BELGIUM/ GERMANY: Battlefield return brings closure for WW2 veterans

A U.S. organisation is providing World War II veterans with an opportunity to revisit the sites where they fought during the Second World War, to bring their memories back and enable them to put the past behind them. Over fifty years after the end of the Second World War, the Ardennes region, a hilly terrain stretching through parts of Belgium, Luxembourg and France, is hosting the return of U.S. veterans who took part in the fighting. All year round, the memorials and battlefields are visited by men and the families of those who fought in World War II. In Bastogne, a quiet town in the Belgium Ardennes, the Monument of Mardasson commemorates 76, 890 US soldiers who were killed, wounded or reported missing. In the shape of a star, the memorial is dedicated to the friendship between American and Belgian peoples. The Battle of the Bulge (Battle of the Ardennes in French), named after the dent German forces made in US-defended lines, caused the most casualties among American forces. On December 16, 1944, Adolf Hitler launched a last-ditch counter-offensive in the Ardennes Forest. German troops marched onto Bastogne towards the Meuse river aiming to push to the North of Belgium and take Antwerp and its harbour leading to the North Sea. The German attack caught unprepared American troops by surprise and the battle raged in freezing conditions for over a month before the Allies re-established their positions. Many soldiers froze to death. It has taken more than 60 years, but gazing down a ridge over a former battlefield near Germany's border with Belgium, Stan Tuhoski believes he has finally found closure from the greatest trauma of his life. Now a frail 81-year-old, the Polish-American was just a teenager when he was caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest single engagement for US forces in World War Two. Captured by German troops as they overran his raw, unprepared division in December 1944, he survived death marches and the horrors of prison camps, but returned home broken and verging on suicide. ''Oh I had to spend some time in a veterans' psychiatrist because you know my brain wasn't perfect. You know, I go sometimes sit down and cry and cry and cry. Can't stop,'' he said, explaining how he needed psychological counselling to allow him to stabilise his life and raise a family, including two sons who were to die in the American war in Vietnam a generation later. But it took a return to the rolling forested battlefield of the Ardennes to come to terms fully with his wartime nightmare. ''But I like to see where I was fighting you know where I was fighting. And that's cleared my mind, you know, I get it out of my mind now. Before I keep thinking, you know, what, what am I doing over there, why did I do what I did you know,'' Tuhoski said during the trip organised by the Greatest Generations Foundation, a non-profit organisation established in 2004. Tuhoski and nineteen more veterans were invited by The Greatest Generations Foundation, a Colorado-based organisation that has so far helped six groups of about 20 World War Two veterans return to Europe. Timothy Davis, the charity's President and CEO, said that with America's 1.8 million World War Two veterans dying at the rate of 1,500 a day, time was running out for those who want to make similar trips before they die. Davis said the foundation had a waiting list of 11,000 veterans and aimed to expand its trips to Vietnam and Korea. But with each visit to Europe costing 3,000 US dollars per head it currently had only enough funds for two more groups. It aimed to raise more money from big corporations, not just in the United States, but in the European Union and the Pacific. This latest trip began with a visit to D-Day's Omaha beach in Normandy, France before heading eastwards to the Ardennes. After the Ardennes, the twenty veterans attended a memorial ceremony for the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Several hundred people took part in the ceremony on Sunday (May 13th). They laid flowers and took part in a special religious service in memory of those who lost their lives in the Nazi camp. American soldiers liberated the concentration camp on April 29th 1945, among them George Bullene, who was a doctor in the 42nd infantry division of the US Army at the time. He said he remembers the sign on the gate saying 'Arbeit macht frei' (work makes free), but that otherwise it was very different to how he had seen the concentration camp. "It was a lot different, there were a lot of railcars with bodies and this sort of thing," he told Reuters More than six decades later Bullene said it was still distressing to remember it. "I am rather emotionally disturbed still. I have many pictures at home that depict this as it was then, and I have feelings that it was a horrible, horrible thing to have ever been allowed to happen," he said. In the 12 years of its existence 200,000 people were imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp, more than 43,000 of them died. At the time of its liberation, over 67,000 prisoners were in the camp.

ITN Source | May 19, 2007

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