‘Walking dead’ haunt him still

Lawrence Rowse, fresh out of Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, had not turned 21 when he hit Omaha Beach on D-Day, witnessed the liberation of Paris and was injured in the Battle of the Bulge.

Yet the images that have haunted him for the next 60 years were from a camp outside of Weimar, Germany: Buchenwald.

“We didn’t know much about concentration camps at all,” said Rowse, 80, then an Army radioman. “I suppose some of the intelligence officers knew about them. But us soldiers, we didn’t know.”

He and his unit in the 17th Field Artillery Observation Battalion arrived a few days after the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945. Their job was to transport “what we could salvage of the living dead” to the American field hospitals.

He and the other soldiers were so appalled by the conditions, they could barely even talk.

Rowse’s reaction was to shoot photos with his new Argus C-3 camera. Even today, he finds it easiest to simply point to his pictures from that day, later printed in his battalion’s official history book. He shot pictures of bodies stacked like cordwood, and prisoners who looked too emaciated to be alive.

“The walking dead, we called them,” said Rowse. “The real tearjerkers were seeing the kids.”

His unit emptied equipment from their trucks to make more room to transport the ex-prisoners.

“But actually, I don’t think many of them survived,” he said. “They were so far gone.”

His unit had already been through various stages of hell in the previous year.

He and his unit bobbed off Omaha Beach for most of D-Day, June 6, 1944, waiting to fight their way ashore. They were delayed until evening because so many troops were backed up on the beach – a lucky circumstance for his unit, because by then the beach was relatively peaceful.

“I’ll never forget the bosun’s mate on the (landing craft),” said Rowse, now a retired construction foreman. “I recall him saying, ‘Hurry up and get off my boat, you dog-faces. This is my seventh landing.’ He meant the seventh that day.”

By August, Rowse was driving through newly liberated Paris in a command car, as the radio operator for his captain.

“I recall the huge crowds and women climbing all over the command car,” said Rowse. “I didn’t like that. Any one of them could have dropped a grenade in there. You get so you don’t trust anyone, even kids.”

That winter, he was in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, manning a radio outpost on the upper floor of an abandoned farmhouse. He heard an ominous buzzing noise.

“It was a buzz bomb coming,” said Rowse. “It makes the weirdest drone. It landed 50-60 feet outside this building and hit our field mess and kitchens. It was a 1,000-pounder.

“Somehow, the wind force blew me and my other friend clear through the house partition wall, clear up to the ceiling and we landed in the rafters. Luckily I had my steel helmet on, and it stayed with me because otherwise I would have had my head blown half apart.”

He ended up with a concussion and blown-out eardrums, but nothing broken. After a two- or three-day hospital stay, he was back in action. He received the Purple Heart for this incident.

So when his unit was sent to help out at a then-obscure German prison camp in April, he thought nothing could faze him again.

“Oh God, seeing as how we had seen so much war before, we were pretty hardened,” he said. “Death was an everyday occurrence.”

Yet for Rowse, the effects of that one day in Buchenwald linger today.

“I still have occasions of post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Rowse. “It kind of came up to where I had to start seeing counselors and some shrinks, psychologists. Partially they did me some good, but mostly they did more harm than good.”

He has also survived two surgeries in the last year: triple-bypass heart surgery and a lung operation. Now, he’s back on his feet, working in his backyard shop.

“I try to keep my mind occupied, keep it off the stress points,” said Rowse.

Meanwhile he wants people to know that Buchenwald was as horrible as they have heard.

“Worse,” he said. “Some of those neo-Nazis, who say it didn’t happen? I figure they’re not very intelligent.”