Nov 6, 2005 By Angie Santello 7 min read

It’s always hard to tell how your service will reward you later on in life. For two World War II veterans, their time spent traveling through the European countryside with the objective to root out Hitler and his Nazi Party in the 1940s was often filled with hardship and discomfort different from war today, but it led to a pleasant surprise.

Elliot Stalnaker of York Run, Georges Township, and William Enoch Sutton of Dupont Village remembered their time spent with Company C, the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion, which was partially responsible for capturing German prisoners of war.

The surprise is that one of those prisoners was the current pope, Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger.

As a member of the 2nd Chemical Mortar Battalion, Stalnaker and Sutton are said to have helped “liberate” the pope as two of the U.S. soldiers who marched 25,000 German Prisoners of War marched down the autobahn to Munich, Germany, in the spring of 1945.

Stalnaker said when he marched the prisoners down the autobahn he could have been standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the current pope.

Stalnaker, 85, recalled the success of the Americans during the war when he went with another comrade to set up mortars in the town Traunstein – the German town in which Ratzinger’s family had settled when hints of war became stronger.

The town had been evacuated, but the soldiers were still on a mission to find any people who remained. They entered one home and found three German officers.

“They raised up their hands and surrendered,” Stalnaker said. “We had the infantry take them back to prison camp. …We had run them all the way down through Germany into Austria. We destroyed most of their equipment. They just gave up.”

Stalnaker noted joy from the Germans when they saw allied troops.

“They were a bunch of happy campers to surrender,” he said.

Stalnaker said he and Sutton were together throughout the war and raised their families together once they came home after returning from war.

The two were still youthful men in their early 20s when they met at a train depot in Uniontown, Stalnaker recalled.

Stalnaker entered war January of 1942, near the beginning of U.S. involvement.

“When I found out we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, I wanted to see what I could do,” Stalnaker said. Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, at a time when Stalnaker was working for a tree company in Ohio. “Once we heard Pearl Harbor was attacked, we put our name in at the post office,” said Stalnaker, who was born in Jane Lou, W.Va. “Everybody was willing to lay down on the line for America, for our country.

“We were shipped out by train,” he said. “We went through Connellsville to pick up more soldiers and into Indiantown Gap.”

The destination was the military base in Fort Bragg, N.C., for training and then onto Camp Carabell, Fla., for amphibious warfare training in which the soldiers went through simulated wartime training before being shipped overseas where they initially invaded Sicily the same way they were taught.

Upon leaving the states to embark on a trip to war-torn country, Stalnaker said in 1943 it took the troops 23 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. On the way there, the Germans created a challenge to avoid their attacks on troop ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

“We had to zigzag to avoid the German subs and protect us from getting sunk,” Stalnaker recalled. “They sunk a lot of ships and supply ships.”

We landed in Orion, Africa and embarked on a 17-mile hike that required the men to pull guns that weighed 500 pounds on a two-wheel cart and ammunition that weigh another 500 pounds under temperatures that reached 150 degrees, Stalnaker said.

“To get away from getting bombarded out of harbor, we stop and positioned ourselves to make the invasion of Sicily,” he said.

The troops began the invasion of Sicily by unloading off the ship at 4 a.m. Stalnaker remembered waves 20 feet in height.

“It was so stormy,” he said. “A lot of Navy guys said they never saw the Mediterranean Sea that rough.

“They didn’t think we could hit the beach in the kind of weather,” he said.

The infantry landed on the shore of Sicily at 4 a.m. Some people drowned attempting to make the landing. “They missed the boat,” Stalnaker said.

Sutton and Stalnaker agreed that the toughest part of their experience was trying to take German-defended Monte Cassino in Italy.

Troops always had minimal supplies. Soldiers had to carry mortar shells that weighed over a quarter of their body weight. Stalnaker described the attack as a blind, head-on push to route out the enemy.

“We were losing thousands of men taking that mountain,” Stalnaker said. “We would lie in the foxholes sleeping during the day and we could see them. We fired all day long.

“It’s hardly no comparison to war today,” said Stalnaker.

Stalnaker said at least 1,000 died on the mountain from the 25-pound shells fired from the 4-point chemical mortar that could reach up to 4,000 yards.

“We were backing up the riflemen and infantry,” Stalnaker said. “All there was time for was the war. …There wasn’t anything nice about it.

“You never realized what war was. Nobody knew until you were in it,” he added. “There was no safe place. … I was fighting for my life, for my country, for my family back home.

“You didn’t know what was happening the next day, in the next town,” he added.

At one point during his travels, a snowstorm struck. He and a fellow comrade went to explore a house.

“We haven’t been sleeping in no house for it seemed like a year,” he said.

Stalnaker said he opened a door at an old farmhouse and he and his comrade had a bayonet stuck in their ribs.

“Here, there were French troops lined up row by row. I could see them when the man lit a match,” he said.

The man took them in and took them downstairs, roused the French officers sleeping in the beds and made them move so the American soldiers could sleep there.

Stalnaker watched one French soldier killed and cooked a billy goat and ate it.

“He grabbed it and sliced its throat with a knife and cooked it over an open fire,” Stalnaker recalled. “That was the first time I ever ate billy goat meat.”

At another point during the war, Stalnaker came down with double pneumonia. An airplane flew him into Paris, France, to a general hospital where German prisoners assigned the troops to beds and cared for them for the duration.

He remembered the Germans that cared for him as nice people and today senses a touch of irony about the situation.

“Up the road, we’re fighting these people and here they’re putting us in beds.”

He only spent two weeks in the hospital and went back to the front line.

“They were determined to get my rear end,” Stalnaker joked.

By September of 1945, Stalnaker had come home.

He and Sutton were awarded a star for each major battle he and fellow soldiers fought in during their travels through Europe.

Though he went on to marry and raise four boys, the memories of war were still too fresh to wither away.

When working with his brother for a body and fender business in Utica, N.Y., he explained, “We had air hammers used to straighten out fenders and dents in cars. It sounded like a machine gun. …I woke up to that noise. It sounded like I was on the frontline.”

Stalnaker stayed in the hospital for a while because he began to have flashbacks.

“My mind went back to war,” he said.

Since, he said, he’s been able to overcome it and realizes that other military men have not been so lucky to survive war or to at least survive it amicably.

“We all will remember it to our graves,” he said, speaking of veterans. “I’m proud I’m still here,” he added.