Seeing the world through war: A veteran's story

By Alex Strickland / Bigfork Eagle

He was on the doorstep, stuck in those moments between the knock and the answer, just waiting for a girl.

It was a common act, a boy waiting for a girl to answer the door, in an uncommon time.

When the door opened the young G.I. asked a stunned-looking woman if Paulette was home

and then pulled out a picture of the girl that she had sent him.

The proverbial light bulb went on in the mother's mind when she realized,

"You're Howard Dillman."

Dillman had gotten a three-day pass from his commanding officer in Dijon, France in 1944 and had hitchhiked 60 miles to pay a visit to a girl he'd never met, but had corresponded with for years through a high school French class.

He had brought oranges from his unit's kitchen, something the French family said they hadn't seen since Germany invaded years before.

Paulette was engaged to be married and Dillman said his time with the family was notable for it's bit of normalcy and pleasantness, if not romance.

Dillman was following General George Patton to Germany as part of the 178th Signal Repair Corps, a unit responsible for installing and maintaining radios and communication for allied forces. He had been plucked out of the University of Notre Dame's engineering school and trained in California in the intricacies of communications equipment.

From there he went to Hattiesburg, Miss., to join his unit where he got a taste of Southern hospitality before he went off to war. When he got off the bus he called the commanding officer there to report and have him send someone to drive him to the base, Dillman recalled. While waiting, he went inside for a cup of coffee but couldn't get anyone to serve him.

"They'd heard me on the phone," he said. "They knew I was a damn Yankee."

Dillman next found himself leaving New York harbor aboard the Queen Mary with 18,000 other troops on his way to Britain and the battle against Nazi Germany.

He said more than anything else he remembers the thick fog on the morning he left.

"I was watching New York fade into the weather and here comes the Statue of Liberty," he said. "I realized right then I was really on the way to somewhere."

Once in England, Dillman was sent to stay with a family in the small farming village of Stanton Drew while he awaited his orders. He kept up with the family — the Harris' — for years after the war.

Dillman said he remembers the head of the Harris' household going out to ensure that all the lights in the village were extinguished for his job as the village warden. Mr. Harris was also tasked with lighting a decoy airstrip outside of town to fool German bombers into thinking they were lining up the Bristol field in their sights. The Harris' home had walls that were four feet thick, a small hearth fire for heat and an outdoor toilet, Dillman said, and a rich history he was only too ready to absorb.

While he was there, Mrs. Harris took her yearly walk to a neighboring town along an almost-overgrown trail through the fields. Curious about why she took this long route, she told Dillman that 400 years earlier the King of England had signed a decree dictating that as long as the path was walked once a year it could remain on the private lands it cut across. The depth of the culture fascinated Dillman, but, as he said, "I knew it was too good to be."

He was sent to Warminster to install radios in tanks, something he would do for the next year, as part of a huge arms buildup in southern England. Dillman said the country there was all rolling hills and that as far as he could see in any direction it was a sea of tanks, armored vehicles and weapons.

"I don't know why the island didn't sink," he said.

After D-Day on June 6, 1944, Dillman's unit sailed across the English Channel to France to follow Patton's 3rd Army toward Paris and then to Germany.

"We went through places just blown to smithereens," he said of Northern France. "They were going to have to rebuild everything."

Once in Paris, Dillman found he had the chance to take in some of the sights and, instead of hitting the pubs, went to places like Napoleon's Tomb.

After Paris, his unit got closer to Patton as the 3rd Army famously came in to rescue the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in Belgium. Dillman's days were filled with repairs to broken communications equipment and refitting vehicles that had been damaged. He did that until Germany surrendered on May 7 and 8, 1945.

Dillman headed toward the Mediterranean Port of Marseilles soon after, bound for the Pacific. The day after he got there Tokyo surrendered, ending the century's bloodiest conflict.

For Dillman, memories of the war are more often memories of the good times than the bad, like when he ran into Leyland George — an old high school classmate — in Belgium or when he brought oranges to Paulette's family near Dijon.

"When I look back at it I see a lot of good times and a lot of historical things that I just lapped up," he said.

By the time he left the Army he was a Staff Sgt. and he credited the men around him, "a great outfit," for much of his fond recollection. Getting a chance to see some of the sights of the Old World didn't hurt either, something Dillman had the foresight to do while he was there and has no regrets over.

"I took advantage of being there," he said. "I didn't think I'd have the opportunity to go back and I haven't."