Veterans' Day 2014

My consistency at blogging has been terrible.  I admit it.  Things that need my attention get in the way and by the time it’s over I don’t really feel like blogging. 

It might be the introvert in me.  Oh, I can play the extrovert, but I’m one of those who has learned certain skills in the last 20 years that have helped me be more sociable and less the guy standing with his back to the corner of the room praying for the shindig to end.

But today isn’t about me.  It makes it easier.

I want to tell you about David Collinsworth.

When he was drafted in June of 1944 the Second World War was at its height.  The Western Allies were landing in Normandy and liberated Rome.  Soviet forces had ended the 900-day siege of Leningrad just months earlier and had nearly pushed Nazi forces out of Soviet territories. The Imperial Japanese forces had been dislodged from numerous island strongholds in the Pacific and the fight for Saipan was just getting underway.

The tide of the war had turned but the end had not yet arrived.

He left behind his family on their large cotton farm in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana.  After receiving the most-basic of instruction at Camp Robinson, Arkansas, and completing training maneuvers somewhere in the U.S., David sailed from Norfolk, Virginia to Marseilles, France on January 1, 1945 arriving January 7^th.  As a replacement, he was shuffled through replacement depots, moving steadily forward until he was assigned to Easy Company, 2^nd Battalion, 15^th Infantry Regiment of the 3^rd U.S. Infantry Division on January 17, 1945. 

At that time, the 3^rd ID had been pulled off the line to rest and refit in advance of Operation: Grandslam, the American attack on the northern shoulder of the Colmar Pocket.

Now, you’ve heard of the Battle of the Bulge and how cold it was with all that heavy snow and the misery of the guys who fought through it.  The Colmar Pocket was a mini-Bulge in Alsace-Loarraine (southeastern France) that stuck out from the Rhine River.  The American Seventh Army (of which the 3^rd ID was a part) was tasked with driving east around and behind the large historic city of Colmar to the Rhine River and meet up with the advancing Free French forces from the south and capture as much of the German XIX Army as possible. 

Beginning January 22, that’s what started.  At first Easy Company was in reserve during some of the more intense actions to pierce German lines.  But when they did advance, David’s first sight was a gruesome one.  American GI’s taken prisoner by a Waffen-SS unit operating with the XIX Army were shot execution style while tied to trees in the woods north of Reidwihr. 

The weather was miserable as well.  Audie Murphy, who was in command of Baker Company, 15^th at this time, described in his autobiography To Hell and Back how his hair froze to the side of a shellhole overnight after his helmet slipped.  When he sat up, it ripped a chunk of his hair out by the roots.  Temperatures were consistently dropping into the single digits or below during the day as the American forces pushed east and turned south behind Colmar.

On January 25, Easy Company, in rubber boats, crossed the Colmar Canal and seized a bridgehead on the other side to allow 1^st Battalion to pass through and “push the ball” forward. 

But for David, the war ended on the night of January 30 – February 1, 1945.  Second Battalion, 15^th Infantry (now suffering attrition losses due to frostbite, trench foot, and combat casualties) number barely over 200 effectives.  This skeleton battalion – Easy, Fox, George and How Companies – was tasked with seizing the bridge over the Rhine-Rhone Canal due east of  Durrenentzen.   To get there, the Dogfaces of 2^nd Battalion – David still among them – pushed through the local forest until they came right up on the canal. 

It was heavily defended by emplaced German machineguns and panzers. 

The best way to capture a bridge is at both ends and that’s what the battalion commander decided to do. 

Easy Company was tasked with crossing the Rhine-Rhone Canal under fire and seize the far end.  David, and the handful of men he was with, descended into the icy waters of the canal.  He would later say that all he remembered was getting and getting out.  He couldn’t recall anything in between. 

It must’ve been terrifying.  Twenty-two  years old, weighed down by nearly 60 pounds of gear and a 10 pound rifle, David Collinsworth swam the fifty or so feet of the Rhine-Rhone Canal to the other side.  He climbed out alive, not caring that he was soaking west from water that was near freezing in temperature. 

With his platoon and squad mates, David seized the far end of the bridge...

Machinegun rounds from a German MG ripped through him.  A grenade went off near him.  Somehow, in the confusion, he found himself in the path of a German Tiger Tank.  I don’t know who got him to safety, but I figure someone did. 

As David lay bleeding from multiple wounds, the battle raged on until American artillery, armor, and air support drove the Germans back. 

He was rushed to an aid station where he nearly died.  In a field hospital the majority of the German shrapnel was removed from his body.  He would be in military hosptial until July, 1945 when he was released from the hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

He was alive, though.  But part of him died on those snowy fields around Colmar.

For the next fifty years he would be plagued by memories and dreams; waking up screaming in the middle of the night as he tried to claw his way up a wall until he was awakened to the safety of his bedroom.  He spoke about the war only three times.  If something came on TV about WWII, he would quietly excuse himself from the room.  You never brought it up around him. 

David died fifty years to the month after release from Ft. Sam Houston.

Hundreds of thousands of other men like David came home with part of their souls left on far away battlefields.  Hundreds of thousands more never left those battlefields.  In spite of the wounds and a lifetime of permanent impairment from them, David was one of the lucky ones. 

David Collinsworth was my grandfather.