Where was Grandpa on Christmas Eve?

It's unlikely Grandpa knew, 75 years ago, that the Allies were soon deep, deep, deep into what we now call "The Battle of the Bulge." He likely could not have known that Hitler's last-ditch effort to save the Fatherland required unimaginable secrecy since der Fuhrer sent 600,000 troops into Belgium on a mission to reclaim the precious port at Antwerp. What he could not have missed, however, is significant changes in what the 555th was doing.

For one thing, they'd moved. Three times they were warned about the very strong possibility of air raids that never came, but after the last of those warnings the whole shop moved out of Liege and took a road north five miles or so and set up shop again.

The Battle of the Bulge

The red arrows are the 600,000 Wehrmacht who broke through the war front drawn in in purple; the blue arrows chart the movements of what eventually became an Allied force of 500,000 required to repel the surprise advance. You can do the math, but over a million troops were part of the action, dead of winter.

Grandpa's motor pool was initially in Liege (circled), but then on December 24, they'd been moved up the road to place called Herstel, Belgium, where one of the 555th was given a medal for bravery. Tech 4 Stratton was a welder. A buzz bomb had taken out a bridge and left the road blocked. In the face of imminent danger, Stratton cut up the steel girders to open the road up for reinforcements.

Grandpa had trained to repair tanks. Before he'd shipped overseas, he'd trained at an International Harvester plant specifically for tank maintenance. But once German troops swarmed through the front all bets were off. As the fighting grew ever more intense, the history of 555th makes clear that the mission of the Grandpa's unit changed to include "'everything and anything that runs' for our Armies." What's more, the shop never closed. It "carried on, night and day."

Grandpa may not have called what was happening around him "the Battle of the Bulge," may not have any sense of the magnitude of danger Hitler's immense surprise offensive created. What he couldn't help knowing and feeling, however, is that his company of grease monkeys were somewhere in the middle of action that was more ferocious, more fierce than anything he'd been close to since July 25, the night they landed on a dark and lonely Utah beach at Normandy.

The fighting was so thick that twenty men from the unit were reassigned, grabbed out of the motor pool to be retrained as infantrymen. Eisenhower needed men with rifles.

Historians claim that Hitler's power waned once he spent his last bit of airpower in attacks meant to cripple Allied air power. At that mission, he was successful. However, his own Luftwaffe was crippled greatly in the process, and Germany, at that point in the war, simply had nothing left to give to making war. Allied industrial power--a host of Rosie the Riveters back home--kept churning out more planes and war munitions.

By late January, all those red arrows had been pushed back east into Germany. Late in February, Grandpa and his company was reassigned--moved from the First and the Ninth Allied Army into the 12th Army Group under General Omar Bradley. On the last day of February, 1945, the 555th left Herstal, Liege, Belgium, for a new permanent station at Kleindorp, Holland. 

Less than two weeks later, they moved again, this time east to Grefrath, Germany, where their mission changed officially "to operate a  Collecting Point for units of the Ninth Army and to service, maintain and repair combat vehicles of units attached to the XVI Corps."

But things were changing rapidly in the waning months of the war, and they no sooner set up operations in Germany when they were, once again, called back into Holland, back to Kleindorp, where the 555th was given what the unit's history calls "the most responsible mission of its entire European campaign." Along with other motor units, they "assumed responsibility of readying scores of amphibious vehicles in preparation for the crossing of the Rhine River."

And at that too they were succesful. "Gratifying news was received the morning of the Rhine Crossing [March 20, 1945] that all amphibious vehicles had made the crossing without a mechanical failure."

On May 8, the Germans surrendered. On the 27th of May, the 555th received their orders for "indirect redeployment" to the Pacific Theater. Had President Truman not dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he and the unit would have been bound for the South Pacific.

Grandpa and his friends departed France on June 17 for a seven-day trip back to the States, and arrived in New York harbor on June 26, 1945. "No doubt this day will be well remembered by every man aboard the ship," the unit historian reports.

Until September 2nd, when President Truman officially announced V-J Day, Grandpa and company stayed in New Jersey. In October he was sent home to the farm in Iowa.

Grandpa's stay in Europe was just 11 months, but it had to be the most unforgettable set of  experiences of his lifetime. He was as close to combat as anyone could come without shouldering a rifle. 

He never spoke much about his war experience, but when you look over where he was, what he did, what he'd seen and what he'd had to feel, his relative silence is understandable. Those two years of his life were so unlike any other that it must have seemed virtually impossible for him to talk about, to explain, to define, to document what had happened. Where would he start? What would make sense to men and women who were not there?

The nation is remembering the Battle of the Bulge, 75 years later. The United States of America suffered 75,000 casualties, the Germans 80,000. You can make the argument that the Wehrmacht lost the war there in Belgium and Luxembourg. 

Grandpa was part of that. Grandpa gave two years of his life to that effort. I'm sure, knowing him, he would have said, some--many--gave more.

If you're wondering where Grandpa Van Gelder spent Christmas Eve in 1944, eighty years ago, he was just beyond the thick of it in the Battle of the Bulge.