Memories of World War II Left Most Painful Wound

My father’s ankle-length, black-and-white tweed Mayfield, the first fine piece of clothing he bought for himself when he returned from the war, hangs still in my crowded closet. Once a year, I slip it from the hanger and try it on, always astonished that I cannot squeeze into the giant’s coat.

I picture him draped in it, towering over me as we stand beside his robin’s-egg-blue 1948 Plymouth coupe, a snap-brim fedora pulled low over his twinkling eyes, his mouth curled in the confident smile of a man who knows that he helped save the world.

But behind his eyes something dark lurked.

Even as a child, I could sense it, a bone-deep sadness -- or was it some horror? -- that I could not name. I ached to know his demon, but I could not form the question and lacked the courage to ask it. Instead, I would ask about the scar I could touch, a railroad track of puckered pink that bloomed at the center of his right forearm, curved north at the elbow and ended at his shoulder.

“Why don’t you tell him about it, Al?” my mother would say.

“Evelyn,” he’d say, “some things are best forgotten.”

Albert R. DeSilva never was much of a talker. Few of them were, those legions who left our shores as boys and returned as men. When the subject was the war, even the blabbermouths among them usually chose silence.

What could you tell a wife, a child, a buddy who got a deferment, about the fatal beauty of tracer bullets arcing through a foreign night, about wallowing in mud for so long that it became your second skin, about arms and legs and heads that suddenly learned how to fly?

Much later, time, not war, would bring them to the brink of death again. But for now, they had lives to live.

Through the GI Bill, they flooded the colleges. They fathered children in record numbers, then built thousands upon thousands of schools for them. I entered first grade in a spanking-new elementary school and was in the first class to graduate from our new high school, Dad a member of the board that approved its construction.

From the ash heap of war and economic depression -- with their sweat and smarts and determination to give their children a life better than their own -- my father’s generation built the middle-class life that most Americans today take for granted.

What they did not do was build a monument to themselves. That was left largely for their sons and daughters, who were to dedicate it in the nation’s capital on this Memorial Day weekend after more than three-quarters of the 16 million who served in World War II -- including my father -- were gone.

I doubt that it was something Dad wanted; I can’t imagine he would have gone to see it. A monument, after all, is about remembering; and some things are best forgotten.

When I was small, we had a black-and-white Philco television. Whenever Dad walked in on me and my younger brother Dennis watching the World War II documentary series “Victory at Sea,” he’d leave the room or turn the channel to “The Honeymooners.” When I stalked the house with a toy Tommy gun that stuttered like the real thing, he’d turn white and ask me to play outside.

One night when I was 12, Dad brought a friend home for dinner. After Mom cleared the dishes, I sat with the men as they sipped their coffee, hypnotized as the friend spun war stories. They were what I had longed to hear from Dad -- tales of adventure, of glory, of “killing Krauts.” Dad struggled to change the subject, but on the guy went, punctuating the air with his hearty laugh.

“It’s getting late,” Dad finally said, although it wasn’t; and he hustled the blowhard out the door. Then he wheeled on me, angry, the demon restless behind his eyes.

“That’s not how it was,” he said. “Anyone who talks like that wasn’t there.”

It was around then, if I remember it right, that Dad’s Army dress greens vanished from his closet. But I had gazed at the uniform often enough to memorize the round patch sewn to the right shoulder -- the gray head of a howling wolf on a field of dark green.

It was the insignia of the Timberwolves, the 104th Infantry Division, composed of conscripts drawn from the length and breadth of the nation in the bleak year of 1942, when victory by Nazi Germany and the empire of Japan was as possible as it was unthinkable.

America was building a vast army virtually from scratch, gathering coal miners from Pennsylvania, autoworkers from Detroit, lumberjacks from Oregon, farm boys from Georgia -- and Al DeSilva, a young butcher from Taunton, Mass.

They had grown up poor, most of them. Who hadn’t during the Great Depression? For some of the Tennessee boys Dad served with, Army boots were their first shoes. Many, Dad included, had never been more than 50 miles from their homes until a fearful nation drafted them, packed them into troop ships and flung them to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Dad was 22 when he entered the service on Dec. 2, 1942, and headed to Camp Maxey, Texas, for basic training. From there, he was sent to the University of Illinois to study mechanical engineering. The Army would need engineers, it was thought, for the invasion of Europe.

But a year later, it needed infantrymen more. Dad was pulled from school and sent to Ft. Sheridan, Ill., to be trained on the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle, 19.4 pounds of steel capable of firing .30-caliber slugs at up to 650 rounds a minute. Most rifle companies were issued one per squad, to be carried by the most reliable soldiers.

The weapon was 47.8 inches long, Pvt. DeSilva 66 inches tall.

Dad was assigned to the 104th and awaited deployment at Camp Carson, Colo. On June 6, 1944, when radios crackled with news of D-Day, word came that they would be shipped to Europe by the end of the month.

Dad pleaded for a 10-day furlough, caught a train to his hometown and proposed to the woman he would stay married to for 54 years. Striding out of a jewelry store with a diamond in his pocket, he stopped the first man he saw in uniform -- a total stranger -- and asked him to be his best man.

Albert Richard DeSilva married Evelyn May Archibald in a little white Congregational church in the village of Westville, Mass. In the wedding photo, the bride, sheathed in a gown of ivory satin, stands beside the soldier who would soon have to leave her. He is picture-book handsome in his tan summer dress uniform, a wolf howling from the shoulder.

After a short wedding trip to Boston, Dad caught a train back to Camp Carson, but the rails were clogged with trains hauling troops and war materials. By the time he got back, he was AWOL; his division had already shipped out for the coast.

The MPs threw him in the stockade. But the Army needed infantrymen more than it needed prisoners, so they rushed him east, where he rejoined the 18,000 men of the 104th for the cross-Atlantic voyage.

Commanded by flamboyant Maj. Gen. Terry de la Mesa Allen, they landed in France on Sept. 7, 1944. On Oct. 23, they were bloodied in the first of 195 consecutive days of combat.

The 104th helped drive the enemy from Holland, then penetrated deep into Germany. Pvt. DeSilva didn’t make it that far. He was one of the division’s battle casualties -- 5,305 wounded, 1,294 dead.

Dad was evacuated to a military hospital in Paris; for a while, it was thought that he might lose his right arm. Our family has a letter he sent to his younger brother, Rudy, the tone light, full of banter. But he also begged Rudy not to tell his wife and parents how badly he was hurt: “There’s no need of them worrying unnecessarily. OK?”

The Queen Mary, doing duty as a hospital ship, carried him back to the United States, and he spent nearly a year recovering in Cushing General Hospital in Boston. He had lost total use of the arm, his war record said.

When he finally came home, he spent hour after hour squeezing a rubber ball in his hand, then began lifting small objects. I was born in 1946, and by the time I was 10, Dad drove 10-penny nails flush with two swings of a hammer as he transformed our little house into nine rooms and a garage. Afterward, he would sit motionless, the flicker from the Philco licking his face as he popped aspirin and cradled an icepack in the crook of his arm.

Dad never shared my passion for the Boston Red Sox. “There’s too much suffering in life to suffer with your team,” he’d say. But each spring, he’d pick one Saturday to toss a baseball with me. Then he’d sit in an easy chair, silently swallowing his pain.

As the decades flew by, I came to know two fathers: the haunted veteran and the tender patriarch with the quirky sense of humor I seem to have inherited. (“Evelyn, it’s over,” he said on the eve of her 80th birthday. “No way I’m going to be married to any 80-year-old woman!” Mom didn’t think that it was funny.)

I never stopped trying to fill the hole in Dad’s story. It became a ritual for us. Once a year, I’d ask him to tell me what happened in Holland. He’d grimace and shake his head no.

In November of 1997, Mom roasted the traditional turkey, and my three grown children and I sat down with my parents to share what we sensed might be my father’s last Thanksgiving.

For years, he had worked as a plant manager for a company that manufactured felt. (If you used a felt-tipped pen in the 1970s, my father probably had a hand in making it.) Dad never earned more than $20,000 a year, but he had given his five grandchildren $5,000 each toward their college educations.

In the middle of the meal, my youngest son, Jeremy, dared the demon: “Grandpa, tell us how you got wounded.”

My father froze, a forkful of mashed potatoes suspended halfway between mouth and plate. A clock ticked to mark the silence. I held my breath.

Then Dad began to speak.

It was early morning as they crossed a turnip field in a light rain, a company of 180 men. There were no Germans for miles, they’d been told; they had been cleared out by other elements of the 104th.

The company reached a canal, 40 feet wide and shallow between earthen berms. The men waded in, weapons raised above their heads. As they emerged from the water, a superior force, dug in and waiting for them, opened up with rifles, mortars and light machine guns.

Dad flopped on his belly and fired bursts as men around him began to fall. Did he hit anything? There was no way of knowing. But the Germans were close, less than 100 yards away, and he was good with the BAR.

Soon the order came to retreat back across the canal. Dad was up to his waist in water when a mortar round exploded nearby, hurling a geyser into the air.

Shrapnel tore through his right arm. The BAR slipped from his grasp and sank.

His right arm dangling, he reached the bank, crawled over the berm and collapsed. A colonel rushed past, screaming at him for dropping the BAR, the heaviest weapon in his squad. Other soldiers, some dragging wounded, drew back about 50 yards from the canal, dug in and returned fire.

Dad lay on his back on open ground between the lines as tracer bullets streaked over him in both directions. Twice more he was hit, shrapnel tearing into both arms, both legs, his right hand and both sides of his chest. Concussions from mortar rounds fractured two of his ribs.

For 13 hours he lay there, his blood leaking into the wet Dutch soil. It was 10 p.m. before medics could reach him, Dad said.

With that, he stopped talking.

My children and I stayed silent, sensing that there was something more.

A bead of sweat popped from Dad’s right temple and slid down his cheek. When he spoke again, it sounded as if memory had thickened his tongue.

“I shot one of our own men,” he said.

It happened in the confusion of the initial exchange, when he opened up with his BAR.

“Oh, Al!” my mother said. “You can’t know that for sure.”

“He was right in my line of fire, Evelyn,” he said.

And there was a big hole in his back.

Never before had I seen my father look ashamed. The emotion was palpable, like a stifling cloak.

My oldest son Richard was the first to speak: “Are you kidding me? You’re a hero!”

But the hero, stunned by his own history, lowered his head and silently refused the honor.

I couldn’t fathom my father’s courage in choosing to shoulder such a burden alone. On his face, I glimpsed the demon that had also ripped at the souls of millions of other fathers, men who were asked, a lifetime ago, to save the world -- and did.

On March 15, 1998, the day after his 76th birthday, Dad’s heart finally quit. At the funeral, I rose and looked out over the faces of family and friends, one of them a frail old man who carried shrapnel in his body from Anzio.

“I miss Dad,” I said. “I think we all will, the next time the world needs saving.”

Some things are best not forgotten.