By JOHN GUERRIERO
Morning News staff reporter
Lamoine ""Frank'' Olsen was not involved in the D-Day invasion of France, but he contributed greatly to the war effort during subsequent battles in Europe during World War II.
Olsen was 17 when he and his family settled in Union City after moving from South Dakota in the late 1930s. But Olsen, now 73, would make a much bigger move not long after he joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard
about one year later.
The 112th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard went to England in October 1943, and stayed there during the D-Day invasion of France on June 6, 1944.
(The 112th Infantry, an active reserve unit, is still headquartered in Erie at E. 6th and Parade streets.)
""The 28th Division was held back in reserve on D-Day,'' Olsen said in a recent interview at his
Harborcreek Township home.
A platoon sergeant then, Olsen remembered being ""scared stiff'' in England while awaiting action because of the uncertainty of what lay ahead. He would have good reason to be
frightened.
While Olsen didn't participate in the D-Day invasion, he would experience more than his share of battle experiences, including the bloody Huertgen Forest campaign in Germany and his capture by German
troops during the Battle of the Bulge and subsequent detention in four prisoner of war camps.
(The Mornings News will do a separate story later on Olsen's experiences in the Battle of the Bulge and in the POW camps.)
Olsen spent 30 years in active and reserve duty in the service, retiring in 1974 as a colonel. Olsen joined the National Guard in 1941, following in the footsteps of his friends.
""At that time, jobs were hard to come by,'' he recalled.
He saw his first ground combat on July 20, 1944, near St.-Lo, France. Less than one month later, on Aug. 4, he was hit by German machine gun fire.
At the time, his regiment was attacking the enemy from one shoulder-high hedgerow to another. About half of the men were injured, including Olsen, and some were killed. Olsen doesn't know how many died.
""When you get hit, you don't really know what goes on after that,'' he said.
Olsen was hit in the left thumb, and other bullets grazed his arm and hip. The impact of machine gun fire ""shattered
my rifle barrel and a piece of that went into my stomach.''.
Still, Olsen considered himself lucky.
""That's what we call a million dollar wound. That's what we call them when you're just slightly
wounded,'' he said.
Olsen was out of action until October, when he rejoined his regiment in the bloody battle in the Huertgen Forest. Though Olsen was not injured in that combat, ""we lost 75 percent of the
regiment,'' he said.
A regiment had 2,000 men, including four troop battalions.
Olsen described the Huertgen Forest as the ""worst hell of all.''
Only 16 of the 200 men in his rifle company survived.
Olsen had written down his thoughts of the battle for his 47-year-old daughter, Rita Shoynacki, and provided a reporter with a copy of the page and a half recollections.
""I don't remember how many days
the battle lasted but we went for days without sleep or eating, and it was cold and wet. Going through the Forest was tough because artillery, both German and American, had blown treetops off and made so much rubble
that the only way we could move a lot of the time was by crawling underneath and over and through some of the treetops,'' he wrote.
""In doing so, we sometimes crawled right on top of Germans in their holes.
Whoever shot first was the one that got to see the sun come up in the morning.
""We ended up finally fighting in a little village called Schmidt. By that time, we had lost so many men that we were all mixed
up with other units of our battalion. Wherever we would meet, we would just band together and try to hang on,'' Olsen wrote.
In the village, the U.S. troops sometimes found themselves surrounded by Germans. They would
have to fight their way out, turn around and go at the enemy again, he recalled.
""That went on so long that no matter where you looked, there were bodies (of Germans and Americans) lying all over ....,'' he
wrote.
""It was like being in the twilight zone.''
Olsen had a close call when he saw a German tank heading straight toward himself and about nine other men who were firing their weapons from the windows
of a stone house. The tank rammed into a wall of the building.
""I jumped back just in time before the wall came crashing in on us. Three men were buried under all the rubble.''
The tank conked out after it stopped upon the rubble.
""While the tank driver was trying to get it started, we all rammed chunks of rubble in his bogey wheels and tracks. When he finally got it started, he
couldn't go in either direction.
""One guy crawled onto the tank and when the tank commander opened the hatch, he slugged him with his rifle barrel and dropped two grenades in the tank. I motioned for
everybody to take off and they surely did, and I had no idea where they went,'' Olsen wrote.
Olsen knew there was a trail in the rear, but he was not sure how far back. ""By that time, I was so sick that I
felt like I just didn't care and was just walking.''
Then Olsen heard a tank, looked behind him and saw an entire column of German tanks rumbling up the road. Olsen wondered why the machine guns weren't firing upon
him until he realized that they intended to run him down.
""I suddenly decided I cared and dove off the road, not knowing it was almost straight down. I thought I was just going to dive into the brush. When
I hit bottom, (I) must have passed out or just fell asleep.''
Olsen, fatigued by the battle, found it difficult to stay awake even with all the action around him.
When he awakened, he finally found the trail and
walked until he saw an aid station, where both German and American doctors were working on injured troops from both sides.
""I walked on by and after some distance, I saw two German soldiers coming up the
trail with their rifles slung on their shoulders with the (rifle) butt up. Right then it dawned on me that I had not checked my rifle barrel to see if it had gotten plugged with mud when I went over the bank.''
The
German soldiers and the lone American soldier passed each other without removing the rifles from their shoulders.
""Finally, I got to the bottom where the trail crossed a river. Tanks had made such deep ruts
crossing (it), so I went up the river until it seemed shallow enough to cross.
""Halfway across, the water was up to my belt and was so cold. I could hardly get my breath. Shortly after I got on the other
side, my pants were frozen but I guess I was so sick with the dry heaves that I didn't care.''
Olsen sat down on a log or stump, curious about the whereabouts of his fellow troops. ""The whole Army can't
just disappear,'' he remembered thinking.
The next thing he knew, someone was tugging at him and he awoke in a large building, where rows of men were lying on straw.
""The guy shaking me said I had been
there a day and a half, and one night, and he asked a medic to check me out.'' The medic told the man to leave Olsen alone because he was sleeping.
Olsen never did learn how he ended up in the building, but he was
famished.
""I was ready to eat a dead, rotten horse,'' he wrote.
>From there, he was sent to the Division Headquarters, then to Battalion Headquarters and then on to his company.
""What a
blow to find out only 16 of us survived, and only two of those from my platoon,'' he wrote.
By JOHN GUERRIERO
Morning News staff reporter
For Lamoine ""Frank'' Olsen, the Battle of the Bulge is more
than a key part of World War II history.
He was in the battle and lived to tell about it, despite his capture by German soldiers and captivity for nearly five months in four prisoner of war camps.
The 73-year-old
Olsen, of Harborcreek Township, talked about his role in the battle during a recent interview at his home. He served in the 112th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
He
spent 30 years in active and reserve duty in the service, retiring in 1974 as a colonel.
Olsen was about 23 years old and the sergeant of his platoon when he was captured by the Germans about one mile east of the
Luxembourg border, across the Our River into Germany. Most of the 28th Division, he said, was west of the river.
The Battle of the Bulge, from December 1944 to January 1945, was a German counteroffensive in the
Ardennes part of Belgium and Luxembourg. It's known as the greatest pitched battle between Germans and Americans in the war.
The battle got its name when the Germans' progression came to a halt on Dec. 25, four miles
short of the Meuse River, after creating a triangular ""bulge'' 50 miles wide at the base and 60 miles deep.
U.S. forces drove the Germans back by Jan. 28, 1945.
Olsen's story is told from the answers he
gave in an interview and from the thoughts about the battle that he has written down for his 47-year-old daughter, Rita Shoynacki.
About 4 a.m. on Dec. 16, 1944, Olsen was checking foxholes and talking to his men as
he moved from one position to the other ""when all of a sudden everyone started shooting and I found myself among German soldiers all around me.''
Olsen's first thought was to get to the stone farmhouse that
served as the platoon command post so he could report to his superiors.
""The Germans couldn't distinguish me from their own in the dark so I removed my helmet and tucked it under my arm like a football and
ran through them as fast as I could,'' he said.
Near the farmhouse, he collided with several Germans. Olsen and the Germans spilled to the ground, but his enemies didn't realize that an American had stumbled into them.
""Being a prudent man, I kept my mouth shut, got up and continued on my way,'' he wrote.
When he got to the house, he saw two Germans entering an outhouse nearby. Olsen and a guard at the door fired at
the outhouse.
""All hell was breaking loose at that time,'' he recalled.
Olsen was lying alongside the house, firing at anything that moved, when he got a radio message from his captain that his platoon
was to stay put and buy time so that motors, artillery, machine guns and ammunition that had been used to support the ground troops could be moved back.
""I knew then that we were to be sacrificed,'' he wrote.
Olsen ordered all his men into the house. ""We had more men than windows and doors to shoot out, so some crawled up to the attic and
poked holes in the straw roof to fire out of.''
About mid-day, the Germans could not be seen and it got strangely, eerily quiet _ except for the anguished cries of the fallen.
""We could hear the cries of
the wounded Germans and bodies were laying all over the landscape. This really bothered the men,'' Olsen wrote.
It didn't take long for Olsen to figure out why it had been so quiet: The house was about to ¥et hit by
German artillery fire.
""I think I was relieved when the barrage started so we didn't have to hear those cries and moaning. Everyone was scrambling around trying to find some kind of a safe place,'' he
recalled.
""There was one of those big Dutch ovens in the kitchen and I swear there had to be a dozen men packed in it,'' he wrote. All Olsen could see were legs sticking out of the oven.
""I guess they thought they could sacrifice legs to stay alive.''
After the barrage, which injured one man, the infantry started hitting next.
During the second day, a sergeant in the rear of the house
told Olsen that a long column of Germans carrying a white flag was approaching from the left rear.
Olsen figured it was a trick because what he saw with his field glasses didn't make sense. The column of men scattered
after the Americans fired a few rounds into the ground in front of the man holding the flag.
By noon the following day, the platoon inside the farmhouse had nearly used all its ammunition. Three German tanks charged
at the house from the northeast, stopped about 50 yards away and lowered its guns toward the house.
A staff car drove up and a German officer, with shiny boots and a clean uniform, got out and in broken English asked
to speak to the platoon sergeant.
Olsen, his legs like rubber, walked only part of the way outside. The officer told him to put down his weapons and then, according to Olsen, he lied because he promised a good home
until the war's end.
Olsen didn't say a word, but returned to the house and told his men to destroy all their weapons and rations so the Germans wouldn't get them.
Then the Americans put their hands on their heads and walked out.
A German lieutenant who couldn't speak English stood before Olsen, trying with difficulty to break through the language barrier so he could order the
prisoners to line up in a column two abreast.
Meanwhile, German soldiers in the double doors of a barn 50 feet from the house pointed a machine gun at the prisoners. ""All of a sudden the machine gun started
firing and the three men on my right dropped dead,'' Olsen wrote.
""In cold blood,'' Olsen said, recalling the chilling moment.
""The (German) officer was furious, not because of the three dead
men but because the shooting was so close to him. I thought he was about to shoot one of his own men.''
The prisoners marched for two days before arriving at the first of four POW camps, Stalag 12A in Lindberg.
""During the second day the German air force made what I believe was their last big effort and there were many dog fights in the sky,'' Olsen wrote.
""Each time an American plane went down in
smoke, the guards made us clap. The first time it happened we didn't know what was expected of us ... and one man was shot for not complying. I don't know if he was dead because they made us leave him when we moved back
on the road to continue to march.''
At the camp, privates were separated from sergeants. Olsen said he never saw the privates again.
Olsen is lucky to be alive after his reaction during one of his four interrogation
sessions. In one session, the Germans seemed angered by the Americans' destroying the weapons and rations back at the farmhouse.
""I appeared to them as arrogant, and probably was, because of the shooting
(of the three Americans) in cold blood,'' he recalled.
""Each time they asked a question I either gave my name, rank and serial number or tried to tell them what their troops had done. They didn't want to
hear it and told me so.''
During the second interrogation, an English-speaking officer with shiny boots and a ""pretty'' uniform - ""a real dandy'' - lost his cool and slapped Olsen across the face
with a pair of leather gloves he was holding.
""I was furious. That stung,'' Olsen said.
""I reacted without thinking and kicked him in the scrotum. I saw him start to fall when the lights went
out for me,'' he wrote.
Olsen said another officer hit him in the back of the head with what he assumes was a rifle butt. The assault split the back of his head; the wound didn't heal until he returned to the United
States after the war.
""When I think of it now, that was a pretty stupid thing to do on my part and it's a wonder they didn't finish me off,'' he wrote.
Olsen figures the stone building where he was
interrogated saved him. ""If they would have shot inside of that building, it would have ricocheted around,'' he said.
Conditions in the camps were miserable and filthy, Olsen said.
""We didn't
get baths. Any water you got, you used it for drinking,'' he said. ""We didn't shave. We never got a change of clothes. My socks rotted off.''
His feet froze. When they thawed out, pus oozed from them. His
feet are still scarred from the ordeal.
In the camps, food consisted largely of potato peels. Occasionally, the prisoners got bread, but they never ate meat.
""I weighed 192 pounds when I went in. I
weighed 103 pounds when I came out of there,'' he said.
The Germans moved the prisoners to different camps to delay the inevitable - their liberation by advancing American troops. ""They didn't want to have
the Americans liberate us, so they kept moving us farther and farther into Germany,'' he said.
The prisoners either walked to camps or were crammed into railcars. ""They packed us in so solid,'' he said.
""If you had to go to the toilet, you just let it go. If you needed a drink, you caught (melting) snow as it dripped through the hole (in the railcar),'' he said.
Olsen has no photographs - just his memories
- of his wartime experience.
""See, I was a prisoner, so when I came home I had nothing, other than the clothes on my back,'' he said.
