SOLDIERS AND HEROES AND SMALL MICHIGAN TOWNS
by Julie Albrecht Royce

Standing behind the counter of Nehmer’s jewelry store in Croswell, Michigan, Harold Nehmer is everyone’s image of the perfect grandfather. His smile is welcoming, his blue eyes still twinkle, and at 94 years old he continues working at the store his father, Albert, opened in 1919.

Harold was born in 1914 and lived his first five years in a little house near the entrance to the Croswell Canning Factory. One of his earliest memories is asking his grandma when Uncle Floyd would be home. Floyd was a soldier in WWI. Harold’s grandmother told him “Uncle Floyd will be back when the snow flies.” Young Harold awoke one morning and saw from his bedroom window a few soft, white, flurries drifting to the ground. He dressed and ran to his grandmother’s, only three doors down, this time asking, “Where’s Uncle Floyd?”

His amused grandmother patiently replied, “He’ll probably be here when the train comes in.” The train depot was close enough that Harold could see it from the family’s front window. Sure enough, the train pulled in and a minute later he saw Uncle Floyd walking up the street.

Harold’s paternal grandparents emigrated from Germany where his great grandfather, Daniel Nehmer, worked for a wealthy landowner. “Grandpa was in charge of keeping German peasants from getting into the wood and stealing it,” he recalls. “But grandpa knew it was all those poor folks could get to keep from freezing. So he let ‘em take a few branches or twigs. The overseer called him into the office and chastised him. The next time it happened and he got yelled at, Grandpa decided it was time to gather the family and head to the United States.”

Harold’s father, Albert, attended the Roseberg School near Croswell. Classes were taught in German and Albert became fluent in the language. “My mother did not approve of dad and his parents speaking German in the home. I think she was worried they were talking about her. So other than learning a few German songs, I never learned to speak the language.”

Harold was the youngest child in his family. Older twin brothers died of pneumonia, which in the early 1900s was often fatal. His older sister survived the illness.

In 1929, the Great Depression rocked the country, devastating families as wage earners lost their jobs and their savings. In January 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt took office, 15 million Americans were out of work. Four months later the president introduced the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). One of its goals was to find work for the thousands of unemployed teachers then on public assistance. FERA provided funding for states to hire out-of-work teachers and have them teach classes to the hundreds of thousands of unemployed wage earners who might become more employable with additional education.

Several teachers were sent to Croswell. Students enrolling for, and successfully completing, a year of classes qualified as a sophomore at the University of Michigan. Harold became a student in the program and obtained a year of college credit with the emphasis on math, English and geography.

World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Soon fighting raged throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. When it ended and the casualties were counted the estimates reported as many as 72 million people dead: 47 million civilians including deaths due to famine and disease, and 25 million military deaths including 5 million prisoners of war who died in captivity. The Allies lost more than 60 million of the total, the Axis more than 10 million.

On September 16, 1940, the first peacetime draft in United States history was passed by congress. The term of service was set at a year. Realizing the implications, 28-year-old Harold Nehmer volunteered. He preferred to leave at the beginning of summer so he headed off to boot camp in June 1941. His year would be up the following June and he would be back home for the summer of 1942. Summertime in Michigan’s Thumb was beautiful and it gave him something to look forward to. It would be the first time he had been away from Croswell, but how bad could one year be? He was not married, and although he had a couple of girlfriends, there was nothing seriously holding him back. He could serve his country, see a bit of the world, and be back home in the span of 12 months. That was the plan. Instead, he was gone for four and a half years and the absence would change his life.

The Army sent Harold to Fort Polk for two months of basic training, but halfway through he was shipped to Fort Knox and assigned to the Third Armored Division. He was quickly chosen as ‘key personnel’ and reassigned to help with the creation of a new Fifth Armored Division. One day his commanding officer walked up to him and told him “to put on sergeant stripes,” because he was already doing the work normally assigned to a sergeant: handling fine materials and fancy optical instruments. He jumped from a buck private to a sergeant in one leap. The army looked at his college classes and assigned him to the artillery where math skills were a necessity.

December 8, 1941, six months after Harold joined the Army, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. It was the day President Roosevelt said “would live in infamy.” The strike came exactly four months after congress approved the indefinite extension of service for officers. Harold knew that as a sergeant he was in for the duration.

In early 1942, Harold spent a short time in Santa Barbara and while stationed there the Japanese surfaced a submarine and fired on an oil field. “Few people know about that one,” he says. “It was just months after Pearl Harbor.” Apparently, the submarine’s Japanese commander fired on the oil field as retaliation for a perceived snub he suffered when visiting the area 10 years earlier. The shell damaged the pier, but the feeble attempt at revenge caused no human casualties. To avoid alarming people, the incident was not reported in newspapers of the day.

Harold remained with the Fifth for about a year and then in the spring of 1942 one of his commanding officers convinced him to get his commission. He was one of 10 or 12 candidates applying for Officer Candidate School and one of three chosen to attend. “I got commissioned in artillery and didn’t want to go back to the Third Armored Division because I knew too many fellas there. It’s never good to command your former buddies. I figured I’d spent enough time with the Fifth and I ruled out the Seventh because I didn’t want to go to Watertown, New York.” The small town Michiganian was not interested in big town New York.

“I chose the Ninth Armored Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. Cavalry. Horse school. We were put up in a bunch of tents out in the boondocks and practiced artillery before we got shipped to the Mohave for desert training in the middle of the summer of 1942.” So much for being back home by then.

The desert training was in anticipation of being sent to Africa where Rommel was creating havoc. In the desert, the troops were again housed in tents, but this time the excruciating heat bore down on them. It was a place to meet scorpions and endure sandstorms, neither of which he had ever experienced in Croswell. “It only rained one time although a hail storm pummeled us. Quite an experience in the desert,” he says, offering a smile that suggests it is not something he would want to do again, and then adding, “Survived that.”

But, it was all about timing and now the war in Africa was calming down so the army decided there was no reason to send troops there. They rounded up Harold’s division and sent them to Louisiana to practice in the mud, getting ready for the European invasion. “It was different than being in the desert,” Harold concedes. “Different equipment. Set up different. We had to learn to fire in the trees and hills with artillery.

“They put me in communications at that time. I became battalion communications officer. I was responsible for all radio equipment, wire equipment, the message center, the fellas riding motorcycles around, and all the information sent from headquarters out to the batteries. Those were my responsibilities.”

This new assignment required Harold to attend several more schools, “one school was to learn things you would encounter in combat, like gasses, mustard gas, phosgene gas: I had to be able to identify all those things. Put us in a room and gave us a whiff. Once you had a whiff of that you never forgot it.”

Phosgene is a highly toxic chemical compound that gained notoriety during WWI and became part of the United States military arsenal in WWII. It was generally colorless and had the odor of freshly cut hay or green corn, both pleasant smells to a country boy. In high concentrations, it had a strongly unpleasant odor and was deadly.

Because he was a communication’s officer, Harold learned Morse code. He was never speedy, and modestly admits there were many who were better than he at deciphering, but he merely needed to know what it was all about so he could supervise those who actually read incoming messages.

He was trained in the wire section, how to get the wire up across roads and lay it by hooking it to trees or posts they planted. Sometimes it was necessary to dig a trench and string the wire under a road. A roll of wire would weigh 60 or 70 pounds and would have to be strung a couple miles before a phone could be placed at each end.

Finally, with months of training to help him survive, Nehmer was deployed to Europe. He arrived at the coastal waters of Firth, Scotland, and traveled by train to Salisbury Plain.

“I was sent to Luxemburg where we used wire quite a bit for our communications. Germans came across at night and put pins between two wires. Then we’d have to go the length of the wire trying to find the pins, never knowing if we were headed into an ambush and about to be shot. They could have ambushed and got rid of a lot of us, but they didn’t.”

One evening, not long after he landed, he was sitting on the ground watching a movie, “I looked over and recognized Walter Rogos sitting off to one side. Rogos was a farmer from Croswell and we went to school together. I hadn’t seen him since graduation.” Halfway around the world and a long way from home, it was good to see a familiar face.

Watch for the continuation in the June issue