The photo on this page is of my dad, Ben Barlas, on the right, with Richard Baron, his lieutenant during World War II. It was taken in 1989 upon their return to Reipertswiller, France, where they and their comrades from the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Regiment received a rousing welcome. I was fortunate to witness that warm greeting and learn more about my dad’s military experience when I accompanied him on that trip.
My 21-year-old father had just been drafted and quickly inserted into the 157th Regiment that January, as soon as he arrived on a ship from England. He was an ammunition carrier. He must have been scared as heck as he scurried into one of the foxholes in the ridge about town. Colonel Felix Sparks commanded the 157th, which was part of the Seventh Army's 45th Division, known as the Thunderbirds. Author Alex Kershaw immortalized Sparks in the 2013 book The Liberator, which has an extensive section on the Reipertswiller battle.
As a young boy, I used to love to climb up into the attic of our house and look at the green, woolen army uniform my father had packed away there. The shiny medals on the jacket captured my eye and my imagination. The uniform said "adventure" to me. I was too young to understand its broader context and meaning. My father occasionally dished out more substantial tidbits as I got older. But the full story of dad's military career spilled out when he took me back to Reipertswiller on that reunion tour.
I'll never forget the tour bus entering the small, one-street town. U.S. flags were flying from the balustrades of apartment buildings and shops. People were hanging out of windows waving. The welcome sent shivers up my spine. I can only guess how it affected members of the 157th as they gingerly unloaded themselves from the bus in the town's small main square before the ceremony.
After the mayor's remarks and more cheering from the town's residents, the boys from the battalion circulated and schmoozed. Then we got back on the bus and took a windy road up the hill behind the town to the site of that ferocious battle that took place between four days in mid January 1945.
We were there during September. So it was nowhere nearly as bitter cold in the high hills as it was 44 years earlier as members of D, K, L and I companies of the 3rd Battalion hunkered down in the foxholes under booming incoming artillery. Germans quickly surrounded the men of those four companies. Kershaw writes that some of the Germans were from the 6th SS Nord Division, which had been accused of a massacre of American POWs on December 17, 1944 at Malmedy, during an offensive in the Ardennes.
Unbelievably, the foxholes my father had talked about over the years were still there on that hilltop above Reipertswiller when the bus dropped us off in the heavily forested terrain. The German artillery bombardment had been so intense that dad had been unable to leave his foxhole for the four days, a doubly unfortunate situation since the Germans had previously occupied the hillside and used my father's foxhole as a latrine.
On the morning of January 20, the Germans gave the surrounded companies until 5 p.m. to surrender. The beleaguered Thunderbirds originally voted to decline the offer. But as the day wore on, they realized they had no choice. As the white flags attached to rifles were raised from the American foxholes, the German artillery went silent. As my father gingerly climbed out of his foxhole (he had suffered frostbite), he took off his dog tags, which identified his religion as Jewish, and tossed them away. On our return in 1989, he looked for them. He had no luck with his search, not surprisingly.
The Germans actually treated the 400 prisoners well. The captured Americans boarded a train to Fallingbostal in northern Germany and the camp called Stalag 11B. Field Marshall Montgomery liberated the camp in May 1945.
I never served in the military; I chose not to enlist and had too high of a lottery number to be drafted and serve in Vietnam. But witnessing the scene of so much fear and bravery helped turn a certain distrust for the military, obtained during the Vietnam War, into admiration.
The Greatest Generation was aptly named. Though political views of the wars we fight today vary, there is no doubt about the courage of all the men and women who fight brutal battles on behalf of this country in far-off, inhospitable places. I hope they live to take reunion trips with their children.
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