An Old Soldier recalls war's tragedies

May 1, 2007
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

For three days, in daunting drifts, sheets of ice, and cold so bitter the water cooling the barrels of soldiers’ machine guns froze in its channels, Staff Sgt. Chester “Rudy” Rutigliano rode with his buddies in an open truck to Bastogne, Belgium. Earth was frozen, so foxholes were dug only as deep as the snow. The GIs were positioned at the portal of the bloodiest battle fought by American forces during World War II.

Before the “Battle of the Bulge” ended 40 days later, 19,276 Americans lay dead (six times the number killed in the war in Iraq as of April 11), 24,000 were captured or missing, and 43,493 were wounded. Rutigliano was among the fortunates in the last group, downed – temporarily – by a hand grenade.

Monday (April 9), Rutigliano sat erect in his West 9th Street, Del Rio, Texas, living room, chuckling over X-rays showing a bright, white spot, the grenade fragment never removed from his right leg. In the hallway, hangs a shadow-box containing Rutigliano’s Bronze Star, a Purple Heart medal, and a set of tarnished dog tags.

Before the vicious fighting ended with a stunning victory for Allied forces, Rutigliano and 83,000 Americans and British had defeated a desperate German force of more than 200,000. American commanders – Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton – and the British leader, Montgomery, pushed back the German salient, or “bulge” that had unexpectedly advanced into Allied lines before the counteroffensive started.

Rutigliano’s military career was less than two years old when he was ordered to the European theater. After his 18th birthday, he and four buddies dropped out of high school in Ridgeway, Penn. to volunteer.

Rutigliano was born August 19, 1923, in Crenshaw, Penn. where his dad was a coal miner, and later a leather tanner for shoe manufacture. The younger Rutigliano made the decision to volunteer for overseas duty, along with thousands of patriotic young men and women caught up in the indignation and anger over Nazi predations in Europe.

But his father voiced strong feelings about his branch of service, as Rutigliano trundled off to Erie, Penn. for his Armed Services physical. “Make sure you’re in the Army,” he admonished. “In the Navy, you die, and you die in the water. Air Force? You die up in the air. In the Army, if you die, you die on land, and that way we can have you back home.”

After training at Fort Jackson, S.C., and Camp McCain, Miss., Rutigliano and his unit, Company M, 346th Infantry Regiment, 87th “Golden Acorn” Infantry Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Frank L. Culin Jr., were transported to the theater of war aboard the British luxury liner Queen Elizabeth, retrofitted for troop-carrying. “We had 18,000 guys on that ship! We were all packed in there,” said Rutigliano, whose combat military career then began with this ocean passage.

In Europe, from Manchester, England (Nov. 1944), the 87th pushed up the English Channel through France, to the city of Metz. Staff Sgt. Rutigliano was non-commissioned officer in charge of a heavy weapons machine gun platoon of 36 men, most of whom would not survive the next few weeks.

In early fighting, the unit’s machine guns ran low on ammunition, and Rutigliano sent a soldier to the rear for re-supply. The GI never returned, but was spotted months later, bragging to Rutigliano that he’d spent the whole war with a beautiful French girl in a remote country house. Rutigliano detained the errant soldier, turning him in to the company commander, who ordered the man shot. “They took him off, and I just don’t know if they really killed him or not, but legally they could have,” Rutigliano said.

At Bastogne, Company M was attached to Company L, Infantry, to provide “overhead protection.” Quickly, a lieutenant platoon commander was killed, and Rutigliano was asked to accept a battlefield commission to assume command as a second lieutenant. “They couldn’t pronounce my last name – Rutigliano – so they gave me a nickname, said my name was now ‘Rudy’,” he said. He declined the commission. “I said, ‘Sir, give it to somebody else. I don’t want it.’”

A replacement officer finally arrived in a Jeep, and reprimanded Rutigliano for failing to salute, at which Rutigliano explained that, on the front lines neither saluting nor shiny uniform brass were permitted, thus avoiding the eyes and targets of enemy snipers. The new lieutenant complained to Rutigliano’s commander who “threw that lieutenant right to the ground and said ‘Don’t you ever salute on the front lines!’”

The junior officer later wore bright brass insignia, polished helmet, and spit-shined boots going into battle, and was instantly killed by a sniper’s bullet through the spiffy helmet. With this command vacancy repeated, Rutigliano was ordered to take command of the platoon. But his own heroism once again deflected the job he didn’t want.

Three days before the brevet commission was to become effective, Rutigliano was patrolling a street in Falkenstein, Germany. “All at once, there was a guy, threw a hand grenade out a window, and it landed right beside me. So I picked up the grenade, and I was going to throw it back up, but there was two little kids out in the window. Not to kill ‘em or anything, so I dropped the hand grenade, and jumped into a doorway, and it went off.

“So I came out, and hollered, ‘Anybody get hurt?’” Rutigliano said. His buddies asked if he was OK, and thought he was. “But later, I’m walking down the road, towards the guys, and I feel my leg wet, and I thought, heck, I must’ve wet my pants. But then I look back, and I see all these little red dots, and then down the front of my shoe was all full of blood.”

In a field hospital, surgeons told Rutigliano they had removed the “bullet” from his leg and discarded it, though he’d asked for it as a souvenir. Years later, Rutigliano discovered that nothing had been removed, because the grenade shrapnel was too close to a major nerve, threatening paralysis if it was damaged during surgery. Recent Val Verde Regional Medical Center X-rays reveal the 62-year-old fragment clearly.

In Belgium, Rutigliano said, two men in German uniforms jumped in front of him in frantic gestures of surrender, and he obliged, taking them prisoner. “SS” tattoos on their upper arms identified the men as officers of Hitler’s elite schutzstaffel, literally “protective force” that, toward the end of the war, built and operated concentration and extermination camps. Turning the captives in to his commanding officer, he was told, “You know what the order is. Any time you capture an SS, shoot ‘em.”

Rutigliano refused, saying there must be an explanation for their surrender, but his reticence only got him a threat of court martial. Two recent recruits, fresh from the States, were assigned the job, and took more pleasure in it than Rutigliano could stomach. The soldiers bragged, “We stopped the Jeep, and one was screaming, ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!’ I took my .45 out and – bang – blew his head off. The other guy turned around and he said ‘Heil Hitler’, and I walked down the road and got behind this .50 caliber machine gun, opened fire, and I cut him in two.” “And I said to him,” Rutigliano recalled, “‘You’re stupid!.’”

The unit commander offered this pair to fill two vacancies in Rutigliano’s platoon, and he declined. “I said, ‘I don’t want ‘em. Give ‘em to somebody else. I’d rather have less men than have these two guys with what they just did.’” An hour later, the company commander came around to investigate what happened, taking the platoon leader and the two gun-happy soldiers away. “I never found out what happened, because just then we got orders to attack Goldbrick Hill.”

At the orders of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., Rutigliano’s unit, the 346th Regiment, sped toward the Germans’ Siegfried Line, marked most conspicuously by two soaring hills, together dubbed “Goldbrick Hill.” The Line had to be penetrated to advance Allied forces deeper into Germany, and it was, but at a cost of 829 soldiers killed or wounded. Rutigliano’s platoon commenced the battle with 36 men. When the smoke cleared, only six remained standing.

“You know when I came back to the states, we got orders to regroup, get training, and go over to the Pacific and fight,” Rutigliano said. “We had a 30-day leave, and I went home, and that’s when they finally dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, and they surrendered.” Because of his wound he was not allowed to ship out to help clean up the tragic mess in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In 1989, Rutigliano and his wife, Rose, took a tour with veterans, seeing again the battlefields and cemeteries from the bloodiest struggle of the war. “We went all over Luxembourg, France, Belgium and Germany,” said Rose. “And all those battle sites and cemeteries are so carefully maintained and, too, all those thousands of white crosses!”

At another reunion, in Oklahoma City, a fellow veteran approached “Rudy” and Rose on the street, extending his hand and thanking Rutigliano profusely for being so tough in training for the rigors of war and soldiering. “He told me I saved his life by teaching him how to fight and stay alive.” Rose chimed in, “I told him Chet is not tough at all; he’s just a little pussycat! But this cat has nine lives, too.”

Rose Rutigliano’s oblique reference to her husband’s lifetime of near misses includes not only surviving the Battle of the Bulge with little more than a grenade fragment still in his leg, but also a terrific automobile crash, as well as a near-fatal accident at Del Rio National Bank. In the 1969 car wreck at St. Mary’s, Penn., Rutigliano’s vehicle was demolished, and he escaped, but sustained serious injuries.

The former soldier, grocer, butcher, and women’s clothier also became a teller at Del Rio National Bank while it was still locally-owned. Rutigliano rose to the position of vice president, when his fifth or sixth career was interrupted by a malfunctioning elevator.

“I was jack-of-all-trades at that bank, so I told ‘em I could fix it. I got the key, and put it into the door, and started pulling the doors apart, when they flew open, and I fell forward into the shaft.” Rutigliano landed hard on a steel railing twenty feet below, sustaining only seven broken ribs. “But then I had to retire after 18 years at the bank.”

“Rudy,” the soldier whose last name was unpronounceable to fellow mortals in combat, now busies himself with activities in the Rotary Club of Del Rio and the Elks Lodge. Rutigliano served on the Chamber of Commerce Red Carpet Ambassadors Committee for more than 30 years.

And he’s preparing for a big celebration. “Hey, on April 19, Rose and I will be married 60 years, and we’re having a big family party in Colorado Springs!”