Clearing the Fog of War

On D-Day, Texas soldier was part of history

SAN ANTONIO — Smoke, dust and debris filled the air over the Normandy coast when Sgt. 1st Class Henry Willmann jumped out of a landing craft into neck-deep water and swam toward the beachhead.

Treading slowly through the surf, he turned to see a young draftee from Kansas suddenly vanish beneath a choppy wave.

“I looked back, he was behind me, and he was underneath the water, floundering around,” he said. “I reached back and grabbed his hand and pulled him up and told him to hang on to my backpack, and that I would swim toward shore, and he did.”

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South Side doctor fled Germans, led medical society

At 99, Dr. Simon Pierre Zeitlin could look back on two lives full of risk and adventure.

There was the one he had as a physician who opened a South Side practice and later headed the Bexar County Medical Society.

And before that, there was his life at war as a French army captain, held prisoner by the Nazis until escaping, and crossing the Pyrenees from Spain to France.

He talked some about that, but not a lot.

“I know he was captured,” said his daughter, Paulette Mallard. “I know he was in the French Foreign Legion in North Africa making his way back to France and I think ... he was captured in Spain.”

Zeitlin had lived in San Antonio for more than 60 years when he died Aug. 28.

He was born on a train in Latvia to French parents, Bernard Pierre and Rachel Zeitlin, and grew up in Charleville, Alsace-Lorraine.

He studied medicine at the University of Paris and joined the French army's medical corps after the war broke out.

Taken captive by German troops, he was relocated to a prisoner-of-war camp in Spain.

Zeitlin, a captain, broke out and crossed the Pyrenees on foot until he made it to France. Details, however, are sketchy. He didn't talk a lot about the war, but talked of it in a newspaper story in 1946.

“‘He constantly emphasized the systematic starvation rations handed out but was restrained in his descriptions, due, he said, to the fact that many things he had seen and experienced were too obnoxious to ask civilized people to listen to,'” Mallard said, reading from the newspaper story.

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Pilot finally lands his medal from World War II

Second Lt. Samuel Smith knew what he was up against when his B-17 bomber group got orders to strike a German base that was home to 16 of the war's newest planes, the Messerschmitt Me-262 — the first jet-powered aircraft to be used in combat.

“On the mission before this we went to Hamburg and there must have been 15 of them in the air, and I must have seen 10 or 15 bombers go down,” he said.

A few weeks shy of 88, Smith was honored Friday for his heroics on the mission that took them Hopsten on March 21, 1945. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph's Taj Mahal, a crowd of more than 80 people giving a long standing ovation.

“He's a representative of a generation of Americans that did something special,” said Gen. Edward A. Rice Jr., head of the Air Education and Training Command and himself a bomber pilot. “We were talking about the thousand-plane raids that will probably never again be replicated.”

The medal, which falls between the Bronze Star and Silver Star, was given decades late because a commander during World War II refused to sign off on them.

Long after the war, at a reunion, the commander admitted he was wrong, apologized and helped Smith get the medal.

Still, it was a bittersweet day. Only three of Smith's eight crewmen and a few pilot buddies still are alive. Still sharp, he's the only member of the crew who is mobile.

“Here it is 60, 70 years later and finally the award is being made,” said Smith, a Kerrville petrochemical plant consultant. “It's a great thing to me, but in lots of respects it's kind of sad because the guys who flew with me and helped are not here.”

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At 94, D-Day veteran is a survivor

Retired Army Master Sgt. Henry Willmann stood on the deck of his transport ship off the Normandy coast, a pair of binoculars in hand.

Raising them, he saw soldiers swimming the length of a football field from their landing craft, stumbling forward out of the beach and running for their lives.

“You had about 100 yards to go from the water up to the cliff,” he said, “and on this beach you could see these people get out of the water on the beach and start running to this cliff, and all the sudden they'd just slump down.”

Willmann made it onto the beach and soon had other chances to die after D-Day. Later, in Korea, he did it again, but when the Army began sending GIs in his unit to Vietnam, there was a decision to make.

On Sunday, family and friends gave a surprise birthday party for Willmann, who turns 95 next week. The lights were off as he entered a darkened party room, and when they snapped on a crowd of more than 35 relatives and friends cheered and applauded.

He surveyed the room, smiling.

“This is great,” he said. “I sure didn't expect this, I guarantee you.”

The tale of how he made it to Grady's Bar-B-Q on Bandera Road in sound mind and body starts after graduating from Fredericksburg High School in 1935. He quit after a few weeks into his first job as a gas jockey because an Army recruiter had a good pitch: Work for Uncle Sam and you'll make 25 cents more an hour, and we'll also pay the rent.

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Survivor of 'Black March' had faith

Jim Kirk and thousands of other Allied prisoners at Stalag Luft IV in what is now Poland heard Russian artillery in the distance.

If their hearts beat faster, there was reason. A German army broken by the Battle of the Bulge was in retreat. When the POWs got orders to leave the camp two weeks later, on Feb. 6, 1945, those excited by the prospect of soon being freed, ironically, lived one of the war's great unknown horror stories.

“Everybody was whooping and hollering and gathering their stuff up,” recalled Kirk, 87, of San Antonio. “They told us to pack enough stuff for three days. We're going to probably take three days to get where we're going.”

Lining up four abreast, the POWs left Stalag IV and covered 30 miles before bedding down in a field covered by ice and snow. Their journey turned into an 86-day march, with the POWs sleeping in fields and barns. They ate little. Disease ran rampant among the men, most of them Army Air Force noncommissioned officers.

Virtually every prisoner was infested with lice. Some ate bits of rats mixed with herbs in a dark brown stew.

As the column moved through the wilderness, at least 1,500 POWs who fell out of formation were shunted into the woods and executed.

“This continued on day after day, week after week,” said Kirk, whose weight fell from 159 to 96 pounds over 11 months of captivity. Decades later, he calls it the “Black March” and can't say why so few have heard of it. Others call it the “Death March.”

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