Memories a Salve for 3 Uncles Lost in War

They were always smiling, always looking down at me.

There were four men in uniform in the portrait in my grandmother’s living room. They are my uncles, soldiers during World War II.

Three of them--Jay, Tom and Danny Baluh--died in that war, all within 12 months. My grandfather was in the picture too; he died years later, heartbroken.

My uncles died before I was born. My family didn’t speak of them often and I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t ask. I knew almost nothing about them.

It was the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan,” and its effect on my parents, that aroused my curiosity. It wasn’t their reaction to the movie, because they didn’t see it -- they wouldn’t see it. It was their reaction to hearing about the film.

“It hits too close to home,” my mother said.

In “Saving Private Ryan,” one brother is killed in the Pacific campaign, and two others die on Normandy’s beaches. In real life, Tom died in the Pacific, and Danny and Jay died in France.

In the movie, there is a daring mission to bring a fourth brother back home. There were no such heroics in real life; there was nothing left to rescue.

Except for the memory of my three uncles, and I set out to do just that.

*

When I began my search in 1998 I had no intention of involving my family. There was no point, I thought, in having them relive all that pain just to satisfy my curiosity.

There were all sorts of obstacles.

A 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed 80% of the military records from 1917 to 1959. Records in Pennsylvania were destroyed by Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972.

And the biggest obstacle of all: World War II vets are dying at a rate of 1,000 per day. As one vet told me: “You should have started this 10 years ago.”

First, I tried to get my uncles’ military records, but I had only their names to go on. An official at the records center said I needed their service numbers and politely told me I would need a closer relative to make the requests. Their parents are dead, I said, and the men never married and had no children.

He said a brother or sister would do--but I didn’t want to involve them.

The Army said it would need the dates of death to search death and burial files. The Church of St. Stephen in Plymouth, Pa., could tell me only that “they were buried sometime between Sept. 19, 1947, and Nov. 15, 1947,” and the Larksville American Legion, where their bodies lay in state, didn’t have records of the funeral.

I remembered hearing that a Baluh post had been named in their honor. After a few calls I learned that the Larksville Veterans of Foreign Wars Baluh Memorial Post No. 6551 was established on April 25, 1946, but declared defunct on May 27, 1953.

Finally, I stumbled onto two wonderful people: Ken Schlessinger, a military archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., and Jesse Teitelbaum of the Luzerne County Historical Society in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Schlessinger found my uncles’ service numbers and Teitelbaum sent me newspaper clippings about their funeral.

My father had told me the funeral was a big deal, and he wasn’t exaggerating. Articles started appearing in the Wilkes-Barre Record in October 1947, when my uncles’ bodies arrived in New York.

Of course, the men’s pictures were printed. Jay was a string bean, tall and incredibly thin. Danny was cute, and young--he was drafted at 18 and died about two months after his 19th birthday. Tom wore a big grin, and as I got to know him better, I learned how different he was from the others. There was a lot going on behind that smile.

My grandparents, John and Mary Baluh, reared their seven boys and a girl in coal company housing in Larksville, a town of about 8,000 in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. And it was to Larksville that the boys would return.

Originally, they were scheduled to be shipped back separately. But I would later learn that my grandfather had requested that all three be sent home together “because [of] the expense of three funerals and the emotional upset that would result from burying each boy at different times.”

They arrived on Nov. 10, to more than 500 people waiting at the station. There was a procession through Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, Edwardsville and then Larksville, where the bells of St. Anthony’s, St. John’s, St. Casimir’s and Brooks Memorial churches tolled.

“As the three caskets were carried to hearses at the railroad station, the veterans present to pay homage stood at attention” with tears in their eyes, reported another paper, the Times-Leader Evening News.

Grandma cried, “Which one is in that one?” as the first casket was placed in a hearse.

“But the veterans and the undertaker, Andrew Strish, busy with the task at hand, did not hear her, and no one could give the answer,” the paper reported

On Nov. 12, the Record told the story of the funeral, how “scores of ex-servicemen” paid their respects and “hundreds of people lined the streets.”

The day the newspaper clippings arrived, my husband came home to find me crying--the first tears for the uncles I never knew.

*

But who were these men?

When the death and burial records arrived, Tom, Danny and Jay began to take shape.

There were names, ranks, service numbers, dates of induction, dates of death.

I learned that Jay was inducted in June 1942 at age 27, was wounded twice and died in September 1944. Tom was 25 when he was drafted in November 1942; he died of infectious hepatitis a year later. Danny was inducted in September 1943 and was dead in less than a year.

There were lists of personal effects. Danny and were infantrymen, soldiers in the 79th Infantry Division, 315th Regiment; they had what they could carry and it wasn’t much.

Danny had a wallet with 100 francs, a key, 11 souvenir coins and a religious medal. Jay had with him eight photos, a wallet, a fountain pen, a greeting card, a religious card, francs, souvenir coins and his first Purple Heart.

Tom was stationed at a base with the 6th Infantry Division, 1st Field Artillery, Battery C. There were 200 items on his list, among them duplicate shaving, sewing and shoeshine kits. There was a marksmanship badge, a deck of cards, two prayer books and a New Testament.

Finally, between February and September 2000, I received copies of my uncles’ military service records--some barely legible, many charred by the 1973 fire.

These papers told me that all three men finished eighth grade. Jay worked as a pants presser in a clothing factory. Tom was a mechanic’s helper and farmhand; Danny also worked on a farm. They all had brown hair and ruddy complexions. Jay had blue eyes, Tom’s and Danny’s were hazel.

They had money deducted from their pay for “partial support” of the family. Jay sent home $30 a month, Danny $25 and Tom $20.

Each had money deducted for a $10,000 life insurance policy. I later found out that my grandmother didn’t want the insurance money, calling it “blood money.” Her children, however, persuaded her to bank it. Thirty years later, it would help pay her nursing home bills.

All three were thin, but Jay was so tall and skinny--”markedly undernourished,” if I can decipher the doctor’s notes on the charred document. He weighed 124 pounds. Danny was shorter and weighed even less. The doctor wrote that his hands were “cold, sweaty ... he is shy ... appears seclusive.”

Danny arrived in England in mid-June of 1944. He joined Company A of the 315th as a replacement on July 14; four days later, he was dead at 19. The company was in a defensive position near the Ay River in France; it is not known how he was wounded.

Like Danny, Jay died a private first class, though he had been busted back to private once because he took a couple of extra days’ leave. Unlike Danny, he survived his first combat, though not for long.

He hit France’s beaches on June 14, 1944, and the unit saw combat five days later in the assault of Cherbourg. Jay was wounded on July 5 on the Cotentin Peninsula; he suffered a “light head wound” from cannon fire and was hospitalized. He didn’t rejoin the unit until Aug. 30.

Two weeks later, according to regimental reports, the unit engaged in “bitter house-to-house fighting for the town of Chatenois ... casualties were high on both sides with E and F [Jay’s unit] companies suffering the most on our side.”

Jay was among them. He died Sept. 16 of a severe head wound.

Tom never saw combat. He was sent to Hawaii in late September 1943 and had been there about a month when he became ill. The autopsy report said Tom probably had a viral infection when he received his yellow-fever vaccine, and the two were a deadly combination. His temperature topped 106 degrees.

He died Nov. 19, 1943, the first of the brothers to perish.

I tried, in vain, to find comrades who served with Danny, Tom and Jay, and remembered them well. Aside from one who had a vague memory of Jay as a tall, skinny guy with a helmet three sizes too big, none could recall them.

*

Two years into my search, I still didn’t know what my uncles were like. Were they quiet men like their brother Fran or lively like their brother Joe? Were they loving men like my father?

On a visit home, I told my mother what I’d been doing.

The next morning, Dad asked me about my findings. I showed him some carefully chosen records. He didn’t say much, and left the room.

Minutes later, he returned, carrying a box.

“Thought you might like to see these,” he said.

It was a battered box of memories--photos of my grieving grandma, flag-waving crowds, the procession. A wooden frame with a picture of a flag and three gold stars--one for each son.

With that, my father started to tell me about his brothers. And I began to interview other members of the family.

They told me about Danny, who was every little brother’s dream. He played with Dad and my Uncle Fran, building basement forts and funhouses. He played baseball and football and shot hoops in the yard; he was a crack shot with his BB gun. “I’ll probably go and get my leg cut off and I’ll be back,” he told Fran when he got his draft notice.

They told me about Jay. “I’ll always think of him as a saint,” Aunt Dorothy said. He was a quiet man, a hard worker who didn’t drink or smoke. Though he didn’t dance, he would drive his girlfriend to dances and wait in the car until it was time to drive her home.

And they told me about Tom, the mischievous one who loved pickles and playing cards (he was quite good at it) and girls. He was an altar boy, but he got into some scrapes-- such as the time he broke into a pool hall when he was in fifth grade, or the times he got caught smoking or borrowing homework from his buddies.

But “he would give you the shirt off his back,” said Uncle Joe. Tom worked in a garage and on a farm, at restaurants, at Civilian Conservation Corps camps and at a plant in Connecticut making bullets. The Army took him even though pneumonia had affected his lungs.

The telegrams the family received, notifying them of the brothers’ deaths, were sympathetic, in a bureaucratic kind of way: “The Secretary of War asks that I assure you of his deep sympathy in the loss of your son Private Thomas J. Baluh.”

And a letter in Jay’s file: “The significance of his heroic service to his country will be preserved and commemorated by a grateful nation.”

Fran remembers the messengers who delivered the news. They “came in quick and left in seconds,” he recalled. “They knew what they were delivering.” His sister Dorothy said the telegrams seemed to arrive one right after another.

When Danny, Jay and Tom came home in their caskets, the procession paused in front of their old house. “You’re home now,” their mother said. “Go ahead in.”

Life in that house was never the same.

Al, the fourth brother to serve during the war, retired as a sergeant in 1952. He would be the last to serve. When my father received his draft notice during the Korean War, his parents argued that their son was needed at home and that the Baluh family had given enough. He was deferred.

My grandmother poured her energy into her home, and baking. The aroma of bread from her oven would waft through the neighborhood. My grandfather, though, could not move on. After the boys died, he was frequently hurt at work, and retired in 1946 when he was in his 50s. He sat rocking on the porch--”a broken man,” Fran said.

He died in 1955.

There are no monuments to the Baluh boys. Their names are included among the 49 WWII dead on a brass plaque in the borough building. There is a stained-glass window in St. Stephen’s that reads: “In memory of parents John Sr. & Mary and John Jr., Thomas and Daniel Baluh.”

One miserable winter day, I went to the cemetery, my first visit since my grandmother died 20 years before. I located the graves the way we did when I was a kid.

First you find the water faucet, then walk a couple of rows back and a couple of plots to the left. There they were, with three bronze military insignias in front of the Baluh headstone flanked by two stone angels.

I pushed away some dirt and leaves to reveal each flat stone:

John T. Baluh Pennsylvania PFC 315 Inf 79 Inf Div World War II March 7, 1915 Sept. 16, 1944

Thomas J. Baluh Pennsylvania PVT Field Artillery World War II Feb. 8, 1917 Nov 19, 1943

Daniel E. Baluh Pennsylvania PFC 315 Inf 79 Inf Div World War II May 5, 1925 July 18, 1944