UPDATED with info on the US Army Heritage and Education Center at bottom.
Why would a CIS white male, 49 years of age, middle class, with all the comforts associated with that class and privilege try to become a full time anti-authoritarian activist?
July, 28, 1944; 75 years ago today
The 9th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division of the US Army under Colonel Chester Hirshfelder were advancing southeast past the village of St. Lo in Normandy, France. The 9th Infantry had been reasonably lucky so far; they landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day+1, which meant they had missed the butchery of the initial landings the day before. But that did not mean their past 53 full days in France had been uneventful.
Their baptism of fire had come on June 9th, when they were tasked with capturing Trevieres by flanking this German stronghold and seizing the tiny town of Rubercy to the southeast. However, their mortars and machine guns had yet to be unloaded onto Omaha Beach, so this attack was done without their heavy weapons. M-1 Garand rifles, grenades and the Thompson submachine guns were the only weapons available. On that day they lost 10 men killed, and 80 wounded, but achieved their goals.
July 11th was another bloody day. Standing before 9th Infantry Regiment was the Bayeux-St. Lo highway and overlooking that, in between the villages of Le Calvaire and La Croix Rouge, was a pleasant, green hill covered in hedgerows, thick walls of brush which marked out grazing fields for livestock since … well, probably since before Romans in sandals with swords had been here 2,000 years before.
To an American infantryman, hedgerows were terrifying because you could not see what lay behind them – grazing cows or Nazis with their sights zeroed in on the GI’s. And the Germans had prepared to defend this area for months. They mapped out advance routes and plotted those coordinates so mortars could easily hit American soldiers with great precision. Further, they had in-depth defenses of overlapping fields of fire for their dug-in, fortified machine gun nests.
And the enemy waiting for the Americans were not Romanian troops who could not wait to surrender to Americans and get out of this stupid war. Nor were they reluctant, overage Wehrmacht conscripts dragged away from homes to a far front. No, these were 16,000 members of the elite German 3rd Fallschirmjäger (Parachute) Division, commanded by Generalleutnant Richard Schimf – men with a lot of combat experience.
The Fallschirmjäger did not have heavy artillery; however to make up for this lack they were heavily equipped with mortars. These easily mobile, light “artillery” substitutes were virtually invisible from the air, rendering Allied air superiority useless. Additionally, the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Division was armed with a fearsome complement of automatic weapons - twice as many as a standard infantry division was equipped with. Each roughly ten-man squad was armed with (2) MG-42 machine guns (Hitler’s Buzzsaw) and (5) submachine guns (probably mostly MP40s, although since these were actual Fallshirmjäger the fearsome FG-42 was present on this battlefield in some quantity).
Video of an original 2nd pattern FG-42 being fired in full Auto. This illustrates how mobile and transportable these guns were as well as how controllable of a weapon they were. Unlike submachine guns, which fire pistol rounds, this fired a full size 8mm Mauser rifle round and could inflict horrific damage to anyone hit by it.
This was Hill 192, which offered a commanding view of the entire region, allowing defending Nazi troops to have a clear view of American moves in real time before them. There was no sneaking up on German positions, and capture was essential to Allied plans.
GI nicknames indicate how tough the fight was: Kraut Corner and Purple Heart Draw. 69 American soldiers died, 328 were wounded and 8 missing from the fight. The hill was taken using the heaviest expenditure of artillery, other than the Battle of the Bulge, by the 2nd Infantry Division in WW2.
By July 12th, the hill was secured in American hands, but the 3rd Fallschirmjäger had withdrawn, substantially intact.
But today is July 28th, and on July 25th Operation Cobra, the breakout of the US Army from Normandy, had begun.
The 9th infantry regiment was advancing from the village of Vire towards the village of Tinchebray. And here is where I let you down. Because I don’t know what happened exactly. But this is where my grandfather died. This is what his obituary says:
On July 28, 1944, 31-year-old Sgt. Edward Kranepool was machine-gunned down in Saint-Lô, France, leaving behind a three-year-old daughter, Marilyn, and a wife, Ethel, six months pregnant. The son, Edward Emil III, was born on November 8 of that year, in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx.
Looking at the retreat route of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger it seems very likely that my grandfather fell to a squad of these troops during their retreat.
Ed Kranepool, son of German immigrants to the United States, entered military service in the United States Army in 1930 (which makes me wonder if he was escaping the joblessness of the Great Depression). He was awarded the Purple Heart in 1943, although I have not yet learned what for.
That Edward Emil Kranepool III in the obituary a couple paragraphs up? That’s Ed Kranepool of the New York Mets, who was on the team when they won the World Series in 1969 – the year I was born and adopted by the Marilyn Kranepool mentioned in Sgt. Ed Kranepool’s obituary.
I never met my grandfather, yet he is an example of how America is SUPPOSED to work; child of immigrants, taking opportunity where he found it to make a better future for his family. It worked; one child became a world class athlete and sports star; the other a PhD Psychologist still working at 79 years old. My Grandma Kranepool was able to support her children as a secretary supplemented with the Survivors Pension provided by the Government. Queens then, as now, was not exactly a borough of New York known for its super wealthy inhabitants.
To my knowledge, there is not even a surviving photo of my grandfather to share with you.
Lessons Learned
My mother and my grandmother did not talk about my grandfather. My mother had no memory of him. For my grandmother, well, I suspect the pain was too real and immediate to her. She never remarried and my impression of her is of a sad, angry woman.
My mother, on the other hand, was driven to succeed. She was a star swimmer in high school, graduated near the top of her class, got her bachelors in biology and went on to become a real estate agent — until her husband, my dad, did something that appeared on its surface to be incredibly sexist and disrespectful to her that it is almost beyond belief. He called her boss at the real estate agency and quit for her; told the man she would NOT return to work.
My father’s motivation was not as misogynist as it appeared. My mother had for years expressed her dislike of the job and wished to attend graduate school. Financial insecurity prevented her doing so. My father had sold his first organic chemistry textbook and was confident the family could afford for mom to go to graduate school and achieve her dreams. And indeed, she got a Masters in Psychology from Texas Woman’s University and PhD in Psychology from North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). I’m still not sure my mom appreciates the WAY my father did what he did, but I am certain she appreciated that he DID believe in her dreams and was confident she could get her PhD.
This is all relevant to my story because my mother raised me from childhood with the following moral tenets. They were never spelled out as explicitly as I am putting them here, but this is the core value system she (and my father) imparted to me:
- It is always appropriate to question authority. If, by the values below, the authority is legitimate, you should respect and defer to that authority. If the authority is not legitimate, it must be resisted (my mother would probably add politely and respectfully. I would not.).
- The feelings of others matter and are as real as your own.
- Everyone deserves equal access to opportunity, education and financial/medical security
- All human lives have equal value. Animal and plant life also has value.
- Screwing others for your own gain is unacceptable.
- Victimizing those weaker than you is despicable, and when you observe it you have a responsibility to stop it.
This is not my only connection to anti-authoritarianism from my family and childhood; I attended Cistercian Preparatory School in the 1980s, and our Form Master (Homeroom teacher) was a survivor of the Nazi camps. He was Catholic and never singled out for extermination – but he saw what happened to the Jewish and Roma who were. He had a number tattooed on his arm. And he had permanent kidney damage from being kicked by Nazi boots. A number of our other priests had similar stories. That’s why I don’t believe the “if you’re not one of the groups singled out by Trump, you have nothing to fear” nonsense. Once you start dehumanizing people, it is remarkably easy to expand the target groups. Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are proof of that.
Speaking of Stalinist Russia, some of those same priests were in the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956. I have seen photos of a young man throwing a molotov cocktail at a Soviet T-54 tank; that man was a priest teaching me math (hero for the molotov cocktail, villain for the equations from hell).
Turns out, left wing and right wing authoritarianism look almost EXACTLY THE SAME.
AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS HAVE NO RESPECT FOR HUMAN LIFE OTHER THAN THEIR OWN.
Right now, despite the whining about Antifa on the right, there is no credible left-wing authoritarian movement to fear. Bernie’s First Shock Army is concerned with registering voters, not handing out Kalishnikovs, despite the fevered dreams of Fox News hosts. AOC wants a living wage, not gulags. No, today only one movement in the United States is an authoritarian threat: the Republican Party and its leader, Donald J. Trump.
Our president is a kind of “the cowardly fascist”. He yearns to be Hitler, to inspire the fear and blind loyalty that that man commanded. But he lacks the courage to take the risks and bold steps Hitler, Mussolini and Franco took (none of these are good people, nor do they deserve any kind of celebration. But history shows they were bold and willing to take risks. I report this as fact, not as something to admire in them). Trump makes a proclamation on Twitter, watches what happens and then either backs off or pushes forward. Sometimes he will proclaim the same thing three or four different times and see if people react differently.
The only areas where we do not see him back down, ever, are his racism, his belief that somehow, some way, black and brown skinned people are inferior and thus not fully human, and his misogyny, that women are subservient to men. Those appear to be the only beliefs truly central to Trump’s thinking and which are immutable to him.
I am convinced that he will not willingly give up the presidency. I pray I am wrong. But it is my gut feeling that fear of consequences after he leaves office will force Trump to cling to power, even if it leads to an American civil war of sorts. He is not worried about expending the lives of others if it benefits him.
Yesterday, I attended a training session learning how to take direct action to help protect undocumented human beings from ICE. I agree with those who predict that this time in 2020, ICE will be a deportation terror force against brown skinned people in an effort to terrorize voters of color into not voting.
Each of us must resist in every way possible, to the full extent we are able. Everything depends upon it. The lives of people of color, LGBTQ rights, religious freedom for everyone, and ...whether the planet will remain habitable to humans.
Please get active. If you do not, my grandfather died for no reason at all. As did 416,799 other Americans. What you do today matters for every child of tomorrow.
UPDATE From Mok in comments:
May I take this opportunity to mention the U.S. Army Heritage & Education Center in Carlisle, PA.
As we are losing veterans of WWII every day, I periodically try to make sure as many people as possible know that there is a physical archive / museum / research library run by the Army Heritage Center Foundation in cooperation with the U.S. army that seeks to preserve materials, artifacts, and stories of the U.S. Army and its soldiers.
It’s a great place to donate materials that families may find themselves with after the death of a loved one who served. Journals, diaries, and letters are particularly valuable and welcome. They will be preserved by professionals and may be made available to scholars and researchers. The USAHEC is currently undergoing a massive digitization project to make more of the archive available online, though it is also possible to visit the library in person. (See Web site for details on in-person research.)
From the Web site:
MATERIALS OF INTEREST TO THE ARCHIVES, LIBRARY, AND MUSEUM
The USAHEC collects artifacts related to the history of the U.S. Army and its Soldiers:
- Uniforms
- Weapons
- Accouterments
- Soldier souvenirs
- Original artwork
- Captured enemy materials
The USAHEC also collects manuscripts, audio and video, digital and printed materials related to the history of Army Soldiers:
- Memoirs
- Diaries and journals
- Personal correspondence (letters home, etc.)
- Official documents
- Photographs
- Unit and command newsletters
- Newspapers and periodicals
- Army manuals and publications
- Audio and video recordings
- Films
- Unit histories
- Books relating to Army and military history
ITEMS NOT ACCEPTED:
The USAHEC does not accept some items!
Items that will not be accepted into the collections include:
- Live ammunition, explosives, and ordnance
- Hazardous materials
- Pharmaceuticals or controlled substances
- Items in poor or infested condition
- Newspaper clippings
- 201 files
- Medical or financial records
- Commercial motion pictures
- Any item that does not fulfill the mission of the USAHEC