THE REFUGEES - Spring, 1945

In the Spring of 1945, following the Battle of the Bulge and during the Rhineland and Central European campaigns, the 357th Antiaircraft Arillery Searchlight Battalion was constantly on the move. With the German Luftwaffe no longer a threat to Allied troops, our antiaircraft guns and searchlights were employed wherever commanders felt they could best serve -- in those closing months of the war, against V-2 rocket bombs which still fell on Antwerp, as illumination at the Rhine for night crossings of the river, as support field artillery. We were attached to different commands, British as well as American. Men and materiel from Headquarters and A, B, and C Batteries were often widely dispersed, requiring much vehicular travel over country roads, through the leveled towns and skeletal cities of Belgium and Germany. The deeper we plunged into Deutschland, the more our routes were crowded with human flotsam, endless streams of homeless wandering, stumbling, fleeing across landscapes of devastation.

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The Allies labeled them Displaced Persons (DPs). The perfect designation, as most of us did not know from whence they came or where they were headed. Dressed in rags or covered by faded finery they'd managed to salvage, carrying boxes, valises, even articles of furniture on their backs, their ranks composed mostly of women, children and the elderly, all shared exhaustion, confusion and hunger. Few escaped despair -- that most pitiful of human emotions hauntingly seared into hollowed eyes which looked on a world turned incomprehensible.

Working in Battalion Headquarters, often billeted in appropriated private homes or public buildings, I too often confronted refugees who broke ranks with their cortege to seek help under the American flag. I met nationals from all of Europe, recently liberated from labor camps, hoping to find their ways home. German civilians who had fled east to avoid advancing US troops only to be faced with the prospect of meeting Russians, whom they feared more, and were now stranded between both armies. Military deserters, Germans who'd managed to cross into Allied lines, sought sanctuary as prisoners of war. Teenagers desperately seeking families lost or dead, pleading for work, food and shelter. Young women ready to sell their bodies for survival. And the elderly, alone or in pairs, disoriented, babbling, weeping. Languages I'd never heard, questions I couldn't answer, supplications I couldn't meet, tears I couldn't dry.

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Naught to do but turn them away, point them in the direction of the long lines from which they'come. Sometimes it would be dusk, close to curfew, when the last of them left Headquarters. And violation of curfew meant that anyone on the roads after dark could be shot on sight. A few times, alone over paperwork during the night at Headquarters, when I heard shots fired, I thought of the desolate souls my comrades and I had watched stumble into setting suns.

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WARTIME LINKS
Children of War
Christmas 1944, Southampton
Maman - Belgium, February 1945

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