OUR WWII STORY: The winter Irving Locker will never forget

American Legion member Irving Locker moved to The Villages, Fla., about 12 years ago because, he recently said, “I needed to get someplace warm.”

At 96, he remembers in vivid detail the brutally cold winter of 1944-45 when he was a 19-year-old staff sergeant with the 116th AAA Gun Battalion of the 1st Army’s 7th Corps. “When we went into the Battle of the Bulge, they had us surrounded on three sides,” he told The American Legion Magazine in 2014. “We didn’t have ammunition. We didn’t have food. We didn’t have anything. I had to send my own sergeant into our own mortuaries where our own dead people were and take the boots and the clothing off of them to bring back.”

Locker and his fellow soldiers – who had come ashore at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, in the D-Day invasion – had to dig fox holes through snow and ice to survive the Battle of the Bulge the following winter. They fired 90mm anti-aircraft, anti-tank guns at the Germans in Hitler’s last desperate effort to avert inevitable defeat in the European Theater of World War II.

Locker’s unit was among the Allied soldiers who liberated Nazi death camps. Discovery of the Holocaust, the Jewish veteran explained to the magazine, was extremely emotional. “Anybody who says the Holocaust never happened better talk to me… ‘cause I know what happened.”

In Berlin, Locker collected a Nazi flag and had other U.S. troops sign it. Today, he brings the flag with him to classrooms and other gatherings where he tells others about the war. He also has among his war souvenirs his dog tags, a canteen, a Luger, his knife, a grenade and other items that he displays for visitors. He has spoken and shown his war items at numerous venues, including the White House in 2019 and Normandy for the 70th and 75th anniversaries of the D-Day invasion. He has also been interviewed for multiple television news segments and documentary films.

His life story – from a 5-foot-1 teenager drafted upon graduation from high school to a successful business owner – was also shared in the Dec. 7, 2020, Daily Sun of The Villages, Fla., which featured in a package called “WWII’s last legion: heroes living here,” numerous World War II veterans who live in the community.