David Silverman: The day that East met West

By Chris Rosenblum

Comrades in arms, they shook hands and grinned. Songs broke out.

When American and Soviet troops met finally at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, the war in Europe was almost over.

But not all the Russians were in a celeb ratory mood.

"They were on the other side of the river," said David Silverman. "I guess as revenge for what the Germans did to their villages, they burned. You could see the towns burning on the other side. They set fire to them."

Silverman, 82, of State College, witnessed the historic merger of the Western and Eastern fronts as a sergeant in the 272nd Regiment of the 69th Division. To this day, he can't blame the Red Army for retaliating.

"If it had been our homes that had been destroyed, we would have maybe done the same thing," he said.

Others in his division greeted the Soviets outside the German town of Torgau. Silverman had different orders. Company D of the 1st Battalion set up its machine guns along a nearby road to provide security for top brass from both sides traveling to meetings.

"I was surprised how many horse-drawn wagons they had. Our (transportation was) all trucks," he said. "And then they had women MPs with submachine guns."

It was his fifth year in the Army. Two days after his 18th birthday in 1940, unable to afford college, he enlisted in New Jersey. Partly, he had his eye on Signal Corps Radio Technician School.

But he could see war looming with Nazi Germany, and being Jewish, he wanted to be ready for the fight. Instead of school, though, he shipped out to Iceland.

Arriving in September 1941, he helped form a supply depot for radio and telephone equipment. He had just returned from guard duty when news came of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

America was at war, but Silverman battled mainly the North Atlantic chill for another two years. A 1943 transfer led him to a training program at Syracuse University. Four months after he started, the Army cut short his engineering studies, canceling the program. It needed infantrymen more.

Silverman, assigned to a heavy-machine-gun squad, trained for jungle warfare. So, naturally, he wound up in England in the fall of 1944.

By January, he had arrived in France, riding in open trucks in blizzards, staying in ruined houses and scrounging for fresh eggs on farms.

In Belgian towns scarred by the Battle of the Bulge, he saw evidence of the recent combat -- German corpses, burned-out equipment. Then it was his turn on the front line.

At night in the thick Eifel Forest, two-man sentry posts peered into the pitch-black darkness for enemy patrols. Artillery whistled overhead. Eventually, someone had to fetch the relief from the log pillboxes. Silverman often pulled the job.

"It was scary going through there, trying to find your way back to your dugout," Silverman said. He didn't stay in the woods for long.

As the Allied armies advanced east, the 69th took one town after another. In between, Silverman lugged the tripod of a .30-caliber, water-cooled mac hine gun on his back -- a leg across each shoulder and the third resting on his pack. During assaults, his squad would first pepper selected targets, then follow behind riflemen to prepare for counterattacks.

"We didn't sit there like we saw in the movies when I was a kid, the machine gun sweeping back and forth," he said. "That wasn't the way it was."

From knolls, once from behind gravestones in a cemetery, he set up his gun. In one town, he fired from a second-story window at German positions across a river.

"It was a small room, and the noise was deafening," he said.

Throughout March and April, he moved across Germany in a jeep -- to flames consuming Kassel; to a bitter fight for Bettenrode; to the smashed city of Leipzig, where warning sirens wailed before his division attacked. Some towns offered more than resistance.

"We ran into places where they had wine, so we could live it up for a while," Silverman said. "It was kind of novel to be in houses when we captured a town, rather than living in pup tents or foxholes."

Unlike some of his buddies, he saw little of the peacetime occupation. His length of service earned him an early trip home by way of France and a "cigarette camp," one of the bases named after popular brands.

Thanks to the GI Bill, he finally became an engineer. Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he went on to a career that included work for the Apollo spacecraft. He raised four children with his first wife, then remarried after her death.

And it all started on a May day when the Third Reich finally collapsed.

Silverman remembers no celebrations in his outfit, among men who had paid dearly for the news.

"I guess, after so long, you get a little bit numbed down to anything too emotional," he said. "You take them as they come."

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.