German bomb did not stop Ranger

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DENT - When Tom Anderson takes the podium today as keynote speaker at the downtown library's 50th annual Veterans Day ceremony, he will speak for all the grime-covered young foot soldiers who fought and sometimes died in America's wars.

Those soldiers would not object, because Tom Anderson is one of them.

He earned the right to speak for them 60 years ago, when he was plucked off the streets of East Price Hill, put in a uniform and sent to a war that was raging across Europe.

And he earned it Feb. 19, 1945, as his 69th Infantry Division fought its way across Germany, when the then-20-year-old Army Ranger knelt over a German booby trap, trying to disarm it. The bomb exploded, tearing off his left forearm and the fingers on his right hand.

"I have no idea how it happened,'' Anderson said, sitting in the dining room of his Dent apartment, with mementos of his World War II service spread out on the table before him. "If I had known what happened, I would have made sure it didn't.''

The program where Anderson will speak is scheduled for 10:45 a.m. today at the Main Public Library, 800 Vine St.

The disabilities that earned the young soldier two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star took him from the front only a few short months before the war ended and sent him into a depression for more than a year after he returned to his family's home on Hawthorne Avenue in East Price Hill.

Although he was fitted by Army doctors for an artificial limb, he never wore it. Eventually, he married, raised a family, ran his own West Side flooring business and became well known as a youth football and baseball coach.

Seven weeks shy of his 80th birthday, he plays tennis twice a week and can fit into his old Ranger uniform. He weighs only 2 pounds more today than he did when he went into the Army 61 years ago.

And, his friends say, he has earned the respect of his fellow veterans in his hometown.

"Tom is a hell of a guy - a solid, dependable guy,'' said Howard Osterkamp, the Korean war veteran who is commander of the Cheviot chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, where Anderson is sergeant-at-arms. "In all the years I've known him, I've never heard a single word spoken against him.''

Although Anderson has borne the scars of battle for almost 60 years now, he insists he is no hero.

"There are guys lying up there at the VA hospital, flat on their back for a long time now,'' Anderson said, "and guys who never came home, buried all over France. Those are heroes. I'm just an old dogface, an old soldier.''

In his apartment, images of a new generation of dogfaces flicker on his TV screen - news video of soldiers and Marines fighting street by street, house to house, in Fallujah.

"These kids over there in Iraq, they have their hands full,'' Anderson said. "Not knowing what is around the corner.''

From trouble to battlefield

Anderson knows. When he saw his first combat, he was the same age as those fighting now in Iraq. His story is not unlike that of thousands of other Cincinnati boys who came of age after Pearl Harbor and found themselves thrust onto a particularly dangerous period of American history.

He grew up on the streets of East Price Hill, a kid playing rough-and-tumble pickup football at Dempsey Park on Hawthorne Avenue.

"I've got a Dempsey Park nose,'' he said, pointing to a well-worn proboscis that has seen more than a few hard tackles.

He attended Elder High School for a while, but struggled, and ended up at Central Vocational High School in Cincinnati.

His mother died when he was 17. His father couldn't work after he broke his back. His home life "turned me into a kind of wild kid,'' Anderson said. "I was always in some kind of trouble.''

In December 1942, he had just turned 18 when Capt. Patrick Hays, the Cincinnati police chief of detectives, gave him some advice.

"He said, 'Tom, you ought to go in the Army before you end up in Columbus,' '' Anderson said. "He meant the state pen, not the statehouse.''

By March, Anderson had volunteered and was in the U.S. Army. He joined the Army Rangers, an elite group trained to make raids behind enemy lines. Ranger training was the hardest thing Anderson had ever experienced. To this day, he remembers having to build rope bridges over pits full of live percussion grenades at Camp Robinson, Ark.

"Nine men were killed in training,'' Anderson said. "Never left the U.S.''

Sleeping in German bunkers

A year later, after serving as an anti-tank squad leader and in the 66th Division, Anderson found himself assigned to the 84th "Railsplitter" Division in December 1944 as it pushed its way through the Belgian forest in the Battle of the Bulge.

It was the bloodiest battle American troops have fought, before or since, with more than 20,000 Americans and 30,000 Germans killed. But, like many soldiers, Anderson remembers parts of the ordeal with a smile.

"I never dug a foxhole the whole time I was over there,'' he said. "We always used German bunkers they'd given up.''

On Christmas Eve 1944, he slept on the floor of a brick factory in Verviers, Belgium. It was more comfortable than many other winter nights.

"If you think you'd enjoy sleeping on the ground in wet clothes in a sleeping bag you had to keep open because you were afraid somebody was going to kill you, you're born to be an infantryman,'' Anderson said.

Infantrymen "aren't the glamour boys; they're not the fighter pilots with the dramatic stories to tell. They're the grunts. The guys who did the dirty work.

"If I get up at the library on Veterans Day and tell my story, I'm telling theirs.''