Being on the other end of a phone call with 84-year-old Bill Patton is something like holding a seashell up to your ear. Only instead of the distant rock-a-bye of the ocean, you hear the imminent, breath-tightening chop of the Rhine River flowing through Nazi Germany.
At first, Patton speaks in generalities — “Well, it was an experience” — because talking about the things he did unto others and the things that were done unto him is still so very new.
It wasn’t, in fact, until just a few years ago, when Patton and his three sons took their pilgrimage back to the spot he was captured, that his youngest boy even knew he’d been a prisoner of war (POW) during World War II.
But that trip did something to him. It brought a certain sense of closure so that now once you get him to open up, you almost wish you hadn’t. The memories — the descriptions — racing through the phone are as vivid as a Steven Spielberg epic and they are genuinely terrifying.
Asked if the stories Patton tells are true, his pastor — Kevin McCreless of Broadway Baptist Church, Rainsville, in DeKalb Baptist Association — laughed. “Well, he’s a storyteller but yes sir, I expect they’re true,” McCreless answered.
Other than the Sunday mornings that Patton attends his wife Kathryn’s Methodist church, he is inside Broadway Baptist whenever the doors are open, McCreless said.
Patton, a 31-year member of Broadway, grew up in the mountains of DeKalb County. He entered old Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham at the age of 16. He was going to be a doctor. Two years later, on May 21, 1943, he was drafted into the Army.
“Three busloads of 18-year-olds left Fort Payne. All the parents were crying, waving goodbye,” Patton recalls. “It had a kind of strangling effect on you.”
He was stationed at Fort McPherson near Atlanta. He was in Mississippi, California and North Carolina.
Then came the war. For the next two-and-a-half years, Patton experienced the torture of combat, the power of patriotism and the mighty force of faith.
He was shot at, filled with “52 pieces of German shrapnel” and captured on the shores of the Rhine, along with 10 others.
Nine of the POWs were shot dead in a pigpen. Patton and another were spared. He attributes the rare show of mercy toward him to his last name.
“The Germans thought I was kin to Gen. Patton,” he said. And for the record, Patton actually thinks he might be and even named his first son in honor of the general. “They said, ‘He may be our enemy but we respect him,’ so they let me live.”
Patton survived two days as a POW and the war, which still astounds him.
“You ask yourself, ‘Why me? Why? Why? Why?’ It’s just unbelievable that you could come through something like that,” he said.
He was later awarded the Purple Heart.
Patton credits his fate to the well wishes of his family, especially his father, whom he claims actually collapsed under the intensity of a prayer said at almost the exact moment a hand grenade that was close enough to kill him exploded into his body just before his capture.
“I think I was surrounded with a wall of protection,” Patton said.
And the Bible verse that got him through the war and saw him home? John 15:5 — “‘I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ That was my favorite.”
“I never got scared,” he said. “I just faced each day, every day.”
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