The years are beginning to blend together for Lincoln Shedd, but his memories of service in Europe in the early 1940s are still as sharp as a tack.
Shedd, who celebrated his 98th birthday last week, can still trace his movements through Germany and France with close detail of what he saw and heard and felt. He remembers feeling slightly unsettled as he set foot in Hitler’s mountain-top house, the Eagle’s Nest, shortly after the war had ended. A smile stretches across his face as he recounts his meeting with Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps feeling a little star-struck meeting a man he so revered.
Today, Shedd and countless other men and women, young and old, enlisted and retired, will reflect on their service and, perhaps more importantly, the comrades they served alongside who did not have the chance to come home.
Shedd remembers returning to Utah Beach decades after the war with his wife, Ruth, a marriage that will reach 74 years on June 14. His first steps on the sands of Normandy were just after D-Day in June 1944. Years later, he stood on that same beach admiring the multi-national memorials that honored men who fell not only those beaches, but across the European theater.
“I took Ruth to Omaha Beach and Utah Beach so she could see where the transport dropped us off and we went ashore there,” Shedd said. “The American cemetery is there and all the American bodies are buried with their heads facing towards the west, all lined up.”
Shedd was caught in the first U.S. draft, Feb. 6, 1941. A native of Waltham, Mass., with a background in television and radio, he trained at Camp Edwards and ascended from private to artillery communication chief in the 26th infantry division. After entering the European theater by way of Utah Beach, he found combat in France and fought at the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 into ’45 under the command of Gen. George Patton.
Shedd had a couple of close brushes with death. While on patrol one night, Shedd was tracing a telephone line for a battery unit. Using a code to identify himself as he approached the unit, he says the men must have misunderstood him and one pulled a pistol out and fired a shot that zipped by Shedd, missing him completely.
Another night, on Christmas Eve 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, Shedd and some men entered an old farmhouse in Belgium. While setting up generators in the basement, one of the men connected a generator to a telephone line while Shedd was cutting the lines in another part of the house. Once the lines connected, Shedd was shocked almost to death.
But through combat and some chance encounters that proved nearly fatal, Shedd survived the war and became a first sergeant in the occupying army. He traveled to Berchtesgaden in southeastern Germany where he saw firsthand Hitler’s mountain retreat.
Shedd, along with a few other soldiers, climbed the windy mountain highway in a Jeep to a lot below the Eagle’s Nest. As they got out of the Jeep and made for the elevator that would take them up the compound, another Jeep with a group of generals riding along pulled up behind them.
One of the generals, Shedd recognized, was Eisenhower. He didn’t say anything to him at first, but he admired the general for pointing out a sign that had been posted on the elevator designating it only for use by field-grade officers and higher ranks. The sign was removed, allowing all soldiers to use the elevator rather than climb the stairs.
“I saw Gen. Eisenhower point to (Gen. Mark Clark) and he came over, took the sign down and threw it over the the side of the mountain,” Shedd said. “Now anyone who wanted to see Hitler’s hideout could use the elevator.”
Shedd said there was nothing remarkable about the Eagle’s Nest. Aside from the views overlooking the German-Bavarian Alps, the compound was empty but a lingering sense of the man who had only recently used the hideout as a retreat.
After taking a picture, Shedd went back down to the parking lot below the compound where he saw Eisenhower again. He didn’t think he would have another opportunity to meet the general, so he approached Eisenhower and asked to take his picture.
“He stood up and smiled and said, ‘I feel like a movie star,’ ” Shedd said, closing his eyes as he recounted their meeting.
Years later, in the 1950s, Eisenhower visited Boston and Shedd was there on Tremont Street to see him go by.
“Eisenhower was a very humble person, in my opinion,” said Shedd, who supported Eisenhower in both of his races for the White House.
Not long after visiting Bertesgaden, Shedd traveled back to France and eventually crossed the Atlantic and landed back in Boston.
Life after the war was peaceful, and Shedd found interesting and innovative work. After a short stint driving a truck for a fuel company, Shedd began working for the Air Force’s aerospace program at Hanscomb Field in Bedford, Mass., and lived in Lexington. In 1971, he retired from the military and moved to Hopkinton with Ruth in 1978.
Shedd keeps an old collection of photographs from the war, including the one he snapped of Eisenhower. He remembers the GIs giving chocolate to the French children and cigarettes to the women. The sound of men in pain as they battled trench foot in the cold winters has stayed with him, and the uneasiness of sleeping in a combat zone.
The war is long over, but Shedd can remember such things vividly.
“Men would sleep in bags, and people would kill them right in their sleeping bag,” Shedd. “You’d find anywhere a place to sleep, but sleeping was dangerous.”
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3309, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)