On Veterans Day, Valley vet recalls WWII horrors

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By JORDYN GRZELEWSKI

jgrzelewski@vindy.com

BOARDMAN

About 15 years ago, William Lee Davis Jr. attended a raucous reunion of the 63rd Infantry Division – also known as the “Blood and Fire” Division – that fought in World War II.

The men met for a gathering that included a trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton. While touring the base, they happened to come upon a traveling exhibit about the Holocaust.

The talking and laughter immediately evaporated, recalled Davis’ daughter, Deborah Metzger, who tagged along to the reunion with her two sons.

“Not a sound was heard when they walked through that exhibit,” Metzger said.

Metzger cannot remember her father ever discussing his military service when she was growing up. To this day, however, Davis, 90, can vividly recall the challenges of war and the horrors he witnessed.

Davis, who grew up on Youngstown’s East Side, was drafted in 1943 to serve in the war. A month after his 18th birthday, he was sent to an Army infantry division in Texas.

After a brief stint in Mississippi, he traveled by ship to Europe, landing in Marseilles, France.

His squadron followed the Rhone River as they traveled to Colmar, a town in the Alsace region of France near the German border. The enclave was held by the German Army.

“The word was, you gotta clear that town,” he said.

That was often the order they got.

“You played leapfrog, I called it. You take this town. Then you get word” to go to the next, Davis said.

Through it all, the biggest challenge he faced was trying to train new members of the squad he led.

“I lost fellas. That was the hardest thing for me. We would get replacements,” he said. “You couldn’t teach them how to take care of themselves in the snow. Some of them froze to death, overnight.”

Trekking through the mountains, with snow up to your waist and all of your possessions weighing you down, you didn’t have time to think about anything except survival, Davis said.

“You were trying to do what you were told to do. You were trying to not get shot or wounded,” he said. “You knew there was a war going on. You didn’t think of it. ... You thought mostly of food and trying to get warm.”

The advice he gave most often was to learn the sounds of warfare.

He’d tell his squad members: “Keep your rear end down the minute you hear a sound. Don’t look around to see what it is – get on the ground.”

You learned to tell the difference between mortar shells – he indicates the sound with a snap of his fingers – and artillery fire, which was less predictable, “like an umbrella spreading out.”

“You learn sounds, and that’s what keeps you alive,” he said.

His squad crossed the Rhine River into Mannheim, Germany, then followed the Neckar River to southern Germany.

One of his division’s biggest victories was breaking through the Siegfried Line, a German defensive line, for the U.S. Seventh Army.

“You lost men. You had men get hurt. ... But we got through it for the Seventh Army,” Davis said.

The part of his European tour that seems to haunt him the most is what he witnessed at the concentration camps he helped liberate.

“They were horrific as far as what one human being will do to another human being,” he said. “The photographs can never come close. The stink of those camps – a mile away you could smell them.”

Gesturing to his own arm, Davis described the skeletal limbs of prisoners. The light from a flashlight would shine right through their arms, he said.

He recalled, too, an atrocity that particularly horrified him.

“Females, especially if you came into that camp with an unusual tattoo, would be dead within an hour. The skin would be cut off your body. ... It would be tanned into leather, and that leather would be made into a lamp shade or book cover,” he said.

He later tried, he said, to get the person responsible for that crime indicted, but was not successful.

After the war, Davis ended up staying in Berlin working for OMGUS – the Office of Military Government, United States.

He came home in 1946, arriving to an empty B&O Station.

The first thing he did was drive over to South Side Hospital, where his girlfriend, Delores Goodge, worked. He recalls her running out of the hospital, wearing her nurse’s uniform.

Davis, eager to get out of the service, filed his discharge paperwork and didn’t look back.

“You put them [memories] away and you didn’t bring them up,” he said.

Davis and Goodge later married and had two children. Davis chose chemistry as a career, retiring as an Environmental Protection Agency chemist for the city of Youngstown. He has been honored numerous times for his service, including, most recently, being awarded the French Legion of Honor distinction.

He began to open up to his family about his service after his grandsons, Drew and Scott Metzger, joined the Air Force.

Both grandsons vividly remember the Army reunion they went to with their grandfather all those years ago, especially the veterans’ reaction to the Holocaust exhibit.

“For my children, who have no idea the impact of that, to this day they’ll talk about that – how quiet those guys were,” Deborah said. “It was a memory come back from the dead for them.”