Until three months ago, Russ Kunz never talked about the war.

He never talked about what he did commanding a U.S. Army tank destroyer with General George S. Patton in France in 1944, and later in Germany in 1945.

Russ, 94, has plenty of other stories to tell.

His father was an ace fireman on the Port Townsend Southern railroad, and would take the locomotive out to Leland to court the girl who would become his bride.

Russ, at the age of 16, was a timber faller, working with springboards and crosscut saws on old-growth Olympic Peninsula timber.

He was among the first Jefferson County men to have a number called for the draft, early in 1941, before America entered World War II.

After the war, he worked 36 years here at the paper mill.

Of course as a local outdoorsman, he has plenty of fishing and hunting stories.

But he's never talked about what he saw and did in the war.

Until now.

"When you hurt yourself when you're young, when you get old, it comes back," Russ says from the brown recliner in the living room of a house he's lived in since 1950.

"You never get over the damn things," he says of military combat experiences and the general degradations of war. "You can say all the prayers you want but you won't get over it."

He never talked about the war with his beloved wife, Dorothy. He didn't share gory details with their children, Russ, Mike or Sandy.

Kunz said he didn't even talk much with his brother Ben, who spent more than three harrowing months as a prisoner of war in Germany.

These last few months, Russ has changed.

"I've always had trouble sleeping," but lately restful sleep has become even more fleeting.

"The last few months, I thought maybe if I talked about it, maybe I'd get over it and quit dreaming about it."

FAMILY HISTORY

The Kunz side of Russell's family came over from Germany in 1851, and was in the Port Townsend area by the 1880s.

In 1910 his father, Bill Kunz, was the fireman on the Port Townsend Southern, responsible for having a stock of locomotive firewood along the route between PT and Quilcene. During his work he became friendly with people in the Leland area, and would take the locomotive out on firewood gathering runs. He would use these trips to court a girl named Myra Courier; they married, and began a family. Russell was born Sept. 15, 1919.

Bill Kunz left the railroad to become a logger. He died in 1926, and when the Great Depression hit in 1929, it was hard times for a lot of families, including the Kunz clan.

In 1933, his seventh-grade year, Russ went to live with Mae Thomas, an aunt. He was one of the Leland community kids.

He was like a “big brother to all the little ones and he was very popular with the girls," wrote Mary Beth Munn in a Leland history book.

Russ finished eighth grade in 1935, and then went to work as a logger. He teamed up with older brother Ben. They built a cabin on a Tarboo ridge with their own tools and a 10-cent can of nails to attach the shingles. They lived two years in the dirt-floor structure, outfitted with a wood stove, bed and chair.

They supported themselves by cutting cedar shakes and shingle bolts, and by selling cord firewood. They peeled Cascara bark (dried and sold as a laxative), and picked up odd jobs in Town (Port Townsend).

A skilled logger with a knack for felling trees, Kunz hired out to Noah Johnston of Quilcene, who loved his work ethic but was shocked to learn he was only 16 – it was illegal to hire someone for a woods job who was not 18.

In January 1940, Russ joined the Civilian Conservation Corps outfit up Penny Creek Road in Quilcene. The federal effort to employ men and to get public works projects built brought Kunz a new pair of cork boots, a full set of dress clothes, enough work clothes for a change, plus three meals a day and meaningful work to do, Munn reported. With warm quarters and three good meals a day, Russ learned to make the regulation bed, and how to follow military-style rules. The experience would prove practical, sooner than he would realize.

IN THE ARMY NOW

In late 1940, he left the CCC to go to work with his brother Ben, but then his number came up (696) during the first military draft in Jefferson County.

According to a Leader story from the time, on Jan. 9, 1941, the first Class 1-A (no dependents) U.S. Army draftees were Russell Louis Kunz of Leland, Bernard Peterson of Eaglemount, Arne Ramstead of Nordland, and Michael Sike of Port Townsend.

The men were treated to a big dinner in Port Townsend and given a room for the night in the Central Hotel, then sent to Fort Lewis for induction on Jan. 21, followed by a trip to California's Fort Ord.

Eventually, Kunz joined a unit activated in December 1941: the 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion. The tank destroyer motto was “Seek, strike, destroy," with a tank-crushing orange tiger as their symbol.

He trained at Fort Hood in Texas on 3-inch anti-tank (AT) guns towed by halftracks. Later, he trained on the new M-10 motor carriage tank destroyer, also with a 3-inch gun that was more powerful than those carried by the M-1A Sherman tank.

TDs were meant to fire from concealment or a distance, but were not intended to go toe-to-toe with more heavily armored tanks. "They weren't, but we did," Kunz noted.

In March 1944, the unit left Boston for England, part of the troop build-up for the coming invasion of Northern Europe. But his unit's TDs went elsewhere, and he went into combat with a 3-inch towed AT gun. He went ashore June 9, three days after the D-Day invasion of France. While waiting to unload, an adjacent ship was blown in half. "We were waiting like a duck. There were bodies floating everywhere."

By then, Kunz and many other soldiers already knew what awaited them in Europe.

"You don't figure you're going to come home," he said. "When you crossed that channel, you figure you're not coming back."

SILVER STAR

His unit, third platoon of Company B, was attached to the 90th Infantry Division on June 26, 1944 in a combat action that led, a few months later, to Kunz receiving the Silver Star for gallantry.

The platoon's 3-inch guns were engaging enemy armor in the vicinity of Sainte Eugenie. Kunz's gun was in an apple orchard. Under fire and unable to get a clear shot at the enemy, he made a command decision.

“During the course of the action," the medal citation reads, "one gun received direct hostile small arms and artillery fire which could not be effectively returned from its concealed location." Cpl. Kunz (and six others) “in the face of enemy fire, seized the trails of the gun and pushed it forward by hand to an exposed position one hundred yards from the enemy’s line. From this position the gun destroyed an enemy tank, four other vehicles, and an enemy self propelled gun which had prevented the advance of our troops.”

Kunz recalls, "They were shooting at us but we lucked out. I think we got a hit that jammed their turret, then we finished them."

In the exchange, one of his crew was killed, a few wounded, and the gun's tires were blown off.

"It's bad. One minute you're working with a guy and the next minute he's gone."

Part of the Third Army led by Gen. Patton, Kunz participated in the celebrated St. Lo breakout from the difficult Normandy country into the more wide-open part of France. He was at the Falaise Pocket, where in August the retreating German 7th Army, using a narrow corridor, was literally chewed to pieces by allied firepower.

It's now one of Kunz's most haunting memories.

"People don't know what it is," he said of the gruesome sights of war, the result of mechanized armor mixing with the Germans’ horse-drawn artillery.

"Christ help me. There were 6 to 8 inches of bodies and horses ground up on the road. There was nothing you could do. You had to drive through it."

IN COMBAT

Moved to Metz, France, his unit received new diesel-powered M-36 tank destroyers. This was an open-top, turreted and tracked vehicle with a powerful 90mm gun, but still with less frontal armor than a regular tank.

"There was no great armor, but we had firepower and we were fast," he recalled, at least 40 mph on roads.

Standing about 5 feet, 8 inches, at 178 pounds, now a sergeant, he became commander of a TD crew that included a driver, gunner, loader and radioman. There were four tanks in his platoon.

Tankers could carry more rations and gear than what he called an infantry "gravel agitator," but Kunz was always ready to give any solider a lift. He did his best to care for his crew.

"I used to try and sleep when I could in the evening," and always take the 3 a.m. sentry duty because that was the hardest time for most people to stay awake.

TD units were typically moved around, attached to various infantry units as needed. His company supported the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 9th, 28th, 87th, 90th and 95th infantry divisions.

Over the next 10 months, Kunz was in steady action aboard an M-36 "Jackson" TD. One TD was burned out from under him, with one crewman dead and another severely burned.

Another TD was lost to cannon fire from a pillbox, a concrete dug-in guard post. He and his crew scrambled out of that TD and into a nearby house, joining with a few army infantry. They captured two German soldiers and told them to go to the pillbox and convince their comrades to surrender. The result: a German colonel, who had studied in New York and spoke perfect English, came out to talk. "This guy had just come from the Russian Front, and [surrender] seemed like a good idea to him." Another 100 Germans became prisoners.

MORE HORROR

The European winter campaign of 1944-45 was the coldest on record. When the German army counterattacked in Dec. 16, 1944, Kunz's unit was with Patton's Third Army on the bulge's southern flank.

"We held our corner," he noted, and then were part of Patton's counterattack, which within days, reached the bulge's center – Bastogne, Belgium.

The winter campaign meant weeks without a change of clothing (and no winter clothes, anyway), cold and exhaustion. It was the worst of times in another way for Russ – he learned that his brother Ben, a truck driver with an Army unit, was captured and had become a prisoner of war.

"Everywhere I went, the rest of the war, I was looking for Ben," Russ said. It wasn't until after the war ended that Russ knew Ben was alive.

Kunz's TD unit ended up in Germany and Czechoslovakia. After the war ended in April 1945, he saw Buchenwald, the largest of the Nazi's forced labor camps, where an estimated 56,000 people died. Kunz said that he searched the entire camp on the chance that his brother was there. Kunz saw the pits, the cremation ovens, hundreds of naked corpses stacked like cordwood, and the survivors "who were bone with a little skin strapped over them."

Army records show that Kunz participated in the Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, Central Europe and Rhineland campaigns. He received the Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster (meaning he was wounded more than once) and the Silver Star for gallantry in action.

He returned to the U.S. on Sept. 1, 1945, was discharged from the Army and returned to Jefferson County.

"When I left home there was a big sendoff downtown," Kunz recalled of when he left Port Townsend in 1941. "When I came home, they wanted to throw me in jail because I was drunk."

Three days after he returned to PT, he got a job at the Crown Zellerbach paper mill, working for 80 cents an hour, loading paper rolls onto railroad boxcars with the shipping and weighing department.

BACK HOME

Fresh back from the war, he never liked to answer the question: Did you ever kill anybody?

"You used a lot of ammunition," Kunz said. "You wanted to go home."

Even back home with plenty to eat and no hostile fire, the war was rarely far away.

"When I first came home, I'd be in bed and wide awake and couldn't move a muscle, couldn't talk. It's like I was paralyzed." For some years, when in this state, he just needed someone to jar one of his arms or legs and then he'd be OK, like nothing had happened.

Still, he never talked about what put him in such a suspended state.

An outdoorsman since childhood, when he'd get too burdened by wartime memories, he'd just take off by himself for a while.

He always found solace and friendship in 607th reunions, still a "close family" even after many years. The TD units were smaller than most other Army units of the period, and reunions were always well attended. A few years ago, he called friends from his reunion list, and found he was among the last. The reunions have simply "run out of guys."

He and brother Ben were close, but still never talked about their respective war experiences.

"He never said too much and I didn't either," Russ Kunz said. "I've told you more today than I've told my family."

These days, Russ is in the twilight of his life. He moves around pretty well; he rototilled his garden spot last week. He is grateful for his children and their families, and his friends and relatives, for their patience, love and support.

He does not have a lot of patience with politicians, people who find excuses not to work for a living, or people who advocate sending young people off to war without a clear prospect of victory. In war you do what must be done to survive, he said, and then live the rest of your life dealing with it. He wishes younger vets well.

Although he does not yet have many answers from God on why he survived many times of near-certain death, he expects them some day.

Yes, Russ Kunz has led a full life, and has a lot of stories to tell.

Now he's finally shared his deepest story of all.