Army Awards Bronze Star
To Laurens’ Remagen Vet
By JIM KEVLIN • for allotsego.com
LAURENS – For the past 70 years, he’s been William Brindle of Laurens, working at Bendix, driving cars for Country Club Automotive, or on the job at the Hanford Mills Museum, (plus doing wedding photographs, hunting with wife Betty, and developing his woodworking skills.)
This morning, he was transported back to March 28, 1945, where, as Staff Sgt. Brindle of Company G, First Battalion 16th Infantry Regiment, part of Patton’s First Infantry Division, he and his unit “didn’t move” as five German divisions counterattacked after losing control of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, the last intact span over the Rhine.
In a ceremony in front of the American Legion Post here, Col. Carlton Cleveland of the New York Army National Guard pinned a bronze star on Brindle’s original uniform, along with a European-African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal. (His wife Betty said, except for shortening his trousers an inch, and using a safety pin to give him a little more space in the collar, the uniform still fit.)
Brindle recounted that his unit had just participated in the capture of Bonn when they were rushed to the small town of Griesbach – smaller than Laurens, he said – when they were deployed to prevent the German counterattack that included an elite Panzer division. By morning, only 20 members of his company survived; 40 comrades, 60 percent of the company, had died.
The veteran said he’d read about the decades-late awarding of medals last year in a book about Remagen, and applied through the First Infantry Division Association, which led to the Army Board of Corrections of Military Records updating his record. He asked Colonel Cleveland, a village native and Laurens Central grad, to make the presentation.
Cleveland said he is unsure how many local Remagen veterans may remain. Last year, Cooperstown’s Bob Lettis, a cousin of former Oneonta Mayor Jim Lettis, passed away; he had participated in seizing the bridge from the Germans.
