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June 6, 1999. Today is the 55th anniversary of D-Day, so it seemed
like the right day to finally finish this page.
My grandfather was not on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He'd be the first to tell you that, and he'd be a little annoyed if I let you think otherwise. He came ashore on that same beach about five weeks later, as a replacement, a 23-year-old coal miner's son from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and he spent the next ten months with the Big Red One on the way to Czechoslovakia. He died this January at 77. My name is Brent Hudak, I teach eighth grade social studies in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I'm his oldest grandson. This page is what I know about his war. It isn't much, because for most of my life he didn't talk about it at all. What's here, he told me in the last five years, mostly at his kitchen table with a cassette recorder running. |
| SERVICE RECORD (as best we can piece it together) | |
| Name | Andrew Joseph Hudak |
| Inducted | November 1942, Wilkes-Barre, Pa. |
| Training | Engineer training in the States, shipped to England in the spring of 1944 |
| Unit | Joined the 1st Infantry Division as a replacement in Normandy, July 1944 |
| Rank | Technician Fifth Grade (T/5), "same pay as a corporal, half the respect," he said |
| Where | France, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia |
| Wounded | Hurtgen Forest, November 1944. Shell fragment, left shoulder. Back with his outfit in about three weeks. |
| Decorations | Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Good Conduct Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal |
| Discharged | October 1945, Indiantown Gap, Pa. |
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What an engineer did
When I was a kid I thought "engineer" meant he drove a train. It doesn't. Combat engineers went in with the infantry and did the jobs nobody else could: clearing mines, blowing up obstacles and pillboxes, building bridges and repairing roads so the trucks and tanks could get through, and, when things went bad, picking up a rifle and fighting as infantry. Grandpa said he spent more of the war holding a shovel than a rifle, and that he dug "half of France and all of Belgium." The division was there for the fighting at Aachen, the first big German city to fall, in October 1944. Then the Hurtgen Forest in November, which is the one place he would never say anything about except that it was cold and dark and the trees were the enemy too. Then the Battle of the Bulge that December. In the spring of 1945 they crossed the Rhine and pushed across Germany, and the war in Europe ended with his outfit in Czechoslovakia. |
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After
He came home in October of 1945, married my grandmother Irene Mazur in June of 1947 at St. Mary's, and never left the Wyoming Valley again except for one trip to Florida that he complained about for the rest of his life. He worked at the Army depot at Tobyhanna for thirty-one years. He grew tomatoes, he went to every one of our Little League games, and he could fix anything with a coffee can of bolts and a roll of electrical tape. When "Saving Private Ryan" came out last summer, my dad offered to take him. He said no thanks, he'd seen it. My mom gave him Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation for Christmas. He read the whole thing in two days and then gave it back to her and said, "Nice book. We were just kids." That was three weeks before he died. |
His letters home. My great-grandmother saved every letter and V-mail he
sent, forty-some of them, in a candy box. They're short and they don't say
much (the censors made sure of that), but they're him.
Read some of Grandpa's letters.
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One thing I'm asking you to do
If you have a grandfather or a grandmother, an uncle or a great-aunt who served in World War II, go see them. Bring a tape recorder. Ask them where they were and what they did, and then be quiet and let them talk. Some of them won't want to, and that's their right. But some of them are just waiting for somebody to ask. They are in their seventies and eighties now, and we're running out of time. I have eleven hours of Grandpa on cassette. I would give a lot for twelve. |
