Washtenaw County’s Honor List of the men and women who died or disappeared during World War II includes names still familiar to our communities: Hafly, Heselschwerdt, Koch, Schaible, Schneider, Salter, Van Dyken, Vetter, Vocker, Volz, Webb, and White, among hundreds of others. Every veteran fortunate enough to return brought home important, and sometimes difficult, stories. Many didn’t share them for decades.

As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.S.’s entry into the war approached, some local vets had just begun to let friends and relatives hear those stories. In 2014 and 2015, Robert Reed, James Retzloff, and George Winans shared their extraordinary experiences of the war they witnessed firsthand. Retzloff died last November, within weeks of his wife, Shirley, and Reed in April of this year.

James Retzloff: heavy losses in a winter war

“I haven’t talked about the war in all these years–even my wife doesn’t know anything much about what happened to me in Europe,” James Retzloff said during an interview in November 2014. “When my children were small, they’d dress up in my uniform now and then, but that was the only contact I allowed myself with my memories of the war. Until now.”

When his wife, Shirley, joined us for the interview, she heard his war stories for the first time. Retzloff had hoped to join the Army Air Corps as a pilot, but when doctors discovered he was color-blind, he was assigned to the 44th Infantry, which shipped out to France early in the fall of 1944. Under the command of General George S. Patton, they raced toward Cherbourg.

On the ground in Europe, Retzloff recalled, “There weren’t enough of us … We saw constant combat, and when we weren’t fighting we sat in wet, cold, muddy foxholes. It was a hell of a life,” he said with a visible shudder.

“To this day, I can’t really tell you where we were. We were dug into the ground in a wooded area and later on farmlands far from big towns or cities. Although we were raw troops and the men we joined were seasoned veterans, they welcomed us–they badly needed bodies to replace the men they’d lost.”

The fall and winter of 1944-45 were among Europe’s coldest on record. “The weather was always bad, constantly raining or snowing. We lived in mud and muck and muddy water. Everything we wore and everything we had with us was always wet. We weren’t adequately dressed, although we had plenty of ammunition and guns. Winter came on, and we had only shoes to wear–and they weren’t waterproof. We desperately needed boots.”

He remembered charging out of his foxhole, fighting, then digging another foxhole for the night. “We were constantly trying to get closer to the Germans and push them back. We saw a lot of dead Germans. We never had an idea of the bigger picture of the war. We never really knew how it was going, who was winning. To us, the war consisted of what we could see and hear from our little patch of ground–and it wasn’t a pretty sight. We were pinned in holes for weeks at a time, firing and fighting, then going underground again.”

He paused and swallowed hard before adding, “I lost too many friends early on. After that, I didn’t get acquainted with many people. We didn’t want to get too close because we didn’t know what would happen. One day we’d talk to a soldier in the next foxhole, and then we’d never see him again.” Officers tried to keep the news of casualties from the soldiers “to bolster what morale we could muster … We lived with fear pretty much every minute. We were constantly aware that we could get hit at any time.”

After three months of fighting, an officer found Retzloff in his foxhole suffering from a high fever and pneumonia. A plane transported him to England, where he was diagnosed with a serious case of trench foot. “That happens when your feet have been in mud and cold so long that your toes turn black and you can’t walk,” he said. “To this day, my feet bother me.”

“I never realized that was the reason why,” his wife murmured.

He was hospitalized in England for three months while his unit fought the Battle of the Bulge. That probably saved his life: by the time he returned to his unit, “half the soldiers I knew had been killed.” Yet, he said, “I can’t remember feeling angry at the Germans. We knew they were just like us: young guys who were given guns, sent to the front lines, and told to obey orders. They just were on the other side.”

In the spring, with the war in Europe winding down, Retzloff was promoted to sergeant, sent home on furlough, and told he would be sent next to the Pacific. “I can’t say I was happy about the news,” he said dryly. But he was still on American soil when the Japanese surrendered.

“My entire war experience consisted of intense, constant combat, except for a few days when I could go behind the lines to rest,” he said. “I was relieved–and, to be truthful, amazed–that I got out of the war all right. I was glad I was able to participate, but I had a lot of friends who didn’t come home alive. And so I never talked about the war until now.”

Robert Reed: hand-to-hand combat in Sicily

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to talk about the war. It means bringing up memories that I’d like to keep away,” Robert C. Reed of Chelsea recalled. “I don’t actually remember when I heard about Pearl Harbor … but we knew right away that war meant our world was about to change. I was drafted, but I didn’t mind. I was about to enlist anyway.”

The eighteen-year-old joined the 551st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne, attending jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. “The first time I jumped out of a plane at 3,000 feet, I felt like an angel must feel, floating down to earth.”

The Allies were so desperate for men that his training was condensed from thirteen to eight weeks. The 82nd Airborne shipped out of Newport News, Virginia, as part of a huge convoy; only the highest-ranking officers knew their destination: Sicily.

“We fought our way across the island, battling Germans every step of the way. I fought for three months and never had the chance to change my clothes once.”

He carried a backpack, bayonet, knife, and the semiautomatic M1, which could shoot eight times before reloading. Their C rations were “biscuits so hard even dogs wouldn’t eat them, cigarettes (Chesterfields, four to a pack), salt tablets, a can of something (probably beans), and once in a while, if we were lucky, a chocolate bar. Chocolate was like gold; we’d trade anything for chocolate.”

Occasionally, officers would give the men a ten-minute water break. “We guarded our canteens with our lives. We didn’t come upon many places where we could fill them up, you see. There were no portable kitchens, no newspapers, very little mail, no comforts.”

And the Germans, he recalled, “were like fleas on a dog–they were everywhere … Many more than a few times, it boiled down to hand-to-hand combat. The Germans were stationed on the higher land, waiting in ambush. They had Tiger tanks that would knock our General Shermans out of their boots. The Tigers were faster, bigger, and stronger, and they had 88-millimeter guns. General Shermans had 75s, which couldn’t shoot as far. We didn’t have any air support, and we could have used more ammunition.”

His unit took Sicily foot by hard-fought foot. “It was tiresome, dangerous, rough work. We were fighting too hard to round up our dead and bury them. I can’t begin to tell you how hard the fight became. I saw one or two soldiers go crazy with shell shock. Some men just disappeared from our ranks. We didn’t know what happened to them, and the officers didn’t keep us informed too good. We just kept moving. Moving. Moving.”

When Sicily was liberated, his unit moved on to Italy. Reed was wounded there on July 13, 1944. “It must’ve been a German 88 shell that got me, because when they bust, the pieces go wide and far. When I came to, I was in a hospital on the mainland of Italy. To this day, I don’t know where I was taken … I looked like a mummy: I was all wrapped in bandages except for one eye.”

Reed lost his left eye and three fingers, and the doctors counted fifty-two pieces of shrapnel lodged inside their patient. For the rest of his life, he had nightmares about his war experiences.

Reed was awarded the Bronze Star, and four other medals. Back home, he was active in the Chelsea VFW, American Legion, Purple Heart, and disabled groups. He served with the Washtenaw County Honor Guard, honoring deceased veterans.

“Going to war was a duty I had to do. I’m glad I went,” the Chelsea native said. “I have peace of mind. We showed the Germans that they couldn’t tread on us or any other people without paying the consequences. We showed them that American men would fight to the death for their beliefs.”

George Winans: Flying B-24s over Europe

On December 7, 1941, George Winans and his father were listening to the radio as they decorated their jewelry store on Chelsea’s Main St. for Christmas. The program was interrupted by the announcement about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“Where’s Pearl Harbor?” he asked his father.

“Things started happening right away,” Winans recalled. “Almost everyone I knew was prepared to volunteer immediately. We didn’t want to wait to be drafted–we felt that would be a stigma. I went to Detroit right away and signed up for the Air Corps Cadets. The idea of being a pilot seemed very glamorous to a kid of eighteen.”

Winans was eventually assigned to copilot the B-24, a four-engine bomber. He met his ten-man crew in Boise. “Our crew was international, and we were all buddies.” The pilot was twenty-one; everyone else, including Winans, was less than twenty years old.

In March 1944, Winans’ crew joined the 392nd Bomb Group. Their first bombing mission targeted a submarine base on the coast of France. “The mission went like clockwork. We weren’t attacked, and when we returned to the base, we boasted, ‘We’ll be home in a month.'”

After several successful missions, Winans’ crew was sent to bomb a Nazi synthetic oil refinery. Their plane was so seriously damaged that they barely made it back; the crew bailed out over the English Channel. They were fished out of the water, and by the time they returned to base, another plane was waiting for them.

On D-Day, Winans took off at five o’clock that morning. “It was a beautiful sight to see all those ships below us and all the planes in the sky.”

Two weeks later, Winans’ crew was sent to bomb Szczecin, a city near the Baltic coast in what is now Poland. “When we flew over the Baltic, I looked back and saw planes off to our right … JU-88s, rocket-firing attack ships. Every plane ahead of us was shot down except one.” Winans and his pilot shook hands. “We were sure that we’d had it, but we came out of the smoke untouched. Then we got hit. We felt a tremendous impact and saw a big hole in our wing. One engine was out and we’d lost our oxygen system.” Their navigator, who was Jewish, had previously warned his crewmates that he refused to go down in Nazi territory; he directed the plane north to neutral Sweden. Once again the crew bailed out, this time over the Swedish coast.

The enlisted men were sent to a POW camp, the pilots to a luxurious hotel in Falun. Eventually they were transferred to Stockholm, where they shared a hotel with Nazi pilots until they could be flown to England. Under the terms of their release, they could no longer fly combat missions–much to Winans’ regret. He became a flight instructor in Oklahoma.

Winans notes that his war experience was, in a sense, fortunate. “I didn’t see the horrible parts of war … the Marines and GIs fighting in the jungles and coming down with malaria, dysentery, and jungle rot–they make me very glad that I didn’t experience war that way. My friend Dick White was a Marine in the Pacific, and he went through terrible battles and suffering.”

Seven decades later, the retired jeweler looks wistful when he says, “The biggest mistake I made in life was to return to Chelsea rather than re-up in the Air Force. Those were the best years of my life.”