We’ve been following Green Valley’s Fred Braakman and his journey from the family farm in northern Iowa to deploying to England in the spring of 1944 as a gun mechanic with Battery D of the 546th Automatic Weapons Battalion (AWB).

The battalion crossed to France in July where commanders assigned individual batteries and platoons to missions in support of General Patton’s Third Army.

Fred crossed into Germany with Battery D in mid-March 1945 in support of the 65th Infantry Division and remained with that division through central and southern Germany. He explained that his unit did not suffer many casualties despite being in the assault through Germany.

“We were in the combat zone practically all the time, but we were very fortunate, except a kid by the name of Lee. We had moved that day again to new positions. I was always riding on a truck with one of the gun crews . . . the truck stopped and we got off. I just felt uneasy. There was a house maybe 15 feet away that had been shelled . . . unoccupied and it had holes in the walls and windows blown out. I walked over and went down the basement.”

Fred’s closest friend and another soldier followed him. The three were taking a cigarette break when a member of the gun crew, Lee, came down, trying to interest them in a game of poker. They declined and Fred described what happened next.

“He said, ‘Well, I guess I ain’t going to make no money here.’ So, he crawled out of the hole and just about that time there was a series of explosions just on the other side of the wall. We waited about 30 seconds and there was no more, so we crawled out the hole. I found Lee, laying on his back with a piece of shrapnel sticking out of his chest about that far out (indicating 10 inches) — just a huge piece of shrapnel. (He was) laying just about where I was standing when I got off the truck. Now, what told me to go in that basement? I don’t know.”

While Fred spoke freely about his experiences, he did not share what shook him the most until we were about done. The incident was in central Germany.

“We liberated some concentration camps. I can still see piles of bodies. There was — I would call them barracks and there was no beds. There was like a shelf that they laid on. There were a lot of Polish and slave laborers. You stand there with your mouth open. You can’t believe that one human being can do this to another human being. You’d rather not even think about it, it’s so horrible. (Fred’s voice shook) Survivors are just skin and bones. Some of them can’t even get up. We tried to help feed some of them. (T)he officers said you can’t give them too much. So, that’s what we did. Whatever we had on the trucks or in our barracks bags, we tried to feed something to these people. Then we had to move on.”

Fred explained that the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, had visited this camp, called Ohrdruf, and directed his commanders to arrange for American soldiers to see it. He feared people would try to deny what had happened and wanted as many witnesses as possible to be able to testify to the horror of what they had seen there.

Fred’s Battery D was near Linz, Austria when they heard the German government had surrendered. The Army shipped them to redeployment camps in France. Fred describe that time.

“The war in the Pacific was still going on and there was a lot of scuttlebutt with everybody wondering are we going home or are we going to the Pacific? You had to wait in these camps: Lucky Strike and Chesterfield, cigarette names. It was kind of relaxed. They gave us a furlough and I spent a week on the southern coast of France on the Riviera. I had a good time.”

Fred laughed as he described his trip back across the Atlantic.

“When they loaded us on a boat to come back, it was not the Queen Elizabeth. I felt a little queasy on the smaller boat coming home. One day I finished my meal and had gone to the head to clean up my mess kit and was going to leave when this kid come barging through the door with his cheeks full. I just backed up against the wall and let him by and just as he went in front of me, he let it go. I just followed him over and dumped [my lunch], too.”

Fred’s unit landed in Virginia and the Army discharged him from Camp Grant, IL. He received a rail ticket to Hawarden. IA where a friendly civilian drove him to his parent’s front door in Sioux City.

Fred met his wife, Vi, through a friend and discovered he had served with her brother in the 546th AWB.

The Great Northern Railroad hired Fred and trained him as a station agent, eventually sending him to the station in Green Valley, MN. He later managed the larger station in Marshall where he worked until his retirement.

Fred reflected on lessons from his time in service.

“Well, you don’t think of yourself as an individual. You are a part of a group and you function as a group and you depend on each other in a group.”

Thank you for your service, Fred, and the lessons you brought into our community.