Veterans Day

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

“Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.” – Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions, p. 6.

Today is Veterans Day.

I am not sure what that means. Wikipedia tells me that Veterans Day is “an annual United States holiday honoring military veterans.” (It also says something about eating ravioli.) To me this seems a stupid thing to dedicate a single day to doing; in the United States, elsewhere but especially (to me) on Twitter, it also makes people say ignorant things.

This quote abounded on Twitter today, tweeted and retweeted all over my feed: "If you're reading this thank a teacher, if you're reading this in English thank a veteran." I suppose all veterans, of all wars, ever, encouraged the use of English?

That statement seems doubly empty to me, because I had taught myself to read (out of spite; the adults were keeping secrets from me and I found that unacceptable) by the time I was four years old.

As I was saying, about dedicating a single day to veterans: I feel that if one wishes to honor military veterans, one should do so all the time. Maybe then there would be a list on the Internet of the men in the regiment in which I am told my grandfather served. Maybe VA hospitals would be in better condition. A quick trip to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs website informs me that “Currently, NEPEC estimates that approximately 27,000 new Veterans request services for homelessness each year.”

Shameful.

Veterans Day, indeed.

I feel I have been celebrating this day – by which I mean honoring veterans, or at least thinking about them more than I usually would – at length of late. Yes, my grandfather is especially important to me (after all, some 25% of the DNA in me is, in fact, his), but what of the others? It is with this thought in mind that I have decided to go ahead, without any certainty that my grandfather was in this regiment, and share with you what the 273rd regiment of the 69th division did in the Second World War.

I have debated, too, whether I should paraphrase my source or copy and paste. This piece I am writing, it is like a quilt: it has all these different passages, and hopefully I can stitch them together into a complete, at least quasi-coherent whole.

First things first, the information from the United States Army website:
The 69th Infantry Division was a division of the United States Army during World War II. It was known by the nickname “The Fighting Sixty-ninth” and fought in the European theater. The 69th Division was activated on May 15th of 1943; they were sent overseas to England on December 12th of 1944 and entered combat on February 11th of 1945 (in what the website refers to as “Rhineland” but I believe is actually Germany). They were in combat for 86 days and suffered 1,506 casualties – defined on the site as the “number of killed, wounded in action, captured, and missing.”

The Division is the larger unit, so I will continue in the vein of this larger unit, speaking of their actions more generally, before moving into a discussion of the 273rd Regiment later.

Wikipedia disagrees with the Army website right out of the gate, saying, “The 69th Infantry Division was a formation of the United States Army formed during World War II. It should not be confused with the much older and still existing 69th Infantry Regiment (United States) which is the famed Fighting 69th.” Who to believe? The article goes on to reiterate much of what the Army site stated, adding that the Division returned to the United States on September 13th, 1945, and was inactivated on September 16th that same year. Also on the Wikipedia site is what it calls a “combat chronicle,” more of a play-by-play of the action that this regiment saw in the war.

“The 69th Infantry Division arrived in England, 12 December 1944, where it continued its training. It landed in Le Havre, France, 24 January 1945, and moved to Belgium to relieve the 99th Division, 12 February, and hold defensive positions in the Siegfried Line. The Division went over to the attack, 27 February, capturing the high ridge east of Prether to facilitate use of the Hellenthal-Hollerath highway. In a rapid advance to the east, the 69th took Schmidtheim and Dahlem, 7 March. The period from 9 to 21 March was spent in mopping up activities and training. The Division resumed its forward movement to the west bank of the Rhine, crossing the river and capturing the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, 27 March. It relieved the 80th Division in Kassel, 5 April, seized Hannoversch Münden on the 8th and Weissenfels on the 14th against sharp opposition, and captured Leipzig, 19 April, following a fierce struggle within the city. Eilenburg fell, 23 April, and the east bank of the Mulde River was secured. Two days later, Division patrols in the area between the Elbe and the Mulde Rivers contacted Russian troops in the vicinity of Riesa and again at Torgau on Elbe Day. Until VE-day, the 69th patrolled and policed its area. Occupation duties were given to the Division until it left for home and inactivation 7 September.”

The Wikipedia article cites two main sources, including an online reproduction of The Army Almanac: A Book of Facts Concerning the Army of the United States, which was published in 1950, and http://www.69th-infantry-division.com/ which my father sent me in an email after I stumbled upon it in my own research. This site seems to be the definitive source for information about the 69th Division, and has in fact already been referred to and described in this essay. I would like to get into it in more detail, but I feel that should occur in a different section of the paper.