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‘They gave us our freedom’

Torresdale resident Sir Stanley Wojtusiki was a prisoner of war of the Nazis in World War II for about six months. He shows us the purple heart he recieved while in service. (Maria Pouchnikova)

It was Dec. 18, 1944, and the members of Stanley Wojtusik’s U.S. Army 106th Infantry Division found themselves surrounded by Nazis. Two days earlier, the Germans had launched what would be their last major offensive of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge.

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Wojtusik, a South Philadelphia native who has lived in Torresdale for the last 50 years, was positioned with his 422nd Regiment east of St. Vith, Belgium, in the Schnee Eifel, a densely wooded highland region on the German frontier. The 106th, a newly constituted division of largely untested youngsters, had been on the European continent for less than two weeks.

“For some reason or another, the Germans didn’t come directly at us. They kept hitting our flanks, but not directly,” Wojtusik, 89, said in a recent interview. “Then we learned that they had formed a line in front of us, but didn’t attack. They had formed a horseshoe around us.”

Then the enemy closed the circle. A few German envoys showed up to meet the American commanders, arriving with arms raised and waving white. The message: surrender or be killed. The Americans turned them away.

A day later, on Dec. 19, the messengers returned with the same proposition. The Americans, cut off from the rest of the First Army, with their ammunition and food reserves drained and no sign of reinforcements, surrendered to avert a massacre. More than 6,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. Wojtusik was one of them.

So was Kurt Vonnegut, who drew upon his wartime experiences to pen Slaughterhouse-Five a quarter-century later. Of the surrender, Vonnegut later wrote, “The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks …”

Next week, Wojtusik and his surviving brothers in arms will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the battle, which lasted 40 days and claimed some 19,000 American military lives, 200 British and tens of thousands of Germans. About 3,000 civilians also lost their lives.

“Younger people should know that their fathers and grandfathers made that history, that war. And they gave us our freedom,” Wojtusik told the Northeast Times.

As much as anyone, Wojtusik can be credited with keeping the history on the forefront of contemporary consciousness. He served two tenures as national president of the Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge and led efforts to build the Battle of the Bulge Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, as well as about a dozen additional memorials from Maine to Florida to California, including the “International Monument” at Valley Forge Military Academy and College. Wojtusik, who is of Polish descent, has been knighted in Belgium and Luxembourg for leading those projects.

But 70 years ago, he was sitting on the Western Front, hoping for a relatively quiet winter in the Ardennes forest. Conventional military wisdom said that the conditions would be too harsh and the terrain too rugged for a German advance there. Tanks, personnel carriers and cargo vehicles couldn’t navigate the wooded hills and valleys, they thought, although Hitler’s forces had used the same routes to blitz the Low Countries and France a mere four years earlier.

“We were just holding a line at that point, like the Germans were,” Wojtusik said. “You could take a set of field glasses and watch them shaving, watch them horsing around with each other, just like they could do to us.”

Perhaps a quarter-mile separated the lines, which were just beyond the range of each other’s guns. As a division, the 106th was assigned to defend a front of more than 20 miles, whereas the Army field manual stated that a single division could hold a front of no more than five miles. Yet even after the shelling began on the 16th, American commanders were reluctant to accept the reality.

“It really was a surprise. Eisenhower, when he heard that they were attacking us, he said they were just testing to see where our lines were at,” Wojtusik said.

The 422nd and 423rd Regiments were miles inside Germany when it all began. They were on the right flank of the Panzer-led German advance, which sought to capture the vital crossroads town of Bastogne on the way to the port city of Antwerp. Wojtusik saw the enemy tanks mobilizing, seemingly unaware of his unit’s position.

“Instead of coming toward us, they were going up the road in the distance,” he said.

German soldiers marched among the tanks. The American riflemen began picking them off one-by-one.

“The tanks turned their gun turrets around and started shooting toward where our fire was coming from,” Wojtusik said.

The shells got closer and closer until one struck within a couple feet of Wojtusik, who took shrapnel to his face and eyes. He lost his sight temporarily as the regiment pulled back, only for the Germans to overrun them within a couple of days. Nevertheless, the 106th is credited with disrupting the offensive and buying time for Allied reinforcements to join the fighting.

But the rest of the battle would have to unfold without the 422nd in what would be one of the coldest central European winters on record.

“The cold was just starting to set in and it was getting close to Christmas Eve,” Wojtusik said. “They marched us to a town called Bitburg that had a train station.”

Following that 50-mile trek through the wilderness with no food or rest, the Germans stuffed the prisoners into boxcars. The unmarked cargo train had barely left the station when a Royal Air Force bomber escort spotted it and opened fire, killing dozens of Allied troops.

The Germans ordered the prisoners to carry the wounded back to the station, where German medics and imprisoned American medics worked side-by-side to treat them. Other prisoners stood in a large “PW” formation to inform any other passing air patrols that they were prisoners of war. Wojtusik knew that the only thing keeping any of the prisoners alive was their potential value as bargaining chips.

He was taken hundreds of miles deeper into Germany to a POW camp near Bad Orb, where he was placed on work detail. After about a month, the Germans moved Wojtusik to another camp near Dresden, where his daily ration was one liter of “soup” that he describes as “hot water with grass.” By day, Wojtusik and other prisoners worked on local farms, pilfering eggs, bread and any other sustenance they could get their hands on without being shot.

On Valentine’s Day 1945, the British and Americans controversially bombarded Dresden, a cultural landmark city with debated military significance. About 25,000 civilians perished while much of the historic city burned.

“I guess (the Allies) knew they were making bombs in Dresden,” Wojtusik said. “The following day, we were taken into town and our job was to clear up the dead bodies.”

By May, he had lost 50 pounds. The advancing Russian Army liberated the prisoners that month. After more than five months of internment, Wojtusik was finally able to contact his family to tell them he was still alive. Two of his brothers, Leo and Ted, served in the Navy during the war. Both are deceased. Their sister Emily is 96.

Throughout the ordeal, Wojtusik always knew he and his comrades were in a race against time.

“I never lost faith in victory, but I knew (the battle) meant a lot more killing,” he said. “The Germans sort of asked for it and they got it.” ••

Natural born leader: Stanley Wojtusik is the past national president of the Battle of the Bulge Veterans and was knighted by Belgium and Luxembourg for leading efforts to build the Battle of the Bulge Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. MARIA POUCHNIKOVA / TIMES PHOTO

An American hero: Torresdale resident Stanley Wojtusik was a prisoner of war during World War II. Next week, Wojtusik and his surviving brothers in arms will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which lasted 40 days and claimed some 19,000 American military lives. MARIA POUCHNIKOVA / TIMES PHOTO

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