Allan Appel Photo
Morgia, left, and Celentano, holding artillery shell casing, fielding questions
Jim Morgia remembers the bitter cold and the three German tiger tanks his unit destroyed, saving the inhabitants of a nearby town.
Lou Celentano remembers his anti-tank gun firing 125 shells in an hour and the luck of hitting the treads of German tanks, at the front and back of a column, halting an advance.
“I was a little boy then when all this happened,” he said gazing out at his audience, “and how grateful I am to be sitting here listening to good, peaceful people talking.”
Those were some of the poignant recollections of the Battle of the Bulge, a final and brutal German offensive of World War Two, whose 75th anniversary was marked by a program of remembrance headlined by Morgia and Celentano, local vets, now in their late 90s, who participated in the battle.
Vietnam War vets Bob Bracci and Bob Johnson, from VFW Post 9460 in Stratford, were among the rapt listeners.
Their standing-room-only audience Monday night, in the downstairs community room of the New Haven Free Public Library Ives Main Branch, comprised many members of Home Haven, one of the city’s pioneering aging-in-place organizations, and one of the sponsors of the event.
Their stories and those of related by the children of ex-soldiers not longer with us, including Anton Pritchard and city arts and civic leader Newt Schenck, who spent four months in German prison camps, were formally recorded during the presentations.
They are to be part of the New Haven Story Project, an online repository of tales of New Haven. The library plans to launch the repository in January in partnership with the New Haven Museum, said library staffer Gina Bingham, who is helming the project.
Monday night’s program was for World War Two history buffs. They were treated to personal stories of young soldiers trying to survive and writing letters home that conveyed a hyperlocal perspective along with the mysteries of human behavior brought during crisis.
Aimlee Laderman with Morgia.
Arnie Pritchard recited, by heart, several letters written by his father Anton on what it was like to be a forward observer during the battle, begun on Dec. 16 on through January, often alone, in the deep snow of the Ardennes forest, with or ahead of the infantry, and spotting targets for his unit’s artillery.
“It’s really a struggle,” he wrote “between the animal and what’s good in men.”
Then he related how in the midst of a German shelling he passed a barn burning. He noticed three horses inside still chained to posts. Their hides were already being singed. Pritchard was on a mission. There were more important things to do, he related in the letter, but he stopped and unchained the horses. Why? he asked himself. Why that small spontaneous gesture to save three equine lives amidst all the destruction of human lives around him?
Aimlee Lederman related the story of her husband Ezra Laderman, who was a young 19-year-old Brooklyn-born radio operator with the 69th Infantry Division during the battle. He later went on to be a distinguished American composer and dean of the Yale School of Music.
Laderman and his unit participated in the battle for Leipzig. When he wrote a symphony occasioned by the event, and officers heard of it, he was asked to play it for some of them. It later was radio-broadcast with an introduction by journalist Edward R. Murrow throughout the theater of war. However, at that initial recital, as Laderman was a lowly enlisted man, he had to ascend to the designated room by the back stairs.
Rev. Susan Izard, Newt Schenck’s daughter, said she had pieced together from her father’s letters sent home how he served with a unit surrounded by German troops on Dec. 19, three days after the Battle of the Bulge had begun. Part of a group of young men who had been rushed through Yale so they could be commissioned and serve, he was sent to an officers’ prison camp.
He lost 60 pounds and barely survived, but when he was freed and the war was over, he wrote home, “Darling mother … liberation is like being reborn.”
In the question and answer period that followed the presentations, someone asked Sgt. Celentano (the rank he had risen to) what it was like to come home. He said he was anxious to be discharged but he was a young single guy, and discharges came first to married men. If you had three children, you were discharged before guys with two children. Finally, the unmarried guys.
When he returned to his mother’s house, where he lived, he said, “it was very strange.” All in all, he added, despite the horrors of war, he acknowledged that seeing so much of Europe, all the travel, all the experiences he had amounted to a plus in his life.
Then, as he lifted up an artillery shell casing to show the audience, he said, with both candor and a sense of mystery, “I was a little boy then, when all this happened. I managed to forget it. This piece of artillery was in the Battle of the Bulge.”
Celentano said he could no longer remember even its caliber. He said he wasn’t even sure the precise reason he had picked it up and had lugged it with his gear across Europe and across the Atlantic.
“I guess I knew I was going to be talking to you, so I brought this home.”