Joe Canavan, 2004 
Walthan, MA
b. 1924


The Two Eisenhowers

A few months after D-Day, Joe Canavan and his “bastard battalion” of combat engineers were sent to repair an airfield.  They were used to shuttling among divisions—building log roads through mud, laying down Bailey bridges—anything to keep the war moving.  On this day a cargo plane landed, probably a C-47, says Joe, and “out popped Eisenhower.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, plain as day.  He brought his personal jeep on the plane, remembers Joe, and wore his trademark khaki coat, cut short above his trim waist.  Ike quietly said hello to the troops and shook a few hands.  Joe was lucky to have his camera and snapped the old man smiling and waving, just yards away.  He almost could have touched him. 

But when the photos came back from the Army developing lab, the Eisenhower shots were gone.  Maybe they were removed for the usual paranoid security reasons.  Maybe someone swiped them for a souvenir.

“I'd sure like to get my hands on those photos,” says Joe.

Joe was captured during the Battle of the Bulge and shipped to a camp in Gerolstein where, he states, “I worked my ass off” carrying water and filling in bomb craters.  The POWs watched American planes rip across the sky, day after day.  Each man got a slice of bread in the morning, a ladle of miserable soup at night.  They starved.  And Joe witnessed a second Eisenhower.

In German, Eisenhower (spelled Eisenhauer) means “iron worker” or, more literally, “one who beats on metal.”  This Eisenhower, a sergeant in the guard, was a tall man with a pointy face and stern expression.  He dressed like an officer, his cap shiny, a leather crop gripped in his hand.  He was in his late 20s, probably.  “An old man to us,” says Joe. 

One day Sgt. Eisenhower had trouble rousing prisoners for a work detail, which was strange because details were good for scrounging food.  He became furious.  He took out his Lugar and approached an American prisoner lying flat in his bunk.  He put the gun to the boy's head and shot him dead.  Then he walked away and Joe never saw him again.