Chappie, The Story Continues

Hilter's Guest Glasses

 
My father recorded in his diary, Chappie World War II Diary of a Combat Chaplain, this entry dated 15 March 1945: 

Yesterday we reached Rodert, Germany, which we found to be surrounded by German supply depots. It was here that Hitler built bunkers to create for himself an elaborate operational headquarters in the Eifel Mountains south of Munstereifel. From this fortified shelter, he directed the invasion of Belguium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

Upon discovering that some of Hitler's hideaway had been taken intact, Group took it over for their temporary stay. We found the offices and general staff sleeping rooms beautifully furnished, and I was given a room with a spectacular view of the mountains.

While rummaging through the contents left behind, I unearthed a bolt of linen, tablecloth material and a box of Hitler's guest wineglasses, both still in their packing. Hitler won't need those glasses now; so I think I'll send the entire box home to Alice.

He did manage to ship that box to us in Mississippi, and you can image the shock my mother received upon opening the box - turned out to be sets of five, different size crystal, wine glasses with each piece adorned with a small, German swastika. Neeless to say, that was one souvenir that never made its way to our table. She did find a use, however, for the roll of formal, white table linen included with them. Upon his return, my father gave most of the glasses away to family and friends who wanted one. Years later he placed one on a shelf in his library that he filled with sand and small shells that I had brought back to him from Omaha Beach. To him, it was a fitting reminder of that bloody battle.

 

WWII Souvenirs VIA Army Mail

For a child, packages were more exciting than letters, and my father's WWII surprise packages always contained something special for my brother and me. As an adult, I have come to realize that what he sent was not your usual WWII combat souvenirs. Throughout the war, he made a point of purchasing items from local villagers whenever possible, sometimes paying them in WWII "military" issued money, while at other times trading with them. On the front lines of combat, money is not always what people want or need.  He also collected some battlefield souvenirs, taking only what he knew was legal.

In his book, Chappie World War II Diary of a Combat Chaplain, on 17 December 1942 my dad wrote about his Moroccan shopping experiences in North Africa.  His first package, shipped via Army mail, arrived just after Christmas. It contained all sorts of wonderful things that he had bought in Morocco. Among the beautiful hand-made leather items and carefully wrapped china pieces, he had tucked numerous packages of gum and rolls of Lifesavers candy. With sugar rationed In the US during WWII and most of the candy being sent overseas to our troops, that candy and gum made us the most popular kids in the neighborhood.

 My mother, however, was more delighted with the beautiful, china coffee-sets (three different ones) that had miraculously made the trip undamaged. My dad loved coffee, so those beautiful French-made sets caught his eye.

 For me he had included two china "egg cups," something I had never seen. Eating an egg out of them became my favorite "grown-up" thing to do. I am sorry to say that only one of the set survived my childhood.

 But even this package, with all its wonderful surprises, didn't make up for not having my dad with us for that first Christmas. From the news, we knew that the Allies had invaded North Africa and successfully captured Casablanca. What we didn't know at the time was that the fighting had just begun and that it was going to be a long time before we would be sharing a Christmas with him. 

Staying In Tourch - WWII Style

     When a GI went off to combat in WWII, their family didn't know if they would ever see them again. There was only one "tour of duty" for a soldier shipping out to Europe - you went and you stayed until you either got killed, were so seriously wounded that you couldn't return to your unit or the war ended. Today, our soldiers have access to the Internet and can send email and pictures or even talk with their families back home. Not so in 1942. There were no cells phones, Internet, or emails. So, how did we stay in touch?

Good old fashion mail. You wrote letters, sent pictures, and mailed packages via an APO mailing address. It took weeks and weeks for letters to get there, and sometimes they never got there - ships were sunk or planes shot down that might be carrying the mail. You might go a month without getting a letter, and then get four or five in the same week.

My mother always shared his letters with us, and we all wrote to my dad. I don't remember much about what he said in his letters, but I do remember asking my mother where APO was on the map because all our letters to and from him had that on them. Except for the time he was in England, we never knew where he really was when he wrote us - always said "somewhere in...," and it was kind of a game for us to look at the map and try to figure out where he might be. Also, sometimes there were words blacked out in his letters. He couldn't tell us anything about the war, so we would listen to the radio every night and go to the local movie theater every Saturday, when they showed the weekly newsreel about the war. My mom told me years later that she always had a horror of seeing my dad in the midst of one of the battles they were showing.

Then the government came up with the V-mail (Victory Mail) - remember those? The idea was that since mail was so important to the morale of our troops, it was important that they received it. At first, we sent all our letters through the regular mail, but later we were able to get the V-mail forms. My mother would buy these special one-page sheets, write the letter, fold it. address it to my dad and drop it into the mail. She told us that the army would photograph it, put it on film, and fly it across the world to where it would be printed up for him. I thought that was so wonderful of them to want to get my letter to me in a hurry. Only as an adult did I learn the other reason we were encouraged to send V-mail. The Government needed the space on the ships for supplies, not all those bags of mail, and the weight of bags of mail made it difficult to fly much of it - both of these problems were solved with converting the written letters into rolls of film. With the V-mail, the originals were kept until it was known that the film copies reached their destination. [Left: Picture shows V-Mail letter compared to small envelope used to mail regular letters]

    But most of all, I remember those wonderful "boxes" my father sent via the army.  After my dad left to go "somewhere overseas," we moved to Mississippi to live in a small town with my grandmother. While we picked up our letters at the post office, the post master always made a special trip to our house to bring us a "box from your dad," as he called them. I can still see him standing there, waiting for us to unpack it so that he could what my father had sent us. My mom would say, "By tomorrow morning, everybody in town will know what we got."  And, she was right! The content of those boxes is a story in itself.

    We no longer have any of his letters. All his letters, both to and from us, along with his uniform were stored in a large cedar chest that was lost when my parents made the move from Alabama to Arizona in 1963. Thankfully, his diary was packed with his books and maps, and they did survive the move.

A War II Diary

 

I was an adult when my father handed me a well-worn, black notebook that had been tucked in among his numerous books and asked me if I wanted to read it. I was amazed. It was a diary that he had apparently kept during his years in combat - a document that I had not know existed.  As I began to skim through the entries, I discovered that he had been in almost every major battle with the Germans in North Africa and Europe. However, it was not just dates and places. Instead, he had noted details, included descriptions, and inserted his own opinions about the various events, places, and people. It read more like a story than a diary, and it was unique because it had been written as these events were occurring around him, not written from memories of the past. 

 Once I was able to convince him to let me turn his diary into a manuscript, he and I began my work, and we had three wonderful years before his death to complete the task. Chappie World War II Diary of a Combat Chaplain is the result of that effort.

    It is the account of an ordinary man’s response to extraordinary events going on around him.

Meet Chappie, my father...

I was seven when my father volunteered to serve as a chaplain in World War II. I might have been too young to understand what "war" meant or who Hitler was, but I do remember the feeling that it was something awful and that my father might be taken away from me. I can still see him standing beside our car, saying his goodbyes to us as my mother drove away from the army base in Florida. We were going back to Louisiana, and he wasn't coming with us. I didn't know it then, but it would be almost three years before I would see him again. I would be ten.

That was July 1942. For the next three years my dad served as a combat chaplain to the same unit of front-line, combat engineers (20th/1340th/1171st Combat Engineers) in North Africa and Europe. For most of those years we never knew where he was, only learning after the battles were won or lost where he might have been, based on that familiar "somewhere in..." that was written in the upper, right-hand corner of his letters. The only exception was during those months leading up to D-day when he was allowed to tell us that he was staying with an English family. After the war ended, he returned home, and like most WWII veterans, he never talked about the tragic details of the war, only about the men with whom he had served and a few funny stories. But, was he ever proud of those young engineers! 

The only time he broke that silence about the reality of the war followed an incident that occurred several months after his return. We had just stepped out of our car in front of where we were living, when, what we later learned was a small, private plane, crashed into a building down the street, resulting in a loud explosion. Without thinking, my dad flattened himself on the driveway in a defensive position. My mom, brother, and I were standing there not knowing what to think. He was embarrassed, and as he stood up, brushing the dirt from his clothes, he said that he was sorry if he had frightened us, but it had been a "gut reaction" to the explosion because it had reminded him of the war. It wasn't until years later that i was to learn the significance of that incident.

Welcome to my Blog

I want to introduce you to my father.