This is the story of my father, Willard T. Dalton, who served in Europe with the 30th Infantry Division, 119th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Company E, from June 14, 1944, to September 1945.  He was a sergeant, Tec 4, radio operator, and a marksman with the M1.  His nickname was Woody.

Dad was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1915.  His mother, Gertrude Schaefer, was German.  Dad often talked of his mother's uncle, Herman "Germany" Schaefer, a professional baseball player who played for the Washington Senators and Chicago White Sox in the early 1900s.  Dad always spoke of how wonderful his mother was, especially so during the Depression.  She helped whomever she could, regardless of nationality.  He told of how she helped out a lot of Irish families when their own kind would not.  She loved Notre Dame football, and the whole family, including his brothers Charles and Harold and sisters Evelyn and Mary, would drive to South Bend for their games.  His father, Harry Dalton, was Irish, born in Liverpool, England.  He was an orphan but apparently a self-made man who became a highly respected engineer who was often consulted in the building of large water towers and similar structures.  Harry Dalton was supposedly involved in the design of a structure that was used in the development of the atomic bomb.  Much of the research into the atomic bomb took place in the Chicago area, principally that of Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.

Woody grew up at 61st and Washtenaw and graduated from St. Rita Grammar School on the South Side of Chicago.  In 1936, he graduated from Lindblom High School, where he had quite a reputation as a fine dancer and athlete. 

Baseball was his favorite sport, as was true of most men in those days.  As an avid big band dancer, he spent a lot of time at the dance clubs around the city, and that is where he met his bride, Kathleen Brennan.  My mother's mother, Anne Dillon, came from County Mayo in Ireland to America in 1912 at age 16 aboard the Lusitania.  She had attempted to get passage aboard the Titanic, but no tickets were available.  Mom and Dad were married in May of 1942 at Visitation Church on "The Boulevard," 55th Street.  Dad had already finished his basic training, but where it was I am not sure.  He did spend some time in Biloxi, Mississippi, and only mentioned it in terms of the awful heat down there.  After their wedding, Mom and Dad spent some time in beautiful Palo Alto, California.  Dad was probably receiving technical training in radio operation.  Mom worked in the office for a submarine base, the name of which I do not know.  Some of his buddies from those days were Vince Przekop, Tom Creagh, and Ed Galligan.

Kay, as Dad and Mom's friends called her, was the world's greatest conversationalist.  You could always depend on her to keep a conversation going.  She had a tremendous amount of genuine grace and class and the looks of a model in her youth.  Had she gone to college, she could have become anything she wanted, so intelligent was she. A voracious reader, Mom seemed to know everything.  Apparently Dad agreed because during their little tiffs he would often say, "You think you know everything."  Mom was truly the world's greatest mother.  She was always there for us and treated us all equally.  Unselfish to the very end, one of her biggest concerns as she was dying of lung cancer was not being a burden on any of us; so she carefully organized all of her papers and the house so that none of us would have to worry about them.

Dad was originally scheduled to land in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, but he severely sprained his ankle beforehand and did not ship over until June 14.  He fought through France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany until September 1945, and the closest call that he reported was when a bullet passed through his pocket.  That he went uninjured for more than a year seems even more incredible as I have learned in the last couple of years how the 30th was almost constantly involved in heavy action.  Mr. Fred Cone, a fine gentleman I met through the 30th Infantry Division Association, told me recently that their commander, General Leland Hobbs, told his men at the outset, "You can forget about getting any rest.  This division is going to fight, fight, fight."  Thus they earned the nickname "The Workhorse of the Western Front."  They also earned the respect of Hitler and the Germans they opposed, principally the elite 1st SS Division.  German high command christened them "Roosevelt's SS Troops" when it tore to shreds the 1st SS before the breakout at St. Lo, again at Mortain, and finally during the Battle of the Bulge.  After this defeat, the 1st SS was never again to do battle.  A German soldier captured near Stavelot during the Bulge said, "We know you - you're Roosevelt's shock troops.  You always show up where the going is toughest."  The Army historian S. L. A. Marshall called the 30th the "Finest Infantry Division in the European Theater of Operations."

Mom and Dad both did their part during the war, as millions of other military personnel did, along with the millions of people on the all-important home front.  What an unselfish generation they were.  Well before Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation, it was obvious to me that this generation was something special.  The Southwest Side of Chicago where I grew up was brimming with them -- hard-working, modest, patriotic, good citizens, and good parents.  Everybody did what they had to do, what their country expected them to do; and because so many people were involved, they apparently did not feel that they were remarkable or special in any way.  But the fact that so many people sacrificed in so many ways does not diminish what individuals did; therefore, I will always be extremely proud of what my Mom and Dad did during the war.  I think largely because of this modesty, my Dad did not talk much about his experiences.

Dad did tell us about how beautiful the countryside was in France and Belgium.  He said that some guys were so desperate for a drink of booze that they would drink hair tonic or perfume, anything with alcohol in it.   Every so often he would tell a story here and there.  He described the sight of dead American soldiers being "just pitiful, stacked like cordwood," a description that was repeated by a lot of men in recounting the war.  One of the few times the 30th Division is mentioned in any of the history books was when they were bombed by their own planes at St. Lo during the breakout, Operation Cobra.  Over 80 men were killed and 500 or so injured in two separate bombings.  He said that generally when bombers released their bombs while overhead, you were safe.  But in this situation, the bombers released their bombs before they were over the 30th's positions, and they knew they were in trouble.  He said that men ran like hell, but obviously they couldn't run far enough.

Another story I always liked was about a time when three or four German tanks were approaching their position down a narrow road and one of their men knocked out the lead tank with a perfect bazooka shot, which prevented the other two tanks from advancing, thus preventing what could have been a massacre.  A very sad story he told to my uncle was about a situation when he and a platoon of men, I believe, were pinned down in a valley, and my dad was told to get to some high ground so he could make radio contact with headquarters.  After he got up to high ground, the Germans shelled the platoon, and there were no survivors.

He talked about the brutally cold weather during the winter of 1944, one of the coldest, most severe winters in European history.  He was very homesick during Christmastime that year, while they were in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle in American military history with over 1,000,000 men engaged.

There was another story he told which illustrates his moral character very well.  It seems his men were in an area where German prisoners were being marched away from them when one of his men raised his rifle to shoot one of the Germans in the back.  Dad knocked the rifle out of the man's hands.  After the horrible experiences these men had, I can understand how someone could be driven to do something like shoot a prisoner, particularly after Malmedy.  But my Dad wouldn't have it.  He never expressed any great hate for the Germans.  Like a lot of guys, I think he realized that a lot of them were just like the Americans, regular guys just following orders.  Of course we know that this wasn't true of the militant Nazis.

Mom experienced what wives and families at home most feared, the telegram announcing the death of a loved one.  When she received this telegram, she stayed calm, read it carefully, and found that the man killed was not my father.  I recently saw a listing of 30th Division men killed in action in a book about the division, and one of the brave men killed was a William N. Dalton.  There is a good chance my mother received the notice for this soldier because of the similarity in names.

While on occupation duty, he talked of playing baseball on the fields that the Germans would so meticulously cut with their hand scythes.  This theme of almost fanatical cleanliness is repeated by author Stephen Ambrose about the Germans when he described how their buildings could be bombed out in the morning and all the rubble would be cleared out by the evening.

After the war, in 1947, Mom and Dad bought a new house at 83rd and Pulaski in Chicago, which was the middle of nowhere in those days.  They got a GI loan at about 5 percent for the $8,000 cape cod brick house.  They spent the rest of their lives in that house, Dad having died in 1992 of complications from Alzheimer's Disease, and Mom having died in 1997 from lung cancer.  Dad worked as a plumber for Dalton Plumbing Company, 81st and Ashland, for almost 40 years, six days a week.  Many of his regular customers referred to him as "the big plumber."  He was a big, strong man, about six feet tall and 230 pounds.  The business was originally owned by his brother Charles, but Dad and his cousin Emmitt became partners in ownership for about the last 10 years of his working days.  He took a week's vacation maybe once every three or four years but never complained.  He was happy to be working and enjoyed "working with the tools" as opposed to working in an office.  He was most proud of the fact that he was always honest with people in what he did and what he charged.

Mom and Dad were avid square dancers for many years, until Dad's legs gave out.  Degenerative arthritis took a heavy toll on his body, probably from working in cramped, damp quarters all those years.  He had to give up bowling and golf in his 40s because of it.  He was excellent at both, averaging about 175 in bowling, and often golfing in the 70s.

Dad had a good singing voice which he displayed in church and in the shower.  Every day after work, he would shower off in the basement and sing and whistle so loud that we could hear him upstairs.  He had a great sense of humor, a quick wit, and he loved to laugh. He always looked for the good in people, one of his most admirable qualities.  He was very disciplined.  If he wanted to quit smoking, he did it.  If he wanted to lose some weight, he did it.

Life after the war unfortunately was not devoid of tragedy for my parents.   They lost their first son, Billy, to whooping cough in 1948.  My sister Barbara, born while Dad was in Europe in 1944, was killed in an auto accident at the age of 22 in 1967.  Barb was a beautiful girl, a graduate of Mother McAuley High School and was an X-ray technician at Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital.  The only time I had ever heard my parents cry out loud was the night they returned from the hospital in which she died.  Understandably, they never got over her death.  Even 25 years later, Mom couldn't bring herself to watch slide shows of the neighborhood kids which included Barb.

There were three other children of their marriage, Bill (Willard Jr.), now living in New Orleans, with his wife Marisol and Bill's four children from his first marriage, William, Ryan, Matthew, and Brennan.  My sister Ann has had the good fortune to live in Hawaii for almost 10 years, with her husband Nelson and their two children, Jordan and Shannon.  I live in Midlothian, Illinois, with my wife Evelyn and our two daughters, Rebecca Kathleen, and Rachel Barbara.

Dad and Mom were as unselfish and selfless as they come. They raised the four of us, sacrificed to put us all through Catholic grammar and high schools, then through college.  They were very strong Catholics, faithfully contributing to their new parish after the war, St. Denis, and helping to build a beautiful new church there.  As in all areas of life, they led by example. They never referred to themselves as religious; they just were.  My dad never told us how hard he worked; he just did it and didn't complain.   Any extra money that he had went to the family.  Mom took care of the finances, and they never fought about money.  Dad never spent a cent in a bar or in any other foolish way.  One of the great pleasures we children had was the fact that in their later years they were able to travel and enjoy themselves after all those years of hard work.  They traveled to Ireland and other parts of Europe once, to the East Coast, Houston, New Orleans, and they went to Hawaii numerous times.

I think that one of the best ways we children of veterans can honor them is to teach our children about the tremendous sacrifices these men made for this country.  Hopefully then when they are grown they will faithfully display the American flag and give some thought to what it represents and the thousands of people who have fought and died for it.

Don Dalton