SALUTE TO WWII HERO
Hyde Park vet to be honored at Fenway
On a “cold, snowy, freezing” day somewhere in Germany almost a lifetime ago, John Leoncello of Hyde Park jumped into a bomb crater to escape sniper fire and bumped into a war reporter from his hometown paper.
“I couldn’t believe he was on the front lines. There were snipers all over the place,” Leoncello, now 94, said of the scribe from the Boston Evening American, now the Boston Herald.
“He told me his name was Austen Lake and I told him I was from Dana Ave.,” he said, adding they talked about Boston while keeping below the bullets.
All these years later, this Purple Heart recipient is set to be honored Tuesday night at Fenway Park before the Red Sox game for his valor during World War II as a rifleman in Gen. George Patton’s Third Army.
“I feel proud,” Leoncello said yesterday of the invitation to the park. “I’m glad I participated in World War II to save freedom for the people of the United States.”
“We’re told it won’t be on TV,” his wife, Theresa Leoncello, 90, added.
“They are going to honor him as a vet. Our two sons are all excited. God love him. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge,” Theresa added.
The two have been married for 71 years. It seems the visit to Fenway can’t come soon enough for this devoted couple. He starts a sentence and she finishes it. He has a memory, she helps fill it in.
He had a hand in capturing five German soldiers, including an “SS trooper who got mad when I took his hat off when I frisked him.” His squad had jumped up from a ditch to subdue them.
“I was wounded in Dusseldorf. I caught some shrapnel in the leg,” he added. “I hopped along to the first aid house and then they sent me right back to my squad.
“If I couldn’t walk, I hopped on top of a tank to get a ride to the next town. Then I’d stop and fight again,” he said.
Under Patton, he was in and out of Germany and Belgium in the later stages of the war.
Early German gains in the Battle of the Bulge — Hitler’s last-gasp offensive — were wiped out when Patton’s Third Army tanks “opened up a hole for us,” as Leoncello said, freeing U.S. troops pinned down in Bastogne, a small Belgian town.
He said it was “cold, snowy, freezing” in that winter of 1944 and 1945.
That’s where he bumped into the Boston reporter, who made this modest man a hero back home a few years later writing: “It was Sunday afternoon and snipers were still picking off wary stragglers ... so I joined a doughboy patrol as it wove its way gingerly over the rubble, eyes on the upper windows, rifles at the ready, fingers on the triggers.
“‘Gives you the creeps,’ said Pvt. John Leoncello. “It did!” the author wrote. John’s brother, Sam Leoncello, 86, of Melrose said 36,000 or so Sox fans will see this “hero” Tuesday. “He deserves it,” the Korean war vet added.
He’s a member of the Greatest Generation who are fading into history. The hometown team will give him a well-deserved salute one more time.