Thanksgiving is upon us.
And this is Marvin Boller’s final resting place, killed just the day before in 1944.
MARVIN K. BOLLER
PFC, 743 TANK BN WORLD WAR II
Birth: Oct. 9, 1908
Death: Nov. 22, 1944
Riverside Cemetery, Oshkosh, Winnebago County, Wisconsin, USA. Credit: J M Schumann
Exactly 75 years ago today, Marvin was killed in an apple orchard four thousand miles away from his home in Wisconsin in a horrific incident that occurred in the earliest days of American penetration onto enemy turf in Germany. Unlike 40% of those who lost their lives in combat on foreign soil during World War II, his remains did make it home after the war.
A Thanksgiving letter written to him did not.
Resistance was stiff; on that cold and rainy day before Thanksgiving, 1944, three tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion’s ‘D’ Company were wiped out in a muddy apple orchard a few miles into Germany.
A few years back, I was alerted to the existence of this unopened letter in a memorial museum in Belgium. The envelope was postmarked Nov. 27, 1944, and addressed from the USA to PFC Marvin K. Boller, D Co., 743rd Tank Battalion. It was also stamped ‘DECEASED’.
Vince Heggen, who tends graves of the men who were killed with Martin, posted this one Memorial Day:
Co D 743rd Tank Bn was moving from Langendorf to Erberich in November, 1944. It kept raining the whole day before they arrived in the orchards near Erberich. It was 8h20 when a German tank opened fire and knocked out 3 light tanks… All the crews were killed and a few of them are buried at the cemetery of Margraten. The letter, in front of the graves , was written by Marvin Boller’s wife. Marvin was killed just the day before Thanksgiving and the letter was marked ‘return to sender’. The letter made the link between the crew members of Marvin’s tank buried here, and Marvin who was buried [elsewhere].
Frank McWilliams grave by Vincent Heggen, 2017. Netherlands American Cemetery.
I wrote to Carrol Walsh, a liberator of the train near Magdeburg and a fellow member of Company D, and asked if he knew Boller; I also sent him the image of the envelope.
He wrote back:
‘Hi Matt, I was stunned when I read your message. I remember Boller very well and remember when he got killed. I believe it was just before Thanksgiving 1944 when a big German tank wiped out three tanks of the first platoon of Co. D of the 743rd. Every member of every crew of every one of the tanks was killed. I seem to remember packages arriving for some of these guys after they had been killed. I used to tease Boller, who was an older man, because he wanted to vote for Tom Dewey and I was big for my pal, FDR. Boy what a memory you stirred up. I knew all the guys that got killed in that engagement.’
Walsh and others would survive and go on to liberate Holocaust survivors on April 13th, 1945. And the letter has never been opened.
I did not know you, Marvin, I don’t know if anyone is alive who knew you. We give thanks as a nation this week; seventy-five years later, you are not forgotten. Maybe someday we will find someone who can open the letter.
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