BELGIUM CONNECTION

It's a small world...

A year or so after converting my dad's World War II story into a blog, I received an email from a man in Belgium looking for information on John Cairo for a book he was researching on the temporary cemetery at Fosses-la-Ville. His search for information on dad's unit, the 474th AAA-AW Battalion, hit on "No Major Goofup," and I was so pleased to point him to the blog passage on how John died and my father's recollections of him.

Since then Max and I have exchanged photos and stories, and he has kept me updated about his research, as well as his growing family, job changes, and remodeling a farmhouse.

I never realized until Max that many, many soldiers were buried in temporary graves and their remains relocated stateside only after the war ended. Fosses-la-Ville was the first of such cemeteries in Belgium, opened by the 1st Army on Sept. 8, 1944, which would have made John Cairo, my dad's friend, who died Sept. 12, one of its first inhabitants.

Burials continued there until February 1945, and the cemetery eventually held 2,199 American soldiers and 96 men of other Allied armies. The remains of an additional 1,600 German soldiers were buried on a lower level separated by a large lawn. Most of those laid to rest at Fosses were casualties of the liberation of Belgium and Netherlands, the entry of the first American troops in Germany, the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, and victims of air crashes.

The small town of Fosses-la-Ville is located on the highway to Charleroi, Belgium, 10 miles southwest of Namur, Belgium, and 150 miles northeast of Paris, France. The road was one well-traveled by American troops in 1944 and 1945. The cemetery sat on a picturesque hill called Campagne du Chene, with the La Biesme riverbed and the Bois de Sainte-Brigide d'Irlande (forest) to the north and the Collegial church to the east.

Cemetery grounds consisted of a pavillion guarded by seven U.S. Army soldiers and surrounded by a forest of small crosses arranged in 11 square plots with 200 graves each. The other Allied soldiers were laid to rest in a 12th plot. As of this writing (September 2019) my friend Max had obtained information on all but 96 of the 2,199 American soldiers who temporarily rested there. Max's research is complicated by the fact that many military records were lost in a fire at the military's St. Louis, MO, archives in the 1970s and many others have to be requested through the Freedom of Information Act.

But he keeps at it, and many interesting stories have come out of his research. For one, he was able to direct a woman to the Texas reburial site of her grandfather, originally buried at Fosses, even though family legend reported his body was never brought back from Europe. In another, Max tied a soldier buried at Fosses to a high school class ring found onsite and displayed in the small museum of a local collector. Eventually the ring was returned to the man's daughter, who was an infant when he died and had never met him. That story made her local TV news:

My father often remarked on the graciousness of the Belgian people, and in true form, the townspeople of Fosses-la-Ville adopted the graves of these fallen soldiers, decorating them with wreaths and flowers and attending Memorial Day ceremonies.

It's also true of my friend Max, whose dedication to his task awes me.

"I sincerely thank all the people who, like Susan, support my work and help me in this research in the USA, Belgium, Netherlands and France," Max says. "They include Cheryl, Dee and Greg and their family, Cousette, Adelaide, Roger, Gerard, Jacques, Isabelle, Myra, Max, Roland, Nicolas, Jan, Joey, Bob, Sheryl, Geoff, Dorothy, Amy, Piet, Nancy, Astrid, Henry, Daniel, Howard, Timothy, Quentin, Francis, Naomi, Alice, Dianne, Steve, Patricia, George, Sharri, Dominique, the volunteers at 'Find a Grave,' and all the others."

Follow the link to view the Fosse #1 Virtual Cemetery he put together. Someday I'll use this space to tell you how to buy that book of his when it's out.