Frank Towers
Soldier Born: June 13, 1917; Died: July 4, 2016 WHEN Frank Towers, who has died aged 99, stepped ashore from the ocean liner-turned-troopship SS Argentina at Greenock on February 22, 1944, they were his first steps on European soil. His welcome from Scottish folks on the shore would become one of his most abiding memories of the Second World War.
He was in charge of unloading his division’s equipment and ammunition and getting on to freight trains from Glasgow Central to Bognor Regis in preparation for D-Day. As an infantryman with the famous US 30th Infantry Division, he would go on to land at Omaha Beach in Normandy and fight through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and on to Berlin.
But his most abiding and most horrific memory happened on the way to the German capital. It was on April 13, 1945, that a reconnaissance patrol attached to his division came across a group of weak, hungry and desperate civilians who had escaped from a Nazi train taking them from the BergenBelsen concentration camp to another camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) in German-occupied Czechoslovakia where they feared they would be exterminated. The escapees led the American troops to the train, which was on a siding at Farsleben, near Magdeburg.
When First-Lieutenant Towers, by then a liaison officer for the 30th Infantry Division, got there a few hours later, the train’s crew and SS guards had fled but the Americans found 2,500 Jewish men, women and children on board, most of them locked in cattle wagons where they had spent six days and nights, some 75 to a wagon with a single bucket for sanitation. It became known as “the Farsleben death train” and Towers was possibly the last survivor of the US soldiers involved in saving most of the 2,500. (Around 20 had already died on board).
Right up until Mr Towers’s death, many survivors of the train, and their sons, daughters and grandchildren remained in touch with him and he was a regular and welcome guest in both Israel and Normandy. He had co-founded an association in Normandy called Les Fleurs de la Mémoire (The Flowers of Memory) which, until this day, decorates with flowers the graves of his comrades of “Old Hickory” in cemeteries in France and Belgium. Mr Towers himself returned to Normandy well into his nineties, including at the 70th anniversary commemorations in June 2014.
Reaching Berlin and hearing of Hitler’s surrender was the culmination of Mr Towers’ wartime ambition. But it was the mixture of the horror and joy of liberating those Jews that defined his war.
“They had been packed in like sardines for six days, 75 to a wagon, with a five-gallon bucket for sanitary purposes,” Mr Towers recalled in an interview. “So they eventually had had to relieve themselves where they stood. Some of our boys puked from the stench. They wanted to hug our guys as liberators but they were covered in lice and fleas. We had to turn away. When our engineers eventually set up showers for them, they were terrified. They had heard of the “showers” in the gas chambers. Some of our guys stripped to their underwear and took showers to show them it was OK. We sprayed them with DDT, which was all we had, burned their clothes and began requisitioning clothes and food for them from local German farmers around the nearby town of Hillersleben.”
After the turn of the millennium, Mr Towers, on his Old Hickory memorial website (www.oldhickory.org), wondered if any of the Farsleben death train might still be alive. Eventually, he located no less than 235 survivors or their families, and later met many of them, including a nuclear scientist, doctors, lawyers and other professionals in the US, Israel, Europe and beyond. Some historians say Hitler may have ordered the passengers on the Farsleben train as negotiating pawns to be exchanged for arrested Nazi officers. Whatever the case, the passengers did not know that in April 1945. Nor did Mr Towers and the other liberators.
Frank Winchester Towers was born in Boston, MA, on June 13, 1917, to Everett and Jane Towers (née Winchester). He lived there for 10 years before his family moved to St Johnsbury, VT, where he graduated from the St Johnsbury Academy before working as a claims insurance adjuster. With the winds of war blowing in Europe, he joined the Vermont National Guard and, during training met Floridian Mary Olive Thomas, whom he would wed on 1 March, 1943, in Macon, GA. Having been called up to the army, he was transferred to the 30th Infantry Division, eventually as a First-Lieutenant in its 120th Infantry Regiment. On February 12, 1944, his regiment sailed on the SS Argentina from Boston harbour through a gauntlet of Nazi U-Boats, part of what was possibly the biggest-ever convoy to cross the Atlantic.
Mr Towers’s 120th Regiment of the 30th Infantry Division waded ashore at Omaha beach on July 12, 1944, his 27th birthday and a week after D-Day. In fact, they had first landed by mistake on Utah Beach due to mixed signals among allied officers and commanders, a mistake that would probably have cost them their lives on D-Day itself. As part of M (Heavy Weapons Company) of 120th Regiment, Towers and his comrades first liberated the village of St Jean de Daye before taking part in Operation Cobra in late July 1944 which consolidated the success of the Normandy landings. On 24/25 July, Mr Towers survived devastating “friendly fire” in which US ground forces were hit by carpet bombing raids from the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) meant to hit German frontline troops. The bombs used were far too big and red guiding flares from the ground troops had suddenly been blown in the wrong direction by winds. More than 100 U.S. troops were killed or wounded.
Promoted to liaison officer between divisional and regimental front line headquarters, Mr Towers found himself moving along frontlines to deliver high priority messages and battle plans which he had to memorize in case of capture. That included taking messages to and from his “Old Hickory” comrades who defended Hill 314 at Mortain, Normandy, for six days in August 1944 against three Panzer divisions and 1,000 elite SS troops. It was a key battle which altered the course of the war. Half of the 700 “Old Hickory” men on the hill were killed or wounded.
After the war, Mr Towers, his wife having joined him, was given post-war duties in Frankfurt, in the American zone of occupation, where his first three children were born. Leaving the army with the rank of Captain, he returned to the US, settling in Florida in 1950, where his fourth child was born in Gainesville, and working as an office manager for the University of Florida until his retirement in 1979. A firm believer in “Lest we Forget,” he went on to be the leading historian and supporter of his beloved “Old Hickory.”
He received many awards for his war service and bravery, including the Purple Heart, Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Clusters, the Order of Orange Nassau from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the president of France.
Mr Towers died in Gainesville, Florida. He is survived by his wife of 73 years, Mary Olive Towers, his son Frank Jr, daughters Jane, Anne and Kathy, as well as four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
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