Barbed Wire Wings

John Gualtier was born in Wellsville, Ohio on October 4, 1925. John was born at home, which was the custom in those days. His father worked for the railroad and his mother was a housewife and mother. The whole family worked hard. The children went to school in a one room schoolhouse. The Gualtier family lived a mile away and the children rode a horse to school. Four children rode one big old grey horse named Dobbin. The Depression years were really rough but thankfully, John's family grew most of their own food. He remembers his mother canning 500 quarts of green beans to feed their family. John was the fastest guy in school and his nickname was "the deer." He played football in high school and when he was seventeen, he asked his father to sign giving him permission to go to war. John's three brothers were in the war, so he refused. As soon as John turned 18, he volunteered. After basic training, he was ready to serve as a medic and was shipped out of Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. This was the largest processing center for troops heading overseas. John went by ship to England and then on to Le Havre, France. It was February of 1945, and John was able to see the famous beach at Normandy many months after the invasion. As a medic, he was not allowed to carry either a knife or a gun. He had a red cross on his hat and another red cross on his arm band. During the war, John made difficult decisions of who would live and who would die. It was a nightmare every single day. John said the worst was hearing the soldiers calling out to him in the middle of the night. They would call "Doc, Doc" and his nights were tormented like his days. It was in May of 1945 when they walked into a timber in Austria and saw people crawling on their hands and knees. The nightmare continued when he saw some of the starving people taking food and dying on the spot. They looked like skeletons; the adults looked as if they weighed about forty or fifty pounds. They laid on bunks with straw mattresses. There were five or six people stacked in those bunks and at times, only one in the stack was still alive. John felt as if the war had taken in a young kid and made an old man out of him in a matter of months. John was holding an emaciated Jewish man in his arms and was feeding him canned hash. He put a small piece of potato in his mouth and the man swallowed it. He passed away before he could take another bite. He learned the walking skeletons were Jewish people who had been imprisoned because of their faith. They were in Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp, which was a sub-camp of a famous concentration camp called Mauthausen. His unit liberated another camp near Staubling, Germany that contained mostly Russians but also Negros, Jews and others who were not "blonde-haired and blue-eyed." John came home from the war a changed man. The memories of the war haunted him and he tried to commit suicide twice. He did weird things that worried and frightened his mom and dad. Today, John admits he was as "wacky as a bedbug." John was involved with a group of WWII soldiers who had group session at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City. He outlived all of them and today, he joins a group of Vietnam Veterans who meet weekly. He still speaks to schools and groups in Central Iowa about his experiences in the war.