War Remembrance

WAR REMEMBRANCE

Ypsilanti veteran meets comrades in France

By WILLIAM B. TREML
NEWS STAFF REPORTER

PINCKNEY — Bill Horner, an old soldier of a war now almost forgotten, sat in the kitchen of his Patterson Lake home, hidden away along a sandy lane, deep within the pines and the hickories of the lake country. Before him on a table was spread a huge map of France. With a finger he traced the battle route of his old outfit, the 103rd Division.

“We tracked it,” Horner says. “All the villages, all the old places. It was a trip I’ll never forget.”

For Horner and for his aging comrades who recently came back from France, it was a bittersweet revisit, a wrenching, jolting return to a time when they were young and eager and sure they could fight and never lose. There were tears and laughs and silent moments on Bill Horner’s journey to the yesteryear of World War II. And there were many memories of comrades who who never came home, who lie like A. E. Houseman’s youths, by brooks too broad for leaping, in fields where roses fade.

Horner, an Ypsilanti native and Eastern Michigan University graduate, was one of 169 former members of the 103d Infantry Division who toured the Alsace section of northeastern France where they fought so many years ago.

It was there in the fall and early winter of 1944, there in the lush farm fields and in the vineyards and around the centuries-old villages that the men of the 103rd, the Cactus Division, stormed the German lines, overran the enemy command posts, liberated the towns which had been held in the Nazi grasp for four brutal years.

“It was a tour that came about by chance, by happenstance really,” Horner, a retired Michigan Highway Department bridge inspector, says. “ A couple of years ago Harley Richardson from Oklahoma, a lieutenant in the 103rd, was in France on business. He was traveling through the section of Alsace where the division had fought and he happened to run into Pierre Marmillod, the son of a man who had dreamed for years of welcoming back members of the 103rd. The father had died but Pierre remembered his dad’s dream and when he found out that Harley had served in the 103rd he urged him to help organize a reunion in France. That was the start. It just got rolling after that.”

When he returned to the United States, Richardson began making contacts with 103rd Division historians who provided lists of names and addresses. Soon a tentative plan for a tour of the Alsace area was drawn up and letters were sent out.

The veterans flew to France together in mid-June. There they made their way back to the towns where once there was only shell fire and death.

“We went village to village, following the trail,” Horner recalls. “We started at Dijon and went to Epinal, to Bruyeres to St.-Die, to Alsace. We went on to Saverne and Haguenau. At Epinal we visited an American cemetery. The lines of graves, the white crosses, where some of the 103rd boys lie, those things you don’t forget. Some of our group found the graves of buddies, found their names on the crosses, a sad thing.

When we liberated St.-Die the mayor named a city park after the 103rd. It’s still there. I guess that’s what the real story of this pilgrimage is all about: the gratitude, the respect the French people showed all of us, even after more than 40 years. In each village, everywhere we went, there were welcoming ceremonies, receptions, handshakes, embraces. And it wasn’t just the older people. There were a lot of young men and women, in their 20s who just read in their history books about World War II but had been told by their parents and their grandparents about the American liberation, about how we had driven out the Germans and given their towns back to them. They’re still grateful, still giving thanks. It made you glad. It made you think of the sacrifice, of the loss, of what freedom meant to these people. And that we were able to help.”

Outside the Horner home on the shores of Patterson Lake the yard was basked in the bright, yellow August sun. But inside the house where a map of France covered a kitchen table, it was early winter again, the winter of 1944. And the young tigers of the 103rd were once again charging through Dijon and Epinal and St.- Die, daring and eager and sure they could fight and never lose.

World War II veteran Bill Horner traces the battle route of his old outfit, the 103rd Division that fought in the Alsace section of northeastern France.
NEWS PHOTO • ROBERT CHASE