Love, Daddy
Some veterans became fathers in foxholes and faraway bases during war
Bob Sieber met his daughter Kimmarie when he stepped off a plane at Milwaukee’s Mitchell Field dressed in his Air Force uniform.
Alfred Endres was still wearing his Army uniform when he met his daughter Eileen for the first time.
Ron Ziolecki celebrated many Father’s Days because of the actions of his battle buddy Ross Hartwig. Both Marines became fathers in Korea, but only one made it home to see his baby.
Wars don’t stop for births. Combat doesn’t halt when women go into labor. Many American GIs have become dads in foxholes or on far away military bases — Sieber in Vietnam, Endres in Nazi Germany and Ziolecki in Korea.
Sieber vividly recalled what it was like to hold his little girl when he arrived at Mitchell Field late on the night of April 23, 1970. A faded photo in a picture album shows Sieber holding Kimmarie in his arms, gazing in wonder at her while she stares at the camera.
See FATHERS, Page 8A
“That was a tear moment. Even still today,” said Sieber, 71, sitting in the backyard of his West Allis home a few days before Father’s Day.
Sieber’s wife, Linda, was 21⁄2 months pregnant when he got orders to go to Vietnam. They had been married just six months when he shipped out.
“It was terrible,” she said. “With a baby on the way, you don’t want your husband on the other side of the world.”
They picked out baby names before he left and wrote letters to each other almost every day.
Kimmarie was born at the old St. Michael Hospital in Milwaukee on Nov. 13, 1969.
Sieber got a phone call in the middle of the night in Vietnam from the Red Cross telling him — it’s a girl! He immediately told his buddies at Binh Thuy Air Base.
“There was hoopla, raising hell, the whole camp woke up,” recalled Sieber. “I didn’t have cigars but we sure passed around the bottle.”
Kimmarie is their only child; Sieber likes to joke that he’s never seen his wife pregnant.
Linda Sieber made a recording of Kimmarie crying for a few minutes, which she mailed to her husband in Vietnam so he could play it on a tape machine.
Now 50, Kimmarie Rosa, who served eight years in the Wisconsin Army National Guard, accompanied her father on a Stars & Stripes Honor Flight in 2018. Before the flight left Milwaukee, they stood next to each other to re-create the photo taken in the same airport so many years earlier.
“I had no idea that there was turmoil back home in the States” during the Vietnam War, said Rosa. “I was always super proud he was a Vietnam veteran.”
A promise from the front
While serving in Korea, Ziolecki saw a photo of his friend Hartwig’s baby girl back home in Iowa, never dreaming that one day he would meet her.
Ziolecki dropped out of West Allis Central High School in 1949 to join the Marines — last year he finally received his diploma — and was sent to Korea in October 1951.
When Ziolecki jumped into a foxhole, Hartwig introduced himself and the Midwesterners became fast friends. They looked out for each other and watched each other’s backs.
One day Hartwig saw Ziolecki pinned down behind a tree during a battle. Despite the danger, Hartwig stood up and from around 15 yards away shot two enemy soldiers, yelling to his buddy, “You OK, Ron?”
Shortly after Ziolecki arrived in Korea, he had become a dad when his son Richard was born, news he learned in a letter.
“We were in a tent ready to go on top of the line. I said, ‘Guys I’m a father,’ ” Ziolecki, 87, said at his West Allis home.
Meanwhile, Hartwig’s daughter Roxanne was born a month after he left for Korea.
He frequently talked about his baby girl with Ziolecki, wondering if she would know him when he returned home. The two battle buddies made a pact that if one of them was killed, the survivor would contact his friend’s family.
In February 1952, Ziolecki and Hartwig were in a foxhole trying to stay warm when Hartwig suggested they flip a coin to see who would head first to the chow tent for a hot meal. Since Hartwig was hungry, Ziolecki told him to go.
Moments later, Ziolecki heard the sickening sound of enemy artillery
rounds land behind him. He ran to the demolished chow tent, frantically searching for Hartwig among the bodies of the dead and wounded. Ziolecki placed his friend on a medevac chopper and told Hartwig he’d see him later. The 19-year-old Hartwig died two days later.
Seven months later, Ziolecki returned home to Milwaukee but lost his buddy’s address and couldn’t remember his Iowa hometown. Ziolecki worked four decades at Unit Drop Forge and raised three children, celebrating Father’s Day with them each year.
Months turned into years, years to decades.
He never forgot Hartwig, always thinking of him on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. He recently built a memorial to Hartwig on his lawn, featuring a flag pole, a sign with Hartwig’s name and small statues.
In 2014, he mentioned to a neighbor his unfulfilled promise to Hartwig.
Ziolecki’s neighbor used the internet to track down Roxanne Goecke, who by then was a grandmother in her 60s. She was ecstatic to learn more about the father she had never known and drove from Iowa to West Allis, bearing fresh baked bread and cookies.
The two continue to call each other every year.
Upon first meeting the woman whose baby picture he saw in Korea, Ziolecki enveloped her in a bear hug and kissed her.
Ziolecki told her: That’s from your dad.
Thinking of his baby girl
Seventy-five years ago, Alfred Endres celebrated his first Father’s Day the month after the war in Europe had finally ended. But it would still be several months before the Wisconsin farmer would return home to hold his daughter Eileen.
Eileen Waldow was born Sept. 13, 1944, some 13 months after her parents married. Endres got the happy news two weeks after she was born, while his unit in the 320th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division was pinned down.
He was 26 and soon picked up the nickname “Hot Papa,” said his daughter Louise Endres Moore, who wrote a book about her father’s wartime experience, “Alfred: The Quiet History of a World War II Infantryman.”
Endres survived several campaigns following the D-Day invasion and push across Europe to defeat Germany.
Like many World War II veterans, Endres didn’t talk about his experience until much later in life and his family accepted his answer when asked what he did in the war — chauffeur, barber, translator. It wasn’t until a few years before Endres died in 2007 that they learned he was a machine gunner who had seen heavy fighting.
“He went into the Battle of the Bulge, from what I understand, never thinking he would meet me,” Waldow said in a
phone interview from her Colorado home. “The statistics they were given were pretty gruesome.”
Endres met his wife, Louise, at a wedding dance when they were teens growing up near Lodi and Cross Plains. After they married in the summer of 1943, Louise traveled to California with him while he trained for war. Among their group of eight couples in the same Army outfit, three of the husbands would die in battle and never get to meet their children, said Moore.
Later in life, Endres told Waldow “I didn’t think it would take so long for me to see you,” she recalled. “I don’t know how he turned out to be such a stable, loving man. He must have had a compartment that he put the war away.”
When he returned home, he raised a family that would eventually include eight children on a dairy farm in Lodi. Father’s Day was usually celebrated with a special meal and a trip to church for Sunday Mass. But other than that, the holiday was not a big deal because Endres was busy being a farmer, husband and dad.
“We would give him a (Father’s Day) card and he would say ‘Thanks, it’s very nice. Now put it away and give it to me next year,’ ” remembered Waldow. “I don’t think we ever did but ... he thought it was an unnecessary expense.”
After their mother died in 2001, family members found and read letters he sent home from World War II that had been kept in his Army trunk. Among the cards and letters was a note Endres wrote in pencil on Dec. 9, 1944.
The Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s lastditch effort to stop Allied troops, would start one week later and Endres’ unit would be in the thick of it. American casualties in the Bulge totaled almost 90,000.
Endres was thinking of his baby girl and his wife at home and longing to be with them for the holidays.
He wrote: If we’re not together for Xmas let’s make the best of it like we have been and we got our happy future to look forward to, so here’s wishing you & Eileen a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Love, Daddy