John 'Jack' Moran WW2 Vet, Battle of the Bulge Survivor Shares His Story This Memorial Day 2024 🇺🇸

[appalachiablue]

- May 14, 2024, (2 min). Capital Concerts, PBS.
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- Westlake Village resident recalls Battle of the Bulge, 74 yrs ago, VCStar, Dec.19, 2018. Photos

Jack Moran holds a picture of himself at 19 somewhere in Germany. He fought in World War II and participated in the famous Battle of the Bulge. At 93 years old, he is still working as a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker in Westlake Village. 74 years after the Battle of the Bulge, retired U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jack Moran, now 93 and living in Westlake Village, knows how lucky he was to have survived the bloodiest battle for U.S. forces in World War II.

Of 42 soldiers in his platoon, only one other soldier along with Moran made it home. All these years later, his memories of that battle are still gruesome, as are some of the ones from the day he helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp two years later. The Wisconsin boy was just 17 when he enlisted in the Army in September of 1943...
https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2018/12/19/westlake-village-resident-recalls-battle-bulge-74-years-ago/2215407002/
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- John 'Jack' Moran, Service Record, Digital Collections, The National WW2 Museum. Ed.

- John Moran was born in Superior, Wisc. He had a great youth and enlisted in the Army at 17. He was then sent to the Univ. of Wisc. for engineering courses, followed by basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., then he was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division in S. Carolina. [Annotator's Note: Moran was assigned to Company K, 3rd Battalion, 347th Infantry Regiment, 87th Infantry Division.]

Moran trained all summer of 1944 and then took the RMS Queen Elizabeth to Scotland. The unit trained more in Knutsford, England and then crossed a stormy English Channel to Le Havre, France before moving in inland. Moran's first action was in Nancy, France. He spent a week in the Saar Valley, Germany. It was very tough fighting against the German 11th Panzer Division's 88s [Annotator's Note: 88mm multi-purpose artillery], mortars, and machine guns.

Moran's unit suffered 96 killed and 113 wounded in first 6 days. The first morning, they crawled into foxholes of the people who had left. Dawn broke over farmland and they did not see anything dangerous. Once they started advancing, they lost 7 men in the first 15 seconds. Moran spent the next few days moving cautiously, digging in every time they stopped to be below ground level. The first 3 days they did not see any Germans but were getting cut down regardless because the Germans could see them.

He says that in warfare you have to move to make the enemy move. The 88s were hard to move so that is where they applied the most pressure. Obergailbach, France had a valley before Hill 360 which was their objective...
https://www.ww2online.org/view/john-jack-moran
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- Freezing Battle of the Bulge Combat and Crossing the Rhine River, John 'Jack' Moran, Ret. Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army. Recorded Nov. 5, 2022, (35 mins). American Veterans Center.
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Wiki, BATTLE OF THE BULGE, DEC 16, 1944 -JAN 25, 1945. The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II which took place from 16 Dec. 1944 to 25 Jan. 1945.
It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. The offensive was intended to stop Allied use of the Belgian port of Antwerp and to split the Allied lines, allowing the Germans to encircle and destroy each of the 4 Allied armies and force the western Allies to negotiate a peace treaty in the Axis powers' favor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge

[comradebillyboy]

1. Battle of the Bulge VICTOR! He did a lot more than just survive.

[appalachiablue]

4. Victor, absolutely! His detailed record above is amazing. And so sharp, healthy,

and modest, at 98!

THE Greatest Generation of Americans, amen..

[underpants]

2. My grandfather survived the Battle of the Bulge. Barely

Got out a foxhole to go the bathroom and a mortar landed in it. He spent two years at what was an Army hospital at The Greenbrier. Well into the 1970’s my grandmother would massage his shoulders from time to time when he got home from the plant. Tiny bits of shrapnel came out fairly regularly.

He was my mother’s stepfather but he was the only grandfather I knew.

My stepfather once asked him why a guy who’d been through that and had a GI Bill at his disposal (he read voluminously) why did he marry a woman with 4 kids.
Johnnie didn’t hesitate, “ because I loved her”

[appalachiablue]

7. That's a lot to go thru, wounding, 2 yrs in care and

shrapnel pieces still in the body. He must have been strong, and very patient.

What a beautiful retort to a nasty comment, ahole. Well done! Thanks for posting.

[leanforward]

3. Battle of the Bulge

There was a unit involved in the Bulge, the 52nd Armored Infantry Battalion. And later at the Ramagan Bridge on the Rhine. Two Presidential Unit Citations were given. There was a nickname given to survivors running “around” in Bastogne prior to the 101st dropping in. The bridge river crossing “feet dry” lasted 10-14 days, before it collapsed. Because of my relationship, years later I was BS’ing with a survivor (sp) and at the tender age of 21, he was a 1st Sgt.

[appalachiablue]

8. Those troops were the best to endure the Bulge and then

crossing the Rhine at Remagen in those fierce times. I just rewatched the R. Bridge movie from the 1960s and enjoyed it.

I've been to Germany a couple times, around Bavaria, Munich area where my dad was in WW2. Thanks for posting.

[BlueSky3]

5. My mother's 1st cousin was mustard gassed

from his position looking out from a tank. He made it home but as my relatives said, “He never was right after that.” A lot of those who made it back were just shells of themselves.

[appalachiablue]

9. That's so sad, I didnt realize Germans used gas again in WW2. Many

servicemen were harmed as we know, some got thru it but not others. Thanks for replying.

[PortTack]

6. Thx for posting...interesting harrowing story!

[appalachiablue]

10. A remarkable man, real inspiration & source of national pride. TX!

[Wonder Why]

11. My father was pretty old when he was drafted so he was placed in administrative work and then blood testing in Belgium

during the war. When the Battle of the Bulge started, he and all his fellow soldiers were handed rifles because, although behind the lines, their commanders thought they might be overrun. Luckily, enough brave combat soldiers stopped the Germans from getting through. He was always thankful for that. So was I because, had he died then, only one of us four would be around now and it would not have been me.