Fellowship of Dust

I began this project for personal reasons: my uncle had made an enormous personal sacrifice for his family and his country; yet, because of his silence, no one in my family ever fully knew what he endured. As the last living relative who knew him, I felt a responsibility to rescue his story from the shadows before it disappeared forever and to preserve it as a source of pride for my family and me.



But a second reason for telling my uncle’s story materialized as I assembled the details of his journey. I came to realize that while many GIs experienced extensive combat operations or the trials of being held in a POW camp, very few men survived the amount of combat my uncle experienced and six months in a POW camp. Frank’s five-year wartime journey, which included three monumental amphibious invasions, six major battle campaigns, and six months in three different POW camps, was breathtaking in scope. The odds against his surviving all this, or being seriously wounded out of the war, are almost incalculable.



Despite the unusual scope of Sergeant Shaw’s tour of duty, his day-to-day adventures are quite typical of what tens of thousands of combat infantrymen experienced during WWII. To that extent, the character who emerges in this story is a composite or representative figure, an American Odysseus, whose mission of extraordinary historical significance, requires him to define himself through trial, suffering, courage, and perseverance before he returns home in triumph.



But the similarity ends at the triumphant return. Earlier civilizations celebrated their returning warriors at ceremonial feasts. These men were expected to show their wounds and relate their adventures to their countrymen so bards might record them for posterity. Such rituals insured the warrior a rightful place in history, enshrined his virtues, and shed his reflected glory on his community. No such salutary ritual greeted a battered Frank Shaw when he returned from the war; no one saw his wounds or took his testimony. And his silence consigned his deeds to the shadows of time and dimming memory. But the ancient customs were correct — the hero’s deeds are not his alone. They are his legacy to his family and his country, and they deserve to be honored not shrouded. Therefore, since Sergeant Frank Shaw, like so many of his World War II comrades in arms, would not, and did not, tell his story, I did.



About the Author



William Shaw is a native of Brooklyn, New York. He teaches English literature at North Carolina State University. Dr. Shaw is a specialist in Renaissance Literature, especially Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, and has published numerous academic articles and two books. He has also written two screenplays, "Silhouettes" (loosely based on this book) and The Runner." Shaw lives in Pinehurst, North Carolina with his wife, Connie Kretchmar.



Shaw became intensely interested in his uncle's experience with the Big Red One in WWII several years after he died. He subsequently began researching where his uncle was every day during the war. He wrote letters to WWII veterans, attended regimental and division reunions and took two guided battlefield tours to Europe to visit the places where faced death.



He was three years old when my Uncle Frank returned from the war on June 3, 1945, one month after his release from a German prisoner of war camp. Four uncles on my mother’s side also served in the armed forces along with numerous family friends. A national euphoria marked those early post-war days for the “boys” who had just come home. More than the total victories over Japan and Germany, “Welcome Home” parties celebrated the survival of these young men—the simple joy of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers being reunited with their wives, children, parents, and siblings. But when the parties ended, veterans and their families quickly tried to put the war behind them.



His uncle was typical of most returning combat veterans: after the streamers and confetti were swept up, he would not talk about the war. The family knew he didn’t want to rehearse painful memories, and neither did they. My uncle died at the age of 70 in August 1986. He left behind a negligible amount of war memorabilia: his Silver Star, two Bronze stars, campaign ribbons, two war-related newspaper clippings, his discharge papers, and a few photographs. Nothing else. No letters. No diary. No one to whom he had related his war experiences, except his wife Florence (my late aunt), who remembered only fragmentary comments made over the years. So, the story I tell here is a “retracing” of my uncle’s war journey.



The story begins with verifiable events — the movements of 1st Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment of the famous 1st Division, the “Big Red One.” Frank was attached to this unit from before the outbreak of war until he was captured in December 1944. He was then imprisoned in three different German POW camps until his release in May 1945. After his return home, he had a difficult period of adjustment. These are the facts gleaned from my uncle’s few documents, from my reading, from garbled family lore, from two guided tours of European battlefields, from numerous communications with military historians and WWII veterans and their families. But, since the facts, here, are insufficient to the deeper truth, I have built a story out of these facts in order to understand what happened and why.