By Dorothy Chomicz / dchomicz@newsminer.com Fairbanks Daily
News-Miner
Several of the Fairbanks area’s World War II veterans,
now in their 80s and 90s, shared their war memories with Daily News-Miner
journalists as the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
approaches. We will publish the stories of six men starting on Veterans Day,
continuing for four Sundays and concluding on Dec. 7, 2011.
FAIRBANKS — Dennis Abbl was a 21-year-old farmer’s son from
Cottonwood, Idaho, when he joined the Army in the fall of 1943. By the time the
war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, Abbl had landed on Omaha Beach during the
Invasion of Normandy, had helped liberate Paris, and was with some of the first
troops to discover the horrors of the notorious German concentration camp at
Dachau.
Abbl is now 89 years old and living in North Pole with his
wife, Geraldine. Though neither he nor his wife play any musical instruments,
their home is filled with superbly crafted mandolins, violins and miniature
guitars, all embellished with delicate scrollwork painting along the edges. A
hand-painted plaque next to his wife’s computer depicts two bears under a
painted banner reading “Do I love you or do I not? I used to know, but I
forgot.” The instruments and decorations were all made by Abbl, who seems
simultaneously embarrassed and proud as he shows off his handiwork.
Seated at his kitchen table, which was covered with war
photos, Abbl spoke matter-of-factly about his wartime experience. He recalled
his first time in battle with a robust and deep voice that belied his age.
“I was excited. Was I frightened? No. I’m not that type of a
person to get frightened.” He chuckled. “It didn’t bother me that much.”
D-Day
Abbl, who had done some telephone line work before joining
up, was assigned to the 92nd Signal Battalion, Company C. After training at
Camp Maxey, Texas, he and his company were shipped to New York, then Ireland,
and then England.
“We stayed there until we got ready to ship out,” Abbl said.
The “shipping out” that Abbl referred to so casually was the
Allied invasion of Normandy, otherwise known as D-Day. More than 160,000
British and American troops landed on the coast of Normandy, France, on June 6,
1944, in what was, and still is, the largest amphibious assault in world
history. Abbl’s company was assigned to Omaha Beach, one of five code-named
sections of a five-mile stretch of coastline. Heavy seas and strong German fortifications
and resistance combined to make Omaha Beach one of the deadliest battlegrounds
of the war, but, as luck would have it, Abbl’s company landed later in the
morning and suffered fewer casualties as a result.
“There was a few dead bodies around that we had to kind of
push out the way so we could hit the beach. The Germans was gone pretty well by
the time we got in there. They shot the hell out of people before we got there,
but once we got established they’d already retreated,” Abbl said.
One of the other companies encountered difficulties and
Abbl’s company was sent in to help.
“I was company C. Company A, they was ahead of us. We hit
this crossroad, we was gonna go straight through, they told us they was blocked
down there so we had to go down there. That was at night time and that’s when
the planes hit us. The big bombers,” Abbl said.
“See, they’d drop the flares down so they could see, but
then the gunners, they’d shoot them out. Finally they did get one lit that we
couldn’t hit, and that lit us up so they could see where we was at. We got hit
pretty bad. We all got off the truck and went up in the hillside and stayed
back there until it was all over. But they never hit our truck or nothin’. And
we was lucky enough that nobody got hurt then.”
Memories of France
Signal Corps companies were responsible for stringing,
testing and repairing telephone wire from the front lines to headquarters. Abbl
had been a corporal when his company landed in Normandy, but was promoted to
sergeant several weeks later. The original sergeant was removed because he went
searching for alcohol and was not there to command the company, so Abbl was
given his position, he said.
As sergeant, Abbl made sure that the telephone lines were
laid out and tied correctly and that “when we went out we had enough wire to go
from here to there.” The company would typically lay the wire on the ground,
unfurling it from a large reel mounted on the back of a two-and-half-ton Jimmy
truck. They were supposed to gather the line as the battlefront moved, but “if
there were too many Germans around, why we’d let it lay and just keep on
going,” Abbl said.
Being in the Signal Corps meant that Abbl was often in the
thick of fighting. Abbl said he can’t recall all of the battles he was in, but
one stands out in his mind. After French Resistance fighters were joined by
French troops and the U.S. Third Army under General Patton, Paris was liberated
from an occupying German garrison on Aug. 25, 1944. Abbl’s battalion was with
the Third Army when they entered the city.
“We took Paris. People was always afraid of everybody, with
the military and all that. It was different with us Americans — they was glad
to see us. Any town we took, when we come in, they was all glad to see us. Some
of them wanted to shake hands,” Abbl said.
Abbl said he has fond memories of the French countryside,
and he describes with amusement a typical French farmhouse of the time, with
the bottom level devoted both to housing farm animals and to making wine and
spirits.
“Practically every house had a winery. They’d make their own
whiskey and everything right there. Every time, in the morning for breakfast,
they’d always have a shot of whiskey, along with their coffee,” Abbl said,
shaking his head.
Dachau
The last days of the European war were played out during the
unseasonably cold spring of 1945. As Allied and Soviet troops overran Germany
in late April, the depravity of the Third Reich was revealed to the world.
Abbl’s company was one of the first to arrive at Dachau, located about 10 miles
northwest of Munich in southern Germany. Dachau was the first German
concentration camp, having been established by the Nazi Party in 1933 to house
political prisoners and Jews. At the time of it’s liberation on April 29, 1945,
approximately 32,000 Polish, Russian, French, Yugoslav, Jewish and Czech
prisoners were interned there.
Abbl described the scene as he leafed through photos, taken
by the photography section of the 92nd Battalion, showing emaciated bodies
spilling out of boxcars and piled haphazardly on the ground.
“This stuff here, I walked through this stuff. And these
people, some of them was still moanin’ and groanin,’ thrown in there like
that,” Abbl said. “They had people there, live people, taking them apart,
pullin’ the bones apart to see how long their bones would last. How far they
could pull them apart, see how long it took to break them. The people was still
alive. You might not believe that, but it’s true.”
Though conditions at the camp were nightmarish, Abbl claims
that he’d seen so much death “on the way” that it didn’t bother him too much.
He points to another gruesome picture with one calloused finger.
“Here’s another place where they took them and threw them in
the forest and burned them. That’s everyday stuff for them, that’s what it was.
And that’s the way them people looked, nothing but skin and bones. Even the
live ones looked just like that,” Abbl said.
He reached down and picked up several items from a shelf.
“I’ll show you some remembrances of the German Army,” he said. He lay a heavy,
silver metal swastika ornament on the table, followed by a Nazi dagger in its
scabbard. The dagger’s brown wooden handle bears the Nazi eagle emblem, and on
its slightly tarnished blade was engraved the Sturmabteilung, or Stormtrooper,
motto.
“Alles fur Deutschland,” it says. Everything for Germany.
War’s end
Abbl returned to his hometown after the war and worked as a
logger. He married Stella, a girl he met through a fellow soldier, and together
they raised six children. He came to Alaska in the mid-1980s to try his hand at
gold mining, settling outside of Wasilla. Stella died after 58 years of
marriage, and Abbl moved to North Pole after meeting Geraldine, his second
wife. He is a tall man whose only sign of infirmity is the back brace he has
worn since injuring his back while stringing telephone line shortly before
being sent home from the war. He has not kept in touch with the men from his
company, he said, and sometimes wonders what happened to them. This thought
prompts a final war story.
“We ended up in Salzburg, Austria, when the war ended.
Salzburg had some really beautiful homes all in there, and all these big shots,
these Germans, they run all the people out of there and they took the big
houses,” he said.
The American forces were ejecting the Germans from these
houses when they encountered what Abbl characterizes as behavior typical of
Nazis.
“We opened the door, we heard some ‘bang, bang, bangs,’ and
we didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “We went in there and the (German)
guy and his wife and two kids? He’d shot all four of them. His family and then
himself. The German bigshot, shot them right there. That’s the way they lived.”
Contact staff writer Dorothy Chomicz at 459-7590.
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