This Was No Vacation

It’s a miracle that I even exist. My father, Fred Sauceman Sr., was a member of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. He survived the D-Day Invasion and the hedgerow warfare in Normandy. He survived Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, despite being towed in a glider, a craft once described as a “flying coffin.” Freezing and surrounded by Germans at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, he survived.

He would go on to make radios, phonographs, and televisions for Magnavox, but World War II was the defining event of his life. This year, 45 years after his death at the age of 53, I followed his soldierly route through these European battlefields.

In the forests of Belgium, you can still see foxholes. They’ve filled in some over the years, but those humble means of defense and protection, dug into frozen ground that terrible winter, are still there.

Normandy and Bastogne were words I heard often during my childhood. Our Christmas card list every year included names of “Army buddies” who, like my father, miraculously survived the horrible slaughter of those European battlefields.

In the bottom of my father’s footlocker, years after his death, I found a folded sheet of yellowed paper. It was an original copy of General Anthony McAuliffe’s Christmas message to the troops from 1944.

On June 4 of this year we visited Bastogne Barracks, where General McAuliffe composed that letter. There, Joel Denis of the War Heritage Institute in Belgium presented me with a framed copy of General McAuliffe’s letter, decorated with the colors of the Belgian flag, in memory of my father. 

“How was your vacation?” friends offhandedly ask. But this was no vacation. It was a pilgrimage, a trip I had to make to find answers to questions I haven’t been able to ask my father for the past 45 years. On this trip, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of death and destruction at every stop. As much as I’ve heard, read, and now seen, I still cannot imagine being cut loose in an unreliable craft to land in totally unknown territory teeming with the enemy. I cannot come close to feeling the misery of frozen feet in a snowy foxhole, amid the hell of dying comrades.

I hope this trip continues to give me the perspective and wisdom to realize that the minor inconveniences of daily life we sometimes complain of today are nothing compared to what these soldiers bravely endured and sacrificed to liberate Europe.

About the author: Fred Sauceman is a frequent contributor to Smoky Mountain Living.