U.S. ARMY Thomas Newman By 1944, fighting for one’s country was so popular a drive that only six boys out of an initial 20 remained in Thomas Newman’s graduating class. “I knew if I didn’t enlist, I’d be drafted,” Newman said. Failing to get into the Navy due to his colorblindness, he joined the Army that August. Newman, was born June 4, 1926, in Southwest Harbor and had never been out of the state. “I hadn’t been to Ellsworth hardly, just through here playing basketball,” Newman said. He was subsequently very homesick at first. After inoculation and uniform fitting at Fort Devens, Newman took the train to Camp Blenny. “We were supposed to have 16 weeks of basic training,” Newman said. “They cut it a little short, I think because of the need of replacements overseas.” He left around New Year’s Day 1945 on the Queen Mary (on which he would later, coincidentally, return), one of 56,000 troops. Newman was “18 years old and a stranger to everybody” in the 30th division, Gen. George S. Patton’s army. Welcoming the outfit, the First Sergeant told the men, “Sometime between now and four o’clock the next morning we’ll be on the battlefield and some of you, by this time tomorrow, you might not be alive.” As predicted, they went into battle around 3:30 a.m. the next day in what would be the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. “It’s scary. When you’re 18, I guess it doesn’t bother you quite so much as when you’re my age. Nothing’s going to happen to you, but you’re still scared. Every day you’re being shot at or you’re being shelled. Up until the last two months, maybe a little longer than that, we’d walk sometimes 26, 27 miles a day and every once in a while run into resistance [and] have to fight our way through.” Newman soon became First Scout in his platoon. Fighting was at such close quarters with the enemy, Newman said, “at times we could spit at them.” At night he could hear the rumble of tanks and knew the Germans could at any moment “put an 88 artillery shell in your back pocket from 20 miles away.” “Instead of carrying an M-1 rifle, which weighed nine pounds, I carried a Browning automatic, which weighed 15, 16 pounds … I probably carried five to 10 bandoleers plus three or four hand grenades plus food, K-rations. We had a field jacket that we wore and we’d put a slit in the back of it, in the lining, put everything down in that lining – K-rations, wallet. Everything I had was in that jacket. It’s much easier to carry,” Newman said, especially since the soldiers didn’t have to fight with packs on their backs. On April 11, 1945, as they moved toward the Russian front, Newman’s platoon marched behind the tanks and witnessed the last moments of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. “The incinerators were still going,” Newman said. As he walked through the prison barracks, he encountered prisoners too weak to leave. “Nothing but skin and bones,” he said, sleeping four or five to wooden bunks six high and living on one meal a day while working in the camp’s ammunition factories. After the war in Europe ended, it was back onto the Queen Mary for a stop in America before heading to Japan. The ship was still at sea when they dropped the two atomic bombs. Newman insists that if he had gone to Japan he would be long gone, as would millions of civilians had the Allies invaded. In a respite between wars (he also served in Korea) Newman was married in 1949 and worked as a trucker until retiring. This month, he and his wife celebrated 57 years of marriage. They have three sons and a daughter, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. After the war, Newman said, “you don’t take life quite for granted as much as you had. You start to think about some of the close calls you had. You know you were shot at, hear the bullets snap when they went by your ears.” “I put a lot of this back in my mind,” Newman says today. “I never talked about it for a long time.” He says war is inherently bad, but the current war is an unavoidable entanglement. “I feel somewhere, Iran or one of them countries is going to come after us. They already did on Sept. 11, but they’re in there now and you can’t just go off and leave them. You’ve got to stay, finish what you’ve started,” Newman says. “If you’ve got to fight a battle … it’s better to fight it in someone else’s country than ours.” — Ashley Meeks