Burton Craige is the husband of my cousin Heather. He is in Boston this weekend with his brother and sister-in-law to donate some 300 wartime letters written by their father to Harvard University. Jeanine and I joined him for dinner in Cambridge this evening and learned of his father’s exploits which our eloquently summarized in the letter Burton wrote appended below.
BEHIND THE SILENCE
In recent weeks I have been working with my brother Tito and sister-in-law Kim in compiling my father’s wartime letters. Ernest Craige graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1939. A brilliant student, he won a Rhodes Scholarship, an award he was unable to accept because the program was put on hold when the war broke out on September 1, 1939. Instead of going to Oxford, he entered Harvard Medical School, joining a class whose education was compressed so that newly minted doctors could be deployed to the war zones in Europe and the Pacific. Ernie graduated from Harvard in 1943 and, after a brief internship, joined the Army that fall. Sent to Texas, he was assigned to the Fifth Auxiliary Surgical Group.
After months of training and many false starts, the Fifth Auxiliary made its way to Normandy in late August 1944. The surgical teams followed the troops across France and Belgium and into Germany, treating injured American soldiers and Nazi victims, including allied POWs, slave laborers, and concentration camp survivors, as well as German POWs. In the spring of 1945 in western Germany, Ernie, age 26, was given the enormous responsibility of directing six rapidly improvised hospitals with thousands of beds in the chaotic conclusion of the European war. In June 1945 he and the Fifth Auxiliary were sent to Marseille, where they waited for their redeployment to the war in the Pacific. Only days before they were to be shipped to the Far East, the atomic bomb forced Japan’s surrender and the end of the war.
For his entire life, Ernie was a remarkably gifted and prolific cartoonist. To the delight of his classmates and comrades, he captured their experiences with a keen eye, a deft hand, and a trenchant wit. Immediately after the war, he published a collection of cartoons documenting the wartime experiences of the Fifth Auxiliary. Brilliantly executed, “Our Hearts Were Young With Gay” is a timeless record of the miseries, absurdities, and joys of army life.
While in Europe, Ernie (“Tito”) sent dozens of letters to his parents in El Paso, Texas, and his brother Branch, an Army doctor who was directing a malaria research project at a federal prison in Joliet, Illinois. As children, we treasured our father’s cartoons. But beyond the cartoons, we knew nothing of his wartime experiences. He never spoke about the war.
In reading these letters, I am again amazed by our father’s extraordinary talents, wisdom, and humor. At the same time, I regret not having known, read, and talked about the letters with him while he was alive. In the last year of his life, while he was confined to a bed in the assisted living facility at Meadowmont in Chapel Hill, I read him the collection of letters his grandfather Ernst Kohlberg wrote to his family in Germany in 1875-77 as an émigré to El Paso. My father took great pleasure in hearing these letters. I wish he had asked me to read his own wartime letters, many written from Germany not far from the towns that his Jewish grandparents left to come to America.
Like my father, many veterans of World War II were reluctant to talk about the war. These letters have caused me to reflect about the reasons for that silence, for that generation in general and for my father in particular.
Perhaps the first reason, shared by millions of veterans, is the horror of war. My father’s letters –muted because of military censorship and fear of alarming his family– describe experiences that no one would want to relive:
[A German insane asylum converted into an American hospital] is intact and was somehow bypassed by the avalanche that came through this area. All the other towns are completely destroyed — just heaps of rubble, furniture tumbling out of shattered second stories, burned out tanks, tracks all along the road, and scores of swollen dead horses, carts, a mess of clothes, ammunition, etc. (3/2/45)
The Stalag [for Russian POWs] here was perfectly incredible – patients had to eat each other; they were shot if they poked their heads out of the door, etc. The Russian doctor tells me that 60 dead daily in a camp of 18,000 was routine. (3/4/45)
With this new field hospital we moved to this little town … less than a day after the tanks moved through. …The roads have occasional roadblocks … [a]nd some well-placed machine guns. These obstacles apparently were not as formidable as planned and the roadblock is pushed off to the side and plenty of Krauts are lying around. A lot of them died in their foxholes and can be seen clutching a potato grenade or a burp gun. (3/5/45)
This camp we’re in now is also inhabited by several hundred refugee slave laborers from all over Europe gathered up by our advance. They had hidden in caves and holes until the Germans went by and then delivered themselves to the Americans. They are of every nationality and are very motley looking. (3/12/45)
The way the [allied] armies are knifing across Germany prevents any very effective defense. We had quite a busy run of it for a few days being the only field hospital this side of the river for three days in the army area….The casualties that we got were as usual very severe — traumatic amputations, chests, bellies. 80% required either thoracotomy or laparotomy. (3/31/45)
All along the roads there were thousands of Belgians, French, Russians, Polish, liberated POWs and slave laborers. They were very down-at-the-heel looking. Occasionally you pass the grimy gray barbed wire enclosed barracks in which they have spent the last 3 – 5 years. Many such camps kept a large herd of police dogs to catch escapees. In order to free one group of prisoners our soldiers had to machine gun a large pack of these brutes. These foreigners have a few camps along the road but in general there is a considerable degree of disorganization and they wander in the general direction of France or Russia living off the land which must be a source of terror to the natives. (4/13/45)
If one goes across Germany more and more examples of the incredible brassy cruelty of these people are uncovered. It’s like rolling over a stone and having all the foul crawling insects revealed scurrying about. The citizens however are unperturbed, impenitent – whereas yesterday they gladly benefited from the slave labor of these thousands of Russians, Poles, etc., today they would indignantly demand protection from ravages of the unfortunate creatures…. We have been getting several bullet wounds and squashed skulls daily from the sporadic episodes of violence which followed the wandering in search of food and roof by these foreigners. (4/18/45)
We are open now as a station hospital which apparently is what most evacuation hospitals will do in occupied areas. Some evacs are needed in the horrible pesthole concentration camps that are constantly being liberated. (4/20/45)
You can believe anything you read about these incredibly ghastly German concentration camps. There are four kinds of camps as far as I can make out.
- For regular POWs: some bad and some not so bad
- Stalags for foreign workers: Black bread and soup, barracks etc.
- POWs and workers boarded out on farms, bakeries etc. OK
- Concentration camps political prisoners etc. ghastly (4/23/45)
More frightful POW camps full of Americans have been uncovered. A hospital moved in to take over. A major back from there gave a most horrible description: four in a bed, three dead, the other too weak to push them out. Other dead: buried in such a shallow fashion that to scuff the earth would reveal the decaying remains of American boys. The average citizen here though is bland about the whole thing and considers himself as guiltless as somebody in Joplin. (4/26/45)
Did you see the description of those death traps at Buchenwald etc. in TIME last week? The Stalag a couple of miles from here was not so spectacular but the same story. (5/8/45)
My new assignment is a 300-bed hospital which runs along all right without me. It has mostly surgical wounds with many, many amputations and 100 infections as is true in all German hospitals I have seen. (5/19/45)
At present I’m near one of the big cities in the Ruhr…. The city is an absolute ruin in the downtown area…. The air raids did most of it I guess. The [German] doctors here say the problem of taking care of casualties was terrific. They had to let almost all guts & bellies go and take care of what they could of the extremities. The latter ones 100% foully infected with amputation as common as flies. (undated, probably June 1945)
I’m glad we won’t have to patch up any more American boys who have just had parts blown off. (8/14/45, after Japanese surrender)
So for my father and many others, the war was a violent interlude that one longed to forget, not an uplifting story to be told and retold. Their aversion to reliving the past was reinforced by their dreams for a radically different future. In these letters, my father began to envision a new life back home, where he could build a family and launch a career. He declined an offer to take the Rhodes scholarship after the war, telling Branch “I will have had enough of these foreign countries after this campaign and the next one.” (4/20/45) He applauded Branch’s engagement and marriage to Jean McCracken in 1945, and said he hoped to follow their example (6/26/45). He rejected an offer to work with Branch on the malaria research project in Illinois. (7/5/45) Instead, he decided to apply for a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston Children’s Hospital. (8/7/45)
When Ernie returned to the United States, his final army assignment was to treat wounded veterans at a hospital in Denver. There he met and fell in love with Hazel Fischer, an army nurse from Minneapolis. Married in September 1946, they settled in Boston, where Ernie began a cardiology residency under the guidance of the great Paul Dudley White. With a busy schedule of patient care, teaching, and research, a new marriage, and four children arriving at two-year intervals, Ernie decisively turned the page, leaving the war far behind.
While most returning veterans made a similar transition after the war, Ernie’s personality ensured a deeper level of silence. Although he had multiple talents, recognized by all who knew him, he never spoke of his accomplishments. He was incapable of telling a story that placed himself above others. While confident of his talents, he was the epitome of self-deprecation. He knew that whatever he had done, suffered, or lost in the war, others had done, suffered, and lost more. Perhaps he felt that to speak of his war would have dishonored theirs.
Finally, Ernie’s silence about the war may have reflected painful losses at home that coincided with his army service. His beloved mother Else died of breast cancer in El Paso in early 1944. On the final day of 1944, his father Branch died of a heart attack in El Paso, while Ernie was encamped with the Fifth Auxiliary in Belgium during the final German counteroffensive. Because of delays in mail deliveries, Ernie did not learn of his father’s death until the evening of January 25, 1945, when he received a letter from Branch II listing unresolved issues about their father’s estate. Ernie wrote his brother the next day:
This letter of yours hit me about 9:00 o’clock last night. We were having a little party for one of the nurses whose birthday it was. I had to get out — to think this over — and put on my coat and walked about 5 miles. It was the most magnificent night I have seen. Bitter cold but with clear sky, full moon — the ground covered with thick snow. You could see a block or two away with ease it was so light. I hate to be stuck here in what seems to be the end of the world while you must have had your hands full at home. I wish I could have been of some help.
Of his father Ernie wrote, “I know of no one more kind, loving, devoted.”
His father’s distant death was forever linked to the terrible sights that Ernie witnessed in the final months of the war. To protect himself and his family, he closed the door on the past, leaving these letters behind.
Burton Craige
February 6, 2023