
My connection to our Army started in 1945, two years before I was born in Wels, Austria. My parents had fled from Hungary, their homeland, before the advancing Soviet armies. Their goal was to reach the American army so that when the war ended, they would hopefully be in the US not the Soviet zone of occupation.
Their journey took them to the picturesque town of Gmunden, Austria which had just been occupied by American soldiers and there they stopped.
Finding shelter in a dairy barn, they eventually secured better accommodations while my father went to work as a bricklayer in a neighboring town.
Finally, four years later, they found a distant relative in Cleveland, Ohio who, with the help of Catholic Charities, sponsored their passage to America. I, meanwhile, was born in Austria in February 1947, early enough to make the crossing with them on a Navy transport ship the USS General S.D. Surgis (AP-137) named after a USMA 1846 graduate.
Forty-seven years later, as the Commander of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, I attended a reunion of the Regiment’s World War II veterans. They brought their albums showing their march through Europe at the head of Patton’s 3rd Army.
“Here is where we ended up”, one veteran related, “in a beautiful little town in Austria, named Gmunden” !
It was then I realized that my parents, so many years earlier, had found refuge in a town occupied by the regiment I then commanded.