A Daughter of the 313^th

By Jimmie von Tungeln

 

            Ask Brenda von Tungeln why she decided, as a middle-aged woman, to attend a World War Two infantry reunion and she will answer that she did it for her dad. As his only child, she had always intended to take him to one of his regimental reunions, but things like growing up, becoming educated, pursuing a professional career, and getting married—to the author in 1972—forced postponement after postponement. The annual invitations piled up.

            “Finally, one year I just decided to do it,” she says. “They held the reunion in Pittsburg and I had never been there. So I signed up.”

            She never imagined the decision would lead her to new friends, a prolonged study of the history of the 313th Regiment of the 79^th Infantry Division, and an encounter with a lost moment of family history.

All this happened despite the fact that when she left for the reunion in the summer of 1999, her dad couldn’t even make the trip. He was suffering from the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s.

            So what happens when a lone woman shows up at a convention filled with veterans, all of whom are old enough to be her father?

            “I knew it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find someone who actually knew my dad,” she says. “The 79^th Infantry Division had thousands of men at its peak. It contained battalions, regiments, companies, platoons, and squads. An individual soldier usually only knew the men in his squad. If a man was a replacement, the other squad members might not even remember him at all.”

            “I didn’t care though,” she adds. “I just wanted to meet as many people who might have known him as I could.”

            Robert Julius Cole might have lived out his life without ever venturing far from Lonoke County, Arkansas had not it been for the war. His only dream beyond the world of farming was the occasional thought, when nature proved particularly vicious, that he might someday get a more stable job “working at a filling station.” Arkansas summers have caused more than one farmer to dream of a different career.

Then World War Two happened.

He received his call for service in early 1944 and found himself in Texas training for the infantry. Arriving in Europe in August 1944, he joined A Company, of the 313^th Infantry Regiment as it headed across France.

The 79^th 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. Dormant for years thereafter, it was re-mobilized it 1942. After landing in Normandy on D-Day plus eight, it fought almost continually across France, Belgium, and Germany until war’s end.

            Afterwards, most units began annual reunions. By the time Brenda had decided to attend one, she could boast of being a minor historian of the 79th, partly from study and partly from the stories her dad told over the course of more than 50 years.

Thus resolved, she left her husband to look after things at home and her mom to look after her dad. She explained to him as best she could what she was doing. That proved difficult. He was no longer the strapping twenty-one year old that had landed in France in 1944, nor was he the lively story teller who graced every table with a tale or two, or three. He wasn’t even the gentle father who, after the war was over, came home, married, doted on his daughter, and refused ever to fire a gun again.

This time he just looked and nodded as she explained where she was going. Whether he understood or not lingers as a mystery of the cruelest type.

            A plane ride and taxi fare later, she checked into the convention hotel. She didn’t stay in her room long. Instead, she headed for the main lobby and began asking questions. She had things to do.

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.

            They have become friends, O’Neil, his wife Dorothy, and Brenda. They exchange news regularly by both regular and e-mail. And they see one another at the reunions.

The next time von Tungeln attended a reunion, she took her mother, Hazel Welch Cole. 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 ring a bell for each of the men of the 313^th who died during the preceding year. The wives of the 313^th watch it through their own dimming eyes. Some men won’t receive the honor, though. Each reunion threatens to be the last, although some of the children and grandchildren are maintaining the tradition. The brave men who crossed the Rhine and stormed the Fatherland are too old to make the trip anymore. Like Brenda von Tungeln’s dad, all that will be left soon are the memories.

            When asked what she remembers most about him, she gives an odd answer.

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

The last photograph taken of Julius Cole shows him leaning against a fence at his farm looking out over his pasture. No one will ever know what he was thinking, if anything, through the pitiless fog of Alzheimer’s. In the summer of 2000, they rang the bell for him at the 313^th 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 79^th, his Purple Heart, and his Combat Infantry Badge—so cherished by those who have earned it. He would have liked that.

During his final days, along with her mother, she hardly left his bedside, often rubbing his hands the way she used to rub his feet. Sometimes they would have to help restrain him when he would choose to “not go gently.” Sometimes they had to help clean up the messy side of advanced dementia. Above all, though, they had to watch this good man waste away. Unpleasant? Maybe, but they feel no regret.

That’s simply what the women of the 313^th do.

Hazel and Jim O'Neil with the flag
Julius signed in 1944.

Postscript: The Army disbanded the 79th Division when Germany surrendered. They transferred Julius to the First Infantry Division, The Big Red One. Had events forced the invasion of Japan, anyone who has studied World War II knows what unit would have constituted the first wave and this story would likely never had been written.