By Rhonda Schulte
November 8, 2006

     Gordon Cruse’s military identification paper is bullet torn and blood spattered. The pocket dictionary he carried while chasing Germans through Europe also shows signs of the damage caused by an enemy bullet as it tore through his pelvis.
     Cruse preserves the delicate paper and book in a framed collage of war medals and photos at his home in Torrington, Wyo. With them hang a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, a picture of Cruse as a smiling, self-assured young soldier and another picture of him with fellow troops from the 692nd Tank Destroyer Battalion.
     “I’m really proud of the presidential citation of our tank destroyer unit,” he said.
     The award was given after the battalion took part in the capture of Lucherberg in December 1944. The small village stood on a hill that overlooked the entire countryside. Its capture gave the U.S. First Army guided by General Hodge’s control of the Roer Valley and part of the road to Cologne.

Calvary horses and motorcycles

     Cruse’s display is a modest reminder of the extraordinary sacrifice this 84-year-old veteran made while with the 115th Cavalry E Troops during World War II.
     On Dec. 29, 1938, Cruse was so young, 16, that he needed his parents’ permission to enlist in the National Guard. Born in Illinois, he moved to Torrington with his family during the Great Depression at age 11 when his father took a job as boiler house foreman with Holly Sugar. In February 1941 the federal government took over the National Guard unit, and Cruse soon found himself on a troop train headed to Fort Lewis, Wash.
     “They said we would serve one year,” Cruse said. “It ended up five years for me.”
     The E Troops cavalry, made up of Torrington soldiers, was first assigned to horses before becoming one of three troops moved to motorcycles. Neither mode of transportation appealed to Cruse.
     The horse maneuvers were suddenly stopped when, in a mock battle, officers determined the E Troop had sustained 90 percent casualties.
     “That’s when I decided I didn’t want to be on a horse,” Cruse said.
     And there was the time when during an extended order drill in which soldiers were lined up in columns of four and divided into platoons, his callused-mouthed horse, Kettle, bolted at the loud “gallop, ho ” call, ran past the caption and first sergeant and circled a tree-lined grass pasture.
     “I was so embarrassed,” Cruse said.
     When assigned to Kettle, Cruse was downright afraid. He’d already heard about the big Swede the horse had bucked off four mornings in a row - the last fall sending the burly soldier to the hospital for removal of cacti spines.
     When he inherited Kettle, Cruse slowly placed blanket and saddle on the horse’s back and loosely cinched up, not taking any chances that a tight strap across the belly would send the horse out of control. He put his left leg in the stirrup and threw his right leg over.
     “The horse never bucked the whole time I rode him,” Curse said, amazed to this day.
     In an area that racked up 90-100 inches of annual precipitation, the move to motorcycles proved just slightly more appealing.
     “On a nice day, everybody wanted to ride your motorcycle, but on a rainy day, you couldn’t get anyone to ride your motorcycle,” Cruse said. “They all wanted to stay in the scout cars by the heater.”

     Powder River, let ‘er buck

     The Torrington E Troops were on their way from San Francisco to Corregidor, an island in the Philippines, when they learned the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. The ship made a 180-degree turn and the troops immediately headed back to San Francisco where they patrolled the Oregon and California coasts.
     “I’m glad we never made it (to the Philippines),” Cruse said. “Had we been a couple of three days quicker, we would have gone to the islands (where the Bataan death marches took place).”
     The troops were eventually sent to Salem, Ore., to rejoin the 115th Calvary. It was there the soldiers stood each day for inspection by U.S. Army Col. Hazeltine.
     “If he didn’t say Powder River, you fell out for an hour and polished your boots,” Cruse said.
     Inspection done, the satisfied colonel would stand in front of the regiment and say, “Powder River.”
     In response, 1,500 soldiers yelled, “Let ‘er buck ”
     “He’d dismiss us and everybody would go have a beer,” Cruse said.
     It was at Salem that Cruse passed the Officer Candidate School test. He was sent to Camp Hood, Texas, to attend officer training and was promoted to 2nd lieutenant at tank destroyer school. From there, Cruse went to Camp Gordon, Ga., for further training.

Fighting in Europe

     It was September 1944, nearly two years after Pearl Harbor, that Cruse was sent to fight in Europe.
     “The good part of the trip was we had two general hospitals aboard, which was a lot of nurses,” Cruse said.
     The 115th arrived in France after the Allied landing on Normandy. Cruse’s ship was met with strong winds, high seas and a harbor full of sunken ships, making it impossible to continue to shore. So bags of personal items and supplies were loaded onto barges. The first barge sunk, leaving the soldiers without protective gear such as raincoats and goulashes.
     The troops were welcomed as their tanks rumbled through Paris, already liberated by the Allies, on the way to Belgium and Holland.
     “We got to kiss a few girls from the jeep as we passed by,” Cruse said. “Some handed us loaves of bread.”
     Antwerp, Germany, was freed Oct. 23, and by Nov. 8 the Allies had breeched the Siegfried line with little trouble. By then, the German defenses had collapsed and many Germans who feared the Soviets were surrendering to the Americans in hopes of kinder treatment.
     Cruse said the toughest part of the war for him came between Aachen and Cologne.
     “We had to fight for every inch,” he said. “We lost an awful lot of men.”

A million dollar wound

     As the Allies closed in on the Rhine River and made plans to cross the only bridge the Germans had failed to blow up, Cruse was hit by German fire. He doesn’t remember much of what happened that day, March 6, 1945, but said the area was fairly quiet at the time.
     “(The Germans) just opened up from a basement a couple of blocks down,” he said. “I remember getting dropped. I can still hear the steel helmet hitting the street.”
     Wounded, Cruse thinks he crawled behind some bricks. He called his lead tank and gave orders to fire into the basement.
     “I don’t know if we killed them or not,” he said. “I don’t know if my unit crossed the Rhine that day or the next.
     “They took me by jeep from my lead tank, put me on a stretcher and back to a tent.”
     Cruse was stabilized and taken by ambulance to Liege, Belgium, where his stretcher was put on a “chopping block,” or rolling table used for operations. Next to him two medical aides were taking delight in tormenting an injured German soldier with the idea they were going to cut into him with a saw.
     “I was operated on and so I missed out on the outcome,” Cruse said.
     Cruse’s recovery had just begun. He was placed on a train to Paris where he was put in a huge airplane hangar along with hundreds of other soldier on stretchers. From there, he was flown across the English Channel to a large hospital in England where doctors worked carefully to repair the damage. Cruse lost track of time, but knows he was kept on the same stretcher until reaching England. His blood-encrusted pants had to be unstuck from the stretcher before he was finally moved.
     The bullet had passed close to his spine and cut part of a sciatic nerve, temporarily paralyzing Cruse from the hips downand causing him a great deal of pain. It wasn’t until two weeks after his final operation that relief came and he could finally sleep through the night. As Cruse initially fought for his life, the U.S. First Army crossed the Rhine and made its final push toward Berlin. By late March, victory was all but assured.
     The war in Europe officially came to an end at midnight on May 8, 1945. That night at the English hospital, nurses celebrated by using up their entire supply of alcohol allocation cards and Cruse danced, despite having one leg encased straight out in a caste from hip to ankle.
     “It was wonderful,” he said.
     More good news was delivered.
     “You’ve got a million dollar wound - they’re going to send you home,” Cruse was told.
     As the medical ship filled with 4,000-5,000 wounded soldiers traveled up the Hudson River toward New York, hundreds of boats with horns blowing and water canons spraying escorted the heroes home. When the ship passed the Statue of Liberty, Curse remembers it listing severely as nearly every soldier moved to one side to see the universal symbol of freedom and democracy.
     “It was wonderful to get home,” he said. “A lot of guys kissed the ground where we got off the boat.
     “If I had to do it over, I’d do the same thing, I’d volunteer. ... I love this country.”

Walla Walla, Washington?

     When a lieutenant colonel asked Cruse which hospital he wished to spend the remainder of his recovery, he was skeptical.
     “What do you mean?” Cruse asked. “You’re not going to send me where I want to go.”
     Assured that was the Army’s intention, Cruse picked Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver.
     “I got my orders to Walla Walla, Washington,” he said.
     He retired as a caption on Dec. 31, 1945, at age 23, returned to Torrington and soon married his high school classmate, Dorothy Elder. Cruse spent the next 30-plus years working for the Bureau of Reclamation, eventually retiring as chief of the Bureau’s irrigation operations branch.

Images of war

     Sixty years have passed, yet many disturbing images remain: German soldiers so young they had yet to grow facial hair, the decapitated head of a lieutenant left on a street, a couple in Holland who refused to listen when told over loudspeakers to evacuate their home ahead of the troops.
     “They were left sitting in chairs full of shrapnel,” Cruse said.
Cruse described the war in Europe as “just a series of taking towns and cities.” During combat, people hid in the country, returning once a city was secured and troops were moving on. That made it difficult for soldiers to make friends with the people they were liberating.
     “I remember one woman - I can’t remember the name of the town - she was on her knees in front of a bombed-out house,” he said. “I didn’t know what she was saying but to this day I regret not going back and putting my hand on her head and telling her we weren’t going to harm her.”

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