Paratrooper Padre: The Priest Behind the Real Private Ryan

The poet Horace said, Bellaque matribus detestata, “And the wars detested by the mothers.” The truth is that most wars could easily be avoided, and, in the words of the late G.K. Chesterton, most wars are started because “big people want to get bigger.” But enough of my war lecturing!

Our story is about the Paratrooper Padre, Fr. Francis Sampson, a priest who served with the famed “Screaming Eagles” of the101st Airborne Division, whose motto is “a Rendezvous with Destiny.” He saw action during the Normandy Invasion, as well as the Battle of Bastogne in Belgium; and the last six months of World War II he spent in a German prison camp. His six-part story is found in the pages of the late Jesuit publication, The American Ecclesiastical Review, which ran from 1889 to 1975. These articles are found in volumes 115 and 116, 1946-’47. We mention in passing that the Jesuits closed the Review in 1975, mainly because of the destruction which ensued as a result of Vatican II; whether one realizes or admits the fact, by 1975 Jesuit vocations had dried up, the “Springtime of the Church,” which the modern popes had piped about so vociferously, had begun. Springtime had turned to Winter, and the Review was over and done with, liberalism had accomplished its triumph.

The paratrooper padre tells us of his first jump in wartime, and it did not go smoothly:

“But, as soon as we were over land the ack ack was terrific. The plane was hit many times and one boy had a bullet go right through his leg. As we stood up and hooked up, the plane was rocking badly in a strong wind…Our jump was a surprise all right…The Germans were waiting for us and they sent such a barrage of bullets at us that it will always remain a mystery to me how any of us lived. The tracer bullets made it look like the Fourth of July. I collapsed part of my chute to come down faster. From there my guardian angel took over.”¹

War is ugly, but redemption is often found as men are faced with the imminence of death, forcing them to look into the eyes of eternity and the salvation of their souls. War unfortunately claims also the lives of the innocent. Fr. Sampson encountered one such incident in the farmhouse of a French family, while tending to the wounded:

“It was just a three-room house and the French farmer, his wife and child were there…Chaplain McGee -a splendid Protestant chaplain- was giving first aid as best he could…A boy came in wounded telling us of his buddy who was shot in the back in the tall weeds about 100 yards from the house. Chaplain McGee and I decided to try and find him. Just as we stepped out of the house (front door) a German mortar hit the back door and killed the French woman and the little girl. The poor farmer nearly went out of his head.”²

One American G.I. had a grenade go off in his pocket, but Fr. Sampson tells us, “The boy with the grenade wound died about 4 a.m. in my arms…a peaceful and holy death clutching the Crucifix which I had taken down from the wall. All the boys joined in prayers for him.” Eventually the 501st Infantry Division was able to come to the house where they were holed up, rescuing the wounded and capturing many of the Germans as prisoners. Fr. Sampson made his way to the Division Hospital where he met the hospital chaplain, Fr. Durren. Fr. Sampson assisted in saving the souls of many of the German prisoners:

“I had picked up enough German to ask if they were Catholic and to tell them that I was a priest. About sixty percent of them were Catholic, and they always made the Sign of the Cross when I took out the stole. They made acts of Contrition and received Viaticum reverently as well-instructed and good Catholics. These, I later learned, were mostly from Bavaria. Many of them were in their early teens; some had not begun to shave.”³

He tells of one incident which left an impression upon his memory. There was a badly wounded German “who had his abdomen ripped open and his intestines and other organs were hanging out.” About twelve feet away from this German was an American boy with a serious head wound, and underneath his head the folded blanket had slipped out, causing the American to moan. Fr. Sampson tells us:

The German soldier crawled off his litter and along the floor on his back to the side of the American, fixed the folded blanket under his head again, and crawled back to his own litter. The German boy died within the hour.⁴

It is difficult to read this story and not sympathize with the vanquished Germans somewhat. Because of the propaganda which we have been fed through film and print for the last seventy years, we Americans have been made to believe that all the Nazis were barbaric Neanderthals, and it is simply not true.

We end this first part of “Paratrooper Priest” with a lengthy quote about Catholicism in war, and an incident in which he celebrated Mass on a Jeep:

Confession and Communion are the greatest comfort to our men at the front, and non-Catholics have observed with open envy our Catholics receiving the sacraments. Many non-Catholic boys have come to confession at the front, and not infrequently I have discovered that they received Holy Communion from me without my realizing who they were. I heard confessions and celebrated Mass under every conceivable circumstance. One Sunday the CO told me that he thought it would be safe to hold Mass in the reserve Bn. under a grove of trees. A large number gathered there, and I started to say Mass, using my Jeep as an altar. Some German artillery observers must have spotted us. 88’s began to fall all around us, and at the elevation a shell threw debris all over the Jeep and altar. I turned around and told the men to hit their holes, which they did - but quick. I finished Mass in two minutes flat - record time.⁵

*After World War II and then the Korean Conflict, Fr. Sampson was promoted to Major General. The movie Saving Private Ryan is based upon the story of Fr. Francis Sampson rescuing the last of the Niland brothers from World War II.

Part II: The Battered Bastards of Bastogne

There is only one fate worse than being an American wife of a “Screaming Eagle” at Christmas time in 1944, being a “Screaming Eagle” in the city of Bastogne, Belgium. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was a proud Irishman who graduated from West Point in 1919, and when asked to surrender as commander of the 101st, he famously replied “Nuts,” confusing the German commander. When the German commander asked for clarification on the meaning of the word “nuts” the American translator replied, “You can tell them to take a flying shit.” Fr. Sampson replied that General McAuliffe was a Catholic and a “very good one.”

Fr. Sampson tells us that his unit was in the vicinity of Veghel, Netherlands, for about two weeks, only to move northward to the town of Nijmegen, a city of 9,000, but possessing a church “as large as St. Patrick’s in New York” and “more beautiful.” It was here that his regiment CO Col. Johnson was killed by a mortar shell. Fr. Sampson says of him:

In France he had attended the Mass…and told me that he had been thinking about coming into the Catholic Church. As he put it ‘It is the only Church with enough guts to demand obedience and sacrifice and the only one capable of understanding and dealing mercifully with weak human nature’…I sincerely regret not having been with him before he died, for I am sure I could have baptized him into the Church.⁶

Fr. Sampson relates that one Sunday that he said Mass at a small church beside the dyke, and as the faithful were walking to Mass German 88’s were landing all around them, and no one was killed. After Mass he went to the Bn. staff headquarters which was located in a farmhouse with an attached barn. He relates one incident which made a believer out of several men:

One fellow was lying on an old mattress next to the wall and had his legs spread apart. An 88 came through the roof, right between his legs and buried itself in the concrete floor. It was a dud. The boy was about paralyzed with fright and the perspiration just rolled off him. He had quite a reputation as an exaggerator, and when he got his speech back he groaned, ‘Nobody will ever believe me when I tell them about this.’⁷

Eventually the Regiment made its way to the town of Mourmelon, France, and from here he would travel to Paris, “a city like no other in the world.” But in between Paris and Mourmelon was the city of Rheims, which possessed the most beautiful church in the world, Rheims Cathedral. He calls it easily “the most beautiful church I have ever seen.” Fr. Sampson’s unit was eventually called back to the front in Bastogne. At Hq. the troops had mentioned that one soldier was pinned down by a German gunner who was manning the machine gun on a the tank. The priest and a medic sought out the boy:

We were pinned down to the bottom of the ditch by crossfire. I laid down beside the boy and heard his confession and anointed him. Not a word of complaint did he say. He said, ‘Thanks’ and that he felt everything was going to be alright now, and that he hoped nobody thought that he was yellow because he yelled for a priest…I never heard whether he lived or not - he was not of our Regiment.⁸

Pt. III Arrested by the Germans

The Irish have a saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Such was the case with Fr. Sampson. On Dec. 19th, 1944, the priest was informed by his warrant officer that there was heavy fighting, and some U.S. troops were possibly in need of help. Off in a Jeep they went, only to be captured by the Germans, prompting Fr. Sampson to admit that he would endure “the fifteen most miserable days I have spent on earth.” He had an interesting conversation with his English-speaking German interrogator. He says of him:

He spoke of the position of the Church in Germany- that it was the only stable and sensible organization in the world, and especially in the Fatherland…He knew as all sensible Germans knew that Germany was beaten and had lost the war when she was driven out of Africa. America was more civilized than Germany, but Germany was more cultured than America. England was the real cause of the war, Russia the real menace to future civilization. Germans are home-loving, kindly, and unwarlike people, but the Nazi regime was ambitious - insanely so.⁹

They had walked (all 800 of them) from Belgium, all the way across Luxembourg, and on the 24th of December, they walked (without breakfast or dinner), to Prum in Germany. “They were fed,” he tells us, “one half a boiled turnip and a cup of hot water.” And on Christmas Day a slice of bread. They were reunited with 700 more prisoners, bringing the total to 1500. They made their way to the city of Gerolstein, “a city of misery.” Stopping in the little village of Bos, every housewife “made soup and sandwiches and hot coffee,” prompting Fr. Sampson to label them “very kind.” From Bos they traveled to the city of Koblenz, a city of 400,000 that was absolutely flat, “a more devastated city it is impossible to imagine.”¹⁰ The debris was so horrendous, every street being blocked, that it took the prisoners three hours to find their way out, finally making their way to Bad Ems, a city twelve miles away. They were exhausted with little or nothing to eat. Now reduced to 400, they had walked 185 miles in ten days, only to be loaded in boxcars for a six-day, no-food journey - their final destination, Neu-Brandenburg, Mecklenburg.

Once inside the camp there was some return to normalcy. At least the soldiers were able to eat of little bit of something. In all fairness, admits Fr. Sampson, even the Germans did not eat well. The German hatred of the Russians at the camp was evident:

The Russian dead were buried in pits, five hundred to a pit. On one occasion when I was burying an American and a couple of British men a Russian corpse had mistakenly been placed along side of the other three, and all four bodies were buried in coffins. When the Germans discovered the mistake the next day they dug up the Russian and dumped his body into the pit for the Russian dead. Many Russians were buried while still breathing. It was also a common thing for the Russians to keep their dead with them for days so that the dead man’s rations could be drawn from the kitchen, and at roll call the dead would be held upright by the men on each side in the close, tight formation.¹¹

A profound incident occurred just before the liberation of the prisoners by the Russian forces. It was the feast of Easter and the priests in the camp decided to have an outdoor solemn high Mass with priest, deacon, subdeacon, and all:

All of the Catholics in the camp and many of the non-Catholics attended, and the number was well up in the thousands, the largest congregation I have ever seen apart from a National Eucharistic Congress. The crowd entirely surrounded the alter and what a sight it was. Many of the Germans were there, not as guards but as worshipers. This was the Catholic Church; here were Frenchman kneeling next to Serbs, next to Poles, Americans worshiping besides Belgians, beside Italians, Scotsmen finding the bond of brotherhood in the Mass with the Dutch, with Germans and with Russians. There was no argument here, no friction, no hatred, no intrigue or struggle for balance of power. Here was Christ the King elevated again, and drawing all things to Himself.¹²

In many regards the Russian liberators were far worse than the Germans. Each Russian soldiers received his apportionment of vodka every day; many of the German girls were raped, hung upside down, and had their throats slit. One German priest lamented the fact that his mother and two sisters (nuns), were raped by a drunken gang of Russian soldiers. There is a story of one Russian, who, during the invasion of Berlin, shot a toilet to pieces with his rifle, thinking it something demonic. Another Russian put a fish in the toilet to keep it alive, eating it later. These are true stories of the Second World War, and this is the war which the mothers abhorred!

1. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 114, 1946. p. 325.

2. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 114, 1946. p. 326.

3. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 114, 1946. p. 330.

4. Ibid.

5. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 114, 1946. p. 330.

6. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 115, 1946. p. 414.

7. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 115, 1946. p. 415.

8. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 115, 1946. p. 418.

9. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 116, 1947. p. 44.

10. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 116, 1947. p. 47.

11. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 116, 1947. p. 118.

12. American Ecclesiastical Review, vol. 116, 1947. p. 122.