John Nesbitt: A painful ticket home

By Ron Bracken

John Nesbitt called out for help, but the sound of his voice was swallowed up by the Hurtgen Forest. He was alone in the inky night, hurt and far from home.

"I couldn't see my hand in front of my face," Nesbitt recalled. "I called out for a while, but no one came. Everyone took off (when the shelling began). They couldn't find me. No one could."

So the lanky 20-year-old from State College did the only thing he could.

"I lay there all night," he said. "I don't think I slept much. I really don't know how I passed the night. Nothing happened. I just laid there hoping someone would find me in the morning. I don't know that I felt too scared.

"And I wasn't in pain unless I moved. Fortunately, the shrapnel didn't hit an artery. If it had, I wouldn't be here."

The shrapnel was from a mortar shell that had landed too close to the newly arrived replacement in Company L, 60th Infantry, 9th Division.

It ended his war, or at least his combat experience, the day after it started.

Nesbitt, who had joined the reserves, had been pursuing his civil engineering degree at Penn State when, in May 1943, the reserves were activated. He followed the usual path, going to Fort Meade, Md., then on to Camp Wheeler, Ga., where he spent 16 months.

"I had good grades, so they sent me to ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program)," recalled Nesbitt, who, upon returning home, graduated from Penn State with a degree in civil engineering and went on to get his master's and doctorate from MIT. "They took a group of us and shipped us to NCO (noncommissioned officers) school. They made us corporals and sent us back to the battalion to train recruits."

But in the months following D-Day, the demand for replacements in the European theater ended Nesbitt's days in Georgia. He shipped out in September 1944, and after a long, circuitous journey, ended up in Aachen, Germany, with the 9th Division.

Like so many replacements, he was alone in a crowd. He knew no one; no one knew him. As a combat rifleman, he was just a tiny, expendable piece of the war machine, plopped down in Belgium. He was a long way from 250 S. Gill St.

Even now, almost 61 years later, Nesbitt remembers the sequence of events that altered his life forever.

"I arrived near the front lines on Friday, Oct. 13, 1944," he said. "They took me to the front lines on Saturday afternoon. They told us we were on the Siegfried Line. I had never heard of it before.

"The company was attacking a pillbox when I got there. We had a tank helping us, shelling the pillbox, but it got held up. Someone said they had tried to put a 76 mm shell in a 75 mm gun and it got stuck.

"But finally the Germans gave up. I don't know how many were in there -- 10 or 20, I guess -- and they needed someone to take them back to headquarters."

This is where Nesbitt violated the long-standing military dictum. He volunteered.

"I had just come from headquarters, so I knew where it was," he said.

But he never got there.

A mortar shell penetrated the dense forest, and shrapnel hit Nesbitt. It broke both of his femurs just above the knee. The shell had done exactly what it was designed to do.

"Mortars are supposed to cripple, not kill," he explained. "The same shell got one of the prisoners. I don't know how that shell got down through those trees."

When it did, Nesbitt's war ended after his having fired "just a few rifle shots at that pillbox," leaving him alone in the dark, wondering if help would ever come.

"The next morning, I looked around and there were the medics. They came looking for me," he said. "They had been told I was out there. They gave me a shot of morphine and tried to pick me up and put me on a stretcher. I think you could have heard me yelling all the way back to State College.

"So they gave me another shot of morphine and put me on a stretcher, put me on a jeep. There I was -- it was a beautiful Sunday morning, P-47s were flying overhead, and I didn't have a care in the world."

Nesbitt's first stop was at a field hospital where his wounds were evaluated. "Someone told me I had a ticket home," he recalled.

He did. But the trip had several layovers, including one in Paris, where he received his Purple Heart, and another in a hospital near Ipswich, England, before he was put aboard a ship that eventually brought him back to the United States and a hospital at Fort Dix, N.J. That's where the full body cast was removed and he began to walk again. That's where he was when the war in Europe ended in May 1945.

"I remember several of us were sitting on our beds playing cards, either bridge or pinochle," he said. "We celebrated (V-E Day) by switching games."

Nesbitt's return to Penn State was delayed by a semester when he rebroke his left leg when he and a bunch of fraternity brothers were kicking a football around in the backyard of the TKE house.

Having earned his doctorate, Nesbitt went to work in the private sector before returning to Penn State, where he became a member of the College of Engineering faculty in 1953. He remained there until he retired in 1984, although he taught one course for 10 more years before finally stepping down officially in 1994.

Today, his Purple Heart and a photo of him in uniform hang in a frame on the wall of his College Heights home. They are his mementos of his short-lived war experience.

"I like to think I saw the war, didn't like it and left," he laughed.