Frederick Clark, Gettysburg, and the Malmedy Massacre

The headstone of PFC Frederick Clark, Section 2, Row 2, Grave 54. NPS photo.

The Battle of the Bulge

On the morning of December 16, 1944, thousands of German soldiers poured through the weakest sector of the Allied front in the cold, dense Ardennes Forest of Belgium. The attack was born of desperation: with the Soviets closing in from the east, morale at home sinking and many German commanders doubting the war could still be won, Hitler gambled on breaking the Americans and British in the west, rolling back their recent gains and perhaps retaking the port of Antwerp.

It became the largest American battle of the war. More than 80,000 American casualties, almost ten percent of all American combat casualties in the war, fell in that one battle. Caught off guard at first, the Americans rushed reinforcements against the bulge the Germans had driven into their line, and by the end of January 1945 had retaken all the ground they lost, at a heavy cost in a harsh winter. On the battle's second day, December 17, came an incident that stood for the cruelty of war, and that ties the Bulge to Gettysburg.

A Pittsburgh family

Frederick Clark was born on January 21, 1916, and grew up in Pittsburgh, one of nine children in a hardworking western Pennsylvania family. His father, David, was a coal miner with an eighth-grade education; the eldest son, Sylvester, was working in a steel mill at 17. By 1930, in the depths of the Depression, David was in his mid-fifties and out of work; three of the sons took laborer's jobs, and David's brother Sam, a steelworker, moved in to help. By the 1940 census most of the children had left home, their mother, Clara, worked in a Pittsburgh office building, and Frederick, 24, was out of work and looking.

He enlisted in the Army on January 11, 1943: single, with no dependents, a grammar-school education, just under five and a half feet tall and 138 pounds.

The Baugnez crossroads

Clark served in Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, which reached France through Omaha Beach in August 1944, just over two months after the first landings. Observation batteries located enemy artillery; they had no heavy guns, which left them exposed at close quarters.

On December 17 the battalion was driving through Malmedy toward St. Vith to help defend it. Heading south toward the Baugnez crossroads, the column was surprised by SS tanks and half-tracks under Joachim Peiper. Vehicles were knocked out and some drivers swerved into ditches. According to Corporal George Fox, Clark was among a few men cornered by a German tank; as they raised their hands to surrender, machine guns opened fire, and Clark was hit in the chest, one of the first to die.

The SS then rounded up some 130 American prisoners, took their valuables, and machine-gunned them. Officers walked among the bodies, shooting many in the head to make sure they were dead. Some men escaped; 84 Americans were killed in what became known as the Malmedy Massacre. Survivors spread word of the atrocity, and it moved many Allied units to take no prisoners in the fighting that followed.

An American soldier looks across the field where men killed in the Malmedy Massacre lie. National Archives and Records Administration.

The crossroads stayed in German hands for weeks, and the bodies lay frozen until American troops retook the ground. The dead were then gathered and identified and the scene documented as a war crime; Clark's body was among them. After the war Peiper and a number of his men were tried and convicted of war crimes, Malmedy among them, and served prison terms; Peiper had not been present at the shooting, but it was part of a wider pattern of atrocities by troops under his command. In the 1970s, living in France under cover, he was discovered and murdered.

Coming home

Clark was first buried at the American cemetery at Henri-Chapelle. In 1948, at his family's request, he was brought home to the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg, where he lies in Section 2, Row 2, Grave 54. His father had died in August 1945, knowing how his son had died; his mother later received a government pension.

At Gettysburg Clark lies among Americans who died in wars from Gettysburg itself to Vietnam. Their deaths were not always heroic charges; some, like his, came far from home in a frozen field by a Belgian crossroads, cut down while trying to surrender. When Lincoln spoke there of "these honored dead" in November 1863, he asked the living to take "increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion", words as true for those who died at Malmedy as for those who fell at Gettysburg.

Sources

• National Park Service, Gettysburg National Military Park, "Frederick Clark, Gettysburg, and the Malmedy Massacre." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/gettysburg-and-the-malmedy-massacre.htm
• Corrected: "Henri Chappelle" to "Henri-Chapelle".