I NEVER FOUGHT IN A WAR. I was born and raised in a time and a place that didn’t require young men to sign up, take basic training in the country’s armed forces, and leave its villages and cities to serve in a theatre of war overseas, the way my father did. And I certainly didn’t have to witness the death and dying that he did. About as close as I ever came to serious injury in my youth, believe it or not, happened when I was participating in America’s favourite pastime. It was during a competitive but relatively friendly game of baseball that I sustained my worst physical injury. On the final day of classes that year, my grade nine phys-ed instructor had no curriculum left to teach, so he gave us a bat and a ball and told us to go to the school diamond and play some work-up baseball. Not long into the game, I was playing at shortstop when the catcher and I chased the same infield fly and ran into each other head-on in the middle of the diamond. The collision broke my nose, knocked out my front teeth, and put me out cold for several minutes.
After the dentists and doctors sewed me back together, I spent several weeks recuperating at home in bed. My father happened to be working in his home office at the time, so he spent many hours trying to distract me from my pain and self-pity by telling me stories. It wasn’t long before I popped the big question.
“What did you do in the war, Dad?” I asked former T/Sgt. Alex Barris.1
Never afraid to tell a good yarn, but in this case holding the power to choose what he would say and not say, my father used a ploy—a safety mechanism that many veterans of the Great War, the Second World War, the Korean War, and recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have used—to answer my question. Never tell the rough stories, the remembrances of destruction close by. Don’t revisit the deaths of comrades on the battlefield. Under no circumstances let loved ones see you break down and cry. Instead, protect them from the truth. Always recall the antics, the quirky tales, and maybe the odd near miss. But never let them know the hell of your war.
That’s what my father did. For several afternoons in a row, as I lay in bed recovering from my schoolyard wounds, Dad regaled me with just the war stories he knew would leave me laughing. I had a rough idea that he was a US Army medical corpsman during the Second World War. I knew from some of the stories he’d told at parties and occasionally around the family dinner table that he’d endured military training camps from Kansas to Mississippi. He rose to the rank of sergeant. During one stint in the winter of 1943, he recalled accidentally waking the battalion commander an hour too early for roll call outside in a freezing Kansas pre-dawn. My father told me about army food—K-rations, or “shit on a shingle,” and coffee that tasted like mud. Everybody in the army hated the food, and the cooks hated everybody back. Nobody ever got any food he liked. So, from the moment he received his baloney sandwich ration each morning after breakfast until noon, when they stopped to each lunch, my father searched for anybody who hated the peanut butter sandwich ration as much as Dad hated his baloney sandwich ration. Only then could he eat lunch—two peanut butter sandwiches. Then there was the time at the end of the war, while part of the army of occupation in Czechoslovakia, that he and a buddy went AWOL and illegally snuck into the city of Prague, in the Russian sector, for the weekend.
What my father failed to mention, in all of his wartime descriptions, in all of the anecdotes he shared with me during those days when I was curious and convalescing, was an incident at Campholz Woods, Germany, during the Battle of the Bulge in February 1945. I didn’t know about it, and as far as he was concerned, that’s the way it would stay. Toward the end of my recuperation in that June of 1964, I asked my father one last question about his war.
“Were you awarded anything? A medal? Something?”
Presently my father retrieved a medal with five points on it, hanging from a short piece of striped ribbon. He made no fuss over it. He shrugged off any mention I made of his wartime bravery. He simply suggested that if I really cared about it I should put it away for safekeeping. So I tucked the medal into a dresser drawer and promptly forgot about it. While I’d managed to get an answer to the question “What did you do in the war, Dad?” it was, after all, the answer he’d chosen to give. He had gone only as far as he felt comfortable. Later, he wrote a memoir about growing up in New York City, and in it he offered some glimpses of his time overseas during the war. Then, in the 1990s, when he and I co-authored a book on the Second World War, Dad shared a few more of his wartime experiences and writings with me. But the rest would be left to my imagination or, as in the case of what happened at Campholz Woods, up to me to find out on my own.
FEBRUARY 12, 1945—CAMPHOLZ WOODS, GERMANY
IT WAS A TRAP. On the surface it looked like just another forest on just another hilltop. The trees were mature. But because it was the dead of winter, they had no foliage. The woods appeared dense, the outer trees—like dark sentries—hiding the inner ones. The only softening aspect of the woods’ appearance was the blanket of fresh snow that dappled the tree limbs and covered the ground in the fields leading to the forest. But it was what lay beneath the snow, beyond the outer trees, and up the incline of the ridge on the other side of the woods that proved so deadly. On the battle maps this place had a name—Campholz Woods—and the American GIs approaching it that mid-winter morning would never forget it.
In the first week of February 1945, the fighting unit to which T/Sgt. Alex Barris was then attached—the 1st Battalion of the 302nd Infantry Regiment, supporting the 94th Infantry Division of the US Army—received orders to enter and clear Campholz Woods. My father served as a liaison sergeant on that mission. That meant, as a sergeant in the field with B Company of the 319th Medical Battalion, he maintained contact between aid men attending to the wounded of each fighting company and the doctors and technicians at aid stations behind the lines in the village of Borg. He ensured that casualties received treatment from front-line medics and that the wounded were then rapidly transported by stretcher-bearers to the regimental aid station—an evacuated farmhouse in the village—for further treatment. He regularly reported to a major at the aid station, informing him about the status of casualties—their numbers, their whereabouts, and the status of their evacuation to collecting companies, clearing companies, or field evacuation hospitals in rear echelons farther back from front-line fighting.
As a consequence of his duties—running between the battlefield and the regimental aid station in Borg, where motor transport might speed up an evacuation—and also because he’d never learned to drive (a born-and-bred New Yorker, he’d grown up travelling everywhere on transit), Barris faced an additional challenge. The army described his service, maintaining the chain of evacuation from battlefields to aid stations, as “being without organic transportation.” In plain English, he carried out his duties on foot, “hitching rides with ambulances or other vehicles heading in the appropriate direction,” he said. “But I managed.”2
As American combat units advanced deeper into Germany that winter, this also meant that he was rarely in the same place twice—whether he was marshalling stretcher-bearers and medics to retrieve the wounded, managing the movement of those wounded to aid stations, or ensuring that wounded troops were quickly and efficiently loaded aboard ambulances. Conditions along the front line during both the German Bulge and the Allied counteroffensive meant that T/Sgt. Barris’s whereabouts were nearly always in flux. He was something of a ghost—here one moment, gone the next. And in those infrequent times when he wasn’t on the move, he might be found hunkered down in a foxhole, huddled in a parked ambulance, or resting on a vacant cot at the aid station in Borg.
Always a moving target, as it were, Barris felt on one hand that he’d formed a decent attachment to the medical unit he served, that he belonged to his outfit. There was a certain esprit de corps, he said, that was inescapable. The medical corpsmen were no longer New Yorkers or Southerners, no longer non-coms versus privates or even officers against enlisted men. In what he described as “this lonely little world of B Company, we knew each other as few citizens ever get to know their neighbours; and the cold shadow of death that hung over us all somehow made wherever the company was feel like home.”3 On the other hand, so peripatetic was his existence, dashing from front line to regimental aid station, that he also felt as if he were just a visitor, an outsider imposing on somebody else’s small corner of the war.
But in February 1945, T/Sgt. Barris’s feelings about whether he belonged or was an outsider didn’t matter. The job at hand required his full attention and skill. By this stage in the Siegfried Switch Line campaign to undo damage inflicted by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, operations almost routinely began in the cold and darkness of the early morning. Just after dawn on a day in early February, advance troops of B and C Companies of the 302nd filed out of Borg and entered the southern edge of the woods in large numbers for the first time; they quickly captured a handful of prisoners who, it appeared, were a forward artillery observation group; that meant the Americans’ exact position was known almost immediately by German gunners on the higher ground up Münzingen Ridge. It wasn’t long before the enemy reacted. Rockets, artillery shells (also known as “screaming meemies”), and mortars were soon crashing into the advancing troops of the 302nd. Things went from bad to worse. Seeking shelter deeper into the woods, the American riflemen tripped into communication trenches, dragon’s-teeth obstacles, and, worst of all, anti-personnel mines. The resulting chaos, reflected in the B Company sector, was typical.
As they moved from bunker to pillbox, inevitably the troops stumbled into more Schü mines—wooden boxes with a spring-loaded lid, a detonator, and 200 grams of explosives. Working with G Company, a group of 319th Combat Engineers tripped one of the mines, wounding three of them. A corporal leading a rescue party moved in to carry out the wounded, but he triggered a second mine; the corporal was temporarily blinded and two corpsmen wounded. A second aid party assisting another wounded rifleman set off a third mine; this explosion killed the medic and wounded a lieutenant and an infantryman who’d both volunteered to assist. And each new Schü mine explosion brought down more German artillery and mortar fire on the advancing troops. This domino-like process continued every costly step of the way into Campholz Woods. One staff sergeant witnessed the carnage at close range.
“Suddenly a mine went off killing the scout, and the platoon leader set two men to probing,” he wrote. “No sooner had they started than they were blown up. The explosions alerted the Krauts in a bunker not fifty yards away and the machine gun opened up. . . . Men hit the ground setting off more mines as they landed. Legs and feet were blown away. Men began screaming. Others cried, ‘Medic! Medic!’ The enemy was throwing mortars and 88s and a machine gun was adding to the hell.”4
At the first sign of trouble, the medical corpsmen of the 319th Medical Battalion began dashing from their positions at the starting line of the operation near Borg, forward into Campholz Woods to retrieve the wounded, and then back again. An indication of the frenzy T/Sgt. Barris’s unit faced during this one engagement alone is reflected in the patient case lists of previous days. On February 10, between 9:15 a.m. and 9:36 p.m., for example, the 319th Regimental Aid Station processed 119 wounded (including seven medics and two prisoners of war.)5 In other words, litter-bearers, medics, surgeons, and orderlies attended on average six wounded every minute, all day long. It’s perhaps no surprise then, that somewhere in the haste and confusion of the next forty-eight hours, a squad of litter-bearers had failed to return to its rendezvous point. As many as four men dispatched to bring back wounded from the killing zone concealed in the woods had disappeared.
Waiting, watching, listening, and attempting to hasten the evacuation of casualties that day—February 12, 1945—T/Sgt. Barris was first to realize that the four corpsmen and the men on their stretchers were long overdue. With no other way to learn where the squad was located or what had caused the delay, and, as usual, with no “organic transportation” to get him there, he felt he had no choice but to set out on foot to find them.
“Tech 4 Sgt. Barris personally entered these woods, which were heavily sown with mines and booby traps,” an official report later described, “and located the members of this squad. Two of the members of the squad were wounded and the remaining two were disoriented. He managed to extricate [all four of them] and further their evacuation through medical channels.”6
Perhaps it is a result of the chaos that day at Campholz Woods, up Münzingen Ridge, where 119 wounded needed full attention, and of the wartime medical system that always had difficulty labelling, treating, and cataloguing such injuries as disorientation and shell shock, that neither T/Sgt. Barris’s written accounts nor the battalion’s case lists show which litter-bearers were extricated from that battlefield. Apparently they survived their initial wounds and either returned to active service nearly immediately or disappeared quietly beyond the evacuation hospitals, on their way home to the States. In either case, it appears that T/Sgt. Alex Barris never gave his actions another thought. He had to be reminded, a month later, of his meritorious service. Meanwhile, the battle of the Saar-Moselle Triangle dragged on for several more bloody weeks before the 94th Infantry Division established a bridgehead over the River Saar and commenced the final stage of the war, on its way to VE-Day in Düsseldorf, Germany.
IT’S THAT ATTITUDE—not giving his actions another thought—that has haunted me, not just about my father but among other veterans whose stories I’ve listened to for half my life. In fact, my library of recorded conversations, stacks of stenography pads full of notation, unpublished letters and diaries, and walls of books I’ve collected all harbour passages revealing such thinking. Those moments in interviews, references in documents, or images in film or video all have that unique selflessness, dedication to service, and disregard for one’s safety to save others.
From my earliest awareness of warfare and the history of battles, I knew of Florence Nightingale, who transformed a British base hospital in Constantinople—where patients were often abandoned amid contaminated water and vermin to face certain death—into a functioning facility with attendants, soap, bandages, and hope; in the process she and her staff of thirty-four nurses reduced horrific mortality rates in Crimea by two-thirds. During tours I’ve led to historic spots of the Great War, I’ve stood many times in the entrance to John McCrae’s advanced dressing station at Essex Farm, near Ypres, Belgium, and wondered how he could steady his hand for first aid as well as for writing those evocative lines of “In Flanders Fields” with the German artillery firing relentlessly so close by.
Since the Second World War was my father’s war, and since I was born right after it, I had access to more veterans from Dad’s war than any other; consequently, my travels and research have led me to hundreds of first-person accounts of medics in the front lines between 1939 and 1945. Among my father’s books, in the Time-Life series, I was always struck by the story of Pfc. Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who served his faith and his country not by bearing arms but by saving lives. According to both the Time Capsule story and the 2016 big-screen movie Hacksaw Ridge, during the Battle of Okinawa, medical corpsman Doss climbed a four-hundred-foot escarpment and under relentless Japanese infantry fire managed to lower seventy-five wounded men down the rock face to safety. A photograph accompanying the Time Capsule story shows President Harry Truman placing the Medal of Honor around his neck, with the caption: “Medal for a pacifist.”7
As compelling, the six hours of Frederick Topham’s battlefield heroism have always resonated. The former northern Ontario miner, who enlisted in the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, jumped first into Normandy on D-Day, and then across the River Rhine on March 24, 1945. On the ground that morning near the end of the war, the battalion came under heavy fire; orderlies from a field ambulance attempted to attend a wounded paratrooper but were killed as they knelt next to the casualty.
“Without hesitation and on his own initiative,” a citation read, “Cpl. Topham went forward through intense fire to replace the orderlies. As he worked on the wounded man, he was himself shot in the face. He never faltered and carried the wounded man to shelter.”8
But Topham didn’t stop there. When he finally consented to evacuation to be treated for his head wound, he came across a carrier vehicle struck by enemy fire; despite warnings not to, Topham rescued all three of the carrier’s wounded occupants. His selfless acts under fire remain among the most extraordinary in Canadian military medical history. He received the Victoria Cross at the war’s end.
Awards came to many deserving survivors (and others posthumously) who exhibited what the citations routinely called uncommon acts of bravery. But when those courageous feats also involved trying to save the lives of others—as with Sarah Emma Edmonds at Bull Run, Francis Scrimger at Ypres, Grace MacPherson at Etaples, Jacob Markowitz along the “Death Railway,” Dane Harden in Iraq, and Alannah Gilmore in Afghanistan—somehow the citations fell short of explanation. Sure, one could argue that saving lives came with the job description. Signing up to be a field surgeon, a nursing sister, a military dentist, an operation room orderly, a battlefield ambulance driver, a stretcher-bearer, or a medical corpsman brought with it an “in the fine print” acknowledgement of perceived peril. And I dare say that none of those taking on such official wartime medical roles ever considered themselves immune from attack in a war zone. Even if the articles of the Geneva Convention clearly stated that shooting a medic on the battlefield was considered a war crime, too much history of atrocity in warfare proved such articles weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. In short, being a medic was not a bombproof job.
And yet, for so many of these individuals, even when conditions appeared to be at their worst, where the risk seemed its greatest, or in what seemed a suicidal action, the perceived peril didn’t seem to matter. I have always found myself in search of answers to very basic questions about such people: Why would these military medical personnel go so far beyond job function and duty? Were these people so hotheaded, or cold-blooded, that nothing could stop them? Did something intangible inside—a faith, an obligation to do better, a call for what seemed right—drive these men and women to defy the law of averages and override their instincts for survival?
As I have devoted more and more of my life to studying war, researching its context, interviewing its warriors, and writing and publishing the stories of its participants, I have come to realize that I never really asked my father the most important question about his time as a medic in the Battle of the Bulge. In 2017, when I returned to Campholz Woods in Germany to walk the same mile my father did to save those four corpsmen in 1945, I kept asking—right into my cellphone recorder—how he could have accomplished such a mission and survived. Maybe the more relevant question—and, in fact, the motivation for this book—is why? Why, against his better judgment to stay within the safety of friendly lines, would my father instead choose to pick his way through a snow-covered minefield and into a forest infested with booby traps, find those wounded and dazed young litter-bearers, and bring them safely back? Why, when all the world was dashing the other way, would he choose to rush to danger?