SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE IN THE THREE OR FOUR YEARS I have been writing this column, I may have noted my own wounding and departure from combat in World War II. But on the eve of the 68th “anniversary” of that April 13 occasion, and the prior related experience of touching upon the incredible sickness of the Nazi regime, I am moved to comment upon both today.

But first, a bit of very early and significant introductory personal history. My parents were divorced when I was 7. For whatever reason, and in the sense that we relate masculinity and aggression, I was not fully masculinized by my childhood. I was very close to my mother and, somehow, singing the plaintive love songs of the 1920s and ’30s with her, which I loved to do as a boy, would not have appeared conducive to life as a warrior! Also, at that point — and later — just the thought of hitting someone in the face with my fist nauseated me. Being a tough guy was never in my repertoire. Other than for a few pathetic and quickly aborted efforts at self-protection in childhood encounters with my older brother, I was never in a fight with another human being until military combat.

However, coupled with the above was my mother’s passionate hostility to prejudice and discrimination. Somehow it would appear that my personal experience of war could surely be interpreted as a story of the triumph of her values and that internalized commitment over my fundamental abhorrence of physical conflict!

There was, of course, that stint on an isolated farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my role from the age of 14 as family hunter, which I suppose helped shape my survival skills and moderate those tender sensitivities. Nonetheless, the reality was that in training I could bayonet a straw dummy but whenever I did, could not imagine doing the same to a human being. And what a fake I felt myself when I led bayonet training!

Going back a little later in time, I was a student at Michigan State University. State had begun enrolling a number of students from New York City, many of whom were Jewish. I found some of these students particularly challenging and intellectually stimulating and developed several important friendships. It was through them that I was made much more aware, emotionally and personally, of the consequences of the virulent anti-Semitism engulfing Germany. This awareness, coupled with my internalization of my mother’s convictions, profoundly shaped and directed me in much that followed. I needed none of the conventional training movies on “Why We Fight!”

The most powerful connection to the latter for me, as a rifle company commander, came very near the end of my war. We were moving across Germany fairly rapidly at that point. We came upon the town of Nordhausen, which was adjacent to the German missile development site and their frantic effort to develop missile weaponry. I received an urgent order to bring two medics to the adjacent prison camp to help cope with the large number of emaciated and dying prisoners we found. (These were accompanied by the larger numbers of those simply lying around already dead.)

We were at the time moving fairly rapidly and I had little time for more than the dropoff, but what I did hear there of the situation from the officers with whom I spoke was a gruesome testimonial to the sick character of Nazi brutality. For detail, I quote from the website WWII HOLOCAUST MITTELBAU-DORA.

“Mittelbau-Dora (also Dora and Nordhausen-Dora) was a Nazi Germany labour camp that provided workers for the Mittelwerk V-2 rocket factory in the Kohnstein, situated near Nordhausen, Germany.

“Approximately 60,000 prisoners from 21 nations (mostly Russians, Poles and French) passed through Dora. An estimated 20,000 inmates died; 9,000 died from exhaustion and collapse, 350 hanged (including 200 for sabotage), the remainder were shot or died from disease or starvation.

“Regardless of sex, all prisoners were treated with extreme cruelty, which caused illness, injuries and deaths. Examples of the cruelty routinely inflicted on prisoners include: severe beatings that could permanently disable and/or disfigure the victims, deliberate and life-threatening starvation, physical and mental torture as well as summary execution under the smallest pretext.”

Should the above not be sufficiently appalling, a viewing of the large number of pictures on that site is surely enough to confirm for anyone the pure raw evil of the Germany of Adolph Hitler. However, I do not recommend this to the sensitive.

I would note that the setting for that experience was remarkable. I recall the beauty of the lovely countryside and the charm of the villages I had traversed before encountering Nordhausen. The contrast between that beauty and the sheer horror of the camp was extraordinary.

Very shortly after leaving Nordhausen, on the 13th of April, 1945, my personal participation in the war came to an abrupt halt.

It was in the Hartz Mountains, where one of my squads was under heavy fire. The German troops involved were a very significant number of hardcore SS and Hitler youth who had gathered in that mountain retreat area. I moved up with my command Jeep below the crest of a hill behind which the squad was pinned down, then crawled to the crest, where I had visibility. The squad was situated just above a small stream and two of the men were wounded and down in the shallow rocky waters.

There was a bridge with concrete abutments about 40 feet downstream from the men. Calculating that the men would drown without help, I took off for the stream planning to turn them over and then cut for the abutment.

I had just reached the first man and turned him over when I was shot. I went down. My right leg was useless and the effort to move in that heavily rock-strewn stream to the abutment was tortuous. Part of the way I moved by rolling, but each time that right leg hit rock was both extremely difficult and painful. Every second of that journey, of course, I was anticipating arrival of the final killing shot.

I was finally able to reach the abutment, behind which one of my men hauled me out. My radio man had called for a medic and he reached me fast, which turned out to be crucial. At that point one of our mobile field hospitals had advanced to a position not far from ours. The bullet had torn my femoral artery, a wound that not many in World War II survived. Within 15 minutes I was transported to the hospital and was immediately on the operating table. I had the extraordinarily good fortune to have as surgeon a man doing cutting-edge experimental work in arterial surgery. I was so lucky!

Just a few days later, I was flown to England and a hospital for a second operation, followed by a long period of existence in a body cast, a time which, believe it or not, proved to be quite exhilarating in its way. (Interspersed, as cast veterans painfully understand, with that formidable itch that can’t be scratched!) But that basic visceral appreciation of the sheer marvel of existence, of good food, of nurses — beautiful nurses! — of the wonderful companionship of a ward of those wounded but upbeat, simply of being alive, was huge.

Thus did I go through those stages, just 68 years ago, in a brief few days from an actual contact, though fleeting, with the consequences of the Nazi horrors of the Third Reich, to the actuality of being shot, and suddenly in a hospital in England, to become one of the lucky, the favored, who survived. From whence you, the reader, have inherited the ordeal of sharing the experience!

Jerome Page is a Benicia resident.