The Fighting Falcon

"Anything, Anytime, Anywhere — Bar Nothing." Regimental motto of the 39th Infantry, “Triple-A Bar Nothing,”
assigned by Col. Harry A. “Paddy” Flint, Sicily, 1943

Frontispiece Portrait Morgan R. Donato Jr., Private First Class, U.S. Army Serial Number 33 716 463.
Studio portrait, c. 1944, taken before his departure for the European Theater.
He was eighteen and a half years old, a son of South Graham Street, Pittsburgh.

Prologue The Soldier Who Did Not Speak of It

A grandson's preface, written in May 2026

He did not speak of it. That was the first fact about my maternal grandfather's war, and for most of his life it was nearly the only one that mattered. Morgan Roy Donato Jr. came home to Pittsburgh in the late autumn of 1945 with two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a campaign ribbon for the European Theater, a body that had been twice torn open by German fire, and a deep, working silence that he would keep more or less intact for the next seventy-six years. There was no grand telling. There were no war stories pulled out at family dinners. There were a few parades, a few quiet conversations with other veterans who already knew, and there was the slow accumulation of the ordinary life that came after — the butcher's apron, the technical school, the family television-repair shop in East Liberty, the church eldership, the ceramics fired in the basement, the dollhouses built for granddaughters, the model trains assembled at the workbench. Beneath all of it ran the unspoken inheritance of the Hürtgen Forest, the Eifel highlands, and a winter spent under tree-burst shellfire in the most cursed woods on the Western Front.

The document on which this monograph is built is a single piece of typewritten paper, stamped JAN 9 1950, filed in Volume 154 at page 445, bearing the serial number 33 716 463 and the words HONORABLE DISCHARGE across the top. Beside it survives a small case of medals and patches — the octofoil shield of the 9th Infantry Division, the silver bar of the Combat Infantryman Badge, two Purple Hearts in their oxblood ribbons, a Bronze Star on its red-and-blue, a sharpshooter's cross, the marksmanship qualification badge, and the modest single chevron of a private first class. There is also a photograph of him as a boy in uniform, perhaps nineteen years old, eyes dark and serious, jaw set, the cap of an infantry soldier tipped back from a forehead that had not yet seen what it would soon see. Together these few objects are the surviving documentary record of a year and a half that very nearly killed him, and that changed the man who came back.

He has been gone since November 10, 2021 — a long life ending in Boynton Beach, Florida, at the age of ninety-six, surrounded by his fourth wife Wilma and the family he had quietly built up out of the wreckage of his twenties. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct, as honestly and as carefully as the surviving sources allow, what happened to him between January 1944 and November 1945. It is built from his official Enlisted Record and Report of Separation; from the campaign histories of his regiment, the 39th Infantry; from the corresponding histories of the 9th Infantry Division of which the 39th was part; from the brief but precious moments before his death when he did, finally, speak of a few things; and from the public obituary published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on November 25, 2021. Where the family record and the official record diverge — and they do, at several points — I have followed the official record and noted the discrepancy in the margins. He deserves no less than the truth, even where the truth is more modest than the legend, and more terrible than the silence.

This is a grandson's monograph for a maternal grandfather who almost never told the story himself. It is also, in its way, a small act of repair. The silence he kept was earned and it was his to keep. The telling, now, has fallen to those of us who came after him, and who can hold what he could not bring himself to say.

Chapter I A Pittsburgh Boyhood

South Graham Street, Peabody High, and the world before induction

Morgan Roy Donato Jr. was born on the ninth of August, 1925, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Morgiano “George” DiDonato and Adeline (Donatelli) DiDonato — two children of the Abruzzese emigration whose own people had crossed the Atlantic from the high stone villages of L'Aquila and Chieti provinces a generation earlier. His paternal grandfather Giuseppe Antonio di Donato had been born in Rivisondoli in 1854; his paternal grandmother Giovanna Philomena Romito had been born in the same hill town in 1860. His mother's people, the Donatellis and Colangelos, had come out of Sulmona and Bugnara in the Valle Peligna. By the time Morgan arrived in the second August of the Coolidge administration, the family was already four years past the point where his father had begun spelling the surname “Donato” rather than “di Donato” — an Americanization that would harden in the next generation, though Morgan himself would always be a DiDonato on the older paperwork and a Donato on the newer.

The DiDonato & Donatelli Families — South Graham Street, c. 1920s A family group portrait taken at the family residence in Pittsburgh's East End — three generations of the DiDonato and Donatelli families gathered before a black sedan on a Pittsburgh lawn, well-dressed against the summer trees. The photograph predates Morgan's own birth or shows him too young to be identified within the group; it is, in any event, the world he was born into. The eldest patriarch leans on his straw hat at left; the matriarchs cluster in the center; the children in white shirts and tie-knots, sailor collars and Mary-Janes, sit on the grass at front. It is a portrait of an Italian-American family in the full confidence of the decade between the two world wars, photographed in the city where Morgan would, half a century later, raise his own children and grandchildren.

The household into which he was born was a large one. He was one of seven children: brothers Corry, Albert, Arthur, and Raymond, and sisters Evelyn and Dolores. The permanent mailing address recorded on his eventual discharge — 115 South Graham Street, Pittsburgh, Pa. — places the family in the East End, just south of Penn Avenue, within easy walking distance of Peabody High School on Highland Avenue. This was a working-class corner of Pittsburgh in the 1930s and early 1940s, dense with Italian, Jewish, and Black households, threaded by the streetcar lines that connected East Liberty to downtown, and oriented economically toward the great steel and rail concerns whose smokestacks gave the air its perpetual taste of iron.

What we know of Morgan as a child is fragmentary. He was a boy of average height for his eventual generation — at induction he would measure five feet ten inches and weigh 146 pounds, with brown eyes and brown hair, blood type A. He attended Peabody High School in East Liberty, the same school that had educated and would educate so many of the city's Italian-American sons; his obituary recorded his enrollment there, and his discharge paper logged his civilian occupation at the time of induction as simply Student, High School, with the date 2–19–44 noted beside it. He had completed eight years of grammar school and what the discharge form coded as four years of high school. He had not attended college. He had not yet entered a trade. He was, by every available measure, an ordinary Pittsburgh boy in the last weeks of his American boyhood.

He would later say almost nothing about Peabody, or about the boyhood that came before the war. The boy in the surviving studio portrait — sepia-toned in its original, restored here in color, head turned slightly, an infantry overseas cap pushed back on his hair — has not yet been to Europe. It is most likely the photograph taken either at induction or just after, in the first weeks of training, when families were given a portrait to take home. The face is young, expressive, and unmistakably the face of someone's youngest son. He has not yet been wounded. He has not yet been shelled in a forest in Germany. He has not yet watched a man he knew die in a fire break under enfilading machine-gun fire. He is, in the photograph, a Pittsburgh boy from South Graham Street with the rest of the twentieth century still in front of him.

Chapter II Induction

January–August 1944 — from Local Board No. 8 to the troop transport

The family obituary, published in November 2021, would later set the date of his enlistment as January 1943, when he was seventeen. The official discharge document, prepared at McGuire General Hospital in Richmond and signed in November 1945, is more precise — and the two records do not agree. According to his Enlisted Record and Report of Separation, Morgan was inducted on 17 January 1944, when he was eighteen years old, and entered active service three weeks later, on 7 February 1944, at Pittsburgh, through Local Selective Service Board No. 8 in Allegheny County. The interval between induction and entry into active service was passed on the Enlisted Reserve Corps roll, in the army's customary practice of giving men a few weeks to settle their affairs at home. He had just turned eighteen the previous August. He was, by the math of the form, a boy of eighteen and a half on the day he reported for duty.

The family memory of an earlier enlistment is understandable. It is the kind of slight chronological compression that often happens with stories about veteran fathers and grandfathers — the dates of induction, of training, and of overseas departure collapse over the decades into a single “he went in” that, in retrospect, gets pushed earlier and earlier as the years lengthen. But the discharge is unambiguous, and the chronology it lays out is the one this monograph follows. He was 18 at induction, 19 when he sailed, and 20 when he came home.

The form's coding is bureaucratic and abbreviated, but it tells a coherent story. He was inducted at eighteen, trained through the spring and summer of 1944, sailed for the European Theater on the twenty-fourth of August, arrived eight days later on the first of September, and was wounded in action for the first time on the seventh of October — a total of five weeks between landing on the Continent and being carried off the line for the first time. He returned to duty, was wounded a second time on the first of March, 1945, and shipped home from the ETO on the thirtieth of April — six days before V-E Day. He was admitted to McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the army's largest convalescent facility for the wounded returned from Europe, and was discharged from it under Army Regulation 615-361 — the regulation governing Certificate of Disability for Discharge. He was, in other words, sent home not because the war was over but because his body had been damaged badly enough that the army would not put him back into uniform. His total foreign service was eight months and twenty-two days. In those eight months and twenty-two days, he was wounded twice, decorated four times, and given the second-highest distinction the United States Army gives an infantryman who has been in close combat: the Combat Infantryman Badge.

Training and the Replacement Pipeline

His training, like that of most American infantry replacements in the spring and summer of 1944, would have begun at one of the Army's Infantry Replacement Training Centers — most likely Camp Croft in South Carolina, Camp Wheeler in Georgia, or Camp Blanding in Florida, all of which were running compressed seventeen-week basic and advanced individual training cycles to feed the manpower demand of the European campaign. The army's immunization record on his discharge places his smallpox vaccination at 26 February 1944, his typhoid at 27 February 1944, and his tetanus at 16 August 1944 — that last date, just eight days before he sailed, is the typical pre-embarkation booster given at a replacement depot. The interval of his training was thus roughly six months: the regulation seventeen weeks of basic and advanced individual training, plus a short interval at a replacement depot at port of embarkation. His Military Occupational Specialty was coded 745 — Rifleman, and he had qualified Sharpshooter with the M-1 Garand — the second of three rifle ratings, between Marksman and Expert. He was, in the army's terms, an ordinary, competent, eighteen-year-old American infantryman, sent across the Atlantic into the worst manpower crisis of the European war.

He sailed for the European Theater on the twenty-fourth of August, 1944. He arrived on the Continent on the first of September. The 9th Infantry Division at that moment was crossing the Marne River, sweeping toward Belgium in the giddy pursuit phase after the Falaise Gap, and reaching for the Siegfried Line. Morgan would not have been with them yet. He would have been moving up through the great replacement pipeline that snaked from Cherbourg eastward through France — the “repple-depples,” the replacement depots, where new men were sorted, re-equipped, and parceled out to whichever line unit had most recently been bled by combat. By the time he was assigned to Company E, 2nd Battalion, 39th Infantry Regiment, his division was already on the German border, beginning a forty-day battle for a fifty-square-mile patch of fir and beech woods that would, in the eventual American memory, become a synonym for hell.

Chapter III The Fighting Falcons

The 39th Infantry Regiment and the meaning of “Triple-A Bar Nothing”

To understand what happened to Morgan Donato in the autumn of 1944, it is necessary to understand the regiment he joined. The 39th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army had been activated on the first of June, 1917, at Camp Syracuse, New York, in the first muster for the Great War. It had spent the twenty interwar years as a peacetime cadre. It was reactivated in August 1940 as part of the new 9th Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina — a so-called “assault division” trained for amphibious operations — and was the first combat unit of American troops to set foot on European soil in the Second World War, landing at Inverary in Scotland on the seventeenth of October, 1942, and then assaulting the beaches near Algiers on the eighth of November. It fought across Tunisia, took its place in the line at Kasserine Pass, and forced the surrender of the German Panzerarmee Afrika in May 1943. It landed at Palermo in August and gave eight days of ferocious fighting to take the Sicilian hub town of Troina from the German defenders. It was there, on Sicily, that its commander Colonel Harry Albert “Paddy” Flint — a legendarily theatrical, scarf-wearing, cane-carrying combat officer — gave the regiment its slogan: “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere — Bar Nothing,” shortened on the helmets of his men to the painted letters AAA-O. It is the slogan that gave them their nickname: the Fighting Falcons, Triple-A Bar Nothing.

Flint himself was killed on the twenty-fourth of July, 1944, at Le Désert in Normandy, shot through the head while standing in the open under fire — characteristic and, by his own design, instructive to his men. By the time Morgan reached the regiment in early autumn 1944, it had been under the command of Lieutenant Colonel (later Colonel) Van H. Bond for two months. The 39th had landed at Utah Beach on the tenth of June, 1944, four days after the initial invasion (D+4), and had fought across the bocage and the Cotentin Peninsula to Cherbourg. It had been part of the St. Lô breakout in late July. It had reached the Seine River by the twenty-sixth of August and had crossed into Belgium in early September. On the fourteenth of September, 1944, the 39th had captured the German town of Roetgen — the first German city to fall to Allied troops in World War II — and on the same day had begun a long, grinding advance into the Hürtgen Forest that would not end for any of its men, alive or dead, until the first week of November.

This was the regiment Morgan Donato joined as a replacement in late September or the first days of October 1944. He was placed in Company E — the second-battalion rifle company under Bond's command — and given a Garand and a position in a rifle squad. He had been a Pittsburgh high school student in February. He was a private first class, a rifleman, and a member of the most blooded American infantry regiment in the European Theater by the first week of October. He had eight months and twenty-two days of foreign service ahead of him. He would survive precisely one of them before he was first wounded.

The Regiment's Three Battle Honors Before His Arrival

By the time Morgan joined Company E in early October 1944, his battalion — the 2nd — had already earned the regimental decorations that he would later wear by right of assignment, even though the actions themselves had taken place before he arrived. On the eleventh and twelfth of July 1944, in the Norman hedgerows during the long bloody slog toward St. Lô, the 2nd Battalion of the 39th Infantry Regiment had been awarded a Presidential Unit Citation (then called the Distinguished Unit Citation) by War Department General Orders No. 24 of 1945 — a regimental honor that attached to the colors of his battalion and that a serving member of that battalion was entitled to wear on his uniform. The 1st Battalion of the 39th had received a French Croix de Guerre with Palm for action on 18 June 1944 near Saint Jacques de Nehou, and a second Croix de Guerre with Palm — together with another Presidential Unit Citation — for the bitter encircled defense at Cherence Le Roussel during the Mortain counteroffensive of 6–9 August 1944. The Regiment as a whole therefore carried the French Fourragère on its colors — a green-and-red braid worn over the left shoulder by every soldier assigned to the unit. Morgan, when he joined the rolls of Company E, walked into a regiment that had been bled three times and decorated three times in its first ten weeks on the Continent.

Chapter IV The Death Factory

The first attack on Schmidt and the wounding of 7 October 1944

The Hürtgen Forest is fifty square miles of dense second-growth conifer and beech standing along the German-Belgian border south of Aachen, north of Monschau, and west of the Roer River. It is dark even in summer. Its slopes are steep, its narrow trails ankle-deep in mud for most of the year, its firebreaks long straight cuts that turn into killing zones for any infantry that tries to cross them. By the autumn of 1944 the Germans had reinforced its natural difficulties with bunkers, pillboxes, registered mortar and artillery concentrations, and mile after mile of the concrete “dragon's teeth” that formed the leading edge of the West Wall. American troops who survived their first few days there came to call it the Death Factory. It was the longest single battle the United States Army ever fought, and it claimed nearly thirty thousand American casualties before it ended in December 1944.

The 9th Infantry Division was the first American formation committed to it. The regiment's two sister units, the 47th and the 60th Infantry, had been fighting in the forest since the fourteenth of September. By the end of that month, after two weeks of inconclusive battering at fortified pillboxes along the Hürtgen-Lammersdorf road, neither regiment was capable of pressing the attack further. The 9th halted in place. The forest had claimed its first victim, and the Americans, in the chastened phrase of the official historians, were beginning to discover its secrets.

On the fifth of October, 1944 — postponed twenty-four hours by weather to the sixth — the 9th Infantry Division resumed the attack with a new objective: the road junction at the town of Schmidt, deep in the forest. Major General Louis A. Craig, commanding the 9th, would commit two regiments: the 39th on the left and the 60th in the center, with the 47th holding a defensive position to the north. The 39th Infantry's objectives, in sequence, were the villages of Germeter and Vossenack, then beyond to Schmidt itself. The regiment would attack on a narrow frontage along the wooded plateau east of the village of Lammersdorf, in three battalion columns. The 2nd Battalion, with Morgan's Company E in its order of battle, was on the left of the regiment's attack. It was his second week in the line.

The First Attack on Schmidt — 9th Division, 6–16 October 1944 The official U.S. Army map of the operation in which Morgan Donato was first wounded. The 39th Infantry Regiment ("39") is shown attacking east through the Hürtgen Forest from the line north of Wittscheidt and Germeter. His Company E was in the 2nd Battalion ("II") of the 39th, attacking on the regiment's left, in the box marked at the upper-left of the regimental sector. The dotted lines marked with dates trace the regiment's slow advance and the heavy German counterattack of 11 October led by Colonel Wegelein. Map: U.S. Army Center of Military History, “Siegfried Line Campaign” series.

The 39th's attack on the sixth and seventh of October was the worst kind of infantry fighting the Western Front would produce. The official Army history describes it laconically: the regiment was “halted at the Weisser Weh Creek; there were problems with narrow paths, air bursts in trees, and fire breaks which were blocked or enfiladed. Evacuation and supply was difficult or impossible.” What that sentence means, in the experience of a private first class in the second battalion, is this: a rifle company moved single-file along a wet track between fir trees that rose seventy feet overhead. German artillery, firing from prepared positions to the east, dropped 105-millimeter and 150-millimeter shells into the tops of the trees, where the fuses burst on contact with the canopy and threw splintered wood and hot shrapnel downward onto the men below. There was no trench to hide in; the rocky forest floor would not permit one to be dug. Foxholes were shallow scrapes covered with whatever logs and branches a man could pull over himself. A direct hit on the canopy above a squad would kill or wound everyone in it. The fire breaks — the long straight clear-cuts that the German foresters had maintained for fire suppression — became lanes of registered enfilading machine-gun fire, swept by emplaced MG-42s firing twelve hundred rounds a minute on traversing mounts. To cross a fire break was to die. To stay in the trees was to be shelled by the air bursts. To go forward was suicidal, and to go back was forbidden. By the third day the rifle companies of the 39th were taking casualties at a rate that, sustained for a single week more, would have destroyed the regiment as a fighting unit.

Morgan Donato was wounded in action on the second day of this attack — 7 October 1944, somewhere east of Germeter, in the woods above the Weisser Weh Creek. The discharge form gives no further detail; it gives only the date, the place (“Germany”), and the fact of his removal from the line. He was one of approximately four thousand five hundred American casualties the 9th Infantry Division would sustain in that ten-day attack, against a gain of barely three thousand yards. He was carried back through the battalion aid station, then back through the regimental collecting station, then to a clearing company and an evacuation hospital somewhere in the V Corps rear. He survived. The Schmidt attack itself did not. By the sixteenth of October the 9th had been so badly mauled that it was withdrawn from the line and replaced by the 28th Infantry Division — a Pennsylvania National Guard unit that would itself be destroyed in its turn over the following month.

The First Purple Heart

Morgan was awarded the Purple Heart for the wounds he received on the seventh of October. We have no record of where he was hit, or how severely, or what kind of weapon caused the wound, or which evacuation hospital received him. We know only that he recovered, and that he returned to Company E sometime in the weeks that followed — possibly within the regiment's reconstitution at Camp Elsenborn after the twenty-eighth of October, possibly later, certainly before the second week of November. He did not, as far as the family memory recorded, ever say a word about the Hürtgen. It was the kind of thing he did not say.

The Hürtgen Forest would, in the eventual American memory, become a synonym for the futility of infantry warfare against fortified positions in bad terrain — the very name of it, in the historical literature, comes wrapped in the same kind of bitter quotation marks as the Somme or Passchendaele. Veterans of the 9th Infantry Division called it the Death Factory and the worst of all battles. Morgan's part in it lasted eight days. He came out of the Hürtgen alive, with a Purple Heart, and with the first installment of the long silence he would keep.

Chapter V The Northern Shoulder

November 1944 – January 1945: the Roer plain, the Bulge, and the long winter

The 9th Infantry Division came out of the Hürtgen Forest at the end of October 1944, was reconstituted at Camp Elsenborn in Belgium, and returned to the line in mid-November in a different sector. Its assignment for the rest of the autumn was to close up the left bank of the Roer River, the wide, shallow, fast-flowing waterway that constituted the last natural barrier between the western Allies and the Rhine. From the sixteenth of November to the sixteenth of December, the 39th Infantry Regiment fought a series of small sharp engagements along the Roer plain east of Aachen — taking the villages of Echtz and Schlich on 10 December — until, on the morning of the sixteenth, the Germans launched the surprise offensive in the Ardennes that would become known to history as the Battle of the Bulge.

The 9th was not in the Bulge salient itself. It was on the northern shoulder of the German breakthrough, holding a long defensive line from the village of Kalterherberg in the south to the high ground at Elsenborn in the north — the same Elsenborn ridge whose American defense by the 1st, 2nd, and 99th Infantry Divisions has gone into history as one of the great unsung achievements of the campaign. The 39th's role from mid-December through the end of January 1945 was to hold its sector against any expansion of the German offensive to the north. The fighting in this period was, by Hürtgen standards, almost quiet: patrolling, screening, occasional skirmishes, daily artillery exchanges, frostbite. Morgan was in the line throughout, recovered from his October wound, presumably back with Company E. We have no detailed record of his service in this period. The 9th Division Combat Chronicle records it tersely: From mid-December through January 1945 the division held defensive positions from Kalterherberg to Elsenborn.

The Ardennes-Alsace Campaign — to give the Bulge its official Army campaign designation — ran from the sixteenth of December 1944 to the twenty-fifth of January 1945. Any American soldier serving in the relevant geographic area during those forty days was entitled, under Army criteria, to a campaign credit and to a bronze service star on the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal. Morgan was a serving rifleman in the 39th Infantry Regiment, in position on the northern shoulder of the Bulge, throughout that entire window. He was decorated with the Good Conduct Medal during this period — an award given for one year of honorable and efficient service, which would have come due in his case in February or March of 1945, depending on the unit clerk's computation.

The army of January 1945 was, by all later accounts, a colder and more battered force than the army that had crossed the Channel in June. The 39th Infantry Regiment had been through the Norman hedgerows, the Falaise pocket, the race across France and Belgium, the breach of the Siegfried Line, the Hürtgen Forest, and the long defensive on the northern shoulder. Its rifle companies were full of replacements like Morgan — men who had arrived in the autumn, had been wounded once already, had returned to the line, and had spent Christmas and New Year's in a forest in Belgium, eating cold rations and listening to incoming artillery. By the end of January, the army was ready to attack again. On the thirtieth of January, 1945, the 9th Division jumped off from Monschau in a drive that would carry it across the Roer, through the Eifel highlands, and across the Rhine River at Remagen.

Chapter VI The Bridge

1 March 1945 — Operation Lumberjack, the Eifel, and the second wounding

Late in his life, when he had begun for the first time to speak in small fragments about the war, my grandfather told me that he had been “blown off a bridge.” He could not remember which one. There were no details given, no battle named, no river identified. It was the kind of fragment he sometimes offered without explanation, the kind a grandson received and stored away without quite knowing what to do with. It was, however, almost certainly the literal description of the event that produced his second Purple Heart. The discharge form gives the date: 1 March 1945, in Germany. The research conducted for this monograph, working backward from that date through the operational record of the 39th Infantry Regiment, places him in the right region, in the right kind of action, at the right time, for that account to be exactly what he said it was.

Operation Lumberjack: The Eifel Highland Advance

On the morning of the first of March, 1945, Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley's Twelfth Army Group launched Operation LUMBERJACK, a coordinated drive by First and Third U.S. Armies through the Eifel highlands of western Germany toward the Rhine. The 9th Infantry Division — now attached to Major General John Millikin's III Corps, First U.S. Army — was at the center of First Army's axis of advance. Its mission was to drive southeast through the rolling country between the upper Roer and the Rhine, sweeping toward the junction of the Ahr and Rhine Rivers near Remagen, and to swing south to meet Patton's Third Army. The 39th Infantry Regiment, under Colonel Van H. Bond, was on the regimental line of attack alongside the 47th and 60th.

The country through which they moved was a landscape made for ambush. The Eifel is a region of steep wooded valleys, fast-running headwater streams, and scattered villages tied together by a network of narrow stone-arch road bridges. Every one of those bridges — the Olef, the Urft, the upper Roer, the Kall, the Erft tributaries, the Swist — had been demolished by the retreating German rearguards. The streams themselves were swollen with the flood release from the Schwammenauel Dam, which the Germans had partially destroyed in early February to flood out the American assault. American combat engineers were emplacing treadway and Bailey bridges as fast as the rifle companies could clear ground, and the rifle companies were crossing those improvised bridges single-file under direct observation from German artillery emplaced on the high ground east of every valley.

On the first of March, 1945 — Day One of LUMBERJACK — the 39th Infantry Regiment was somewhere in the belt of country between Schleiden and Stadt Meckenheim, roughly fifteen to twenty-five miles west of the Rhine. The exact bivouac of Company E on the night of 28 February / 1 March is not recorded in the published divisional history; it survives, if at all, only in the unit's daily journal and morning reports at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. What is certain is the operational pattern of the day. The 39th was advancing east. It was crossing small flooded streams. The Germans were demolishing bridges as they fell back, and registering artillery and Nebelwerfer rocket fire on every demolished crossing so that the first American infantry to come up to a treadway or footbridge would be caught in pre-plotted concentrations.

The “Blown Off a Bridge” Account

My grandfather's account, told decades later as a single sentence, is entirely consistent with the documentary record of that day. A rifleman of Company E, advancing single-file across an engineer-emplaced footbridge over one of the small Eifel streams under registered German indirect fire, would be a perfect candidate for the kind of casualty he described. The mechanism could have been any of several: a near miss from incoming 105-millimeter or 150-millimeter artillery, throwing him bodily off the bridge by blast overpressure; a direct hit on the bridge itself, collapsing it under him; a delayed German demolition charge triggered as American infantry crossed; or a Nebelwerfer rocket impact in the water beside the crossing. The physical injury — the wound that gave him his second Purple Heart and ended his combat career — would have been compatible with concussion, fragmentation, fall trauma, or some combination of all three. The discharge form gives only the date and the country; it does not catalogue the wound.

He was carried back through the battalion aid station, then through the standard chain of evacuation — collecting company, clearing company, field hospital, evacuation hospital, general hospital in the Communications Zone — and ultimately back to the United States. He did not return to the 39th Infantry Regiment. He had been a rifleman in Company E for approximately five months, had been wounded twice, and was finished with combat. The regiment he left behind would, six days after his wounding, march into history. On the seventh of March, 1945, the 47th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Division crossed the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen — the first U.S. infantry across the Rhine, into the heart of Germany — and the 39th and 60th followed in the next forty-eight hours. The crossing at Remagen has become one of the iconic moments of the European Theater. Morgan was not on the bridge. He had been blown off another bridge, a smaller one, an unremembered one, six days earlier and twenty miles to the west.

The Second Purple Heart

For the wounds received on 1 March 1945 he was awarded a second Purple Heart, represented on his ribbon by a single Oak Leaf Cluster — the small bronze device that on a U.S. military decoration indicates a second award of the same medal. He had also, by this point, accumulated the Bronze Star Medal, the Combat Infantryman Badge, and the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbon. The Bronze Star, on his discharge form, is paired with no specific citation; its award for an infantry soldier in his pattern of service was typically given either for a single act of heroism or for meritorious service in ground combat against the enemy. The CIB was awarded automatically to any infantry soldier who served in active ground combat against an armed enemy — it was the second-highest distinction the Army gave its riflemen, and the one most prized by them.

On the thirtieth of April, 1945 — six days before V-E Day — he was placed on a hospital transport bound for the United States. He arrived on the fifteenth of May, 1945, and was admitted to McGuire General Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the army's largest convalescent facility for soldiers returned from the European Theater. He was twenty years old. His foreign service had lasted eight months and twenty-two days. He had survived the Death Factory and the bridge. He was going home.

Chapter VII Decorations

The medal case, the Airborne patch, and what each piece records

The small framed case of medals and patches that he kept in his house for the rest of his life — and the larger, more elaborate display he later assembled in retirement — together form the visible inventory of his war. Some of what is in those cases was earned in his own name. Some was earned by his regiment before he reached it, and was his to wear by right of assignment. Some is commemorative, given to him long after the war by veterans' associations and private mints. And one item — the “AIRBORNE” shield with its glider and parachute — sits in the case as a puzzle that this monograph cannot fully solve. Each is addressed in turn below.

The Original Display — Personal Effects, c. 1945 The original collection of patches, badges, and medals as it was assembled in the years after the war. Visible: the PFC chevron (upper left); the octofoil shoulder sleeve insignia of the 9th Infantry Division (the red-white-blue rosette); the First Allied Airborne Army patch with "AIRBORNE" tab; the Honorable Discharge "Ruptured Duck" lapel pin (gold eagle in diamond); the Combat Infantryman Badge (silver musket on blue); the marksmanship qualification badge (sharpshooter cross); the Bronze Star Medal on its red-blue ribbon; and two Purple Hearts. Lower row: Good Conduct, American Campaign, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign, and World War II Victory medals.

Decorations Earned in His Own Right

Regimental Honors Worn by Right of Assignment

The 39th Infantry Regiment carried, on its colors, decorations earned by its battalions before Morgan ever reached the unit. A serving member of the regiment was entitled to wear these regimental honors on his Class A uniform during his assignment, and many later veterans' displays continue to display them as part of the unit's lineage.

The Airborne Patch and the Parachute Story

Among the patches in Morgan's medal display is a red shield bearing a white glider and a white parachute, surmounted by a curved black tab reading AIRBORNE. This is the shoulder sleeve insignia of the First Allied Airborne Army, activated on 2 August 1944 under Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton, which controlled the U.S. 17th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne Divisions, the British 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions, and the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade. Morgan was an infantry rifleman, MOS 745, assigned to the 39th Infantry Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division. He never served, on the documentary record, in an airborne unit. His discharge bears no parachute wings, and there is no airborne identifier in his MOS.

He told me once, late in his life, that he had jumped out of a plane with a parachute. He was very private about his service, and the remark was offered without further context. The question is what to make of it. The official record is dispositive in one direction: he was not parachute-qualified, because the parachute wings are absent from his discharge, and an airborne-qualified soldier would have received both the wings and the entry for the fifty-dollar-a-month jump pay on his pay record. The patch in his display is therefore not the insignia of a unit he was formally assigned to. The most likely explanations are several:

First, patch-swapping was a routine practice in the rear areas, in evacuation hospitals, and in the great convalescent wards of the Communications Zone in the spring of 1945. Wounded men shared trains, mess lines, and hospital beds with airborne troopers wounded in Operation Varsity (the Wesel jump of 24 March 1945) and in the earlier Bulge fighting; trading patches and insignia was a constant low-level activity. The FAAA patch in Morgan's case is most easily explained as a souvenir acquired in this way. Second, the 9th Infantry Division did serve adjacent to the 82nd Airborne Division in early February 1945, during the V Corps drive on Schmidt and the Schwammenauel Dam. The 82nd had been brought up from its post-Holland refit to fight in the Hürtgen-Schmidt area, and the two divisions worked side by side for several days before the 9th relieved the 82nd in place on 18 February 1945. A patch acquired in that period is consistent with the operational record. Third, some later-life medal displays are augmented by framers and by family members who add unit and theater patches that seem appropriate, even when the veteran himself had no direct service connection. If the larger expanded display was assembled by a custom framer in retirement, this is a parsimonious explanation for several of the items in it.

As for the parachute jump itself: I do not know what to make of that fragment, and I will not pretend to. He was a private man, and the remark was offered, like most of what he ever said about the war, as a fragment rather than a story. It is possible he was remembering a training event, a familiarization tower drop, an air-evacuation flight, or some other single experience that produced the sensation of falling out of an airplane. It is possible he was remembering something else entirely — something the documentary record does not preserve. The most honest thing I can do, as his grandson, is to record the fragment, set it beside the official record, note the inconsistency, and let it stand. He told me he jumped out of a plane. The discharge form says he did not. Both statements are in the record now. The reconciliation will have to wait for another generation or for a deeper archival dig than this monograph can perform.

The Expanded Display

The Expanded Display, c. 2010s The larger framed display that he assembled in retirement, including the regimental honors and a series of commemorative medals issued by veterans' organizations. Visible additions beyond the original case include: the French Croix de Guerre regimental award; the Presidential Unit Citation (blue ribbon in gold frame); the “D-Day Invasion,” “Battle of the Bulge,” “Combat Service,” and “Victory in Europe” commemoratives; and a printed history-card explaining the 39th Infantry Regiment's nickname (AAA-O) and the meaning of the slogan “Anything, Anytime, Anywhere — Bar Nothing.”

Chapter VIII The Long Quiet Life

Pittsburgh, East Liberty, Florida, and seventy-six years of coming home

He was twenty years old when he was discharged from McGuire General Hospital in Richmond on the seventh of November, 1945. The Army gave him a final pay of one hundred twenty-nine dollars and three cents, twenty dollars and fifty cents in travel pay, and the modest mustering-out total of three hundred dollars — the standard separation package for an enlisted man with under two years of service. He kept his National Service Life Insurance policy active, paying six dollars and forty cents in monthly premiums into the future. He was issued one lapel button — the so-called “Ruptured Duck,” the gold eagle in a diamond that authorized a returning soldier to wear his uniform for thirty days while he found his civilian feet. Then he went home to South Graham Street.

The Pittsburgh he returned to in late 1945 was a city at the height of its industrial confidence. The mills along the Monongahela and the Ohio were running at full wartime capacity, converting overnight to peacetime production. East Liberty was a streetcar town of department stores, neighborhood movie houses, and small family shops; Highland Park was full of returning veterans starting families. Morgan, like most of them, did not speak about what he had done in Europe. He took a job as a butcher. He attended technical school under the new G.I. Bill, learning the still-novel trade of electronics and television repair. By the early 1950s he had become a partner in National Television, the family-owned television and electronics repair shop in East Liberty that would serve the neighborhood for more than thirty years. He fitted antennas. He replaced vacuum tubes. He installed the first color sets in living rooms along Penn Avenue.

Wedding Photograph — Late 1940s A studio wedding portrait from the years just after his return from Europe — Morgan in a gray tweed suit with a white carnation boutonnière, his bride beside him in a tailored jacket and corsage of pale orchids. The photograph shows him as a young man trying on civilian life: shoulders relaxed for the first time in three years, eyes the same dark serious eyes of the 1944 enlistment portrait, hair grown out, jaw less set. The Hürtgen Forest and the bridge are eighteen months behind him.

His personal life would prove more complicated than the public face of National Television. He would marry four times across the course of his long life — first to Fyrn Hanford (the mother of his eldest daughter Sherry Ann, who would in turn become my mother and marry my late father Stanley Schalcosky); then in succession to Linda Johnson, Nanci Tiepel, and finally, in his later years, to Wilma Coralde, who was with him in Boynton Beach at the end. He fathered five biological children: four with Fyrn Hanford — Sherry Ann, Morgan III, Mark, and Catherine — and a fifth, Lisa, with his second wife. Through his second marriage he also gained two stepdaughters, Lindy and Wendy, whom he counted as his own; and in his later marriages he became a father-figure to Ryan, Liezel, and Ryan Atienza, for a total of ten children in the household his obituary would later list. He was the grandfather of twenty: John (myself), Amy, Erica, Harrison, Cayla, Christopher, Lia, Michael, Amanda, Christian, Caroline, Madison, Tyler, Lauren, Alex, Jacob, Zachary, Lily, Erin, and Emma. By the time he died he had eleven great-grandchildren, of whom my own three — Anthony, Chael, and Julian — are the first three on the list.

The Church and the Workshop

He was a serious and a quiet Lutheran. He served as an elder and deacon of Ascension Lutheran Church in Pittsburgh for many years, and then, after he moved to Panama City Beach, Florida, in retirement, as a member of Trinity Lutheran Church. The Lutheran piety of his adult life sat oddly, on the surface, with the Italian Catholic culture his Abruzzese parents had brought from Rivisondoli and Sulmona; the underlying continuity is perhaps in the quiet practical seriousness with which Italian-American men of his generation often took their faith. He was not a man of dramatic religious gesture. He was a man who showed up and did the work.

His private hours, away from National Television and the church, were given to a series of intricate hand-crafts. He was an exceptional golfer, scratching out scores in the low seventies into his eighties. He was a fine ceramicist, firing pieces in a basement kiln. He built dollhouses for his granddaughters — elaborate multi-story Victorian and Colonial structures, fully wired with miniature lighting, individually shingled, hand-papered — and model train layouts for his grandsons. These projects ate hundreds of hours and consumed the workbench in the basement for months at a time. They were the labor, perhaps, of a man whose hands had once been used for very different things, and who preferred for the rest of his life to give them the most patient and constructive employment he could devise.

The Honor Flight, 2014

For most of his life, he did not speak about what he had done in the war. He did not give interviews. He did not write a memoir. He marched in occasional Memorial Day parades with other veterans of the American Legion and the VFW, kept his medals in the small case I knew as a boy, and otherwise kept his silence. In April of 2014, however, he agreed to participate in an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. — one of the programs that flies aging WWII veterans free of charge to see the National World War II Memorial that had been dedicated on the Mall ten years earlier. He was eighty-eight years old at the time. He went down to Washington in a wheelchair, wearing a Combat Wounded jacket and a World War II Veteran cap. He saw the memorial. He saw the Atlantic pillar. He sat by the fountains. He was photographed.

Honor Flight to Washington — April 2014 Two photographs from his trip to the National World War II Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, at age 88. He had spent most of his life refusing to speak in public about what he had done. He went, in the end, to see the memorial that had been built to him and to the men he had served with. The pillar behind him at left reads ATLANTIC, marking the European Theater. The white headstones behind him at right are the rank-on-rank stones of Arlington — the same kind of stone many of his Hürtgen comrades had earned and he had not.

Some of the pictures from that trip — the ones in which he sits in front of the great Atlantic pillar at the WWII Memorial, or by the long rows of Arlington headstones — are the photographs of a man who had spent six decades doing the ordinary business of a long American civilian life, and who, very late, allowed himself to be returned for an afternoon to the public memory of what he had done in his nineteenth and twentieth years. He did not, even then, say very much. But he went. And he allowed the photographs to be taken.

The Display in the Hallway

The Veteran and His Display — Panama City, c. 2015 Morgan in retirement, standing beside the expanded shadow-box display he had assembled for the wall of his Florida home. The shirt embroidered “Combat Wounded, Chapter 794, Panama City, Florida” identifies his local Military Order of the Purple Heart chapter. He had become, in his last decade, willing for the first time to put what he had done on a wall in a hallway where his grandchildren and great-grandchildren could see it.

Late in his life, in the Florida house, the small wartime medal case became a wall-mounted shadow-box display — the larger and more elaborate framed piece in which the regimental honors, the campaign ribbons, the Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman Badge, and a set of commemorative medals issued by veterans' associations, were arranged together with a printed history card explaining the AAA-O slogan and the meaning of the 39th Infantry Regiment in the campaigns of the European Theater. He stood beside it in photographs. He had become, in the last decade of his life, the steward of his own war's memory in a way he had not been at any earlier point. The boy who had been blown off a bridge in the Eifel in 1945 had become an old man who, in 2015, would let his grandson photograph him beside the case.

Morgan with His Grandson — Late Life Morgan in his World War II Veteran cap with the European Theater ribbon bar pinned beside its brim. Beside him, his grandson — the author of this monograph — in a Carl Sagan T-shirt. Two generations standing close together: the rifleman of 1944 and the public historian and writer of 2026, separated by seventy-odd years and connected by what came after the war.

Chapter IX Boynton Beach

10 November 2021 — a death, a Marine Corps coincidence, and a Florida sunset

He died on the tenth of November, 2021. He was ninety-six years old. He died peacefully at his home in Boynton Beach, Florida, surrounded by his fourth wife Wilma and the family he had built. The date is itself a small grace note for a man who had spent his life in quiet relation to American military memory: the tenth of November is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps, the day before Veterans Day, the day on which old soldiers traditionally gather one last time before the country's official observance. He had outlived nearly every man he had served with in the 39th Infantry Regiment. He had outlived three of his four wives. He had outlived his eldest son. He had outlived a Pittsburgh that no longer made steel and an East Liberty whose family television-repair shops had long since vanished. He left behind ten children, twenty grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren, and a small wooden shadow-box on the wall.

His memorial service was held at Glick Funeral Home in Boca Raton on the twenty-sixth of November, 2021, followed by a formal military procession to South Florida National Cemetery in Lake Worth, where he was buried with full military honors. The bugler played Taps. The flag that had draped his coffin was folded with the precise tri-cornered geometry of military protocol and presented to his widow. He was, at long last, given the kind of public farewell he had not, in life, particularly sought.

His obituary, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the twenty-fifth of November, 2021, contains the public summary of his life — the dates, the family, the regiment, the medals, the church, the business — and a few of the family memories that diverge in detail from the documentary record. It records that he “didn't speak much about his time in the Army, but he did proudly march in parades with other veterans, took part in a WWII Honor Flight to Washington D.C. in 2014 and was active in the American Legion and VFW.” The obituary's final paragraph, before the funeral arrangements, asks that any memorials in his name be made to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and to Team Rubicon, the veterans' disaster-response organization. It is, in its own way, the most precise statement he ever made about what the war meant to him: that he had been a soldier; that he honored other soldiers; that he believed they should look out for one another after the country had finished with them; and that the rest could be left in silence.

Epilogue What He Carried, and What He Did Not

A grandson's afterword

He carried two German wounds for the rest of his life. He carried, as well, the quieter wounds the documentary record does not catalogue — the things that happen to a nineteen-year-old infantryman in eight months and twenty-two days of frontline combat in the Hürtgen Forest and the Eifel highlands, and that he did not, for seventy-six years, find a way to put into words. He carried the silence he had chosen, which was the silence many men of his generation chose, and which we who came after must respect even where we wish, sometimes, that he had chosen otherwise. He carried, finally, the long ordinary American life he made on the other side of it — the wife, the children, the shop in East Liberty, the church eldership, the dollhouses and model trains, the late-life trip to the Memorial on the Mall.

What he did not carry, on the documentary record at least, was bitterness. He did not speak ill of the army that had broken his body and discharged him under a Certificate of Disability at the age of twenty. He did not nurse grievances against the war, or against the regiment, or against the men who had commanded him. He kept his Purple Hearts in a small case. He wore his Combat Infantryman Badge with quiet pride when veterans gathered. He marched in parades. He held the memory of his service the way a man holds a heavy stone — knowing precisely its weight, capable of putting it down, choosing not to. He chose the work of building the next sixty years instead.

I am writing this monograph in May 2026, in the childhood home in Perrysville where I was born and where my own three sons now live. I am four and a half years past the date of his death, fifty-five years younger than he was at his ending, the grandson of a maternal-line rifleman whose Italian Abruzzese family came from a hill town in L'Aquila I have never visited, and whose American war was fought in a German forest I have never seen. The grandfather I knew personally was the long quiet man of the East End workshop and the Florida wall display. The grandfather of 1944, the boy in the studio portrait, the rifleman in Company E who walked into the Hürtgen Forest two weeks after he arrived on the Continent and who was carried back out of it three days later — that grandfather I have had to reconstruct from a discharge form, a regimental history, a few late-life fragments, and the small case of medals.

This monograph is the reconstruction. It is built from the official record where the official record speaks, from the family memory where the family memory adds something the official record does not contain, and from the careful historical research that lets us place a single rifleman within the great mechanism of the European Theater. It is not the whole truth of his war. The whole truth went with him to South Florida National Cemetery on the twenty-sixth of November, 2021. What this monograph attempts is the truth that can be saved — the dates, the places, the regiment, the wounds, the silence, the long quiet life, the late display on the Florida wall, and the photographs in which he sits, finally, in front of the memorial that the country had built to him.