From Normandy to Nuremburg, a story of survival and victory
Dan Altman spent his 24th birthday knowing it could be his last. It was June 4, 1944, and the young Army sergeant was one of 160,000 Allied troops who would invade the beaches of Normandy as soon as the weather cleared.
A few months later he was in the Hurtgen forest, where German shells reduced trees to stumps and American soldiers had to dig deep foxholes in the frozen ground to avoid the falling timber.
"The worst thing was the cold," he said. "It was below zero all the time. Our machines guns froze up, it was so cold."
Next was vicious fighting at the Battle of the Bulge.
"I never worried about dying," Altman said during an interview at his Verona apartment. "I worried about staying alive."
For his 95th birthday last year, Altman received the Croix de Guerre from the French government, which learned of his D-Day experience from his granddaughter, Fawn Zwickel.
This year, her birthday gift is the release of "The Forgotten Soldier: Of the Second Wave on D-Day" (History Publishing, 321 pp. $9.99 Kindle Edition), the personal story of her grandfather's survival amid the fiercest battles of the war in Europe.
Zwickel, who lives in Rockaway, wrote it as an homage to Altman and his generation.
"They had the secret sauce," she said as she sat with her grandfather during the interview. "They knew how to endure and survive."
For Altman, his tour of history didn't end on the battlefield. He would later guard Nazi war criminals at the Palace of Justice during the Nuremburg trials, and would be sent to the death camps at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald to gather records and other evidence.
"The bodies were stacked up, at first I thought it was cardboard," said Altman, who turns 96 this year. "They had bodies frozen in railroad cars, all stacked up. They were trying to get rid of them, but they couldn't do it fast enough."
One reason Altman was called to extended duty during the Occupation is that he was fluent in German.
"It's not that much different than Yiddish," he said, which he heard all around him growing up on the streets of Brooklyn's East New York, which had heavy Jewish and German populations.
But like so many World War II veterans, Altman came home and put it all away.
He settled into life with his wife, Rita, started a home improvement business, and then worked in sales for an engineering firm.
"He never talked about Army life," said Rita Altman, his wife of 73 years. "Even in the war, his letters were 'I miss you,' 'I love you.' He never wrote much about what he was doing. Once he wrote that he was angry about the guns, and he got in trouble."
"We had lousy guns," Altman said. "We started with leftover bolt rifles from World War I."
Other than that, there were scant details from Altman, either during the war or after.
"I didn't want to talk about it because I'm here and they're all gone. We lost a lot of guys over there," he said. "Survivor guilt ... I've had plenty of it."
In 2014, Bryce Zwickel, Altman's great-granddaughter had to do a 4th-grade genealogy report. Altman's service record came up on Ancestry.com.
"It was very basic," said Fawn Zwickel, who is Bryce's mom.
But it spurred a memory.
"When I was a kid, he used to rattle off the names of the concentration camps," Fawn said.
She began to wonder more about her grandfather's service and began deeper research. She wrote for his records, but the 1973 military archives fire in St. Louis incinerated 80 percent of the files from both World Wars and Korea. Fawn got what was left of Altman's records and took her hunt to national and military archives in Washington and other places.
She soon learned that her grandfather's unit was part of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, during Normandy and the subsequent push through France and Belgium and into Germany.
She researched the troop movements of that Allied struggle to end the war, and realized her grandfather had a role in some of the most dramatic moments of the European theater.
Next, she sat with him for the details and stories.
Through it, she got to see her grandfather as a young man in his 20s.
"These were just boys, some of whom had not much education, had never been out of their hometowns and were now exposed to these horrors. The emotional part was so raw... ," she said. "The more he talked, the more he remembered. And it was tough because he would jump around a bit, but because of my research I was able to fill in the pieces."
Some of the war images remained indelible in Altman's mind, even after 70 years. At Omaha Beach, he watched the first few men of his landing craft with 75-pounds of gear on their back, step off the ramp and sink to the bottom and drown.
He saw his best buddy, Bronco Grizovich, get shot in the head as they disembarked right next to each other.
"The blood was coming out of his helmet," he said. "I figured, that's it. I'm next."
(Because of Zwickel's research, Altman learned that Grizovich didn't die. And he cursed "because he never told me was alive," Zwickel said.)
With all the death around him at Omaha Beach and the Hurtgen, forest he began to feel death was inevitable.
"If I get killed in the morning, at least I get paid for the whole day," he said. "That's the truth. As long as you were alive in the morning, you got paid for the whole day. That was my mantra."
In the Hurtgen forest, he received a letter from Rita about how she became unnerved by wrapping the body of a deceased person at her job as a nurse's aide.
"Me and the boys had a good laugh over that one," he said. "There were dead bodies all around us."
Shrapnel tore through his winter uniform during one shelling in that battle.
"It was popping out all over me -- my back, my shoulders," he said.
And it was there he learned to pray.
"I thought, 'If there's a God in heaven, I believe in you right now ... if you came through, you had to thank God. I never believed in God until that time."
Zwickel said she wanted to tell her grandfather's story as an example of the "true grit" of that generation, but also for people today to perhaps better realize the trauma of those fighting our modern wars.
"People who go to war are never the same," she said. "I wanted to let his story be known. I'd like people to have a better understanding of what happens to the boys we're sending off now."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.