The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  “Rubbish!” he snorted. “I asked men suspected of that if the girls were German and they said, ‘No, displaced girls from Poland.’ It’s easy to differentiate because German girls wear silk undergarments and the Poles wear burlap.”

  The inspectors seemed to be satisfied with that and left Munich. “And had they asked one more question,” Frederick recalled, “they would have left on stretchers.” A week or so later, after his remarks had been reported in a U.S. newspaper, Frederick received a letter from his wife.

  “How do you know,” she asked, “what underwear girls have on?”

  REIMS, FRANCE, JULY 1945

  IT WAS NOW more than two years since Sparks had landed in Sicily. To his great frustration, instead of returning home he was assigned late that June to a new command in Reims, where the German surrender had taken place. As “Commandant of the Sweep Sub Area,” he was to oversee the transport of tens of thousands of impatient GIs back to the United States. Liberty ships would arrive at several Channel ports, and Sparks would determine how many and which soldiers should then board for the return to the States. Understandably, as he saw more and more men with far less combat experience going home, he soon grew to detest his new assignment. “I got goddamn tired of it,” he recalled. “I had a wife back in the States, a kid who was two and a half years old that I’d never seen.” He knew it would take another year at least to ship every American soldier out of Europe.

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stay here another year,” he vowed.

  Sparks had a full staff and an adjutant. Ever the maverick, one day he ordered his adjutant to list his name as the troop commander on the next ship that had no officers aboard who were above Sparks’s rank. A few days later, his adjutant told Sparks there was a ship scheduled to leave from Antwerp with mostly Air Corps men. The commanding officer was listed as a major.

  “Eliminate his name and put mine there,” Sparks ordered.

  Sparks set off for Antwerp and boarded the ship bound for New York as its troop commander. “Nobody said a word. I had my own stateroom and I got to eat with the captain.” The voyage across the Atlantic seemed to last forever. “It took three weeks for Christ sake! The captain and I and a couple others played bridge the whole time.”

  Sparks’s fellow Thunderbirds also returned that summer, aboard the SS Marine Devil and the SS Sea Owl. “On board,” remembered one man, “the relief was as deep as the sea itself, for only when land faded would many believe that they were actually homeward bound.” After 827 days overseas, the Old World was now finally in their wake. The division’s artillery had left behind almost a million shell casings for scrap metal merchants from Sicily to Munich to remember them by. The Thunderbirds approached New York after eight days of “hominy grits” for breakfast and “smoke corned shoulder” for dinner.

  Young American women waved from small boats that plowed up the Hudson River abreast of the troopship. Somehow, they were so much more beautiful than the European ladies they’d loved and now left far behind. To the Thunderbirds’ immense delight, one group of women, a river band, began to play “Beer Barrel Polka.” It got better. An inspection officer boarded and broke the news that all the Thunderbirds were to be treated to steak dinners. Then he apologized for the mist and rain that had greeted them.

  “What do you mean, rain?” cried one Thunderbird. “It’s the most beautiful day we’ve ever seen.”

  NEW YORK HARBOR, AUGUST 1945

  SHE STOOD TALL, 151 feet to be exact, at the center of Liberty Island, unblemished by the war, in her flowing pale turquoise robes, holding up a torch, representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, a broken chain lying at her feet. Sparks would never forget first setting eyes on her as he stood on the deck of a troopship, about to set foot on American soil for the first time in more than two years. To his right, across the busy New York Harbor, he saw New York City for the first time, the Manhattan skyline, the Empire State Building most prominent, towering above the streets crowded with honking yellow cabs and countless frisky military personnel.

  Almost as soon as Sparks arrived at Camp Kilmer across the Hudson River in New Jersey, he managed to place a call to his wife, Mary, back in Arizona. It was the first time they had spoken in more than two years. Sparks had left her as a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant and was now a world-weary lieutenant colonel, as well as a father who had yet to hold his two-year-old son, Kirk, in his arms. “He said he’d been put in charge of a troop train,” Mary recalled more than sixty years later. “He was headed out west but it would take him a few days.”

  Sparks had had enough of the army by the time he arrived in baking hot San Antonio several days later. Told he could be discharged at Fort Bliss, the army base near El Paso, he called Mary again. He couldn’t wait a day longer to see her and wanted to be alone with her before returning home to Miami, Arizona, where his family were eager to welcome him.

  “Come to El Paso,” Sparks told Mary, “and get a hotel room.”

  She took her father’s car, dressed in her best, a striped pantsuit, her strawberry-blond hair done up as was the style at the time, and set out from Tucson, through the empty desert, alone, wondering how he might look, how he might have changed, as excited as she had ever been. She booked into a hotel, parked the car, and went to her room fifteen floors above downtown El Paso, the Rio Grande just to the south, Mexico beyond. She had waited two years to see Sparks again, and every minute more was agonizing. The last time he had held her close, their baby Kirk had been inside her, kicking. She had prayed every day he would survive and that her son would have a father. She had shown Kirk pictures of Felix and read his letters out loud to him. She wanted nothing more in her life than for him to see his father and be held by him.

  EL PASO, TEXAS, AUGUST 15, 1945

  AT 7 P.M., radios across the city and indeed America announced that the Japanese emperor Hirohito had made a public broadcast for the first time. He had in fact declared that the Japanese would “treat with the enemy” after it had employed a “new and most cruel” weapon—the uranium 235 atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, killing some eighty thousand civilians, and then on Nagasaki on August 9, incinerating a further twenty-five thousand.

  World War II was finally over.

  Some 416,000 Americans out of 16,000,000 in military service had died since Pearl Harbor, at least 200,000 fewer than during the Civil War. Almost twice as many had died in Europe as had died in the Pacific. Three-quarters had served in the army, whose losses dwarfed those of the combined navy and fabled Marine Corps by a factor of four. The Japanese had lost around 1.2 million men in battle, more than a tenth of their military personnel.

  Never again would America enjoy such prestige or economic clout around the globe. The nation of 140 million people had arguably suffered least of all the main belligerents yet had gained most from victory, its industrial productivity now greater than the rest of the world combined. Average wages had increased by more than 50 percent and the catastrophic unemployment of the thirties had disappeared. By contrast, the Soviets had lost more than six million men in battle, and a further fourteen million were wounded. Many of its cities and much of its agricultural land had been laid to waste. An estimated ten million Soviet civilians were also killed, part of the final butcher’s bill for World War II—“the Great Patriotic War,” as Russians still call it—of well over fifty million lives.

  It was indeed America’s greatest achievement: Two highly advanced forces of immense inhumanity and destruction had been defeated in less than four years. There was plenty, finally, to celebrate, and all across the nation people went wild with relief and delight, streaming from homes, workplaces, and bars into the streets.

  THAT NIGHT OF V-J Day, Mary sat on her own, feeling terribly lonely, listening to drunken revelers crowding downtown El Paso. She had left Kirk in the care of her parents back in Tucson. The following morning, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it. Her husband was finally within reach, standin
g there, thin and gaunt, around 140 pounds, in his lieutenant colonel’s uniform, a felt Thunderbird patch and silver oak leaves on his shoulders, same gorgeous black hair, a great smile on his face, joy in the dark brown eyes. Then, at last, he was holding her in his arms. There was no need for words. It was the happiest day of her life.

  They had saved themselves for each other. She was real, not an image, so pure, an angel, a goddess; full of stories of Miami, his three sisters, the now booming mines, and of his son, two-year-old Kirk, walking, talking, able to say “Papa.” The thought of being with Mary again one day had sustained him through the darkest hours, times when he might otherwise have given up hope like so many other young men who lay in graveyards from North Africa to the Alps. At last she was beside him, fifteen floors above the dry, dusty city, its streets filled with happy voices, drunks in peacetime.

  To mark the end of the war, all businesses in El Paso closed, even the restaurants. But the streets were full of cars, horns hooting and honking, and with people hollering. Sparks and Mary went hungry, but couldn’t have cared less. The following day, they climbed into the car and drove a couple of miles north, toward the boulder-strewn Franklin Mountains. At Fort Bliss, Sparks found an adjutant.

  “I want to get out of the army,” said Sparks. “I was in college when I got drafted and I want to go back.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel. I don’t have any orders to release anybody.”

  “The war is over and I want to get out.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel, we don’t have any orders or authority … but we anticipate we will.”

  “Well, as soon as you get authority,” said Sparks, “you send me a telegram.”

  Sparks gave him Mary’s address in Tucson and then climbed back into her father’s car and set out on the four-hundred-mile journey across the desert to their homes in Arizona, the Chiricahua Mountains looming to the south, the Gila wilderness rising to the north near Silver City. There was plenty of time to catch up and get to know each other again. But Sparks said nothing about what he had really been through while he had been away. That would have to wait another thirty years. In Tucson, their car pulled up in front of Mary’s parents’ home. Sparks was soon walking into the house, to the room where his child was waiting. Mary would never forget seeing him hold their son for the first time. Kirk recognized his father from photographs, but it would be several weeks before he grew accustomed to the tall stranger who had suddenly entered his life. It was difficult to forge a bond at first. “He was two-and-a-half years old,” recalled Sparks. “I had never seen him. He didn’t take to me very well.”

  Sparks then drove a hundred and twenty miles north with Mary and Kirk, through the Sonoran Desert and the Tonto National Forest with its towering Ponderosa pines and bald eagles, to Miami, Arizona. The copper mines were busy again; the reassuring growl of machinery beneath the ground had returned. There was no party to welcome him, just close hugs from his sisters and parents.

  A few days later, Sparks received a telegram announcing that he could in fact be discharged. He had fought in eight campaigns and earned two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts, and the Croix de Guerre, among many other honors. But now his career in the U.S. Army, one of the most distinguished of any American in combat in World War II, was finally over.

  COLORADO, LATE 1940S

  HE DIVED TO the ground, lying flat. Would the shrapnel miss? But there was no hot metal and, when he looked up, no screaming men with stomachs gouged, limbs missing, jagged bones showing. There was just a power line buzzing above his head.

  Other than diving to the ground under power lines, Sparks showed remarkably few outward signs of being damaged by the war. Yet emotionally he had been profoundly affected, and it had been partly his fault: He had gotten to know his men too well, and so their deaths had left him more wounded than most. There had been so many men killed under his command. In particular, he remembered the senseless gunning down in Italy of his medic Jack Turner, from Lamar, Colorado; and the losses of Sergeant Vanderpool and Lieutenant Railsback near Epinal a year later. Turner’s death seemed to torment him most. He would never forget seeing him cut in half by machine-gun fire, lying in the open, bullet-riddled, with a red-cross armband, “deader than hell.”

  During the war, Sparks had enjoyed listening to men like Turner wax lyrical about their hometowns, the Rockies and Colorado in general. “I got to thinking about it,” he recalled. “I had served with all these men from Colorado and [yet] I had never been in Colorado.” In early September 1945, eager to complete his law degree, Sparks called the registrar at the University of Colorado and learned that he could attend the fall semester, which started the following week. He and Mary packed a few bags and with their son took a bus from Arizona to Boulder, Colorado, a thousand miles to the north. Their first home as a family was in a trailer park, dubbed “Vetsville,” near Boulder Creek. “The trailer was a little bit primitive—we didn’t have a bathroom or water,” remembered Sparks. At last, he was back at school, back with his family. Just a few months ago, he had been confronting immense loss and horror. Now he had a future. He had survived.

  SPARKS HAD BEEN attending classes for less than a month when he received a letter from the governor of Colorado, John Vivian: “I’ve discovered you were one of the senior officers in your regiment and have returned to Colorado.” Vivian went on to ask Sparks to help reorganize the state’s National Guard. “There were still a lot of problems in the world,” Sparks later explained, “and the Army was getting frantic because it didn’t have any soldiers.”

  Sparks had no desire whatsoever to resume a full-time military career, but he strongly supported the National Guard and its traditions and was glad to help revive it in Colorado. But it would take at least two months of his time, and he was busy studying for a law degree. He went to ask permission from his dean, a man named Ed King. “You’re a good student,” said King. “Just take the final exam.” Sparks took two months’ leave and, with a military vehicle and gasoline credit card, set off around the state, discovering its immense majesty as he visited the hometowns of many of the men who had served under him.

  In Lamar, on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado, Sparks sat with the parents of Jack Turner, the medic whose death had affected him so much. It was from this small town on the old Santa Fe Trail, more than three thousand feet above sea level, that Company E, which Sparks had so fondly commanded, had originally been drawn. Sparks told Turner’s parents that their son had been “a good man.”

  In the rich farmland on the eastern plains of Colorado, in Fort Morgan, home to Glenn Miller and K Company before the war, Sparks visited a young widow called Rose. “She had two kids in rapid succession, and then her husband was killed. I was sitting in the living room, and the two little kids were there. She said, ‘This man knows Daddy.’ Two little tiny kids. They didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. That really got to me.… ‘This man knows Daddy.’ ”

  Getting the National Guard back up and running was a tremendous challenge, given that so few men wanted to return to service, but Sparks succeeded nevertheless in laying the foundations for the state’s present-day force, and still found time for his studies. Two years later, in 1947, thanks in part to the GI Bill, he finally achieved what he himself described as his greatest goal in life: a law degree. He then passed his bar exam with ease and decided to set up his own practice in Delta, a small town in southwest Colorado, near the Continental Divide, that had been home to Company C, and where he knew the hunting and fishing along the banks of the Gunnison River were as fine as any in Colorado. Indeed, the town lay at the very heart of arguably the most stunning scenery in the American West. There were bighorn sheep, desert cottontails, and collared lizards in the surrounding forests. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park plunged just to the north, the Gunnison River flowing bright green from the sunlight reflecting off its sediment-rich waters, at the base of vertical walls of gray and purple rock crisscrossed with pink granite.


  Sparks rented an office for 15 a month from a World War I veteran, bought some secondhand furniture and an old typewriter, asked his wife, Mary, to work part-time as his secretary, and took whatever business he could find. He had sacrificed five years of his life to fighting a war far away in Europe and was determined to make up for lost time. Now he gave free rein to his ambitions, working very long hours to establish his reputation as a lawyer and becoming active in local politics. Like others who had come back from the hell of so long in combat, he wanted to squeeze everything he could from life, as if doing less might in some way dishonor those who had not survived.

  In 1948, Sparks “campaigned to beat hell” as a Democrat “with no fat in his talk” and was elected district attorney, serving four years. He began to make waves in statewide politics, notably by attacking Colorado senator Ed Johnson, a prominent isolationist before the war who had voted against aid to the British when they stood alone in 1941, failed to support the New Deal, and yet had found time to introduce legislation requiring the “licensing of movie performers based on their morality.” In Johnson’s jaundiced eyes, the luminous Ingrid Bergman, a favorite among former GIs, was nothing more than an “apostle of degradation.”

  In an open letter to fellow veterans of the 157th Infantry Regiment, Sparks claimed that Johnson had led a “small but powerful group of men who did everything in their power to reduce the military strength of this country to impotency.” Sparks added that while in combat he had “sworn a thousand times that if I lived to return home again the people who were responsible for our unpreparedness would not go unnoticed.”

  Sparks himself certainly did not go unnoticed by the powerful in Colorado. One day in 1952, he got a call from a reporter with the Rocky Mountain News. “Judge, how do you feel about being appointed?” What? “The governor just appointed you to the Supreme Court.” Sparks immediately called the governor and asked why he had not been consulted, but he agreed to take the position. Utterly incorruptible, he would quickly come to regret the decision: “I was extremely disappointed. Matter of fact I was quite bitter about it before I was through.… There were some rotten things that went on in that court—very rotten.”