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Kids need to know what fighting
in WWII meant veteran says After 50 years he breaks his silence on Battle of the Bulge
By Carol D Leonnig Staff Writer
For almost 50 years John Hodge wouldn’t talk about what he saw on the wintry front lines of the Battle of the Bulge.
The former private with the 82nd Airborne Division stored away the sight of his combat buddy's chest opened wide by machine gun fire. Home safe in Charlotte Hodge tried to bury memories of playing dead on a Belgian field and feeling a German bullet rip into his face.
Now on the 50th anniversary of the largest Army battle in history Hodge explained why he’s thrown off the silence. The 70-year-old wants young Americans to learn more about World War II and to acknowledge the sacrifices and terror US soldiers endured in the fight for Europe’s freedom.
“To a lot of our children it's just words” he said.
On a trip to Europe this summer Hodge and his wife Mary returned to the old scenes of the war. He visited the Belgian town of Erria where at age 20 he helped fire mortar shells at the German soldiers. He looked over the field where Germans shot him, walked inside the white stone house where he was taken prisoner.
When Hodge and his fellow American soldiers passed through towns French schoolchildren waved flags and pushed forward to touch their uniforms.
“It’s not words to them, he said from his brick home in east Charlotte “They know what the Allied Forces sacrificed for their country.”
By Dec 16 1944 German troops had secretly amassed tanks guns and 25 assault divisions near the forested Ardennes region of Belgium near the borders of France and Germany. Seeking to push Allied troops off German soil and seize the Belgian port of Antwerp Hitler’s army that night surprised thinly spread US divisions with thunderous firepower/
Hodge was one of the “Red Devils” the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne stationed at a base camp in France. The day the Germans began their 34-day attack he had just returned from a hospital where he was recovering from a shrapnel wound on his hand. His division was ordered immediately to Belgium.
“Everybody was drawing their ammunition, getting their rifles” he said. "The camp was just buzzing.”
Hodge’s regiment traveled a day and a half in roofless tractor trailers to the town of Werbomont, Belgium.. As army commanders realized
how many Germans were in the area, Hodge’s group was ordered eight |
miles north to the more protected town of Erria on the night of Christmas Eve.
 Everyone was on tiptoes trying to avoid alerting the enemy.
“This was probably the longest Christmas Eve of my life” he said. Hodge, a private first class, pulled guard duty from 10 pm to midnight at the camp on Dec 26. Thirty minutes after his shift ended he was pulling off his boots to go to sleep when “all hell broke loose." After more than two hours the mortars ran out. Hodge and his friend Robert Lindsey were running back to a second line of troops when they were spotted by German soldiers.
“Something from within told me to hit the ground and play dead,” Hodge said.“ As
I was falling, I glanced at Robert, it looked like fire was coming out of his chest.*”
From the ground Hodge saw a German soldier aiming a rifle at his head. Next thing he felt a blaze of heat as a bullet entered his cheek, knocked out his front teeth and exited his chin.
After telling this part of the story, Hodge goes silent and his eyes tear up. His wife Mary sitting on a sofa nearby cries quietly.
“They turned him over” she said. “That’s when he thought they were going to kill him”.
Instead the Germans dragged him into a nearby house. Hodge’s company later recaptured the house and carried him to an ambulance/
Hodge said he’s no hero. just grateful he got home.
He decided in the last couple years that he should talk about his ordeal so at least his five children and 12 grandchildren would know. He’s gathered records, diaries and maps to reconstruct his regiment’s part in the battle and typed a four-page story of his days in Battle of the Bulge so he doesn’t always have to say it aloud.
“It brings back memories you’d prefer not to recall”, he said.
In the years since Hodge moved from his native Laurinburg, NC, worked in textiles and started a few of his own businesses. He retired last year and spends time working on his garden and lawn and plays golf occasionally.
His thoughts return to his children and young people in general who know so little of the Battle of the Bulge.
“I hope they’ll look back and see that freedom has cost something” he said “and it’s worth something because it cost so much”
[The Charlotte Observer,
Charlotte, NC,
19 Dec 1994, Mon, Page 28]
* Pfc Robert T. Lindsey, of Pittsfield, MA was
killed in that action in Erria, Belgium. |
