WWII veterans share tales on Memorial Day

CROMWELL » The three men sat side-by-side on a bench mounted on a trailer.

Two of them are in their 90s, and yet they all remained erect Tuesday night as they watched the ceremony forming to honor the nation’s war dead begin.

They understood only too well the significance of Memorial Day and of the honor: they knew some of those men who died, having served with them in battle.

Hugh Penney was just out of high school in Massachusetts when he was drafted and sent off to become a soldier in 1944. Penney’s unit, the 75th Division, arrived in England in November, and in France on Dec. 13.

It was coming on winter, in what would turn out to be the last full year of World War II.

There had been boastful talk

that “the war would be over by Christmas.” No one had asked the German Army about that, however. Three days after the 75th disembarked at Le Havre, the German Army stormed out of the Ardennes Forest, throwing back understrength and overwhelmed U.S. units.

It was the beginning the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans’ desperate last gasp that evolved into the largest land battle the U.S. fought in Europe in WWII.

Penney had wanted to be a naval aviator. But he was color blind, which ruled out being a pilot. Instead, he wound up as an infantry scout. “They told me because I was color blind, I could see better at night,” he said Tuesday.

The 75th was thrown into battle in an effort to halt the German drive toward the port of Antwerp. “I was wearing a beige uniform — khakis,” Penney recalled. “The Germans may have been at the end of their rope, but they were smart enough to wear white winter uniforms,” Penney said in deadpan.

There was danger everywhere. In the company of a fellow scout, Penney fell into an icy river. “The fellow who was with me, he died,” Penney said.

Penney survived but developed appendicitis. “Don’t ever get appendicitis in the middle of a war,” Penney said. The medic who operated on him “had never done an appendectomy before,” Penney explained.

Although he suffered the effects of frostbite, Penney survived the operation and the battle, which generated 80,000 U.S. causalities. “I turned 19 two days after the war ended,” Penney said.

Discharged in 1946, Penney went on to the University of Chicago and ultimately became a Congregationalist minister. He served in three churches in Connecticut, including 27 years as pastor at First Congregational Church in New Britain.

Now 91, Penney lives at Covenant Village.

Seated beside him as they waited for the ceremony to begin was George Goldfuss, 92, a White Plains, New York, native who now lives in New Britain.

“I graduated high school and went right into the Navy,” Goldfuss said. He remained in the service for six years, serving on board a subchaser in the Pacific.

After he mustered out, Goldfuss returned to suburban Westchester County, where he worked as a prison guard at the Sing Sing Prison in Ossining and as a police officer in Thornwood, his daughter Gail Spada said.

Goldfuss was in the company of his 24-hour-aday caregiver, Holly Ericson. Gail Spada was helping Goldfuss, who is hard of hearing.

Sitting alongside Goldfuss was his half-brother, Paul G. Fischer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served with the First Air Cavalry (Airmobile) in Vietnam, where he flew a UH-1 Huey helicopter gunship.

Fischer’s father was a navigator on a B-24 Liberator bomber who was killed when the plane was shot down over Europe in WWII. When his mother married Goldfuss’s father, Fischer kept his father’s name as a memorial to him.

It was a special day for Fischer; not only was his brother George on one side, his grandniece Courtney Spada was on the other.

Front and center at the ceremony was Ray Michaelis, also known as “Grandpa Ray,” a Farmington resident whose hometown parade was canceled this year. He asked to come to the Cromwell parade, and his daughter Emily brought him — gladly.

Michaelis is another World War II veteran, a radar/navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress assigned to the storied 8th Air Force in England. Michaelis, who is 98, flew 20 plus missions carrying the war to Nazi Germany.

As the ceremony got underway, Hugh Penney was asked what Memorial Day meant to him. He paused for a moment and then said, “I didn’t expect to live this long. I had a lot of close calls.

“There were 75,000 casualties in six weeks (in the Battle of the Bulge). The word ‘slaughter’ comes to mind,” Penney said.

JEFF MILL — THE MIDDLETOWN PRESS At Cromwell’s Memorial Day parade Tuesday evening, American Legion Post Commander Louis Gagnon urged those gathered: “Do not take our freedom for granted. Its price is too well-known. All you have to do is look around.”