🎖️A HERO’S STORY: Delaware resident Ernest Marvel was recently honored by the French Legion of Honor in July — almost 80 years after he helped liberate the country from the Germans in World War II.
In 1945, Marvel made his way through French and German villages, across the Rhine River and to the gates of Dachau.Pfc. Marvel entered the war late, just after the Battle of the Bulge, according to historian Eric Montgomery. A member of U.S. Army Company B, 179th Infantry Regiment, 1st Battalion, 45th Infantry Division, the 20-year-old made his way to Europe aboard the Queen Elizabeth troopship.
“He said my trouble was it was all bottled up in me; I wouldn’t let it out. He said, ‘You start letting it out and you’ll feel better.’ And I did. I started telling different people about different things and it started coming around, but it’s still never left my mind,” he said.Part of the trauma he experienced was during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Marvel’s memories are vivid of the horrific place where thousands of people were killed.
“The smell was terrible. They had … big incinerators that they were burning them with and they couldn’t burn them as fast as they were dying,” he said. Soldiers “tossed candy bars and cigarettes over the barbed wire to the starving prisoners until ordered to stop,” according to the July 2022 National WWII Museum article, “The Last Days of the Dachau Concentration Camp,” but most of them stayed out of the main compound for “fear of disease.”
Marvel’s grandson, Donnie Carey, knew of Moninger from stories shared by his grandfather. He began wondering if the fallen soldier had any family still alive. The historian he’d been working with, Montgomery, found Moninger did indeed have a living son, and Carey gave him a call.
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