OUR WWII STORY: Erle Cocke Jr., survivor of Nazi firing squad

Erle Cocke Jr. of Dawson, Ga., was shot four times by a Nazi firing squad on April 24,1945, just two weeks before the Allies claimed victory in Europe. The lieutenant toppled into a heap of other escaped prisoners who had been overtaken by withdrawing enemy forces in a small German village.

He was hit twice in the stomach, once between his ribs and finally in the back, just above the kidneys. All the others were dead.

“The villagers, cleaning up their town in tidy German fashion, found Erle breathing,” American Legion Magazine writer R.B. Pitkin wrote in December 1950. “When they had buried the dead, they took him to an aid station, where a doctor sewed up his stomach with silk thread. The lung bleeding clotted and temporarily paralyzed his left arm.”

Fourteen months and 17 operations later, Cocke Jr. was back in action, running the family peanut farm, pursuing a graduate degree from Harvard Business School, helping veterans with their VA benefits claims and more. By 1947, he was director of Georgia’s commerce department and the following year was a railroad executive in the state. Rising fast through the ranks of The American Legion, he was elected Department of Georgia commander in 1948 and was called upon to travel with the national commander the following year. On Oct. 12, 1950, Cocke Jr. was elected national commander of The American Legion, at age 29, the youngest ever to serve in that office.

Cocke Jr.’s remarkable survival of the attempted execution was the conclusive punctuation to a storied World War II combat journey that drew widespread national attention. He was stabbed in the right hand by a Gestapo agent in 1944. A sniper later shot his left hand. And a ricocheted bullet on another occasion hit him in the head.

A G3 intelligence officer who would sneak into villages to alert the French Underground of approaching Allied movements – and thus a prize for enemy forces seeking information – Cocke Jr. was taken prisoner three times by the Germans, and he got away three times, once traveling on foot with a French companion 150 miles before he was found, disguised as a local laborer pushing a wheelbarrow. On his final escape attempt, he and 18 other prisoners had made their way to a bridge in a small town near Stuttgart. The bridge was vital to the German withdrawal late in the European Theater’s final act.

Cocke Jr. and his group blocked the bridge with tractors, assumed superior firing positions and killed more than 80 enemy soldiers, taking hundreds more as prisoners. They held their position in the village, knowing the Germans desperately needed to use the bridge, until a much larger withdrawing enemy force roared into the village, none too happy with the actions of this small group of escaped prisoners. Cocke Jr. and the others were briefly interrogated and quickly lined up for execution.

The attempt brought an end to Cocke Jr.’s war, which at one point, he said, involved 87 straight days of combat. On June 2, 1945, he left France on a stretcher and soon began a lengthy convalescence in Georgia and Florida hospitals. While recuperating, he trained to become his own service officer and to help others with their VA benefits. And in 1946, he went on a war bond tour, transported from place to place on a stretcher, and was nationally recognized for the amount he was able to sell. Later that year, American Legion National Commander John Stelle called upon Cocke Jr. to travel with him and speak about the organization’s expectations for VA medical care.

Initially rejected by Harvard Business School because its quota had been met – with thousands trying to use their GI Bill benefits at the time – Cocke Jr. went to Boston anyway and literally staged a sit-in, waiting for some student or another to not show up. Three failed to appear, and he was admitted. While at Harvard, he managed the farm remotely, went to American Legion conventions and events and often traveled to Washington, D.C., for media appearances and testimonies.

At Harvard, the dean put Cocke Jr. to work, counseling other World War II veterans on campus who were struggling with readjustment. “When some of Erle’s classmates cracked under the strain of concentrated studies, they tended to fall back on their war experiences as a reason for their failure,” Pitkin wrote. “This was only natural, and it was an argument the dean couldn't meet on common ground. He would send these men around to have supper with Erle, who would listen to their stories until they had nothing more to say. Then they would naturally ask Erle if he knew how it was, and Erle would tell his own story in his easy, smiling Georgia way. Some of these men could equal Erle's rough war experience, but none could beat it. After that, the dean could help the slipping student readjust.”

In 1948, Cocke Jr. was elected American Legion Department of Georgia commander and served as chairman of the organization’s newly established National Security Commission. The son of an American Legion founder and past national vice commander, the young combat veteran was at home among Legionnaires and well-versed in the organization’s policies, programs and positions.

Universal Military Training (UMT) had been a 30-year rallying cry for The American Legion, and it seemed to be getting some traction at the mid-point of the century. The concept, to require some military training for high school age students, was one of Cocke Jr.’s main messages in 1950 and 1951, as U.S. forces were summoned back to war on the Korean peninsula, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was growing colder by the minute and U.S. military strength was declining after the World War II experience.

In his argument for UMT, Cocke Jr. said that if it weren’t for the basic military training he received, along with ROTC experience while he was an undergraduate in college, he probably would not have survived World War II, especially captivity.

“Training had everything to do with it,” he said. “In basic training we even practiced how to starve, and I thought when the time came to starve, I could do it as well as the next man without practice – but as a prisoner of war I learned differently. Without sound basic training, I might not have lasted long enough to be ‘executed.’

“I have no more idea how I survived four bullets at close range in my mid-section than do the many well-wishers who ask me. It happened, and I’m too humbly grateful to ask God for an accounting of why and how it was done.”

Following his term as national commander, Cocke Jr. was appointed to multiple federal posts under Democrat and Republican administrations alike, was president of his own lobbying firm, and continued serving as an active American Legion leader.

He died in 2000 at the age of 79 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His obituary in the New York Times quoted him from a 1999 interview: “I would have apologized the rest of my life if I had not been in World War II. I owed my government that much. That was my opportunity to contribute.''