By Stephen Smoot
Eighty years ago this month came Victory in Europe Day. This represented the Greatest Generation’s first complete military triumph, although the three main Allied commanders in the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Douglas Macarthur, and the Earl of Mountbatten (who held all of the highest ranks in the British military simultaneously with the title “Supremo”) still had much work to do in rolling back the Empire of Japan.
Some of the greatest in the Greatest Generation, however, never saw victory. Among those countless heroes stands tall the Wereth 11, whose story remained classified for decades until United States Senator Joe Manchin brought them to the nation’s attention.
These 11 men served in the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, one of the so-called “colored” units established in the armed forces for service in World War II. Not until after the war would President Harry S. Truman, a World War I artillery officer, risk his presidential race in 1948 by ordering the desegregation of the United States armed forces.
They came from all over, but one of the most senior of the group in both age and rank came from a small rail and industrial town in West Virginia.
In September 1906 James Aubrey Stewart entered the world, born to a hard-working family in Piedmont, West Virginia. Piedmont clings to a steep mountainside on the banks of the Potomac with massive turn-of the century mansions sitting well above both the downtown and the flood plain.
Across the river in Luke, Maryland, the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company churned out products for all manner of publications. Here, Aubrey Stewart (he went by his middle name to distinguish himself from his father, whom he was named after) followed his father into the mill for work.
Stewart also joined a local semi professional baseball team, the Piedmont Colored Giants, dominating the league with his pitching prowess. By the late 1930s he came to the front door step of middle age as a respected co-worker and man in town.
Then came the Second World War.
Directly after Pearl Harbor, Stewart patriotically enlisted in the United States Army. He received induction into the service at an induction center in Clarksburg, likely riding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to get there. From there, he went to Oklahoma to train at Camp Gruber and Fort Sill before shipping off to join the 333rd in Europe.
Their unit landed in Normandy exactly 20 days after the June 6 invasion, working their way inland to support thrusts made against the Germans by George Patton’s Third Army.
In his last letter home, Dec. 7 1944, Stewart described the bitterly cold European winters and the frustrations of slow mail delivery. His father also heard of how much he enjoyed a recent USO show starring Marlene Dietrich.
Overall, both Patton’s American and Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery’s British forces made good time against the retreating Germans. The summer and fall of 1944 seemed but a prologue to a German collapse as the Soviet Union battered their Eastern flank.
Then came the completely unexpected, a major German offensive. Called by the Allies “the Battle of the Bulge,” this plan from Adolf Hitler and his generals marshaled all available assets to attack the Western powers, break their momentum, and drive them into the English Channel as they had in 1940.
On December 16, 1944 came the massive offensive with the 333rd Field Artillery directly in its path. Outnumbered at some times 10 to one, the unit did its duty in holding its position and fighting fiercely to help slow the German drive so others could regroup.
This same battle found the 101st Airborne surrounded at Bastogne, defying the besieging Germans as Patton pushed his troops day and night to relieve them. The 333rd fought as long and as hard as it could, holding its position for 24 hours.
And being a “colored” unit, they also knew ahead of time what their fate would be if they surrendered and trusted to the mercy of the advancing Germans.
When the lines broke, Stewart and 10 other survivors of Battery C fled under cover of night to find their way back to their own lines, or at least a safe haven.
They found one in the Belgian town of Wereth.
Mathias and Maria Langer took the 11 men under their roof. They offered a warm and safe respite and freshly baked bread for the battle-weary men, but that haven soon dissipated. Elements of a Schutzstaffel, or SS, unit had responded to an informant and came to the town to find the Americans.
On the night of December 17, the 11 men chose to spare their benefactors the awful consequences of the SS finding them in hiding there. Instead, they left the home quickly and offered themselves for surrender.
The next time anyone saw them, soldiers from the 99th Infantry Division uncovered their bodies from the melting snow. SS forces had not simply executed the men, but tortured and mutilated them brutally before leaving them in a nearby farmers’ field.
A strange dynamic emerged over the legacy and memory of the men. Immediately after the war, the town of Wereth and the Kingdom of Belgium recognized them as war heroes. They celebrated the American soldiers who gave their lives to save a Belgian family. But the families of Private Curtis Adams, Corporal Bradley Mager, Private Davis George, Sergeant Thomas Forte, Corporal Robert Green, Private Leatherwood James, Private Nathaniel Moss, Private George W. Moten, Sergeant William Edward Pritchett, Sergeant James Aubrey Stewart, and Private Due W. Turner, would only hear of their sons’ loss, but neither how it happened, nor the brutality visited upon them as they died. That story remained hidden for many decades.
In the movie Judgment at Nuremburg, Spencer Tracy plays an old fashioned judge asked to serve in war crimes trials of National Socialists late in the 1940s. The arrival of the Cold War and Soviet aggression made allies out of the former enemy West Germans. One of the pressures on Tracy’s character lies in the desire of the US government to wrap up such proceedings so as not to perpetuate bad feelings between the two countries.
Likely, the same government in the real world buried the story for the same reasons. Not until March 2017, and after work on the Senate side by Manchin and in the House of Representatives by Congressman David McKinley did the United States government officially recognize the unimaginably horrific fate that befell these 11 men of remarkable courage, honor, and virtue.
The legacy of Stewart remains alive and well in Piedmont and across Mineral County due to the efforts of T. J. Coleman. Coleman, a Piedmont native and a veteran of the United States Air Force, has taken on a new mission. He passionately relates the story of Aubrey Stewart and the Wereth 11 to schools and as part of other events around the area.
Coleman has also established a society of young people to perform community service in memory of Stewart and the others. Additionally, he created a scholarship fund to reward young scholars who best exemplify the legacy and perpetuate the memory of the men.
The Wereth 11 symbolized to Belgians the entirety of the American and Allied effort to liberate the prisoners of the National Socialist empire.
Coleman and others prefer to speak to the heroism of the men as Americans than to use them as examples of racial discrimination, though that likely figured in the silence about what happened to them. They tell their stories to bring Americans together through honoring the memory of men who made the choice to give the ultimate sacrifice to save the innocent, recognizing them as being among the greatest of the greatest who defeated tyranny in World War II.
