During the war, where was Grandpa on Christmas?

The 555th before leaving for Europe

Grandpa wasn't exactly a kid. There were kids galore on both sides--18-year-olds just out of high school and scores of 17-year-olds who'd quit years before. Not that World War II was a young man's war. There were boys out there fighting and dying between the French hedgerows, if they had survived the invasion on June 6; but it didn't take long and they were all men. 

Grandpa wasn't a kid. He was all of 25 on the first Christmas he'd ever spent away from home on the farm. He was out in the cold in Belgium, doing what he loved, what he was good at, what the Army determined he should be doing; he was at work in the motor pool. 

Family and friends at Alton station for Grandpa's leaving into the service

Seventy-five years ago, Grandpa and the 555th Ordinance Tank Maintenance Company had just moved their operations up the road a ways from Liege, Belgium, where they'd been since early November. The war was getting close. Earlier they'd spent six weeks at Brest, where the Gerries didn't quit without a fight because everyone knew Brest was a harbor the Allies needed. In September, 1944, 37 Allied divisions would need 26,000 tons of supplies each and every day. That's a lot of food, a lot of munitions, and a lot of motor vehicles.

The 555th had been officially commended for their good work at Brest, keeping Allied engines running; but the siege itself could hardly be called successful. By the time the city was in Allied hands, the Germans had destroyed the harbor while putting up a fight that became a torrent of bloodshed. Finally, the city belonged to the good guys, what was left of it--and them--anyway.

On September 6, 1944, they'd left for Rennes, France,  where they'd spent a month before being moved east to Liege, Belgium, a move they made in only two days. Nothing was moving at the time. The countryside must have seemed almost eerie. No American officer, not even Eisenhower, had guessed that getting as far as they had into Nazi-occupied Europe could have sped along as quickly as it had. Normandy was a horror of course. Once off the beach, they'd walked into hedgerows that were soon soaked in blood. Thousands of GIs and Brits and Aussies and Canadians had died. But once they got off the coast, the only Wehrmacht lots of guys saw were high-tailing it the other way. 

Conventional warfare that features intense battles always also has long stretches of quiet, of rest and retooling. When the 555th got to Liege, the lull all around them made life seem good. Not that there wasn't anything to do. Eisenhower had his hands full trying to keep troops supplied with guns and grub. Grandpa and his grease monkeys were supporting both the First and the Ninth Armies. Nobody sat on their laurels; after all, war creates wrecks.

Cartoons drawn up by a member of the 555th

Work didn't slow down, but the fierce fighting that characterized some of their earlier days in France has somehow cooled, even though they were never beyond danger. Two days after they'd arrived at Liege, a V-1 or "buzz bomb" came down 150 yards from the shop, sending shards of glass flying all over. Two guys got bloodied enough to earn purple hearts. 

Just living with buzz bombs was trying. You could hear them coming, couldn't miss that infernal buzzing, and when you did you just knew that if one would suddenly go silent, it could be the end of everything. Just because the motor pool was not a hot target didn't mean one of those death devils wouldn't go rogue. You lived with death, even ten or twenty miles from the front.

Just exactly when word got out that Hitler had ordered up a huge gamble to beat back the all but unstoppable Allied advance (and their vastly superior air power and artillery) isn't clear. When did Grandpa learn that something huge was in the offing? Hitler had demanded silence. No one knew what was coming. The little history book doesn't detail what the 555th knew, when.  

Operation Wacht am Rhein ("watch on Rhein") was anything but a watch. Hitler threw just about all he had left into a massive offensive, pushed munitions and manpower into a full-bore blitzkrieg that took aim not simply at the advance of the invading enemy, but at the heart of the front. The Battle of the Bulge was about to break open less than an hour away from where he and his buddies were retooling tanks.

It all started, dead of night, December 18. There's no mention of it in the little book, but it says this for Christmas Day, December 25, 1944: "The first Christmas overseas for the 555th Ordnance Company was spent in the shop from 0745 to 2100."

It's really unimaginable, isn't it? Seventy-five years ago today, Grandpa was hip-deep in grease and oil when he wasn't under the hood of whatever needed service for a momentous battle being fought right then just outside the shop door. 

(More tomorrow.)