Memorial Day 2024 (Part 6)
Oops there goes another D-Day anniversary
After my last Substack, Kaye Ackermann emailed me to ask if I found any information on William Perna, as she had tried with no success. I said there was one last place I could look. The late Louis Gruntz Jr. had made a tremendous effort to locate the final resting places of all the 712th Tank Battalion members killed in action, and when Paul Wannemacher, the battalion association president, passed away, his widow, Annie, sent me a whole batch of material which included the postings Louis had added to Find-a-Grave.
I didn’t go through those, but as I was thumbing through some correspondence, I found a list of names that Louis was unable to account for. One of them was William Perna. Paul wrote back and said that Perna didn’t show up on any of the battalion rosters, but that there was a Peter Perna in the 359th Infantry Regiment of the 90th Infantry Division who was killed in action.
That was all Kaye needed, and she sent me this.
It’s still a mystery as to how he wound up on the 712th Tank Battalion monument, but his date of death was March 22, 1945 which was right after the battalion crossed the Rhine River at Mainz, and there was a great deal of fighting. Who knows, maybe he filled in for a missing tanker; that’s one mystery that will never be solved.
I want to welcome a pair of new subscribers: Ian McHarg, a fellow Substacker who writes about commandos and has an excellent piece on Piper Millin, who landed on Sword Beach on D-Day; and Rob Turano, whose dad was in B Company of the 712th.
This will be a shortened Substack as I head to Reading, Pa., for the World War II Weekend. If you plan on being there Friday, Saturday or Sunday, be sure to look for me in the hangar and say hello.
Edmund Pilz: In 1994, I drove to Buffalo, New York to interview Francis “Snuffy” Fuller about the battle in Pfaffenheck. I had a free day after the interview, so I called Joe Bernardino in Rochester. I’d never met Joe, but he figured prominently in a story told to me by Sam Cropanese of A Company and I thought it would be nice to get his account of the story. Joe said he’d just gotten out of the hospital — he was being treated for cancer — but that I was welcome to come by.
It was kind of an amusing story Sam had told, albeit of the black humor variety. Sam was outside the tank making coffee and things were quiet in the Falaise Gap when a shell exploded and shrapnel tore off a piece of his lip. When he got to the aid station, his jaw was wired shut and his head fully bandaged. A short while later, Joe was brought in, having been wounded when the tank was knocked out. He didn’t recognize Sam, who was trying to communicate that it was him but all that would come out was “mmmf ts m smm” or words to that effect. When a nurse told Joe that Sam knew him, he said to Sam, “I knew it was you, I was just kidding.”
Sam Cropanese:
Joe Bernardino:
“We were in the same tank. “There was Sam, and me, and Eugene Crawford. Eddie Pilz was the driver. I was the bow gunner. Sammy was the loader. There was a David, I think, was the gunner, in the turret. And Eugene Crawford was the tank commander. And we were waiting in front, there was a Falaise Gap. There were 27, no, 22 German divisions, the 7th Army, Von Kluge’s 7th Army and the 1st Panzer Division. And it was the breakthrough that started, we were right here. That’s where it started, right here. And all night, there was a cow that was moaning and moaning. It was wounded. Moaning and moaning. We were nervous. The Germans were in there, and Eddie Pilz was telling them, he was of German descent, he was telling them to come on out. And they were coming out, but not all of them.
And then things got real quiet. And I started biting my nails. And Eddie and I had a little argument because I was biting my nails; we were all uptight. So I said some words and he said some words.
I figured well, I’ll apologize to him in the morning, or later. Well, that morning, at 10:21 a.m. in the morning, they broke through, right where we were. And we got an 88 right in the front, in the center. Eddie got a chunk in his throat and he was dead. I got it all over the whole left side of me, but I was all right. Sammy got his jaw blown off. The gunner was killed. Eugene got blown out, but he was all right. And the thing went right out the back and killed two doughboys making coffee behind the tank. One shell, it was an 88, armor piercing.
(I was unable to find a David from A Company on the battalion monument, so it is possible that the gunner was wounded, but not killed.)
Fred Putnam: On July 19, 1944, Fred Putnam accidentally fired the machine gun on his tank, killing Private Edwin Jarusz. Putnam was killed on Sept. 8, 1944, in Mairy, France during a battle with the 106th Panzer Brigade.
(To be continued)
Tanks for the Memories, expanded third edition, is available at Amazon.