Marsha Henry Goff: Remembering her father, who served well in WWII
Remembering L. Lew Henry, my Ranger father, who fought from Africa to Sicily, through Italy to Anzio with Darby’s Rangers and then from Anzio throughout Europe with the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion (aka The Rangers’ Artillery) until the end of the war. Also remembering June Shellhammer Henry, my mother, who was a single parent to three young daughters for almost three years while Dad was overseas. She nursed us through chicken pox, pink eye, and whooping cough (catching the latter disease herself) until Dad returned home in the autumn of 1945. I couldn’t have asked for better parents. God bless them.
Marsha and her Husband, Ray
Marsha has done so much, and we, the children of these units, are so grateful!
The soldiers are now gone, but we have her to thank for holding it together for so long and providing so much information on them.
You can see more on her wonderful website, Jest For Grins
He and my father served together in some of the same units, in the same areas during the war.
Carl D. Johnson, my Dad
You know, I had to add Daddy in today's post as well
I've always been so proud of him, of all of the men!
I think they were a force to be reckoned with, heroes one and all!
L. Lew Henry Marsha's Dad
L. Lew Henry, as told by his daughter Marsha Henry Goff
Dad, I hardly knew ye
I first called him Daddy, then shortened it to Dad. During my early teen years, I briefly flirted with calling him Lew, but that felt silly and stilted even to me. I'm grateful I had the opportunity to know him as an adult, but -while I thought I knew him well- there was a part of his life that was closed to me.
We viewed a photo of Dad standing next to his Jeep, making snowballs during June in the Bavarian Alps. Other photos of him pictured with his buddies in exotic locations in Africa and Europe
What we didn't see were the heartbreaking photos he took at the liberation of Dachau. I have dad's Dachau photos now and realize he was wise to take them and even wiser not to show them. Ike prophetically said that in the future, some would say the Holocaust never happened, and he ordered that photos of man's inhumanity to man be taken as absolute proof.
Ray and I have continued our efforts to learn about Dad's World War II experiences from his contemporaries in Darby's Rangers and the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion, the unit he joined when the Rangers were disbanded after the Cisterna disaster.
As I learn more about Dad and the men with whom he served, my admiration grows for them, not only for their daring and necessary deeds during World War II but because they came home to build families, careers, and communities.
The 83rd CMB, aka The Rangers' Artillery, supported the Rangers in many battles across two continents. The relationship between the units was a close one, so close that one 83rd officer at the reunion sang the beginning, stopping before the X-rated part of a Ranger ditty I'd often heard Dad sing. I didn't tell him that I knew all the verses.
The Father I Didn't Know
While Grams told me what Dad was like as a boy and Mom described him as a young man, neither knew much about his service as an Army Ranger Officer in World War II. Like many combat veterans, they wanted to forget what had happened.
I am blessed that Mom kept Dad's wartime letters. In a letter to his parents from Anzio Beachhead in April 1944, he depicted the role of a combat soldier. "War cannot be described: only those who have experienced combat can have any conception of the term to the soldier who lives in holes like animals, whose existence is characterized only by the barest minimum of necessities of life, and who has for almost a year and a half suffered day after day from heat or cold, in desert or in icy, muddy mountains, going without sleep, or bathing, or changing clothes for days, weeks and months, life has been crystallized into the expression of one desier--to return home!"
The Rangers were fairly strict in accepting only single men, so the jury is still
out on whether Dad concealed that he had a wife and three children. Personally, I think
that Dad’s fluency in German and knowledge of Italian and French may have made him a
valuable acquisition in spite of his family baggage.
Ray and I attended a mini-reunion of WW II Rangers, and there I met 84-year-old Sgt. Les Cook. A winner of Silver Stars in WW II and Korea and wearer of a Green Beret in Viet Nam. An original Ranger who was trained in Scotland by British Commandos. He admits he was unimpressed when his captain called him in and introduced my father, who had joined the Rangers in Africa, as his new lieutenant.
Les Cook was surprised by something about Dad that didn't surprise me at all. He said the captain told Dad to listen to his sergeant, who had participated in the invasion of Africa and was battle-hardened. "When you think you're able to take over the platoon, tell Sgt. Cook, and he will give it to you."
"That's exactly what happened," says Cook, "It worked out O.K., but he is still surprised that Dad, who at 26 was an old man for a Ranger, listened to and learned from his 19-year-old subordinate.
I told Sgt. Cook, that I grew up with this advice from Dad: "There isn't anyone, Marsha, who doesn't know something that you don't. And if you close your mind to that, you will never learn what they have to teach you. " Dad obviously was following that advice long before he gave it to me.
Perhaps the father I didn't know was the father I knew all along.
Thank you, Marsha, for sharing these stories with us
I am your sister in this with our father's history, and so proud of both our hero fathers!
I am your sister in this with our father's history, and so proud of both our hero fathers!
Missing them and celebrating their service in the US Army on this 250th Birthday
More to read here at Hibiscus House
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