“A lot of guys were killed and more were wounded. After a couple of months in the mountains of Southern France, attacking villages looking for Germans, they pulled us out and sent us to a camp ninety miles south of Paris for rest and recuperation. We rested up, ate well, drank a lot of wine and looked for French girls.”
For our Memorial Day 2013 piece we included a conversation with a Battle of the Bulge survivor.
Diane Lafond Marler sent us a three-page memoir written by her brother, Raymond C. Lafond, another one who survived what would become the battle that helped exhaust Germany’s ability to fight anymore.
Lafond must have written this sometime in 2007. He died in April 2008 at 83. He was living in a Silverdale care facility at the time.
His story not only provides some of the hard details of war, it is also filled with some of the humor you would expect in tales of when boys are forced to become men. Some parts of the boyhood never go away.
Raymond Lafond remembers the Battle of the Bulge by Steven Gardner
