Kentucky WWII veteran, 107, looks back on the Battle of the Bulge

FEATUREDWIB HISTORY October 6, 2023 Staff Writer

Linda Blackford
Lexington Herald-Leader
(TNS)

Jim Hellard is not the oldest World War II veteran in Kentucky; that distinction goes to Oakley Hacker, who recently celebrated his 107th birthday with great fanfare in Clay County.

But Hellard is 98, so he’s one of the few remaining people who fought in the last world war. He hasn’t been interviewed by this newspaper in quite a while — 77 years ago on Tuesday exactly. When he came home from Europe with a Nazi dog.

So, 77 years is a good anniversary, and after all, the best time to interview a 98-year-old is right away.

He lives alone in a small house on the south side of Lexington. He uses a walker but still irons his clothes, cooks for himself and goes to church. He turned 98 on Sept. 17, and the pastor at Gardenside Christian Church made him sit in a chair and asked everyone to shake his hand as they were leaving.

“I shook hands until I thought it would fall off,” he said.

In celebrating Hellard, the pastor reminded his congregants about the Greatest Generation, the people who lived through hardship that we, the generations of complainers, can’t even imagine. Add together World War I, the Great Depression, World War II. 

Then imagine Hellard, an 18-year-old Versailles High School football team captain who’d never been outside of Central Kentucky, shipped out to Europe for the final, bloody last stands of the war. Hellard arrived in time for the Battle of the Bulge, the last major offensive by the German Army, which lasted five weeks in the winter of 1945 in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg.

“We had 17 weeks of basic training, and one day we were on maneuvers, and they called us in and said, ‘Boys, the Germans are breaking through, and you’ve got to go now,’” Hellard said.

He was in the U.S. Army’s Ninth Division, first shipped to England and then to the front of a frozen European wasteland where war had been going on for four years.

“I was scared as hell,” he said.

His memories are clear but disjointed, a kaleidoscope of blood, mud, bullets and fear. His first day on the front and his unit found shelter in an abandoned house. It was so cold, they built a fire. A sergeant yelled and told them to get out. A few seconds later, a German artillery shell landed on the house, demolishing it.

His division moved into Germany for an important siege known as the Battle of Remagen in March 1945. The Ninth Division was about to capture the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine River, which, despite having been wired with explosives, was still intact.

“I was approaching that bridge when one of our soldiers came back across it,” Hellard recalled in an oral history he compiled a few years ago. “Part of his shoulder had been shot off, and his arm was just dangling.

He said, ‘Man, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s rough out there.”

Hellard had a bayonet and started cutting every wire he could see on the bridge as German and American fighter planes held a dogfight over top of the bridge. When they got to the other side, the fighting continued, with artillery screaming around their heads.

Finally, the Germans surrendered, and that battle is credited with getting the Allies into the German interior three weeks ahead of schedule.

Hellard and his unit kept moving further and further into Germany. He watched friends die. He marched so much his heels would bleed.

“I would take off my boot and there would be blood in it,” he said. “The only way I could endure the pain was to keep telling myself, ‘I can take one more step.’ They were never told where they were going.

They made it to the Elbe River, 30 miles from Berlin, where the Russians were moving in. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

“I woke up one morning, and the sun was shining, and the birds were singing,” Hellard recounted in his oral history.

“There was no rumble of artillery in the distance, no bullets pinging off rocks and metal, and no chatter of German machine guns. The war was over, and it was the first day of peace. I recall strolling through some woods near a creek. Birds were singing. It was so peaceful it seemed like heaven.”

Next stop, Dachau

It didn’t stay heavenly for long.

The Ninth Division was ordered to become part of the occupation forces. His next stop was the Dauchau concentration camp, originally set up in 1933 to hold Hitler’s political opponents. It soon grew to much more, of course; more than 30,000 documented deaths and many more besides.

When U.S. forces liberated it on April 29, 1945, there were still 30,000 prisoners.

The camp was reused as a holding cell for SS soldiers awaiting trial. When Hellard got there, he could still smell the odor of dead bodies stacked on each other, awaiting cremation in the ovens. As soon as the prisoners were sentenced, they were shipped to Nuremberg for execution, Hellard said.

“They were the meanest men I ever met,” he said of the SS soldiers. “Hitler made them that way.”

But that’s where he met Tiger, a former German Shepherd guard dog in the camp also used in interrogations.

The rumor was that an older U.S. soldier had come across Tiger and his handler. He shot the German and kept the dog. When the soldier went home, he passed him onto Tiger. He got his name for his habit of biting GIs but Hellard cured him with a canine “de-Nazification” training of a switch every time he did it.

Pretty soon, he would stay by Hellard all day long, even on guard duty, where he would wake Hellard if anyone approached.

By 1946, Hellard was due to be shipped home, and he arranged for Tiger to come with him. He showed up a few weeks later in a wooden crate that he was chewing his way out of. That’s when Hellard and Tiger were interviewed by Herald reporter Betty Pugh on Oct. 2, 1946, with the headline: “Tiger, detrained Nazi canine, now has a home in Lexington.”

Tiger lasted another three years, no doubt worn out by his own PTSD.

The transition was hard. “I was pretty wild and my mother was worried about me,” Hellard said. “My father had been in World War I and told her to give me some time, and I would settle down and straighten out.”

Nowadays, when the word “trauma” is heard in everyday conversation, it’s incredible to think that returning GIs — who’d witnessed the worst that man can do to one another — got little to no counseling. The “shell shock” first diagnosed in World War I did not get an official mental health diagnosis of PTSD until 1980.

Hellard found work as an auto insurance adjuster, got married and raised two children. He played guitar in bands and orchestras around town. But he admitted that he was still wild, his drinking more or less ended his marriage and he never remarried.

Just last week, he told me, he woke up from a nightmare about the war.

“I do remember growing up, that if he was asleep, there was a rule that you don’t jump on Daddy and give him a hug,” said his daughter, LaTonna Wilson. “It was too startling to him. Other than that, he didn’t talk about it.”

Sometimes, when Wilson takes her dad out to dinner, people may stop and thank him for his service. But as its last participants fade out, the reality of World War II gets further and further away.

“Think about it,” Wilson said. “You take a boy at 18, put them on a plane to a foreign country and give them a gun and tell them to fight for this country, digging foxholes and getting shot at. They just did what they had to do to survive. I don’t think any of us hearing the stories can comprehend it. I don’t know how you recuperate from that or if ever.”

Hellard prides himself on his stoicism. So many years, later his stories are just that. Until a nightmare wakes him up.

“I don’t think people understand the war,” he said. “They don’t know how much suffering I’ve done.”

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