Veteran Reluctantly Talks About Combat in France
John Heffernan • Sioux City
Corporal, U.S. Army
Don Doll, S.J. photo • Story by Tim Gallagher
The last thing you hear from John Heffernan are tales from World War II.
He'll talk about his seven children. They're all college educated. He'll talk about the years he spent trying to change his wife's nickname.
Everyone calls her "Happy." It’s been that way for years.
"It didn't work," he says with a laugh on the day of their 54th wedding anniversary. "Even I call her Happy." Or he'll visit about his career at the Sioux City Stockyards. The longtime president and owner of Hayes Order Buyers Inc. served as president of the Sioux City Livestock Exchange twice.
The last thing you get to is war. John never even joined the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He never attended a reunion of fellow soldiers. He didn't encourage any of their seven children to enter military service. He's visited Europe, but has never retraced the steps he took capturing German soldiers who retreated as the U.S. Army advanced across France.
It's a part of his life he left in the 1940s, only brought up later when a child or grandchild needed his expertise while writing a paper for school.
He watched half of "Saving Private Ryan."
"I didn't need to see more," says John, 83, and from Sioux City. "I'd been there and had seen what it was like."
What was it like?
"The first day in combat we came up over a hill and there were two Germans in a fox hole. It was late October and they were frozen stiff. That got my attention," he says.
Later, he prepared an area to rest for the night. Soldiers in the infantry marching through France shortly after D-Day found any roadside spot they could. John put his head down atop the boot of a German soldier shot dead not long before.
It was the fall of 1944. When asked if the German effort at the time was winding down, he pauses and considers the question. "I guess you could say it was winding down unless you were on the ground getting shot, which I was."
Yes, John was shot. On or about December 20, 1944, German soldiers zeroed in on the 19-year-old marksman from Marvin, South Dakota, as he carried his Browning automatic rifle.
"They always targeted the automatic weapons." A shell exploded 20 feet from Heffernan, killing a fellow soldier instantly and blowing the left arm off a soldier directly behind him. Fragments struck his left hip and knocked him to the ground.
"I was unconscious for a short time and then came to," he says. "I laid there on my stomach and waited until dark."
John says the pain wasn't great; his resolve was. "I never lost confidence that I'd make it out alive."
He was transported to a field hospital and remembers a doctor expressing skepticism he'd leave there alive. John’s reaction? "Baloney! I'll get out of here!"
Luckily, the fragments missed an artery. The young soldier underwent surgery at the field hospital and more treatment later at a hospital in England. Soon, he was on a ship headed for South Carolina. He would ultimately spend seven months recuperating at Baxter General Hospital in Spokane, Washington.
"I went from a bed to a wheelchair and from a wheelchair to a walker and from a walker to a cane. And now I'm back to a cane." That's all you notice about John Heffernan's war experience. He limps and favors the left hip shot up on a December day in France. His stance is the only thing unsteady about him.
Otherwise, he's an educated businessman who married, raised a family and built a respected livestock exchange business before retiring. He served as a deacon for three decades with the Sioux City Catholic Diocese.
"The nerves are shot," he says with a shrug while tapping his left hip. "I guess old age has caught up."