My dad flew air support for the Battle of the Bulge and spent that winter sleeping in a tent in the snow of northern France. He hated cold till the day he died.
As hellish hot as Texas gets in the summer, he never minded the heat, but winter cold bothered him the rest of his life.
He and his men won a Presidential Unit Citation for their efforts. They and their buddies came home and left the horrors and hardship behind, never demanded the respect they were due and often didn’t talk about what they did.
I miss him every day.
God Bless him. Did he served with the 9th. Tactical Air Force? I knew a vet who flew a P-47 Thunderbolt providing support for ‘’the ground pounders.’’ He told me they had to light fires under the engines to keep the oil pans and oil pumps from freezing. Funny, now that you mention it a number of these men who saw combat in the Bulge would tell me about the cold and they’d do a quick kind of hunch of their shoulders as if to emphasize the point. I wonder if they were even aware they were doing it. God bless them.
I still have my father, he is 86. He missed the bulge by 2 weeks.
He farms. He worked every day until a year ago. He had quadruple bypass surgery. He was not out long for that, but lately he spends more time with my mother. She has dementia, but they are still lovebirds after 65 years. They met when he stopped in DC on his way to Europe. They wrote throughout the war. When he was on his way home after being discharged he called my grandfather to wire money for a train ticket to my mother. He did. When she arrived in Texas they were married in my grandparents dining room.
He never talked much about the war. Just settled down to farm again and to live his life in peace. That is the way it was and is here.
Pray that it remains that way, but the way things are now. Well we won’t go there.
Perhaps w/ the 410th Bomb Group? I’ve been blessed to meet a few of those gents at recent reunions, wonderful collection of memoribilia and pictures they have. Just this fall,I finally got take a drive over the area - from Utah to Bastogne - and on the way back to Paris, dropped by Coulommiers Aerodrome, where they flew from in Dec ‘44. Perhaps your Dad slept right where I was looking. A salute and a tear.