From USA Today:
“On Battle of the Bulge's 75th
anniversary, WWII vets return to celebrate — and pay tribute”
It wasn’t the thunderous booms of
shelling or the acrid smell of smoke that filled the air on Saturday. It was
the click of horses’ hooves on paved roads in a celebratory parade. The smell
of churros coming from the Christmas Market on Rue Joseph-Renquin, the main
stretch in downtown. And, it was bursts of fireworks — harmless
pink slivers in the night sky. Thousands from around the world descended on
Bastogne, a town of almost 50,000, to celebrate the country’s liberation. Monday
marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, a bloody altercation
with Hitler's Nazi war machine that began Dec. 16, 1944, and stretched into
late January 1945. It was the last major German offensive campaign on the
Western Front, but it was a costly one: An estimated 19,000 American soldiers
died during the five-week battle. The weekend's scenes were a distant cry from
the snow-covered conflict that erupted in the Ardennes Forest three-quarters of
a century of ago as Germans, supported by powerful tanks and armored carriers,
raced to stretch the advancing Allied front lines. A "bulge" was
created in the American lines — but the units held and repelled the Nazi counter-attack. Within
weeks, the Allies finished their sprint across Europe and took the fight to
Hitler's backyard. John Pildner Sr. salutes the school children of the
Noeville, Belgium Public School during a visit as part of the 75th Anniversary
of the Battle of the Bulge. From left to right are, Frank Riesinger, George
Merz, of Louisville, Vietnam veteran. Dec. 13, 2019 This weekend, each glass storefront in the
quaint downtown row was painted with a scene of the war: Pictures of tanks, gun
barrels and kissing sailors all looked out on streets full of reenactors
dressed as American soldiers and Belgians waving paper American flags. Before crowds gathered downtown to see a
parade of veterans and active U.S. and Belgian military, a delegation led by
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hosted veterans for a meal at Le Jardin
des Anémones outside town. There, she
presented Louisville, Kentucky, veteran George Merz, 94, and others with
commemorative coins to mark the occasion.
Pelosi later joined Belgian and
U.S. dignitaries atop a second-story balcony along Rue Joseph-Renquin and threw
English walnuts – three to a pack – to a frantic crowd reaching into the air,
at one point to the tune of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)."
The nuts-throwing ceremony carried on
the legacy of U.S. Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe. He is famous for his
one-word reply of, "Nuts!" to a German commander who demanded the
Americans surrender Bastogne, an essential piece of geography that kept Nazi
forces from taking Antwerp and fueling their powerful Panzer tanks. Frank
Riesinger, 93, an Army Air Corps retired corporal from Tulsa, Oklahoma, said
McAulliffe’s "Nuts!" sent a simple message to the Germans:
"Basically, go to hell.” Each year, when the nuts are thrown into the
streets of downtown Bastogne, it’s a way of “carrying out McAuliffe’s answer to
the Germans,” Riesinger said. Riesinger, who trained to become a navigator for
B29 bombers, attended the Nuts Weekend in Belgium as part of the Liberty Jump
Team, a group that funds and escorts veterans back to their battlefields. Riesinger
never made it to Belgium but had been itching to get to Europe back then. “Everybody
wanted to be in the fight," he said. "But I missed out.” The war ended before he was deployed. When
the war ended, Riesinger celebrated in Tulsa. He remembered the ticker tape
came down from the sky like snow. "People started screaming," he
said. "Horns started honking.”
It’s a day he’s never
forgotten.
Bastogne, though not his
battlefield, has a special place in his heart. Repeatedly over the weekend,
Riesinger said, “I don’t deserve to be here.” He attended to honor the ones who
fought, the ones who died and those who survived. He’s collected newspaper
headlines from Tulsa for all but 22 days of the war. He’s studied every inch of
the stories on the Bulge, read the lists of casualties again and again. He’s
looked at pictures of Bastogne’s devastation during the German siege, how the
brightly lit cafes and shops were blackened by shelling and missing the top
halves. Today, it's rebuilt and
thriving. “I’m so thrilled,"
Riesinger said. "I’m so proud of what they did here.” Like Merz, he sees his visit as a way to pay
homage to what is and remind himself what would be if the Americans had not held
the town: “We’d all be speaking German,” he said. Merz,
who was stationed in the main square of town (now Place Général Mc Auliffe) as
an MP in the 818th Military Police Company during the siege, for which he was
awarded a Bronze Star, said his return to the battlefield was special. “I feel
like I’m a part of these people,” he said. “I feel like I’ve come home.” Throughout
the day of the parade, though, the waving children couldn’t shake his thoughts
of war. Saturday, Merz said his mind
kept wandering back to all the men who died in combat, of seeing soldiers’
bodies pulled from the cold ground and stretched out to be placed in mattress
bags before burial. “It makes me feel
proud that I was there and very, very proud of what I did,” Merz said. “I was
not one that pulled the trigger to shoot the Germans, but I was there on the
intersection to get the traffic in to do their job, what they did well. "They
were the ones that did it. They are the ones that are still laying over (here).
A lot of them. And I really feel that I’m honoring them as well when I go in
there to represent the American solider. And I just appreciate the fact that I
had that opportunity to do it.” He told a crowd gathered Sunday at the
Bastogne War Museum that his hope is the world would never see another global
conflict like World War II and never again use nuclear bombs. "This is the
human race," he said. "And we need to take care of what we have. ...
Let's never again have the same situation we had back then. "And if we
ever do, we need to stick together as a whole unit."
^ This is an important
anniversary of the largest and bloodiest single battle that the US fought
during World War 2 and the third deadliest campaign in American History. My Grandfather
also fought at the Battle of the Bulge. ^
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