THE Eisenhower farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is worth a visit every day, but especially on Dutch Remembrance Day, and not just because of the nearby Civil War battlefield. You step into the museum, at the stop where the special bus drops you off. There they run nonstop the interview that Walter Cronkite, descendant of Wijntje van Cuijk from Naarden, made in 1964 with General Ike at the cemetery at Omaha Beach.
They walk past the graves and Cronkite begins to read the names aloud. “Richard Vollbracht, Illinois.” “Comrade in arms, known only to God.” “Chester Tenhagen.” Eisenhower, whose mother read Dutch aloud at home, recognizes a Dutch name and interrupts Walter: “What unit did he fight in?” Cronkite reads from the cross: “86th Battalion.” Chester Tenhagen from Virginia, his family came from Rotterdam, Leerdam, Lopik.
CHESTER was alive, May 1944. He had just turned twenty. The day after his birthday he had boarded a train with his unit in Texas, a three-day trip to New York. There the Nieuw Amsterdam was waiting, the flagship of the Holland America Line since 1938, christened by the Dutch queen. It had now been converted into a troop ship, with 36 guns and 374 lavatories for 6800 troops. A semi-luxurious one-week cruise, to England, to Stonehenge.
Chester Tenhagen was a corporal with the 86th Chemical Mortar Battalion. The name indicates mortars with poison gas grenades, in particular grenades with a highly explosive charge. The 86th ran behind the infantry and was sent to where it was needed. The soldiers were usually just behind the front, rather than in front. Their chance of survival was relatively high.
Three weeks after D-Day, Chester Tenhagen walked on French soil. And another three weeks later, he was dead. Literally shot to pieces. He was given his own grave in Colleville-sur-Mer because they found his dog tag, with pieces of his body and his uniform. But there were too few remains to send him back to America in a coffin, like the 6,000 Normandy dead who did return home. Corporal Tenhagen was left with 10,000 others under the grass above Omaha Beach.
CHESTER WAS actually still a boy, at 20 years old. He must have feasted his eyes on that train ride across America. He saw New York, and the Statue of Liberty as he sailed away. He was not thinking about death, but about his life after the war, and the stories he would tell later at home, to his parents, to his girl.
Apart from that grave, nothing of him has survived, no letters, no photograph, nothing. But Walter Cronkite from Naarden read his name aloud. And his commander-in-chief asked about his unit. That’s why we know Chester Tenhagen was there, and that he did what was asked of him. His division fired 11,500 mortar shells during the fighting that took his life. Three days before his death, most of the men in his unit were allowed to rest behind the front. Chester Tenhagen was not; he was considered essential. He paid for that with everything he had and was.
