World War II heroes gather for one final salute

NASHVILLE — Most of them are gone now.

The men who overtook the train heaving with Holocaust victims destined for death. The men who saved more than 2,500 Jewish death camp survivors from execution.

The men, fathers and sons, who fought in a global war 70 years ago.

So many have passed.

Those who do remain — those hailed as veterans of the 30th Infantry — are here in Nashville this week for their final reunion.

They held their first reunion here, in 1947, to much fanfare.

Two thousand soldiers strong, they packed the Andrew Jackson Hotel, organized a fish fry near the Hermitage grounds, held an old-fashioned Southern barbecue in Centennial Park and partied until the sun rose with a grand ball at Nashville Hippodrome.

This time around, their numbers are fewer and the pace is slower. Only around 70 former infantrymen, their widows, children or friends, have made the trip to Music City. Many move around with canes and walkers.

Their war-worn bodies are weary, but their memories remain strong.

When they gather, as they have in different cities every year since 1947, they talk about the close calls they had, and they honor the men left behind. They share stories of who they have become.

In the war, these men were friends because they were dedicated to saving each other's lives.

Over the years, they have grown up to become family.

"It's the camaraderie, the friendship, that we really didn't have time to enjoy during the war," says Frank Towers, a tall man with wisps of white hair who at 97 is the oldest surviving member of the 30th Infantry Divisionand one of the reunion's organizers.

It was an infantry, he says, originally comprised of National Guardsmen from Tennessee, North and South Carolina and Georgia. Activated in 1940, they trained for four years at various military bases, coming to Middle Tennessee on maneuvers because the hilly terrain was similar to what they would face in Europe.

They departed for foreign duty on Feb. 12, 1944, and entered combat on June 10, just days after D-Day. It was the first infantry division to enter Belgium and the Netherlands. It was instrumental in breaching the Siegfried Line in October 1944, and in the capture of Aachen, Germany, the first large German city taken by the Allies in World War II.

Among them, the 30th Infantry boasted six Medal of Honor award winners.

A staff sergeant who voluntarily attacked an enemy strong point in Belgium while his company was pinned down by heavy semi-automatic fire. An rifleman who knocked out a German tank with a bazooka and launched grenades at another. A gravely wounded company leader who advanced on his belly alone to distract the enemy.

And there were the men who discovered a train filled with thousands of concentration camp captives en route to execution. The men who freed these victims and gave them a life.

Elisabeth Seaman remembers the day in detached snippets. She was 6 at the time of liberation, a survivor from the train uncovered by the 30th Infantry.

She recalls being jammed in a passenger car with people miserable and sick. She remembers the train stopping, a blown-out bridge in its path, and she recalls stepping out into a beautiful spring day surrounded by a field filled with wildflowers.

It was so different from the labor camp barracks where she had lived, making toy figures from the tar that dripped off the ceiling and watching as prisoners, including her father, died from overwork and malnutrition.

When the Americans came, she says, there were three soldiers and two tanks — with an entire infantry in support.

Seaman was one of three from the train at this, the final infantry reunion. The 76-year-old — a mother of four and a professional mediator — came from California with one express purpose: to thank them.

"I'm just so grateful," she says. "If it hadn't been for them I probably wouldn't be here."

That thank you reaches fewer ears than it once did. It's sad to read the list and hear the taps for all those who have died — a tradition carried out at every reunion.

It's hard also, to continue to coordinate the group gathering each year.

Nancy Pitts, a lifelong Nashvillian whose father and brother fought for the 30th, organized this reunion — here in the very city where as a girl of just 22 she attended the first one.

"The first one was quite special," she says.

As will be the last.

"It makes us feel good to be here together," Towers says, "even though we know this is the last time.

"It's symbolic to have the last one here."