‘‘I justI’mdidnomyhero,job!” Staff Sergeant Calvin L. Havekost, Anti-Aircraft Automatic Weapons Battalion BY NANCY D. LACKEY SHAFFER
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ike many young American men, the life of Calvin L. Havekost changed dramatically on Dec. 7, 1941. “I was squirrel hunting when my father came to me and said Pearl Harbor had been bombed,” Havekost recalls in an email communication. Havekost was born on May 19, 1924, and raised on a farm in Monroe County, Michigan. He was drafted a mere eight months after graduating from high school, and set out for basic training on March 23, 1943. He was just 18 years old. After training in Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina, Havekost was selected as an Administrative NCO (noncommissioned officer) in the AntiAircraft Automatic Weapons Battalion and shipped out from New York soon after New Year. His unit was in Kent, England, where the soldiers could hear London being bombed 40 miles away. He remembers gliders carrying men, jeeps and provisions filling up the sky, heading for Normandy. Twelve days after D-Day, on June 18, Havekost’s unit moved to Southampton, where troop ships bound for Normandy were loaded. The landing docks in France, however, were blown away in a storm, and the fleet was halted for 15 days in the English Channel. “I felt like a sitting duck!” he recalls.
The unit made it to Omaha Beach, near Saint-Lô, which Havekost describes as “a crossroad for German supplies.” Bombed by the Allies, he saw pieces of German equipment, animal corpses and human bodies littering the streets of the pulverized town. It was a sobering experience. “That was our first exposure. The really tough facts of what was going on hit us at that point.” The Germans promptly retreated from the area and the unit left for Paris, going through many towns along the way. “The people were so kind to us,” Havekost says. “They’d throw us loaves of bread. Sometimes you’d get a bottle of champagne!” The unit arrived in Paris at the end of August. Rapidly assigned to the 29th Infantry Division, it then traveled north through Belgium and stopped in the Netherlands. Setting up camp on the Dutch-German border for most of the winter, the unit became the lead division in the north for the United States. Havekost remembers it as a particularly frightening and uncertain time. “Should the Germans have been successful in winning the Battle of the Bulge and taking Liege, we would have been completely cut off!” Nevertheless, the soldiers, as they say, stayed calm and carried on. “They say that it takes 50 people to service one combat person,” he explains. “You’ve got truck drivers, people delivering gas and supplies, intelligence people trying to decipher the German codes. I’m no hero, I just did my job!” When spring came around, the unit marched through industrial towns in Northern Germany. At one point it stumbled upon a discovery that would shake Havekost to the core: a German ammunitions plant where prisoners from all over Europe were forced to work. “There were very high fences as people were trapped. You couldn’t identify much of them, they were just skin and bones. Life had gone out of them.” The unit liberated them, but Havekost’s emotions at the time were dark: “Sad. Just hatred for what the Germans had
done and I’m German, my ancestry!” The unit eventually moved on and met with the Russians at the Elbe River. “We entertained them. Our guys jitterbugged for them, they did their Cossack dance. They drank our whiskey, we drank their vodka, but we didn’t trust them completely.” Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. In August, Havekost — by now a staff sergeant — and the rest of his unit were sent to Bremen, Germany, where the soldiers awaited orders to go home. “We were on a point system as to when we would go home. The guys with the Battle Star and [those] with the Purple Heart, they had a lot of points and I didn’t have enough. I didn’t leave until January.” “I came back to my home town and married my sweetheart. It wasn’t a hard transition as my family and friends were there with me,” he continues. “I went to work [in the auto industry], my wife and I bought a house, we raised a family and I’ve lived a blessed life.” Havekost, who now lives with his daughter in Oxnard, notes that what stands out most about his time in World War II is “how much I grew up by what I saw and experienced. I’m proud to have served and happy that I have lived this long so I can share my story with my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.” “I am a proud Veteran who honors all who have and continue to serve for our liberty and freedom.” F Portraits and interviews of Calvin Havekost and other veterans will be included in Pictures for Heroes, a new coffee table book by photographer Zach Coco, which should be available by Veterans’ Day in November 2019. For more information, visit picturesforheroes.com.
June 6, 2019 —
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