Four Ordinary Men Remember When the World Held Its Breath : World War II: Fifty years after D-day, veterans--American, German and Japanese--recall a desperate time.

In June, wildflowers invade the Illinois prairie. Rose bushes explode in red along the Rhine. In Tokyo, in an old man’s garden, plums drop from their branches, a sweet springtime barrage.

June brings memories too. Of another spring, when the world stood still, held its breath.

Of a gray morning--just yesterday?--when an untested American lieutenant splashed ashore in France to fight for a continent, and a teen-age German corporal leaped into his boots to meet him. Of a day--can it be 50 years?--when a hard young Marine called “Smiley” hit the beach on an island called Saipan, and a green young sergeant from Kyoto leveled his gun sights to stop him.

Four men’s lives, four memories intersecting on the battlefields of man’s greatest war, a struggle that left up to 60 million dead, a clash of arms that shaped today’s world.

Theirs are only four stories among hundreds of millions of people swept up in that global tide. But they can tell us much about how it was, about the evil men can do. They can tell us, too, about peace, about twists of history that make friends from enemies, make partners, allies, customers. Even future husbands for future daughters.

*

Nauvoo was where Lyle Scheetz went for a good time, a town wedged between the Mississippi mud and a green ocean of Illinois corn.

It was 1941, and farm boy “Smiley” Scheetz, 6 feet tall and all-American handsome, was a year out of high school. The Depression was still on, the Scheetzes barely scraped by, but all you needed was a dollar for a Saturday night--a tenderloin sandwich and chocolate milkshake at Rouse’s, maybe a hand of cards, and jitterbugging at the parish-hall dance.

And then, one Sunday afternoon, the music stopped. Out for a drive with Virginia, his best girl, Lyle heard it on the radio: Japanese planes had bombed Hawaii.

Like the rest of America, Lyle Scheetz was unprepared for war. But the Japanese made up everyone’s mind for them. “I felt I’d have to go.”

He rode up to Peoria in June of ’42 to enlist in the Air Corps. They didn’t like the look of his tonsils. Downhearted, Lyle stepped outside. Across the street stood another recruiting station, a big poster in the window: “Join the Marines and See the World.”

*

By spring of ‘42, the troublesome student from Kyoto prefecture was pushing his luck at Tokyo’s National School of Foreign Languages. Military training was compulsory, but Takeo Yamauchi was skipping the classes.

In Kameoka, his hometown, Takeo played soldier like the other boys. But through his teen-age years, swayed by a free-thinking older brother, he grew uneasy about Japan’s militarism and the war against China. By the time he left high school, he was “half-socialist, half-emperor worshiper.” And when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, uneasiness turned to despair. Takeo had read about U.S. industrial power. “I knew we would lose.”

And yet, after being drafted into the Imperial Army, 21-year-old Takeo Yamauchi, bespectacled, scholarly, confused, allowed himself to be whipped into shape as a disciplined soldier of the emperor.

Perhaps he was trying to please his shopkeeper father, the father who would one day erect a tombstone for his soldier son.

*

“Miller, Joseph E.” was a veteran by the time the bombs fell.

His turn had come one Tuesday night in February ‘41, when Capt. Grimaldi stood before the National Guard unit in West Haven, Conn., with “good news.”

“You’re all going to be inducted in the U.S. Army.”

Joe, a 22-year-old toolmaker and Tuesday night sergeant, could handle it. He’d grown up rough and ready, one of five kids of a poor young widow. He hadn’t gone beyond high school. Maybe the military would be good for him that way. But it meant leaving his bride of three months.

At first, Jeannette followed him to the training camps down South. They talked about the future, about kids. “We were so in love.” Then he shipped out, and she was left to wait, and pray, and someday read in the paper about the hero from West Haven.

*

Egon Nuess’ mother wouldn’t hear of it.

He was just 16. His 37-year-old father, a reluctant draftee, was already fighting in Hitler’s army on the Russian front. She wouldn’t let her boy enlist. Never.

In Roebel, his north German village, young Egon had been a member of the Hitler Youth, like all the boys. Then local Nazis tried to enroll the bright youngster in their elite academy. But his grandfather, an old farm worker and leftist, said no.

Still, the Nazis impressed Egon. In his isolated world, the “People’s Radio” was all-important: the Hitler speeches, the martial music. “Today Germany belongs to us,” they sang. “Tomorrow the world.”

There were no Jews around Roebel, but Egon believed the radio when it said Jews were exploiting good Germans. He was so proud, at 13, when his great nation went to war. And too proud, at 16, to listen to his mother. On Oct. 20, 1942, Egon Nuess volunteered for Hitler’s armies.

Within months, the father was dead in the east, and the son was headed west, to France.

June 6, 1944

Utah Beach, Normandy

Joe Miller, first lieutenant, 4th Infantry Division, had trained three years for this day--Officer Candidate School, amphibious training, Raider courses.

He could handle anything. But his anti-tank platoon couldn’t handle seasickness. After two days aboard a landing craft in the English Channel, they were begging for an enemy shore.

At 9:20 a.m. on D-day, Miller and the 12th Infantry Regiment bore in, third wave to hit Utah Beach in history’s greatest amphibious invasion. First off when the ramp dropped was a three-man Jeep. It nosed straight to the bottom--in 15 feet of water.

“Get the hell in closer!” the Yank lieutenant screamed at the British boatmaster.

German artillery fire crashed around them. A U.S. ammunition barge exploded on their right. But Miller’s men got their shaky legs down in France, on a beach where American dead still lay from the first wave.

Under mortar and sniper fire, they towed their 57 mm anti-tank guns inland and dug in. It was bloody going--a half-dozen wounded in a 30-man platoon. And the frightening German artillery barrages made the sleepless night hell. Some of Miller’s green GIs sobbed in their foxholes.

“I almost cracked myself,” he recalls. “I decided, no way was I going to live through this war. But I thought, if you’re going to go, at least take a few of them with you.”

*

The siren wailed at 1 a.m., jolting Egon Nuess into action.

In D-day’s earliest hours, American paratroopers were dropping onto Normandy’s pastures. Nuess’ 9th Parachute Regiment, 150 miles to the west, was soon on the move, by foot and truck, through the pre-dawn darkness, toward the war.

The 18-year-old lance corporal, trained by elite paratroopers, was unafraid. But even the veterans couldn’t foresee the cruel conflict about to engulf them.

On the road into Normandy, they came under nerve-shattering fire from Allied planes. Some of Nuess’ comrades curled up in terror. “They cried for their mamas,” he recalls. “They were all 17 or 18 years old.”

In the towns, they trudged beneath bodies of Frenchmen hanging from telephone poles, Resistance fighters strung up by the German SS. Nuess shuddered. The grim gray German columns pushed on.

Finally, his anti-tank company plunged into battle along Normandy’s St. Lo-Bayeux road, against an American armored assault. And in days and weeks of close-quarter fighting, Frau Nuess’ boy became a combat veteran, setting up behind thick hedgerows, covering anti-tank teams as they fired their rocket-propelled grenades, watching American Sherman tanks explode in flame, watching his countrymen fall. And slowly pulling back.

Near St. Lo, they took a stand at a farmhouse. A grenade blast blew down a wall, killed two comrades and buried Nuess, deafening his right ear. They pulled him out, stood him up. The retreat resumed. Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” was being surrendered foot by foot, soldier by dead soldier.

*

Miller’s 4th Division first swung west to capture Cherbourg, then southeast to spearhead the St. Lo offensive, the “breakout” from the deadly hedgerow country.

Leveled towns, broken bodies of Germans and Americans, bloated carcasses of cows and horses--Miller grew hardened to the Norman landscape. And the fighting grew ever more vicious, with little quarter given.

One day, an American tank sergeant machine-gunned six of Miller’s German prisoners as they sat eating K-rations. “Sons of bitches knocked out one of my tanks! Burned my men to a crisp!” he screamed.

The lieutenant knew it was wrong. He took names. But “the same thing happened, I’m sure, against Americans.”

At Mortain, German Panzer divisions counterattacked, and Miller and his gunners helped hold the line. The Germans pulled back. But American losses mounted.

One night a German plane dropped a flare directly over one of Miller’s gun positions. Bombs followed, killing all nine men in the squad. “Sgt. Cartwright. A hell of a good soldier. What a mess.”

In the mornings, in his wet foxholes, his filthy fatigues, the lieutenant would roll over, look up, see American B-24s on their way to bomb Berlin. “I’d say, come on, God bless you, get this war over with.”

But for Joe Miller, it had just begun.

June 15, 1944

Beach Red, Saipan

Breakfast came early on the landing ship that day, 12:45 a.m. But it was good--steak and eggs. “New Zealand breakfast,” Lyle Scheetz called it.

The Marine corporal had learned to appreciate a decent meal.

The 2nd Marine Division liked the Illinois farmer’s size. They made him a machine-gunner. After training in California and New Zealand, he was shipped to Guadalcanal in late 1942, for some on-the-job training in hell.

In the Japanese army’s dying weeks on the ‘Canal, Scheetz learned that the enemy attacked bravely, even suicidally. He also learned that they were not a Marine’s only problem: On Guadalcanal’s remote front lines, he went from a solid 198 pounds to 147 on one C-ration meal a day.

But 76 hours on “Bloody Tarawa,” 10 months later, was still worse.

The landing boats couldn’t clear the reef on that Pacific atoll, so squad leader Scheetz and his men had to wade 600 yards through murderous Japanese fire to the beach.

Philips was the first he lost, shot through the head. Then Brown and Bright. Then the fellow from Texas and the one from Colorado. Tarawa was taken, but his I Company had more than 50% casualties. The stench of Japanese and American dead reached pilots flying overhead.

Now it was Saipan, his third campaign, a key stepping stone to Japan. And Scheetz’s 6th Marine Regiment soon was aboard a flotilla of amphibious tractors, headed for a beach code-named “Red.” H-Hour was 8 a.m.

*

In a trench 300 yards in from Beach Red, in a moonscape of craters left by U.S. battleship barrages, Sgt. Takeo Yamauchi waited.

He had reached the Japanese colony just a month earlier with the 136th Infantry Regiment, sent to help make the island an “invulnerable bastion.”

Saipan’s defenders knew they were next on the Americans’ list. But Yamauchi, fresh from training in the homeland, wasn’t prepared for what he saw on June 13, a vast U.S. fleet assembling far offshore in the morning sun--a “city at sea,” he recalls. He couldn’t stand up; his legs grew weak.

Precisely at noon, the naval guns opened up. Yamauchi and his 13-man squad clung to the bottom of their trenches, terrified by the deafening blasts, choked with earth, but surviving.

Then, on the morning of June 15, a shout went up, and Yamauchi looked out. The Americans were coming.

*

The amphibious tractors clambered over the reefs and chugged in toward shore. They were under fire--but, thank God, not like Tarawa, Scheetz thought.

The Marines scrambled out of the vehicles, regrouped, began moving across the narrow beach. Then, Scheetz remembers, “they hit us with everything they had.”

*

For a while, Yamauchi did give them everything he had.

His squad opened up with their bolt-action rifles and light machine gun. Yamauchi believes he shot at least one Marine dead. But by midafternoon the landing force wiped out the forward Japanese positions and were within 100 yards of Yamauchi’s trench. That’s when a battalion officer ordered him to charge.

It was lunacy, Yamauchi knew, but he had no choice. He shouted, “Let’s go!” and leaped out of the trench. Almost instantly he dropped behind some rocks, under withering Marine machine-gun fire. He looked left and right: Only two of his men had followed him, and one lay dead.

Bleeding from a graze wound on his neck, Yamauchi scrambled back to his squad. “Too many bullets, too many bullets,” they said.

That night, Yamauchi’s entire regiment counterattacked. His platoon was kept in reserve. Silent squads slipped over his trench, headed for the American lines. Suddenly the darkness exploded in Marine gunfire and red streaks of tracers. The Imperial Army’s 136th was being mowed down or driven into headlong retreat.

Takeo Yamauchi, in his trench, decided he was one young Japanese who wouldn’t get himself killed for his emperor.

*

Scheetz remembers that first night clear as day: “Banzai” charges, no sleep, no food. “And still I wasn’t tired. Nerves, I guess.”

The first 24 hours were devastating. He lost half his squad, dead or wounded. The air support the 6th Marines expected wasn’t there. It took days to get Marine tanks ashore.

But they inched inland day by day, finishing off pockets of Japanese. And Scheetz, promoted to sergeant, showed the way for his men. “I didn’t get shook up, not like some of them who swore they wouldn’t make it through the campaign, and they didn’t. I was coming back home.” After all, he had left Virginia with a diamond ring.

He had his close calls. Twice he was wounded by shrapnel. And one day, as he checked out a foxhole, an enemy soldier popped up behind him. Before Scheetz could react, another Marine’s bullet dropped the Japanese.

The cleanup was gruesome. The Marines had mastered the use of the flamethrower and dynamite for finishing off holdouts in caves and bunkers. In the end, fewer than 2,000 of the 30,000 Japanese defenders survived.

The Americans, enraged by Japanese atrocities, had made the Pacific a no-holds-barred war. Today, Scheetz wonders.

“The generals decided we wouldn’t take prisoners. But there were some who wanted to live, to surrender.”

Takeo Yamauchi, for one.

*

He had joined the chaotic Japanese flight inland. Survivors tried to reorganize in the hills, but were spotted repeatedly by American planes, bombed and scattered.

In the sun and tropical downpours, Yamauchi wandered through valleys littered with the blackened, swollen bodies of his countrymen. Twice he was wounded. He had to dig out the shrapnel with his own hands.

Behind him, Japanese die-hards mounted a last suicidal charge against the Americans. More than 4,000 were slaughtered. Yamauchi straggled northward, toward Saipan’s greatest horrors.

On July 11, at the island’s northern tip, he crawled into a cave where soldiers cowered with Japanese women and children.

During the nights, he could hear soldiers’ ritual suicides outside: “Banzai” shouts--”May the Emperor Live 10,000 Years!”--followed by grenade explosions. Farther off, unknown to him, Japanese civilians were leaping to their deaths from seaside cliffs, panicked by fears of American “atrocities.”

In the cave, a dozen babies cried from hunger. A senior sergeant, fearing detection, ordered them silenced, or killed.

One mother left with her infant. But in the muffled darkness Yamauchi could hear the other distraught women, sometimes with a soldier’s help, strangling their own babies.

It was the end for Yamauchi, the confused young student who had “half-worshiped” the emperor. He got away in the night, to wait for the rising sun, to surrender, to take his chances with the Americans.

September, 1944

Langenfeld, Germany

Hitler’s armies were disintegrating. Bloodied, moving only at night through the French countryside, soldiers gathered in makeshift “fighting groups.”

On a road in Belgium, American tanks caught up with Fighting Group Hapke and Cpl. Egon Nuess. The outgunned Germans scattered, and their Capt. Hapke surrendered. But Nuess escaped and headed east with other stragglers, through Aachen, over the Rhine, to a small town called Langenfeld.

All but 20 of Nuess’ 200-man company had been killed, wounded or captured in the three-month rout. But at Langenfeld the paratroopers were regrouped and readied for the Third Reich’s final military adventure.

At Langenfeld, too, at a farm-resthouse, the war-weary Nuess met a pretty young worker named Annelore. He soon left Langenfeld, but she wouldn’t leave his mind.

Dec. 16, 1944

Berdorf, Luxembourg

In the long drive through France, Joe Miller’s platoon got just one break, a memorable one--two August days in Paris, after the 4th Division helped liberate the City of Light. The GI celebration is frozen forever in a photo in the regimental history, a snapshot of Miller’s men thronged by Frenchwomen. “Boy, they sure loved us.”

Then it was on to bloody new battles, at the Schnee Eifel ridgeline on the Belgian-German border, and the Huertgen Forest. A mortar blast wounded Miller--shrapnel in the face--but he stayed with his men.

By late November, the division needed a rest. Instead, Joe Miller got another place in the regimental annals.

The 4th was assigned to an “inactive” stretch of front in Luxembourg. In the town of Berdorf, Miller turned the tiny Parc Hotel into a platoon post. “Beds. A shave. Hot meals!”

But things quickly got uncomfortable.

“Are those ours out there?” someone asked one morning. Miller raised his binoculars: Infantrymen were pouring through the fields, and they weren’t “ours.” It was Dec. 16. Hitler had launched the great counteroffensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Miller got on the radio and called back his outlying gunners. They were vastly outnumbered, but they’d make a stand.

Gunfire from the holed-up Yanks pinned down the Germans as they tried to pass through town. The enemy turned mortars and tank guns on the hotel, blowing off the roof. But the defenders simply moved downstairs.

Then the Germans found some unexpected help. It was GI payday, and an Army paymaster suddenly showed up, driving his Jeep right into the Germans’ arms. They marched the captured lieutenant down to the hotel.

“You guys had better surrender!” he shouted. “They’re all over the place!”

Miller had other ideas. “I thought they’d kill us.” His men fired from the windows, and a half-dozen Germans fell. The American, unwounded, scrambled into the hotel. And for four more nights and days, the siege went on.

The GI machine-gunners and sharpshooters kept the roads dangerous for the Germans. The holdouts even laid a ring of empty bottles outside the hotel, an early warning system for nighttime assaults by “Jerry.”

“We’d hear the noise, open fire and throw grenades. And every morning there’d be dead Germans outside.”

Miller’s men ended up five miles behind the advancing German lines. Finally, on the fifth night, American armor punched into Berdorf and rescued the infantrymen.

An Associated Press story flashed word back to the States of the “fortress hotel.” After months of dread and intermittent letters, Jeannette could read about Joe in the New Haven Register. And worry still more.

Up and down the line, 4th Division holdouts like Miller had slowed the Germans, contributing to the offensive’s collapse. But the cost of the Bulge in American lives was heavy--19,000 dead, including scores of captured GIs slaughtered in cold blood by German troops.

And as the huge GI army in the west and the Soviets in the east closed in on the Third Reich, evidence emerged daily of still greater crimes, of the Nazi genocide of millions of Jews, the “enemies” in a German country boy’s simple world.

December, 1944

German-Belgian Border

The waste of war had changed Egon Nuess’ view of the world.

During the Bulge fighting, his unit came under attack as it held a pillbox on the Siegfried Line, near the Belgian border. The Americans pulled back, but left behind a fallen lieutenant.

Nuess helped the captured man, wounded in the arm, back to an aid station. Along the way, U.S. artillery fire poured in. The American--instinctively?--threw himself on his German escort to protect him.

“His name was Lieutenant Stein,” Nuess recalls. “Before the war, he was a police officer in Ohio.”

They exchanged addresses, but in the confusion of the weeks that followed, Nuess lost it. His single-minded purpose then, as the Reich crumbled, was to get back to Langenfeld, and Annelore.

At one point in April, near the Rhine, Nuess and a half-dozen other soldiers were captured by Americans. But he managed to escape, to cross the Rhine, to finally reach the Langenfeld farm. He took off his uniform.

“The war ended for me April 16, 1945.”

Days later, American troops found him and shipped him off to an internment camp.

*

Of the four, Takeo Yamauchi was the last to go home. And there, in Kameoka, he found his tombstone.

In November, 1945, after 16 months in prisoner-of-war camps, he sailed into Yokosuka harbor and telegraphed his family. A tearful sister met him at Kyoto train station. The family was mortified. He was supposed to be dead in Saipan. They had held a funeral, and his father made a speech to the townspeople.

“My father was bewildered,” said Yamauchi, now 73. “He might have preferred that I were dead.”

He moved to Tokyo, married, reared a son and daughter. Over the years, he worked for a leftist pacifist group, an economic research organization and as an academic. Today, he and his wife, Sumiko, live in a sedate middle-class district, in a small house with rock garden and plum tree.

Unlike most Japanese, the socialist Yamauchi is uncomfortable with the U.S.-Japanese partnership that has helped make his country an economic superpower.

“I think Japan is now achieving by economic power what it couldn’t achieve before by force--domination of other Asian countries,” he said.

And he has never forgiven those responsible for the war.

“The emperor should have been hanged as the No. 1 war criminal,” the old Imperial Army sergeant said.

*

Ask Lyle Scheetz what the war was about and the emperor springs to his mind too.

“If somebody didn’t fight, hard to tell what kind of country we would have had if you let Hirohito take over.”

But the old Marine recently had to update his views of the Japanese.

When he came home to Illinois, Scheetz had a fine postwar stake, $3,000 in Marine poker winnings. He settled into farming, gathering up 430 acres down the road from Nauvoo. Corn, wheat and soybeans--beans whose price was long kept nice and high by Japanese importers.

Today, at 73, he relaxes in retirement with Virginia in their 1950s prairie farmhouse, renting the land to their three sons.

They also have a daughter, Linda, a high school teacher who came to her father not long ago with the news that she was marrying a college professor, a foreign-born fellow. Actually, a Japanese.

Scheetz smiled at the memory. “Fifty years ago, I kind of hated them,” he said, but “they were just like Americans, sent to fight and have one job to do, surviving.”

In fact, the old machine-gunner says he might take a look at a Japanese car next time. His “Semper Fi” sticker might look just right on the bumper.

*

Maybe the war did have its good side, Joe Miller reflects.

When the infantry officer hung up his uniform in Connecticut, he told his factory boss he could no longer settle for a workbench job. He left for a sales career, rising to general sales manager for a tool-and-die company.

“The war taught me to be confident, and open, and an optimist,” said Miller, 76.

But the war’s many victims may have included his Jeannette, he fears. She suffered three miscarriages in the late 1940s. He wonders whether the tense months of wartime waiting had something to do with it.

They adopted two little boys and prospered through America’s boom years. In 1982, he retired to Florida’s golf courses. Seven years later, Jeannette died.

Once, in the mid-1970s, Miller went back to Germany, this time on a friendly scouting mission, looking for a business partner. “I have great admiration for the German people.”

“But, you know,” he said, “they’re a militaristic people in a way. Hitler had to be stopped. Otherwise, we’d be ‘achtung’-ing right now.”

Still, the old infantryman wonders: Do young people really understand? “When I talk about the war, my daughter-in-law just kind of shrugs her shoulders,” he said. All that blood. All those tears.

*

Egon Nuess looks out his window onto Hardt Street, the road that brought American tanks--so long ago?--up from the Rhine, into Langenfeld. Today, the sleek Mercedeses of a new Germany roll down the road.

After the war, Nuess settled in Langenfeld with his bride. She bore a daughter, and the bright young man from the north found a calling, tax consulting.

He lost his beloved Annelore six years ago. But at 68, Nuess still runs his busy firm and delights in seven grandchildren, including a 17-year-old girl studying in America.

The ex-corporal first learned of the Holocaust months after the war. But he doesn’t evade responsibility for Germany’s crimes. “I accept guilt. I live with that.”

He, like the others, finds lasting lessons in the war: the need for democracy, not Nazi-style narrowness and nationalism; the need for friendship among nations.

But the memory of war, for the warriors, will always be deeply personal, a memory of dreamlike images, of strange moments that somehow don’t fit the script of history, of random faces, living and dead.

The face of the German officer who, surrendering, proudly informed Miller he had a wife and daughter in Chicago. The Marine who amazed prisoner Yamauchi by carrying a wounded Japanese woman in his arms. The buddy who lost a leg fighting beside Scheetz and went on to deliver mail for 30 years.

Or are these the memories that truly get to the heart of things?

“Sometimes I think about that day on the Siegfried Line, and Lt. Stein,” said Egon Nuess.

“I hope he’s well. I hope he’s at home, with his family in Ohio.”