Posted by Allan Wilford Howerton Link: A 335th Infantry Story
on May 2, 2009, 4:29 pm, in reply to "My dad"
172.129.199.204
The 84th Division roster lists Sergeant Richard M. Hartsock of Washington, D. C. as a member of Company E, 335th Infantry. He served in all three of the division’s campaigns (Rhineland, Ardennes, and Central Europe). The E-335 roster lists two soldiers from Wisconsin, Ralph H. Smith of Wauwatosa and Andrew Kukec of West Allis. Eighteen men from Company E-335 are noted as having been killed in action.
The June 29, 1997 issue of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported the death of Andrew Kukec, Sr. on June 25, 1997. Survivors included a son, Andrew Kukec, a daughter, Mary (Tom) Roeglin, and six grandchildren. The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) confirms the death of Andrew Kukec (DOB: Nov. 12, 1920) on June 25, 1997 in Milwaukee.
The nightmares your father experienced are common to many of us. I have suffered them off and on and dentists have often pointed out that my teeth are pretty well ground down. Your father was not alone in not speaking about the war except in very casual terms. Few did until very late in life and some not even then. None of us were heroes. As your dad said, most of us simply endured hoping to stay alive.
Yeah, lots of interesting things went on along the West Bank of the Elbe River forty-five kilometers from Berlin where we met the Russians. For the most part we drank whatever we could get our hands on and took thousands of German prisoners fleeing toward Allied lines as the Red Army approached hot on their tails. At night we fired tracers into the sky in celebration of the war’s end, thankful that we never got the order to cross the Elbe to try and beat the Russians into Berlin. After the Siegfried Line, the Belgian winter, the Roer, Rhine, and Weser River crossings, and the trek across Central Germany we had had quite enough.
Your dad probably knew the young Henry Kissinger who was an enlisted man in the 84th and who also interrogated German prisoners.
Thank you very much for the remembrances of your father.
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