BREAKOUT BOX: The author will present Finding Phil on Wednesday evening, Oct. 5, at 5:30 at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord.
INTRO: Bauhan Publishing of Peterborough has just released a book by Concord resident Paul Levy titled Finding Phil: Lost in War and Silence. The book reveals Levy’s efforts to learn about his Uncle Phil, who was killed in World War II nearly 70 years earlier. Phil’s family had handled their grief with silence, so the author knew little about his uncle and expected, at this late date, to find little more. Instead he found a great deal, including many surprises and several extraordinary findings related to Phil’s death. In the following excerpts, the author describes the origin of his interest in his uncle and his first steps of discovery.
EXCERPT: I was a year old when Phil died – killed in a tank in World War II, somewhere in France. His final face to the world tells us that he was:
Lt. Phillip A. Levy
March 7, 1922
January 7, 1945
Killed in Action
Lt. Levy was “Uncle Phil” to me, but I grew up learning little more about him than his gravestone revealed. Like many families devastated by the loss of a boy in the war, my family rarely spoke of Phil and my sense of him and his life was embodied in only a few scattered facts. I had heard, for example, that he was a skilled drummer, that he had attended the University of Michigan like most of my family, and that his best friend at college was Mark Van Aken.
Of course I also knew that Phil had married Barbara, and my research revealed that their wedding took place only three or four days before Phil left for North Africa.
After the war, Barbara remarried and settled in her hometown of Indianapolis. Occasionally she visited my parents in South Bend, and I recall those visits as short and generally somber. She sat and talked with my parents while my sister and I went out to play. From those visits, we knew that Barbara was somehow very special to our parents so she was very special to us as well, but she was nearly as much a mystery as our Uncle Phil.
With one important exception, I had little contact with Barbara after I left home, and particularly after my parents died in the early 1970s. So I didn’t know that Barbara had died in 1987 until I received a package later that year from an unknown sender. The note inside stated:
“I am sending Phil’s diary and Purple Heart to you for Gil. He is recovering from lower back disc surgery. . . . He seems to think he told you he would send this to you.”
– Marjorie Cohn (Barbara’s sister)
The package arrived when I was busy with life. I glanced at the Purple Heart and the several pictures and letters in the package, skimmed the journal, and then set the package on a shelf, promising that I would attend to it more carefully when I had time. It would be quite a while before I would translate that intention into action.
Getting to Phil and his journal was among my retirement priorities, and so I began my search in earnest early in 2011.
Discovery at that point simply meant an effort to find a few Phil stories that could replace the anonymous hyphen that filled the space between 1922 and 1945 on Phil’s grave and beneath his leaf on the family tree. I organized my quest through questions: What did Phil do in his South Bend boyhood? How did he decide to be a soldier? Who was Barbara and how did she and Phil meet? What did Phil do in the army? Were there ways other than silence that my family used to deal with their grief? Did Phil share Nathan’s commitment to social justice? Eventually I found many more stories about Phil than I imagined possible, enough to feel that I had come to know him pretty well and to love him a great deal.
But as I searched to learn about Phil’s life, a funny thing happened. My search began to take on a life of its own. It began to produce both Phil stories and Paul adventures. Some of my adventures involved learning new things such as Allied strategies in the European Theater so that I could track Phil during the war, and how the army handles its dead. Others led me to discover new things about my ancestry and my family. Yet other adventures led me to self-reflect, to explore my sense of “heroism,” for example, or my stereotype of Nazis.
At times searches lured me onto off-ramps that sometimes led to cul-de-sacs and dead ends, but often to interesting places like Oceanside, New York; Sejny, Russia; and Lembach, France; as well as to unexpected people who may be familiar to you, like Gene Krupa, General David Petraeus, and Kurt Vonnegut, andto others who may be unfamiliar, like Linda and Jacky Bergmann from the Alsace region of France, a French soldier named Galula, and a German soldier from Latvia named Zoepf.
As I said, I framed my search with questions, and initially one question dominated my interest and research: Where did Phil die?I knew only that he had died “somewhere in France.”
I knew that Phil was killed in France on January 7, 1945, but had no idea where and had few clues to help me. I knew from his journal that he participated in the invasion of southern France on August 16, 1944, and that he had reported for duty with the 191st Tank Battalion on October 15 of that year after serving behind the lines. An article enclosed in one of Phil’s last letters home indicated that he had crossed from France into Germany on December 15, 1944, but none of his other wartime letters in my possession mentioned his location, and such references usually would have been deleted by military censors had he included them.
I figured the best way to pinpoint Phil’s location when he died was to follow general troop movements of the Allies in Europe. Very quickly I found that the invasion of southern France was the start of Operation Dragoon. Just as quickly, I realized that I would need at least a working knowledge of World War II to follow troop movements, so I gave myself a crash course in the war before trying to track my uncle across France. Let me summarize some key knowledge I gained in case your memory of that war is as cloudy as mine was.
America was a late entrant into the War. By the time we declared war, the conflict was more than two years old and Germany occupied almost all of Europe, including most nations that thought they could avoid occupation by neutrality agreements. Moreover, Japan had begun its sweep through the Pacific and had devastated the major threat to that sweep, the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
We were unprepared for war. Through the Lend-Lease program, we had provided the Allies with significant amounts of supplies and equipment, but we were not at all war-ready. Our stock of armaments – planes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. – was depleted and badly outdated. Our troops were sparse and untrained. We needed to retool our industries for war production, design and build reliable weapons, and recruit and train an adequate armed force. Congress, hopeful that the war in Europe would be fought only by Europeans, failed to approve most of these activities and appropriate funds necessary to carry them out until their hand was forced on December 7, 1941, by Pearl Harbor.
Our late entry and unpreparedness dictated our war strategy – retreat to victory. We needed time to produce troops and arms that could confront Axis powers on equal terms, and the only way to buy that time was to adopt a strategy called, by at least one author, a “retreat to victory.” We would reluctantly cede locations in the Pacific and help England and Russia only with supplies and equipment and only from a distance, tolerating German and Japanese advances while trying to make their victories as costly to them as possible. At the same time we would build our own war capacity at a record pace so that we could enter the fray offensively. This defensive posture was expected to last at least a year and a half or two years.
The shift from defensive retreat to offensive attack began in the winter of 1942-43. In the Pacific Theater, this shift began at Guadalcanal. In the European Theater, it began with a push to conquer North Africa and establish a base for invading continental Europe. After conquering North Africa and then Sicily, the island at the toe of Italy, the invasion of the continent began on September 9, 1943, with landings at Salerno, Italy. All of this happened before Uncle Phil arrived in Europe. At that point the Allies envisioned the long-anticipated liberation of France and the rest of occupied Europe, and the final advance toward Berlin. General Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander in early 1944 to plan that assault.
The Allied strategy for invading and liberating Europe consisted of two major initiatives: a landing in northern France at Normandy called Operation Overlord, which was carried out by a mix of Allied forces known as the Twelfth Army Group; and a landing in southern France called Operation Dragoon, which was carried out by Allied forces known as the Sixth Army Group, composed essentially of the US Seventh Army and the French First Army. Overlord began on June 6, 1944, (D-Day), and Dragoon began on August 15. The plan was for the Overlord troops to move south, the Dragoon troops to move north, and the two to meet and form a single north-south line that could then move east liberating France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other German-occupied territory, cross the borders into Germany, move toward Berlin, and end the war. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, opposed the southern (Dragoon) component of this strategy, feeling that it would spread Allied troops too thin, but General Eisenhower, with his two-pronged strategy, prevailed.
The shift from defense to offense and then to liberation meant sharp rises in casualties. In the defensive or retreat phase of American strategy, we tried to stay out of harm’s way to preserve our troops to the extent possible, helping allies with supplies and equipment while building our own capacity. In Europe, much of our early support was given to the air war, which had its own casualties but not nearly as severe as those in the ground war. As we invaded the mainland, Allied casualties immediately skyrocketed. This, of course, was true for Germany as well, and both sides became increasingly challenged by the need to find fresh troops for the front to replace those wounded, captured, or killed.
During my crash course, I learned that there were various types of military records, both personal and unit records, and how to request them. I sent for Phil’s personnel records housed at the Military’s National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and for daily records of the 191st Tank Battalion for the week Phil died, which were housed at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. While awaiting those records, I began to track troop movements from Phil’s landing on the French Riviera in Operation Dragoon.
In great contrast to the Overlord troops invading at Normandy, the Dragoon troops met relatively little German resistance on the beaches of the French Riviera. They landed and were able to fight their way quickly northward up the Rhône River Valley. By early September, they had turned eastward and were in the vicinity of Lyon, France. Meanwhile, the Normandy troops had moved much more slowly. They had secured their position in Normandy after taking heavy losses, and then in July began to move south (in what was called Operation Breakout) and by July 25 began the next phase (Operation Cobra) in which they moved east to Paris. After liberating Paris on August 25, the Normandy troops continued eastward.
On September 11 the Dragoon and Normandy troops made contact, forming a rough but continuous north-south line that began to move east toward the German border. The Allied armies in the northern and southern portions of the line remained distinct. They encountered different terrains and variations in German resistance, and as a result moved at quite different paces. By December, both were nearing the German border, but neither would begin the march across Germany to victory until the spring of 1945.
Phil was involved in the southern invasion and was part of the Sixth Army Group. By the time he joined the 191st Tank Battalion in mid-October, the Group had reached the Vosges Mountains in France somewhere near Épinal, the future site of the American Cemetery that would be the final resting place of most Americans killed in action in this sector of the war.
The Vosges Mountains run north and south, forming the western wall of the Rhine River Valley. They form two sections, the High Vosges to the south and the Low Vosges to the north that end just over the border into Germany. The 191st along with the rest of the Sixth Army Group remained in the Vosges until two months after Phil was killed. So, through this initial research, I had identified the vicinity where Phil’s life ended. It also turned out to be the vicinity of the chief achievement in his military career and a highlight of his short life. Seventy years later, these same mountains were the area where my search for Phil essentially ended and where I, too, experienced a great highlight of life.
But as a storyteller, I have gotten far ahead of my story. There is much territory covered in both Phil’s life and my adventure before either of us ascended the Vosges Mountains. And worse, I have been a rude host, for I have not yet even introduced you to my uncle.