Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part Two

by Andrew Himes, executive director of Voices in Wartime Education Project

A few days after the wedding I called up the Sandberg house in Chattanooga, Tennessee and spent a couple of hours talking to Uncle Sandy and my Aunt Jessie about his time in the war.

"It was only about three years ago that I ever said anything to anyone in the family about being a soldier," he said. 'One of the grandchildren came to me one day to tell me about a project he was doing for his school, He asked me, 'Granddad, were you ever in a war?' 'Actually,' I said, 'I was wondering when someone might ask me that question!'"

So Sandy told his grandson the whole story, and then at Christmas that year he told everybody else -- all his kids and grandkids. He had just wanted to forget about the war. When he came out of the army in 1946, he said, he took off his uniform and threw it away. The army gave him a piece of paper saying he was eligible for a GI life insurance policy, and he threw that into the trash. He decided he would never tell anyone what he had seen and done.

Uncle Sandy was quiet on the other end of the line. I waited, pictured him sitting there in that room in his house in the subdivision south of Chattanooga, with his eyes closed and a hand pressed to his forehead. Uncle Sandy had always been one of my favorite relatives. He was a gentle and sweet-natured man who always had a smile for me. Even in the painful throes of my adolescence, when I was angry at everybody in my family as well as most people in the world outside my family, I could never be angry at Uncle Sandy or Aunt Jessie. Both treated me with respect and affection no matter what kind of self-righteous and angry jerk I might be. They asked me serious questions about my beliefs and my life, and they actually seemed to care about my answers! For many years, while I had much difficulty relating to others in my family, Uncle Sandy and Aunt Jessie were people I could talk to.

It was odd for me to think of Uncle Sandy as a soldier. He was a Baptist minister and a musician. He composed and arranged music for churches, and he led a large choir from Tennessee Temple College that toured the country putting on performances at Baptist churches large and small in dozens of states. His fingers were the long and delicate fingers of an artist, and he had the discipline and passion of an artist. Aunt Jessie is a painter who has been producing her work for the walls of friends and family and members of her community for decades, and their home is tastefully decorated. It was hard to square this pleasant world of my Uncle Sandy with the revelation that he had painful memories of slaughter and terror crashing around in his brain, competing with musical crescendos, sforzandos, and diminuendos.

His voice was pianissimo, just barely audible.

"I was 18 when I arrived in France a couple of weeks after D-Day. They had given me several weeks of training in telecommunications, you know?" He chuckled. "That meant I knew how to climb up a pole and string some wires."

But the Army needed replacements for those wounded and killed in action, and so they gave him five days of combat training and put him into a howitzer company. There were times when he barely escaped being killed. Once his company was a few miles behind the lines where they thought they were safe, and two German soldiers drove up wearing American uniforms and driving an American jeep. The charade was convincing at first, and then the Germans started firing and Sandy felt bullets zip just over his head. Sandy and his buddies started shooting at the jeep until it exploded and burned.

Uncle Sandy remembered travelling through a forest after a battle finding scores or hundreds of dead American soldiers lying in the ditches along the road or out among the trees, unburied. "We were so angry at this sight," he said. "We marched into a small German village near the forest, and we rounded up all the people in the village, old and young, men, women and children. We made them all go sleep in the forest with the dead Americans, and we went into their houses and slept in their beds. All of my life I have felt guilty that we did such a terrible thing to them."

Over the next year, Sandy's unit marched all the way through France and Germany and then into Austria. His regiment was conducting mopping up operations at the end of the war in May of 1945, looking for German troops who had escaped the other American regiments as they invaded Austria. Thousands of Germans were surrendering everywhere. The soldiers were suspicious about the Austrian civilians because they saw them as the enemy, but the villagers were cheering, happy to see the Americans, throwing flowers, the children asking for chocolate, everyone smiling. "This was so strange and confusing," said Sandy.

And then they found the death camp. It was called Gunskirchen, and was outside the small town of Wils, Austria. "We came into this camp and there were thousands of people who were dead or dying," he said, and then paused a long time being going on. "I never wanted to talk about it again. I wanted to wipe those memories away. Before then I was just a kid trying to stay alive. But there at the death camp I thought I knew why it was we had to fight in that war."

That's all that Uncle Sandy would say about the death camp, but I asked him to send me copies of any photographs or letters he had from that time, anything about his years in the war. A few weeks later I got a packet from Aunt Jessie, who warned that they were trusting me with their original copies. I discovered grainy black and white snapshots of my uncle as a teenager in Europe, posing with his buddies standing up against a jeep, riding on an armored car, waving from the windows of a train. Finally, at the bottom of the stack in the envelope I found a letter, written on May 28, 1945 from the town of Wels, Austria, by a member of Uncle Sandy's howitzer company, whose name was not on the letter, and who wrote it to his wife Ellen.

Sandy's friend gave him a carbon copy, and Sandy had kept it for these six long decades. The letter told the story of what Sandy's company found at Gunskirchen Lager, the Nazi death camp just outside the town of Wils.

"We were in the foothills of the Austrian Alps," said Ellen's husband, "one of the most beautiful and inspiring sections of scenery that I have seen in Europe. It was sundown of a sunny day and the sun's red rays reflected off the snowcapped mountains, brilliantly coloring the violet haze of the day. The war was drawing to a close; the roads were lined with liberated people, all smiles… And then, what was revealed is utterly beyond human comprehension. In this obscure town, unknown to the world, prevailed a system of mass murder, a system of slow, torturous, agonizing, sure death.

"The next morning dawned as a cool, dreary day with spasmodic thunder showers. The narrow streets were ever more crowded with Jewish slaves finding their way to town. There were Jewish men, women, and children. They were cooking on small fires in every conceivable vessel. They were literally skin and bone, and here, in this area, they were undressing, and men were picking lice from the women and women likewise picking the lice from the men, for sex had probably long since ceased to exist. The lice bites had a resemblance to small pinpricks over their complete bodies. The skin on many of the bodies was open with suppurating wounds. Their digestive system received a shock in the consumption of food and hence the majority of them were afflicted with diarrhea. These people were, as a result of their treatment, no longer civilized, but more in the category of lower animals; they would not absent themselves from the group to defecate, but in the group where they were cooking and eating would tend to the normal functions of their bodies…

"At two different areas in the camp, approximately 50 yards apart, were piles of bodies. Tangled arms and legs -- human beings that had slowly and surely starved to death. The bodies were so emaciated that their sharp bones stretched taut over their shriveled skin; there was no flesh on the bodies, the abdomen so sunken that it was possible to see the outline of their backbone and their thighs were no larger than a man's arm. Single bodies were lying around the edge of the group, stiff, showing how they had died in their sleep."

This letter from Ellen's husband had been a barely-readable carbon copy, so my Aunt Jessie re-typed it on her computer. She wrote, "I understand why Don wanted to forget all that. After reading the account, all of us can see why. But perhaps we all need to know and to feel what these suffering people felt."

I have come to see that these questions of war and peace are not nearly so simple and easy to understand as I once thought they were. Support for war in general or for a particular war can be driven either by terror or compassion or maybe a mixture of the two; it can be driven by a desperate fear or by some high moral purpose, or by a mixture of both; it can be motivated by a desire to punish and destroy, or by a desire to end suffering and promote democracy, or by a combination of all of these. And popular support for any war, including the present war in Iraq, rests upon a complex set of motives and desires, all of which may be related to my own desire to end the practice of war as a human activity.

I have begun to reflect that the support of my parents' generation for the war in Vietnam was conditioned by their earlier support for U.S. participation in World War II. That war began for the U.S. as a defensive war in the Pacific and as a war to stop German aggression in Europe. A heavy dose of fear for our national survival drove our initial involvement – more than any desire to help the Jews of Europe. But the war ended with horrifying revelations of the slaughter of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis, as my Uncle Sandy witnessed. A natural step after the war was the founding of the United Nations. Americans wanted to bring into being a new world free of war, holocaust, and imperialism. In a moment of idealism and hope after the hot war and before the Cold War, they supported and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My parents' generation identified "war" with their own idealistic impulse to stop the Holocaust and oppose the unspeakable moral evils of Nazi and Japanese imperialism.

By contrast, as I arrived at adulthood, my own consciousness was being shaped by the pointless slaughter and national self-degradation of the Vietnam War. I knew the history of World War II, and understood logically why it might be a just war, but in my bones I truly could not imagine why any sane person could justify participation in any war.

Go to Part Three