The 18th Infantry were still on R&R when, the following day, the news of the German attack reached them. Their leave was over: by three that afternoon, they were packed into trucks and were beginning to hurry to the front. The 2nd Battalion found itself holding a position south of the town of Bütgenbach, on what was soon to become the northernmost limit of the Ardennes salient – or ‘bulge’. By Christmas Eve, the German attack had run out of steam, crippled by lack of fuel, but what followed was two months of appalling attritional warfare. In the Ardennes, the war soon began to resemble the worst horrors of the Western Front over twenty years before.
On Christmas Day, the big freeze started, and then came the snow, covering everything in a deep white shroud. The temperatures dropped below freezing and stayed there, and the Americans, with too much cotton clothing and not enough wool, began to suffer badly as they crouched in their foxholes and listened to the shells screaming overhead.
There’s another photograph of Tom and Dee, taken around this time. There’s still an air of swagger about them, but they look more serious, older even, although this may have something to do with the Errol Flynn moustaches they’re both sporting. Standing ankle-deep in snow, they’re wearing thick scarves around their necks and white camouflage covers over their tin hats. ‘The worst part of the Bulge was the snow and my clothes being froze,’ says Dee. ‘Course, we had thick pants over our other clothes, but we didn’t have snowshoes or anything. We just had our regular boots and a field jacket and anything else we could find.’ Their clothes became so frozen they would grate together like paper. They also suffered from German V1 rockets, or ‘buzz-bombs’. They could hear them coming, like a persistent drone, then all of a sudden the engine would cut and they would hurtle into the dense fir forest where the battalion was crouching. ‘You didn’t know where they was going to land,’ says Tom, ‘so you’d lie there waiting for the bang.’ Huge craters would be formed, obliterating everything in their wake, and propelling shards of stone and lethal tree splinters in a wide arc.
But the guardian angel that had been watching over the twins since the day they joined the US Army continued her good work, although Tom and Dee both had their close shaves. Dee was even wounded again on their way back to the front. Having just passed through Bütgenbach, their column was attacked by Allied aircraft. One bomb landed no more than twenty feet from Dee, blowing him up into the air and onto the bank of the road and showering him in mud.
Tom found him a short while later, standing in the doorway of a building in Bütgenbach, covered in mud and blood. ‘But just by the way he was standing, I could tell it was Dee,’ says Tom, who then took him down to the aid station. After being cleaned up and bandaged, Dee rejoined Company Headquarters. ‘I didn’t go to hospital or anything,’ he says. ‘I’d already been separated from my brother once, so I just stayed with the outfit. I was fine soon enough.’
Tom had another eerie experience during the Bulge. He was with a new wire-man buddy, a replacement named Private William White, and they were laying wires when shells started whistling overhead and exploding nearby. Taking cover by a fence, they waited for the barrage to lift, then heard voices up ahead.
‘I’m going to take a look at what’s going on,’ Tom told White. ‘You wait here and I’ll holler for you.’ Moving cautiously forward, he soon found a couple of badly wounded Germans. One had already passed out but on seeing Tom, the other asked him to shoot him to put him out of his misery.
‘No,’ Tom told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you.’ He then called back to White, but there was no answer, and so he shouted again. But White still did not appear. So Tom went back to the fence where he had left White, but he was gone. ‘That son of a gun,’ thought Tom, ‘he’s deserted on me.’ He felt like shooting his buddy when he next caught up with him. Heading back to the command post, Tom reported that White had gone missing.
That night, it snowed again, and the following morning they moved positions, passing within a few yards of where Tom had been the previous day. He saw two mounds where the Germans had been – evidently they had both died and been buried under the snow. ‘I just looked at them and didn’t say nothing,’ admits Tom. Soon after, White was found, dead. ‘When I left him there,’ says Tom, ‘there must have been some Germans still in the area and they grabbed him after I’d gone forward.’ Later, as White had tried to escape, he had been shot. ‘It could easily have been me,’ says Tom.
The Bulge was the last major action the twins fought, although there was still much fighting right to the very end. Tom remembers seeing a twelve-year-old German soldier during the last weeks of the war. He’s got a photo of him. ‘Most of the time you never knew who you was fighting against,’ he says, but claims he never felt any great animosity towards the Germans. Nor did Dee. ‘At the end, they just wanted to get away from the Russians,’ he says. ‘We wasn’t their enemy. The Russians was their enemy.’
When VE Day finally arrived, the twins were in Czechoslovakia. The Americans told everyone in the town to turn their lights on so that the German troops still up in the hills would know that the fighting was over. ‘I guess they got that signal,’ says Tom, ‘because the next day they were coming home in droves.’
They got to celebrate the war’s end a short while later. Earlier, they’d passed through Bonn and had found a cellar full of wine and even whisky. Backing up an army lorry, they had helped load the drink onto the back. ‘Boys,’ the officer in charge had told them, ‘when the war’s over, you’ll get all this.’ Neither Dee nor Tom believed a word of it. But once the fighting was over, they pulled back to a bivouac area and lo and behold, there was the lorry still full of the drink. ‘So they was good as their word,’ says Dee. They all had a skinful that day. ‘We was glad it was over,’ says Tom. ‘Of course we were.’
A month later, they were heading home. The war in the Pacific might not have quite been over, but after three invasions and fighting through Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia, the Bowles twins had more than done their bit. The Army was happy to let them go and get on with the rest of their lives.
In May 2005, Tom and Dee came back to Europe for the first time since the war. I’d first met them eighteen months before, at Dee’s place in northwest Alabama, and even then I was struck by their laidback, easy-going approach to life. They seemed pleased that someone was interested in their wartime experiences, but when I asked them whether they had ever been back to Normandy they said no, they’d not thought about it too much. And do you think you might some time? I asked. They looked at each other and shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Dee. ‘Tom’s son Tim has been talking about it for a while, but I’m not so sure…’
Tom lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but since his wife passed away he’s been spending more time with his brother and sister-in-law. They’re as close as they ever were and it’s still almost impossible to tell them apart, even now that they’re both in their eighties. When they came back, I wondered, after the war, did they ever talk about their experiences as soldiers? No, came the answer, hardly ever. ‘We just forgot about it,’ said Dee. ‘We talked more about before the war, growing up and stuff.’ Instead, like millions of others, they simply came back and got on with their lives. They learnt a trade and became electricians. Dee married and had two daughters, Tom married and had five boys. Most of the boys became electricians too, all except Tim, the youngest. He works in IT.
Then in 1994, there was a notice in the local newspaper in Lake Charles. The fiftieth anniversary of D-Day was approaching and veterans were being asked for their memories. Tom called them and a reporter came out to talk to him, wanting to know about his war record and how he came to get two bronze stars. It was the first time Tom had thought about it in years; he hadn’t even got his medals. He’d never bothered; nor had Dee.
They began to realize there weren’t so very many of them left and started thinking it might be a good idea to get some of their memories down for their children and grandchildren. They ordered their medals,