McClellan: A vet's letters tell a story of post-WW2 Europe

When he graduated from grade school in 1940, the German Army was overrunning Europe.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Wolfe’s father, a circuit court judge, enlisted in the Army. He was 46. He was commissioned a captain and assigned to intelligence. He was sent to the China-Burma-India theater of operations.

Oh, how Wolfe, an only child, wanted to join his father.

In the spring of 1944, recruiters visited his high school. Wolfe signed up for the Army Specialized Training Program. As soon as he graduated, the Army sent him to the University of Maryland for further education. Then in December, the Battle of the Bulge broke out, and the program was shut down. Wolfe was sent to Florida for infantry training. He was thrilled.

He was diagnosed with “swamp fever” and was in the hospital when Germany surrendered in May. He finished training but developed a hernia. He had surgery. Japan surrendered. Wolfe was distraught that he had missed the fighting.

Finally, in October 1945, Wolfe was sent overseas. He landed in Italy. He wrote home. “Everyone here is in the best of spirits and we have fun wherever we go.”

He was plucked from the infantry and assigned to the military police. He was stationed in Trieste. It was a wild, almost lawless kind of place. Thousands of Yugoslav troops were camped on the edge of the city. They were communists, Tito’s men. Italian partisan fighters mingled with their former enemies, the regular Italian troops. Abandoned weapons were everywhere. The financial system was broken. The most common currency was cigarettes.

In addition to keeping the peace between the well-armed factions, the MPs were supposed to curtail the black market.

But how do you shut down the black market when that’s the only working economic system? The GIs who wanted war souvenirs could buy Barettas and Lugers for a few packs of smokes. The officers of the occupation army had unrealistic expectations of their men. I mean, who didn’t want war souvenirs?

“Some officers are deplorably stupid,” Wolfe wrote in a letter to his mother. Fortunately, she saved all of his letters, and they paint a portrait of a young man whose thinking evolved during his time in the service. He had enlisted to fight. In fairness, so had the officers. Nobody had signed up for peace-keeping, and in this corner of Italy, the peace was fragile. The Yugoslavian troops paraded through the town. The Italians had parades.

Once the reality of the situation set in, Wolfe realized there was more to the Army than being a hero. By the summer of 1946, he was dabbling in the black market himself. In one letter to his mother, he wrote, “I’m certainly glad to hear that the machine guns got there all right. I guess you ought to set them up in my room.”

He was also sounding like a real soldier. He liked his friends. “We sit around talking about every subject under the sun. Everyone is a little strange in their own way. We have a lot of fun.” He had disdain for the officers. “It would be all right if it weren’t for these stupid, imbecilic officers who think they are a bunch of little Caesars.”

This probably sounds familiar to 90 percent of veterans. Unless you were sleeping in the mud and risking your life on a daily basis, the military can be more of a sit-com than a drama.

By August of 1946, he knew how to game the Army.

“I’m getting away with murder now. Every day I take off and leave the office under one pretense or another. I usually go swimming.”

He was about to undertake the adventure of his life. He and two friends, one of whom was a cook, commandeered a jeep and headed to the Austrian border. Europe was still in an unsettled stage. Black market activity was everywhere. Theoretically, an MP could be investigating something. The three adventurers had no real reason to cross into Austria, but who was guarding the border crossing? Other soldiers, who probably shared the same attitude as the three adventurers.

“We proceeded to cross the border using the proverbial gift of gab instead of travel papers and official orders,” he wrote.

In Austria, they got lost. None of them spoke Austrian or German. The roads weren’t well marked. They came to another border crossing. Back to Italy, they thought. Again, security was slack. Why not? The war had been over for more than a year. They talked their way through.

They were in Germany. Fortunately, they didn’t seem out of place. There were lots of American soldiers in Germany. They drove on. They found themselves in Berchtesgaden. Above the town was Obersalzberg where prominent Nazis like Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring and Albert Speer once had lived. And above Obersalzberg was the “Eagle’s Nest” of Adolf Hitler.

They headed up the mountain road. They toured the unguarded Eagle’s Nest. “Best views I’ve ever seen,” Wolfe wrote. The place had already been stripped by earlier souvenir hunters, but the cook chipped off a piece of tile. The adventurers took plenty of photos and returned to Berchtesgaden to spend the night. They paid for their room with cigarettes.

They also met a teenager who offered to sell them Martin Bormann’s official Nazi pin.

Probably not authentic, thought Wolfe, but he bought it for some cigarettes.

The next day, they drove back to Italy.

“When we got back, we were sweating out a three-day AWOL charge, but due to our extraordinary ability to get this all confused, we hadn’t even been missed,” Wolfe wrote.

By the way, the Nazi pin had a number on it, and later, after the war, it was authenticated as Bormann’s.

In September1946, Wolfe returned to the States. He received his honorable discharge in October.

He studied Romance languages at Washington University and worked for various companies in the Americas and Europe. He and his first wife, Libby, had three children. He became a widower and remarried. He and his second wife, Doris, spend about six months of the year at his family home in Ladue and the other six months at a home Wolfe purchased years ago in Normandy, France.

He will be in France, as he often is, for the D-Day ceremonies. He has met presidents and generals at the ceremonies. He does not pretend to be have been in France for D-Day but takes justifiable pride in being a World War II veteran.