By Al Zdon

Marvin Hackbarth hates war.                      His experiences as an infantryman in Italy in World War II have left him convinced that there is no greater evil on earth than war.
He saw things he would rather have not seen. He did things he didn't want to do. And he lost friends that could never be replaced.
And he still has nightmares. "Now they call it PTSD. I know people expect that it would get better with time, but it hasn't. It hasn't at all."

Hackbarth grew up in the Minnesota rural community of Cosmos as a "town kid," the son of the area's farm implement dealer. He graduated from Litchfield High School in 1939, but even before graduation he had enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard.
"Part of the reason I joined was that I was patriotic. I thought it was the right thing to do for my country. Both my brother and sister joined the service. That's how people were in those day.
"The other part was because it was the Depression and the little bit of money you could get from the Guard meetings was important. Money was hard to come by."
The approach of war was clear to him. "There was the tremendous bombing of England. We'd turn on the radio every day and hear news of Hitler marching through Belgium, France and Poland. It was just a matter of time before we were in the war."
On Feb. 10th, 1940, Hackbarth's unit, Company B of the 135th Infantry, was called to active duty. The unit was headquartered in Hutchinson.
Company B trained and slept in the old Hutchinson Armory and then was sent to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, to join the 34th Division, made up of men mainly from Minnesota and Iowa. "It was a brand new camp with lots of mud. We slept in five-man tents." The training went on for 10 months as the United States teetered on the brink of war.
On Dec. 7th, 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor settled the matter, and Hackbarth's company was sent to Pensacola, Florida, to guard the communications centers there for two weeks.
During his time at Camp Claiborne, Hackbarth decided he was wanted to get into the action a little faster, and he tried to transfer to the Marines. When that failed, he applied to get into the newly formed 101st Airborne, but his company wouldn't let him go. Finally, he applied to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps and passed the test.
"I got my orders to report, though, when we were in Northern Ireland. Naturally, they wouldn't let me go. At the time, I didn't realize how fortunate I was. If I had gone to any of those places, I probably wouldn't be here today."
The 34th Division in 1942 traveled to Fort Dix in New Jersey and then on to Northern Ireland for more training and waiting. "Company B was all broken up by that time. I was assigned to Company H in the 133rd Infantry. It was a heavy weapons company, and we trained on machine guns, mortars, and BARs. Most of the company was from Iowa, and they called me the 'stump jumper from Minnesota.'"
The training intensified in Northern Ireland, with the company running at least 10 miles a day, seven days a week. On one forced march, the men went 36 miles without a break.
"We slept in sleeping bags. They gave us straw to put in mattress covers. And the food was absolutely terrible. It was British rations. They gave us sugar once, and the next day we asked for more. They asked us how we had used a whole week's ration of sugar in one day."
On one exercise, the company broke all the existing Army records for a speed march, and word filtered up to Gen. Eisenhower. As a reward, he made the company his headquarters guard when the Division went to war. "They called us the 'Palace Guard.' We didn't think too much of that. We were a fighting unit."
After a long stay near Swindon, England, the division shipped out to North Africa. Because the company was assigned to headquarters, it didn't land until about two weeks after the initial landings in Algiers.
Hackbarth was a sergeant by this time, and his platoon was given a number of different jobs around Algiers. At one point, they were the fire guard for the headquarters at the St. George Hotel.
"We had some guys who had been in reform school before they got in the Army. In fact, they joined the Army to get out of reform school. One of these guys came up to me one night and gave me a brand new Reader's Digest. He said, 'I just stole it from General Eisenhower's room.' He thought he was doing me a big favor. I told him to put it back right away, and hope he didn't get caught doing it."
Hackbarth did have one major encounter with Gen. Eisenhower. "Our rooms were in the attic of the St. George, and Eisenhower was on the second floor. I was heading up to my room, taking two or three stairs at a time, when Eisenhower came around the corner of the landing. I hit him square in the chest with my shoulder. He just went 'woof' as the breath went out of him. I really hit him hard. I picked myself up, saw all those stars, saluted, and got the heck out of there.
"I can truthfully say that I made contact with General Eisenhower."
Another of Hackbarth's memories of those days was when General of the Army George C. Marshall came to visit and held a press conference. "I wasn't in the room, but I talked with the reporters afterwards. There were about 40 reporters, and Marshall went around the room and allowed each of them to ask a question. Marshall didn't answer, he just listened and didn't take notes. When each one had asked his question, Marshall went around the room again and answered each question. The reporters were just shaking their heads. It was an incredible feat of memory."
The company spent 10 months in Algiers, and at one time was guarding the Allied Forces intelligence unit, about 50 miles from the city. "They had some visitors one time, and they asked if my platoon could put on a firing exhibit. So we set up our machine guns and fired them all at the same time into a hill nearby. It was pretty impressive. But then we found out later that we had killed three Arabs who were on the hill."
Another time, Hackbarth was called into company headquarters. "The captain told me to pick four other men who weren't afraid to do some shooting if they had to."
They left in five trucks and went to a fort near Algiers where the trucks were loaded. "They told us to shoot anybody who came near the trucks." The trucks were driven through Algiers, down to the docks where the material was loaded on ships. At one point, a local civilian approached the convoy, seeking a cigarette. Hackbarth said he was able to warn him away before he was gunned down.
"We found out later that we had been guarding the invasion maps of Sicily and Italy. They said we'd get medals for that, but of course we never did."
The company was sent to Oran where they joined convoy of ships headed to Italy. The unit quickly joined the fighting at Monte Casino. "Some of the 34th Division saw action there. Thank God we didn't. We got there just as they bombed the monastery. It was the most devastated place I've ever seen. They had to use road graders just to find the roads. There were no buildings, nothing but dust, sand and stumps of trees. And it turns out they really didn't have to bomb the monastery. I talked to German prisoners later, and they said they were never in the monastery."
The company's next stop was at Anzio as replacements for troops that had gone in earlier. Company H was sent immediately to the front lines at the perimeter of the beachhead. The famous 442nd "Go for Broke" Combat Regimental Team, made up of Japanese-Americans, was right next to the 34th Division. "It was really cold out, but they all took a bath in the cold water. I don't know if it was tradition, or what. I know they were tremendous fighters."
Hackbarth's platoon was on the perimeter occupying a house that had been 90 percent destroyed by shelling. The men could look through a hole in a remaining wall to observe the German lines in the distance. "In between our lines were two dead German soldiers. Nobody ever did anything with them. You can imagine what they looked like after a while."
Telephone wires led back to the company's headquarters about a mile away. Each night Hackbarth would have to head back to the command post to get his team's rations for the next day. On one of his visits, he was told that an artillery spotter would be coming back with him.
"I told them flat out I didn't want him there, but they told me it was an order. I told the officer that it was my opinion it would bring death upon us, and it nearly did."
The artillery spotter brought a long telescope with him, and the next day called Hackbarth over to look through it. In the distance off to one side, the telescope revealed four Germans working their way through the grass carrying mortar shells. The spotter communicated back to the big guns. "They brought the artillery in on those guys. There was just a big cloud of dust. They killed everybody."
After the artillery man had left, the Germans sought revenge, knowing that the observation had come from the American outposts. "They hit another house about 150 yards away from us. They just flattened it. No one could have lived through it. That would have been us if they had picked the right house."
The weather was miserable, but the rain may have saved Hackbarth's life. "A shell came in and hit right next to me, but I wasn't hit. I could reach out and touch where the shell had gone into the ground, but the ground was so soggy that it absorbed the impact." 
Another night, Hackbarth was ordered to take a gun crew to another position. His way of finding it in the dark was to follow the telephone wire. As he led the men, he could feel something tugging at the wire. He quietly asked if anyone had stepped on the wire, but no one had. He quickly ordered the men to take cover in a nearby shell hole.
"There was a blast of automatic fire. You always hear about bullets whizzing by, and I suppose they do. But they also make a loud crack as they go by, sort of like a small sonic boom. They're as loud going by your ear as they are when they come out of the rifle." The German patrol soon moved on, and the Americans had been saved when one of the enemy had tripped over the phone wire.
Still out on the perimeter at Anzio, Hackbarth and two other soldiers were playing cards one day, hidden by the wreckage of the house that was their shelter. "I was leaning back on the sandbags when a mortar shell came in and hit a tree right next to us. One of the guys got hit four times in the guts with shrapnel. The other guy was hit in the shoulder. We had to carry the first guy out, and both of them went to the field hospital. I never saw either one of them again. I was only saved because I was leaning against those sandbags, and they shielded me from the blast."
After leaving Anzio, H Company and the 34th Division joined the long, slow push up through northern Italy, fighting through some of the most mountainous terrain in the world.
At one point, in just walking a few yards, Hackbarth recalls he had to step over seven dead Germans. "War is such hell."
One of his jobs was to fire heavy weapons into caves the troops encountered along the way to make sure there were no enemy troops lurking inside. As his unit approached a small Italian village in the mountains, they came upon one of the most horrific scenes of the war.
"The Germans had just pulled out of the town, and the Americans were coming in. Evidently the townspeople had dug this cave in order to protect themselves from the fighting. Apparently the whole town had gone inside this cave.
"The American troops that went before us did what we always did. They fired into the cave. When they went into look around, they found bodies, lots of bodies.
"They started bringing people out. They laid the men in one row, and the women in another row, and the children in a third row. By far, that third row was the longest. When they got everybody out, there were 200 bodies.
"If I had been there, that would have been my job. But I didn't do it, thank God. It wasn't me. But somebody did. I don't know how he lived with himself after that.
"And the amazing thing, nothing about it ever appeared in the newspapers or anywhere else that I saw. It happened, but it was like it didn't happen."
Another time, Hackbarth was called in and sent to a prison compound. "They told me one of my men had deserted. Sure enough, he was there, but while I was looking for him, I found one of my old friends from Cosmos. He had also deserted.
"You know, those guys all got dishonorable discharges, but it wasn't their fault. They had been in all the shelling, and their nerves just went all to pieces. They were sick people; they couldn't help it. My friend had seen so many of his comrades killed, his nerves just went. I know they have a policy, but he was a brave man, and he should have been treated better."
At one point, the Americans came up against a hill that may have contained German soldiers. "They asked for volunteers, but this was getting late in the war, and there weren't any. They asked again, and promised medals to anybody who went. Still nobody volunteered. Finally, they picked a handful of men, and up the hill they went. I was a sergeant and so I had binoculars, and I watched three of them get gunned down trying to get up that hill. I said to one of my buddies, 'Who's going to get those medals -- their mothers?' I never thought much of medals after that."
Hackbarth spent some time in a hospital in Naples after he was injured. "My men were digging in, and, of course, I didn't think they were doing it fast enough, so I grabbed a pickax to help them. Just then a shell came in, and I jumped down in the hole and got big gash on my foot."
Much to his surprise, he found that most of the beds in the Naples hospital were taken up with by American GIs with venereal disease. "We didn't think much of that. They were using our beds. But then while I was there, the Army brought in the first penicillin in the war. Some of these guys had been suffering quite a long time. There was a real celebration. They all got relief finally."
While recuperating, he wandered over to a nearby racetrack. He stepped through an open door and realized he was in a makeshift hospital wing. "It was a ward for guys who had lost their legs. Every guy in there had lost at least one limb, and many of them had lost both. So here am I walking through, and they can hear my boots hitting the floor. I wanted to get out, but I couldn't find another door. Those guys were completely silent and just staring at me. Finally I found my way out. That's another reason I don't like war."
Back at the front, Hackbarth was approached by an officer. "'Sergeant Hack, move your squad a mile and half up the road,' they told me. So I got in my jeep, and with four trucks behind me, we headed up the road. After we had gone for a while, we came to a gate blocking the road. I pulled my jeep over and went and opened the gate and motioned for the first truck to move on through. It didn't go very far before it hit a mine and killed everyone in the truck.
"Why that gate was closed I don't know. But if it had been open, that would have been my jeep that hit that mine."
As the war wound on, the 34th Division came up with a morale booster. Each month, two men from each company would be allowed to go home on furlough. The second month, Hackbarth's name was picked.
It was great being home in Minnesota, but there was a price. "After I had been there a couple of weeks, and my time was short for heading back, I would go to movies with my friends and just sit there and shake. I was dreading going back."
When he did get back, the war seemed even more deadly than before. "I was with the guys, and they were shooting artillery over our heads. They did that all the time. On this day, they were shooting what we called radar shells because they were set to explode before they hit the ground. Well, sometimes they'd get too close to each other in the air and they would set each other off. That happened right over our heads. I jumped for cover, while the other guys just stood there looking at me. They wondered why I was so jumpy, but I had had a taste of normal life. They were so used to war, but now I wasn't."
Going out on a death detail was the job Hackbarth hated the most, but he and his men were assigned that duty three times while in Italy. Somebody had to pick up the bodies and bring them back.
"The worst was one time when we were in the mountains, and it had snowed. Our soldiers were all dressed in white, but during the day all the snow melted, and they were sitting ducks as they tried to get up a hillside. There were 37 men killed. Because I had been raised in the country, they thought I could handle the horses. It was so steep there that that was the only way get the bodies out."
The chore was to get the men into rubberized body bags. "But often they had died in strange positions, and if an arm or leg stuck out, we just had to break it to get the body into the bag. That was kind of tough. I knew some of those men.
"We got them all into the bags, but when we tried to get them on the horses, it was a disaster. The horses were rearing up and throwing the bodies into the mud, and then the horses were trampling them. Finally, I said to the other fellows, 'I wonder what their mothers would think if they could only see their sons now? What would they say?'"
Hackbarth recalled another night when he was ordered to take a truck with about 15 infantrymen in it down a certain road. "As we traveled along, all of a sudden there was a big bonfire in front of us. What was going on? Why was it there? There was something very mysterious going on.
"We stopped at farmhouse and woke the people up to find out if they knew about the fire. I left a couple of guys to guard the road. Soon, one of them came back and said there were Germans marching on the road. I went out there and hid behind the pillars by the gate. A whole company of Germans went right by me. I was scared to death. I was just a few feet from them, and our truck was sitting right there in the farmyard."
Hackbarth was able to make his way back to the farmhouse and send a message that it appeared that an entire German division was going down the road. "It was one of those nights when you hope daylight will never come because then they'll be able to see you." Eventually he ordered his men in groups of twos and threes to find their way back to the American lines.
"I was the last to leave, and as I went down this small road, all of a sudden this German on a motorcycle came around a bend and was there right in front of me. I aimed my rifle at him three times, and each time I put it down. I was an expert shot, and I would have had him. But in the end, he went past me. Thank God, I didn't shoot him because I would have had that on my conscience all these years. I've thought about that so many thousands of times through the years."
Because of his earlier warning, though, the Americans were able to rain down artillery on the Germans. "We tore up that column pretty badly."
In the end, the 34th Division accepted the surrender of the German 34th Division. The Americans, by this time, had pushed all the way to the Swiss border. Hackbarth volunteered to drive a jeep back to Naples, and the terrain that had been so devastating for the prior 14 months now seemed beautiful and serene.
Back home, he considered going to the University of Minnesota, but instead took over his father's farm implement business. He ran it until 1980 when hard times in rural Minnesota forced him to get out of business.
He has been retired since, living in Florida in the winter and on a lake near Litchfield in the summer. His wife of 50 years died several years ago. They had two sons and a daughter.
His war experiences remain with him daily.
"I often think about, what if that gate had been opened? What if I had joined the airborne? What if a hundred other things hadn't happened? But here I am, alive. I feel like there's something that God wanted me to do in this world."