The current war in Iraq has meant the recall to active duty of thousands of military reservists and National Guard members. They have been uprooted from the daily routines of their civilian endeavors and sent to a hostile environment far from home. Recalls of this sort blend reservists and regulars in a common environment, for a common purpose. That was also the case 60 years ago, when Americans united to win World War II.
One of those reservists was a young man named Hans Bergner, who had grown up in Texas as the son of German-speaking parents. When war came, Bergner’s loyalty was committed totally to the United States. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in history and government, he entered the Navy’s V-7 officer training program and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve ensign in November 1943. In December he joined the crew of the tank landing ship LST-282.
In the months that followed, the ship’s crew trained and went to England, where the LST was designated for a role in the momentous D-Day invasion of Normandy. On the night of 4 June 1944, she and thousands of other vessels shoved off into the English Channel. As he lay in his bunk that night, the religious Bergner put a little extra effort into his prayers, because survival was at stake. The armada turned back when weather postponed the invasion for a day. The following night, Bergner’s prayer indicated everything he had said the night before still applied.
Early in the morning of 6 June, the LST-282 anchored off Utah Beach. She put her load of soldiers into landing craft for the trip ashore that would launch the liberation of occupied France. Once the invasion was under way, the ship linked with a barge where she could unload her cargo of rolling stock. Still later, her tank deck became an ambulance facility, and the ship picked up wounded men at both Utah and Omaha beaches for transport to hospitals in England. Bergner’s language capability came in handy for interrogating German prisoners of war.
The young American’s prayers were answered, and the ship came through unscathed. Bergner foresaw easier times ahead when the ship went into the Mediterranean to take part in the invasion of Southern France. A shipmate, gunnery officer Peter Hughes, felt an eerie sense of foreboding. On the evening of 15 August, as the LST prepared to beach on a rocky shore, a German plane launched a radio-controlled glider bomb that slammed into the LST-282 and turned her into an inferno. Soldiers, some with uniforms on fire, began going over the side, and Bergner joined them. He had not been a strong swimmer before joining the Navy, but that night he found new strength and made it to the beach before momentum carried the burning ship ashore. Hughes was among those killed.
Before war’s end, citizen-sailor Bergner was assigned to another ship, the LST-1043, and eventually became her commanding officer. With the coming of peace in 1945, he was able to return to Texas and rejoin his wife Gladys, whom he had married shortly after joining his first ship. He also now had an opportunity to put his education to use. In the years that followed he worked in Comfort and Fredericksburg, two towns in the Texas hill country. In that time he was a teacher, bus driver, football and basketball coach, principal, and superintendent of schools. Students remembered him for his sense of discipline and fairness. One of his students later wrote: “You gave me hope and inspiration, understanding and education.”
For nearly 20 years after the end of the war, Bergner continued to drill as a Naval Reservist and to take his periodic tours of active duty. He retired as a commander in 1964. In 1984, television coverage of the 40th anniversary of D-Day inspired him to go back to Southern France. After some exploration, he found the spot where the LST had come ashore. Among the rock formations he found a burned, rusted piece of wire rope his ship had used for mooring. The memories came flooding back, and Bergner began to cry as he thought of his lost shipmates. Though they had been together for less than a year, they had forged an emotional bond. As he put it, “I have seldom felt so alone or so strange, because I was there for people whose lives had ended 40 years earlier.” Bergner’s own life ended less than a year before the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings. In 1993, on an October Friday night, he was in the stands to root for Fredericksburg High School’s football team. He felt ill during the game, drove himself to a hospital, and died of a heart attack before that Friday was over. He is again with his shipmates of so long ago.