Sperandieu says the war “has always been a part of my life, and it will be until the end.”
The first thing 89-year-old Maurice Sperandieu will tell you is the meaning of his name. “Hope in God,” he softly says, seated beside his daughter, Lee, at an American Legion steak dinner in Brussels, Belgium.
Sperandieu does not need to explain the three words. They are undoubtedly a mantra he repeated often in one of several languages he spoke in 1944 when he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army. Following Belgium’s liberation in September of that year, he went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and later translated terms of surrender to German soldiers, as well as long-awaited words of rescue to Holocaust survivors as he and his unit moved eastward in the final half-year of World War II.
When Sperandieu turned 18 in June 1944, his country had been under Nazi occupation for more than four years. The Allies had just stormed the beaches of Normandy and were fighting their way across Europe. By September, they had reached Belgium and Luxembourg, where they established the final major combat line of Germany’s defense against the inevitable. There, in the winter of 1944 and 1945, the Battle of the Bulge would account for more than 89,000 U.S. casualties, including nearly 20,000 killed in action.
As the Allies were battling to harden the line, the teenage Sperandieu saw a U.S. GI about his age shot and killed by a German sniper. “I looked at him and thought, ‘That could be me,’” Sperandieu says. “I thought about what this young guy had done for me.”
To get into the U.S. Army as a Belgian volunteer, he needed parental consent. His father, a veteran who had fought alongside Americans in World War I, granted it.
“I volunteered because my dad did, for 20 years,” says Sperandieu, peering through glasses that fail to give him much vision anymore. “It was normal that I would follow his example. It was normal, but it was frightening at the same time. You were risking your life every day.”
By the time he was trained and serving in the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division, the thunder of bombs and crackle of gunfire were familiar white noise to Sperandieu, who knew that death could strike anyone, combatant or not, at any moment. “My dad was proud. I was excited. But he said to me it was possible I wouldn’t come back.” That was a risk they were willing to accept.
As a boy surrounded by war, Sperandieu had taken refuge in schoolwork, confident that liberation was imminent. He excelled in language studies, skills the Army later put to use. He was attached to an MP unit that consisted of a first lieutenant, a sergeant, a driver and him. As the Allies pushed the Germans back, Sperandieu and his team could be found in their jeep near the front, translating to the Germans what was coming and what they needed to do about it.
After the Battle of the Bulge, German resistance began to soften. As the Allies continued to push the line toward Berlin, Sperandieu personally saw Gen. George S. Patton on two occasions as they moved forward, looking for billets. “The Germans were starting to surrender. Even the Germans had had enough of the fighting. Sometimes we didn’t know if a place had already been taken by the American troops.”
Sperandieu’s advance team did encounter enemy fire, once forcing the teenage translator to leap out of their moving jeep while under attack from the air. “A few (German) planes were still active. They tried to kill us. Fortunately, they were not that accurate.”
In April 1945, Sperandieu and the first lieutenant were scouting a German village when they entered a big building. They went in and began opening doors, one by one. “They were nice rooms. Silent. I opened one last door, and there were at least 15 high-ranking Nazi staff officers. I was raising my tommy gun. They looked at us. We looked at them. Nobody said a word. After a few seconds, my lieutenant said, ‘Let’s go.’ I think that was a good decision.”
The outnumbered U.S. soldiers could easily have been gunned down by the enemy officers. However, says Sperandieu, “They were not speaking about attacking. They were speaking about surrendering.”
When his unit reached the Buchenwald concentration camp in western Germany, Sperandieu saw a scene that would be seared into his memory forever. “The prisoners were all sick and dying,” he recalls. “Lying on the ground, barely able to speak. Horrible ... horrible.”
Today, he believes the tuberculosis he contracted after he got out of the Army in 1946 was connected to the liberation of Buchenwald, a place he has revisited over the years if only to provide firsthand testimony of one of history’s darkest chapters. “The Germans don’t want the whole story told, but I was there.”
Shortly after the war, Sperandieu joined The American Legion. He is a Paid Up for Life member of Belgium’s Flanders Field Post BE02. “For 32 years I organized remembrance walks for the Battle of the Bulge,” he explains. His winter walks – retracing the steps of the Allies in that fateful winter – continue to this day and are organized by the City of Bastogne.
Sperandieu tried to re-enlist in the Army to fight in the Korean War. “They wouldn’t take me,” he says. “My eyes were not that good.”
He and his wife, Elly, later adopted two South Korean girls who had been orphaned after the conflict. Lee and Lin grew up in Belgium and live there today. Lee is an active member of the American Legion Auxiliary in the Department of France and has created a Facebook page on behalf of her father. She also helps him get around and explains what he cannot see. “I am his eyes,” she says.
Sperandieu says the war “has always been a part of my life, and it will be until the end.” On that hope, the World War II veteran from Belgium can be even more certain than he was in 1944, when the words that make up the meaning of his name proved both therapeutic and prophetic, as he and his fellow soldiers helped change the course of human history.
- Magazine