Memorial Day, 2022

From the memoirs of Robert Sage

    

Robert and Anne Sage, 1943

My father spent 180 days in combat in Europe in 1944 and 1945. He credits his survival to his assignment as a messenger. His job was to get the message through. That meant he needed to stay alive. He survived tank fire, rifle fire, land mines, piano wire across a road, and the weather. After the war he came back to Medford with his new wife. He finished college. He was a teacher, then principal. He lived to be 92 1/2. They were all good years for him.

He finished writing his memoirs in 2008, at age 88.

From Part Three, The War Years: "Closing the Bulge."

     "Take this message to Col. Bodner, Sage. They can't contact him on the radio. He's with the rifle companies," Sgt. Sullivan said.

    "Any idea in which direction that would be?"

     "Hell no. That's your job," was Sullivan's answer.

     I headed north on a snow-covered road. I came to a river. Abutments were there, but the bridge was gone. I got out of my jeep and walked to the river's edge. It was frozen over. A jeep with a lieutenant and a driver pulled up beside me. They were from my regiment. I asked, "Do you know where the rifle companies are?"

     "Can't be this way. We'll try another route," the lieutenant said. The driver of the jeep was now out on the ice. It sloped to the middle of the river. He slipped, then started sliding. Then, breaking through the ice he went up to his neck into the water. Using our jackets for rope we were able to reach him, then pull him out. The temperature outside was barely above freezing. We stripped off all his clothing. I was now wearing three suits of wool long johns. I took off two of them and put them on him. The lieutenant had a sleeping bag. The driver would be OK.

     The lieutenant, now driving the jeep, yelled back "Now follow me," and we drove through woods that had many sharp curves. Two soldiers from the Second Battalion were putting up a bridge. "You can be the first to cross," they said. Easy and Fox Companies are up the road."

     I crossed and continued up a narrow snow-covered road. After a mile I heard someone yelling at me. I stopped. Then I realized there were foxholes on both sides of the road with riflemen in them. I heard one say, "Now I've seen everything. A jeep driving down the front line! How dumb can they get?"

     I started backing up. When I came to a place to turn off, I did. It was the square of a small town. The snow had been removed and the pavement showed land mines placed here and there on it. It looked like a load of waffle irons had been dropped off a truck. I stopped moving.. The mines were plainly visible but there could be wires between them.

     I carefully walked to a nearby house. There was a boy there. He said, "I speak English." I asked if he saw a man with a radio. I knew the colonel would have a jeep and a radio man with him. The boy seemed to understand a single word, "radio." When he heard that word, he said, "Ya. Ya. Come."

     We went to another building and we opened a door. There was a machine gun set up and a U.S, radio, just like the one a radioman accompanying a colonel would have. I found the colonel in another room. I gave him the message and asked, "Do you have a message for me to take back, sir?"

     "I want you to stay here tonight," he said. 

     I told him about the soldier falling through the ice and my having given him most of my clothes. He didn't comment, although I was now visibly shivering from the cold. There was a stove in the room, but no fuel. I was wondering if I could stand it through the night when the colonel said to the radioman, "I have a GI sleeping bag in the jeep. Go get it."

     "Thank God. Now I can have at least a bit of warmth," I thought to myself, as the colonel took the bag from the radio man. What was he doing? He was already fully dressed, dry and out of the weather, sitting inside his sleeping bag, leaning back in a rocking chair. He took the bag and wrapped it around his feet.

     And I had stood up for the guy when Sgt. Curry had said, "I sure admire Colonel Bodner. He was a chickenshit son of a bitch back in the States and he has the guts to be the same way here." Sgt. Curry knew him well. Chickenshit son of a bitch.

     The door flung open. In came a sergeant from E Company accompanied by two English noncoms. They reported that our units had come together. The Bulge had closed.

     I took a flashlight and found some boards I could pull off a building to make a fire in the stove. It got hot enough to heat my aluminum cup of water to lukewarm. I also shaved, since our general might be coming up and I had read his recent order to company commanders. It read, "The General repeatedly has expressed his desire that such soldiers as Sergeant Sewell who are not clean shaven should be reduced to the grade of Private and placed in a rifle company as a rifleman." This would be almost certain death--for not shaving. Pretty harsh penalty,

     The radio operator and I took shifts staying awake. Morning finally came and we drove to an area where our front lines had been. The hundred or so men there fell into a formation. The colonel gave some congratulatory remarks, after which he gave the command, "Dismissed!"

     He turned to me and said, "You may return to headquarters." I gave him a snappy salute, wondering why it was that I somehow had to admire the balls of a guy willing to be so unapologetically a chickenshit son of a bitch, even over here.