Photo from wartime Germany a poignant reflection of war's cost

They were somewhere in Germany, early in the spring of 1945. My father, Marvin, is the lanky lad on the far right, facing the camera, in both photos.


The dark-haired man on the left in each photo is Private Lester Dillard, of Pacolet, S.C.

Dad was the only person in each photo who would not be killed or gravely wounded on the front lines - and, based on what he would later share, I estimate he could or should have died about 7 times.

Private Dillard was killed on April 6, his family was told by the U.S. War  Department. Based on what my father shared and official accounts indicate, that would mean it was somewhere in western Germany. He was riding on a tank when another GI was thrown off the tank. The fallen soldier's rifle went off. The bullet struck Lester and killed him.

Dad was on a special mission behind enemy lines on the day Lester died. He was also riding a tank, as the American forces were racing to break up pockets of German resistance. The tank he was on took the corner of a cobblestone street too fast, skidded over a wall and into a deep ditch. The tank's long gun barrel jammed into the ground, bucking several soldiers off.

Dad would have been one of them, but as he flew up his shoulder hit the gun barrel. That smacked him back down on a grappling hook, crushing a testicle and fracturing a vertebra in his back. The back injury would leave him temporarily paralyzed several minutes later as he tried to push forward into a German city. It would also plague him for the rest of his life.

But Dad never mentioned one of his close buddies being killed by a dropped rifle on the mission behind enemy lines, so I am not sure where Lester Dillard died. I'm certain Dad would have talked about it had he known, because Lester was one of his six closest buddies in the outfit.

"We were closer than brothers," he often told me. "There wasn't anything we wouldn't do for each other."

I haven't been able to unearth where Lester was killed, and his family doesn't know, either. I still hope to discover the location, though.

The others in the photo were killed or gravely wounded on April 25 - just a couple of days after Dad collapsed with a bad case of pneumonia and was shipped back to the Army hospital in Nancy, France. He always told us the pneumonia came from the poison gas he inhaled as a result of a booby trap unleashed when he was clearing a building in Bamberg a few days before. His lungs, too, would never quite be the same.

Dad always blamed himself for not being there with his buddies when they were ambushed by snipers in the streets of Augsburg, a suburb of the Nazi stronghold of Nuremberg. "We'd been through a lot worse and made it out," he told me.

"That may have been God's way of saving your life," Mom told him.

I tend to agree with her.

Lester had a twin sister, Lizzie, back home in Pacolet. He was a good boy, she said, nice to folks and fun to be with. But time had dulled her memory so much, she told me late last year, that she barely remembered what he looked like.

When we unearthed these photos in the family archives, I hoped to get them scanned and sent quickly to Lizzie so she could see her brother again after so many years. Sadly, she died in October at the age of 92 before I could get the photos from my sister.

I suspect the twins are catching up with each other now.

At least her kinfolk will get to see Lester in what would turn out to be the final days of his life. Based on what Dad shared, he would have made them proud.