Humanoid Profiles
by Gary Greenberg
Photo by Mike Price
Ralph Shear: Invincible Infantryman
“Surviving war has nothing to do with being a good
or bad soldier,” Ralph
Shear says. “It’s all a matter of luck.”
Shear ought to know. He was an infantryman who fought
in five major
European battles, starting on D-Day.
“We were the third wave to hit Omaha Beach, and
when the Coast
Guardsman bringing us to shore saw all the bodies in the water, he
tried to let us
off too far out,” Shear recalls. “We threatened to blow his head off
if he didn’t
take us closer, so he did and we jumped into water up to our knees.
“Nobody knew what was going on. I was 20 years old
and scared to death.
Omaha Beach was the worst of the landing spots because the Germans
were
entrenched on top of the cliffs and were zeroed in on us, picking us
off like flies.”
Shear managed to survive by hunkering behind a seawall.
The son of a
Brooklyn tailor, he’d been trained to be a navigator in the Army Air
Corps. But
Uncle Sam needed more grunts than navigators, so he was sent to the
front lines of
the big invasion as a replacement soldier.
After D-Day, Shear was assigned to the 35th Infantry
Division. He fought
his second battle at St-Lo, then hooked up with Patton’s Third Army.
“We rode across France on the top of tanks,” he
says. “And when we ran
into opposition, we eliminated it.”
What might sound glamorous, wasn’t.
“It was so bad, guys shot their toes off to get
out,” he says. “The only way
out was to get wounded, captured or caught.”
Any one of those things might have happened to Shear
at various times.
Once, during a driving rain, a 155 mm shell landed five or ten feet
from him but
just stuck in the mud without exploding. Another time, he was ordered
to fetch
more mortar ammo and unknowingly ran right through a minefield. Then
there was
the time he was sent to fix a severed communication line and got caught
by
German artillery.
“I ran zig-zagging back with shells popping all
around me,” he says.
At Bastogne, his company was decimated. “When you
see the first few
guys killed, it’s horrific,” he admits. “But you see it, say ‘thank
God it’s not me’
and move on.”
Remarkably, he kept moving on, and the tide of the
war turned.
“On January 30, 1945, my wife gave birth to my first
son,” he says, “but I
was occupied at Venlo taking Holland back from the Germans.”
He was also with the group that stumbled upon the
Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp, where Anne Frank had lost her life.
“Nobody ever told us things like this existed
and when we sent back the
information to headquarters, the guys didn’t understand what we were
talking
about,” he says. “Twenty or thirty thousand bodies were stacked up
like
cordwood, and the live ones looked like the living dead.”
After more than ten months of combat, Shear was
finally shipped home –
so he could start preparing for the invasion of Japan.
“Some people criticize Harry Truman for dropping
the bomb,” Shear says.
“But he saved my ass.”
Shear had a bad case of shell shock after the war,
but he fought through it
just as he’d fought his way through Central Europe. He found work as
butcher and
eventually became the owner of a meat market in Yonkers. Now, he’s
78 and
retired, living peacefully in Boca Raton’s Century Village. An officer
with the
Jewish War Veterans, he volunteers a lot of time with disabled veterans,
taking
them fishing, or to the movies, or on some other outings.
“My wartime experience gave me a love of country
and love of liberty
because there’s no place on Earth as free as our country,” he says.
“But the
memories of war never leave you. They become part of your soul.”