The meaning of Veterans Day came alive for sixth-grade students at High Rock School on Friday when they met Charles Sahagian, a 99-year-old decorated World War II Army veteran and longtime Needham resident.
High Rock Principal Jessica Downey invited Sahagian to the school to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. He met with a group of students in an outdoor ceremony on Nov. 7 that was streamed live into all classrooms.
Students read expressions of gratitude to Sahagian, who engaged in a spirited exchange with them as they asked questions about his life, career and experiences during the war.
Downey said it was an honor to have Sahagian visit the school and invited him to return next year.
“Thank you, Mr. Sahagian, for serving our country, protecting our freedoms, helping us be safe and being a member of our community for over 70 years,” she said.
The Observer’s Linda Polach interviewed Sahagian on Nov. 4 and drew from that conversation and Sahagian’s unpublished memoir to tell the story of a teenage soldier’s World War II experience.
Life during wartime
By Linda Polach
It was 1944, and Charles Sahagian, a teenager from Dorchester, found himself in one of the deadliest battles of World War II — the Battle of the Bulge. The last major German offensive against the advancing Allied forces, the battle claimed an estimated 20,000 American lives.
During 42 consecutive days of fighting, Sahagian said he thought often of his father.
“The thing I feared most of all was not dying. That didn’t bother me. What bothered me was what the impact on my family would be if I died. I had to live. I just had to live. I couldn’t give another casualty to my father.”
Sahagian’s father, Sahag, had experienced trauma as a child when he was driven from his home in Kharpert, Turkey, to escape the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916. While Sahag eventually made it to safety in America, the rest of his family did not. He believed 26 of his relatives, including his baby sister, were murdered.
As a boy, Charles witnessed his father’s anguish.
“The mailman would come and bring the Armenian newspaper, and I’d be watching him look at the list of people still alive from the genocide and not see his family’s names — and he would cry,” Sahagian recalled. “I was only five or six at the time, and I couldn’t help my father.”
Sahagian was 15 in December 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered the war. He remembered sitting outside his father’s store that day. His young friends expressed naïve confidence that America would quickly defeat its enemies.
“They thought it would be a piece of cake,” he said.
How little they knew of the devastation to come.
Sahagian volunteered for the Aircraft Warning Service, which had been set up because of fears of German aircraft along the coast.
“I would get up at 3:30 a.m. and hike up the hill, climb to the fire station into a 30-foot tower, and sit there for two hours and freeze my fanny off looking for aircraft,” he said.
Although there was secrecy surrounding the watches, Sahagian believes he helped tip off the Navy to the presence of a German submarine one night. He later received a citation for his efforts.
Sahagian enlisted on Jan. 25, 1944.
“I wanted to do my part. I was one of 40 kids hanging around Dorchester, and almost everyone had gone off to war. It was something we had to do. We had to save the country and free Europe from Hitler.”
Those kids, he said, had no idea what they were in for.
Basic training exposed both the best and worst of human nature. Sahagian said he witnessed racism and cruelty among commanders and fellow soldiers. He was often cold and exhausted, forced into long marches and brutal cold-water survival drills.
Transport conditions were also harsh. Soldiers were packed so tightly into trucks and trains and ships that they lived amid the stench of urine and vomit.
When Sahagian finally left the States, he sailed aboard the RMS Aquitania, a British ship carrying thousands of GIs to the British Isles.
“We slept in bunk beds, and mine was at the top of eight or nine piled up in the ship’s empty swimming pool,” he said. “I feared if I ever fell off onto that concrete pool floor.”
He was soon called to the upper deck and told he was a gunner.
“They gave me a gun, and I didn’t even know how to load the damn thing.”
When his ship landed at Le Havre, France, the devastation was overwhelming.
“I looked up and there wasn’t an intact window or house in all the city. Basic training was fun and games because I knew no one was getting killed. But now it was a different story. You see your first body, see your first enemy, and now it’s a different ballgame.”
Sahagian became part of Gen. George Patton’s plan to drive the Nazis out of strategic areas in France and Belgium. His expertise as a rifleman and heavy weapons specialist was an asset to the 87th Division of the 3rd U.S. Army.
He and his fellow soldiers were pulled from the south of France, where they had been fighting in the Metz area, and sent to attack the Germans in St. Hubert.
The Battle of the Bulge was raging.
“Everything I had I carried — my food, water, my medicine. My bed was a blanket. I could not afford to be in a sleeping bag with Moroccan fighters crawling in the nighttime with knives in their teeth. I did not want to be caught, so I had to be ready to move and move fast.”
He recalled encountering a German soldier in the woods.
“I shot him in the backside. I couldn’t kill him. He reminded me of my father. Remember, I’m 17 and going around shooting people. I’m thinking they have family, they have children. For a while I wasn’t going to shoot them. But I thought, I can’t do that either. What if he gets one of my guys tomorrow? That was terrible. A tough part of my life. I’ll never forget it — taking a man’s life.”
Still, Sahagian said, there were moments of humanity. He remembered helping a French woman who had been shot and was bleeding badly.
“We tended to her and got an ambulance to take her to a medical station,” he said. “Her husband was so grateful he lifted up a secret door in their home and made a feast for us. We hadn’t eaten in a couple of weeks.”
Sahagian had several close calls. He went “mano a mano” with a German soldier who ripped apart his hand with a bayonet. In France, he was nearly trapped by the enemy until the 761st Tank Battalion, a Black unit, rescued him. Later, he nearly lost his legs from severe frostbite but credited hospital medics with saving them from amputation.
After the war, Sahagian said he never stopped reflecting on its lessons.
“You know, there’s not a night I go to bed without grieving,” he said. “I thought we got rid of fascism — and it’s back, in places I never thought I would imagine. I feel like a failure. It seems like we are getting worse.”
He often speaks to students about his experiences.
“I tell the kids, ‘I don’t want you to be veterans. We’ve gotten knocked around. We’ve killed each other.’ And the kids look at me and think, what kind of veteran is this guy?”
The kind of veteran Charles Sahagian is, however, can be described simply: one who gave up his youth and faced unspeakable horrors to defend his country.
After the war, he had a distinguished career in physics and said that to this day he is forbidden from disclosing details of the secret work he did at his lab at Hanscom Air Force Base.
He has received several prestigious medals, including the Purple Heart and France’s Legion of Honor, but said the one he values most is his Combat Infantryman Badge.
“I tell the kids, when you’re watching TV and there’s some general saying this and that, always look to see if he has the blue rifle. If he wears that rifle, he is for real.”
Sahagian said he drives himself crazy thinking about how he can still help the world.
“Why can’t we help others instead of killing each other?” he asked.
It’s a simple question from a man who has more than earned the right to ask it.
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