That Historic Gas Trap Rifle and the rest of the story
Well at least part of it - here is one article on the vet who originally had the Gas trap
More on Max can be found in "Messengers of the Lost Battalion: The Heroic 551st and the Turning of the tide at the battle of the bulge" ... By Gregory Orfalea
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The Lost Battalion
York County Man's Unit Is Recognized For Counterattack At Battle Of The Bulge 56 Years Later
April 01, 2001|By R.W. ROGERS Daily Press
For years after World War II, Max Bryan never sought other members of the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion because he wanted to forget what had made him old at 20 and because he didn't think there was anyone left.
Besides, where would he begin?
His battalion, which spearheaded the counterattack against the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945, had been lost to God and history.
Unit and personnel records disappeared even before the 551st was dissolved Feb. 10, 1945, because so few soldiers were left in fighting shape after the Bulge. It would be decades before the 551st would even be labeled "The Lost Battalion."
Bryan, 76, took it as an insult that his comrades' fighting, bleeding and dying in the merciless snow-covered Ardennes went unacknowledged, and not even a comfortable life along a serene stretch of Back Creek could soothe him.
Bryan -- who has lived in York County for 38 years and retired from NASA Langley Research Center in 1986 -- wanted to tell the story of the battalion with a palm tree on its helmets that fought tanks with machine guns and charged machine guns with bayonets. But he kept quiet because he feared that no one would believe him.
It would take nearly 60 years for the truth to come out.
The Battle of the Bulge began Dec. 16, 1944, when 410,000 German soldiers -- backed by 2,623 artillery pieces and 1,000 tanks -- drove a bubble 60 miles deep into Allied lines in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. The German advance wouldn't be stopped until Christmas Day.
The 551st Goyas, as members of the battalion were known, entered furious fighting on Jan. 3, 1945, with 643 men near Basse Bodeaux, Belgium. Five days later, only 96 enlisted men and 14 officers were left. The rest were killed, wounded or missing in action, according to Gregory Orfalea's book "Messengers of the Lost Battalion."
Bryan, who enlisted in the Army in 1942 at 17 and had been wounded once before the Bulge, was wounded again on Jan. 3 -- three days before his 20th birthday -- when his jeep hit a mine.
Although knocked from combat with a leg injury, Bryan stayed at the front in the gruesome job as graves register. He and his Thompson submachine gun supervised two German POWs who cleared frozen war dead from the battlefield.
"We stacked bodies like cord wood between two trees," Bryan recalled from his home in the Dandy section of York.
But it's not just memories of battle that have stuck with Bryan.
It happened on Jan. 7, 1945, at Rochelinval, Belgium: Bryan was tagging bodies on a hillside when he saw a woman with a child crossing a meadow. German mortars began firing, and the woman fell to her knees in the snowy field to protect her young son.
A wounded Bryan limped to Alice Gabriel, scooped up her 18-month-old son and led them both to a U.S. camp.
The next morning, Bryan and another soldier tried to milk some cows for the baby, even while mortars fell.
"The cows were so afraid that they didn't give milk," Bryan said with a chuckle. "We must've milked 40 cows to get a pint of milk."
For four days, Bryan pulled bodies from the snow by day and cared for the mother and child by night. He then helped them find their family. He lost touch with the two until a chance meeting in Belgium 40 years later.
Second Story
`Sentimental Journey'
Vet Reunites With Woman And Child He Saved During Wwii Battle
January 31, 1990|By BILL DELANY Staff Writer
Max Bryan still thinks he reached one of his life's major milestones in a snow-swept field outside a small Belgian village.
It has been 45 years since the Dandy resident rescued a young mother and her infant son from no-man's-land outside Rochelinval in one of the first engagements that became the Battle of the Bulge.
Nazi occupiers had forced Belgians to leave the farm community while American paratroopers of the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion stormed across an open field to capture the town.
Last summer, a second milestone came in a reunion between Bryan and the young woman, Alice Willem-Collienne, and her son, Leon Goffin, who still live in Belgium's Trois-Ponts area.
"I haven't talked about it, because so many others have war stories that are simply not true," Bryan says.
But, he spoke of it with Leopold Carlier, a historian with Belgium's Battle of the Bulge, during plans for a return to the battlefield dubbed "Sentimental Journey" by veterans of the 82nd Airborne Division. That conversation motivated Carlier to find the mother and child of Bryan's story. Her written memory of the event matched Bryan's story, which they shared last August in a reunion of their families.
Bryan was among the first paratroopers trained when World War II began. Bryan thinks he was among the first soldiers sent overseas through Camp Patrick Henry near the end of 1942.
He was on his way to the Panama Canal Zone with newly trained paratroopers designated to form the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion.
Bryan is sure it was the Army's first special forces battalion, and the 551st has been his favorite unit ever since. He still owns the M-1 rifle issued in Panama to replace the broomstick "rifle" used in training.
Bryan and the 551st entered combat in Europe with a daylight drop behind German lines in southern France.
Bryan was on duty in the C Company orderly room in Leaon, France, when the 551st received word of a Nazi counterattack which became the Battle of the Bulge.
Bryan, wounded on the second day of the battle, says he was driving a graves registration truck when he spotted the young Belgian and her infant son on the snow-swept field between American and Nazi forces.
In what became confirmation of his war story, Alice Willem-Collienne recalls Bryan "left the pine woods and crossed the fields. You took Leon in your arms. Hearing (the clatter of) equipment on your back, he cried very loudly. It was difficult for me to follow you; night was falling."
It also was snowing, so hard that even as a native she couldn't tell where they were going. By morning's light she saw they were in Dairomont, and that snow was up to the middle of the square.
She remembers Bryan's efforts to milk straying cattle to provide milk for her 20-month-old son, and his refusal to let her return while the battle raged. Afterwards, he drove her through her hometown of Bergeval but only slowed down when he saw everything had been destroyed.
Willem-Collienne says they stopped in Mont-de-Fosse when she saw her husband's brother, and parted without exchanging addresses.
Bryan's service records were mislaid in the confusion of war's end, but he was bound home from Berlin by the fall of 1945."I had been on partial pay so long I had money to buy a car, but I needed my mother's signature because I wasn't 21," he recalls.Loss of his personal records also affected recognition of his role in the battle for Rochelinval.
Everyone in the 551st had been recommended for a bronze star medal in recognition of heroism in battle.
Bryan says his own award was dated Jan. 31, 1983 - just past the 38th anniversary of the battle. The medal and its associated citation was simply mailed to his home on Dandy Loop Road .
Bryan retired from Langley Research Center in 1986 after 24 years as an engineering technician
