Diane Lafond Marler spent many hours trying to convince her brother, Raymond Lafond, to write down some of his memories of fighting in Europe in World War II.
He was reluctant, she said, because he sometimes felt guilty that he lived through the war when so many of the men who fought along side him died.
“He joined the paratroopers when he was 17,” she said. “He was just a kid.”
Eventually in 2006, just two years before his death, Marler got her brother to write a letter with his memories of his time at war. And now she wants to share it with others because, as a Navy nurse herself, she knows it tells what trying to survive in Europe in 1943 to 1946 was like.
Marler and her brother were just three years apart. He was her only sibling and as the older sibling in the household that had no father, she looked up to him. They grew up just outside Denver and their father died when she was just 18 months old, after getting lung disease from being gassed during his service in World War I in France.
“My mother couldn’t support both of us, so my brother went to Clayton College for Boys,” she said. “My mother did anything and everything she could to get by. She was a waitress, an elevator operator, and she got a $40 a month war widows pension.”
Her brother left the school in the fall of 1942 and enlisted in the Army. As he wrote in his letter, “All the young men were joining the Navy, Army, Marines or the Air Force.”
He became trained as a paratrooper, in one of the first paratrooper units that the Army had. He was with the 517th that eventually became the 101st Airborne. By May of 1943, he was sent to Naples, Italy.
“After a week camped in the foothills outside Naples, we loaded our landing craft and were sent to the coast,” his letter reads. “From there we climbed the mountains and attacked mountaintop villages to fight the Germans and we captured some of them.
“The weather was very warm and we had to be careful of our water supply. Every farm we came across, we looked for chickens, fruit and apples. It seemed we were always hungry or thirsty.”
At that time at home, Marler was in seventh grade and was working after school at a local hospital learning how to make beds and bring fresh water to patients.
“I was trying not to worry about my brother,” she said. “We hardly ever heard from him. We would see the stars in people’s windows. Some were blue and some were gold,” she said referring to stars hung to show that a family member was serving or had been killed in the war.
Everything at home was being rationed, she said. She had just one pair of shoes. Her mother went to work in a factory making bullets for the war.
“The young people were very patriotic,” she said. “Everyone pitched in and did something. We planted Victory Gardens because all the food was rationed and there was not much meat. When my shoes wore out, I had to take them to the store and get new soles put on them.”
Her brother had been moved on to Rome to train for the invasion of France.
“It was Aug. 7, 1943, … and it was a four hour (airplane) ride over rough sea. We finally jumped at about 3 a.m. the morning of Aug. 18. After my parachute opened up all I could see was blocked by the mist coming up in my face. I thought ‘My God, they have dropped us over the ocean.’ I was so scared. I threw out my rifle, helmet, rations and was trying to get my boots off when I hit the ground.”
His letter goes on to tell they they crossed wheat fields and gathered to begin their fight with the Germans who were attacking French villages. They cut phone lines, power lines and blew up bridges. He wrote that the entire regiment was spread across 15 miles of countryside and it took two weeks to get the 4,000 troops back together again.
“In December, the Germans broke through into Belgium on a 50-mile front. They shipped our entire regiment on a 300-mile nighttime truck convoy into Belgium to stop the Germans. On the second day the weather turned very cold, and the third day it snowed. They ran the tour engines, truck engines and jeep engines all night so they would not freeze up.
“The fighting was so bad with many casualties. We would look for a warm basement or a farmhouse. We heard two of our guys froze to death at night in the forest. We couldn’t build a fire at night. From then on every fifth man had to check at night to make sure everyone was awake.”
“The Battle of the Bulge had very high casualties. After one month our company of 200 men was down to 25. I was blown off my feet twice by mortar rounds and shot at many times, but never hit. My buddy and I were captured twice but we were lucky to escape at night.”
After a month, Lafond’s regiment was relieved and sent back to France for rest and recuperation.
Back in the states, Marler still worried about her brother.
“We would go six weeks and not hear from him,” she said. “There was once when he was trapped in a cave with nothing to eat.”
When she did hear from him, her brother would write about the good things like spending time in Paris on leave and would send her jewelry and perfume.
“There was a time when he had to be in the hospital because his feet almost froze off,” she said. “They offered him the Purple Heart, but he wouldn’t take it. He told them, ‘Give it to this nurse who is taking care of my buddy,’” Marler recalled.
Of her brother’s company, all but five of 200 were killed or wounded, his letter tells. He spent his last six months in Germany on guard duty, sometimes standing outside the room where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was working.
He returned home to Fort McArthur in California in January 1946.
Marler and her mother relocated to California. Marler studied to be a nurse at Cal State in Long Beach and became a Navy nurse. She married a Marine and eventually they were sent to Bremerton where they raised three children. They were married 60 years and her husband, Lawrence, just died about 18 months ago.
After the war, her brother was depressed, she said.
“He would just sit and stare,” she said. “My mother and I told him he had to get a job. So he went to work in the shipyard at Long Beach.”
Through her, he met a young woman who was a librarian and they began to date. Raymond and Ruth were married almost 50 years and she died about five years ago.
“After that, he had nobody,” she said. “He came to live near me.”
And it was that day in 2008, when she didn’t get her 7 p.m. phone call from her brother, that Marler knew something was wrong.
“He’d call and say ‘This is your brother…’ like I didn’t know that already,” she said. When the call didn’t come she went to check on him.
She found that he’d passed that afternoon from heart failure. But beside him was the daily menu at the nursing home where he lived. On the back of it, he had written something for her.
“It was the 23rd Psalm,” she said. “He’d written it from memory. And I knew that it was his way of telling me he knew it was his time to go.”
Diane Marler took the letter her brother had written to her and the scrapbook of his war memorabilia that she’d made for him and donated it to the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis. His paratrooper jumpsuit and dress uniform hang in one of the displays showing tribute to World War II.
In that display is a framed photograph of Lafond with the survivors from his unit that jumped into southern France.
Today, as a resident of a Silverdale area retirement center, Marler hopes that thinking back to what her brother and others who fought in World War II endured, will help young people become more patriotic.
“They sacrificed so much,” she said. “And they were just kids.”