A Silver Star Chaplain

Capt. Delbert Kuehl won a chest full of ribbons not by firing a weapon but by bringing the men of the 504th Parachute Division the comfort of God and man.

Lt. Delbert Kuehl was drenched in blood from head to foot.
His front side was soaked from carrying over 30 wounded GIs from the battle back to the river bank where they could be loaded on boats and taken to medical care. Along the way he assisted with both their physical and their spiritual care.
His back was bloody from being hit by a mortar round as he leaned over another wounded soldier.
As the action wound down, and the bridges at Nijmegen were taken by the 504th Airborne Regiment on Sept. 20, 1944, an officer landed on the river bank. He surveyed the scene and soon encountered the bloody and wounded chaplain.
"What the hell are you doing here?" the officer yelled in amazement and anger.
"This is where the men are," Kuehl responded simply.

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Delbert Kuehl grew up on a farm looking over the west side of Lake Carlos near Alexandria, Minn., during the Great Depression.
"We were so desperately poor," Kuehl recalled. "When my older sister outgrew her shoes, I wore them."
The family eventually lost the farm and moved to Minnetonka where Kuehl's father hoped to find work. Even with a job, the family did not immediately prosper. "When I graduated from Hopkins High School in 1934,  I went down to the Red Cross and got a sweater so I'd have something to wear to the ceremony. Even so, I was the only kid without a suit. I just had my Red Cross sweater."
Despite the hard times, the one place Kuehl did not turn for solace was God.
"All that religion stuff, I had no time for it. To me it was just superstition, and it wasn't for people who were very smart."
He was impressed, however, by one friend of the family who was an electrical engineer and also a Christian. "He'd tell me, 'Delbert, you need to be a Christian.' But I had no time for it." The man kept at Kuehl, but with no results.
At that time, though, Kuehl was involved in the Boys Scouts, and they were having a contest that the boys in Kuehl's troop thought they could win. One of the prerequisites was to go to four straight Sunday School meetings. He told his friends that he had no intention of going to Sunday School, but they prevailed on him for the good of the team.
"I finally caved in. I figured I could put up with four weeks of it." He was astonished to find out, though, that the Sunday School teacher was the family friend.
The sessions didn't immediately change his life, but as time went by he found himself reading the Bible secretly. "I wasn't a bad kid, but I knew I wasn't going that way," Kuehl said, pointing toward heaven.
One day he prayed and accepted Christ as his savior. "It changed my whole life. Some of my friends laughed at me, but some asked me to tell them about it."
His original intention was to go to the University of Minnesota and somehow escape the poverty he had always known, but in the end he found himself enrolling at Northwestern Bible School in 1937. He attended Bethel where he got his associate degree and then got a double degree in history and philosophy from the University of Minnesota. In 1942, he earned his theology degree from Northwestern Seminary.
When the war broke out, Kuehl didn't have to join up. He was already a youth minister at that point and was exempt from military service. "But I volunteered immediately. I felt so much for this country, and I couldn't bear the idea of Hitler and his super race. I had just turned 24, and I was qualified to be a chaplain."
He was commissioned a first lieutenant and sent off to chaplains' training at Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. Volunteers were being recruited for the first American airborne unit, and Kuehl quickly stepped forward.
A week later he was training with the 504th Parachute Regiment at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
"They really put us through the mill. If you made a mistake, it was 50 push ups. But I had done construction work in Alaska and worked in the canneries in California to pay my way through college, so I was in pretty good shape."
Kuehl did his five jumps and got his wings. He also did his stint on the rifle range even though a gunnery officer wondered what he was doing there. "But I'd been raised as a hunter, and I'd had a rifle since I was nine years old. I could knock a sparrow of the top of the silo. When it was all over, I think I came in second or third out of 600 men."
As the training went on, Kuehl decided it was time to do his first service. He found a place to have it, made the customary announcements, and waited to see how many of the 1,800 men in the regiment would show up.
"Two men showed up, and one of them was drunk."
Kuehl was devastated. He knew that the paratroopers were a hard lot, all volunteers who had chosen one of the most dangerous assignments of the war. They were rough and tough and not given to showing their feelings. Still, he had expected more.
"I walked through the camp that night weeping. I prayed and said, 'God, you've got to do something. There are going to be a lot of casualties with these men, and they will need to hear your word.' God answered me, 'If they won't come to you, then you'll have to go to them.'"
Kuehl made it a point to stay close to the men, staying with every aspect of the training including taking 25-mile, full-pack hikes with them. He trained on every weapon they trained on. "It helped me get closer to them."
The unit shipped overseas on an old World War I troop transport that lost its engine halfway across and was left alone as the convoy moved on without it. They eventually arrived in Casablanca and took trains to Tunisia where they found their parachutes weren't good for that climate. "There were guys with broken legs and broken backs. The atmosphere was just too thin."
The unit's first action was slated to be in Sicily, and Kuehl again scheduled a service. This time the numbers were much better. He told the men that while fear of death was normal, they should have a greater fear that they could die that night and not know Jesus.
They jumped at midnight, and it was a disaster from the beginning. Despite all the planning, the Navy didn't realize that the dozens of planes in the sky were American, and the sky lit up with anti-aircraft fire. In one of the cruelest turns of the war, the Navy shot down 23 of the planes before they could get to the target, and the plane Kuehl was on was hit again and again.
The wounded pilot steered the plane over the mountains, away from the intense fire. He was anxious to deliver his load and head back. The plane was fast losing altitude. It was later determined that there were 546 holes in the plane from the friendly fire.
"The red light came on, and then the green light almost instantaneously. I was the second man out of the plane, and just as I jumped they yelled that there was a ridge coming up."
Before the plane had taken off, it was discovered that there were not enough A-5 chutes to go around, and they asked for volunteers to use A-7 chutes even though the men had not trained in them. Kuehl volunteered.
"If I hadn't been using an A-7 chute, I would have died. I landed right on top of the ridge, only 200 feet below the plane. The A-7 has a pilot chute that pulls open the main chute much faster. If I'd been wearing an A-5, there's no way the chute would have opened in time."
As it was, Kuehl landed so hard that it knocked him unconscious. It also did some severe internal damage that was to trouble him throughout the war. Waking up, though, and finding no bones broken, he set off on his work. Further down the ridge, he found two comrades, one with two legs broken and another with one leg broken.
The 504th Regiment, now part of the 82nd Airborne, was scattered all over the mountain. "We never did take the airport we were supposed to take. But paratroopers are unique fellows. Even if there's only one of them left, he'll still fight. We kept the Germans from getting down to the beach."
While the unit learned to fight at Sicily, Kuehl honed his skills too, crawling from foxhole to foxhole, bringing the Lord to the men as he had been instructed. After three or four weeks, the unit was withdrawn and sent back to Africa.
The next jump was at Salerno, and the mission was to reinforce the Americans who were involved in some of the bitterest fighting of the war. Again, the men parachuted in at midnight.
"We were told to hold the ground at all costs. When we landed, it was unbelievable. There were German dead and American dead lying everywhere. We were shelled for 60 straight hours. At one point, I overheard Gen. Mark Clark order us to withdraw, but Col. Tucker, our CO, told him, 'We don't go backwards, general. We've already paid a price for this ground.'"
Kuehl prayed with the men where he found them, and he noticed that many more of them were now willing to pray.
At one point, he and the others were pinned down in shallow fox holes during a violent artillery attack. "I was laying on my back, but then I decided I didn't want to be hit in the front so I turned over. Then I decided I didn't want to be hit in the back either, so I turned on my side. I figured the shrapnel would have to go through my arm first before it got to my heart."
In this new position, Kuehl's expectations came true. He was rocked sharply in his exposed arm, and the arm immediately went dead. "I couldn't feel a thing, but I didn't want to feel it and find out it was a gory hole. Finally I said to myself, 'This is stupid, I've got to find out how badly I'm hit.' So I reached my other arm around and felt it."
What he found was that a large stone had hit his arm, not shrapnel, and the arm was only numb from the shock.
Much of the 82nd Airborne was withdrawn to England to prepare for the D-Day invasion, but the 504th stayed in Italy and battled through mountains that winter, slowly pushing the Germans back. At one point, the Americans made a thrust at the German lines and then withdrew.
One of the men came up to Kuehl and said there were wounded Americans now behind the enemy lines. "Paratroopers don't like leaving their wounded behind. I rounded up some medics with portable litters and we found an old Red Cross flag and headed over there."
Kuehl and the others knew that if they were facing the more fanatical Nazis, they would be killed on the spot. The Germans did fire one blast of machine gun fire that sprayed rocks over them, but then allowed Kuehl and his little party to remove the wounded. Kuehl took one man on his back, and carried him back to the American lines.  "Those troopers just would not let one of their own lie out there. I was so proud of those guys."
For that action, Kuehl was awarded his first bronze star. There were also newspaper accounts about the chaplain who led the rescue mission, but the news story that went back to America portrayed the chaplain as handing out cigarettes to the wounded GIs, a fiction thought up by some war journalist. "I was so mad when I found out about that later."
The next action for the 504th was at Anzio. The plan was to parachute in, but the weather was so bad, the unit had to go in on landing craft. Again the fighting was intense, and at one point Kuehl was trying to round up men to bring them to the fighting when a shell hit directly under his jeep. The vehicle lifted into the air, but came down on all four tires, and the chaplain was unhurt.
It was at Anzio where the 504th earned its nickname. The Americans would send out patrols every night to harass the German positions. After the battle, a German officer's diary was found that had an entry: "I can't sleep at night, everywhere are these devils in baggy pants."  The Devils in Baggy Pants is the title of the regiment's official history.
It was also at Anzio where Kuehl says he made his dumbest mistake. The men were alongside the main road when a pair of Messerschmitts came roaring by, strafing the Americans. Incensed, Kuehl picked up another soldier's M-1 and calmly squeezed off three shots at the German plane.
Not long after, a soldier came up to the group Kuehl was in. "Did somebody shoot at that Messerschmitt?  It was really smoking. We think it might have crashed."
"I just kept my mouth shut," Kuehl said. "I could just see the headlines in Stars and Stripes, 'Chaplain shoots down German plane.' That was the first and last time I fired a weapon in the war."
The plane incident aside, for his actions in Italy, Kuehl was awarded his second Bronze Star.
After Anzio, the 504th was shipped to England and set up home in small community named Evington. "It was just like heaven, with the flowers blooming and nobody shooting at you." Kuehl got to know the local Anglican pastor, and the Americans were offered the use of the local church.
In the end, Kuehl's congregation presented the church with the unit's battle flag, and also raised a thousand dollars for a new vestry for the 700-year-old church.
The 504th was held in reserve at D-Day because it had been so shot up in Italy that it had taken in several hundred green replacements. By September, 1944, though, the regiment was ready to fight again and was part of the largest airborne attack in history — the ill-fated Operation Market Garden.
Later the subject of the best-selling book and movie "A Bridge too Far," Market Garden was an attempt by the British and Americans to do an end run around the barrier of the Siegfried Line, the massive fixed battlements that Hitler had constructed on Germany's border.
The 82nd Airborne Division was assigned the task of taking bridges in the vicinity of Nijmegen to allow the British tanks to head up the road to Arnhem where British paratroopers were trying to secure the bridge there — the "bridge too far."
The plan went well for a while, but the Germans were able to bring in reinforcements.
After four days of intense fighting, the main bridges at Nijmegen were still in German hands, and the Allied commanders demanded that the bridges must be taken the following day. The British airborne units at Arnhem were being torn up, and needed immediate relief. The plan that Gen. James Gavin, commander of the 82nd, and his staff came up with was to send the 504th across the river on boats to attack the bridges from behind.
Kuehl was determined to go across with the men. "If they ever needed me, I knew they'd need me there."
The men waited all day for the boats to arrive, and when they did, there was great concern. "They were just these flat bottomed things made up of plywood and canvas and propelled by canoe paddles. After seeing them, one of the men took out his cigarettes and lighter and threw them in the river. He said, 'I won't be needing these any more.' And he was right. He was killed in the middle of the river. We all knew it was suicide run."
The river was 400 yards wide and had a swift current. The Allies laid down an artillery and tank barrage on the north shore of the river, followed by smoke bombs, but the wind quickly blew the smoke away. As they crossed over, the 26 frail craft crowded with paratroopers were hit mercilessly by machine gunners, mortars, artillery and everything else the Germans could manage.
In the end, only 13 of the craft made it to the other side. Kuehl was in one of them.
"I was trying to keep my head down, and I heard a grunt from the soldier next to me. I looked over and his whole head was blown off. I had never seen such horror. I was proud to be part of those brave men."
On the far shore, the Americans took a few minutes to catch their breath, and then headed up the banks to attack the machine gun nests with hand grenades and bayonets. The fighting was brutal.
Kuehl had an aid kit with him, and found his place in the melee as part medic, part chaplain and part carrier of wounded men.
"I was leaning over one young man, and he had three bullet holes in his stomach. I was trying to comfort him. All of a sudden a mortar hit the beach right behind me and the shrapnel ripped up my back. It also knocked me over on top of the wounded soldier. He said, 'Oh, chaplain, did they get you too?' Can you imagine this man had three bullet holes in him and he was worried about me?"
Again and again, Kuehl trudged up to the battleground and hand carried the wounded back to the remaining boats where they could be evacuated. It was estimated that he carried over 35 men to safety. He spent over four hours on the beach, under constant automatic weapons and sniper fire.
In the end, he was challenged by an officer wondering what a chaplain was doing in ragged, bloody clothes in the middle of the battle. "This is where the men are, sir."
The tragedy of the 504th's incredible action that day was that once they had secured the bridges, the British tanks only advanced a little ways up the road, stopped by lack of gas, lack of ammunition, lack of infantry support and the futility of rescuing the troopers at Arnhem. The tanks never did reach the bridge too far.
Back in the lines, the 504th took part in the Battle of the Bulge. "The Germans were so brazen. A group of them rode into our command post on an American jeep, wearing American uniforms. They told our CO to go a certain way to avoid the German tanks. Luckily as they were leaving, one of our guys heard them speaking German and began shooting at them."
 The 504th spent the rest of the war fighting its way across Germany and met up with the Russians at the Elbe River. Kuehl would often buzz around on a liberated motorcycle to visit the troops where they were dug in.
"I finally did earn the confidence of the men, and I finally got their ear. I saw God work among these troops in amazing ways." The men gave him several nicknames including "Chappy," "Holy Joe," and "Jumping Jesus."
Kuehl was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his actions at Nijmegen, and later also received the French Croix de Guerre.
Kuehl remembered one more story about his war experience, this one not filled with the trauma of the battlefield but with the humor of his comradeship in his regiment.
"We were in a town in Germany where they had a large enough auditorium to get the whole regiment inside. So we had a service. I had a cold and I had put a handkerchief in the pocket of my Eisenhower jacket that was hanging on the back of the chair. Well, evidently, some of the other officers thought it would be really funny to replace my handkerchief with a pair of silk panties. I have no idea where they got them."
Fortunately for Kuehl, just before going out for the service, he decided to blow his nose. Instead of his handkerchief, he discovered the panties. He quickly discarded the underwear and found a white rag to replace it with.
"As I gave the sermon, I looked over the officers in the front row. I would start to reach for my pocket, and they would all lean forward. There was a real look of expectation on their faces."
Several times during the talk, he reached for his pocket, only to pull his hand away. And each time the conspirators would lean forward in anticipation.
"Finally, as I was winding up my talk, I actually did reach in that pocket and pull out the rag. I've never seen such looks of disappointment."
In September, 1945, with the war over, the division sailed back to America.
Kuehl's war ordeal was far from over, though. That first jump in Sicily, it turned out, had dislodged both of his kidneys. Because of that, and with the lingering effects of the shrapnel wounds, he spent the next 15 months in three different Army hospitals.
Kuehl married his high school sweetheart, Delores, in 1946, and the two went into missionary work. They served for nine years in Japan, and later were asked to take over supervisory duties with the TEAM missionary outreach. The Kuehls had five children.
Delores and Delbert Kuehl now live in a house on Lake Louise, about five miles from Alexandria and just a few miles from the farm he was born on. They have two huge gardens, and Delbert at 85 still loves to hunt.
He is called upon to speak at many services, in and out of Minnesota, and the Kuehl's have attended many reunions of the 82nd Airborne, including one in Holland.