A 'Shared but Unshared' War Experience Is Relived Nearly 60 Years After Battle

Matthew Hersh

In the dead of winter in 1945, the U.S. 410th Bomb Group flew B-17 bombers to counteract a German offensive near the Belgian boarder. The U.S. military was attempting to push back German forces. The 600,000 American troops involved in what would later be known as the "Battle of the Bulge" were trying to thwart a powerful army and a formidable enemy.

"It was war, we were there to kill them. It was the lowest form of animal behavior," said Taylor Kessler, a bombardier in the 410th, the self-proclaimed "best bomb group in the world."

As a 23-year-old bomber in that final year of World War II, Mr. Kessler knew he was up against an enemy unlike any other the U.S. had faced in previous wars. He also knew that civilian sacrifice was inevitable.

"Hitler declared 'total' war on the allies, he wanted to erase [allied] towns. It was a different enemy," Mr. Kessler said.

One of those towns was the medieval hamlet of Mayen, in what would later become part of West Germany. Mayen was the location of a pivotal railroad junction. The objective was to destroy the crossroads, handicapping the German military's mobility.

"We weren't deliberately out to destroy the buildings, we were going after the railroad. That was after we had finally turned the tide against the Germans and pushed them back to the Rhine," Mr. Kessler said.

As the tide turned and the German offensive became less dominant, civilians watched with awe, many relieved by the allied presence as World War II began to wane. Josef Ruehle, then a teenager, watched his town devastated by the effects of war, but did not necessarily feel animosity toward the allied forces.

"We felt 'now it finally stops'," Mr. Ruehle said.

On this 60th anniversary of D-Day, and the observance of Memorial Day, Mr. Ruehle and Mr. Kessler sat across from one another, drinking coffee, remembering a time that they are happy is long past. Their unlikely pairing is stranger than fiction. Mr. Kessler, a resident at Elm Court, met Mr. Ruehle at the senior housing complex on Elm Road, where Mr. Ruehle is the chef in dining services.

When the two got to talking, they realized they had experienced different sides of the same nightmare.

"When he mentioned the name of his town, Mayen, it struck a note with me," Mr. Kessler said. "I checked my 410th history book and, sure enough, found we had bombed Mayen in January, 1945, going after a railroad choke point."

"He was up there, I was down here," Mr. Ruehle said.

The two men seem as though they are old friends, and in many ways, they are. Mr. Ruehle said they have brought their "shared but unshared" experiences into one, complete story. But the chapters of that story that took place in Germany were frightening. Mr. Ruehle described the disappearance of a close friend in the January bombing.

He remembered celebrating the New Year, where he and his friend played the accordion, drank a bottle of wine, and ate chocolate.

"During the night after we had finished drinking and eating, he went to find his mother," Mr. Ruehle said.

Mr. Ruehle's boyhood friend walked into town, right into the heart of a bombing offensive, and disappeared. "Nobody knew what happened to him," he said. "Those are war stories."

"It ain't pretty," Mr. Kessler added. "Not to mention [it's] stupid."

The bombardier considers himself fortunate not to have been involved in direct bombings of civilian areas. His A-20 group specialized in precision bombing, like that of the railroad in Mayen.

"We steered clear of civilians. I can safely say I never killed civilians," he said. The prospect of killing innocents, combined with the fear of facing the enemy was too much to handle for some men in the Air Force, however.

"Fear was the overriding emotion. Fear can be debilitating and takes the efficiency out of you completely," Mr. Kessler said. "But if you can ventilate your feelings, talk about them, you can survive.

One of Mr. Kessler's fellow servicemen could not handle the emotional strain.

"He and I used to compete for who had more accuracy, when you're 21, 22, you can do things like that," he quipped.

The bombardier, who went by the name Shoemate, was undaunted in his missions. "'Weren't you scared?' I would ask him," but Shoemate would never admit to being scared. "One day, I noticed he wasn't around," Mr. Kessler said. As it turned out, his competitive flight mate succumbed to the pressures of war.

"Shoemate ended up in England had a complete and total nervous breakdown," Mr. Kessler said. "Because he could not vent his fears."

"The fear almost paralyzes you," Mr. Ruehle said. "You can't say anything, you can't even scream. It's not just one, it's everybody."

"And once it's done, what a sigh of relief."

That June, Die Schreckliche Zeit, or "the terrible times," were over. And Messrs. Ruehle and Kessler finally exhaled.

Back in the U.S.

Mr. Ruehle came to the U.S. in January 1954 with the fear that he would not be accepted as a German into a world very much still healing from WWII. The Battle of the Bulge alone saw 19,000 American deaths, and 100,000 Germans killed, wounded, or captured.

Under the leadership of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Germany was paying literally and figuratively for the war, and was working to repair relations with the U.S. and France.

Mr. Ruehle did not know if those political reparations would make his own experience easier. But the Princeton household in which he stayed treated him as a member of their own family.

"I was German, but you should have seen how well they treated me, how they accepted me in their family," he said. "From then on, that was my family."

Mr. Ruehle was sponsored to come to the U.S. by George F. Kennan, the U.S. diplomat who developed the policy of "containment" to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence. Mr. Ruehle's wife worked for John Davies, Mr. Kennan's colleague in working on a post-war plan.

"Mr. Kennan asked my wife to come to the states, and that was it," he said.

Mr. Kessler returned from the war and bought a house with his wife, and entered the professional world. "It took me about 40 years to realize that I wasn't cut out for the corporate world," he said with a grin.

Memorial Day

With Memorial festivities taking place over the weekend, and the unveiling of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C., both men say that while they feel the current Iraq War is unjustified, they are supportive of troops stationed around the globe.

However, here at Elm Court, these two men, once pitted in an adversarial arena, laugh as good friends and shake their heads at the effects of war.

"It was the worst of the worst," Mr. Kessler said. "But now I can consider Jo as one of my friends."