As the children and grandchildren of the men of the 111th continue to clear out family homes, treasures occasionally surface.
A few weeks ago, Sergio Gomez (son of 111th Master Sergeant Frank Gomez) discovered a box in the garage of his parents’ home in San Antonio. It contained, to his great surprise, five of the six Dutch ceramic tiles we have talked about before on this blog. That makes five soldiers who somehow obtained these tiles (perhaps a gift?) and mailed them home nearly 80 years ago.
As we reported in previous posts, the 111th was billeted in a tile factory in Maastricht, Netherlands, in late September for about a month before their extended winter stay in Heerlen, nearby. American troops had liberated southern Netherlands from four years of Nazi occupation just two weeks earlier. https://wwiitracings.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/a-french-orphan-and-the-tiles-of-war/.
Our best guess is that someone employed by the tile factory had given the tiles to some of our men as a gift in appreciation. The people of the Netherlands remain grateful to the American troops to this day.
There’s a lesson here: Take a good look around your parents’ or grandparents’ attics, basements, or garages for any historic treasures waiting to be discovered!
Our good friend Peter Pauwels in Heerlen just sent us his family’s story of Christmas during the harsh winter of 1944, which appears below.
The men of the 111th had been in Heerlen since October, living, as Peter says, all over the city in various types of housing. Below is a photo of my father, Edward Johnson (on the left), and his best friend John Andrews next to a decorated tree of sorts my dad had put up. On the back of the photo he had written, “Some tree, eh what? Inside Small Arms Repair truck…Last year, darling!”
Dad and John Andrews, Christmas eve, 1944
Here is Peter’s story:
Christmas 1944: An unexpected downer
It’s Christmas Day. 2022. The situation in Ukraine reminds me of a story my mother told me. She often recalled how Christmas 1944 turned out differently than people had imagined.
It is December 1944. South Limburg, Netherlands, and of course Heerlen, had been liberated by the Americans in September. The U.S. Army has their vehicles everywhere. They camp in farms and even some houses. This also applied to Sint Barbarastraat 66 (at the time called Dorpstraat), where my mother lives, where her brother Herman and both parents lived, and also my grandfather and grandmother. In and around Palemig there were American tanks and other vehicles everywhere. It was quiet at the front, so the men took it easy. At the Red Cross Rest Center, Heerlen, there was plenty of entertainment available, including cinemas, bars and dance facilities. Everyone assumed that the Germans were pretty much defeated.
111th shop area, Heerlen, winter 1944-45
Life also went on in Palemig. Mother Ruijters did the laundry, father Ruijters went to work every day at the Oranje Nassau Mine I, where he was supervisor. And for 15-year-old Lies there was enough distraction from the Americans. The house, in particular one of the rooms, was set up as a reporting post for the soldiers who were stationed in and around Palemig. Young men came by every day to deal with administrative matters, such as issuing passes and travel documents. Especially interesting was a typewriter. To the people here, the compact modern-looking devices of American origin looked ‘high-tech’. The Americans taught my mother to type, which sometimes resulted in mischievous texts.
Christmas was coming and many residents of Palemig and Meezenbroek were preparing for this celebration. The presence of the Americans meant that traditional Christmas food would be back to normal. Due to the rationing of the previous years, the meals had been meager. In many families the menu varied in some way: beans with applesauce one day, applesauce with beans the next. Thanks to the coal mines, our region never really suffered from hunger. Anyway, the Americans had more than enough food with them, things we didn’t know at all here. In exchange for chores, such as doing the soldiers’ laundry, families could count on a can of peaches or a sack of flour. And the latter meant that baking could finally be done again. In the Ruijters house, the iron pie plates were already set up to bake as usual. Oh, how they looked forward to a Christmas as usual!
But it was quiet at the front, too quiet. It would soon become apparent that Hitler’s Germany was far from defeated!
When this became known, panic set in. In the middle of the night, the Americans stationed here had to go on trucks to the Ardennes. Everything that had wheels was used. The young soldiers quickly lost the illusion of a quick victory. Residents wondered what was going on. Fear set in. The Germans are coming back!
Finally, at the end of January, thanks to a lack of fuel and the rapid reaction of the Americans, the Germans were driven back behind the borders of their ‘Greater German Reich’. There were many casualties on the German side, but also on the American side. That’s how my mother heard that one of her military friends had lost a leg. Christmas 1944: It turned out differently than expected.
Let’s silently think of all the people who are in a similar situation today, anywhere in the world.
While we were staying in Valkenburg earlier this month, we took a short trip over to Heerlen to see our friend Peter Pauwels.
Our new friend, Henny Dekker, wanted to meet Peter, so he drove us there; on the way, he took us to visit the two American WWII cemeteries in the area: The Netherlands American Cemetery and the Henri-Chappelle American Cemetery and Memorial.
Both cemeteries are managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission and were established after WWII. The remains of nearly 8,300 Americans lie at the Netherlands cemetery, and about 8,000 more rest at Henri-Chapelle in nearby Belgium; most lost their lives during the advance of the U.S. armed forces into Germany. What makes the Netherlands Cemetery special is that each grave has been adopted by local people, who bring flowers on special occasions to recognize and remember the sacrifices made during the war. There is a waiting list to sponsor a grave here, so many people have adopted gravesites at Henri-Chappelle.
Henri-Chappelle American Cemetery, Belgium
We enjoyed lunch with Peter and reminisced about our visit in 2019, when he showed us many of the places our 111th men had lived and worked during the winter of 1944/45. He took us on a tour of Heerlen, where many new buildings and improvements are taking place. We revisited the building that once housed Heerlen’s American Red Cross Rest Center so we could see the plaque that Peter developed to commemorate its importance; it was dedicated on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of this part of the Netherlands by American soldiers in September 1944. See our post about this, https://wwiitracings.wordpress.com/2019/11/23/heerlen-netherlands-an-american-connection-75-years-later/
Peter also took us to a very interesting small cemetery in Heerlen to show us the grave of an unknown British RAF airman whose plane crashed outside Heerlen in 1944. Local residents have been taking care of this gravesite for decades. The Dutch people here are determined not to forget the American and British soldiers who liberated them from four years of German occupation.
Thank you, Peter, for another enjoyable visit to Heerlen.
The grave of the the unknown British airman in Heerlen
Peter Pauwels at the site of the American Red Cross Rest Center in Heerlen
We enjoyed an unexpected and wonderful surprise during our recent visit to the Netherlands, thanks to Henny Dekker, whom you met in our previous post. As we related in an earlier posting https://wwiitracings.wordpress.com/2021/04/16/the-tiles-of-war-part-2/ we learned that Henny had recently retired as a manager at a tile factory in Maastricht. The 111th had camped out in another tile factory there for a few weeks before moving to Heerlen in October 1944. I had always hoped to find a home for the four lovely ceramic tiles my father (and a few other of the men) had somehow picked up during his stay there. So I asked Henny for help, and in April 2021 he put me in touch with the curator of Maastricht’s Centre Ceramique, Wim Dijkman.
Mr. Dijkman did indeed want the tiles—he knew of their existence, but the museum had none in its collection. There were six in total, all prototypes that were never mass manufactured. I mailed him four of the tiles, and a granddaughter of another 111th soldier sent Mr. Dijkman the two remaining tiles in the set.
Henny took us to Maastricht to meet up with Mr. Dijkman for a tour of the Centre Ceramique and its amazing collection of historic ceramics dating back to the Roman era and even earlier. We learned so much and thoroughly enjoyed our tour. To top it off, he took us up to his offices so we could see the tiles again. Ed and I thank our new Dutch friends for a wonderful afternoon. Mr. Dijkman is planning to do a special display of the tiles at the museum sometime next year.
The Centre Ceramique, Maastricht
Wim Dijkman with the tiles
View from the museum toward the Maas River; the new white building in the center sits on the site of the ceramics factory where the 111th stayed.
This is the first post I’ve done in more than a year—things have been pretty quiet, though we did hear a while back from the daughter and grandson of 111th soldier John W. Strickland in June and hope to learn more about him in the near future.
While on holiday in Germany earlier this month, Ed and I made a side trip to Valkenburg, Netherlands, so we could meet our blog friend Henny Dekker and his sister Rita. (We also caught up with Peter Pauwels in Heerlen, which I will tell you about in a later posting.) Henny had contacted us last year because he was trying to help Rita find her U.S. Army soldier father, whose unit was based in Heerlen during the winter of 1944/45–the same time the 111th was there. Rita, who was born in Heerlen in 1945, did not know until 1999 that the father who raised her was not her biological father. She learned this shocking news a year after her mother died, when her grandmother told her the true story.
Rita knew only the man’s name and the fact that he had been in Heerlen during the war. We checked, and he wasn’t a member of the 111th. We tried all sorts of ways to find him or his family but came up with nothing.
In the end, all we could think to do was to suggest that Rita take a DNA test. We figured that because Rita knew that her father had returned to the U.S. after the war and had a family there, someone in his family might have also taken a DNA test.
So for her birthday last year, Henny gave Rita a gift of an Ancestry DNA test. When the results came in, they showed a close match with someone in the U.S. She wrote to the person right away but heard nothing back for several months. Then one day she had a response. It was from the grandson of her half-sister Frances in Florida, and soon Rita was in touch with her other half-sister, Charlene.
Rita and Henny
Charlene told Rita that their father had passed away years earlier. A half-brother was also deceased. Some 40 years ago, their father had told his children about Rita in the Netherlands, and they had been hoping to find her. Charlene said that her father had wanted to travel to the Netherlands to meet Rita, but that her mother told him to not bother to come back if he did. Ironically, Rita has traveled to Florida in the past, but unfortunately it was before she knew she had siblings there.
Rita and Charlene now communicate regularly, thanks to Google translate, and the two have been sharing photos and family stories. By the way, Henny told us that the reason we couldn’t find any information online about Rita’s father was that we had been searching using a slightly misspelled surname.
We loved how this all turned out and wanted to meet both Henny and Rita, and so we did. We spent an unforgettable Saturday afternoon with them.
WWII Tracings 