The WWII Battle of St. Lo

The residents of a tiny French village will soon dedicate a small plaque remembering an Omaha man who, 65 years ago, died a long way from home.

The ceremony honoring Lt. Col. Alfred Thomsen has another, larger purpose: It's a chance to right a World War II wrong that has rankled a group of Nebraska soldiers since 1944.

Sixty-five years ago, Thomsen and a 134th Infantry Regiment filled with Nebraskans fought through dense hedgerows, clawed their way up a key hill under enemy fire and entered the destroyed village of St. Lo. Nearly one of every three men suffered a serious injury or, like Thomsen, died during the battle and occupation of St. Lo.

Sixty-five years ago, a group of Virginia soldiers got the glory. National magazines and the Army's own records gave them sole credit for liberating the strategically key village. The Nebraska veterans occasionally griped about the oversight as they held reunions, had grandchildren and died one by one.

Sixty-five years later, the ceremony to honor Thomsen marks another success in a decades-long struggle to get the Nebraskans their due.

On July 17 and 18, French villagers will gather for two ceremonies, one remembering Thomsen and the other honoring the 35th Division, which included the Nebraska regiment. The crowd will applaud graciously.

To the Nebraskans in attendance — which will include Thomsen's son — it will sound like thunder.

“He's finally getting the recognition he deserved, that they all deserved,” said Neal Thomsen, who grew up in north Omaha and now lives in Indianapolis. “It's been 65 years. I'm so happy for him.”

Col. Thomsen — “Tommy” to his friends — was a big man with a big voice who commanded a battalion of Nebraska National Guard soldiers in the 134th. At dawn on July 15, 1944, he and his regiment found themselves thrown directly into the little known and shockingly brutal battle north of St. Lo.

The town had importance because all local highways converged there. Hitler's army realized this, too: The Germans had fought off three previous Allied attempts to take St. Lo, fending them off with machine guns and heavy artillery placed on the hill north of the town.

The fresh Nebraska soldiers began a push south toward St. Lo, gaining more ground in hours than previous divisions had in weeks.

But the cost shocked Thomsen and the 134th Regiment's commander, Col. Butler Miltonberger of North Platte. The Germans hid behind the French hedgerows, which were impenetrable rock piles covered with hedges and topped by giant trees.

They cut down Nebraska soldiers who scouted the open fields between the hedgerows.

The Nebraskans, who had never seen combat before and had inexplicably never trained in hedgerow warfare, had to learn as they went. They painstakingly cleared each hedgerow of enemy soldiers and then advanced a football field's length to clear another.

By noon, some of the Nebraska National Guard companies had already lost half their men.

“You would take two hedgerows and lose 100 guys,” said Dick O'Brien of Newport Coast, Calif., who served in the 35th Division and today is the division's historian. “The reward for that is you went and took another hedgerow.”

By nightfall, the Nebraska soldiers had reached Hill 122, the key hill north of town. They scrambled up it. At one point, Thomsen, out in front of his battalion, pulled his pistol and fired shots at a German tank. His men cheered when the tank retreated from their fiery colonel.

At another point, Thomsen was badly cut by shrapnel but refused medical evacuation.

Thomsen's soldiers and others fought off a series of counterattacks and took control of Hill 122 by daybreak.

During the 24 hours of nonstop fighting, 792 of the Nebraska regiment's 3,000 men were either wounded or killed.

Thomsen soon joined the casualty list. In late July, he was struck by an artillery shell during the occupation of St. Lo. He died in an English hospital that August when a blood clot entered his brain.

Several days later in Omaha, Neal Thomsen, then 14, peeled open the Western Union telegram that began with the words, “We regret to inform you . . . .”

“I remember my mother came completely unstuck,” he said. “I just sat in the living room, numb.”

After they took Hill 122, the Nebraska soldiers felt insult piled upon their injuries.

The Germans retreated south, and the Nebraska commanders sent patrols into St. Lo, a once-beautiful town reduced to rubble by Allied bombing.

Then they got an unexpected order: Move out of town and wait.

The Nebraska soldiers waited as another regiment — a group of Virginia soldiers who had gotten bogged down north of St. Lo after fighting nonstop since D-Day — drove and marched into St. Lo with reporters and photographers.

From that day, the Army's official history has said the 29th Division, not the Nebraska troops, had liberated St. Lo, said Doug Hartman, a historian who lives in Omaha.

“That history is wrong,” Hartman said of the official Army version. “The point isn't to disparage the 29th. . . . They deserve credit for what they did, too. The point is, getting the credit always mattered to these Nebraska guys whose buddies died fighting for that territory.”

The campaign to correct the record started just weeks after the battle, when World-Herald correspondent Lawrence Youngman, stationed with the regiment, wrote an article headlined “134th Enters City First; Others Get Credit.”

After the war ended, Col. Miltonberger wrote letters to magazines and newspapers, arguing against the popularized portrayals of the battle, Hartman said.

Miltonberger, who became chief of the Nebraska National Guard, continued to publicize the slight after he retired. During his last known interview, Miltonberger brought up the controversy, crying as he remembered his men who died at St. Lo.

Hartman, a retired National Guard captain, took up the cause after he discovered Miltonberger's papers while interning at the Nebraska State Historical Society. He wrote his undergraduate and master's theses on the 134th.

He devoted several chapters to the regiment and the controversy in his book, “Nebraska's Militia,” a history of the Nebraska National Guard. Hartman also attended the regiment's reunions, interviewing many of the veterans.

Some of the men professed not to care about getting credit for St. Lo. Others were bitter.

“The word ‘bastards' came up a lot,” Hartman said.

The tide started to turn in the 1990s with the opening of a St. Lo museum that honored both groups of soldiers that helped liberate St. Lo. The town also honored the Nebraska soldiers on the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

The two ceremonies this month will further let the veterans and their families know that the 134th's sacrifice was appreciated, said James Huston of Lynchburg, Va., an operations officer with the regiment during World War II and now a retired college history professor and author.

Huston will be in the crowd July 17. He considered Col. Thomsen one of his closest military friends and admired him because “he never gave the impression of being afraid of anything.”

“Much lesser men than him have streets and buildings named after them,” Huston said. “We have always kind of felt overlooked. We're overlooked no more.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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