DEL.ICIO.USWWII vet’s work burying the dead inspires movie
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, May 04, 2009
As a senior at the University of Georgia in 1942, Bill Solms figured there was a battlefield in his future.
Turns out, there was a cemetery.
Johnny Crawford/Jcrawford@ajc.com
Bill Solms sits and waits as journalist Albert Elings from the Netherlands sets up audio equipment for an interview at his home in Atlanta.
Serving his country would take him to a frozen field ankle-deep in mud, tearing holes in the earth for young men who would not be coming home. During his time in the U.S. Army, commanding troops stationed in the Netherlands to bury war dead, a wide expanse of ground became the final resting place for thousands of soldiers from both sides.
Now, some six decades later, the government of the Netherlands is producing a film about the Margraten Memorial Center, which is the only American cemetery in Holland. To help mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Holland, camera crews visited Solms’ Buckhead home last week to capture his memories, and the film is scheduled for release later this year.
“What was a field of mud is now a cemetery,” said Solms, 88. “We never dreamed we would be talking about it 65 years later.”
A Savannah native who participated in ROTC in high school and college, he was finishing his senior year in Athens when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He graduated in the spring of 1942 and began his military service shortly thereafter.
After training stints at several posts in this country, he and his charges in the 960th Quartermaster Company were eventually ordered to the Netherlands. He surveyed his bleak surroundings on the day before Thanksgiving 1944.
“I found roughly 300 dead U.S. servicemen lined up in the mud,” he said. “They were stacked like cords of wood. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.”
Albert Smaha, a native of Maine who has retired to Florida, served as a second lieutenant under Solms and still calls him Captain. He came up to participate in the filming, and says images of those fallen servicemen have marched through his memory for years.
“It’s a part of the service you’d like to cut out of your mind,” he said. “It was hell. I came back a more religious young man.”
Faith kept many of the men going on those long, raw days. Toward the end of the war, Solms’ men began burying German soldiers, and he and Smaha both well remember one of their fellow soldiers offering a benediction of sorts to a fallen Nazi: “You was a good soldier, but you was on the wrong side.”
In those days, the armed forces mirrored the nation’s segregation. The 260 enlisted men Solms led were African-American, and he promoted three of them to second lieutenant.
“My attitude was, we were all soldiers,” Smaha said. “We were just trying to get the job done and come home.”
Not everyone shared that view. After the war, Solms remembered taking a meal in the officers’ mess hall with one of the men. When they sat down, a white officer got up and left. Solms later learned that the commanding general asked the officer to explain his actions.
“I’m from south Alabama, and in south Alabama, we don’t eat with black people,” the officer said at the time. The general’s response: “Well, the captain sitting next to him is from Georgia.”
That memory summoned another one. Solms remembers declaring to his father, who was born in 1889, that black people should have the same right to vote as whites.
“Billy, don’t worry about that,” Solms recalls his father replying. “That’ll never happen in our lifetimes.”
He demurred when asked if he felt he participated, even a little, in shaping racial progress. His daughter Nell Wright said she and her siblings are proud of their father’s leadership by example.
“It’s one of the things we’ve always admired about Dad,” she said.
Solms and his wife, Peg, also have three other children: John Solms, Bill Jr. and Harriet Mathews.
Solms, who retired in 1980 after a long career with the Coca-Cola Co., visited the cemetery about 10 years ago. It was the first time he’d returned since shipping out after the war ended. He was greeted by 8,302 white marble crosses and Stars of David bearing silent witness to the United States’ role in liberating that country from Nazi oppression.
It was a raw and drizzly day, he recalled, as he walked along among the silent rows.
“I often thought, as we buried the dead, why them and not me?” he said. “I believe the physical body and the soul are two different entities. I couldn’t help but think that the souls of those soldiers would like to tell me they appreciated me not forgetting them.”
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