For 40 years, John Schaffner couldn’t talk about it.
As a teenage artillery soldier, he had survived one of World War II’s bloodiest conflicts — the Battle of the Bulge — with just a few nicks and scratches.
Thousands of his comrades did not.
“I was very lucky and I happened to be in the right places at the right times,” Schaffner said. “It was just something we didn’t want to discuss. We wanted to forget about it.”
On Veterans Day, Tuesday, Schaffner attended the opening of the first exhibition specific to Maryland veterans who served in World War II, at the Maryland Historical Society museum in Baltimore. The exhibit, which is open to the public through 2009, pays special tribute to former Gov. William Donald Schaefer, who headed a hospital during the war and donated a uniform and photo albums to the exhibit.
Schaefer was tentatively scheduled to attend the opening but was not feeling up to it, organizers said.
“He has a humility for his World War II experience,” Anne Garside, spokeswoman for the Maryland Historical Society, said of Schaefer. “He says, ‘Oh, I just ran a hospital in Europe. I wasn’t in combat.’ But he had to deal with all the casualties coming back from the Normandy beaches. He had to go Normandy to collect bodies. He saw war close up.”
Gov. Martin O’Malley, whose father is also featured in the exhibit, thanked the 288,000 Marylanders who served during the war, 6,454 of whom did not come home.
“All of you who have given to your country in service and sacrifice have given to all of us a tremendous gift,” O’Malley said.
The exhibit also includes Schaffner’s “mess kit,” consisting of a cold meal of canned food, biscuits, a piece of gum, a few cigarettes and a small package of toilet paper. The kits came in three varieties, Schaffner said: breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Also on display are a pair of boots belonging to Major Douglas Stone, a field doctor who operated on his patients boots-deep in blood, a pilot’s logbook and rivets from the Liberty Ship John Brown, built in the Port of Baltimore and used to ferry troops and cargo across the Atlantic.
Models of the famous B-26 and B-29 planes manufactured at the Glenn L. Martin Company are on display, as well letters collected from Maryland troops. In one, Baltimore’s own First Lt. Gordon Allen wrote home.
“The greatest day of my life,” Allen wrote, “will be when I walk through the front door of 216 Edgevale Road, and holler, ‘Is anyone home?’ ”
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