Dr. Ed Egger and Dr. Bill Schaffarzick have been friends for decades and they have a lot of similarities.
They are the quintessential baby boomers. They are both in the medical profession. Egger is an ophthalmologist and Schaffarzick is a dentist.
They like to hunt and fish. Both can tell a good hunting story.
But, more importantly considering today’s date being the start of the war for the United States, they share a deep connection to one of the greatest struggles in modern history: World War II.
While they never served together, both men’s fathers were doctors attached to medical units in the European Theatre of operations during the war.
In fact, Egger’s father, John Gilmore Egger, would land at Normandy two days after D-Day and serve near the front lines all the way to the Battle of the Bulge.
Schaffarzick’s father, William Robert Schaffarzick, came to France after D-Day and served a bit farther away from the front lines.
The two recently sat at Gino’s in Greenville and shared stories about their fathers.
Both agreed the men were most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when they returned, especially Egger’s father who was quick to anger.
“He definitely had PTSD,” Egger said. “He pretty much had no fuse.”
But that doesn’t stop Egger’s reverence for what the man did in the war and his pride in speaking about it.
Egger shared a story his father told about action on the days around Christmas in the Battle of the Bulge.
“They had set up an infirmary in an old warehouse across the river from the German lines. The building had skylights and they had to black out those openings or the Germans would bomb straight through them. Every day, more casualties would come in and they just kept saying, ‘We are losing the war,’” he said.
Egger said his father had a stack of photos, now lost to time, of the liberation of the concentration camps his unit found along the way through Germany. Those photos showed in garish detail what the Germans left behind.
“The Holocaust was real,” Egger said. “It’s unmistakable.”
Schaffarzick’s father had similar photos.
“There were stacks of bodies everywhere,” he said.
While Egger’s father was the lone World War II veteran in his immediate family, that’s not the case for Schaffarzick, whose mother also served.
In fact, Schaffarzick is the reason his mother didn’t see action in the European Theatre.
His parents were married before the war and his mother was a 2nd Lieutenant. As both her husband’s and her units were deployed to Europe, she found out she was pregnant in 1943. She was immediately put back on the Queen Mary and sent home.
“Thankfully, the German submarines were pretty much out of commission by then,” Schaffarzick said.
Schaffarzick’s father died when he was 15 years old, but he knew about the man’s service in the war and, like Egger, wants people to remember what those men did.
“I just want everyone to remember what our fathers did,” Egger said.
Their work also shaped both of them in their professional careers.
“They could do anything when they came back,” Egger said.
Instead of long months of training before being assigned to a unit and beginning work, they were thrown into the thick of the action.
Egger’s dad had already done a year of general surgery and so he was placed in a M.A.S.H. unit. Those are the front-line trauma centers treating those most recently wounded.
Egger and Schaffarzick agreed their father’s time in the military prepared them to be the good doctors they would become in later life back home.
Many years after he had returned home, Egger’s father wrote a letter to the editor, which appeared in a few newspapers in the Delta, including the Delta Democrat-Times. The letter is a remembrance of the time in service during the war and especially around Christmas of 1944.
He ended the letter (Printed also in this edition) by saying, “Despite the war, there was Christmas Spirit. Christ’s Birthday was not entirely forgotten in the horrible turmoil of war — death and destruction — memories of past and expected future Christmas’s at home were cherished. It helped to sustain the living American soldier in his efforts to end the war and to survive. God with him — his morale and love survived many, many more happy and pleasant Christ-birthdays. No ‘Bah-Hum-Bug!’ but Merry Christmas.”
