Memories of war kept alive by drawings

Richard Tedesco

For the past 22 years, New Hyde Park resident Elsie Baumann has preserved the memory of her late husband by preserving the sketchbook he compiled during his World War II service that included fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. 

When he was 18 years old, William Baumann had sketched the images of war he saw as he fought his way across Europe, sending the ink drawings home to his parents in letters and later delivering them himself when he returned from the war.

“He always considered himself fortunate to have survived this,” said Elsie Baumann, who has lived in New Hyde Park since her husband’s death in 1987.

Elsie said she is “very proud” of the sketches, which she considers to be “worth more than gold,” as a piece of the story of the epic Ardennes Forest battle 75 years ago. 

She she said he has kept his legacy alive by making copies of the non-combat landscapes her husband drew and framing them for her three daughters Linda, Karen and Ellen and a son, Steven. 

Baumann said she presented the drawings to them “because it’s their father’s unbelievable handiwork.”

The eldest of their nine grandchildren was two years old when his grandfather died, so the drawings also provide the grandchildren a connection with their grandfather.

“They never met him. They do know of his talents because my daughters all have them in their homes. It’s their grandfather’s legacy,” Baumann said. “We’re all very proud of him. He had a gift.”

She has also sought to ensure her husband’s memory endures among some of their closest friends by giving many of them framed copy’s of her husband’s wartime drawings.  

“They cherish it,” she said.

Baumann’s unit, Combat Command B of the 20th Armored Battalion of the 10th Armored Division, was the first of Patton’s forces to suddenly change direction and move 75 miles north in one day on Dec. 17 to blunt the German offensive in the Ardennes . For eight hours, it was the only U.S. Army unit in Belgium standing off against eight German divisions. The 101st Airborne Division quickly joined the battle and the scene was set for the “Bastards of Bastogne” as they would be called, to make their legendary stand in the Ardennes.

Baumann deleted the “Bastards” moniker that he drew on Army vehicles in his sketches, as the soldiers in Bastogne did, to get his drawings past Army mail censors.

After he returned home, his wife said, he rarely spoke of the war. He also had no interest in attending reunions of his 10th division comrades.

His son-in-law, Mark Mather, later drew Baumann out on the subject by asking him about the sketches. They were scenes drawn after battles, sketches of comrades and contrasting drawings that showed a bucolic view of landscapes. The few stories 

Baumann told about the war used the sketches as landmarks.

“I  showed interest in his drawings, so he told me about it,” Mather said. “It was hard to pull things out of him apart from talking about his drawings.”

The 10th Armored Division’s advance north to their position in Norville, just east of Bastogne, was so fast the tanks ran out of gas and had to wait for fuel supplies to catch up with them. 

Knowing they were driving into the teeth of an aggressive German counteroffensive, many men had discarded their gas masks in favor of loading extra ammo in the pouches. 

Mather said Baumann told him that as they were waiting for the fuel to catch up, one soldier heard vehicles approaching and yelled “Gas!” 

Mather recounted Baumann laughing about the soldiers scattering, thinking the man was warning of a gas attack instead of fuel supplies.

Mather said Baumann often found a humorous twist in his recollections of the Battle of the Bulge. Bauman said he was much shorter than the soldier he shared a foxhole with, and so he dug footholes in the side of the earthen hole, so he had a position to shoot from, Maher said. And once he stashed a tin of cookies he had received from home in one of the footholes.

In one of the battle’s dramatic shifts, his unit had to fall back when the German 5th Panzer Division pushed through, and he left the cookies behind. A German soldier who later occupied the same foxhole apparently found the cookies. When Baumann’s unit retook the area and he relocated his foxhole, the cookies had been replaced by a loaf of black bread.

He was wounded during the fighting in Norville when a German grenade exploded in front of the 50-caliber machine gun he was firing, slamming the machine gun into face and breaking his nose. Baumann even found some humor in that, recounting how the field medic wound him in bandages, not knowing how seriously he was hurt.

“He said they had him wrapped up like a mummy,” Mather said, before he was brought to an aid station and they found his nose was broken.

Baumann was taken back to what he thought was the outskirts of Norville. But the ominous sound of German Tiger tanks on the move through the town told him the jeep driver had dropped him off in the wrong place. 

“He knew the town was occupied. So he scrambled to hide out in an attic,” Mather recalled Bauman telling him.

Fluent in German, Baumann overheard German soldiers saying their unit was moving out that night, so he knew he had to just sit tight and wait to make his way back to American lines.

“At the time, he must have been scared to death. He just smirked and said ‘It’s a good thing I spoke German’,” Mather said Baumann told him.

He had earned a Purple Heart. But Elsie Baumann said he never received it and never sought the honor after the war. 

Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division’s 20th Armored Battalion also received a unit citation for its service during the battle for Bastogne. And although he rarely spoke of it, his wife said, he had a clear memory of the sound of the Germann 88-millimeter artillery shells that pounded the American positions in Norville on a daily basis.

“He remembered the intense noise of the shelling,” she said.   

Baumann also talked about the frigid temperatures he endured during the battle and frostbite, Mather said.

“Sometimes it was so cold, it was hard to pull the trigger,” Mather said Baumann told him. And in the snow and mist of that dismal winter, Baumann told him he sometimes realized he was firing at shadows in the mist, and feared accidentally shooting one of his comrades.

With German soldiers infiltrating the poorly defined American defense lines around Bastogne, Baumann’s German was useful to his officers for interrogating men they suspected of being saboteurs in khaki. During the occupation of Germany, his language skills were put to use in post-war military trials of German combatants.

When he came home after the war, Baumann earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He worked for Brooklyn-based Edo Corp., a NATO defense contractor, and once again his German fluency was helpful in his work as he worked with engineers from Messerschmidt in an ironic echo of the war years.

Although he avoided contact with most other veterans, he remained lifelong friends with Larry Stein, who had been his sergeant overseas.

He and Elsie met at a wedding in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Brooklyn and married shortly after in 1952. He became involved in St. John’s Lutheran Church in Glendale, Queens, where he served as school board chairman for the church’s elementary school.

His wife described him as “a good husband and loving father” who had a “good sense of humor.” They raised three daughters, who survive him with their nine grandchildren. His brother, Guenter, also survives him.

William Bauman never took up drawing again, but found a creative outlet in music playing violin in a quartet. 

Mather said he thinks the sketches during the war provided Baumann a psychological release from the strain of combat.

That’s evident in one of the last drawings he rendered on a troopship on the way home, showing the sun breaking through clouds over the ocean in an image that conveys a sense of peace recovered after an intense, uncertain time. 

“It’s a new day dawning, the war’s over,” Elsie Baumann said. 

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