By Mike Freeland and Deborah Turner
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Mike Freeland kept a journal of his
wartime experiences as well as his recent revisit to
the battlefields of Europe. He shares those days in
his upcoming book that is yet to be titled. |
"A community's most valuable resource is its people;
people make the difference," says Mike Freeland, who was one
of those people in Carroll County for many years, beginning
in November 1953 when he moved from Lebanon, Tennessee to
McKenzie when he was 29 years old.
World War II had not long ended and despite the sacrifice of
many a Carroll County boy, Mike recalls the era as one of
innocence, when McKenzie was a railroad town with a cotton
economy, a grain mill, the home office and warehouse of the
U-Tote-Em grocery store chain, and Wilker Brothers' pajama
factory.
Mike was among those who served in the second great war.
He'll be back in town Friday, November 11, at 10:00 a.m., to
share his experiences with students, veterans, and citizens
at McKenzie High School on Veterans Day, fresh from a tour
of the battlefields of France that he trekked as a field
medic during World War II.
Mike was not unfamiliar with McKenzie when he and his
23-year-old wife, Flora Ellen, from the middle Tennessee
town of Fayetteville, made the move. His great-great
grandfather, Hillary Pate, had lived in Weakley County, near
Gleason, and Mike remembers Christmases spent visiting the
"old Pate homeplace" owned by "Grandmother Annie Lee Pate
Murphy", wife of Walvin Murphy, when McKenzie's roads were
dirt or gravel. During the Depression, he says,
"Grandmother" drove a mule wagon through town selling
door-to-door watermelons, blackberries, sweet corn, and
"Irish potatoes" in a futile effort to save the farm.
Mike was born near Buchanan, the oldest of four siblings
including sister Eva Lane, who still lives on the family
farm, Randy (now deceased), and Jim, who recently acquired
the 100.9 F.M. radio station in Huntingdon.
Mike and Ellen purchased the big, white (now beige) brick
house on Paris Street. Known as the T.D. Fooks place and one
of the oldest homes in town, according to Freeland, its rear
rooms were constructed with brick made from clay dug from
the back yard, where early McKenzie residents gathered for
horse racing and picnicking.
In a day far removed from those days, Mike recalls a loving
neighborhood of friends remained the mainstay of life in the
small town as his children grew and thrived. Mickey was just
two years old and Patricia was one when the young couple
settled in. Three more--Steve, Doug, and David--would
follow, born in young Dr. E.E. Edwards' downtown office.
It would take several volumes to list everyone who
influenced his life in those years, he says, listing many
names of business men and women and civic leaders worthy of
repeated mention, like Ben Everett, Chandler and Sybil King,
Doug Moore, Jim Alexander, Cecil Jackson, Ruth Morris, Paul
Carroll, H.K. Smith, Wendell Atkins, Paul Ward, Henry Liles
Sr., Frank Barlow, Bailey Wrinkle, Doc Bell, Wendell
Richardson, Edna Motherall, and Ross Martin.
Mike saw beyond the obvious to the soul of the town: "Since
pioneer days, McKenzie has been blessed with strong men and
women with courage and vision,' he says. A student of Bethel
College, he recalls teachers W.A. Smith, Dr. Virginia Smith,
and Mary Holmes (wife of Dr. J.T. Holmes) as icons who
instilled wisdom as well as knowledge in their students.
He had six years of radio experience under his belt,
including a tour of duty in England with the Armed Forces
Radio Network, when he bought the WHDM A.M. radio station
based in McKenzie, Huntingdon and Dresden. Radio, in fact,
was how Mike met his wife.
"God brought us together at a radio station in
Fayetteville," he says, sharing that she was working when he
also began working there.
"The day WHDM began its broadcast, life became a
celebration," he continues. "Friends, neighbors and the
curious came from miles around, and marveled at its
coverage."
Early programs included George Martin's "Over the Back
Fence", a program of home-spun humor, poetry, and
inspiration. Lance Beard emceed live productions of
bluegrass music and an audience participation show entitled,
"Here's to the Ladies". Later, Tibby Edwards, wife of Dr.
Edwards, took over the show and, Mike says, "the hearts of
most of the radio audience."
Mike's little brother, Jim, then 14, was host of the High
School Hit Parade, featuring rockabilly tunes with artists
like Carl Mann and Larry Lee Phillipson. Another rockabilly
favorite, Edd Cisco, went on to D.J. at the station,
nicknamed "Big Edd Cisco".
Local gospel artists spent time in the studio as well the
Rhythmaires (Leon Purvis, Fred and Patricia Gowan, Richard
Welch, and Hilliard Mann.)
Freeland sold WHDM to Earl and Gladys Nolting and in 1963
built WKTA F.M. (now WYN 107 in Jackson), one of the first
F.M. stereo radio stations in the nation. It was a time when
most homes didn't even have an F.M. radio.
Asked if they also sold the radio sets, Mike says, "We
didn't sell them but we gave a lot of them away in contests.
"We thought we would build a good classical station," he
continues. But the rich sounds of the Norman Luboff Choir,
Broadway show tunes and other classics, selected by Ellen,
soon gave way to the country music and gospel music craved
by the audience.
"We had groups fly in here from all the big cities to look
at the station, and we had listeners from Memphis and
Nashville," says Mike, explaining the stations were few even
in large cities.
Both he and Ellen graduated from Bethel, starting late due
to their busy-ness in the radio business. Mike has master's
degrees from Memphis State University (now the University of
Memphis) and Murray State University and a doctorate in
personal communication from Southern Illinois University.
Both became educators, Ellen at Hopkinsville Community
College and he at Fort Campbell, teaching for Austin Peay
State University.
Mike's thoughts, these days, are more focused on the time he
spent in Europe helping to liberate Allied countries from
the oppression of facism, owing to his recent return and the
proximity of Veterans Day.
In May this year he was among a group of 25 World War II
soldiers who traveled to Europe to celebrate the 60th
anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) and who, while
there, met with the President of the United States, who had
diverted his schedule in order to meet with the veterans.
The trip was sponsored by The Greatest Generations
Foundation (www.thegreatestgenerations.org), an
international, non-profit organization dedicated to
assisting veterans in revisiting the sites of their
battlefield campaigns and sharing their stories with the
youth of today.
Mike, far right, with General
Freeman and Colonel Freeman, brothers from Hopkinsville,
Kentucky. The three were among 25 veterans who toured
Europe's WWII battlefields in May.
"These generations of men and women who fought should never
be forgotten," says Mike, "nor should the value of their
deeds be allowed to diminish over time. Fewer and fewer
veterans are alive to keep the stories real."
In a railroad car full of soldiers, laughing and talking
above the sound of Glenn Miller's music, Mike says, it was a
train "back to yesterday."
"The bantering, laughter and music-especially the music-take
me back to another lifetime a million years ago," he says,
recalling Axis Sally, the propaganda queen of the Nazis.
"Sally's job was to play the most sentimental music she
could find and make her pitch to homesick GIs... Her
propaganda didn't work; GIs ridiculed and laughed at her
efforts to persuade, but everyone loved the music and looked
forward to her show."
Somehow, she continues, she even knew what was going on in
the war, he continues, recalling dedications like, "Now
here's a song going out to... followed by the name of a
soldier, his outfit and location.
"The song that got to me most was Lilli Marlene," Mike says.
Originally a poem written by a young German officer-cadet,
he says, Lilli Marlene became the sweetheart of all nations.
"She still stands under the lamplight by the gate waiting
for her soldier to return safely from the front," he says.
"The song speaks even now of all the lonliness and
feeling of loves gone by; it is the most haunting melody
I've ever heard..." (Click here to listen to
Lilli Marlene.)
The men recalled living, with little sleep, in cold, wet,
vine-covered fox holes and slit trenches in the dark
Ardennes Forest that was the backdrop of The Battle of the
Bulge.
Most of them were 20 year-olds during the war, Mike says,
with at most two years of training. These young men were
faced with constant danger and split-second decision making
that spelled the difference between life and death,
desertion and heroism.
Mike, left, and then
best-friend, Joe Gilotti in Michigan.
On the beaches of Normandy, overlooking Omaha Beach--the
Allied landing field on D-Day, June 6, 1944--the men
surveyed acres of green hills covered with white crosses,
the graves of those who died there. Some have names while
others are unknown but to God.
An inscription on the cemetery's chapel reads, "These
endured all and gave all that justice among nations might
prevail and mankind might enjoy freedom and inherit peace."
Freeland recalls the words of one of their number who said,
"Sixty years have passed and the Nazi Party is still alive
and well. You often hear someone argue the Holocaust never
happened, that it's all a lie. I know the truth. I remember
while in France my company was directed to the backside of
Metz to liberate a POW camp but when we got there it was a
concentration camp."
Mike, too, knows better. He was in Ludwigslust in April,
1945, when the Wobelin concentration camp was liberated.
"You could smell its foul stench half a mile away," he
recalls. "It was hard to tell the living from the dead. They
were living skeletons covered with open sores festering with
green flies and maggots... Bodies lay in piles together, the
rotting bodies of the dead along with the dying. You think
no one lives-then a corpse moves a feeble hand."
Among the old soldiers on the victory tour was Sgt. Robert
Bowen of Maryland, who led the way, on the last full day of
the journey, on a visit to Napoleon's tomb. Stopping at its
entrance to wait for others in the group to catch up, he
dropped dead, crashing headfirst onto the cobblestone
walkway, nevertheless victorious at 91 years old.
Decades earlier, a member of the 101st Airborne, 401st
Glider Infantry, Company C, he'd been wounded and was
captured during the Battle of the Bulge, winding up in
Stalag 10B, a German POW camp, where he underwent surgery
without anesthetics. Four other prisoners held him down
while a fifth, a Serbian doctor, performed the operation.
Amazed at his own survival when so many perished, he
recorded his experiences in his book, "Fighting With the
Screaming Eagles". His final message was conveyed in written
note to Freeland five days before his death: "If I had one
wish, it would be that there would be no more wars."
Mike was just 19 when in 1943 he was called to service from
his home in Detroit, where he was working in a defense
plant.
"The poor people in Tennessee had to go to Detroit to get a
job," he says, characterizing his northern residence. He
spent four and a half years in the Army.
Initially assigned to a tank company, he'd learned to drive
a tank before becoming an instructor himself, teaching other
soldiers how to drive the behemoth as well as the M-1 rifle.
He was later transferred to Ft. Chafee, Arkansas where he
entered the medical field.
"I wanted to be a medical doctor and that was good training
for me," says Mike, whose unit, the 22nd Hospital Train, was
assigned to a general hospital in Leicester, England.
Mike soberly recalls the first time he went into combat a
few months after D-Day, during the Battle of the Bulge. It
was close to Christmas in 1944, cold and miserable. The
Allies were losing on average almost 2400 men per day, with
about 77,000 casualties during the entire, month-long
battle.
"I was with a big guy from Mississippi; he was Mr.
All-American and I wanted to be with him. We went up front,
near the Siegfried line, in a cabbage and wine cellar and in
one hour being shelled under heavy artillery, Mississippi
was sitting over on the steps in the cellar. He was sitting
on the steps, shivering, staring straight ahead."
Getting to the front had held trauma enough for the soldiers
who were fresh to the battlefield. They'd heard the boom of
artillery and watched as ragged swaths were cut through the
forest and farm animals, dead and dying, littered the
fields. The smell of burning hair and flesh signaled the
presence of a smoldering Tiger tank with its cargo of
charred German soldiers, even before it came into view.
Farther along, the bodies of more German soldiers had been
half-buried in the mud and snow.
Sitting in the cellar, listening to the scream of incoming
artillery, it was too much for Mississippi, who sobbed and
wailed, crying out for his mother.
"I've heard a lot of boys cry for their mama," says Mike,
who earned a bronze star medal during the war as well as
several other citations.
He was later stationed in Paris, France where he joined the
82nd Airborne and underwent airborne training as a member of
the all-volunteer outfit.
"I made 17 jumps; that was a lot at that time," says Mike,
adding they were made using experimental parachutes.
Freeland kept a journal of his wartime experiences and has
chronicled the events in a book that he has tentatively
titled, "From Blood River to Berlin", though he is also
considering "Coming Home".
"Soldiers are always coming home," he says. Blood River was
a body of water near his boyhood home in Henry County.
Now 81 years old and "proud of it", he is currently on
sabbatical from Austin Peay and is a consultant for a
Hopkinsville-based youth program called Pathfinder
Leadership, which focuses on helping young people in the
areas of communication, speech, writing, self-confidence,
and goal setting. "We have taught courses in many, many
places," he notes.
The Freelands are members of First United Methodist Church
where he is a United Methodist lay leader and a Sunday
school teacher.
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