The good guys in a just war
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.
Minnesotans in the European theater
Belfast
On Jan. 26, 1942, a ship carrying men of the 133rd Infantry Regiment of the 34th Infantry Division, largely composed of National Guardsmen from Minnesota and its neighbors, docked in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A Colonel called down for a soldier from “B” Company, and a Lieutenant turned to the nearest private and sent him up. To the private’s surprise, the divisional commander greeted him on deck and asked if he would talk to reporters. “Well, if I have to, I think I can,” the private replied. As he walked down the gangplank, a band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner and a crowd of civilians roared. “With all the attention I got,” the private recalled, “it looked as though the Army’s plan was for me to win the war single-handed.”
Pvt. Milburn Henke from Hutchinson, Minn., had become the first American GI to set foot in Europe in World War II.
Upon the United States’ entry into the war in December 1941, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to prioritize the defeat of Germany and Italy. While these two Axis powers dominated continental Europe, the only avenues available to strike them were directly by air and indirectly in the Mediterranean.
Air
British bombers attacked Germany at night, targeting entire cities. Meanwhile, American bombers, with the aid of fighter protection, were able to bomb during the day with more precision, hitting industrial and military targets more explicitly.
These missions were among the most dangerous duties a serviceman could perform: Out of 115,000 heavy bomber crews, 26,000 — or 23 percent — were killed. Crosby’s Bob Polich flew 29 missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress. During one such mission, his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, wounding several crew members, one severely. “As I approached the field,” Polich recalled:
…we sent out flares. That let them know we had wounded on board, and we had priority to land. They would also send out the ambulances. When I got on the ground, I steered the plane over to the ambulances. I quickly got out through the nose hatch and went running around to where they were lowering the wounded crew out of the side of the plane. I was helping to lower one of the men down, and I could see he was trying to say something to me. His lips were moving, but nothing was coming out. I was holding his head in my arms. Finally, he was able to say, “mama,” and then he died, right in my arms.
Lloyd Iverson from Goodridge was a tail gunner in a B-17. On a mission in July 1944, his plane:
…was seen to be hit by flak just after bombs away…The aircraft went into a steep dive and disappeared into the clouds. The tail section was hit and was breaking up as it disappeared into the undercast. No chutes were seen to leave the ship prior to this time. All ten crewmembers were initially listed as Missing in Action and later declared killed in action when the crashed plane was identified in Neubiberg, Germany.
Lloyd’s daughter, Judy, was born a few months later.
Mediterranean
The British had been fighting the Axis in North Africa since 1940. October and November 1942 saw them win a resounding victory at El Alamein in Egypt and begin pursuing the Axis forces west across the desert to Tunisia. British and American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in November and began advancing eastward into Tunisia, hoping to catch the Axis troops in between.
In February 1943, the Axis attacked the Allies at Kasserine. It was America’s first land battle against the Germans and Italians, and it was a mauling. “The troops were fed into the battle as they arrived, and it was a big mess,” Lakeville’s John Vessey recalled. “We had German tanks running all over the place, plus the Germans had a lot of air support in those days. We were in all kinds of trouble.” “[Kasserine] was a lesson for all of us,” he continued:
We were well-trained, but we were not trained for the war we came to fight. It was a lot harder than our leaders had envisioned.
Plus, we were miserably equipped for that war. We had just got rid of our World War I helmets before we got there. We were still using a lot of World War I equipment. Our radios were from the early 1930s. We were using really vintage technology.
Still we fought well. We fought a lot better than the history books give us credit for.
“You learned how to protect yourself,” another Kasserine veteran, Owatonna’s Norbert McCrady, explained.
The first time you saw someone dead who you had known, or even badly wounded, you came close to going into a state of shock. After that, you get kind of a cocoon that wraps itself around your psyche. It only allows a certain amount of information into your brain. It kind of dehumanizes you. You don’t become brave, but at least you don’t panic anymore when something bad happens.
With experience and better leadership, the Allies did better at El Guettar in March. The Axis forces in North Africa surrendered in May.
The Allies turned to Italy. Sicily fell in July and August, and Mussolini’s fascist government fell with it. Mainland Italy was invaded in September. But what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill hoped would be the “soft underbelly of Europe” proved much tougher. Advancing north up the Italian peninsula “was just a long series of tough battles,” Vessey remembered. “We crossed and recrossed the Volturno River I don’t know how many times.”
To outflank one of the German defensive positions, the Gustav Line, dominated by the monastery at Cassino, the Allies landed behind it at Anzio in January 1944. “Do you know I was never afraid of the Luftwaffe until after this landing,” St. Paul’s Clarence Spreigl wrote to his brother:
We were just coming into the beach about seven-thirty in the morning when the sun came up and we all knew by experience that Jerry would start his dive bombing and he sure did. I went through two attacks before my turn was to get off.…You should have seen my field jacket all full of powder so you can imagine how close they were. My helmet flew about three feet in the air.
But the Allied commanders hesitated once ashore, and the beachhead became a scene of attrition. “Gosh I have seen some awful sights and some of the fellows in my outfit that I knew for a couple of years are gone but a fellow gets used to it and expects it,” Spreigl wrote in March. The Gustav Line was finally broken in May, and the Allies resumed their advance.
D-Day
By mid-1944, the Allies were ready to strike directly at Germany. On June 6, 1944 — D-Day — they landed in northern France in the largest amphibious operation in history.
The invasion began in the early hours, with 18,000 paratroopers securing positions vital to covering the landings. One paratrooper, Ellsworth Onger from Strandquist, was killed when his glider was hit by anti-aircraft fire, Minnesota’s first casualty of that day. “The weather was bad, and all the planes got lost,” John Hinchliff from Park Rapids recalled. “We ended up eighteen miles from our drop zone.” In anticipation, the Germans had flooded open areas that could be used as landing grounds. “I thought I was coming down in an open field, and when I landed I was mid-thigh in water,” Hinchliff remembered. “A lot of guys weren’t so lucky and they drowned.”
There were five landing beaches, the Americans attacking the western two, Omaha and Utah. While the landings at Utah went largely according to plan, it was a very different story at Omaha. “The theory was that we would land in the second wave,” Goodhue’s Gerald Heaney recalled.
Well, everything, anything that could go wrong, went wrong. First, the Air Force was supposed to bomb the beach. They dropped their bombs, but they were a mile inland. Secondly, the Army had built huge barges, and on each of these barges were hundreds of mortars.…Unfortunately they landed in the water about two hundred yards ahead of us. Thirdly…we were to land behind the 29th Infantry Division, but because of the intensity of the fire they drifted off to the left, so when we landed we were the first wave on the beach. Then the final problem was that we were supposed to be landed on the shore, but for some reason or other the explosive charges that had been placed on…those iron crosses they hadn’t been detonated. So when we approached them and our coxswain saw that he says, “That’s as far as I go, lads.” So we got off in the water.
“I’m on the boat, and the front end goes down, and Joe Rafferty, he’s the captain of Company A, he’s the first man off the boat and he’s shot dead, and he goes off in front of the boat,” Heaney continued.
So I told the men, “Over the side!” So we all went over the sides. And we’re in the water, and we have these heavy packs on. And these packs became water soaked. I’m not sure what the others did, but I ditched my pack because I couldn’t move. Some of the others did, and some of them…[trails off]. So we made our way in the water. That was a short distance — maybe fifty, sixty feet from the edge of the water up to the seawall. We all hit the ground at the seawall. Most of them hit the ground, and the Germans had us zeroed with mortars. Boom! Boom! Boom! We knew we couldn’t stay there. So we leapt over the seawall across the road and started to make our way up the hill, where the German installations were.
American casualties at Omaha Beach were heavy. Among the dead was Walter Kostrzewski, the second son of Strandquist, Minn. — population 180 in 1940 — to die that day. “The infantry boys who landed ahead of us didn’t fare very well. Many of them never made it out of the water,” Monticello’s LeRoy Schultz remembered. “It was sad, confused, hectic — death was all around. People were screaming, praying, crying and cursing.”
By the end of D-Day, 155,000 Allied troops held an area of 80 square miles with 10,000 killed, 60 percent of whom were Americans, but the liberation of Europe had begun.
Germany
Breaking out of the Normandy beachhead in July, the Allies swept across France to the German border, but fighting remained hard. On Dec. 26, Norbert Bruns from St. Rosa was killed in Germany’s vast, last-gasp offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge, two months after his brother, Albert, was killed fighting in Italy. St. Paul’s Henry Lemke was killed in France in August; his brother, Erwin, in Belgium in January 1945. “It is far from being over here,” Clarence Spreigl’s brother, George, wrote to their mother in February.
Fight for a week and only gain maybe a hundred yards…If you could see the hospitals over here. Halls and rooms crowded with the poor boys with arms and legs missing and the fellows lying around on the fields who will never move again!
George was killed in Germany in April.
Pushing into Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the true nature of what these Minnesotans were fighting became apparent. “There was a concentration camp nearby,” Fred Pond from Shakopee remembered. “In the ditches on both sides of the road lay inmates in striped clothing. It appeared that they had been trying to escape when they were shot.” At another camp, Martha Ryan from Webster recalled:
It made us sick when we were told that these people were killed a matter of a day before our American troops arrived…We went to the building a short time later that they had been held in. A wooden barn. We could see the claw marks where they had with their fingernails scratched on the wood trying to break through, to get out from the inside. I think they’d been shot.
“Near Munich we hit a bad deal there,” Loman’s Martin Steinbach remembered:
There was a big concentration camp, one where they burned all the bodies. They had flatcars in there with people piled on them like pulpwood, about two or three feet high…They would throw them in the incinerator and burn them up.
There was guys laying on the ground, dying. Some of them, you might as well say they were dead, but they were still alive. They were starved to death.
The day Milburn Henke landed in Belfast, Alida Baruch was born in Amsterdam. A Jew, she was deported to Auschwitz six months later and gassed shortly after arrival, one of six million murdered by Hitler’s National Socialist regime.
History is rarely black and white. It was in World War II. While no wars are “good,” some are just. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and Germany surrendered on May 8. “We have beaten the terror,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press exclaimed.
In 1982, John Silvernale, a former bomber pilot from Shetek Township, returned to England for a reunion. “I cannot but feel the hand of God was with me,” he told his former comrades. “But you know, we had to have lots of faith in those days — faith in ourselves and our training, faith in our crew members, ground crews and armament, faith in our leaders and commanders, faith in our airplane, faith in our country and people back home, and, finally, faith in God.” In a righteous cause, John Silvernale’s faith was well placed.