The price they paid for our freedoms
Here are some stories commemorating both Memorial Day and the June 6 anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944:
Pete Giron was a Western Union delivery boy in Greensburg during the Second World War. He was a high school kid, 15 or 16 years old, too young to serve in the military, but not too young to understand the war in uniquely personal terms.
Peter delivered telegrams all over town. Telegrams were the emails of their day. Many telegrams were trifling. Others, not so much.
Anything from the government in those days was fraught. It might be a summons to report to active service, to train for war, to march off to war. In many cases, it was a far more fateful summons than even these.
Some telegrams from the government informed the recipient – a mother, a father, a wife, or some other relative – that a loved one was missing in action or had been killed in combat.
That’s why Pete Giron pedaled away extra fast whenever he delivered a telegram bearing the imprimatur of the government. He dreaded hearing the screams and cries of the newly bereaved.
Edward J. (Ed) Danko was a soldier at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. In mid-December 1944, he confided to his diary that the previous night had been nightmarish, and the following day, too. “Hell all night … [and] all day,” he wrote.
During his unit’s subsequent thrust into Germany, Danko, who hailed from Uniontown, witnessed one horrific scene after another: German children emerging as orphans from the rubble of houses; bodies scattered in fox holes or crushed under the tread of tanks; and the remains of an American airman sprawled near his wrecked plane, headless and without legs.
Leroy (Whitey) Schaller was another soldier at the Bulge, which, incidentally, was not a location, but a circumstance: in a fierce counterattack after months of reversals, the Germans forged a huge “bulge” in the Allied frontline that was only restored at great cost.
Whitey, a blond-haired native of rural Westmoreland County, was captured early in the German offensive. An enemy officer told him, “Your war is over.”
Only it wasn’t. Sent to a prisoner of war camp, Schaller, like many Bulge veterans, suffered from the effects of frostbite the remainder of his life.
The winter of 1944 was one of the coldest ever in Europe. At the Bulge, some of the dead resembled statues, frozen in place for days at a time. One such case involved a Wehrmacht infantryman who died kneeling on one knee with his rifle hoisted and ready to fire. The Americans who saw him never forgot.
The second of two wounds Charles Hileman sustained in World War II took place in France while he was firing a 50-caliber machine gun at entrenched enemy positions. Soon enough, a German shell struck a nearby tree, spraying shrapnel and chunks of wood in all directions. When Hileman, 20, of Uniontown, looked down he saw a hole the size of a 50-cent piece in his arm. His war, too, was over.
Private Carl McElhenny was 19 when he was killed in Italy. The previous spring of 1943, instead of graduating from Connellsville High School, McElhenny had enlisted in the Army.
Robert A. (Bobby) Burns also died in Italy. He was also 19. Residing in Connellsville at 404 Johnson Ave. with his parents, Burns had worked at the West Penn trolley garage before heading off to basic training in March 1943.
All of which meant he and Carl had gone from small-town boys to fighting soldiers to corpses in little more than a year’s time.
Finally, these two, briefly, from the Civil War: Lt. Henry A. Purviance of “little” Washington was a favorite of his men in the 85th Infantry Regiment. On hot, sandy, mosquito-ridden Morris Island, S.C., on Sunday, Aug. 30, 1863, Purviance lost his life when a “friendly fire” artillery shell burst overhead, carrying off the back of his head.
Wounded soldier John Inks of “near” Uniontown died while being attended to by a minister’s wife, a Mrs. Morse, in a makeshift Army hospital in Washington, D.C. Inks slipped in and out of consciousness. Mrs. Morse later told Inks’ parents that “it seemed hard for the spirit to free itself from the body.” John Inks died in a “scene of great suffering,” she reported, amidst the constant “cries and groans” of other dying men.
With such grievous episodes as these and others in mind, no American has the right to be cynical or weary or indifferent to the well-being of the country. Its future happiness and the integrity of its democratic institutions necessarily involves each of us.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.