A Burrow, a Beach, and a Bridge

I wrote this piece in 2009 shortly after my grandfather died. It was written as a sample "feature" during my undergrad program in journalism, but it has come to mean much more than that to me. The stories here are pulled from a series of tapes someone recorded, a collection of memories recounted by my Grandpa Evert himself. It is intended as an act of gratitude for him, and for all who served (and continue to serve) in the armed forces. 

On the beach called Omaha, it had been raining for days. The seas were choppy. The wind was fierce. But history tells us there was a short break in the treacherous weather on June 6, 1944 – the day American soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.

As Sgt. Evert R. Engstrom and the other members of the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion, Company C, filed into the hull of their tank-like ship and waited for the gates to open and release them into the waters surrounding the beach, they heard the resounding boom of the big guns.

The warships that flanked the sides of their boat had begun to fire their shells at the shore. “That’s when the old ticker started to go, and I started wondering, ‘Hey, am I gonna make this?’”

Engstrom had been drafted and processed through Fort Snelling in Minneapolis, Minn., where he and his family had lived since their immigration from Sweden.  He was born to a family of dairy farmers, his daughter Linnea says, in Halsingland.  “They had a berm home, and the cows used to graze on the roof, “she says as enthusiastically as if she had seen it herself.  “That’s what my grandma used to say.”

Engstrom spent two days in processing at Fort Snelling, which meant, he says, that there were two nights that he could come home in his new uniform. “It was full of tags, of course, and a little fuzzy.  It even smelled a bit of moth balls yet.” Still, it was his very first uniform, and he wore it proudly.

On his last day at Fort Snelling, Engstrom was given his serial number and assigned to the 9th Armored Division, Company C, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion.  

Then, he boarded the Troop Train. “Of course at that time in the Army you moved everything by train,” he says matter-of-factly.  “There weren’t buses to use or anything like that, so we went by train.” They soon arrived at Camp Funston, Kan., where they would spend almost a year in basic training – military theory and strategy, map reading, rifle training, pistol shooting.  You had to qualify to advance in the skills training, Engstrom says. And he did.

“I made expert in submachine gun -- I’d have made a good gangster, I guess -- and I also made expert in the .45 pistol, automatic.  And I don’t know how I did that because you can stand four feet from something and still miss it with that gun.”

Engstrom quickly advanced through the ranks, from private first class to corporal then from corporal to sergeant.  “I thought, this is better than I hoped! Now that I’m a sergeant, I can have my own room in the barracks!” That wasn’t exactly the case, it turns out.  

Engstrom ended up sharing his new corner bedroom with Sgt. Cliff Johnson, also from Minneapolis.  The two became fast friends and partners in mischief. “I remember that we didn’t much like the color of the floor in our room, so one day we snuck some of the foot powder out of the shower room.”  

The powder, he says, was used to prevent the transmission of athlete’s foot, but the two used it to bleach the floor. “Before we knew it, the floor was starting to get nice and white,” he says with a chuckle.

From Kansas, the unit  traveled by train to Camp Ibis, Calif., in the Mojave Desert.  “This was at the time when they were chasing Rommel around North Africa and we thought, ‘Well, this is where we’re gonna go,’” Engstrom says.

There, they did desert training maneuvers. “Half tracks, tanks, the whole bit. Going without water, 25-mile hikes with full field packs where you take one step forward and slide back two, at three and four o’clock in the morning,” he says, groaning as he remembers the fatigue.  “It was rough, but man, I loved the weather. I must’ve lost 40 pounds, and I didn’t have it to lose.” That part was tough, he says.

Standing 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing in at less than 200 pounds before his trip to the desert, he was always fit and trim, his daughter says.  “And always the consummate cowboy,” she says. “But I suppose that’s another story altogether.”

Engstrom still laughs when he tells tales of Camp Ibis. During one hike, he remembers, he was following a small mountain burrow that seemed to take a liking to him. ““I don’t know why, maybe our ears matched or something,” he says, laughing.

The burrow came back to camp and wound up as a pet. “He slept right next to my bunk,” Engstrom says. And, when the 1st Sergeant would blow the morning whistle, “Man, that burrow was up! And anyone who didn’t get up before he got to ‘em got his bunk turned over!”

Their desert training ended, though, when Rommel was defeated in North Africa.  Engstrom had to say goodbye to his burrow when, again, they boarded the train. “I just gave him a swat on the butt and told him to ‘go on,’and off he went into the mountains.”  He wished he could take the burrow with him, he says, but they wouldn’t let donkeys on the train.

This time, the train took them to Camp Polk, La., for inclement weather training. The training exercises were just as hard as those they had run in the desert, but the temperatures were much colder.

“That was such a reverse that we thought, ‘Oh boy, they’re gonna be sending us to the Pacific.’ ”  

During one night exercise, the men found themselves unprepared for the cold.  So, Engstrom says, they set fire to a tree stump and added anything they could find to keep the fire going.   But the men were tired, and the warmer they got, the harder it was to stay awake.

“So, we devised that we would all stand with our arms out, so that your arms are in front of the guy next to you on each side.  That way, if they fell asleep and started to fall toward the fire, we could wake ‘em up and pull ‘em away from there. That worked well.”

Their training in Louisiana ended, and the men’s predictions once again proved false.  Instead of shipping out the Pacific Theater, the men found themselves on a train bound for New York. There, they boarded the Queen Mary and set sail for Glasgow, Scotland.  Once they arrived, yet another train ride took them to England where they waited for orders.

About a week later, the men were told to prepare for invasion.  “They told us the whole story of what would happen, where we would go and so on.” Still, the coming danger was not completely evident. “We looked at these boats that they were gonna take us over on and they looked pretty sturdy, pretty strong.”

The boat ride to France was deceptively calm. “For the first time since I left Fort Snelling, I slept on a white pillowcase between two white sheets.  And I thought, ‘I’m gonna transfer to this outfit!’” But that calm didn’t last long.

The gates opened, and the men found themselves up to their chins in the cold, choppy water.  Holding their rifles above their heads, they waded as best they could through the enemy fire and the corpses of fallen soldiers. “I think we were the third bank to go in, and there were still dead bodies laying in the water…helmets…it was really gory.  It was terrible to see.

“Once we got off the beaches, I was in an outfit that did nothing but fight,” Engstrom recounts, shaking his head.  “We fought and fought and fought, day in and day out, night after night. I think out of our entire campaign, I can remember two breaks in the fighting.”

 The rest of the time, he says, was spent with dirty clothes, wet shoes, wet socks, frozen feet.  “When the winter hit over there, it was unmerciful. Guys’ fingers just froze stiff so they couldn’t bend ‘em.  We kept ‘em in our jackets, and under our arms, in between our legs – anything to keep our hands flexible enough to pull the trigger if you had to. Some guys froze to death.  It was miserable.”

After fighting their way through France, Engstrom and his division received orders to follow General Patton into Belgium.   It was on the march through Belgium that Engstrom received his assignment to the position of sniper.  

“I remember the first time I heard my dad say he was a sniper in the Army,” says Engstrom’s son Greg.  “As a kid, I was almost awestruck by the idea.” But, not everyone shared that view.

“You tell people that you were a sniper in the Army and they look at you like ‘Hey, we don’t like you guys,’ but we had to get a job done and that was it,” Engstrom says.  He is obviously defensive about the subject. “Can’t be proud of it, of course, but it had to be done,” he says.

It was also on the march through Belgium that Engstrom contracted dysentery, which would eventually lead to his discharge from the Army and ultimately save his life.

The men followed Gen. Patton and his troops into what was officially called the Ardennes Offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge, where 81,000 American soldiers died.  

“We lost a lot of men -- all the time you’re losing ‘em.  You sit next to a guy to eat, when you got a chance to eat, and the next thing you know he’s gone.” One such tragedy stands out in Engstrom’s mind.

“We got into the woods one time, and machine-gun fire had us pinned down.  Sgt. Glinka, from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was laying along side of me. I rolled over to my right, for some reason or another, and when I rolled back he was dead.  He was shot, and both of his legs were blown off.”

At this point in the story his voice cracks, revealing how much the story still affects him.  “War is hell, I guess. That’s what they say.”

His son agrees.  “Not many people realize this, but for a long time after he came home my dad was a really angry guy.”  Turning to his sister, he responds to her obvious disbelief. “You were really too young to remember it.  Still, it took him awhile to come to terms with what he saw.”

Eventually, Engstrom’s division made its way toward a town called Remagen in Germany.  There, from the top of a hill, the men noticed that the Ludendorff Bridge across the Rhine River was still standing, despite the German army’s efforts to destroy all crossing points. It was a momentous discovery.

What happened on the bridge changed the course of the war – the men of the 9th Armored Division stormed the bridge, cleared it and crossed into the heart of Germany.  But, it was what happened before they got to the bridge that changed Engstrom’s life.

As the men were preparing to cross the bridge, Engstrom collapsed.  At the time, he had no idea that he was fighting a severe case of dysentery.  Johnson, who had become Engstrom’s best friend, came rushing to his side.

“‘Cliff,’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna make it’. And he says, ‘Oh yeah you will, you’re damn right you will.’ So he called a jeep, and put me on a stretcher, and tied me down to the front of it.  And they took me to the nearest MASH unit.” From the local MASH tent, Engstrom was sent to a hospital in Paris where he was diagnosed with and treated for dysentery.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, his division worked to save the bridge, which had been severely weakened by repeated German attacks.  Eventually, however, the bridge gave way. On March 17, 1945, the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen collapsed killing 28 men and injuring many more. Cliff Johnson was among those killed in the collapse.

“Daddy always felt so guilty for not being there with Cliff on the bridge.  If he had been, he would have died, too, he thought. He always wondered why he got to live and Cliff didn’t,” Engstrom’s daughter remembers.

Engstrom never made it back to his unit. From the hospital in Paris, he was sent to Camp Carson, Colo., for rehabilitation. There, he says, he played baseball and took up woodworking.  “I did my best to try and readjust to civilian life.”

Finally, his medical discharge papers came in.  “They just called me in and said I had a medical discharge, and that they weren’t going to take a chance and ship me back overseas. So I packed up my things, and they shipped me back home.”  And he took one final train ride.