Blue Jackets military honoree fought in World War II

Coming from a long line of military veterans, 100-year-old Walter Stitt Jr. never thought twice about risking his life to fight against the Germans in World War II.

Recognized by the Blue Jackets on Oct. 17 as part of the the Elk+Elk Military Salute program, Stitt turned 18 just in time for America to enter the war and for him to go against his family's wishes and volunteer himself for his country.

Now he has spent the better part of 80 years with traumatic memories and an abundance of wartime stories to tell. These stories are all in his book, Surviving Three Shermans: With the 3rd Armored Division into the Battle of the Bulge.

Stitt’s title for the book, which also appears on its cover?

What I Didn’t Tell My Mother About My War.

Early Life

Stitt’s father was a veteran of World War I and his great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. These role models made his decision to enlist an easier one then most.

In high school in Elm Grove, W.Va., Stitt played football and basketball briefly, but his parents always had an emphasis on education. Both graduated college, and they shared that expectation of their son.

Stitt graduated from high school in West Virginia in 1942. Once he suspected he and his friends were about to be drafted into the war, he took matters into his own hands and volunteered.

“I ran down and volunteered at the draft board,” he said. “Oh, they were just tickled to death to have me show up and volunteer.”

That decision came with some backlash from his father, who knew the atrocities of war. However, Walter would not be denied a chance to fight for his country with his high school friends.

Wartime Stories

Stitt trained at Fort Polk in Louisiana for 14 months before arriving in Scotland with the 33rd Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Division, E Company on June 6, 1944, more famously known as D-Day. Luckily for Stitt, he just narrowly avoided the horrors that occurred on the beaches of Normandy that day.

He and his unit would go through the United Kingdom before ultimately ending up in Somerset County, Wales.

“Lovely little town, had a gorgeous cathedral,” Stitt said. “Some things I left out of my book, one of them was that the first warm beer I had had stuff floating in it.

“They told us what our behavior was supposed to be, you know, which went right in one ear and out the other.”

He did eventually land on Omaha Beach after the initial invasion, but not without some difficulty getting to shore.

“The waves were too high to land us, so we just pitched up and down for about two days and they saw how many people they could get seasick on the way over,” he said.

His first night in France, he became aware of the dangers of war as he and his unit had to dig into foxholes as they were bombed by a German plane.

It’s a moment he laughs about now.

“They turned on the spotlights and tried to find him, I have laughed over the years because if they didn't turn those lights on, he wouldn't have known where he was,” Stitt said. “He'd have probably flown right out on the Atlantic Ocean and never been seen after.”

He followed behind the front line of the war for a couple months until his sergeant decided he was ready to operate a Sherman tank, where he would spend the rest of the war.

“We all went with the same thing in mind,” Stitt said. “If this tank is made in America by Americans, there isn't anything in the world any better than this tank.”

He was initially trained to be the gunner in a tank; however, he was needed as a loader. He was more than happy to make the adjustment if it meant being inside of a well-armored vehicle.

“I felt better because I'd already been shot at by a sniper, and I had already been around with bombs dropped,” Stitt said. “I thought, well, once I'm in this iron shell, it's going to be different, you know. I'm protected.”

It was also easier on his conscience to be the loader rather than gunner.

“When you're putting all those shells in there, you don't think that they're shooting people. You just do what you're supposed to do,” he said. “Then when you move over near the gunner, you got the crosshairs and all of a sudden you're going to step on that trigger. It's just not the way we're brought up.”

Although he felt safe inside the tanks, there were many instances he came inches away from death.

During a battle where he lost his tank commander and had to be the senior officer from that point forward in the day, he lost his tank and he and his unit had to rush to a nearby house to take cover.

“I reached up and my head felt cold, and I just brought down blood," Stitt said.

He was wounded by shrapnel that fortunately did not cut deep enough, and he was able to survive. However, he was picking shrapnel out of his head for years following the war. When he was in the field hospital, the doctor started picking out pieces, one of which Walter has saved for 80 years since and still has hanging in his war memorabilia room at home.

He was able to keep calm during this by operating emotionlessly and without too much thought.

“I'm obeying orders. He tells me what the target is, and I'm heading to that target,” Stitt said. “Of course, I've got my head down there most of the time watching to see if I see a target.”

Since he was in a tank while he was in France, he could not recall the specific towns that he fought in. However, he remembers he fought through three towns in France.

When he and his unit arrived in Belgium, he remembers surrounding German forces in Mons, part of a decisive victory for the Americans over Germany.

“A few Germans tried the next day, when they realized they were surrounded, to make it out and didn't make it, and the rest of them surrendered. It was something like 14 or 15,000 Germans that we captured in Mons,” Stitt said.

Stitt also fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was in one of the first tanks to cross the Siegfried Line into Germany.

After seeing three Sherman tanks get destroyed, being wounded twice and watching many of his fellow countrymen lose their lives, Stitt left Europe safely and returned home to his parents.

Post-War Life

For his efforts, Stitt received a Purple Heart with the Oak Leaf Cluster, and a few years ago he was awarded the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor for military members and civilians.

Immediately following the war he went to Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, fulfilling the expectations his parents had for him. This is where he would meet his wife, Betty.

Betty – who passed away in 2009 – was an English teacher, and while he was writing his book, he could hear her judging his grammar and punctuation.

“That whole thing is that my wife, whom I married on the day she graduated from Marietta College, was cum laude in English,” Stitt said. “All the time we were married, anytime I wrote something, she would look through it to see how bad it was.”

Upon graduating from college, Stitt would move around the Midwest a few times before ultimately finding his home in South Bend, Ind., where he found his calling as a Lutheran minister.

He would reconnect with the 3rd Armored Division as he took on the role as treasurer of the association. Here he found common ground with other soldiers and began to talk about his experiences.

“It's only after I started going to reunions, I began to talk more about with the family or anybody else,” Stitt said.

His daughter, Beverly Rutan, understands the importance this group had to him and allowed him to open up about his time in Europe.

“I think that was pretty common, though, with a World War II group, because they didn't talk about it,” Rutan said.

After Walter left his home in South Bend to move to Springfield, Ohio, to be closer to his family, he and Beverly found a box of letters that he wrote to his mother during his time in the war.

“I couldn't believe that my mother had saved all those letters,” Stitt said. “There were over 80, yeah, almost 90 letters.”

The contents of those letters, although written during his time in Europe, excluded many of the details of the combat he faced overseas. Which was the idea behind his book and why he chose the title What I Didn’t Tell My Mother About My War.