He is a war hero.
Posted on 07/04/2003 8:49:14 AM PDT by knighthawk
What Harry Wilkinson remembers most about World War II is the cold. More than half a century later, his feet still hurt sometimes because they were so badly frostbitten during the Battle of the Bulge.
"The cold was terrible because there was no place to go to get out of it," says Wilkinson, 78, a retired watchmaker from Chicago who now lives in Oak Forest. "Whenever you found a place to sleep at night in a sleeping bag, it was usually outside because, if I went into a building, they were going to blow it apart. I was in General [George] Patton's 3rd Army. We were just south of Bastogne when Patton did a 180-degree turn and drove back to liberate Bastogne."
Wilkinson agreed to talk about his war memories somewhat reluctantly--"I was no war hero," he said--in hopes it might encourage other men and women to record their war memories for the Veterans History Project, recently established by the Library of Congress. Veterans of all 20th century wars are invited to contribute their memories to the Veterans History Project. Chicago area veterans who want to participate--and volunteers who want to help--can find out how by calling the Chicago Historical Society's Veterans Project line at (312) 799-2006, going online to the Library of Congress' Web site at www.loc.gov/vets or calling the Library of Congress toll-free at (888) 371-5848.
When Patton's troops got to the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg in December 1944, Wilkinson recalled, "it was cold and snowy and wet. We didn't have anything like overshoes at that time, just combat boots--shoes with a piece that went around the ankle.
"The feet were always wet and cold. And it was a severe winter, the winter of 1944-45. That put a lot of people in the hospital."
Wilkinson recalled often being out ahead of the front lines, stringing telephone wires and relaying back to artillery units the coordinates given him by a spotter, an officer with binoculars who would seek out German positions to be targeted. Many times, he said, the wires would be damaged or cut, and he'd have to go back out, ahead of the artillery positions, to repair them.
"A lot of times, we were under fire doing that," he said. "I thought sometimes they actually cut our lines to put us in a spot where they could let us have it."
Wilkinson originally lied his way into the Army, signing up with a bunch of buddies when he was 17 but swearing he was 18.
When he was sent to Fort Lewis, Wash., for advanced machinegun training, he was afraid he'd be shipped to the Pacific--afraid because he was terrified of snakes. It was a relief when he was sent east and put on an unescorted British troop ship zigzagging its way across the Atlantic, counting on its superior speed to outrun German submarines.
He landed at Glasgow, Scotland, went to Southampton, England, and jumped off for France. He landed on the beaches of Normandy, though it was days after D-Day, and troops already were up and over the cliffs and fighting a few miles inland.
After Bastogne, Wilkinson's frostbitten feet didn't prevent him from slogging eastward across Germany in 1945. He was still with the 3rd Army when it began liberating the first of several concentration camps. He doesn't remember the name of the camp his particular unit liberated, but he remembers the horror of the countless dead bodies and the skeletal survivors. To this day, he cannot bring himself to talk about it.
When the war in Europe ended May 8, he had just been shipped back to a hospital in England for treatment of a leg wound and his bad feet. Three days later, he was on a hospital ship headed for home.
He took a test and got his belated high school diploma, trained as a watchmaker and married Geraldine McFarland from the Back of the Yards neighborhood. They had six children, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
This reminds me of a famous speech by Patton about one of his guys stringing up wire while being fired at.
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