Did this ever happen to you? A beloved older relative asks you to do something that's relatively easy to do. You say, "Sure!" and then promptly forget about it. A few years later, that relative is gone forever. The opportunity to fulfill your promise is lost.
If such a thing never happened to you, let me assure you that the unfulfilled promise haunts you. That's where I have been since my father's death in 1994. I let him down.
My father's request stemmed from his experience as an army infantry grunt in World War II, which I
briefly relayed in a previous post. He found himself in France in January 1945 with the 42nd Rainbow Division (7th Army) as part of the final push of Allied forces across Germany. His regiment attacked into southern Germany, taking Wurzburg en route to liberating the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in April. Along the way, he suffered battle fatigue and spent a few weeks at St Johann, Austria in a rear-echelon hospital. When he returned to active duty in late March he was temporarily assigned to guard duty at the regimental headquarters, and (as he would say) by the grace of God he was discovered to be a good reader of maps by the regiment's company commander, Captain Starr West Jones. He was rescued from more front line duty by the good Captain Jones and spent the rest of the war in the headquarters company, still on the move, but not running, crawling, or walking under constant fire with an M1 and a full pack on his back. For this our dad was forever grateful.
We know all this about Daddy because he was a prolific letter writer, except for the month and a half he spent in front-line combat. Once at company headquarters, he had access to a typewriter, and we have three loose-leaf binders full of his World War II letters. He also told us many bedtime stories about his life in the war. We little girls loved his bedtime stories and we each remember them with slight differences in detail. As I look back, they often included a life lesson, and I am sure that he edited them for children's minds. Nevertheless, between the letters and the stories we each have felt we knew what it was like for him to be an unprepared, underweight, undertrained buck private on the front line of the war.
So... what about that favor Daddy asked of me? Well, I live in the Washington D C area, and soon after the
National Holocaust Museum opened in 1993, he re-told the story of his drive through Dachau in the back of a troop truck during its liberation. As in his previous tellings, he emphasized that he had hidden his eyes the whole way for fear of crying at the sight of the dead and dying prisoners, particularly if any of them were children. He did not want to be branded a weakling, especially given his shameful (to him) breakdown in full combat a month or so earlier. All he knew was that he had been ordered into a truck at company headquarters to ride through the camp along with the rest of the company. Nobody told him why or what they were supposed to do there. He thought that the new Holocaust Museum might have information about the specifics of the liberation of Dachau. He asked me to go the the Museum and try to find out exactly what his company was doing there. THAT is what I never did.
He died a year later not knowing.
Here's where the benefits of sharing family histories come in. A couple of years back I spent a day or so organizing Daddy's letters into protected loose-leaf binders, reading as I went along. In two letters Daddy described the "incomparable Captain Jones" (his life saver) with such verve and fondness that I thought it would be fun to try to find the Captain's descendants and share the letters describing him.
Google led me to the Captain's obituary (yr 2000), which mentioned the names of his sons. I contacted one of them through Facebook about 2 years ago, and he answered that he would be interested in seeing the letters. So, I
uploaded them to this blog and then sent the link to the son. I never heard back.
Wonder of wonders (i.e., Google wonders!) about 8 months ago I received an email from a Starr Jones -- a grandson -- who had Googled his Grandfather's name and found my blog post. He asked whether any other letters had mentioned his grandfather. Unfortunately no, but through emails with grandson Starr I learned that our Captain Starr West Jones had written an autobiography in 1988,
Hello, God. Can we Talk? He offered to send me a copy, but I found a used one on
Amazon.com for a few bucks and bought it right away.
I was not disappointed. The book contained a detailed account of the movement of his regimental headquarters Company, 42nd Rainbow Division, from late in 1944 until the end of the war. And, it solved the mystery of the truck ride that my father made through the camp.
Here is Captain Jones tells us in his book:
(p. 128) "In April of 1945 our Allied troops were rolling back the Nazi war machine toward what we expected might very well be a desperate "last stand" in the Bavarian Alps. Advance units of our 42d Division had blitzed into Munich with the mission of liberating the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachua (sic). I was with the main elements of our division, moving rapidly to linkup with them at Munich....(p.135)... The next day we received orders from the division commander informing us that all troops should visit Dachau to see at first hand the unbelievable horrors that man had unleashed upon his fellow man. So I sent most of our headquarters company that day, with my executive officer in charge. The remaining men would carry on the necessary functions of the company and I would go with them to the concentration camp the next day.... (p.136)...Some of the men were so emotionally thunderstruck by what they had seen that they could only shake their heads in disbelief and their voices choked when they tried to describe it.... (p137)...But I did not get a chance to see first hand, because the next day our unit was on the move again..."
So, THAT is what my father's ride was all about! A ride intended solely to witness the horrors of the camp and be a witness to history. My father had hid his eyes for fear of being branded too soft, and saw nothing. Yet, his fellow soldiers were not immune from the very emotions that Daddy so feared.
My son-in-law, a life-long student of history, recently told me that General Eisenhower himself ordered that every possible person, and the press, see the camps at first hand, as soon as the Allies liberated them, in order to avoid denial stories in the future. I just checked through google, and (as per usual when it comes to history) my son-in-law is correct. Here is a link to Eisenhower's own recollections.
General Eisenhower's rememberance.
Eighteen years after his death, I solved my father's mystery for him. Thanks to Starr Jones III, the Captain's grandson, for this little gift no matter how late. (And thanks to Google, and Facebook, and Blogger, and of course the internet, without which none of these findings would have been possible. And even now, my own son-in-law has added to my understanding.)
