Saluting a veteran: Tom Landess
By CYNTHIA AUKERMAN
News-Gazette reporter
Tom Landess will be spending this Veterans Day in a nursing home, recovering from a major surgery. He says, "I'll be back." After all, he's seen tough times before.
On June 8, 1944, two days after the D-Day invasion of France, Landess, a member of an Army engineers unit, landed on the beach.
"It wasn't too bad," Landess remembers. "Our guys had pushed the Germans back pretty good for no longer than they had been there."
That was the beginning of Landess' march through Europe. Sometimes living in tents, sometimes in vacated, bombed-out buildings, sometimes waking up snow-covered, Landess and his fellow engineers worked their way through France, Luxembourg and then Germany.
Landess carried an M-1 rifle all the way. He says he wasn't in any big battles, but the engineers had to deal with snipers.
The Germans blew up some of the bridges as they retreated, so one of the main jobs for Landess' engineer unit was to rebuild the bridges. His unit rebuilt "the bridge over the Rhine," and they promptly renamed it the President Roosevelt Bridge in memory of their president.
One of Landess' prized possessions is a photograph of members of his group standing next to the sign declaring the Rhine bridge in memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Born and raised in "the Island" area of Winchester (Walnut and Maple streets), Landess was drafted in February 1943 when he was not quite 19 years old. Before the landing in France, he and his unit first went to England where they built a hospital. Everyone knew the invasion was coming and that many extra hospital beds would be needed.
"The Brits were good to us," Landess says.
After making it through V-E Day (Victory in Europe), Landess' unit was shipped out to the Pacific Theater. They passed through the Panama Canal and headed for the Philippines.
He says, "The scuttlebutt was that we were going to study Japanese mines." That was in preparation of the invasion of Japan before the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the invasion unneccesary.
When Landess was three days out of Manila, the war ended.
Landess got to come home in December of 1945. He worked as a masonry contractor (bricklaying) for 46 years. One of his major jobs was the building that houses Silver Towne.
After the war, Landess kept in touch faithfully with several of his buddies. Now only one is left, and he hears from him and the widow of another one.
Now 84, Landess is as slim as he was in his World War II days. He and his wife, Zelma, have been married almost 60 years.
