by George Kokiko

George Kokiko attended our storytelling programs often in the early days of the Veterans Breakfast Club. He never shared his story, but he listened closely to others and jotted notes in his little notebook through each breakfast. One day, I ran into George at a grocery store and remarked that I hadn’t seen him at a breakfast for a while. “I don’t need them anymore,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “I realized I had never worked through my own combat experience, and the breakfasts helped me do that.” He added that he hesitated to share his story because some of the other veterans probably wouldn’t like it. I invited him to do an on-camera interview, and he agreed.

Below is George’s story of serving as a machine-gun squad leader in D Company, 1^st Battalion, 328^th Infantry Regiment, 26^th Infantry Division, during the final year of World War II. George was one of 250,000 Third Army troops, led by General George S. Patton, Jr., that pivoted north, under atrocious winter conditions, to break the siege of Bastogne and thwart the German offensive during the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, George went to college on the GI Bill and became a professional social worker developing social service programs throughout the country. He died in 2017 at age 93.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, I turned to the Navy to escape the streets and coal mines of Uniontown, Pennsylvania. But the Navy rejected me, as did the Marine Corps, then the Army. They said I had bad teeth. I had never seen a toothbrush, let alone a dentist.

In 1943, I got my draft notice, and the Army waved me through. Bad teeth didn’t matter in the infantry.

At the end of August 1944, I shipped off on a troop transport from New York City. No one told us where we were going. We were stored like cargo below decks, stacked on racks five high.

After a day at sea, I emerged deck side to an unforgettable sight: ships as far as the eye could see, all heading the same direction. Someone told me there were 143 vessels in our convoy. We were all replacements, supplementing the enormous losses following D-Day and the Battle of Normandy.

We landed on Utah Beach, where the scars of D-Day were still visible. Wrecked landing craft stuck out of the water like skeletons. Bits of equipment and debris were scattered everywhere.

We marched directly inland at least fifteen miles and made camp. We were told we were part of the strategic reserve to back up the units already on the front lines. That meant we were waiting.

Waiting didn’t mean resting. We dug foxholes and drilled constantly. Every day, you saw something new, something you’d never experienced before. One day, it was a load of German prisoners being transported to the rear. Another day, American wounded heading for evacuation. The next, a German fighter strafing our camp.

In October, we got orders to move. The Germans were on the run, retreating to Germany.

We loaded onto trucks and drove to where the French border juts toward Germany at the Saar River. We were dropped off in woods west of the town of Moncourt.

We dug in and waited for supplies and ammunition to make a final push into Germany.

It was a miserable month of wet and cold, living in a single foxhole. We heard, even saw, the Germans not 200 yards away in Moncourt. They seemed safe, dry, and warm. But, apart from exchanges of artillery, they didn’t shoot, and we didn’t shoot. We both just waited.

We started losing guys. Not to the enemy, but to the conditions. We called it “trench foot,” and it snuck up on you. Wet feet rot quickly, sometimes within a day or two. The less you move, the tighter your boots, the faster it sets in.

It starts with tingling, then numbness. By the time you take off your boots, your feet are bright red, deep purple, or light blue. Eventually, black. It turns your stomach.

To keep dry, we deepened our foxholes to create wells at the bottoms. Then, we’d cover the wells with branches so that when the water poured in, it would settle beneath the branches, and we’d be perched on top.

The wells got more elaborate, and our branches became boards. But even with these improvements, we still lost guys.

My foxhole buddy and I made it through without getting trench foot. We took off our boots and checked each other’s feet daily.

He was killed by artillery just before we were ordered to move. I don’t talk about that.

We started pushing forward in November and didn’t stop for over a month. We took town after town in rapid fire.

The Germans were on the retreat, but that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. They’d dig in, put up a fierce fight, and then pull back under cover of darkness. It was like chasing shadows—every time you thought you had them cornered, they slipped away.

We took hill after hill, village after village. I was a machine gun squad leader with three other men, and we lugged a water-cooled Browning M1917A1 30-caliber machine gun everywhere we went. This wasn’t the air-cooled gun with the Swiss-cheese design cooling barrel. This had a metal jacket wrapped around the barrel filled with water. The jacket allowed the gun to fire for long periods without overheating. We could fire bursts of 500 rounds a minute, but at 103 pounds, including the tripod, water, and ammo, it was meant for stationary positions, not for the kind of daily humping we were doing.

Our main job was to stay back and fire in support of advancing infantry. Of course, when we fired, we gave away our positions and immediately became targets.

The main concern of virtually all the soldiers I knew was survival. We just wanted to make it and did everything we could to maximize our chances.

We all had close calls, lots of them. And some of us had a hard time keeping it together mentally. One of my ammo carriers started talking strangely, obsessively, about being blown apart. He tried to run off, and I had to tackle him and bring him back.

We talked hopefully of a “million-dollar wound,” one severe enough to take you out of action, but not bad enough to maim you for life.

My buddy Marty got such a wound in his shoulder toward the end of November. I remember seeing him sitting in a jeep, right arm dangling, covered in blood, and a cigarette jutting from the big smile on his face.

Life got worse, as did our odds of survival, on December 16, 1944. The Germans launched a surprise attack 75 miles north of us, through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg. More than 200,000 German troops and 1,000 tanks slammed through a thinly defended part of our line that bent or “bulged” back in response. Hitler hoped to break through to Antwerp on the English Channel and divide the Allied armies. The Battle of the Bulge would be the largest the US fought during World War II.

We loaded onto trucks and rumbled north. The closer we got to the battle, the thicker the trees and scarcer the roads. The weather turned sharply cold and snowy.

We unloaded in a shroud of icy mist and marched into a forest between Arlon, Belgium, and Eschdorf, Luxembourg. We were ordered to dig. I remember slamming my entrenching tool into the ground only to have it bounce back at me like I had just struck concrete. You had to hack at the earth like it was a vein of coal, chipping away inch by inch. Engineers helped with some explosives, but all had to dig.

After much effort, we got foxholes warmed up enough by our bodies that they the surrounding ice to sludge, which then accumulated around our feet. The cold seeped into my bones and didn’t leave. The snow blanketing the ground was grotesque, churned by boots and trucks, blackened by artillery shell explosions, and dotted with frozen corpses.

We gave chase, and the Germans retreated methodically, pounding away at us from secure towns as they did.

We dug and marched, dug and marched, until we hit the Luxembourg town of Wiltz.

That’s where, on January 6, 1945, I got my million-dollar wound.

The Germans had learned to use the thick forest to their advantage by firing artillery into tightly packed treetops. These “tree bursts” sent hot shell fragments and splinters downward, neutralizing our foxhole protections.

We were dug at the edge of some woods, and a shell exploded overhead, raining all kinds of shrapnel on us. A piece of metal hit me in the cheek. I was stunned for a moment and spit out blood and teeth. A half inch of shrapnel stuck out from my gums.

I hopped out of my hole and started running toward the rear. The shelling was terrible as I ran, a real saturation barrage, but I knew if I made it, I’d be off the line for a while.

My first stop was the battalion aid station. They looked at me, tagged me, and ordered me to wait for transfer back to the regimental aid station. Regimental then sent me further back to division. Each move back meant less shelling, less danger, more comfort. It was like a game. How far back could I get with this wound?

On January 8, I stood in line at an ancient Luxembourgian castle, which served as an evacuation hospital. Wounded were everywhere, many on litters. A few died while I waited.

Finally, it was my turn to be examined. With my face bloody and swollen, I was unrecognizable.

A doctor walked in and probed my cheek.

“Where are you from, soldier?” he asked unthinkingly.

“Uniontown, Pennsylvania, sir” I responded.

The doctor’s head snapped back.

“George?”

Dr. Hemingway remembered me from my time as a newspaper boy on the streets of Uniontown. He operated on me, removed the shrapnel, and sent a note home to my father letting him know I was ok.

He did something else: wrote orders for me to recuperate further in the rear at Bar-le-Duc, France. I got a new tag to wear and a few more days of leisure, so I thought, until the Army deemed me healed, and I was sent back into combat.

At Bar-le-Duc there was a hillside filled with thousands of tents. We stood in line to get reviewed by a senior non-com who read our tags and made the proper assignment.

I stepped to a table manned by a sergeant with stripes up and down his arm. He looked familiar. It was my cousin, George Romanchek, from Uniontown.

George ensured I got shipped back even further, this time to England.

England was the golden destination. It was as far from the war as you could get and still be ambulatory.

I obsessively calculated travel and recuperation time andI figured I’d get at least three weeks off before I was back in combat.

I boarded a train for Cherbourg, then took an LST across the Channel to Southampton. From there, another train to the Midlands and a sophisticated hospital where they treated the badly wounded. We arrived at three o’clock in the morning, and I got assigned to a proper bed with clean sheets, my first in months.

In the next day’s light, I got to see the other guys on my ward. Some were blind, some deaf, almost all badly burned or disfigured.

These guys would ask me the nature of my injuries. I was embarrassed to tell them I had a bloody cheek. I knew I wouldn’t be long for that hospital.

One day, I was standing in the chow line, and who should I see but my buddy Marty, the guy who’d gotten that million-dollar wound in the shoulder.

Marty gave me an insider tip: I should request a transfer to the hospital’s rehabilitation unit. Then, I should tell the administrators that I was a plumber or carpenter, some kind of skilled tradesman. The hospital would keep me as a solution to their manpower shortage.

So, that’s what I did. I was immediately sent to the carpenter’s shop, where I got an apron and a tool belt.

There was always work to do. The problem was, I didn’t know how to do it. I could pound a nail or maybe patch a hole, but not much more.

One day, a full colonel came in and requested that we build him a cabinet. He unfolded a piece of paper with specifications.

This was early March, during the push against the Siegfried Line. The Army was once again running low of infantrymen and had cleaned out the hospital of the lightly wounded. I’d somehow dodged the levy, so I was now chief carpenter.

The colonel’s cabinet order put me in a bind. Failure to build it would expose my fraud and give me a one-way ticket to the frontline. But how to get the job done?

I approached a couple of English handymen I’d seen around the hospital. I showed them the cabinet’s specifications and offered to pay them to build it. They accepted eagerly and returned a few days later with a cabinet so exquisite, I knew it would cause me problems.

“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble,” I said to the workmen. And I meant it.

Sure enough, the colonel was so impressed with the furniture’s quality he told his friends about it. Within days, I had four more orders for similar cabinets.

My jig was up, and I knew it. I had taken my con as far as I could.

Not only that, but I felt guilty milking my wound and masquerading as a carpenter while the real wounded lay suffering all around me, with more arriving to the hospital each day. I thought of my buddies in D Company, now fighting in Germany. It was time for me to return.

The Army was happy to oblige. By the end of March, I was back with my unit, fighting east of Frankfurt. Almost all the faces were new. Only a handful of the 186 guys in my original company had made it this far.

The war was practically over, and we took greater care than earlier. We sent tanks ahead of infantry and relied more heavily on airstrikes. We did a lot of walking, at least 10-20 miles a day or more, down through Bavaria to Austria, taking towns as we went. Locals hung white sheets out the windows, indicating surrender. Some town squares had stacks of weapons outside city hall.

Die-hard SS troopers threw up occasional roadblocks. We proceeded with caution, always with tanks in front to crush any resistance. No one wanted to die on the last day of the war.

We were in Czechoslovakia when we got the news that the Germans had finally surrendered. I remember having a shot of terrible vodka with a Russian soldier. Other than that, celebrations were few. We knew we’d be headed back to training to take on the Japanese.

There was no way I could have survived that second war. All these years later, I still feel a sense of relief knowing I didn’t have to fight it.