IOWA FARMER FINDS FOXHOLE
WHERE HE WAS WOUNDED NEARLY 60 YEARS AGO
By JARETT C. BIES
Argus Leader
published: 7/6/2003 by ArgusLeader.com
When Alfred Knaack sits at the kitchen table and shares his story, a part of that 19-year-old soldier he was in World War II still comes through in his gaze and his voice.
It was 1944 when he stood in the gloom of Huertgen Forest on the border of Germany. Knaack had only been on the line for a week. As one of the bigger men in the unit - 6 feet 4 inches tall - Knaack was assigned duty operating a 60 mm mortar with Company L of the 60th Regiment, part of the 9th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.
His unit was fighting in a dense, 50-square-mile maze of roots and twisted lumber. An eerie, primeval region enveloped in darkness even at noon, Huertgenwald, as the area was known, was so thick with trees that Allied artillery and aircraft could not be used.
Pines more than 100 feet high topped the forest ceiling, with their knotted roots grasping the mud below. The tomblike nature of the environment led to widespread low spirits, while the damp, boggy ground caused trench foot among soldiers on both sides. Rain rarely stopped, and the tree branches always were dripping the remainder of the last storm.
"It was a miserable place," says Alfred Knaack, 78, of rural Kingsley, Iowa. "But you don't think much of that when someone's shooting at you."
On that autumn day in 1944, Knaack was dueling with German artillery and mortars. Most days, Knaack won these shellfire duels.
"On that day, we were getting plastered pretty good," Knaack says. "My gun was the only one still in action. I got the orders to put it into play."
Knaack was operating the gun alone because the second gunner was dead. His assistant refused to leave the bunker. "I don't blame him," Knaack says. "And I don't hold any ill will to him. He was probably the smart one."
Knaack fired five rounds from his mortar, dropping hell onto an enemy invisible to him, working from the commands a spotter relayed from atop a nearby hill.
Then Knaack prepared five more rounds of ammunition. "They yelled 'Fire five!' and I got two off, I guess, maybe three," Knaack says. "That next round, well, it never came off."
He heard no sound and saw no lightning flash when he was wounded. He was dropping rounds when, the next thing he knew, he was flat on his back.
"I woke up laying a ways away from the gun. I opened my eyes, but I couldn't see. I was blind." he says. "Having walked the area so many times, it was in my mind which way to go, so I walked to the command center."
With shells screaming through the forest around him, Knaack joined the wounded, and a doctor made his way over to treat him.
Most of his injuries were to his hands and face. Knaack remembers clearly the words of the doctor who treated him.
"The doctor said, 'You won't be doing any more fighting,' " Knaack says. "On the battlefield, it wasn't 'if' you were going to be hit. It was 'when.' When I did get hit, it was a relief. I was still alive."
When Knaack heard the doctor speak, he did the thing he wanted to do most.
He went to sleep.
Going Back
On March 28, Alfred Knaack returned to Huertgenwald, searching for a connection to the events that occurred in 1944.
"I wanted to see if it was real," he says. "For so long I wondered, over the years, if it had really happened, if I was really there."
Knaack went back to the forest with one of his sons, John Knaack, a nephew, James Mitchell, and a local German historian, Manfred Klinkenberg, who had done exhaustive research to find the very spot where Knaack had fought.
The morning they arrived at the edge of the woods by car, Knaack says he knew they were close. "It looked right when we approached. It had to be the right place," he says.
"He got out of the car and disappeared into the forest," says Mitchell, 60, of Sioux Falls. "When we got there, his limp went away. He walked like a young man, and I couldn't keep up with him."
Knaack says he walked right up to the spot, finding one foxhole, then another.
"The remains of our foxholes were still there. Looking at the area, it was exactly the way I remembered it," Knaack says. "One thing made me certain, and that was the clearing right in front of our position. It was still there."
Knaack's son says the experience was exciting but somber. "To actually stand in that spot, it was easy to tell something bad had happened there," says John Knaack, 47, of Burnsville, Minn. "It was amazing to see it, to see the forest. It was a powerful moment in our lives."
Klinkenberg has studied maps and accounts of the battle. He's certain they were in the right place. "He was only in there for a couple of days and saw only a small range of the forest," Klinkenberg says. "So many things matched together, we were sure that we found the place Alfred was in combat. This was where he was wounded."
Mitchell agrees. "He knew exactly where the hole was," Mitchell says. "He said to us that it was like walking back in time. He said to us, 'I have walked these paths for 60 years.' "
Then Knaack stood in the same foxhole where he lost his right eye 60 years ago, in the place where he received wounds that led to his Purple Heart medal.
Knaack felt relieved once more. "You wonder if it really happened, and now I know," he says. "It's finished. That episode of my life ... finis!"
History
By fall 1944, when Knaack reached the front, the German army had been defeated across France. Now they were cornered and fighting back. He was wounded just a few months before the Battle of the Bulge, the final counterattack before the fall of Berlin.
The battle was one of the longest and bloodiest in the U.S. Army's history. More than 120,000 American men fought in Huertgen Forest, and 24,000 were killed. More than 28,000 German soldiers were killed in the battle, which ended in early 1945.
Knaack lived with fear during the week he was in the forest. "There had to be artillery spotters behind us, because they were so good at calling it down on top of us," he says.
One experience stands out. "I remember walking by the headquarters area and seeing this stack of dead bodies. They were covered with blankets, but you could still see body parts, death," he says. "I didn't stop to count how many there were, or how long it took them to collect that pile, but I know they added to it every day."
The stench of death lingers in this longtime farmer's memory. "When I smell a dead varmint now, I still remember that pile," Knaack says. "I remember looking at the pile and thinking, 'Where's my spot in that stack?' "
After he was wounded, an Army surgeon saved his left eye after careful surgery. In addition to his wounded hands and face, Knaack had severe trench foot. The skin on his feet and ankles came off when his boots were removed in a hospital in Belgium. It took more than three months for him to resume walking.
Knaack then served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps until the end of the war.
Upon his return to Europe this spring, Knaack visited Normandy Beach and other historic sites. But the return to the woods was a moment that forever cemented the past to the future.
"It was all about closure. That part of my life is now done. I don't worry about it anymore," Knaack says. "I know it was real. I know it happened."
Changes
Knaack says he had nightmares for many years after he returned to Iowa, where he operated a radio and television repair shop in his home in addition to farming the family land near Kingsley.
Those nightmares never frightened him. "I knew what they were, and I knew they went with the experience," he says. "I had a couple after we came back this last time, too, but I knew what they were."
Raising his family with his wife, Rhoda, who died five years ago, Knaack never really opened up to them.
"My father always seemed very serious, and he worked seven days a week farming," says son Jeffery Knaack.
"It seems like he carried such a burden for so many years. Not only the physical pain, but also the pain of not knowing why you had to go through it."
Alfred Knaack's son William remembers his father was never a fan of camping. "The earliest direct comment from him I remember is he said he would never again sleep on the ground in a tent," he says. "My mom told me about his nightmares later and about the shrapnel that would pop up on his skin 20 years after the war."
Knaack says he purposely avoided hunting after his discharge as well. "We had a gun, but I never took my boys hunting because I knew what a gun could do," he says. "I didn't want them to know what that was."
About 15 years ago, Knaack wrote out his experiences in a self-published book, reliving some of them. "We all have memories of the war, and I knew all about battle fatigue, but I don't think I ever suffered from it," he says. "But in writing the book, it was a relief to get those memories out."
His son John says going back to the battlefield was crucial for his father. "At the time he served, he had no idea what he was doing there, no idea of the mission or the purpose behind it," he says. "He was 19. He later read some account of the battle which said the men were 'gallant soldiers walking into the forest,' and I know my father never felt gallant about that time."
Now that he has returned to the very spot where he was wounded, Knaack is glad to have ended a chapter of his life that long remained open. "After recovering from my wounds, my experience during the war was good," he says. "I survived, but all those who didn't, they were good men. The scale of the battle, it will probably never be seen again. At least I hope it never will."