Brockton, Massachusetts

1909-2005

Gaps

With the passage of time, Lt. Colonel Chesley Russell forgot his wartime experiences.  At 95 years of age he could no longer relate his hard-boiled tale to a visitor.  Nor could he remember, alas, to boast about his ancestor, Private John Roads Russell, who crossed the Delaware River in a low-riding skiff with George Washington at his side, on Christmas night 1776.

“His memory isn't as good as it used to be,” stated his sister, Barbara Davies, the year before Chesley died.  “We're lucky it hasn't happened to us.”

D-Day Plus One: Normandy, France.  Within a maze of hedgerows, Chesley found himself the senior officer in a ditch full of men raked by machine-gun fire. He was 35 years old, with three children back home; the soldiers around him were just kids and they were getting slaughtered.  Chesley took the responsibility of surrendering 60 men to the Germans. “I have never regretted what I did,” he stated in his wartime memoir.

Chesley's document is brief and unadorned.  Infested with ticks at a prison in Chalon-sur-Marne, he suffered “so many bites from head to foot that I could not recognize myself in the mirror.” At Offlag 64, an officer's camp in Poland, he calculated that POWs existed on 1,100 calories per day (more likely, less than 1,000).  Desperate to make a difference, the prisoners gauged the flight of missiles fired from a nearby V-2 site, and then encoded the information in letters home.  One day an injured boy was taken away in a wagon.  “We never saw him again,” wrote Chesley.  “I hope he got home OK eventually.”

There are gaps in the story.  For instance, Chesley had little to say about the winter of 1945, when the Germans forced POWs from his camp on a brutal march to the west.  “To survive I learned to trade cigarettes for food, steal potatoes and vegetables and even bread and to keep walking some days on my nerve alone.  For the first 48 days I didn't take my clothes off once then I took a bath in a pig pen.

“Many incidents occurred during this trip which I don't have time to mention here,” he wrote, “but, if you're interested, I'll tell you about them sometime.”