The remarkable life of a hero of Normandy
Remembering Augie Herchenratter
WATERLOO — He helped free France from Nazi tyranny, earned a hero’s medal in brutal combat, and met King George VI.
He was a star athlete who played professional hockey and earned more than 100 points in the American Hockey League.
He fell in love in a dangerous time and helped craft a love story lasting 72 years.
Augie Herchenratter, 98, died in his sleep Thursday at Parkwood Mennonite Home after an extraordinary life.
Herchenratter made his name on the darkest, finest day of the Highland Light Infantry, the Galt-based regiment that fought its way through northwest Europe in the Second World War.
On July 8, 1944, at 24, he led a platoon of 28 men into battle against fanatical SS and Hitler Youth troops. He was a sergeant, ordered to capture the village of Buron in Normandy.
It was not by chance that he went into the village as a leader of men.
Before he was a soldier Herchenratter was a fine hockey player, leading his teammates as early as his school days at King Edward in Kitchener.
A minor professional career followed. When he became a soldier in 1942, he trained with some of the best players hockey has ever seen, the famed Kraut Line of the Boston Bruins; Milt Schmidt, Bobby Bauer and Woody Dumart.
Joanne Vaughan knew none of this in 1943, attending a New Year’s Eve dance in England where she lived during the war.
A Canadian soldier asked her to dance. She was 17 and underwhelmed. “No thank you,” she said. The soldier asked if she wanted to come for a drink.
“That was the wrong thing to say because I didn’t drink,” she recalls.
He persisted and later he got her onto the dance floor, where he learned to his surprise that she was a transplanted Canadian.
She agreed to let him walk her home and to visit her again. “That’s how it all started,” she said.
A few months later in Normandy, Herchenratter did not falter, putting his training and leadership to the test.
Moving across an open field, he fired whenever a head popped up from trenches where German soldiers stayed hidden to pick off advancing Canadians.
Bombs and mortar shells rained down. The enemy raked the troops with machinegun fire.
Clearing enemy dugouts, Herchenratter came across an enemy soldier hidden in a trench. He threw a grenade. Nothing! It was a dud. He threw another grenade. Nothing! Another dud. The enemy soldier stood to reach for a grenade of his own. That’s when Herchenratter shot him.
By the time Herchenratter reached the village of Buron, only five of his 28 men were still standing.
His actions there earned him the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the secondhighest award for gallantry in the field after the Victoria Cross.
He earned it for leading his men by example, clearing the enemy from dug-in positions and knocking out enemy machine guns. He reorganized as the men dwindled, assisted the company commander, consolidated whoever was left, and his regiment took the village as ordered.
The Highland Light Infantry had 70 killed and 193 wounded at the battle now known as Bloody Buron.
Eight months later King George VI presented Herchenratter with his medal at Buckingham Palace. Vaughan was there to see her fiancé receive it. She married him days later at 19, after coming to know war almost as terribly as him.
While Augie was away training or fighting, Joanne was dodging German bombs near Portsmouth on the English Channel. At night, she patrolled her yard with buckets of sand to extinguish sparks from enemy firebombs.
At Buckingham Palace, Joanne wore a coat made of wool that her brother Fred sent her from afar, before he was lost at sea on board the last British submarine sunk in the Second World War.
Fred met Augie shortly before sailing to his fate. “You’ve got a real good guy there,” he told her. “Keep him.” And she did.
Lovers in a dangerous time, the couple went on to raise a family of three in Waterloo.
Herchenratter eventually settled into work at Seagram’s Waterloo distillery.
At his memorial Wednesday he’ll receive full military honours from the local Royal Highland Fusiliers.
“He was a role model who inspired successive generations of our soldiers with the legacy of his courage and devotion to duty,” said Lt.-Col Mark Poland, the regiment’s commanding officer.
Many accolades came his way. France awarded him its Legion of Honour in 2014 for helping to liberate the country. Waterloo Region’s Hall of Fame admitted him in 2016.
His children remember him as a sportsman who could lay down the law if he needed to.
He retained the bark of a sergeant even though he never spoke to them about the war when they were growing up.
“He’d tell you that you’ll never get any better if you’re only playing against people you know you can beat,” son Don Herchenratter said.
Joanne, 91, remembers the quiet, private way he committed to his family role. The couple found their balance and for 72 years they kept it.
“I miss him every day,” she said.