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Devildogg4ever
08-31-03, 07:29 AM
Posted on Sun, Aug. 31, 2003



Soldiers who fought in WWII's Battle of the Bulge trained in S.C.
AMES ALEXANDER
Staff Writer

Ron Krum grew up without knowing there was a hero in his house.

Almost 59 years ago, his father, Mahlon Krum, was wounded and captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, the largest land battle in U.S. military history.

But like many World War II veterans, the elder Krum rarely talked about any of that at home. Only when he and fellow survivors come together, as they did last week in Charlotte, are some of their stories recounted.

More than 200 Bulge veterans, who trained for battle in South Carolina with the Army's 87th Infantry Division, reunited in the Carolinas last week.

On Thursday, they returned to Fort Jackson, near Columbia, where they trained in 1944 before they were shipped abroad. And on Saturday, they gathered in Charlotte's Marshall Park for the dedication of a monument to the 87th Division.

During their months in Europe, many of them suffered a lifetime worth of hardships.

On Jan. 3, 1945, Krum was captured by Germans in a Belgian foxhole. After a German soldier knocked Krum's helmet off, he discovered two bullet holes in it. A slug had creased his scalp.

He spent the next three months in German prison camps. There, in unheated barracks infested with lice, three men had to share a bed to stay warm. Seven typically split a loaf of bread for dinner.

Krum's wife, eight months pregnant with their second daughter, received a telegram in January saying he was missing in action. For more than three months, she didn't know whether he was alive.

On March 30, Krum heard a welcome sound: the crackle of Allied gunfire. German soldiers tried to force Krum and his fellow captives to march. But the Allied prisoners had been taught to delay the enemy, so many of them fell to the ground, pretending they were too weak to march. The Germans fled without them.

The liberating Allied forces threw rations over the fence to them. But the relatively rich Army food was a shock to their malnourished systems. After wolfing it down, Krum and the others became sick.

"I'd never give up my experience," said Krum, now 84, who lives near Harrisburg, Pa., and came to the reunion with his son. "But there could never be enough money to make me do it again."

Even when Gen. George Patton's army had the Germans on the run, life was perilous. Earle Hart, a platoon sergeant during the war, remembers the day in March 1945 when he and his fellow soldiers arrived at Germany's Kyll River. As Hart's tank was about to cross the river, the Germans blew up the bridge. For a moment, it rained cobblestones, but no one was hurt.

"If we'd been a length of a tank further, I don't know what would have happened," said Hart, a historian and retired engineer who organized past reunions.

Hart and his men slogged across the river by foot, and began looking for Germans in the woods. An American scout was wounded by enemy fire as he ran across a clearing. Soon afterward, Hart saw a 19-year-old soldier at his side killed by a rifle shot. The soldier squeezed off a few rounds before dropping to the ground. Later that day, Hart saw another private killed when a mortar round landed on his radio pack.

"The whole operation was a great success to almost everyone else," said Hart, who now lives near Allentown, Pa. "But here in the final stretch, two guys were killed and another wounded."

Of the roughly 14,000 men in the 87th, 1,200 were killed in action. About six times that many were wounded.

"We had an awful lot of brave guys," Hart said. "They didn't consider themselves brave; they were scared to death. The main thing is when someone said get up and go, they got up and went."

Even when V-E Day (Victory in Europe) came, many members of the 87th didn't celebrate. They expected more fighting. They were shipped home for a 30-day leave in July 1945, and were told to prepare for battle in the Pacific.

"I said my number is up," said Talley Kelley, a retired banker from Columbia. "How many days can you shoot a machine gun and not get killed?"

But on Aug. 14, 1945, after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered. It wasn't until then that "guys like me said, `Hey, we're gonna live,' " Hart said.

These days, Marion, N.C., resident Sharon Hartwell likes to show her appreciation for what her father, Willie Black, helped accomplish as a soldier. She accompanies Black to the reunions.

"If they hadn't kept going, a lot of us probably wouldn't be here," she said.

Many say the war yielded another benefit. It forged friendships that have lasted lifetimes.

Herb Beers of Seaford, Del., spoke of a war buddy who spent 13 days with him last month to help him recover from surgery.

"When you were over there, you did everything in your life to protect your buddy," Beers said. "... I'd say it stayed that way."

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/local/6660504.htm