Spirit and Truth Ministries
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A DEATH IN THE HUERTGEN FOREST
Don Hawley
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This is an important message for anyone under the age of 75. I hope those 50 or under will pay special note. It’s a message that has dimmed with time, but which never should be forgotten.
Ever since Cain killed his brother Abel, men have been fighting each other. I believe it was General Sherman who said, “War is hell.” He was right of course, but it seems to be a habit we can’t break. During the 1940s the greatest conflict of all erupted, the agony we call “World War Two.”
WWII was unlike any other bloodletting in history. Its major battlefields ranged from Europe, Asia, and Africa, to the far-flung islands of the South Pacific. More than 17 million members of the various armed forces perished in combat! Today I’m bringing you the story of just one of those deaths.
From time to time I hear someone (usually under 50) say, “There’s never any excuse for war.” Or, “When I think of what the A-bomb did in Japan, I’m ashamed to be an American.” Please, listen up.
I’d have to agree that most wars never should have been fought. They have to do with political maneuvering, and the ones involved in the politicing are not the same ones doing the dying. One of the most horrible aspects of war is that it takes away the very finest of a nation’s young men and women.
Nevertheless, as the Bible says, “there is a time for war.” Even God sometimes called his people to engage in conflict. If there ever was a “just war,” it had to be World War II. Except for those who were willing to offer their life on behalf of freedom, even today we might be engulfed in a never-ending night of slavery and pain.
Those nations referred to as “the Allies” didn’t start the great slaughter known as WWII. It was conceived in the heart of a madman named Hitler. This funny-looking little creature had a diabolically clever mind when it came to making war. His dream was nothing less than world domination and he came perilously close to realizing that dream. As one European nation after another fell before Hitler’s well-oiled Panzer divisions, only the little island nation of Great Britain stood in the way of the Third Reich.
Had the tide of war not turned, the barbed wire of German concentration camps would have stretched from sea to sea and pole to pole. The Jewish people would have been exterminated, and multitudes made available for painful, and questionable, medical experimentation. If you don’t know the full story of Hitler’s demonic schemes, you owe it to yourself to find out.
On the other side of the world, Japan also had a dream of conquest. The empire of the Rising Sun planned to bring all of Asia into a state of abject slavery. And once again the dream almost materialized. Had Japan realized the extent of damage she inflicted at Pearl Harbor, along with America’s lack of preparedness, she would have invaded our West Coast.
Except for the resolve of the United States to do battle, the butchery seen at the “rape of Nanking” and the murderous “Bataan death march” would have been unleashed all over Asia. Instead, in a unity never seen before or since, Americans banded together to produce the means of waging war. Those of us on the fighting front never had to question whether or not the people at home were behind us. This was a bonding the Axis forces could neither comprehend nor stand up to.
My LCI gunboat was part of an invasion force launched to drive the Japanese out of Borneo. During that operation our ship hit an enemy mine and nearly sank. Another ship effected a rescue and towed us to a dry dock in Hollandia, New Guinea. When the A-bomb was dropped and the war ended, our gunboat was being prepared for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
A microcosm of that proposed invasion could we seen in the conquest of the tiny island of Iwo Jima. Nearly a third of the 800,000 American troops who fought there, mostly Marines, were killed or wounded. Of the 22,000 Japanese defenders, about 21,000 died fighting rather than surrender! That was the tenacity displayed in fighting for an ugly little pile of volcanic ash in the middle of nowhere. Can you imagine what kind of battle the Japanese would have put up for their homeland? It was estimated that casualties in taking Japan would have been at least one million!
The A-bomb? Without its use it’s quite likely I wouldn’t be alive today to write this message. And hundreds of thousands of other American servicemen and servicewomen would never have come home, or would have been crippled for life—your grandparents. The devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a lot of people, but that was a very small number compared to the Japanese who would have died defending their home soil.
So the A-bomb saved many, many lives, both American and Japanese. It’s so easy for younger people who weren’t involved to make harsh judgments against those who put their lives on the line for freedom. They need to realize that except for those sacrifices, even now they could be starting the day saluting the flag of the Rising Sun, or singing the German national anthem. Instead of criticizing, they need to learn what happened, count the cost, and know that freedom is not free.
A postscript to the fighting. After totally defeating the Axis, the free world didn’t crush what was left of Germany and Japan. Instead they lifted them out of the ashes of their destroyed cities, and helped them build two of the strongest economies in the world. Judge the Allies by that unusual kind of consideration.
The veterans of World War I are almost gone. My father, Dr. D. D. Hawley of Sioux Falls, S.D., who fought in the trenches in France, died during the year 2000. At 102, he was the last living vet in the largest city in his state.
World War II veterans are slipping into the shadows. There are just 6 million of us left, and we are dying at a rate of 1,000 per day. As one of those vets, I want to share for posterity the story of one solitary American soldier.
Jack wasn’t just a friend, or even a good friend. Jack was my best friend. On the high school graduation picture he gave me he wrote, “This is a friendship I’ll treasure forever.” Because of WWII, forever didn’t turn out to be very long.
I’ve never met anyone with so much promise as Jack Stewart. Tall, well built, and handsome, he had a winning personality and great sense of humor. His popularity propelled him to be one of the choices for “King” during our senior year. Had he been involved with sports, I think he would have been selected King. (Even back then the athletic jocks had it all.) God gave Jack a beautiful baritone voice, one that he shared often in church. I could write on and on about our good times together, but I’ll just say that we were inseparable—until the war.
I joined the US Navy and went west to the South Pacific. Jack joined the US Army and went east to France and Germany. The military put him in college for additional education, but then abruptly took him out when there was a need for more men in the drive for the Rhine and Berlin. Jack was placed in the 78th Infantry Division of the First US Army, and sailed for Europe in October of 1944. On December 9, his outfit was trucked to the front lines in Germany’s Huertgen Forest near Aachen. Thirty two days later my best friend was dead.
I still remember that day somewhere in the South Pacific when I opened a letter from home, and out fell a newspaper clipping with Jack’s picture. Above the photo it said, “Killed in Action.” I was unable to eat, and that night I didn’t sleep. It took days before I could accept the fact that he might really be dead. Even years later I used to imagine meeting him unexpectedly; it had been someone else in that body bag.
I learned that Jack was buried at the only US military cemetery in the Netherlands, near the village of Margraten. In my mind I could see those endless rows of white crosses, and wondered which one had such special meaning for me.
Some years later, I learned that Jack’s widowed mother had asked that his body be returned for burial in the United States. For more than a half century I tried to learn the whereabouts of his resting-place, but without results. A huge warehouse fire in St. Louis had destroyed millions of military records. I was unable to find his name at any of the many military cemeteries here at home.
Finally, I got a list of public cemeteries in California, his last pre-war address. I called each one, asking if there was a “Jack Stewart” interred in their property. One day it worked. Jack had been laid to rest in the largest cemetery in California, Inglewood Park Cemetery, not far from the Los Angles Airport. Bunnie and I visited the gravesite, where Jack lies beside his father and mother. It was a rewarding but solemn moment.
Through the cemetery contact I was able to obtain a rather complete report of Jack’s circumstances following his burial in the Netherlands. Part of the report mentioned that when his body was shipped home, the “distal 2/3 of the left femur” was missing. That indicated such a severe wound that I thought perhaps a mortar shell had hit him.
I decided that for full closure I still needed to know what Jack was trying to accomplish when he died, and just how he was killed. Considering that it took more than a half century just to find where he was buried, learning such specific information seemed almost impossible. But I had to try.
I began by contacting (bugging actually) the present headquarters of the 1st Army. No one was really willing to put themselves out for me. After all, I was talking about their grandfather’s day; WWII seemed as distant to them as the Civil War does to me. (I have, however, done some in-depth study about that latter conflict.)
Finally, someone suggested I contact a veteran’s organization made up of those who fought with the army’s 78th Division. They have a quarterly journal that could be of help. Immediately I wrote the editor of their publication, “The Flash,” and he kindly printed my request for information under the following headline, “Need To Have Some Details On How Jack Died.”
Last week I received a copy of that journal, and one hour later Ed Malouf of Dallas, Texas, phoned. He informed me that he had been with Jack when he died. Of all the men they lost, two of them affected him the most, and of course Jack was one of those two. Here is a brief account of his final moments.
The battle of the Huertgen Forest developed from the Allies’ effort to reach the Rhine, a symbolic and real barrier to the heart of Germany. The first objective was to capture the dams on the Roer River. Some 120,000 GIs fought in this campaign, and 25% of them became casualties.
This offensive brought Jack’s yet untried Infantry Division, the 78th, into combat. The fighting in that dark and gloomy forest became one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war. The history of one involved outfit noted that “throughout Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Holland this unit has seen the devastation of war, but never anything to compare with this.”
At 8:00 a.m., on January 30, 1945, Jack’s outfit moved out with the objective of taking the town of Eichersheid. The open ground they walked over had about 18 inches of snow, with drifts up to 4 feet. The bitter cold weather was worsened by a steady wind. As they advanced they began to receive hostile fire. One of their tanks was hit and put out of commission. The GIs trudged on past it in single file.
For a time the 75mm shells dropping around them failed to explode. However, such a projectile still poses danger. Ed Malouf says that Jack was about 80 feet ahead of him when he and another soldier went down. Each had been hit by a 75mm “dud.” A call went out for a medic, but by the time he arrived it was too late.
As Ed passed by that area he saw a GI boot sticking up out of the snow with a leg protruding from it. He assumed it belonged to the other man until I told him on the phone about the “missing femur.” Then he knew it had been Jack’s leg. Jack didn’t scream or cry out. He was silent except for his last word, the last of so many dying soldiers, “Mother!”
By the next morning Eicherscheid was firmly in U.S. hands, but at the cost of 22 members of the 1st Battalion killed or wounded. Eleven days later the “Lightning” 78th, along with other fighting units, had captured the Roer River dams. Of the men in Jack’s platoon, six were killed in action, and only one made it through without a Purple Heart.
On March 8, 1945, just 37 days after Jack’s death, his outfit struck a blow that marked an important turning point in the war against Germany. The “impregnable” Siegfried Line was torn open. With metal ricocheting off the steel girders of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, the “Lightning” 78th became the first complete infantry division to span the Rhine since Napoleon. Jack wasn’t there to participate, but he played his assigned role with courage.
I know that had Jack Stewart lived through the war, he would have made a great contribution somewhere. Instead, all he had was listed on an “Inventory of Effects” from the U.S. Army:
1 billfold, with $12.49
1 cigarette case
1 cigarette lighter
2 finger nail clippers
1 finger nail file
4 souvenir coins
1 German souvenir
2 photographs
1 Bible
Not much. However, he left behind a heritage of freedom, and in the hearts of a few he still is much loved.
Yet there are people “ashamed” of what our armed forces did to keep the lights of the world from going out completely. There still are those who think the lives of men like Jack Stewart were just “wasted.” If you are such a person, it’s best not to voice your opinion in my presence. It might not be safe.
My father’s war, WWI, was referred to, hopefully, as the “war to end all wars.” WWII certainly put the lie to that dream. However, I have great news. There will be a war to end all wars, and I already hear trumpets sounding.
Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, is about to become a Man of War. As Commander of the heavenly forces, he soon will take the field--and he has never lost an engagement. Actually, the devil lost the war on Calvary’s hill, but he hasn’t figured that out yet. The final battle is imminent.
Don’t miss out on this one.
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