"You hear 'Patton, Patton, Patton.' You never hear '94th, 94th, 94th,'" he
said. "His guts and my blood."
Plenty of his buddies' blood splashed the snow of the Ardennes Offensive,
otherwise known as the Battle of the Bulge.
They were supposed to get parkas to battle in the 20-below-zero weather, but
they got frostbite instead while fighting the deadliest battle in WWII.
At one point they were cut off in a farm area for three days when rations
ran out. Hunkered down with hungry soldiers, Cherry ran up to the farm attics,
and found hams and sausages smoking in the attic. He beat the ham to break
it apart and fed the troops.
The trail of the 94th went to Saar-Moselle Triangle in 1945. That January
they CPTured Tettington and Butzdorf, then Nennig, Wies and Berg.
They crossed the Saar River under a smokescreen in little boats that had machine
gun holes in them.
"Then it was battle, push, battle, push until the triangle was taken," he
said.
On the way to Ludwigshaven, "We must have destroyed 100 pillboxes," said
Cherry.
It was at the Saar-Mosel triangle that Cherry ran into Germans from an army
desperate for men. From 500 yards, a soldier can't tell if he's aiming at a
man or a child. Sometimes it wasn't be until he was standing over the body
that Cherry realized he'd taken aim at a boy of 13 or 14.
Sometimes the enemy was too close, like when he jumped face-to-face with a
German at Ludwigshaven.
"I looked at him, bounced back and fired three shots," he said.
He searched the soldier and took a souvenir Luger.
He pulled his trigger many times during his service.
"I heard this command often: 'I want you to take this prisoner and be
back in five seconds,'" he said.
Trekking across Europe, the 94th used shells to announce their approach to
towns along the way. Troops arrived at ghoulish scenes.
"A lot of times you'd walk into homes with tables full of food and people
sitting around them, all dead," said Cherry. "So we'd push them out
of their chairs and eat their dinner."
Cherry became a war businessman, trading cartons of cigarettes for kilos of
cabbage and potatoes. He got himself a Calthorpe 250cc motorcycle.
"That was liberated," he said.
And, as in most war stories, there were good times.
"I had volunteered for kitchen duty when a shipment of Scotch came in," said
Cherry. "We sure had a good time the next two or three days. As bad as
it was, there sure was some fun."
Cherry's major injury happened during an attempt to CPTure Nenning, Germany,
when a house door swung out, broke Cherry's nose and loosened his teeth. His
hearing suffered the heaviest losses, and post-traumatic stress disorder followed
him off the battlefield. Surviving these, he would be awarded a Victory Medal,
Bronze Star, Good Conduct Medal, Combat Infantry Medal and a European Ribbon
with four battle stars.
Though he suffered no physical injuries from the enemy, he was surrounded
by war.
"They were all close calls. There was no such thing as a close call," he
said.
He saw one soldier in a huge tank open the door just six inches. Then blood
squirted out, and the weight of his body thrust the door open as it fell out
of the tank to the ground.
There were tears, too. Cherry once walked into the barracks once to find
a soldier crying on his rack. He said, "I sure miss my mama." Cherry
put an arm around him.
Cherry's brother, Sam, was a medic in the same war. Both made it back to see
their mother.
As she said to Cherry's wife, Bonita, later, "My boys were never the
same. They were never the same."
