Page 212 - Always Virginia

200 Virginia Day Fritscher

Americans—and nearly 9,000 Germans. Among those 25,000
graves are those for scores of Yanks killed in the infamous “Malm-
edy massacre” at the start of VonRundstedt’s winter breakthrough.
Also buried there are thousands of the finest Nazi troops who
died in that last vast gamble by Hitler for victory.
Over one corner of the American section the Stars and Stripes
flies at perpetual half staff.

Memorial Flagpole
“The flagpole was built by one engineering outfit as a memorial
to one of its sergeants killed in action,” said Lt. John McKenna, of
Montclair, N.J., who supervises Allied burials.
Graves are dug by hand by newly captured German prisoners
en route to rear areas. Each day a new batch is brought over from
the army prisoners cages.
“Once we had a little prisoner who was convinced we were
compelling him to dig his own grave,” said T/Sgt. A. H. Herberts,
of Chester, Ill., ranking non-com for both cemeteries.
“He thought we were going to shoot him when he finished
and kept begging that he didn’t want to dig his own grave—he
just wanted time to write his wife that he had died fighting for the
Fatherland. He was still unconvinced at the end of the day. He
thought he was being taken back to the prison camp to be shot
there.”

Combat Chaplain

Major John B. Day, former Jacksonville, Ill., priest, whose
parents live at 5536 Pershing Avenue, St. Louis, Mo., is one of the
combat chaplains who take turns coming back from the front so
that each day the dead soldier can be buried with ministrations
of his own faith.
Father Day is a gentle-voiced man with a gentle outlook in
life and it saddens him immeasurably to see these remnants of