Suburban veterans recall life, death in WWII

Spanning the globe and leaving 60 million dead, the epic saga of World War II earns its nickname, “The Big One.” But the 70-year-old memories of veterans Bob Burns, 91, of Ingleside, and John Sinitean, 89, of Bartlett, reveal brief, intimate moments of that war where life and death for them would hang in the balance.

The middle of seven children born to Bill and Marie Burns in Kewanee, Burns figured he'd spend his life in the Henry County town 120 miles southwest of Chicago. The town of 16,901 offered him the same factory job choices it had given all the Burns men since his grandfather arrived from Ireland in 1852.

“The Walworth Company — my grandfather worked there. My father worked there. Two brothers worked there,” Burns says. “It was either there or the Kewanee Boiler shop.”

But Uncle Sam had other plans for Burns. Drafted after graduating from high school in May 1943, Burns was just an 18-year-old Catholic kid when he killed his first German soldier that December.

“You never forget your first,” Burns says. While he had earned a medal as an expert marksman with his M1 rifle during artillery training, he was reluctant to use that skill as his platoon marched into a small Italian town north of Naples on the heels of retreating troops from Nazi Germany.

“As we would advance, the Germans would leave food behind,” remembers Burns, who would use the goodies to supplement his Army ration. “Their cheese was very good.”

One December afternoon, the Germans left more than cheese.

“I came up on this church, which the Germans had used as an observation post for their artillery pieces,” Burns says.

Burns and a fellow soldier were only 30 feet from the church when a door opened and a German soldier stepped out. The German, who was about 30, was as surprised to see the Americans as they were to see him.

“He looked like a giant to me,“ says Burns, who had an instant to make a decision that would forever change the lives of two men and those of the people who loved them.

“To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have shot that guy,” Burns says. “I would have taken him prisoner.”

But the German forced a different outcome.

“He had a Luger (pistol) and started going for it, so I had no choice. I shot him,” remembers Burns, who watched the enemy crumple. “I walked up to see if I had killed him or not, and sure enough, he was gone.”

Had the German fired first, Burns and his partner could have been the ones who bled to death in front of that Italian church.

“I sure didn't consider myself a hero. I just did what I had to do,” Burns says. He didn't even like the couple of times he'd fired a gun while rabbit hunting back in Kewanee.

“That's tough at that age to have to shoot somebody,” Burns says. “I often wonder what happened to the poor guy's family.”

Soldiers often take anything of value from enemies they've killed in combat. Sometimes, they want a souvenir.

“I could have cleaned the guy out, taken his binoculars and everything. But I didn't,” Burns says softly. “I just walked away. I felt so bad about it.”

A member of the 63rd Infantry marching through Germany, Sinitean was another teenager, fresh off his 1944 graduation from Chicago's Lane Tech High School, when he saw his first dead Nazi.

“The guy got shot in the head and his teeth were out,” Sinitean says, explaining how the gunshot ripped through the man's jaw. Sinitean was the youngest soldier in his squadron, almost like a little brother to be picked on by men who had been fighting for months.

“You go there,” Sinitean says, “and after one day in combat, you're experienced.”

He saw lots of bodies after that, including those of friends he watched die. Sinitean, a skinny 18-year-old, remembers zigzagging through combat zones, hoping to avoid the mortars exploding around him.

“I ran too fast,” he says with a laugh. A radio man who installed wires from one town to the next to set up the communication switchboard, Sinitean says death always was just one unlucky step away.

“There were land mines near the poles,” he says. “We'd get up to the poles and 'bing, bing, bing.' People were shooting at us.”

But he says the closest he came to dying was a night he spent alone in the basement of a German house, manning the switchboard. His life was saved, in a way, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“I fell asleep with my cigarettes,” Sinitean says. The hot ashes fell onto his jacket and the table. The smoldering fire was filling the room with smoke. His clothes were beginning to burn when the radio squawked to life and woke the young soldier.

“They called me up and said President Roosevelt had died,” Sinitean says. “If it wasn't for that phone call, I would have cooked.”

Burns, who still has the rosary beads he carried with him through Italy, says he prayed when he got the chance.

“I said 'Hail Marys' and the rosary,” he remembers. “I can't remember having any fear, believe it or not.”

After his first deadly encounter with the enemy, “shoot or be shot” became a way of life, Burns says.

“I didn't really kill anybody the next day, but I shot at people,” says Burns, who isn't sure how many Germans he killed. “I'd say 10 or 15. That's about all. A lot of times you shoot and you don't know if you really got them or not. One time, I even threw a hand grenade at them and got a couple of them.”

Close calls were a daily occurrence.

“It was almost like the Fourth of July,” Burns says, adding he could tell who was shooting — German machine guns emitted a smooth “brr, brr, brr, brr,” while American machine guns made a “putt, putt, putt” noise.

“The ones that are close, you don't even hear them,” he says of the enemy bullets. “It would hit a tree or hit the ground, mainly. The only thing that saved you at night were the foxholes.”

Even then, Germans could sneak up and kill you while you slept. “Usually they bayoneted you because everybody would hear a gun,” Burns remembers. Every day or two, a member of his platoon would be killed. He remembers Glen T. King from North Carolina “was the first one who got killed out of our outfit.” The Germans often left signs reading “Achtung Minen” to indicate mines lurking under the top soil or to slow Allied troops pursuing them. Burns was sent out with a metal detector to find those mines.

“I didn't realize at the time that it wasn't turned on,” Burns says, laughing at the idea of him searching for mines with his detector off. “I didn't think it was funny at the time.”

Many World War II veterans tell funny stories rather than the horrific ones.

“He always jokes about it. I think they dealt with it with laughter,” says Sinitean's son, John, who lives in Bartlett.

After the war, Sinitean found the woman and the job he loved. He became a “tin man,” installing duct work, and he and his wife, Lois, had kids: Sandra, Donna, John, Patricia, Randy and Susan. Neither Sinitean or Burns talked much about the war.

“I didn't tell my kids and grandkids about it until recently,” Burns says.

After the war, he returned to Kewanee. He and his wife, Betty, had Jeff, Linda, and also Dennis, who died in 1999 of kidney problems. Using the G.I. Bill to take some college courses, Burns worked at Walworth until a headhunter found him a job with the Frank G. Hough Co., a heavy equipment manufacturer in Libertyville. He retired in 1982. His wife died in 2004, and Burns now lives with the family of his grandson, Corey Lowry.

Just as Burns still can recite his dog tag serial number by heart, he can't forget the memories of the first German he killed.

“Every little decision changes life from then on,” Burns says. “Even after all these years, I still think about it. He was a Nazi German soldier, but he had a family. Such is life."