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By Al Zdon
A large display in the Rice County Historical Museum in Faribault honors Stewart Chester as the most decorated World War II soldier from that county.
The display contains Chester's
medals including a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and many others.
Not bad for a guy who served the first five years of his Army career stateside and didn't actually get into combat until the end of 1944.
Stewart Chester can tell stories with the best of them. He seems to have an endless supply of funny, poignant, surprising or horrifying stories from this time in the service. He will keep you entertained for hours.
He's 83, but he looks like he's maybe 60, and he doesn't seem to have lost one detail of his trials and tribulations while serving as an enlisted man and an officer in the Army.
But while Chester will talk at
length about what it was like to be a military policeman in the dark alleys of the red light district in Tacoma, Washington, he is reticent to talk about the events that led to his receiving a Silver Star, two
Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart in his six months of combat. There's also some mystery about whether he earned a second Silver Star, another Bronze Star and another Purple Heart.
"Let's just say I got one of
each, and that's enough," Chester said in an interview in his Northfield apartment.
Chester grew up on a farm near Cannon City, and couldn't wait to get off the farm. "Farming is wonderful thing, but I wasn't a
farmer." His father was Fred Chester, who served for a time as a county commissioner, and he and his wife, Mabel, had three boys. Stewart was the youngest.
Even as a young lad, Stewart was known to be a little on
the far side of feisty. There is a family memory that whenever or wherever a fight broke out, Stewart only had one question before getting involved, "Which side was losing?" That was the side he joined in on.
In
1939, Chester's brother, Fred, was already serving as a mess sergeant in the Army at Ft. Lincoln, near Bismarck, N.D. Stewart decided that was the mark for him. "I wanted to get a little adventure in my life.
I didn't know there was a world war coming that would last six years, at least for me."
"I lied to the registrar of deeds and had him jog my age a little bit so I could get in." The Army allowed him to sign up,
but then made the discovery that he was a few weeks short of his 18th birthday. "They kept me busy for a week or two washing wall lockers at Ft. Snelling until I was legal to join."
Chester got his wish and was
sent off for training at Ft. Lincoln. The fort had some history as an Indian-fighting outpost in an earlier day. "They still had a sign up that said, 'No shooting of buffalo from the barracks windows.' That was the
fort that Custer left from to attack the Sioux. That was a bad mistake."
Chester's brother sternly warned him that he would not get any preferential treatment as a family member. As it turned out, his brother was
later busted for an infraction of military discipline, and it wasn't long before Stewart outranked him. "He could never catch up with me so he quit and joined the Navy." Fred served for 23 years as a sailor.
Chester's next assignment was to Ft. Lewis, Washington, and he vividly recalls the train ride west. "I was in an open baggage car peeling potatoes. I could see all that beautiful countryside going by, like Glacier
Park. I thought, 'Now I'm really getting someplace.'"
He joined the 15th Infantry Regiment of the Third Infantry Division, later the home of America's most decorated soldier, Audie Murphy. The regiment was among
the first American units to practice extensively for amphibious landings, and Chester got a taste of being aboard ships. Also, at about this time, he was picked to play a soldier as an extra in the Wallace Beery
movie, "Bugle Calls."
He also got a taste of what he calls the "Army Way."
"We landed at Ft. Ord and we were making our way through the darkness and sage brush and garbage inland. We were marching in single
file, and the word came back, 'Watch the dead guy. Watch the dead guy.' I had no idea what they were talking about. All of sudden in the path, there was a body we had to step around. It was a sergeant that had
dropped dead of a heart attack. This guy had been in the Army for 20 years, but they weren't even trying to pick up his body. We were just stepping around it."
Chester's estimate of the Army's readiness for war
at that point was not positive. The weapons were of World War I vintage, and the radios were primitive. He remembers using metal tent poles to launch mortars. "The tanks were small and only had 37 millimeter guns.
But that didn't matter because the tanks always stopped short because they overheated."
During this time, he volunteered to be a motorcycle escort for the military convoys between Washington and California. It
was a good way to see the country, and Chester claims to have had "a girl in every port" in the cities along the route. He remembers one of his fellow escorts missing a curve, driving into a barn at top speed,
crashing against the far wall and killing himself.
During his stint as a military policeman, he worked the more tawdry areas that soldiers would frequent on their time off. One of those places was the red light
district in Tacoma. The GIs would enter the whorehouses through the front doors, and exit out the backdoors into the alleys where they often would get mugged by local hoodlums. Chester's job was to protect the
soldiers and get them back to base with their wallets intact. "I'd be involved in about five fights a night."
Another part of his job was to find AWOL soldiers and bring them home.
About this time he joined
the boxing team, a sport at which he excelled. The training came in handy one night when he was called outside the barracks because someone wanted to meet with him. "When I got out there, the guy stuck a gun in my
face and told me to leave his girlfriend alone. I grabbed the gun, and he wasn't able to shoot it. I leveled him with one punch."
It turns out that the man had found Chester's raincoat in his car and had put two
and two together. The problem was that Chester had loaned the raincoat to a friend, and had no idea about the girlfriend. "I told him I'd kill him if he ever came back. But a few minutes later, he drove back and
asked for his gun. I dropped the shells out and gave it back to him."
Chester spent time in the Philippines, and was involved in a landing in the Aleutians after the war started. The regiment had moved
permanently to Ft. Ord, and during this time he was convinced by his superiors that he should apply for Officer's Candidate School. By this time, in 1942, the United States was at war and the Army was desperate for
high quality officers.
"At first I rejected the idea. I didn't want to leave the guys, and I didn't want to leave my company. They were good people."
Eventually, he gave into the pressure to apply. Despite
his 10th grade education, he passed the tests and the board interview and was sent to Ft. Benning, Georgia, for OCS.
"I didn't get off to a really good start. They assigned us to these hutments. I went to
headquarters and got my bunk assignment, but when I got to my hut, there was already gear lying on the bunk. I asked the guy whose stuff it was if he had a bunk assignment, and I asked him to move his gear. He just
looked at me and said he'd move it when he got his assignment."
That was not the answer Chester was hoping for. A few seconds later, the other man's foot locker was sailing through space to the muddy road outside
the hutment. A few seconds after that there was a fight.
"Later, the C.O. called me in. He said, 'Chester, you're off to a roaring start. You've already put a guy in the dispensary.'"
Things settled down after
that, and Chester managed to finish third in his class, graduating in December, 1942. He linked up with a fellow candidate who was strong in math. The friend helped Chester with the math, and Chester helped him with
the Army tactics and other information that he knew first hand.
The course was 90 days, but Chester was extended for further training. He said that even at that time he wanted to get into the newly formed
Airborne training, but instead he took an assignment with the 4th Motorized Infantry Division in Augusta, Georgia, as a second lieutenant. The division was trained to travel quickly in halftracks, and Chester was
assigned to the motor office. He said part of his job was to figure out how to get the halftracks on the railroad flatcars.
His next assignment was at Ft. Dix in New Jersey where he trained soldiers on how to
take fixed fortifications and work through minefields. The Army was already planning on how to crash through Germany's vaunted Siegfried Line.
In Washington and Colorado, he had done quite a bit of mountain
training, both as part of his army training but also because he liked it. After Ft. Dix, he was sent to West Virginia to help set up the Seneca School for training special units in mountain warfare. By this time, he
was a first lieutenant. "I had to set up the railhead for the troops coming into train. A lot of those troops eventually became the 10th Mountain Division. My best friend was another instructor who had been a guide
on the Matterhorn."
During this time, he also graduated from Pack Mule School, another necessity in mountain fighting. He also met his future wife, Rosella, while in West Virginia. They eventually had four
children.
Meanwhile, the years went by with the United States at war both in the Pacific and in Europe. Did Chester get anxious about getting into the fighting? "No, I wasn't antsy at all. I had the world by the
ass. I was enjoying myself."
That enjoyment was over in June of 1944 when the Allies landed at Normandy and the Airborne units took a pounding. They were in need of qualified officers.
"I'd always wanted to be
in the Airborne because they did their fighting and got out. They weren't kept on the line constantly like other units. I'll take my chances. Plus they got an extra $100 a month for jumping."
Chester was sent to
England in July 1944 for training. In addition to the regular training, he had to do five additional jumps because every officer had to be jump master. "I had a wonderful time in England," he remembers wistfully.
That time was over when he got his orders to become a part of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment. During the war, the 507th was assigned to the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne and it spent most of its time with
the 17th Airborne. Chester has all three patches among his memorabilia.
"They had a tough time at Normandy. They landed in swamps and completely out of the drop zones. They were isolated. Their officers were all
wiped out."
During Operation Market Garden, the 507th was kept in reserve. In December, 1944, though, as the Germans launched a major attack through the Ardennes, the 507th went into action. "It was the Battle of
the Bulge, and that's where I started getting serious about war."
The first step, though was to get the 507th into the action from where they flew into France. A convoy was strung out along a road and it was
attacked by a group of German ME109s. Chester got his men out of the trucks and into the ditch. As they were about to get back on the trucks, they could hear the air attack coming around again.
"One of my
superior officers told me to get my men back on the trucks, but I told him I wouldn't until the attack was over. He said he was going to report me to the colonel, and I told him to go ahead, but my people were not
getting back in those trucks."
The officer stomped off to the convoy, and was killed when the planes attacked again. When it was over, Chester ordered his troops back into what trucks remained, and off they went
to battle.
Their first assignment was to guard a bridge over the Meuse River. "I was pretty good at demolition, and we had the bridge mined with picric acid."
Later, Chester's unit closed in on Bastogne to
help break the German siege around that critical city. At one point, part of the 507th was pinned down by enemy fire. A Jeep arrived with the shortest officer Chester had ever seen. He was a forward artillery
spotter.
"He was a little major, and I mean little. Even his helmet looked too big for him. He stood up in the jeep and called in the artillery. Just then a couple of rounds of German 88s came in and missed us by
about 20 feet. The driver and I were both under the Jeep, but the major just stood up there coordinating the artillery on the radio. I yelled up at him, 'If you weren't so short, you wouldn't be doing that.'"
For his actions on Dec. 26, 1944, Stewart was awarded a Bronze Star. The ceremony wasn't held until four years later. Chester declined to comment on how he won the medal.
A few days later, Chester was leading an
engineering officer through some contested country. "There were snipers all over the place. We came to a bridge and I headed below to walk through the creek. The engineer asked me what I was doing, and I said if he
was smart, he'd take the low road too. But he didn't, he decided to walk over the bridge and keep his feet dry, and splat, he was dead. I had to crawl on that bridge to get him off, but he was already dead. There's
some things you just don't do in combat."
Near Houffalise on Jan. 19, 1945, the U.S. had the Germans in retreat, but the fighting was tough, and Chester's men were running out of ammunition. They had run up
against a German position where they were outmanned and outgunned. "The Germans were so close, we couldn't use artillery support. We were getting hit hard. Everybody was wounded, even the medic was hit."
Chester
didn't want to go into detail about his actions in the next few minutes as he carried his wounded back to safety. "I was all over the place. Somebody had to do it." Reports said that he went out five times in the
face of automatic weapons fire to bring back his wounded men. On the fifth trip out, he was hit in both the shoulder and the leg.
The write-up for his Silver Star put it this way: "First Lt. Chester showed
superior leadership and sound tactical skill as he checked the position and fire of his men and encouraged them to high achievement. Without regard for his personal safety, he repeatedly exposed himself to enemy
fire to help his wounded and to supervise with the withdrawal of his men in the face of superior enemy fire power. His actions were in accordance with the highest standards of military conduct."
During one foray
to get wounded, a German bullet hit Chester's helmet, ripping it up, but leaving Chester unscathed. He was angry, though, because the bullet had also destroyed his spare pair of socks that he kept dry in his helmet.
"War really gets down to serious sometimes."
Chester knew he had to get his beleaguered force out of the area, but that meant exposing them to more enemy fire.
"I figured, 'The heck with it, Chester, I might as well go, if I get killed, I get killed.' So I stood up. The men were all yelling, 'Get down, lieutenant.' But I said, 'Let's get the heck out of here.' And they followed me over a ridge. That's what war is all about. You take your shots."
Chester's specialty was in taking out combat patrols. "We knew we had to deplete these people. We knew they had better weapons than we did."
One of those weapons was the panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapon. "Our
bazookas didn't work that well. The Germans kept getting bigger and bigger tanks. But that panzerfaust was the best anti-tank weapons ever invented. It was something we could carry along and feel a little bit better
about our chances."
The unit walked to Luxembourg before being taken off the line, and was finally able to get some rest and hot food for the first time in weeks.
One thing Chester said he found helpful
during that time for his unit was to steal Jeeps when he could. "We would strip off the hoods because that's where the numbers were. Then we'd scratch any other markings off the bumpers and wherever else they were.
They were great for moving men and ammo around."
The next stop was Cleaveaux, near the Siegfried Line. As they neared their destination, they came to a crossroads where the signs had been destroyed. "There was a
soldier at the crossroads, sitting like he was on guard. I went up to him and asked him which way to go. When he didn't answer, I noticed he was frozen, stiff as a board. I just said, 'I guess I don't need
directions, I'm going the right way anyway.'"
While guarding the outpost near the German border, Chester managed to get into a firefight with American troops. "One of our sentries noticed there were people down
in the valley where they shouldn't be. They were in a position where we just couldn't let them go by, so I went down there. I gave them the challenge with the dealies of the day, but there was no response. All of a
sudden, we were in a firefight."
Chester took two hand grenades, pulled the pins, and was about to toss them over a ridge, when he saw the silhouette of an American helmet in the snow alongside the road. "I
yelled out, 'Who the heck are you people?'"
He was suddenly confronted by an American soldier with his rifle leveled at him a few feet away. "I told him if he shot me we were both going to die. It was at this
point everybody figured out it was Americans against Americans and there were orders of cease fire all over the place."
Chester had a little problem, though. He was still holding two live grenades with the pins
pulled. The soldiers began to scramble around in the dark for something to replace the pins, and finally one of the men came up with a length of telephone cable that they snipped into the right size pieces.
It
turned out that they were an American patrol had wondered about three miles from where it was supposed to be. The final irony of the story was that when Chester got back to his command post and tried to telephone
the report into the company headquarters, he couldn't do so. The communications wire had been clipped to use in his hand grenades.
Around this time, a young German soldier came walking up the road and
surrendered. As it turned out, he was a chauffeur for a colonel. "He said that that the Germans were under so much pressure that they never got any sleep. He had fallen asleep on duty and been warned that the next
time that happened, he would be shot. He thought he'd take his chances and surrender rather than be shot."
As spring came to Europe in 1945, the Germans and 507th took up positions on either side of a river at
one point. Each morning, the Germans, just out of rifle range of the Americans, would do calisthenics. "There was this one officer, he must have thought he was pretty nervy. He'd stand with his back to us, and lead
his men in morning exercises. It turns out, though, that we had captured this German anti-tank gun that shot armor-piercing bullets. It had an unbelievable range, and one of our guys lined up that officer. Poof, he
was gone. It was the last time they did calisthenics in front of us."
Chester got to participate in a real jump when the 507th jumped to the other side of the Rhine. "It was a day jump into open terrain. It was
brutal. We lost over 300 men that day. But we did our job and cleared out those little towns over there. We didn't come to play, we came to be bad. The whole British Army was coming across the Rhine."
Somewhere
in this battle, Chester earned additional medals for his exploits, but again he is loathe to talk about them.
When the war ended, he then served in the army of occupation in Belgium and Germany, and he worked
with people who had been in the labor and concentration camps. "We had to be careful how we would feed them. They hadn't had real food for so long. Even our rations were too rich for them. We had these drums of
soup, but we'd have to cut it by about 5-1 so they could eat it."
Another part of their duty was to keep these released prisoners from taking revenge. "We had to disarm them to stop them from taking revenge on
the German people." Eventually, the Americans gathered the camp survivors into groups of similar nationality so they could be repatriated to their own countries.
On their way back through France on the railway
cars, the paratroopers would sometimes buy wine from the locals as they rolled on through. They came to find out, though, that the Frenchmen would sometimes cut the wine with water. "Now these were the worst the
U.S. had to offer. You didn't want to screw around with these guys. I was watching as the train went around a bend, and one of these French guys ran up to the boxcar with a bottle of wine. All of a sudden a huge arm
came out and just snatched this guy up into the boxcar. A little while later he was flying through the air. I guess he must have cut the booze."
Chester came down with hepatitis about this time. "I was as yellow
as a canary." They sent him back first to Paris and then to England where he was hospitalized for a month.
When he got out in November, 1945, Chester bought a farm in West Virginia, where his wife was from, but
he found that he was no better a farmer than when he had lived in Minnesota. He rejoined the Army in 1947, but he had already resigned his commission. He went back in as a first sergeant.
In April 1950, after
spending too much time away from his family, he quit the Army again. His timing was fairly remarkable because two months later the North Koreans flooded over the border and the Korean War began.
The challenges in
his life, however, were not over. He contracted polio in 1952 and he still finds it a challenge to walk, partly because of the beating his feet and ankles took from jumping out of airplanes and from mountain
training.
In his working career, Chester was employed by Sheldahl, and spent much of his time working on projects for NASA including atmospheric balloons.
He lived in Dundas, Lakeville and now resides in Northfield.
With his Silver Star and other decorations, Chester is eligible to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C., but he says he won't.
"With my luck, they'd bury me next to Bill Clinton."
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