WWII landmine sweeper who survived it all
Albert Fraind spent three years fighting the Germans in World War II. he took part in eight major campaigns, from North africa to the heart of Germany.
“I WENT away as a kid into the service and came back an old man. I had experienced life in a different way. I saw death firsthand and lived off the land. I knew what it was like to be hungry and mostly to fear the unknown,” remembers Albert Fraind, 99, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, the United States.
“From day to day, you didn’t know if you were going to make it. The first thing that gets into your mind when you see a dead guy is: This could have been me.”
Fraind was inducted into the Army on Oct 16, 1941, when he was 21. His basic training was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and then he was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to the 9th Infantry Division. He was primarily a rifleman, but his specialty was in high explosives. His job was to find mines. He was at Fort Bragg when the Pearl Harbor attack happened.
“Most of the soldiers in my outfit, the 15th Engineer Combat Battalion, were from New England. They were really nice guys, working stiffs like I was, punched a clock.
“When my squad looked for mines, we’d have four guys with mine detectors, and we’d be about 10 feet apart. We would scan the ground, and when we found a mine, we would mark it with a rod and a flag that said Mine. We’d open up a lane. Then the rest of our outfit would come in and they’d disarm the mines or detonate them. They had the really tough part.”
Fraind remembers that the first casualty in his outfit was a medic. He was on his way to a latrine and a sniper picked him off. That happened in Africa.
In Europe, a good friend of Fraind’s from Scranton stepped on an antipersonnel mine and it blew him in half.
“I was in the area when it happened. I heard the explosion, but we heard a lot of explosions and you never knew it was going to be one of us. We covered him with a GI blanket.
“Especially in Europe, we blew up pillboxes (small, concrete forts used as outposts). You couldn’t destroy them, you’d have to have an atomic bomb for that, but we could disable them. We’d destroy the insides.
“There was a pillbox that my squad had to disable. Four of us had wooden boxes of TNT, 40 pounds of it. The pillbox was inactive. If there were Germans in there, they weren’t firing, or they were hiding somewhere else. We had to prepare the fuse, and we had to know how much time we’d have after we set it.
“We timed the fuse for four minutes and lit it. I was the last guy out. We got a good ways from there, and we were looking at our watches. Five, 10 minutes ... and it didn’t go off. I turned to my foxhole buddy and said, “You know what this means.
“Yeah, you’ve got to go down there and see what happened.”
“I said, ‘I can’t ask anybody to go, but I want you to come with me.’ So we went down there.
“I was panicking after we lit the fuse ... I had to get out of there ... and I slammed the door shut and the fuse was under the door. It burned to the door and stopped. It was a heavy steel door, flush with the floor. I should have closed it partly. We relit the fuse and got away from there, and this time the pillbox blew.”
Fearful crossing
Fraind was born in February 1920 in a house on Green Street in Allentown. When he was 10, the family moved to Fifth and Whitehall streets. His parents bought a grocery store there, and they lived on the floor above it.
His mother came from Austria-Hungary and his father, from Slovakia. Both were devout Catholics.
The third child in the family, Fraind had three brothers: Tony, Joe and Bill. They were all in the service, and in combat, too. And they all made it back OK.
After Fraind graduated from Central Catholic High School in 1939, he had to go to work. His brother Joe was in the finance department at Mack Trucks. “I got a job on the assembly line. My brother Tony worked on the assembly line, too. We were making trucks for England,” says Fraind.
He was at Mack until he got drafted.
After his training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he left for North Africa on Oct 15, 1942, on a converted freighter named the Dorothea L. Dix. It took 23 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“We landed in a little coastal town named Safi in French Morocco (Algeria). We were the first American troops there and were assigned to the British 8th Army, commonly referred to as the Desert Rats. My first foxhole buddy was an Englishman.
“Our rations came in tin cans. We just discarded them when we were done. We left a trail, and the Messerschmitts flying over would see where we were because the cans were shining in the sun. The lieutenants told us to bury the cans. Then they changed our meals to K-rations (individual daily combat food rations).”
Danger and D-Day
“The war in Africa was a different kind of war that we weren’t trained to do. In Europe, you knew where the enemy was. In the desert, you had to look for them. We went on patrol at nighttime to make contact.
“At the Kasserine Pass (in Tunisia), we were supporting services on the periphery. We got some of the shelling, but we weren’t in combat. We were behind the guys in the front lines, and when they retreated, we just packed up and followed them,” says Fraind.
After the African campaign, they invaded Sicily. Most of their combat was in the area of Mount Etna, the volcano. It was the woods.
“The Germans were retreating, and the natives took good care of us. They made spaghetti. We paid them with cigarettes, instant coffee, tea bags. We gave the kids chocolate. We dealt with mines, but they weren’t as extensive as they were in Africa and later on in Europe.”
Next, they went on to England to prepare for the invasion of Europe.
“On June 10, 1944, D-Day plus four, we crossed the English Channel on an LCT (landing craft tank), and landed in Normandy at Utah Beach, France.”
The LCT didn’t bring them all the way in to shore. When it stopped, they walked down the ramp into water up to their waists. They held their rifles up. The noise was deafening. There were shells popping all over, dead bodies scattered around.
“The beach was so crowded with men and material, it was impossible to find each other. You didn’t know who was beside you, only that he was a soldier, too. I didn’t see anyone else in my outfit for 10 days. It was chaos.
“I was on the beach and inland a little bit for five days. Then our commanders started pushing us off the beachhead because we had to make way for stuff coming in. We encountered paratroopers hanging in trees – dead. The Germans had killed them in the trees.”
Bitter cold, gnawing hunger
Fraind recalls: “When you’re hungry, that’s an itch you can’t scratch. In France, we were held up at the hedgerows. Kitchen couldn’t get to us. My buddy pulled onions for dinner. Raw onions burn all the way down.
“In the Huertgen Forest (on the border between Belgium and Germany), there was a lot of frostbite. People had frozen feet, and we didn’t eat. Where would we go to eat? Our kitchen couldn’t get up there to feed us.”
Fraind was fortunate. He didn’t get frostbite, and neither did his foxhole buddy Joe Dempsey, a detective from Brooklyn.
“During the Battle of the Bulge, it was 8°F (-13°C) and we couldn’t dig a foxhole. The Germans had artillery that was considered an air burst. It would hit the tree tops. The trees were sometimes sheared in half, and a lot of them were turned over. Joe and I would crawl under these fallen trees in the snow and hug each other to keep warm. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got through that, not only me but all of us there.”
One of the most horrendous noises he experienced was lying on his belly, with shrapnel flying overhead, sucking air. That was horrible, frightful.
At Elsenborn (in Belgium), they came to a forced-labour camp. There were French, Italians and other nationals in there. They would do farmers’ work in the fields. An old guy, a German civilian, ran the place. They didn’t know it was a camp until they got to the gate. Some of the prisoners came running up to them.
“They were the walking dead, skinny as hell. We couldn’t do anything for them. That was for our rear echelon,” says Fraind.
After the Germans were driven off the Rhine at Remagen, they zeroed in on the bridge and fired 88mm shells every 10 minutes. It was harassing fire. The Germans had also rigged the bridge with explosives, but it never blew up. A few days later, the bridge collapsed.
They stayed in the house of a teacher when they were held up in a German town. Despite Nazi propaganda that made German citizens wary of US soldiers, the woman became convinced that Fraind and Sgt Ernie Micka were good people as they did not try to rape or kill her. She revealed that she had hidden her daughter below a trap door in the kitchen. She opened it and let the girl out, and the soldiers gave her cake and candy.
Moving on to the Elbe River, there was hardly any fighting, only snipers.
“We weren’t aware that we shouldn’t be going any farther. The Russians weren’t supposed to go any farther than the Elbe on their side. We got over on the wrong side and our officers stopped us when they got orders from headquarters. We had to turn around and go back.
“The war was over. I got through it all without a scratch – me and my buddy from Brooklyn. We were just plain lucky.”
Home at last
Cpl Fraind earned a Bronze Star medal for meritorious service from January through March 1945 in Germany. He was an outstanding” squad leader, according to the citation, which reads in part: “With utter disregard for personal safety, he repeatedly exposed himself to enemy artillery, mortar, and small arms fire in order to supervise and assist in the removal of enemy mines and roadblocks from forward combat areas.”
Fraind was also awarded a Soldier’s Medal “for heroism not in actual conflict with the enemy” for saving the lives of his swimming buddies in September 1943 off Sicily.
He was honourably discharged at Fort Indiantown Gap on Aug 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
A few months after his return, he married Norma Starneri of Easton. They had met when he was in high school. The couple had two children, Anthony Fraind and Donna LaBuda. Anthony is an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. Norma died in 2016.
Fraind returned to Mack Trucks. In 1950, he joined the Allentown Fire Department and rose to become deputy chief with an office in City Hall. He left the department in 1980 and became Lehigh County’s ombudsman for nursing homes. He worked until he was 84.
His 100th birthday is in February next year. – The Morning Call/Tribune News Service