Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne - complete book

Dedication and Author's Foreword

Return to La Roche-en-Ardenne

By Philip Sherman Mygatt

Manasota Beach Press

Copyright 2013

Copyright © 2013 Philip Sherman Mygatt

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of an author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Author’s Foreword

The idea for this story happened quite by accident when a dear friend of mine mentioned that when she went through her mother’s personal items after her funeral, she had found two bundles of letters her mother and father had written to each other during WWII while he was in the Army.

Having a keen interest in that period, and having read many books about the war, I asked her about her father’s experiences as he fought in Europe. She said he never wanted to say much about what he experienced, but he had told her some stories, some of which I’ll share with you.

Later that week I visited my father-in-law at the Douglas T. Jacobson Veterans Home in Port Charlotte, Florida. In 1944, he had been a proud Marine and he was now mostly confined to his bed suffering from advanced Parkinson’s Disease. As I walked down the hallway towards his room, I stopped and looked at the many pictures of the home’s residents lining the walls; mostly pictures of young men in their uniforms, pictures of their ships, their airplanes, medals, unit citations and other memorabilia; a veritable WWII museum.

When I walked into his unit, it was sad to see those same men now sitting in wheelchairs, mostly in their mid-eighties and early nineties, and I realized every one of them had a story to tell. That’s when I decided I wanted to write this book and tell their stories for them before they passed away like my father-in-law did in late October, 2012.

While I was doing research for the book, I discovered the 745th Tank Battalion, and I was surprised that after the war’s end, one of their members had written his memoirs chronicling the Battalion’s history from its formation up until long after the war had ended. Looking at the many photographs of the young men standing proudly in front of their Sherman tanks with names like Worthing, Fields, Rotondi, Baker, Blunt, Gass, Perez, Davis, Dippery, Espinosa, Crudell, Malphurs and Beauchamp, I wondered how many of them were now sitting in wheelchairs in a nursing home wearing baseball caps proudly displaying their branch of service.

What did they come home to after the war had ended? What did their wives and families do while they were away at war? Whenever I visited my father-in-law, I made sure to take the time to talk to the veterans and ask them about their war service. It was an honor to listen to their stories and meet their spouses who were often eager to talk about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. We often forget that the war was largely fought by young men, often teenagers, and I wanted to make those old men young and whole again. That’s when I decided to write a book where they could all be young again, and will remain forever young, albeit only between the pages of this book.

Philip Sherman Mygatt, Englewood FL, Memorial Day, 2013

Dedication

 I am dedicating this book to all those brave men and women who are serving and have served their country as members of the Armed Forces. We owe our freedom, prosperity, and future to their service and their sacrifices. I would like to single out, in particular, the 745thTank Battalion whose service during WWII was a remarkable one that reads like a history of the entire European campaign. They were a part of the 1st Infantry Division, “The Big Red One” and supported the ground troops.

The 745thsaw action on D-Day, the St. Lo breakthrough as they pursued the fleeing, but still powerful German army across France and into Belgium, the Falaise Pocket where hundreds of thousands of German troops were trapped, the critical Battle of Mons, the breakthrough of the Siegfried Line (Germany’s first line of The Fatherland’s defenses), the capture of Aachen (the westernmost city in Germany and the first German city captured by the Allies), the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, the march to the Rhine River, the miracle at the Remagen Bridge, the Ruhr Pocket, the Harz Pocket, Czechoslovakia and countless other brief, but deadly skirmishes too numerous to mention, and then finally serving occupation duty in the ancient, storied town of Rothenburg on the Tauber.

Although theirs is a remarkable story, it couldn’t be much different from hundreds of thousands of other stories relived at post-war reunions in the safety of grand ballrooms and fancy bars, totally unlike the bars they had frequented during Basic Training.

I’m grateful to Will Johnston, the son of one of the many 745thheroes, Olin Garner Johnston, for allowing me to include his father’s personal account of the 745thTank Battalion as seen through his eyes, including many black-and-white photographs taken during many of the actions mentioned above. It’s a remarkable history of a remarkable tank unit, and it’s included, in its entirety, at the end of this book. Although Bill Bowers and his team members are fictional, they are meant to symbolize the servicemen and women who left loved ones behind to sail off to unknown places and into mortal danger. Although this book is about one soldier and the young wife he left behind, you need to remember he is only one of countless Bill Bowers, each one with their own story. I wish I could tell each of their stories, but I can’t. Therefore, Bill Bowers’ story is their story, our story, a tale of sacrifice and unselfishness in order to protect our hard-won freedoms.

It certainly struck home as I typed all eighty names on the Battalion’s casualty list and realized these men, too, had left their homes and their loved ones behind. They left full of hope and energy, and now they all lie somewhere in Europe among those rows of white crosses. Sometimes we casually take for granted the freedoms that we enjoy at the expense of forgetting the soldiers who paid for them with their blood; the blood of the eighty men of the 745thTank Battalion who never came home to their loved ones.