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Andy
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| Andy was a little older than the rest of us. He was our first platoon leader. He came from Detroit and had been married to Miriam 15 years. Miriam had sent Andy a scarf she had knitted herself, and when Andy wore his scarf in those bitter cold days and Ardennes nights he looked like Uncle Wiggley, the big rabbit from our nursery rhyme days. |
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| Andy would never have been another Audie Murphy, but he had a sharp eye for a buddy who had a long face and obviously was troubled, and many time Andy said to me, “Something’s bothering you Joseph. After chow let’s you and I got back to the barracks and have a little talk. What do you say?” |
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| We’d begun a dismounted attack before down in the freezing cold in Luxembourg in conjunction with elements of the 4th Infantry Division. Later the sun came up and it was a gloriously sunny day, but deadly because German mortar men found our range and started to make big holes in our combat teams. But we weathered the firestorm and later in the afternoon when the sun was beginning to sink low in the winter sky, we followed our tanks into a wooded section, and for some reason we felt safe. Is it because we were Americans and Americans think when its Christmas nothing very bad is going to happen? |
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| The Germans let us enter that wood and then they clobbered us, and in less than an hour we had lost a lot of men through death and wounds. Later things quieted down and we found German foxholes to climb into. The night turned bitter cold but there was a great big full moon up there. |
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| Joe Stefanisko, a boy from Pennsylvania, came to the foxhole I was sharing with Henry Capistrant from Holyoke, Massachusetts. Joe squatted down at the lip of our foxhole. “Andy got it,” he said in a low voice. “Little piece of metal from a tree burst came down, it went through Andy’s helmet and helmet liner and his cloth cap. I don’t think Andy ever knew what happened. When we found him we thought he’d dropped off to sleep.” |
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| In some ways, men in an armored division had it easier than regular infantry. For one thing, we trained two full years stateside before we left for overseas. Tenth Armored became a division in the summer of 1942, and the bulk of us enlisted men had reached Sand Hill at Fort Benning by Thanksgiving Day. And we didn’t pull out of Camp Gordon for port of embarkation until early September 1944. But to get back to Andy Klein of Detroit. Andy’s death hit us hard, and Joe Stefanisko said when our second platoon commander heard Andy got it, he broke down and cried like a baby. |
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| How many of you guys were in Luxembourg on Christmas Day, 1944? It was a beautiful day. Around noon they brought in the mail and I remember to this day how surprised I was, because some of my letters had been written only a couple of weeks back, while others were dated way back in September. |
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| A herd of deer ran through our positions. The sun went down and it got frosty-cold and word went around elements of the 5th Infantry Division would take over our positions. |
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| These 5th Division guys were real veterans. They’d been in the fight since early September and us 10th Armored Division guys had seen the first action at Metz about the 8th November. The 5th Division came into the forest and took over our positions and they worked quietly and efficiently, and when they were done we filed out of that forest in single file. We came onto a little road and followed it for miles under a great big gorgeous moon that threw gigantic shadows across the snowy landscape. Somebody said we were going to Christmas dinner. |
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| Maybe it was a sort of intuition. Something told me we were finished with the Battle of the Bulge, and you know what? We ate our Christmas dinner at 3:00 on the morning of December 26, 1944 and then we got some sleep where we could hear the sharp crack-crack of an artillery duel. Later, as it came daylight, we stood by our armored vehicles and at a hot chow, and then we mounted up. We passed another armored division going in the opposite direction, and years later, in all the reading I did I learned it was the 6th Armored Division who’d had Christmas dinner down in Metz, France, mounted up and were headed for Bastogne. |
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| Source: Bulge Bugle, May 1995 |
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| Cpl Joseph W. BULKELEY |
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61st Armored Infantry Battalion
10th Armored Division
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Campaign
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Battle of the Bulge,
Belgium
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