – in Life magazine, in Time, in books about the war: the survivors with their thousand-mile eyes, the ovens, the stacked bodies signaling order and supply, expendability.

My father was not among the first troops to liberate Buchenwald. But, as he related to us, a day or two later an officer came around and started pointing at GIs who happened to be standing there. “You, you, you, you, come with me.”

They were taken by truck to Buchenwald and given a tour. Then each man was handed a set of photographs, 10 copies of each picture, and instructed to take them home after the war, to bear witness to what they had seen and to give sets of pictures to 10 people. As an adult remembering the story, I was impressed by that. Someone in the Army had realized immediately that witness and documentation were called for. There should never be any debate about what had happened at Buchenwald.

I still have those photographs, and for me it’s their provenance that clings to them, still haunts them, after all these years. My father was there in April 1945.

The war started before I began first grade, so by 1945, it seemed we had always been at war. While my father was in the army, we lived with my maternal grandparents in Asheboro. My sister, brother and I bought 10-cent war bond stamps at school to paste into savings books. We helped put bundles of newspapers and boxes of flattened tin cans at the curb for pick-up. We watched as convoys of soldiers from Fort Bragg passed in front of our house, the GIs waving to us from the back of trucks. They were on maneuvers, we were told, the red army vs. the blue army. Sometimes we lay flat on our backs in the front yard, watching huge groups of planes flying in multiple V formations. As kids, we sensed the marshalling of forces, the buildup for an imagined knockout punch. Older boys on the playground said, “They started it, but we’re going to finish it!”

My father’s unit landed in southern France in the fall of 1944 and was transported by train to the front lines. At some point, the troops were marched onto a field, formed up in rows and columns, and told to sit down on their helmets.

Sitting on one’s helmet is familiar to me because of my own two years spent in the peace-time Army. You take off your steel helmet, leaving the liner on your head and sit on the helmet for an extended lecture.

Sitting on helmets

My father was 34 when he volunteered for the draft. In basic training, he became friends with Frank, who was from his own hometown of Raleigh. Frank was in his 20s, but they became fast friends. After my father’s death at age 75, I talked long-distance with Frank, who was retired and living in Virginia Beach. He told me about their sitting on their helmets in that field in southern France. The officers addressing them were from the First Special Forces Group, an elite unit consisting of both Canadian and U.S. soldiers. They were looking for volunteers to try out for this unit.

At the end of the spiel, the officers said that anyone not interested could leave. Frank related what happened next. “Your father whispered to me, ‘Keep your seat. Keep your seat. These officers know what they’re doing. Those dumb bunnies we’ve got will get us all killed.’ ”

The Second World War was fought on the fly. Officers who had little or no combat experience were given command of troops and put in the field. Some were excellent, some mediocre, and some were “dumb bunnies” who would most often be replaced – sent back stateside to shuffle papers. But before that happened, before they were evaluated and removed, GIs would die.

Frank and my father kept their seats and were soon accepted into the group, nicknamed the “Black Devils.”

Frank was in his late 60s by the time of our conversation, and I could tell that his hoarse voice had become emotional. I know now that as you get older, much falls away but certain times, certain events, last forever. I believe that Frank felt that, at that moment, on that afternoon in southern France, my father had probably saved their lives.

Coming home soon

As the allies fought their way through France and into Germany, we started to see pictures in magazines and newspapers depicting life after the war. I remember a typical one that showed a father and mother, their son and daughter at their side, standing on a road at the top of a hill. They were looking off to where the road wound through Grant-Wood style fields and valleys toward a shining, futuristic city on the horizon: The Postwar World.

In late summer 1945, my mother told us that our father would be coming home soon. We were excited, of course, and I blurted out, “I’m going to ask Daddy how many Germans he killed!”

My mother’s tone changed immediately. “No, don’t ask him that, Neal.”

“Why?”

“Well, your father won’t want to talk about the war. He’ll want to talk about how happy we’ll be and about the future.”

Recently, my son, Charlie, mentioned a story about my father I had never heard. Back years ago, when my kids were young, our extended family rented a cottage at the beach each August. One year, when Charlie was about the age I was at the end of the war, he and my father went to the grocery store. Driving back to the cottage, Charlie asked out of the blue, “Granddaddy, did you kill anyone during the war?” Charlie said my father got very quiet. He stared straight ahead and didn’t say another word for the rest of the trip.

My father, as far as I know, never owned a gun before being drafted. But, in basic training, it turned out he was an excellent shot. I suspect he did kill Germans, probably more than one. And I suspect from my father’s silence with Charlie that there might have been one killing in particular that weighed on him. His unit was eventually attached to Patton’s Third Army, which in 1945 fought its way into southern Germany. Many of the German soldiers were young then. Hitler was drafting boys. Was it a kid’s face, some scared 17-year-old, he remembered?

When Charlie was 17 and heading to college – the University of Montana, far away– my father stood in the front yard with us and said, “Charlie, I remember the first patrol I went on in the Army. They were sending us out at night to try to determine German positions. And we hadn’t been gone 10 minutes before I had to pee. I couldn’t believe it. I’d peed just before we left. And I kept on having to pee. Every time we stopped. And you know, I peed 17 times on that patrol! I counted them. Boy, was I scared.” My father paused for a second and then added, “Of course, I wasn’t the only one. Everyone else was peeing, too.”

‘There he is’

On a hot September afternoon in 1945, my brother, sister and I stood with our mother at the Raleigh bus station, watching the buses come in, checking each one, looking for the Richmond bus my father would take on the last leg of his trip down from New York City. I held a picture in my mind of what he looked like, but it was hazy, his features not quite in focus. Before being drafted, he had worked in Florida helping to build an air base, and we had seen him just briefly before he went overseas.

Then, unbelievably, the bus was actually pulling in, and passengers were descending the steep front steps. Mother was the first to recognize him. “There he is,” she said. He was in his summer khakis, which was what we expected, what we wanted, the way a soldier should look, carrying a small overnight bag.

There were hugs for my brother, sister and me, and a kiss for Mother, followed by a moment of silence, none of us quite knowing what to do. Then my father turned to us kids, “Well, let’s get my duffle bag.” Saying it as if it were a small adventure that we could all participate in.

The duffle bag! We knew about those from news reels. All GIs had duffle bags. We clustered around the bus’s large horizontal door where the driver was already slinging bags out. Would our father’s bag be there or had it been lost? We felt a tinge of anxiety. But, no, there it was.

We were soon in our borrowed car heading for my father’s parents’ house in Raleigh, our other grandparents, where my father would open his bag like some GI Santa Claus. Out came a German helmet, two German bayonets, a Nazi flag, leather aviator helmets and the fur lining worn under a German coat that my sister could use for dress-up.

The next day we were still in Raleigh and still in that borrowed car, the five of us going somewhere, some errand, with my father in the driver’s seat, Mother at his side, and we kids in back, perched on the edge of our seats to be closer to them. At one point, I noticed we were passing a large cemetery on our right. “Look at that graveyard,” I said. “It’s really big.”

My father glanced over his shoulder. “They’re dying to get in.”

I turned to my brother and sister. “Get it?” I whispered. “They’re dying to get in.” It was a joke. We repeated the line back and forth to each other, while, in the front seat, I saw an amused look on my father’s face. We were learning more and more that, in our family, entertainment, jokes, laughter would be my father’s department. Mother would balance the checkbook.

We’d passed the cemetery now, and we all turned to face forward. We were focusing on the future, ready for that promised postwar world. We could begin to reclaim our lives and leave the dead behind.

The world is more complicated now, and we’re finding that we can’t just go into a region and change things to our liking. But never forget that once, when the world most needed us, we rose to the challenge. In 1941 to 1945, we did nothing less than save the world.

This story was originally published November 8, 2015 at 1:00 PM with the headline "70 years later, our post-war world."