Honoring the Sacrifice: One Soldier Recounts His War

GORENSTEIN: Roger Aldrich and other members of the 62nd Engineer Company landed on Omaha Beach in France June 23rd, 1944.

It was 17 days after D-Day.

ALDRICH: Just as we had opened the doors...to start unloading the trucks, one lone German aircraft started coming down the beach with its machine guns firing. I was scared. I was horrified. I was standing there, exposed on the deck, nothing I could do. No place to go, no hole to run into. That was my first introduction to gunfire.

GORENSTEIN: Aldrich and his unit made their way to camp, the site they would inhabit over the next month.

His outfit conducted surveys.

They checked coordinates for the artillery and in general made sure the maps the Army used were accurate.

ALDRICH: Since I was one of the last people to come to the company, my job was a gopher.

GORENSTEIN: The work often took them to the front lines, where they map roads or find tall structures to climb to get a read on the landscape.

Aldrich says ‘being at the front’ meant witnessing the war up close.

It meant the 62nd Engineer Company would get somewhere before the Army had a chance to cleanup.

ALDRICH: In St. Lo, the last day I ever saw the place. We were in convoy driving through it. and the graves registration people were just picking up bodies. And they had a two and a half ton truck, which was loaded to the top of the stakes with American bodies, all in a state of decomposition.

And as the truck would hit a bump, the load of bodies would jiggle like jello. And I wondered if anybody at home had any idea what was going on.

GORENSTEIN: The Company’s missions also took them across the farmlands of northern France.

As the only one in his survey platoon who spoke French, Aldrich was the guy who swapped cigarettes and chocolate for ham and eggs with local farmers.

One day that summer, he came across a woman with two children.

ALDRICH: And I complimented her on the beauty of the children. And she said, ‘they are not mine.’ They are Jewish children. We had some neighbors who were Jewish and they asked us to take care of the children and we are doing so.

GORENSTEIN: Aldrich, was 21 at the time.

These experiences caused him to ask big questions.

Things like what drives people to cruelty...what drives people to kindness?

Time and time again, scenes from the war simply stunned Roger Aldrich.

But no matter what he had seen his first 6 months on the Continent, he wasn’t prepared for what he and his unit witnessed that January in Germany.

ALDRICH: We were doing surveying from the top of the waste coal heap, which was 200-300 ft. high. And in order to get to it we had to walk everyday through the minefield. There was a small path that was free of mines. It zigzagged.

GORENSTEIN: The path also zigzagged around the remains of 20 or 30 American soldiers who had been killed by the mines and whose bodies had frozen.

ALDRICH: They looked like they had gone to sleep. Some were in position with their hands raised. Some were just curled up in a fetal position. There were so many of them in a group, it was hard to believe.

GORENSTEIN: It was impossible to retrieve the remains, because the lives mines couldn’t be removed from the frozen ground.

ALDRICH: And as we walked through them the third day, I heard a corporal who was in front of me, talking. And I stopped to listen...and he was saying, ‘Good Morning, Joe. How are you this morning? Good morning, Arthur. Are you cold? He was talking to the bodies. It had made such an impression on all of us that it was almost more than we could bear.

GORENSTEIN: These stories, the minefield, the truck in St. Lo, near death experiences; Aldrich largely kept to himself...at least for four decades.

But then in 1985, Aldrich found himself back on Omaha Beach.

He wasn’t the gopher anymore.

Aldrich was tour guide, explaining to his wife and his mother and his aunt what had happened to him that long ago day 41 years before.

ALDRICH: And I am standing there, waving my arms, pointing here and there and the other place. And a gentleman came up to me and asked me if I spoke French. And he said, in French, were you here when the invasion was on. I said yes I was. And he said, ‘could you tell me a little about it. And before I knew it, I was giving a lecture to 30 French people who had congregated around.

GORENSTEIN: It was then, Aldrich says, that he realized something.

Something he hadn’t done before.

ALDRICH: Talk about it. don’t keep it bottled up. There is no shame in talking about it.

GORENSTEIN: The memories, but really, the horror that he had hidden away needed to come out.

But despite his own convictions, it took him another ten years to find the courage to commit the stories to paper.

Finally 51 years after he had served overseas Aldrich self-published a slim 92 page memoir of his experiences.

He named the book ‘Soldiering Yesterday.’

The 86 year old says it was one of the most important things he’s ever done.

ALDRICH: the last four sentences I think I visualize myself on the beach, and I hear voices. They ask me why are you here, and I say, I wanted to see you once more. I saw you beside the highway, I saw you on the fences, and I wanted to see you one more time. and at that, I also said that while I was talking, I could feel my ghosts disappearing into the water, washed down by my tears. And that was the end of the book.

GORENSTEIN: But no matter how powerful it’s been for Aldrich to publicly admit his pain, the nightmares continue.

ALDRICH: Last year I was watching the movie, ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.’ And one of the last scenes depicts the Indian bodies that were massacred, out in the open with snow covering all the bodies. And it hit me so hard that I cried right there in my chair while I was watching it. It brought back the memories of those frozen bodies in Germany that I could do nothing for.

GORENSTEIN: Aldrich says for years he felt the government had reneged on its promise give him the medals he felt he’s more than earned.

He’s got them now, but he sees them for what they are.

ALDRICH: Something I can hang on the wall, pass onto my grandchildren. 100 years from now somebody will look at it and say, yes he was there. that’s about all it will mean to people.

GORENSTEIN: Aldrich knows in the end it’s his book that will outlive him and his medals.

He takes comfort in knowing that confronting the horrors of war, can at least help relieve some of the pain.

And maybe just like that French farmwoman who took in her neighbors’ children, that lesson can help someone.

For NHPR News, I’m DG.