Teedy did make the trip to Fort Meade. He would soon be part of the 112th Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division, a Pennsylvania unit nicknamed the “Bloody Bucket” because of its bucket-shaped insignia and its eventful battle history. He was one of thousands of very young men shipped over to replace the men lost in the fighting during and after Normandy. These new men were at a disadvantage in every way: Not only were they hastily trained and not hardened to battle, but some veterans resented them for replacing fallen comrades and shunned them as green and inexperienced. They tended to “become casualties very fast,” as one officer put it. This was the situation Teedy Braden was thrust into. Dot’s mother came up before he left, and she and Dot both went to see him off. With the Atlantic Ocean swept clear of U-boats, Teedy Braden made the ten-day Atlantic crossing to England, not yet twenty years old, sleeping in the bottom of the ship in a hammock slung from pipes, eating a diet abundant in canned apricots.
When he alighted, Teedy entered some of the worst fighting American troops would endure in the European war theater. The Western Allies were pursuing the German Army, but the Nazi soldiers were putting up fierce resistance, and Allied units and supply lines were getting strung out in the rush to push through France. Hitler was seeking one last, smashing win, a victory that would thwart the Allied offensive and deplete their resources. At the beginning of November Teedy’s unit found itself caught in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, a terrible engagement along the border between Belgium and Germany, where Nazi troops laid mines and booby traps, strung barbed wire, and built bunkers amid the trees. Hürtgen was a dense and dark pine forest with steep slopes pillowed by deep ravines. Teedy’s unit, the 112th Infantry, suffered extremely high casualties; at one point they were down to three hundred men from more than two thousand. Even the Germans later said that the fighting in Hürtgen Forest was worse than that of the First World War; one officer called it a “death mill.”
And it was just a warm-up. Barely two weeks later, the Germans attacked in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last big roll of the dice, the biggest, bloodiest battle the United States fought in Europe. And it was one of the war’s worst intelligence failures. Allied code breakers had noticed a radio silence suggesting the Germans were planning an attack, but the military did not pay sufficient attention and the soldiers were taken by surprise.
The Americans by now had become strung out in a ragged line, and the Germans decided to try to push through with the hope of breaking out and reaching Antwerp. The exhausted Twenty-Eighth, sent for a rest in the southern Ardennes—a quiet paradise resembling Switzerland—was surprised at a time when it was short of both men and weapons. What was left of Teedy’s unit sustained enormous casualties in several days of pitched fighting as the Germans attempted to break through Allied lines. Shattered, the Twenty-Eighth fought and fought. As Dot heard it later, her mother, Virginia, was visiting with friends in Lynchburg when she received the terrible message saying Teedy was missing in action. People in Lynchburg visited her to express their condolences.
Anguished and distraught in her grief, Virginia Braden did not tell Dot, who remained blissfully unaware. At Arlington Hall, the code breakers worked hard throughout the battle, even though the cafeteria had served tainted ham and there was an epidemic of vomiting and sickness. Over at the Navy facility the bombes whirred away, and the women at Sugar Camp also knew the Battle of the Bulge was unfolding. “I used to feel guilty because of enjoying the war years in such a beautiful, comfortable station while the slaughter was going on in Europe and the high seas,” Lieutenant Esther Hottenstein would later write. “I remember especially the winter of 1944 (December) the Battle of the Bulge where we worked overtime.”
When the fog of war cleared, however, it emerged that Teedy Braden had survived. Speaking years later, from the vantage point of decades, Teedy was able to relate how he managed to do that. He recalled how the battle lines were jagged and shifting, and at one point he and some other GIs found themselves behind enemy lines. “I was on an armored car, holding on to it for dear life,” Teedy said. “As we come out the other side I see this German come out of the ditch carrying a Panzerfaust,” which was a handheld rocket launcher. The German pumped it into the side of the armored car; Teedy was blown across the road and into a tree, where he was knocked out. When he came to, he saw burning tanks, burning ambulances, green flares as German tanks fired into the sides of Allied vehicles. Nazi soldiers were running up and down shooting American men. Somehow, his rural instincts saved him. Unarmed, he managed to nip around a tree and spotted some fellow GIs moving cautiously through the forest. He joined them and they made their way through the woods, hitting the ground whenever the Germans opened fire, then standing up and scampering forward.
“Then all of a sudden a.50-caliber machine gun in front of us opened up and we knew we had hit the Eighty-Second Airborne,” Teedy Braden remembered. They had made it to safety. The Eighty-Second Airborne told the exhausted Americans to head down the road until they saw a palace. Teedy started off in the direction they indicated, but he must have been concussed, and he passed out again. An American tank scooped him out of the road and carried him to a chateau packed with weary men. He found a spot to sleep on the floor of a tiled bathroom, wedged between a toilet and a wall. In the morning he got coffee and stood on the once-manicured chateau lawn, watching American bombers flying into Germany. It took a long time for survivors to get sorted and reequipped, having straggled in from many devastated units.
Teedy did not attempt to convey any of this to the people back home. “I suppose that you’ve been kinda worried since I haven’t had a chance to write you for some time,” Teedy wrote Dot in January 1945. He apologized that the letter was written in red ink and said it was the only pen he’d been able to find. “I’ve only been able to write mom a couple of times,” he told Dot. In understated fashion, he explained that Christmas, for him, was a “kinda hectic one.”
Being Teedy, he was still able to joke. He had taken French in high school because his big sister Dot had, and it was proving useful in Europe. He’d been able to eat a meal in a fine Belgian restaurant. “I can now snap my fingers and yell ‘garcon’ with the best of them,” he told her. He reported that the Belgian women were “quite an eyeful but of course I was too interested in the old architecture and the city’s history to pay much attention.”
“Well, Dot, I just wanted to let you know that I am still percolating,” he finished. He enclosed five Belgian francs as a souvenir and told her it was worth about twelve cents. “It sure is fancy money for.12, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, I hope that all of you have a pretty fruity list of New Year’s resolutions now. So long! Love, Teedy.”
When he arrived safely home from Europe, Dot called their mother, and Virginia Braden got on a bus and raced up to Washington so that she could see for herself that Teedy was alive.