A reason to remember

Ninety-seven-year-old Alfred Marcus once stood 6-feet-1-inch tall, but now he bends over his walker as he makes his way to the elevator of his assisted living home, past a room full of residents playing Bingo. He recently moved from the tiny town of Prinsburg, Minn., just 15 miles away, where he spent his whole life, except the time he spent serving in World War II.

He still keeps an old map of northern Europe to show where he fought. Squiggly red lines stretch across France, Belgium, and Germany, depicting the path the United States and the Allied forces forged through Europe. They show Marcus’ journey from the beaches of Normandy to the heart of Germany. For eight months, he lived and fought in a tank.

Marcus grew up on a farm, close to the middle of a pack of 12 children. He was the only one in his family to attend high school because at the time he was too short to do much on the farm. He also was the only one drafted into the military. His older brothers got exemptions because they farmed and had families, and his younger brothers weren’t yet old enough to serve.

“I had a girlfriend for a couple years then already,” Marcus said. “She wanted to get married real bad, but I said, no, we better not. I’m going into the service. I don’t know if I’ll be back, and I don’t want you to be a widow in the Army.”

Marcus entered the Army on Dec. 2, 1941, five days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was 21 years old. He spent the next 18 months training for combat at forts all across the United States with the 32nd Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Division. In September 1943, his regiment shipped out for England to prepare for the eventual Allied offensive into continental Europe.

Marcus and his regiment spent nine months in England preparing for the offensive launched on the coast of Normandy on D-Day: June 6, 1944. His four-man tank crew waterproofed every gun and moving part on their tank; they’d have to drive through 7- foot-deep water to reach French soil. He and his fellow soldiers also prepared mentally for what was about to happen. Commanders told them to be ready.

“Get prepared to kill people. It’s going to happen,” he recalled being told. “You kind of dread the thought, but you’re in there for a reason so you’ve got to go ahead with it.”

Marcus wasn’t in the initial group that stormed Normandy on June 6, securing the beaches with the loss of more than 4,000 troops. His regiment was part of the combat forces that landed June 23. Two days later, they entered their first day of combat. In one day, Marcus’ tank alone fired more than 5,000 rounds of ammunition. For the next four months, the allies faced constant combat against German forces.

“We were 118 days under fire straight,” Marcus said.

Life in the tank wasn’t exactly hygienic. The men didn’t bathe for months. They couldn’t even get out of the tanks to relieve themselves, so they used cracker boxes as toilets. Marcus said day after day of combat turned into a mind-numbing blur. At times, he just wanted it to be over, even if that meant death.

“We were too busy to think about anything,” he said. “I think there were times you wish you could be hit and that’d be it.”

The 10 medals Marcus received hang in a display case on his apartment wall. One is a Purple Heart for injuries he sustained in the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last major effort to keep the Allies from Berlin. In that battle, as Marcus peeked out the top of his tank, shrapnel from exploding artillery hit his head and left elbow. He left the battle just long enough to have a bandage put on his wounds.

“I was the commander of my platoon, so I had to get back in there. I wasn’t out very long. I had shrapnel coming out the side of my head yet for about five years afterwards,” he said.

He also has the Distinguished Service Medal, awarded for bravery. One day, the Germans intercepted U.S. radio frequencies, preventing his regiment from communicating by radio. Ordered to deliver a message to another unit, Marcus’ tank drove a mile over open terrain under German fire.

“I’d tell my tank driver, ‘step on it, step on it,’” Marcus said. “He’d step on it, and pretty soon the shells would start coming a little closer. ‘Now slow way down, slow way down.’ He’d do that, and then they were slightly in front of me always. We kept doing that for that distance and we made it OK.”

Two years ago, Marcus received the French Legion of Honor Medal, the highest award the French government bestows.

“Through this award the French government pays tribute to the soldiers who died and did so much for France and Russia and Europe 70 years ago,” the certificate states. “You gave your youth to France and the French people. Many of your fellow soldiers did not return, but they remain in our hearts.”

Marcus said his Christian faith gave him the strength to keep fighting day after day.

“I had my Lord and Savior taking care of me all the way,” he said. “That’s the only thing that kept me going. There was a little spot about this big in the turret of my tank. There was a spot for a Bible there. It fit right in there nice, and on my tank they could use it anytime they wanted to. We had talked a lot about it.”

After eight long, exhausting months of combat, Marcus’ regiment entered a small town 10 miles south of Berlin. The fight was over. Germany surrendered. Soon after, Marcus returned home to Minnesota, married the love of his life, Martha, and had three children.

In the years following his service, he struggled.

“I got this PTSD, too. Actually, I shouldn’t even say it, I felt like leaving home and going to the woods to be someplace by myself. The PTSD was bothering me more then,” he recalled.

Memories of friends dying haunted him, as did guilt over the lives he had taken in combat and images from the concentration camp his regiment passed through near Nordhausen, Germany.

“Before we got into town there was some prisoners from that camp. They were set free already, and they were feeding on a dead horse trying to get something to eat,” Marcus said. “We didn’t have such good things to eat, but we had it a lot better than that. I get nightmares once in awhile. Just last week I had a bad one again. I was in a prison camp.”

Marcus never told anyone, including his wife, what he’d experienced overseas.

“You go through that, you just kind of break up. You can’t hardly talk about it,” he said.

But after Martha died, Marcus opened up. Family members started asking questions, and he started talking. As his life draws to a close, he is trying to tell his story because he sees younger generations forgetting the evils so many of his friends sacrificed their lives to defeat.

“I think maybe some of the now generation don’t hardly believe some of that happened. Some don’t even believe the death camp and all that stuff. I was there. I saw it,” he said.

His story has become known to many in his hometown of Prinsburg and the surrounding area and now throughout his assisted living home. He said the war taught him the only anchor strong enough to get any of us through this life is faith in God: “One thing about it. If you need any help or anything, trust the Lord to help you.”

Listen to Sarah Wedel’s complete report on veteran Alfred Marcus on the Nov. 10 edition of The World and Everything in It.