Nows and Forevers

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-the-bulge

Today is the 78th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which was the last time the German army attacked the Allied armies that had marched across France and Belgium resolutely following the invasion of Normandy on June 6.
It’s always been a day that I have marked, ever since I learned when I was eight years old that my paternal grandfather, Edward, had been there.
Oh, had he been there.
The Battle of the Bulge is important in history because it is seen as the last gasp of the German Army, a furious surprise attack in snow that targeted the American Army most of all. It was the bloodiest battle of World War II for the American Army and it trapped American soldiers in harsh conditions until the German offensive was halted Christmas Eve and then reversed later that month and into January.
There were 19,000 American soliders killed and another 70,000 wounded. But it led, to the collapse of Nazi Germany several months later.
My grandfather wasn’t a casualty and it’s hard to pinpoint just what he was doing. He and my grandmother, who passed three decades ago, were the only two people who really remembered. Nothing of his time at the Bulge survives, and I’ve looked.
But I do know a lot about the rest of his time in Europe, and his combat career, thanks to his almost daily letters home to my grandmother and then an unpublished manuscript. He landed in France a day after D-Day, an Army officer who had been training for months in England like hundreds of thousands of others for the invasion. He wasn’t a straight infantry soldier but he was often on the front lines, and danger and potential death loomed right around the corner just the same. He was a citizen soldier, to use Stephen Ambrose’s apt term.
Grandpa was a kid from Newton, Massachusetts, who grew up poor and put himself through Boston College through boxing and as a Massachusetts National Guard officer. He had been a journalist and then a social worker. He followed the news and was, in my grandmother’s words years later, concerned about the rise of totalitarianism and the Nazis. When Pearl Harbor happened, even though he had two young children at home and was going to graduate school at Harvard University in addition to his full-time job, he volunteered and got his commission back in the U.S. Army.
He spoke French and German, he was good with people, studious and a crack shot. He was a bookish kid, the son of Irish immigrants, who had willed himself into being a soldier long before the U.S. had joined the war. But reading his letters home, you get the feeling that while he would rather have been home, he understood the moment and he understood that he needed to be where he was.
He served across France and Belgium, with service so harrowing that I’m surprised he made it out alive. He was wounded in action that fall, but returned to service. And he was serving with the Army when the Germans attacked on a snowy Dec. 16.
He didn’t talk about it much. To my dad’s generation, World War II was history and what his father and so many others did was so long ago. Besides, this was the Baby Boom generation that both fought the Vietnam War and pushed back against it. My father has told me with regret that he didn’t talk much about his time in Europe, other than that it was meaningful and he was proud.
When I came of age, in the mid-1970s, he had only a year or two left to live. I was lucky enough to have two grandfathers who had been in WWII as well as two uncles. My maternal grandfather had been a B-24 and B-29 command pilot in World War II and had flown after the war. His experiences were markedly different from my other grandfather’s.
I had learned about World War II and was excited to my grandfather about it. We went to their house on the South Shore of Massachusetts, close enough to the ocean that you could often hear the waves. He was 65 years old then, just retired, the father of three and the grandfather of four, and had been married to my grandmother for 40 years or so. He moved slower, he was frail, and I didn’t know it but he knew he didn’t have long to live. These were the last few days he would end up spending in the vacation house that he had designed and built himself, and that even now remains in the family.
I asked him, as only an enthusiastic 8-year-old could do: What did you do in the war, Grandpa?
My father’s parents were reserved. My mother’s family was nurturing, lively, happy. My father’s side of the family, Irish immigrants all up from poverty and focused, were different. I didn’t talk about my feelings with them. They wanted to know how I was doing in school, what my other interests were, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I don’t really recall having much fun with them, and while I spent time with them, it wasn’t as easy or as comfortable as with my mother’s family.
But I could see in my grandfather’s eyes that I had touched a nerve. Even now, nearly 50 years later, I could see a softening and maybe even a few tears forming. It was just him and me, on the cement steps of the beach house. He sighed and told me that while what he and his generation did in World War II helped save the world, it wasn’t fun and it wasn’t pretty and it was in many ways really bad. I didn’t quite understand. I was looking, at 8, at the airplanes and the tanks and all the things that boys see when they think of war, the only things (hopefully) that they ever do see.
My grandfather knew that I was too young to understand, and he didn’t want me to feel bad. (I was prone to nightmares then and for a long time afterward.) But he told me that he wanted me to remember one thing: War, even if it was necessary (and he believed World War II was necessary), was not something to glorify and was something to do everything to avoid.
And I haven’t forgotten that moment or the lesson. It was the last time I ever saw him. He died, of colon cancer, not too long afterward.