MUKILTEO — Stuart French was a young soldier on a train bound for San Francisco on Dec. 7, 1941, when a porter shared news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
French, the son of a worker at a Lowell veneer plant, was traveling to California on the way to the Philippines with the 3rd Battalion, 161st Infantry Regiment.
His Everett National Guard unit had recently been mobilized and called into active duty.
Instead of going to the Philippines, the Army redirected the men to help defend Hawaii against further attacks from Japan.
When they arrived in Oahu on a cargo ship two weeks later, Navy battleships were still burning with sailors inside.
Nearly 2,400 Americans were dead and more than a dozen ships sunk or beached. Hundreds of aircraft were damaged or destroyed.
That was French’s first brush with the grim toll of war.
He was battle-hardened by Aug. 11, 1944, the day he was helped out of a trench after being injured in a mortar attack near Mortain, France.
Like many of his generation who fought in World War II, French has vivid memories of friends who never returned home from foreign shores.
Roughly half of the 40 men he led into battle against German defenses in France lost their lives.
While some of their names have faded from French’s memory, their faces are still fresh in his mind: The sergeant who fell into a German trap, the soldier who was wounded but still sent back to the front, where he died.
On this Memorial Day, the retired Snohomish County Superior Court judge, who turns 87 next week, will pause to remember those who paid the ultimate price to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.
The Normandy campaign
After a short stint in Hawaii in 1942, French applied and was accepted to officer candidate school in Fort Benning, Ga., where he learned rigorous training, strict discipline and efficient organization.
Three months later, he graduated a second lieutenant. He eventually earned a battlefield promotion to first lieutenant as part of Gen. George Patton’s hard-charging Third Army, which pushed hundreds of miles across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria after the June 6 D-Day invasion of Normandy.
While posted in Cornwall, England, in the days before the Allied invasion of Europe, French saw a German aircraft up close for the first time. He suspects the pilot was scouting out the area. There were very few men in the town, and it was women who fired anti-aircraft guns at the plane.
On the fourth of July, 1944, French became one of roughly 850,000 Allied troops who crossed the English Channel as part of the Normandy campaign.
When he landed on Omaha Beach, he climbed a ravine past a makeshift airfield that is now a cemetery lined with rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David. More than 9,300 servicemen were killed there.
A month after the invasion, the villages of Normandy were obliterated.
The allies were pouring people and equipment onto the beaches on a scale never before seen.
Dead cows laid rotting in fields. The civilians who survived heavy shelling and artillery fire were sullen, although some greeted soldiers warmly.
The going got rough during the offensive to take Saint Lo, which the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett would later call the “Capital of the Ruins.”
The bitter July battle was the scene of some of the most intense hedgerow fighting of the war.
It was there that French came eye-to-eye with the enemy.
Going in blind
French was leading a platoon of 40 ground troops with the 134 Regiment of the 35th Infantry Division.
Across the road was the 29th Division, which had taken part in D-Day.
Somehow, his platoon got ahead of the rest of the company on a narrow blacktop road. He didn’t know it at the time, but he had no protection on his right flank.
“We could hear the Germans in front of us; they were bringing up their meals in a cart,” he said. “I had two scouts up there. They could hear them through the weeds.”
His scouts were two Southern men, excellent soldiers who had honed their skills growing up hunting squirrels in the Smoky Mountains.
The orders came down that night to launch a predawn attack on the German position.
It was unfamiliar territory, and French had been trained at Fort Benning to always reconnoiter targets first. But orders were orders, and he had to go in blind.
Exposed to the Germans, he followed a hedgerow with his two scouts ahead.
One of the scouts whispered to him that they had penetrated the German line.
The area was too low, he thought. He must be mistaken.
He moved ahead by himself.
That’s when he spotted a German soldier several feet away, his gun hanging out behind him.
In the dark, German and American army helmets looked the same. But the German’s rifle was unmistakable.
He took out a grenade, pulled the pin and was prepared to toss it.
That’s when he spotted two German soldiers walking right toward him.
French’s rifle was pointed at them. Their rifles were pointed down.
They stopped. It seemed like they stood there, frozen for minutes.
One of the men raised his gun and French fired the M-1 rifle that he had previously taken from a wounded American soldier. It was the first time in his life he had ever shot at anyone. He had little choice.
He dropped back, then realized he had let go of the grenade handle.
He tossed it.
One of his scouts followed with a burst of .40-caliber machine gun fire at the German camp. When the shooting stopped, the body of a German sniper tethered to a rope fell from a tree, where it dangled.
That was the start of the battle. For the next several weeks, his platoon suffered heavy casualties from rockets, mortars, snipers and aerial bombings. The platoon also took German and Polish soldiers prisoner, including one young Polish man who had once lived in Chicago.
The last battle
After more than five weeks of constant battle, the war for French came to an end near Mortain, 150 miles west of Paris.
A major German counter-offensive there in August resulted in more than 300 Allied casualties.
On the side of a hill, French came within several hundred feet of a building that he suspected Germans were in. Then a man in an American military uniform appeared. One of his best sergeants went out to greet what was in actuality a German soldier. By the time he realized it was a trap, it was too late. He started running back. The Germans opened fire. He was shot in the neck.
French’s soldiers began returning fire. He was higher on a hill and could see that they were missing their targets.
He took control of the light machine gun against a hedgerow. Another man fed the belt of ammunition.
Then the Germans then opened with mortar fire. The first shell flew behind them. French kept firing away. The second landed much closer. He kept firing. On their third try, a piece of shrapnel slammed into French’s right shin. The force was enough to break a bone in his knee. A smaller piece of shrapnel hit the man beside him.
French crawled into a trench. A medic gave him a shot of morphine and fastened a rifle to his leg to act as a splint.
His soldiers ducked into the trench to say goodbye. After several hours, he was helped out of the trench in a stretcher. He was back to the beach within a day.
French would spend the next two years in military hospitals in Spokane and Fort Lewis, undergoing several surgeries.
French, who went on to earn a college and law degree at Gonzaga University in Spokane, said he considers himself lucky.
He jokes that he was awarded a German army marksmanship medal, which is still in his leg.
Adjusting back to civilian life wasn’t difficult for him, he said. Others haven’t been so fortunate.
“You have a totally different mindset in combat; you’re just different,” French said. “You’re not the same person, I don’t think, if you’re in combat for a while. I’d kill a German like I’d step on an ant. It wouldn’t affect me, not at the time anyway.
“I probably shouldn’t be saying that, but that’s the way it was, really. Same with the poor German soldier. He didn’t have much of a choice.”
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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