Soldiers of ’44

A Roll Call

CORPORAL EDWARD G. SOLVIS was honorably discharged from the United States Army at Camp Grant, Illinois, four months after the end of the World War II. At a Lions Club luncheon given in his honor by the president of Citizens’ Trust of Davenport, Iowa, Solvis was informed that he had been promoted to assistant cashier and appointed to the bank’s pension and credit union committees. As an additional gesture of appreciation, his years of wartime service was credited to his seniority at Citizens’ Trust.

After adjusting himself to the routines of civilian life, Solvis assembled his notes and wartime diaries in chronological order and began to prepare an informal history of the unit in which he had served.

He corresponded with the surviving members of Section Eight, sent them questionnaires to fill out and, as his original design expanded, addressed inquiries to other individuals and organizations who might have had information about or related in any way to the section. When this work was as complete as he could make it, Solvis asked Buell Docker to assist him in finding a permanent repository for his files and records and diaries. It was through Docker’s contacts that the permanent Edward G. Solvis Collection was established at the College of Pennsylvania.

The following information is from the Solvis Collection in the archives of the college at Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS JOSEPH PITKO: His body was never recovered or accounted for by Graves Registration. Private First Class Pitko is still carried on the battalion roster as MIA (Missing in Action) in the Ardennes Campaign.

PAUL BONNARD: Widowed, with three grandchildren, Bonnard lives at the gatehouse and continues to tend the grounds of Château Rêve, converted now into a retirement home for the Order of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS IRVING GRUBER: Gruber is buried in the family plot at the Beth Shalom Cemetery in the borough of Brooklyn, New York. His headstone lies between that of his mother and his older sister, Hilary.

PRIVATES FIRST CLASS LEO PIERCE AND CARMINE SPINELLI: They are buried in the Netherlands-American Military Cemetery in Margraten, Holland.

JOCKO BERTHIER: Under a war reparations act, Berthier was granted fifty thousand Belgian francs as compensation for the injuries he suffered during the German occupation of Lepont. He was later awarded Belgium’s third highest civilian decoration for his voluntary assistance to the American gun crew at Lepont during the Battle of the Bulge. Berthier sent Solvis several photographs of his enlarged and renovated cafe-bar, which now occupies two additional storefronts facing Lepont’s old church.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS CHESTER DORMUND: Answered only one inquiry. After his discharge from the Army, Dormund worked as a short-order cook in Sweetwater, Texas. On his nights off, he wrote, he liked to watch the harness races and “bet a little money on the wretched trotters.”

CAPTAIN WALTER “DER HENKER” BRECHT: Captain Brecht left a widow and two sons in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. During the Allied occupation, Frau Brecht contributed her husband’s library of Spanish and Portuguese plays to the American Armed Forces Library at Munich. Solvis learned of this from an article in the service newspaper, Stars and Stripes, which listed the specifics of Frau Brecht’s bequest in a story outlining the cultural opportunities available to GI wives in Germany.

FIRST SERGEANT MILES KORBICK: Released from an Army hospital in Georgia in 1947, Korbick was discharged from the army the same year. He opened one of the first laundromats in Florida — “Korbick’s Korner” — which was the beginning of a chain that has expanded into seven southern states.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SAMUEL GELNICK: His body was returned to the United States at the request of his wife, Doris. Gelnick is buried in the Star of David Cemetery in the borough of the Bronx in New York.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS GUIDO LINARI: Linari never replied to Solvis’ requests for information. Solvis’ third letter was returned from Linari’s former home on Pell Street in New York City stamped “Not Known at This Address.”

LIEUTENANT GENERAL WALTER ADAMSON: Adamson retired from the army in 1954. He captained a senior officers’ polo team at Boca Raton, Florida, and contributed articles to leading military journals. His extensive memoirs. The Last Great War, were published posthumously in 1970.

GENERAL JOSEF “SEPP” DIETRICH: The commander of the Sixth SS Panzer Army was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes in 1946, but was paroled and released in 1955. In 1957, General Dietrich was sentenced by a German court to eighteen months in prison for complicity in the deaths of Captain Ernest Röhm and other SA (Sturmabteilungen) officers in 1934. The general died in Germany in 1966.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS SONNY LAUREL: Laurel is buried in the Mount Olivet Home of Eternal Rest in a suburb of South Chicago. Funds for a Little League baseball park were donated to the city by his parents, the Wellington Laurels. The Sonny Laurel Memorial Field was constructed in Rogers Park on the north side of Chicago on land contributed jointly by the Laurel family and Loyola Academy.

COLONEL OTTO SKORZENY: Skorzeny, sixty-seven, died of bronchial cancer in Madrid, Spain, on July 8, 1975. After World War II Skorzeny was acquitted by an Allied War Crimes Tribunal. While awaiting a denazification trial, Skorzeny escaped from a German prison camp at Darmstadt and spent the remaining years in Spain, where he worked as an industrial engineer. In the 1960s he was accused by official sources in Israel of organizing a network of ex-Nazis called Die Spinne (“The Spider”) whose goals were said to be the resurrection of the Nazi Party and the destruction of the state of Israel. In 1973 it was reported by an Italian magazine that he had served as a consultant to a group planning the assassination of Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba.

COLONEL GEORGE RANKIN: Promoted to Brigadier General four years after World War II, George Rankin was killed in action in the first months of the war in Korea.

MAJOR SYDNEY KARSH: Discharged from the Army in January, 1946, Karsh served for twenty years as a senior partner in the New York law firm of Masterson. Karsh and Nevins. Specializing originally in international labor legislation, Karsh and his associates have in recent years devoted their full time to the International Amnesty Movement, in cooperation with the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

CORPORAL WALTER SCHMITZER: Schmitzer was discharged from the United States Army with a seventy percent disability, suffering from a variety of nervous disorders adjudged directly connected to his combat experiences in the Ardennes. Schmitzer supplemented his Army pension by working as a dispatcher for Goodwill Industries in Detroit, Michigan. In 1967 he moved to Laguna Beach, California, and answered only one subsequent inquiry from Solvis. “I haven’t married and don’t expect to now.”

FRITZ WENDEL: Wendel, who test-piloted the first model of the Messerschmitt-262 on July 18th, 1942, was found dead of gunshot wounds at his home in Augsburg, West Germany, in February of 1975. A hunting rifle was at his side. Police would not comment on whether the death of Wendel, fifty-nine, was a suicide or an accident.

LIEUTENANT BART WHITTER: Discharged from the army at Fort Benning, Georgia, on February 10th, 1946, Whitter returned to Mobile, Alabama, and entered the real estate business. He was a responsive correspondent. He ran for the office of sheriff, but was defeated by several thousand votes. His wife divorced him in 1956. Whitter remarried the same year. In his brief political campaign, his slogan had been: “Vote for the Man!” In a recent letter to Solvis, Whitter appraised his defeat at the polls in these words: “I never changed. The people knew where I stood, but they changed. The whole damned South is changed. People think change is the same thing as progress, but I can tell you this — they’re dead wrong.”

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS VALENTINO “SHORTY” KOHLER: Kohler sent Solvis Christmas cards over the years. Additional news of Kohler came in a letter from Buell Docker dated March 17, 1963. The following excerpt is relevant: “I thought the man looked familiar when I went into P.J. Clarke’s pub about ten last night. He was standing beside his cab across the street. When I came out an hour or so later, he was still there and there was no doubt about it. He’d been waiting for me, and insisted on driving me back to the hotel. He wouldn’t throw the flag even though I reminded him a hack inspector could ground him a month for that. No, the ride was on him. Shorty’s put on weight and lost most of his hair but he’s still ready to tell the world where to shove it. When we shook hands at the hotel, he said, ‘I just wish to hell the guys hadn’t called me Shorty. Because I wasn’t near as short as them rupture-heads thought I was.’ I asked him if he’d meet me for lunch the next day, but he told me he’d be working over in Brooklyn and couldn’t make it.”

COLONEL JOACHIM PEIPER: Peiper commanded the “Kampfgruppe Peiper,” which was responsible for executing eighty-six American military prisoners of war in a field near the town of Malmédy during the Ardennes offensive. Colonel Peiper was sentenced to death by an Allied War Crimes Tribunal, but the sentence was commuted and he was released from Landsberg Prison in 1956. In 1964 Peiper purchased a vacation home in the village of Traves in the Vosges Mountains of France. On the night of July 20th, 1976, the villa was destroyed by explosions and flames. Firemen later recovered the charred body of Joachim Peiper from the wreckage. The words “Peiper SS” were discovered painted on roads leading to and from the village of Traves. Other members of the Peiper family were not in France on the night of the explosion.

DAVID HAMLIN: Hamlin, Buell Docker’s good friend, is a professor of history at the College of Pennsylvania. He was married to Elaine Riley in 1948. Their son, Charles, was born in 1952. Professor Hamlin received a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for his three-volume study of epic poetry in relation to the concept of the war hero in various European cultures. Charles Hamlin enlisted in the United States Army and was killed in 1972 on his twentieth birthday in a helicopter crash near Hon Quan in South Vietnam.

JOHN TRANKIC: After his discharge from the Army, Trankic operated a machine and welding shop in Calumet City, Illinois, for twenty years. In 1967 he moved his family to northern Wisconsin and opened a gasoline station and bait shop near Crawling Stone Lake. As a hobby, Trankic teaches automobile repair and maintenance to the Chippewa Indians on the Lac de Flambeau reservation.

MARGRET GAUTIER: Mademoiselle Gautier lived with her aunt and uncle, the Etienne Francoeurs, until she enrolled in a pre-medical course at the University of Louvain. At twenty-four. Dr. Gautier emigrated to Israel. She wrote one letter to Mrs. Agnes Larkin, forwarded by the United States Army. The letter closed with this sentence: “I remember now only the coldness in the cab of the truck and your husband’s words, which I didn’t understand but which were so comforting to the very frightened child I was then.” Agnes Larkin sent a copy to Solvis, asking his advice on how best to answer it. Solvis explained certain events of that distant night, but omitted any mention of the German supplies Larkin had taken from Castle Rêve.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL KARL JAEGER: In the spring of 1945, United States Army Graves Registration teams collected the bodies of hundreds of German soldiers who had fallen in the Ardennes in the last great German offensive of World War 11. These soldiers were buried in mass graves in unmarked fields near the battle sites where they had met their deaths. Among the German dead buried outside Lepont was Lieutenant Colonel Karl Jaeger. Solvis received this information from Father Emile Juneau, pastor of the Eglise de Saint Esprit in that village. The priest had attempted to locate Karl Jaeger’s wife and family in Dresden, but their apartment building was among the thousands destroyed in the fire bombing of that city in February of 1945.

CORPORAL MATTHEW LARKIN: Larkin’s remains are buried in Saint John’s Catholic Cemetery in the borough of Queens, New York. Prior to the return of his body to the United States, his wife wrote the Department of the Army in Washington requesting a military funeral for her husband. The request was granted. His service record contains the notation that he was “killed in action in the service of his country.” In 1962 Agnes Larkin sent invitations to Solvis and Buell Docker to her daughter’s graduation from the College of the City of New York.

PRIVATE FIRST CLASS JACKSON BAIRD: Baird’s body was returned to the United States at his family’s request and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on the shores of the Potomac, where his grave is linked with those of all the other soldiers in the Fields of Dead, those vistas of endless stone markers used for more than a century in the military cemeteries of America. Baird’s photograph hangs in the library of the Baird family home in Middleburg, Virginia. Flanking it are the soiled letter Baird wrote to Buell Docker on the last night of his life, and the commendation which accompanied his posthumous award of the Silver Star, mounted in antique enamel frames inset with miniature American flags. The Silver Star itself was buried with Jackson Baird at his father’s request.

LIEUTENANT BUELL DOCKER: Docker was elected to the state legislature of Pennsylvania shortly before his thirty-ninth birthday, after practicing law for seven years in Philadelphia. At that time. Docker moved to the capital city of Harrisburg with his wife, Elspeth, his daughter, Martha, and his son, Corey. On the wall of his office in the State House are two framed cables of congratulations which he received the night of his election. One is from Harlan “Tex” Farrel and his wife, Felice Bonnard Farrel, of Herstal, Belgium. The other is from Denise and Etienne Francoeur who still live in the village of Lepont, a block from the church and Jocko’s cafe, on the banks of the River Salm.