Tis the Season

I am a year-round runner and in the absence of snow and ice on a December late afternoon, my mind began to wander through my more recent and distant past, pieces of my life intertwining with world wars and my mostly-German heritage.

I remembered me and my older brother, Tim, crowding close to the big speakers of our parents’ console record-player waiting for “O Tannenbaum” and the tolling church bells to kick into the Royal Guardsmen’s Snoopy versus the Red Baron holiday tune “Snoopy’s Christmas.”

With my big brother, Tim, at Christmas (Floyd & Betsy Light photo).

By my second-grade holiday season, I was standing in the Reese Elementary School gym singing “Stille nacht, heil'ge nacht…Alles schläft; einsam wacht…” My Lower Michigan home area contained a healthy population of people, including many farm families, of German extraction, and was also home to Frankenmuth, self-dubbed Michigan’s Little Bavaria (minus the mountains, lore and grandeur of the real thing). Funny how those German-language lines from “Silent Night” have stayed with me all these years, especially since German was the only foreign language offered when I eventually reached Reese High School and “nein” was my feeling about learning it at the time.

In that pre-computer era, my parents took advantage of a magazine ad offering research of family names, which is how the Floyd Lights learned their ancestors were Germans named Licht (the German word for Light). The quest ended there due to the research firm’s request for additional funds to dig deeper and a lack of immediate resources available to us, the general public.

Back in December 2015 beneath darkening skies, I continued my run along the Lake Superior shoreline, thoughts jumping ahead through years and unexpected turns my life had taken. Because of My Boys, those fallen local soldiers of World War II, I had been to Germany—several times. Turns out the language barrier is not a barrier when your American tour guide speaks fluent German or when today’s German young people almost always speak English. (In the absence of either of the above, enough middle ground can seemingly always be found to resolve the issue at hand.)

“Snoopy’s Christmas” led me to a 1997 Garth Brooks song called “Belleau Wood,” with words about a Christmas truce and a German soldier “singing a song that we all knew.” In reality, the Battle of Belleau Wood took place in June 1918, and while it involved U.S. troops, it did not involve the Christmas holiday.  

Fall back a few years, minus the Americans, and you have the real Christmas truce, a series of widespread but unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front around Christmas 1914. Says Wikipedia, “In the week leading up to the holiday, German and British soldiers crossed trenches to exchange seasonal greetings and talk. In areas, men from both sides ventured into no man's land on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to mingle and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps, while several meetings ended in carol-singing. Men played games of football with one another, giving one of the most enduring images of the truce.”

Reaching the mid-point of my self-propelled journey, I 180’d just past the Lake Superior Theatre to return in the direction of the Coast Guard station and McCarty’s Cove. Meanwhile, those famous truces of World War I brought me to pondering a lesser known truce some 30 years hence as the Americans confronted the well-dug-in Germans on their home turf in the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. Beginning in mid-September 1944 and dragging on through January 1945, the engagement encompassed the Hürtgenwald area of Germany near the Belgian border and proved a meat-grinder, as American commanders sent in division after division only to see them decimated. Imagine an Omaha Beach that lasted for months instead of a day—an Omaha Beach with tree bursts. 

 

The towering trees of the Hürtgen Forest, present-day. (Jim Koski photo)

Wikipedia describes the vicinity of this battle as fiercely defended due to its employment by the enemy as a staging area for Operation Wacht am Rhein (better known by most Americans today as the Battle of the Bulge), and because of its proximity to Roer River dams that could conveniently be used to flood the Allies out of their advance into a major German industrial area.

In the center of that horrible, muddy place was the Kall River valley and a small stone bridge, the setting for an unexpected and impromptu truce led by combat medics from both sides of the conflict. History.net recaps what occurred during that November 7th, 1944 ceasefire, as recounted by German First Lieutenant Heinz Munster. “Between deserted and destroyed tanks [lay] dead and wounded from both sides. Friend and foe hid in their foxholes, totally wet, hungry and demoralized. The fighting was briefly halted, and each side was busy retrieving their dead and wounded.”

American Army medics at work in the Hürtgen.

The ceasefire was more short-lived than it might have been. Said Munster, “We learned that the Americans went on the offensive from Vossenack. Bad timing indeed since our own artillery was ordered to cease [firing] for the duration of our negotiation mission. We had to end our attempt [at negotiation] at once in order to enable our regiment to become fully operational again. The American officer still shook hands in parting with us and expressed his hope that we may see each other again someday under less threatening circumstances.”

Hürtgenwald mud.

According to Gerald Astor’s book The Bloody Forest—Battle for the Huertgen: September 1944-January 1945, the ultimate price of “victory” was 24,000 dead, wounded, captured or missing GIs with 9,000 more disabled by frozen or wet feet, respiratory ailments, and other nonbattle injuries. Victims of that hell from my Upper Peninsula county of Marquette perished at places named Mausbach (Sgt. Hero Karvela), Schevenhütte (Sgt. Bill McKinney), and Kleinhau (tanker Sgt. Peter Paris), and in a massive enemy mine field known as Wilde Sau (Pvt. Axel Sirtola).

A November 2006 Marquette Mining Journal newspaper article about my summer research trip to Europe led to a phone call from a World War II veteran in nearby Ishpeming. Warren Keto (August 21, 1921 – March 19, 2012), part of a 60mm mortar crew, served in a 78th Infantry Division company assigned to do battle in the Hürtgen in December 1944. His outfit entered combat on the 13th, lacking winter clothing and finding life in a foxhole very cold. In Warren’s experience, weeks went by without a hot meal. He said that in over ten days in his foxhole at Kesternich, Germany, besides canned rations, he only received a lone, cold pork chop from a field kitchen. Warren Keto’s E Company, 309th Infantry Regiment, which entered the Hürtgen Forest fighting with 187 men, left with 33. 

Hürtgen Forest U.S. Army veteran Warren Keto & his "Ike" jacket, Fall 2006. (Jim Koski photo)

Making my way from McCarty’s Cove toward Shiras Park and my final leg home, I reflected on my wanderings through Germany military cemeteries and studying of World War II listings of war dead in German communities. I sometimes see a last name I know from growing up in Reese or from living in the Upper Peninsula. Of course, I am always watching for my own last name, and on August 31st, 2008, in the Hürtgen/Eifel German World War II Cemetery my husband Jim and I stumbled upon the grave of Jakob Licht. I attempted to translate the search feature on the German War Graves Commission’s website upon returning home, but was never able to successfully search for Jakob’s name.

Hürtgen/Eifel German World War II Cemetery, August 2008. (Jim Koski photo)

The 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for many amazing things, including olive branches being offered to old foes. In 1993 a shared German/American memorial plaque was placed in a park in Kesternich, Germany recognizing the U.S. Army’s 78th Infantry Division and the German 272nd Volksgrenadier Division. Jim and I took photographs to share with Warren Keto in 2008. In late August 2011, our young Belgian friend and guide Carl Wouters led us to a second shared memorial, this one dated 2004, commemorating December 1944’s battle for Grosslangenfeld (Großlangenfeld), Germany.

Above & Below: German/American shared memorial, Kesternich, Germany, 2008.

Above & Below: German/American shared memorial, Grosslangenfeld, Germany, 2008. (Jim Koski photos)

 

The community of Grosslangenfeld is only about 10 kilometers east of the Belgian border (making for some reluctant enemies in times of war), and is less than 70 kilometers and just over an hour’s drive south of Kesternich...

My closing mental paragraph was marked when this runner made her last turn. As usual the dog on the corner was barking, jarring me from my distant thoughts. I was home.