96 - Avoid fighting, but not at all costs

Dear David,

This is one of my favorite photos of you and Grandpa.

Grandpa is my Daddy. His name is also David. I named you after him. That is one way that I could honor him for being such a good Daddy to me.

But before Grandpa was my Daddy, he was a Soldier. He was one of many soldiers, who together, quite literally saved the whole world, when the whole world was having a great big war. They didn't want to fight, but they had to. Because sometimes if you don't fight, things can get much worse.

Fighting was very hard on Grandpa, and he was very badly hurt several times. But, because he paid this cost, he got to come home and be my Daddy, and you got to be born so I could be your Daddy. He never had to fight again, and I never had to fight at all. I hope you never have to fight either. Maybe one day will come when you have to choose to fight, or not fight. On that day you will need to decide what believe in, and what is worth fighting for.

Grandpa wrote me a letter last week about when the great big fight for the whole wide world was all over, and how everyone just wanted to go home. I thought I'd keep it for you.

Love,

Daddy

"I WANT TO GO HOME
CENTRAL EUROPE
1945-1946

Like so many people who are very smart; the Germans were very stupid also. After easy victories over Poland and France in 1939-1940 and expelling the entire British Army from Europe, they decided to take on Russia, the Balkans and the Baltics.

Since they had committed their own young population to military service, they used the captured French and Polish soldiers to work in war plants in Germany and on farms as well.

That left no one to work on the large farms in France; so they placed Poles and Russians on farms in Holland, France, Belgium and Germany.

So it was, that in 1945, after the U.S. and England had defeated Germany; much of the European population wanted to go somewhere else. I inherited a job with military government, temporarily, at Mai le Camp; an old French Army Garrison near Rheims, holding about five thousand former Russian soldiers, former laborers for two or more years on local French farms.

These men were tough. They had survived three years in combat, and as prisoners, badly treated and always out in the weather with poor food and inadequate clothing.

Quite frankly, the job was easier than I had assumed it would be; our main job was to convince the Russians to police themselves by remaining on the base, managing their own affairs, and only allowing a select few of their troops liberty to visit the nearby town and only in daylight.

We supplied them with spare uniforms and plenty of basic food materials, and other housekeeping items like soap, and fuel for hot water and barracks heating.

They, in turn, behaved well; sold about a third of the food and fuel on the local French "Black Market" and aided in the cleanup of the camp which, had been damaged. In a clever British air raid in June 1944, a German armored regiment on the way to the U.S. invasion at Normandy, parked inside the walls of Mai le Camp for the night. The Russians and the local French Underground arranged with the Royal Air Force to make a low level raid; first with a few planes to allow the Russians to escape temporarily, and then for a larger main force to sweep in with large numbers of bombers at extremely low levels to severely damage the tanks and troops inside. The damage took the German tank corps out of the war. The Russians were quickly rounded up, and put to work clearing debris.

On my arrival, months later, one could still smell the dead Germans under the rubble. The Russians didn't mind the odor at all.

In August 1945, the Russians were repatriated; and reluctantly. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, early in the war, had given an order that no Russian soldier was to allow himself to be taken prisoner alive. Of course, many thousands were taken prisoner and put into German labor battalions. I understand that most of the repatriated Russian war prisoners were sent directly to labor camps in Siberia for life, as were many German Army soldiers captured by the Soviet Union, and not allowed freedom until 1980-1985, if they lived.

War causes so much dislocation. There were thousands of former French Army soldiers impressed into labor battalions in German war plants that were bombed until the war's end. I had a servant in my house in Marburg, Germany, who was a former soldier from Latvia. He had been impressed into a German unit. He did not know if he would ever get home. The three Baltic republics; Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, seemed to cease to exists in 1945.

For much of 1945 and 1946, central Europe was a constant move of humanity. There were Allied soldiers; British, American, Canadians and others; all anxious to go home. There were large numbers of German and former German allied troops being processed through prisoner of war camps, and often setting out on roadways to return to their homes far away.

There were uncounted prisoners from German concentration camps all needing medical aid, and every sort of humanitarian assistance, all, once again, only wanting to "go home", and routes to it were often severely damaged from combat on the ground and from the air.

Railway lines and stations, highways and canals were busy day and night without end. Food and drinking water was always in short supply.

The various U.S. military units kept order and the flow of transport and people though at times seemingly endless, was at a slow and almost quiet pace.

The universal statement was "I want to go home".

-- David Buckley, July 3rd, 2008