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For Veterans Day, UT’s World War II veterans recall images, experiences |
| By
Jim Winkler |
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Nov 10, 2008
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Tomorrow Ronald Boerst and Dr. Duane Johnson will acknowledge their wartime pasts quietly.
Boerst, sitting in his south Toledo home — an American flag permanently flying in the front yard — will watch some television. And he will think about his days as a soldier in France more than 60 years ago and his buddies who were killed liberating Europe from Nazi tyranny.
And Johnson will pause and recall a cow pasture in Normandy and how rains often turned the field where his Army hospital was located into acres of mud.
Both men — volunteers at The University of Toledo Medical Center — are members of the “Greatest Generation.”
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| Ronald Boerst, UT Medical Center volunteer, holds a frame that contains the medals he won during World War II. |
Boerst, 87, is a holder of nine medals, including a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and the Meritorious Service Award. One of 11 children, he grew up in the neighborhood near Belmont and Nebraska avenues and attended the former Macomber High School, but quit to take care of his disabled mother.
Drafted in 1943, he was a 23-year-old private first class in September 1944, when he joined Company G, 137th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, as a replacement in France. The division was part of Gen. George Patton’s Third U.S. Army, the division in which President Harry S. Truman had served in World War I.
With D-Day come and gone, Boerst and his fellow soldiers waded ashore and made camp in a pasture. On Sept. 12, Boerst’s infantry company was attempting to establish a bridgehead over the Moselle River. The Germans tried to crush it with brutal rifle, machine-gun and mortar fire. Casualties were heavy, with many assault boats destroyed. The river had flooded three times its width, drowning several soldiers in the swirling current.
Boerst’s company had reached the east side of the river when Cpl. John Stein, a medic in an assault boat being pulled across the fast-moving river, was shot in the chest.
The commanding officer yelled for volunteers to save the wounded soldier, and Boerst immediately dropped his rifle to join the lieutenant and another soldier. They waded into the river, and Boerst climbed into the boat to pack the wound. He stayed with the medic as they were pulled to shore under withering fire.
Stein was dead when they reached the riverbank.
“He was the medic and if that had been me in the boat, he would have been out there for me,” Boerst said. “I was almost waiting to get killed at any time.”
Later that afternoon, his clothes still waterlogged, Boerst volunteered for a rescue mission to save a wounded soldier from a hill near the Moselle, again coming under heavy enemy fire.
One month later his captain recommended him for the Bronze Star.
A bout of amoebic dysentery that caused him to lose 50 pounds sent him to a French hospital.
He was in Belgium when Germany surrendered and was discharged in November 1945.
Boerst said he learned a lot about life and himself in the war: “It made me realize that if you want something, you have to go for it.”
After the war, he worked for 30 years for the U.S. Postal Service. He attended the annual reunions of soldiers from the 35th and maintained friendships forged in combat.
Boerst and his second wife, Harriett, have been married 62 years. He has two brothers who fought in World War II and his son, Allen, was a helicopter mechanic in the Vietnam War. He has not returned to France or seen the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., but would like to.
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| For World War II veterans like Duane Johnson, the American flag means liberty and freedom. |
Johnson, 83, a retired Toledo dentist, was 18 in August 1944 when he was drafted and sent to Camp Grant in Illinois and Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington for medic training. A 1943 Libbey High School graduate, he’d already worked as an orderly at the former Lucas County Hospital, which is why he ended up in the Army’s Medical Corps, serving in France as wardmaster with the 195th General Hospital.
The field hospital, which treated everything from machine-gun wounds to combat fatigue, consisted of tents in a Normandy cow pasture, where rains often turned the field into a quagmire.
“We were sleeping in pup tents on the ground and I always felt wet,” he recalled.
With increasing numbers of casualties, it was sometimes necessary to treat German POWs alongside Allied servicemen. “I remembered how they would click their heels in an officer’s presence,” he said.
The 195th was one of several Army general hospitals that were attached to Army formations and moved to follow the Army’s advance.
The need to treat the wounded as close to the front as possible meant that working conditions were dangerous and uncomfortable. Besides coping with enemy fire and air raids, medical facilities also had to deal with dust and flies that were ubiquitous in Normandy.
Johnson was in Paris on a weekend pass eating a tomato sandwich when news came that Germany had surrendered.
Following his discharge, he enrolled at UT and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949, followed with a degree from the Ohio State University College of Dentistry. He had a private practice in Toledo from 1953 until his retirement in 1995.
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