About Those neo-Nazi Salutes

One of the more rankling things about our current political situation is the Heil Hitler salutes that Bannon and Musk and their ilk like to toss off; surely the intent is both to signal solidarity with their neo-Nazi brethren and, of course, to pique the rest of us. For anyone who knows anything about our history, it's so plainly un-American.

Today is my father’s 104th birthday. He died before this new wave of fascist sympathizers arrived, but I’m pretty sure he would have been appalled at their unconscionable behavior. On his 23rd birthday, Daddy was up to his ass in snow and mud firing mortar rounds at Nazi’s in the Saar Valley, having spent the past three months in a ruined Alsace-Lorraine doing exactly that every day. Here’s how I described it in my book World War II Mortarman about his path through the war:

Lyn celebrated his 23rd birthday in a muddy foxhole in a cold rain, having assisted the 63rd Division in clearing the towns of Kleinbittersdorf, Auersmacher, Bubingen, and the northern edge of the Hinterwald Woods over the previous two weeks. Some days it seemed that the Germans were retreating, their forces growing weaker; other days they fought back as fiercely as ever. Their artillery shells exploded all about, mined roads blew up tanks, machine guns mowed down American G.I.’s as they ventured forward across open fields, and snipers lurked in steeples of conquered towns, just as they had all winterlong. The task now was to clear the Nazi’s out of France, pushing them back across the Rhine River into Germany. The task for the Germans, who could no longer resist that relentless shove all along their border, was to kill as many Allied soldiers as they could along the way.

 Allow me to pause for a minute here. Daddy, as noted, turned 23 on the battlefield. From here on out, everything in this book happened to a 23-year old. Keep that in mind as you read, perhaps reflecting on your own experience at that age. And remember, he married in the last weeks of his teens, turned 21 in the Texas border country learning how to fire an anti-aircraft cannon, celebrated his 22nd birthday with U-rations cooked over a tin can stove in North Africa, and by his 23rd birthday in an icy trench in France had not seen home in nearly three years.

As testimony to the heavy level of fighting in February, the 99th Chemical Mortar Battalion online narrative lists 9,224 rounds of HE and 13,423 rounds of WP fired, during a month in which the battalion won a Battlefield Unit Citation and the French Croix de Guerre for its key role in breaking the Colmar Pocket, then proceeded without delay to fight entrenched German forces along the Maginot Line. In that short, brutal month, the mortar battalion lost 19 wounded and one killed, while the Seventh Army to which they were attached suffered 7,168 battle and 16,224 nonbattle casualties. The French counted 4,316 battle and 36,540 nonbattle casual­ties in Alsace, and the German Nineteenth Army listed its losses at 22,000 men killed, wounded, or captured.

My father’s mortar battalion would fight on into Germany and end their war liberating a concentration camp and helping to process the many thousands of refugees cut loose by it all. He saw then most clearly what he’d been fighting for, and understood the sheer depravity of what a Nazi state had done. I recall all this every time one of these latter day arrogant fools oh so snarkily raises his arm in a Heil Hitler salute. And hope I’ll be brave enough to take up arms against them, as my father did, if need be.