tool name
closeSixty years ago, a train pulled into an English town, the last stop for a weary soldier eager for a kiss from a waiting nurse.
Little did he know they would be married within minutes.
John Schell, now an 81-year-old retired psychology professor in Ferguson Township, had come all the way from Czechoslovakia, where his division ended up after Germany surrendered. On June 21, 1945, unshaven and rumpled, he arrived on leave to wed his fiancée.
As soon as he stepped off, Lynn Schell whisked him away without so much as a hug.
She had realized their marriage certificate expired that day. It was late afternoon, and the church where the vicar and witnesses waited didn't have lights.
"So I grabbed him and pulled him into the cab and explained that we had to get to the church right away," said Lynn Schell, now 84. "We couldn't stop for anything."
They rushed down the road, reunited at last. He had survived an apocalyptic Christmas in a Luxembourg village. She had endured months of treating wounded bodies and broken spirits in Army hospitals.
Months apart couldn't cool their two-year courtship.
They just had to get to the church on time.
Christmas in the trenches
Eschdorf slumbered on Christmas Eve 1944. Toward the darkened houses walked a second lieutenant from Tyrone.
Company H of the 328th Infantry Regiment, 26th Division, already had been bloodied in the Moncourt Woods area of northern France and in house-to-house fighting that fall. Under a bright moon, John Schell stepped along a snowy highway in front of Task Force Hamilton, a reinforced battalion.
Its mission: Take the village and help relieve pressure on American paratroopers surrounded in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Intelligence had figured a comparable force of Germans, about 500 men, faced the task force. Instead, three times as many waited.
Schell found out the truth once he shot a sentry.
"He saw us coming and, of course, I saw him and I hauled off and got him first," Schell said. "But he jumped up and ran, so I didn't kill him. Then all hell broke loose."
Christmas morning revealed a besieged task force.
"By the time daylight hit, we were holed up in these barns, basements of houses," Schell said. "We were all over the town because we just scattered."
Schell's platoon found itself pinned down in a barn. German tank shells crumbled the stone walls. One burst trapped four men in rubble, seriously wounding them. Schell began yanking them out.
He had the last by the collar when a German "potato masher" grenade flew through a window. All Schell could do was turn away.
Both men were blown into the next room. Tin shrapnel riddled Schell's right hand and side. The other soldier died.
As morning wore on, the platoon dodged into buildings and peered outside through cracks and holes. Its members watched captured GIs march by with their hands over their heads. Schell and his captain pondered surrender but decided to wait until evening.
At one point, the captain appeared, riding atop a Shermantank he managed to find. His men, spotting an enemy Tiger tank drawing a bead, shouted and pointed to no avail.
One round zeroed in.
The dazed captain, who had been blown off the turret, was pulled to safety. Nothing could be done for the burning tank crewmen falling from a bottom hatch.
By early afternoon, all seemed hopeless. A German assault had been repelled, with Schell emptying his carbine point-blank as a barn door burst open. From an attic, he picked off another soldier.
But wounded and crying men lay all over. In desperation, officers radioed the rear lines for artillery on their position.
"They said, 'We cannot tell where you are and where the Germans are,' " Schell said. "We said, 'It doesn't much matter. If we don't get it, we're dead.' "
They finally got it.
The village exploded. Americans were killed, but the Germans pulled back. Under cover of darkness, the remnants of the task force retreated.
Five men were too injured to move. Schell promised them he would return soon.
That night, however, no one was in shape to go back.
Schell's discovery the next morning still haunts him. In pain, he drove a jeep to Eschdorf, only to learn from other troops that a tank outfit had already found the men. Just a couple were alive.
Schell received a Silver Star for his actions that Christmas. But he lost 17 men in his platoon.
"It was the worst day in my life," he said. "After that, the war was a piece of cake."
Beginning of a romance
Lynn Schell entered nursing school straight from a Minnesota farm. Better pay drew her from Minneapolis to a job in Merced, Calif.
It also led to romance.
After war began, she stayed in California and enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps as a first lieutenant. She was writing a letter to her sister one day in the officers club of a base when John Schell walked up and introduced himself.
New Year's Eve 1943, they got engaged.
She left first in the spring, to Southhampton, England, and the 82nd General Hospital.
"We had to put up the hospital completely," she said. "The nurses had to build a hospital. We had to design the wards. ... We just had to use our imaginations."
Eventually, doctors and nurses began leaving. Word spread quickly: D-Day was coming.
"We figured out that they were the ones being taken and being prepared for the evacuation hospitals in Europe," Lynn Schell said.
An alarm, the hospital staff was told, meant everyone to their stations immediately. At 2 one morning, it rang.
"We all grabbed our uniforms and reported to duty," Schell said. "And it wasn't too long after that when we started receiving the wounded."
The Allies had landed at Normandy.
For Schell, the night began months of long shifts, sometimes lasting 12 hours straight. She saw only the worst cases, the men who would be going home if they survived. She did what she could for them.
"It was hard," she said. "But on the other hand, you were glad they were there and being helped."
Later on, she transferred to the 312th Station Hospital in Chester.
"There, we received more of the emotional casualties ... those who had just fallen apart," she said. "They just couldn't take it anymore."
Away from the wards, there wasn't much to do except rest. Most of the nurses weren't in the mood for anything else.
Except for Schell.
As fate would have it, her sweetheart was stationed 30 miles away. They met weekly until he shipped out to France in September 1944.
Unable to reveal his whereabouts in letters, John Schell did the next best thing.
"What I usually told her was, 'Look at the maps that they show you for the advance of the Third Army. That's where we are.' "
A reunion
She waited as he fought across Germany. On a June day, the waiting ended.
"I had been on night duty, and I was asleep and the phone rang," she said. "I was called to the phone and he said that he was arriving at Southhampton at 2 o'clock that afternoon."
John Schell and his driver had bounced across Europe in a jeep to the port of Le Havre, where he caught a ship. A train ride later, he found himself speeding to his wedding.
A hospital administrator and his girlfriend had agreed to be witnesses. Everyone dashed in just before 6 p.m., the closing time, the groom in his combat boots and overseas cap, the bride in her dress uniform.
And like that, they were married.
They celebrated back at the hospital with a dinner of powdered eggs and toast. John Schell was set to sleep in the bachelor officers' quarters until a doctor chided him. Married couples, he said, weren't supposed to be separated on their wedding night.
Off they went into town, to the train station hotel. There were no vacancies, but if a Royal Air Force officer didn't show up, they could have his reservation.
He walked in the door.
After consulting with the clerk, he came over to the Schells. He would be honored to give up his room and sleep in the bar, he said, on one condition: That they let him buy their first drink as a couple.
"Whatever it was, we drank it," Lynn Schell said. "We were just happy we were going to be able to spend the night together."
Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.
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