Memories On A Holiday

“His feet,” she says. “I remember his feet.  They froze in the Ardennes in 1945, and he had trouble with them the rest of his life.”

Then she adds, “When I was a little girl I used to rub them on a winter’s evening. They would hurt him so bad.”

That’s Brenda talking about her dad, the late Robert Julius Cole who served in the 313^th Regiment of the 79^th Infantry Division during the Second World War. The 79th Division became known, in the lexicon of World War Two History, as “a fine attack division,” an honor among the highly honored. Its members wore the Cross of Lorraine from service in World War I. After landing in Normandy on D-Day plus eight, it fought almost continually across France, Belgium, and Germany until war’s end.

I think about Julius on holidays such as this. A gentle man, he survived the awful experience of war, came home, and never fired a gun to harm another creature again. He skipped all of the 313^th Regiment’s reunions, too busy farming and raising his daughter. He did, though, grace many a supper table with stories of the war, some horrible, some sad, some tragic, but some humorous. Life is like that.

Shortly before he died, Brenda decided to attend one of the reunions, just to see if she might find someone who had known him. He was suffering from the cruelty of Alzheimer’s by then. When she explained to him where she was going, he just looked and nodded. Whether he understood or not lingers as a mystery of the cruelest type.

She left me to watch over her parents and flew to Pittsburgh. Once there, she had just started introducing herself to anyone standing still long enough when a man startled her with the simple statement: “I knew your dad.” To her further amazement, he added, “I have a Nazi flag at home that your dad and a bunch of us captured in 1944 and signed.”  The man was Jim O’Neil, from near Sacramento, California. He waded ashore at Normandy when he was barely 15. Brenda remains friends to this day with his widow, Dorothy O’Neil.

(For a great look at war through the eyes of a very young soldier, purchase O'Neil's autobiograpy, The Kid From the 313th: My Boyhood Years From the Streets of Chicago to D-Day Plus Eight, here).

The next time Brenda attended a reunion, she took her mother, Hazel. Jim O’Neil brought the flag that his squad had captured and signed. She has a photograph of her mom with the flag. It occupies a sacred place in her life. It rests beside a heart-wrenching Christmas Card from 1944, pre-printed with the silhouette of a soldier in a fox-hole and the cryptic words: “Somewhere in France.” It is signed in pencil simply: “Julius Cole.”

Each year, in a solemn ceremony, the survivors would ring a bell for each of the men of the 313th who had died during the preceding year. The wives of the 313th would watch it through their own dimming eyes. The reunions are gone now. The brave men who crossed the Rhine and stormed the Fatherland died, or grew too feeble to make the trip. All that’s left are memories and the everlasting honor granted to men who served our country in its greatest hour of need.

In the summer of 2000, they rang the bell for Julius at the 313th Infantry reunion. Never a fan for those wearisome end-of-the-year “bragging letters” or overblown obituaries, his daughter simply mentioned, in the local notices, his family, his service with the 79th, his Purple Heart, and his Combat Infantry Badge—so cherished by those who have earned it. He would have liked that.

Hazel, Jim O'Neil, and the flag with signatures.