A few months back, I got an email from Vince Massier (MYC-77) with a heads-up on Ken Axelson (MYC-47) who will turn 100 in April 2024. I went to our database which showed no contact information for Ken. More research found that his correct name is Albert Kenneth Axelson and that he lives in Wanamingo, Minnesota. By doing further research on the internet and using information gained in some emails, I've put the following story together about Ken Axelson. Some good reading here about his amazing WWII experiences. Let's start with the following:

"Twin Cities Pioneer Press" Richard Chin (2014)

Seventy years ago, Friday, the 20-year-old Minnesotan (Ken) was in one of the deadliest places in a big, bloody battle in the middle of a devastating worldwide conflict. He was an American soldier hitting Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion of German-occupied France, a crucial turning point in World War II.

Axelson lived through what has been called "the longest day." But more bad stuff would happen before the war was over for the Welch, MN, farm boy. He became a paratrooper and fought in another brutal battle, the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and spent three months as a prisoner of war, where he wondered if he would live long enough to be liberated. But now at age 90, he's in his tightest jam.

"I know I'm not going to get out of this one," said the Wanamingo resident. "I read the obits, and most of them are younger than me. I was part of an adventure, a big one," Axelson said. "I was there on D-Day. There's not that many people who can say that anymore."

Axelson was inducted in the Army in June 1943, just after graduating from Red Wing High School. Axelson told the army he liked to hunt and shoot, but the Army didn't give him a gun. They made him a medic attached to an engineering brigade. When his landing craft hit the beach, he waded ashore, avoiding the German artillery fire. They got the ship we were on. The skipper lost his arm," Axelson said.

The invasion force landed at low tide, and Axelson was confronted with a strange assortment of debris littering the beach, possessions that earlier waves of soldiers had dropped. He also started to see the dead, including a man from his unit, the mail clerk, crumpled on the sand with his skull pierced by a chunk of shrapnel.

Axelson's unit set up an aid station in a tank trap, and he spent the day and night carrying in the wounded. His first experience with combat "was just hard work, that's all it is, with a little fear thrown in," he said.

He doesn't talk in detail about all he saw that day, but it must have been the worst that modern weapons can do to a human body. Some men fell apart under the strain. "This is what we trained for. This is what we did," he said. "Some people could handle it. Some couldn't."

"I did what I could," he said. "It was a pretty wild day." The next day he walked by bodies of the dead stacked on the beach "like cordwood." They were three or four high, in a row stretching 200 to 300 feet. "I walked on the foot side. I didn't care to look at the faces," he said. He also saw his first Germans, a group of about 100 prisoners sitting on the beach.

Over the summer, Allied forces fought their way inland, and Axelson ended up taking a crash course in parachute training, jumping five times in one day, because the 101st Airborne Division needed medics after fighting in Holland in September 1944. As part of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.

Holding a key crossroads in Bastogne, Belgium, the 101st Airborne Division was surrounded and besieged by German forces for five days at the end of December. He can recall the wounds of the other men involved in the fighting and the times he narrowly missed being hit himself. "Machine gun tracers like a garden hose, and someone goes down, and I thought, 'Shoot, I'll have to go out and get him.' "

"I stood on the steps and counted seven of our airplanes going down." His full head of hair is white now, but back then he was a redhead. Most of his fellow soldiers knew the shy farm boy as "Red the Medic."

One night, he was trying to sleep in a haystack when another soldier woke him up with this greeting: "Get up right away, there's 100 Germans coming into town." "That's how I woke up, Christmas morning, 3 a.m., 1944," Axelson said.

On Jan. 3, still fighting near Bastogne, Axelson helped evacuate one last wounded soldier just before six German tanks overran his position. He and a handful of Americans there were captured. When the Germans grabbed him, he had to leave behind his medical bags where he had stashed five chocolate bars he had been saving. The loss of that precious food would haunt him for the rest of the winter while he was a prisoner of war.

When he was interrogated by an English-speaking German officer, Axelson tried to convince him that as a medic, he was a noncombatant and should be sent to a neutral country like Sweden or Switzerland. The officer said, "I've been to Sweden many times. Beautiful country. Too bad you'll never see it."

He and the other prisoners were marched through German towns and jammed in crowded boxcars for days. He saw fellow prisoners die of hunger, sickness or just despair. "They were dying every day, maybe a half-dozen would starve to death," he said. "I never gave up. I was going to live for spite if nothing else."

When the prisoners walked into Germany, he joked about the competition between Allied generals to be the first to cross the German frontier. "Hey guys, we beat both Patton and Montgomery across the Rhine," Axelson remembers saying.

But he wondered if he would live long enough to be liberated. "We tried to anticipate how many days we had left. It wasn't weeks. It was days. If someone didn't intervene, we knew it was over. I hadn't lived much yet. I hadn't had a serious romance yet."

On April 2, 1945, he turned 21. It was also the day that American Sherman tanks knocked down the gates of the prisoner of war camp. "The elation, the euphoria. It was just unbelievable. I like to eat. After that POW camp, food is important."

Axelson's parents, who had been told only that he was missing in action, didn't learn he was alive until they got the letter Axelson wrote to his mother a few days after he was liberated. He got back to Fort Snelling on May 2, 1945. He took the streetcar to the end of the line, hitched a ride for part of the rest of way and walked the last few miles through the Cannon River valley back into his hometown. A farmer who saw him passing by said, "You look pretty lively for a dead man."

After the war, Axelson got a job briefly as a smokejumper, parachuting out of planes to fight forest fires. He used the G.I. Bill to get a pilot's license. He built houses and was a Culligan man. He got married and had six children and 13 grandchildren. Before retiring in 1989, he was a building inspector in Goodhue County.

"My brain is still working good," he said. "And I don't feel old. In my heart, I don't feel old." He said that he's outlived all of his enemies. "Who knows?" he said of his knack for survival. "I love life."

Ken jumped at McCall during the 1947 season. Happy birthday Ken.