For a couple of days at least, I'd like to tell some tales I've picked up of WWII vets who were close but never touched at the Battle of the Bulge. Knowing their stories has helped me understand more about that battle and more about war. Right now, it seems that kind of war is not so very far away.
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She gone to war on a whim, really, joined the corps because a doctor told her that she and her friend were young and unattached, and she'd never really been off the reservation--well, to Rapid City to nursing school, but not much farther. He told her she should go out there and see the world, so she enlisted because she got sick-and-tired of having to catch a ride with the mail man if she wanted to go anywhere other than the reservation hospital where she'd found a job after nursing school. She went to war, honestly, for adventure. "What did we know about war?" she asked rhetorically.
The fact is, she knew nothing. She was a Lakota woman, something she knew very well even if her friends didn't. It was clear to her that she was, well, unique among the other nurses shipped to Europe before D-Day, the only nurse in her bunch who could claim Native blood. Sometimes her friends--and they were friends, good friends--called her a princess because they liked thinking about her as an Indian princess. She felt no discrimination during the war. None.
In late 1944, Hitler decided to gamble everything on a last-ditch effort to break the Allied lines sweeping through toward Berlin. Germany needed the port at Antwerp, so he sent tens of thousands of troops--some just boys--into the Argonne Forest in a frighteningly bloody military action the world would soon call "The Battle of the Bulge."
At a field hospital bigger than a football field, a series of tents, a fully equipped hospital that eventually served thousands of casualties, American GIs, her assignment was the very first tent, A-1. It was war, and together with her nurse friends they did nothing at all but work and sleep, tend the thousands who showed up from the battle lines.
Who knows for sure whether or not the Germans actually aimed a buzz bomb at that field hospital? Anything is possible in the fog of war, and Hitler did things that most of us would rank as far more malevolent, more atrocious. Whatever happened that night, a 25 wounded GIs were killed right there in the hospital, red crosses all around, when a German buzz bomb stopped its horrifying buzz and fell near a tent where the patients were sleeping. Buzz bombs whizzed by quite regularly, when Hitler flung them in a blitz at London and then at Antwerp.
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| Patients looking for buzz bombs |
She wasn't right there. She was on duty, but the field hospital was big and rangy, and she didn't see the horror with her own eyes. On her way back to her tent, she met a friend, another nurse, who did, who was there, who literally picked up the pieces. "Don't go," her friend told her. "Just go get some sleep, Marcella," her friend said. It was a warning Marcella understood for what it was.
When she was 100 years old, Marcella still wondered whether she did the right thing by listening to that friend and not witnessing what her friend had said she was better off not seeing.
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