Package unravels war hero’s life
Correspondence to a WWII soldier’s mother
By Gene Kemmeter
A package delivered recently brought a few interesting pieces of family information.
My wife Nancy’s brother was tidying up his home when he found some family papers he didn’t want to hold on to any longer and wanted to pass them on to other family members. So he bundled them up and dropped them off for distribution.
Among the papers were three letters to Katherine Engel of Stockbridge, my wife Nancy’s grandmother, about her son, Claude W. Engel, who served in the U.S. Army.
The first was a letter from the War Department informing Nancy’s grandmother that her son was killed in action on Sept. 16, 1944, in Germany.
The letter, signed by Major General J.A. Ulio, The Adjutant General, said “I fully understand your desire to learn as much as possible regarding the circumstances leading to his death, and I wish that there were more information available to give you. Unfortunately, reports of this nature contain only the briefest details as they are prepared under battle conditions and the means of transmission are limited.”
Katherine wasn’t satisfied by the Army’s response. She wanted to know how her son had died and instituted efforts to find out.
Her efforts prompted the other two letters, handwritten by a Loren Wilson of Lincoln, Neb., who served in the same unit in the U.S. Army with Claude. The letters were both written in response to inquiries for information by Katherine in 1947.
The first letter was postmarked May 14, 1947, and Wilson said he was reading the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) national paper when he saw her notice about her son Claude. His letter was short, only 113 words long, and asked the mother if she really wanted to learn about his death.
“Claude was my squad leader when we left the states, and I was with him all the way through,” Wilson wrote. “You can well be proud of Claude (and I speak for the whole company), everyone of us thought a great deal of him, and his death was a great loss to our outfit. I’m not going to tell you about his death now, but if you wish to hear about it, let me know as I was with him at the time. I only hope I could meet you personally as Claude was my real friend.”
Katherine apparently responded promptly to Wilson because Wilson apologized in a letter dated June 10, 1947, for not responding sooner because he had just lost his father who lived in Minnesota.
60th Infantry Regiment
Wilson wrote that he joined Claude’s squad in the 60th Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, N.C., and four days later they went to Norfolk, Va., for amphibious training. The unit boarded ships to cross the Atlantic Ocean before landing at Port Lyautey in French Morocco, about 100 miles north of Casablanca, to spearhead the November 1942 Operation Torch invasion.
They then moved about 800 miles to Tunisia and fought until the end of the campaign that ended at Bizerte, Algeria, he wrote.
The unit stayed in North Africa until the end of July 1943, and landed on Aug. 5, 1943, at Palermo, Sicily, he wrote, fighting in the mountains and ending up at Mount Etna before being sent to the seaside to rest and await new orders.
Wilson wrote that the soldiers did “lots of swimming and had a pretty good time until one day in November, when we got word to move again. There were lots of rumors as to where we were going, but it ended up to be England.”
After living in those other countries, he wrote, “England seemed like home, anyway they spoke the same language, it wasn’t all fun there, we got lots of training, and, of course, we know what that was for.”
The unit stayed in Winchester, about seventy miles south of London. Wilson said the English treated the troops “very nicely” and the unit remained there until shortly before the D-Day invasion when they moved to the coastal area.
The 60th Infantry didn’t go to France until four days after the actual invasion, although the beach was still being shelled when its soldiers went in at Utah Beach, Wilson wrote. The unit moved inland and “had it pretty rough through the hedgerows of Normandy,” playing “a big part in the capture of Cherbourg and then came the battle for St. Lo,” he wrote. “We lost a lot of men in Normandy.”
Casualty in Germany
After the breakout at St. Lo, the 60th made a “wild” dash across France and Belgium, he wrote, and didn’t meet much of the enemy until it crossed the German border on Sept. 15, 1944. The first town in Germany the unit reached was Monchau, he wrote, and it was just outside of this town where Claude was killed the following day, on Sept. 16.
“We were in a real small town by the name of Hoffen, and it was about midnite (sic) when the Germans broke through our lines with tanks so it was our job to try and stop them, which we did but lost some very good men. I don’t believe Claude knew what happened. I know he didn’t suffer. I hope I have given you an idea as to where Claude went on his travels. I hope I didn’t forget any place.”
Claude was buried at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Henri-Chapelle, Belgium, a small town northwest of Cologne, Germany. Nancy and I visited his grave in 1974 on our honeymoon, a side trip that left us with many vivid memories.
Another item delivered to us was the box containing Claude’s Purple Heart, his World War II military ID bracelet, his Technician 4th Grade shoulder patch, his mother’s Gold Star Mother pin and other pins and medals.
Using ancestry.com and Google, I was able to track Wilson, the man who provided Claude’s mother and family with the information about his years in the Army. Wilson died June 6, 2011, at age 98 in Blackberry, Minn. His online obituary from the June 11, 2011, Grand Rapids, Minn., Herald Review said he moved back to Minnesota after the war.
The obituary also said “He loved his home in the country and spending time with his many friends meant so much to him.” The time he spent responding to Katherine Engel’s letters has also brought countless joy to the family of Claude Engel.
Without his kindness, the family wouldn’t have known what happened to him. Unfortunately, too many other families of war veterans never learn what happened to their loved ones.