Veterans Day

During World War II, I was in the 555th Anti-Aircraft Battalion. We trained in Texas and saw 195 days of combat in Europe. I was a sergeant and it was my duty to maintain the fire control systems for the guns. There was another sergeant whose name was Harold Welch. His job was to maintain the mechanical parts of the anti-aircraft guns.

Little did I realize that after the war, Harold Welch would marry and have a daughter named Laura. Laura would eventually marry a guy by the name of George Bush, who would eventually become the president of the United States.

On Veterans Day 2006, Laura Bush invited all of the survivors of the 555th to a breakfast at the White House. Her invitation included wives and children. There were 40 veterans who attended. I was there along with my wife, LaVerne, and our six children. We had our picture taken with the president and first lady.

During the war, our battalion was involved in the Battle of the Bulge. This was the most stressful period of our entire combat. The sky was overcast and the temperatures were in the 20s with lots of snow. We had no way to stay warm, and there was always threat of an enemy nearby. On Christmas Day, the skies cleared. It was beautiful and snow covered all of the debris of war. Suddenly the air was full of planes – mostly our planes. Bombers were headed to Germany and there were bombers coming back from Germany. There were also low flying fighter planes attacking ground targets.

I was standing next to one of our guns when we saw two planes coming at us. Even though we saw that they were P-51’s, they started firing at us as though we were the enemy. The gun next to me returned fire and shot both of them down. One of the pilots survived. I will point out that there were cases where Germans were using captured U.S. equipment so it was natural to assume that these might have been Germans using our planes. We caught hell for this incident, which led to a write up in Time magazine. The name of the fellow who did the shooting was Lester Brown.

We had dinner in the hotel the evening after our visit to the White House. I happened to sit next to one of the vets. I did not recognize him. We introduced ourselves. His name was Lester Brown. We had an emotional recollection of the events on Christmas Day 1944. A few weeks ago, Lester Brown was killed in an auto accident in St. Louis, MO.