While America celebrated Independence Day this month, World War II Army Veteran Mac McElfresh says there is no country like this one. “Times change but values don’t. “We’ve got a great country and we need to take care of her.”
At 95 years old, McElfresh is 75 percent deaf from a mine explosion that also destroyed his lower right leg, and 100 percent patriotic. Shrapnel remains in his right eyelid. “See that?” he asked with a grin, pointing just above his upper eyelashes. “That’s my German souvenir!” he joked.
McElfresh was shipped to Germany in December 1944 and fought in the Battle of the Bulge at Bastone, Belgium under General George Patton. He and four other infantry solders were on night patrol scouting for enemy troops when they came under machine gun fire.
“The five of us were probably an eighth of a mile behind enemy lines. Our job was to find what the Germans had ahead of us. Our company was to take a certain hill the next morning and our job at night was to go up this hill to see what we could find.”
What they found were three German machine gun nests. “Boy, they opened up on us! We were closer to them than we thought. They were firing over us. We were pushing ourselves backwards in the snow to get out of range of this. That’s when I saw an embankment going down. I tucked my left foot under my right leg – I think the Lord told me to do that – when I hit the dirt, there was a huge explosion at the bottom of the embankment. I felt myself floating through the air. When I came to, my face was up against a tree. My arms were around the tree. It threw me over and over and that’s the way I landed. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear anything.”
And he did not hear the other soldiers calling out to him. When he did not respond, they thought he was dead and left him behind.
“At first, the pain was unbearable. The blast shattered my right leg below the knee. My foot was still there hanging on by shreds. I made a tourniquet from my belt to stop the bleeding. I started crawling back toward American lines. I knew I was bleeding. I was so tired, I could have lain down and gone to sleep but I told myself, ‘No, no, no, keep going,’ and I did. The three machine gun nests the Germans had – they could see something crawling down there – opened up with their machine guns on me crawling. I tell you, the mud, the dirt, the snow was being thrown all over me and I’d just lay down, bury my head in the snow and wait for it to stop.”
McElfresh says it was a windy night and the clouds were moving fast. When the moon went behind the clouds, he would take off again and go as fast as he could. “I was so afraid I’d hit my head on a mine. I kept going and praying.” He kept thinking of his wife, Mary, his young son, Gary, and his new twin daughters, Judy and Trudy.
When he got back to Allied lines, he forgot the password that identified him to his troops. “’If you don’t give it, your own men will shoot you!’ I yelled out to them. I said, ‘For crying out loud, guys. Don’t shoot me!’”
They recognized his voice and they also had heard the machine gun and mines going off. McElfresh says they knew the patrol had run into big trouble.
From there, solders put him on a stretcher and strapped him sideways across the hood of a Jeep. Looking down from a bridge over Germany’s Prune River, he says he prayed the driver would stay on the two narrow planks.
McElfresh lost consciousness. The next time he opened his eyes, he was looking up at high ceilings and crystal chandeliers. What he thought was heaven was actually a palace in Luxemburg.
From there, he was brought to an amputation center in Brigham City, Utah. The government fitted him with his first prosthetic and provided a car designed for him. “I was going home to my lovely wife.”
McElfresh’s son, Gary, was a toddler when his dad came home. “If I did something wrong, I thought I could get away with it, but he’d chase me down!” Gary said.
McElfresh became so proficient with his prosthetic that he spent years in San Diego building artificial legs for others and encouraging other amputees. “You’d never know he had an artificial leg. He could go into a hospital room and somebody might feel sorry for himself,” said Gary. “People could see what they could do if they put their mind to it.”
McElfresh says his experience in the war gave him a greater appreciation of everything. “They weren’t all bad memories,” he recalled, like the cold winter night on patrol when he found a fresh pile of manure in which to sleep. “It was the warmest night I spent in combat!”
McElfresh says he is blessed to have survived. “I was praying the whole time crossing the mine fields. I remember how thankful I was that I made it and was going home.”
The real heroes, he adds, are the guys who did not make it home. From his room at The Peaks in Flagstaff, McElfresh smiles wide and says he is grateful for the freedoms we enjoy. “I love America.” FBN