Lewis Flanigan was a medic, attached to the 30th Infantry Division during the fighting in the Bulge. Both Coustillac and Kaufman were in anti-aircraft artillery batteries attached to the 82nd. Henry Coustillac, the son of French immigrants, killed on January 7, 1945, and Corporal Glenn Kaufman, from Elderton, PA, killed on Christmas Eve, 1944. Wardenski was not the only member of the 82nd Airborne killed during the Bulge and later brought back to Gettysburg. It was there that Henry Wardenski was killed in action. After several days of heavy fighting, the 508th PIR was at the town of Vielsalm, taking German artillery fire on Christmas Eve, 1944. When the German breakout attack began in December 1944, the 82nd was one of the American divisions thrown into the fray to stop the enemy advance. He was a part of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. Accordingly, when Henry was inducted into service, he joined the paratroopers so he could see plenty of action on the front lines. In 1939, when the war broke out in Europe, Henry’s mother and sister were killed in Poland, where they had been visiting family. The son of Polish immigrants, Henry Wardenski was living in Philadelphia with his wife, Eleanor, when he joined the United States army in 1943. Some of them were interred right here in the Gettysburg National Cemetery. While the dead were initially interred overseas, many were brought home after the war at the request of their family members. In the entirety of the war, one out of every ten American casualties fell during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-1945, amounting to over 100,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing. On the morning of December 16, tens of thousands of German soldiers poured into American lines, beginning what became the bloodiest battle for American forces in all of World War II. In December 1944, with Allied forces on the verge of breaking into Germany, Hitler launched his desperate attempt to reverse the tide of the war in Western Europe. These were the times when the grand strategy and the high hopes of high command became a soldiers’ war, sheer courage, and the instinct for survival.ĭwight Eisenhower wrote these words years after the conclusion of World War II, describing one of the toughest challenges of his military career: the Battle of the Bulge.
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