Letters From the Front Lines Keep Love Alive
Roland Peters • Pender, Nebraska
Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army
Don Doll, S.J. photo • Story by Tim Gallagher
A 4-H participant returning from the National Livestock Show in Chicago stepped off the train at Union Station on a Sunday afternoon in December 1941.
The station announcer relayed a bulletin detailing Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Everyone stood and listened, thousands of people not making a single sound.
"I’d never heard of Pearl Harbor before," says Roland Peters, then a 20-year-old farmhand from tiny Oakland, Nebraska. In several months he would be serving his country in World War II. Roland left his folks and older brother Harvey and sister at home on the farm in August 1942 as he reported for duty. He trained as a radio operator for the U.S. Army’s 691st Field Artillery Battalion. He landed in England in August 1944 and moved quickly into France, joining soldiers as they prepared to move into German-occupied Holland.
On September 18, 1944, he sent word home. "Mom, Dad, Harvey and Sis: Don’t be too surprised now, and don’t do too much worrying about me. But I happen to be sleeping on the ground of France now," he wrote.
It was one of 62 letters he wrote in a 45-day period. On Thanksgiving Day, 1944, Roland crossed into Germany in an attempt to support the infantry as it moved toward Berlin. "There was many a night we moved forward in blackout conditions," he says. "I remember helping move three trucks of radio equipment by getting out of the truck and walking on the road ahead a few feet and showing the driver my handkerchief so he could see where to go. That’s how we moved. All night long."
After crossing the Rhine River, the 691st helped repulse three enemy attacks. Roland’s all-night effort retuning crystal radios played a key role. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre (Cross of War) for his work, the only member of the outfit to earn the honor. He was pulled off the front lines the day President Roosevelt died. "That was about a month before the Armistice was signed and they were getting close enough to Berlin, they didn’t need us so we were sent to haul food for a camp in Germany that held 8,000 Russian prisoners of war," he says.
Roland earned the points he needed for his discharge in December 1945. By Christmas, he was on his way.
"I got off a train in LeHavre, France, on New Year’s Eve in 1945," he remembers. "We rode in the back of an open truck to camp that night. It was very, very cold."
He stayed in a tent for 10 days then boarded a ship for the 10-day trek across the Atlantic Ocean.
Now 87, Roland still remembers the feeling he got seeing the Statue of Liberty outside New York on January 21, 1946.
"I had been gone 18 months," he says, pausing. "When I saw the Statue of Liberty, that’s when I knew I was back."
Roland Peters came home to Oakland without a parade, without a party to welcome him. He began feeding cattle the next day. He married Marie Lanz of Valentine, Nebraska, less than two months later. They had met at a livestock show in Omaha in September 1941. She showed much better cattle, he says with a laugh.
"I wrote at least three letters each week to her and she always wrote back," says Roland. "I think I got more letters than anyone in my outfit while we were overseas."
That’s how he and Marie courted – through letters in World War II. They went on to raise four children on a farm southwest of Pender, Nebraska. They are now grandparents of nine and greatgrandparents of 11.
"The letters must have been pretty good," Roland says with a smile for his wife. "Our marriage has lasted 62 years!"