JAMES CUNNALLY – G-Co, 411th

FINDING OUR FATHERS

August 20, 2008

Patricia Lofthouse

We came in search of our fathers, my sister and I. Technically, I should call Diane my half-sister, but we’ve never felt that way. My dad, James Cunnally, was the only father she ever knew. Her own was killed in action on December 15, 1944, in the Vosges Mountains on the Climb to Climbach in France. The Germans hailed bullets from the hill above and Dennis Zaboth was hit in the leg. My father pulled him by his side and immediately sent a signal to the medics because he was the Radio Man of Company G, 2^nd Battalion, 411th. He asked them to have a blood transfusion ready, but when he looked over at his buddy from Chicago -- the one with a beautiful wife and new baby daughter waiting for him at home – he saw in his friend’s eyes a vacant stare that told him he would not be returning to them. He died in my father’s arms.

My dad had to lay his friend down and resume firing his Browning Automatic but he soon paused to throw up. He cried every night for the next six weeks.

 We knew it was their unit because we saw it inscribed on her father’s tombstone in Irving Park Cemetery in Chicago. Our mother, Lorraine, brought her late husband’s body home in 1949 when our government offered free transport of all of the GIs’ bodies. My sister even remembers the cold and rainy funeral at his gravesite although she was just 6 years old.

My father was there. He had returned from the war in 1946, stopping first at the neighborhood tavern in his uniform when he got off the bus from his release through New York and then Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. The bar owner offered him a free drink. This was the only thank you he ever received.

He had liberated a concentration camp in April. The German 19^th Army surrendered to the 103^rd Division on May 5 at Innsbruck, Austria, but my dad didn’t have enough points to leave Europe when the war ended there. He stayed to relocate Russian and German POWS. During the height of the Cold War, he casually mentioned how the Germans had warned him to be careful of the Russians – that we would be at war with them in ten years.

He had written out mother to tell her what had happened that night of December 15^th and then called on her to deliver his late friend’s personal effects. He had met her once when both soldiers were on leave from Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. He had seen her again when she visited her husband with her daughter and mother-in-law at their second camp at Camp Howze, Texas, before they were shipped from New York City to Marseilles. They had even double dated. Once my father arrived now, he never really left. Our mother felt that in some way a piece of her husband had been returned to her.

My dad served as a pallbearer and held my sister at her father’s grave. He took her home to our Italian grandmother’s house on Kildare Avenue where she and our mother lived, and read the comics to her as he held her on his lap. My sister remembers the happy sound of the rustling of the newspaper as he unfolded it and the distinct smell of the newsprint of the funny pages.

Not all of my sister’s lap memories are happy, though. Our mother learned that she had become a widow while seated at the piano while holding her. The doorbell rang and our mother hesitated a moment before lifting the two of them from the bench. When she opened the door, the Western Union messenger handed her the telegram. She cried out, but, being the woman that she was, did not scream.

From that moment on our mother did not go out socially. She continued to work while our grandmother babysat so that she could support her now all-female family, including her disabled older sister. Her in-laws became so concerned about her that they urged their own daughter to bring our mother out to the Green Mill nightclub on Broadway Avenue where their son-in-law played in a band. These same in-laws were joyful when they learned that my father was coming round.

My father’s own mother, my Norwegian grandmother, was not so thrilled. A widow with a child, she worried? She had lost my grandfather in April of 1944 and my dad as well as my uncle, who was fighting in Europe as a Ranger, were not allowed to come home for the funeral. Her oldest daughter had married and moved to Atlanta. My grandmother was left alone to raise a 12 year old son and an 18 year old daughter. My aunt was staying out late and running a bit wild; my young uncle kept running away. My grandmother had hoped that my father would become the man of her unhappy house.

A forty-year-old man named Zack Sigler had created two rooms of photographs, books and research about the 103^rd. His passion began when he found a photo of his namesake, Uncle Zack Sigler, who was killed in action on December 2, 1944, in France. The younger Zack had written to the National Archives in St. Louis to obtain his uncle’s service record, and then found links online to all of the books, newsletters and groups related to the Cactus Division. He spent four days in St. Louis searching and printing from microfiche all of the issues of the newsletters from their camps, The Camp Clarion Ledger and The Howitzer from Camp Howze, Texas.

Zack painstakingly skimmed the photocopies and as he combed through the headlines, he suddenly handed us two articles. The Howitzer mentioned my sister’s dad! Apparently he was a star basketball player and helped his team win several games. We never even knew that he played a sport. Suddenly his humanness became palpable -- a young man playing one of the great American pastimes, not knowing, thank God, that in just a few short months he would be dead.

I held the articles and my hands shook. It occurred to me that perhaps we could track down his yearbook from his high school in Chicago and learn even more about him. All we had were the letters that he wrote to our mother – letters that were about her and my sister, not about him.

We found one – ninety year old Hank Pacha from Springfield, Illinois. He remembered the liberation of Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau. As I sat with him on the bus, he told me nothing of his rank or his role in the war, so like The Greatest Generation. When I returned home I received a note from him with a letterhead that read Brigadier General Henry F. Pacha.

We also met Jerry Brenner who remembered everything. He told us of the cold on the Climb to Climbach that December 15th, the day of greatest casualities for the 103^rd. He reminded us that the Cactus Division engaged in 34 battles from November of ’44 to May of ’45, fighting 500 miles through France, Germany and Austria to the Brenner Pass in Italy. He related how they crossed into Germany on December 16^th, one day after my sister’s father was killed and advised that the name of the cemetery in France where he would have first been buried was Epinal. Mr. Brenner enlightened us that the concentration camp that my father helped to liberate on April 27, 1945, was called Kaufering, near Landsberg, Germany, and was a sub-camp of Dachau, and that the German 19^th Army surrendered to the Division on May 5, 1945, at Innsbruck, Austria.

The time came alive for us.

We began to understand why our dad, for the rest of his life, could not stomach the thought of eating Spam, because he had lived on it for almost a year.

We tasted the Cognac he drank while getting “lost” in a French wine cellar for three days during house-to-house combat.

We heard the giggles of the French girls who gladly gave our father their full attention when he showered them with Lucky Strikes, Hershey bars and the most coveted gift of all – a regulation brown wool Army blanket. The women tailored them into warm and beautiful coats.

We smelled the blood of the young German whose ear was cut off by a member of the battalion, then handed back to him with the advice, “Give that to your Feuhrer.”

We felt the rage when our father reached Hitler’s bunker and proceeded to relieve himself on it.

We saw the sadness when he approached the concentration camp where shadowy figures hid behind the doors, shivering in fear but finally emerging as walking skeletons after they heard the Yanks yell “Americans.”

Yet this man and another named Wallace Morgan of Blyth, California, who was captured, beaten, thrown down stairs, forced to forge rivers carrying German wounded and then getting frostbite, and held as a POW for over a year, came back and fit in. They got their educations on the G.I. Bill and made lives for themselves and their families. “The G.I. Bill was the best thing to happen to America,” he opined and we all agreed. How did our father’s life turn out so differently?

It was only when we met another child of a deceased veteran that we learned about those who never connected with normalcy again. A tall and thin baby boomer from Massachusetts confided to me how he had lived a privileged life as the son of a man who inherited a prosperous family lumber business. Yet he detailed how after the war his father left his mother with four boys to run off with her best friend, the Godmother of one of their children. The father stayed in touch with his sons, to have them touch hot electrical wires to “toughen” them. The deep circles under the handsome man’s eyes mirror my own, a telltale sign of his depression.

In a strange way I breathed a sigh of relief: ours was not the only father who returned unwhole to live life on the edge:

His threats of suicide when he gambled away every penny so sometimes there was no food for us to eat when the little grocery store owner down the block on Sheffield Avenue had to cut off credit to our mother;

how the neighbor upstairs offered to give our mother some oil for the kitchen stove to heat our four room apartment if she would give him herself.

his job, when he could keep one, as a policeman, a good cop who could think like a criminal to catch one.

his drinking every day -- Jim Beam with a Pabst chaser,

his smoking non-stop -- Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls, at least two packs a day;

his sadness every December 15^th, when he wondered why he had lived and my sister’s father had died;

his inability to sleep in a bed, always napping on the sofa for just a half an hour and then waking with a start, sometimes grabbing the loaded gun he kept under his pillow to protect his family. Our mother finally made him remove the bullets when she found our littlest brother waving it through the air.

“C’est la guerre,” he would repeat. That we only knew too well.

Is it no surprise then, why neither this thoughtful man from Massachusetts nor I can sleep a full night; how we wake with a start and have to maniacally work in helping professions to keep ourselves from falling into the pit of our depressions? Or why my two younger brothers often laid stoned on the sofa, with an inability to search for work or find any semblance of a normal life?

As we think of all of these survivors of WWII, we know that the numbers reported are not the real numbers. The casualties of war are tenfold because it is every family member – the wives, their children, the way their children relate to their own spouses, and even the unborn grandchildren of these veterans who experience the effects of war. We know we will never let our kids or our grandkids forget their grandfathers’ sacrifices, or their grandmother’s. Her enduring love, work and commitment throughout a very difficult life with two soldiers are perhaps the greatest example of The Greatest Generation.

Jim Cunnally & Ed Condreva