MERLE MERRY
Merle Merry carried a camera with him as he moved through France and Germany during World War II. Some of the pictures he took appear in a slim hardbound volume titled The Saga 390 AAA AW BN (S.P.) United States Army, published in Munich in August of 1945. All those letters represent the words Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion (Self Propelled).
The title page of The Saga contains a drawing of his Battalion's insignia, the Gollywampus Gremlin, conceived and designed in 1943 by George Ward, a former Disney artist. The Gremlin, a whimsical character, nowhere near represents the strength and determination expressed in the story of the men of the 390th who moved into the Battle of the Bulge, under General Patton's orders, on self propelled half track machinery carrying artillery designed to bring down Hitler's mighty air force. And - as Merle Merry's pictures along with those of other photographers show
- they did just that.
Merle Merry was born in 1923 about a mile from where he now lives in Colfax, the youngest of a family of four. His family moved around a bit during the Depression years when there were no agencies to help anyone. They came back to Colfax where he attended Colfax High School until he joined the Army in 1942, before he graduated. He later received a diploma. He graduated with a Military Degree, having earned points or credits for his military service. He has remained in touch with his classmates, even recently heading his fifty-fifth class reunion.
Merle recalls when he was barely in high school, back in the 1930s, how his brother discussed with him an impending war with Japan. His brother said, "We are going to have to fight Japan. We are sure shipping a lot of scrap iron somewhere."
Merle put that remark made so long ago together with a conversation his wife Harriet had with an aging Japanese-American woman just last year. She told Harriet, "If you hadn't dropped the bomb we would have fought you to the death."
But the war with Japan was not the war Merle Merry was to fight. After receiving Anti-Aircraft training at Camp Haan in California and also at Camp Irwin on the Mojave Desert where they shot at targets towed by airplanes, he and the Battalion were sent by train to Boston where they received additional training at Cape Cod, shooting at targets towed over the ocean. The refitted English ship they were to take overseas was put in dry dock for several weeks so they missed the convoy they were to sail with, arriving solo at Gerock, in Scotland, a month after the Normandy invasion.
The beaches had been secured, as had the land for about twenty-five to thirty miles inland. They went in on Utah Beach, a "friendly landing on a nice sandy beach" according to Merry. They went in at high tide until their LSTs settled in the wet sand covered with swirling tidewater. They waited for the tide to change and for the waters to move out from around their landing craft. Then they lowered the front and drove their self-propelled half-tracks out onto drying sand. Their rigs had "3rd Army" painted on their bumpers, but that insignia had been taped over before they went in for the landing.
"We didn't want the Germans to know we had a third army," he explained.
One of the sights of war he remembers were big horse-drawn wagons the Germans used to move guns, reminding him of the all-out use of materials employed by both sides. "We were fighting a material war," Merry commented. "Germany had samples of the best, high quality, precision pieces, but they could never produce enough to win the war. Because of the effort of the American people back home, we had lots of all kinds of supplies and equipment, everything we needed. That's why we won the war. Equipment now is far more technical."
Merry was in Munich when the A-Bomb was dropped. "We had no idea what that meant," he said. "It came out in the Stars and Stripes [a military newspaper] that we had dropped an Atomic Bomb and no one knew what to think about it."
About eight months before that revelation about America's war power came to Merle, the Allies were facing a major thrust by Hitler's forces which came to be called "The Battle of the Bulge." Merry was camped near Metz with a convoy of over one hundred armored half-tracks, expecting, as were the Germans, that a big battle was brewing. It was an extremely cold New Year's Day in Europe in 1945. His unit had taken the engines out of some of their self-propelled half-tracks and were overhauling them, believing themselves to be on a temporary break. Then the word came they were to move out the next day. They put all their machinery together again overnight, and moved out as ordered with eight inches of new snow on the ground, the leafless trees creating to Merle's photographer eye a scene from a Hollywood movie.
General G. S. Patton ordered the attack on the Bulge in the face of doubts expressed by other military minds. "I trained 'em. I know they can do it," he declared, and history proved him quite correct.
Merle Merry's personal experience of the Battle of the Bulge included seeing his Battalion set a record for the number of German planes they shot down in one day, twenty-four, a hard record to beat. Since Merle was attached to an Intelligence unit, he and some other men were assigned to pick up pieces of the planes to prove they had downed that many. While doing so, he also took pictures with his little folding Kodak, a camera with two Waterhouse stops, fixed shutter, and fixed lens that used 120 film.
Merry continued to document what he saw and near the end of the war he was able to set up a dark room in a German woman's basement. That enterprise didn't work out so well. In an attempt to be helpful she, thinking his processing chemicals were dirty water, threw them all away. Later on, when he got to Lenz, Austria, he discovered that some of Herman Goering's many, many prosperous businesses were located there, one of them being photography supplies. He and some other G.I.s crawled through windows of the deserted building and liberated enough supplies to develop pictures the rest of their time in Europe.
There were plenty of scenes worth photographing, but some remain fixed in his mind. Merle tells of being in a small town where the people spoke both German and English. A G.I. was petting a dog when one of the local women expressed surprise that he would be so kind to an animal. It was obvious Hitler had hoodwinked the German people into believing Americans were monsters, incapable of simple kindness.
On the other hand, Merry also remembers watching prisoners who had just been set free from concentration camps eating raw meat off of the bones of horses that had fallen dead in the streets, leaving the bones absolutely clean. Those horses had been driven to death pulling wooden wagons, frequently the fleeing German military's only available conveyance for hauling their equipment and supplies.
Merle had to wait until January of 1946 to ship out for home. He had moved from one "Cigarette Camp" to another waiting for orders. The camp sites were named after the popular cigarette brands like Luckies, Camels, Chelseas, Chesterfields, and Wings because the guys would sit and wait smoking endless packs of cigarettes, having nothing left to do.
Once on board the light cruiser Reno, they took the North Atlantic route, in the dead of winter, going only four or five knots due to damage to the ship. The six day cruise took ten days in waters so rough they were many times just two degrees from turning upside down. Merle experienced sea sickness that only abated when he was called upon to run the movie projectors, there being two in order to run films without a break in the action, S.O.P (Standard Operating Procedure) in those days.
The 390th originally had nine hundred members, some of whom were lost in Europe. The remainder have had forty-seven reunions since the end of the war. There are one hundred and twenty members left now. Usually forty-five or fifty, including wives, show up at their gatherings. Quoting figures he heard at the Washington State World War II Memorial Dedication and Unveiling Ceremony held Friday, May 28, 1999 on the Capitol Campus in Olympia, Washington, Merle speaks of seventeen million military men and women on both sides lost in World War II. Fifty to sixty thousand of those fallen American military personnel are buried in Europe, most of their graves marked with Italian Marble crosses. Of those fifty-sixty thousand people, six thousand were from the state of Washington.
Merle and his wife Harriet Merry have visited military cemeteries around the world, photographing many sites. One that is of special interest to Merry is the Hamm Cemetery in Luxembourg where General Patton requested his body be buried. On a warm summer day as many as ten thousand local people make their way down a single lane road to his grave site, many bringing a lunch and spending some time reflecting on the life of the American General who refused to let them die or give up. Patton was buried with four thousand American soldiers, but his remains were later removed to a knoll away from the others to save the cemetery from the multitude of footsteps of those who come to honor him.
Merry and one of his Army buddies laid a wreath on Patton's grave. He trained them. He knew they could do it. They just wanted to tell him thanks.