(Tribune News Service) — A World War II veteran from Sacramento, Calif., spent the holiday season more than eight decades ago on the front of one of World War II’s most significant battles.

Howard Buford and his fellow soldiers who were fighting at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 received a Christmas Eve message from the acting head of the 101st Airborne Division, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe. They were up against one of the coldest European winters on record and trying to defend their line until more reinforcements could arrive.

“What’s Merry about all this, you ask?” McAuliffe wrote. “We’re fighting — it’s cold, we aren’t home. All true but what has the proud Eagle Division accomplished with its worthy comrades the 10th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and all the rest? Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us.”

Eventually reinforcements arrived, the allies prevailed and Buford returned to the United States. He made his home in Ventura for decades until a fall in recent months precipitated his move to be closer to family in Sacramento. This Christmas is far from the forests of western Europe, where Buford received McAuliffe’s holiday greeting. Buford will celebrate in his new home city, Sacramento, with his family.

Buford moved to Mercy McMahon Terrace, a retirement home in East Sacramento, in early November. He left Ventura to be near his son and daughter-in-law after falling while going to pick up his mail around the time of his 104th birthday in August.

Prior to his fall, Buford was still driving. He was going a few times a week to the gym, where he’d made friends with people who were as much as 60 years younger than him. Sometimes, Buford and his friend Al would go from the gym to a nearby coffee shop where they’d hold court for an hour, longer on weekends.

“I don’t carry grudges around,” Buford said. “I don’t carry anger around. I tell jokes. I try to enjoy life.”

Buford didn’t adopt this perspective by chance. As a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, he survived one of World War II’s bloodiest conflicts. Of the roughly 600,000 American soldiers at the battle, 19,000 were killed, according to figures provided by the National WWII Museum.

The Battle of the Bulge would help solidify victory for the Allies in the European theater in May 1945. And it helped set a course in life for the everyday Americans like Buford who were in the literal trenches during what was anything but a sure fight.

‘A guy who had never done anything but play around’

Buford, who grew up in Los Angeles, admitted he drifted through high school. He graduated in 1939, with a transcript that was all C’s, he insisted.

He washed dishes at a restaurant, worked for a plant rubber and asbestos company and was building fuselages for fighter planes at a Lockheed Aircraft facility in Burbank around the time the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in December 1941, which thrust America into World War II.

The website of the U.S. embassy in Belgium noted that Buford “planned to join the Army’s airborne division as soon as possible.”

Buford was in for some surprises, though, when he volunteered for the Army in 1943. First, there was his colorblindness, which would keep him from training as a parachutist, at least initially. Another factor came into play to dictate his military career, too.

“I was a guy who had never done anything but play around,” Buford said. “I had a convertible and I knew girls all over East L.A. And I was living a happy life and I figured I was capable of working at a gas station or something. And I go in the Army and they give me an intelligence test. Turns out I’m really intelligent. I just goofed off. So they sent me to college at Iowa State College.”

Buford studied in college to be an Army engineer. Then, losses suffered at another of World War II’s bloodiest campaigns, the Normandy invasion that commenced with D-Day on June 6, 1944, led to a need for reinforcements like Buford.

“They said they weren’t going to need engineers two or three years down the road, they needed feet on the ground,” Buford said. “So they took us out of college and I went to the 97th Infantry Division in Missouri.”

Buford didn’t recall when he switched from the 97th Infantry Division to the 101st Airborne Division, though it’s certain the change happened by late 1944.

Around this time, Nazi Germany dictator Adolf Hitler was growing increasingly desperate, according to John Curatola, senior historian for The National WWII Museum. “At this stage of the game, Hitler is really, he’s a drug addict and he’s kind of lost sense of reality,” Curatola said.

Without support from his upper generals, Hitler developed the plan for the Battle of the Bulge.

“He really thinks that if he can drive a wedge between the Allies, between the British and the Americans and then push up to Antwerp, which is a major logistical hub for the Allies in the West, that potentially they will sue for peace,” Curatola said.

The Germans focused on a city in the Ardennes forest, Bastogne, Belgium, where seven roads converged and could allow them to move further west, according to John McManus, a Missouri University of Science and Technology professor who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Battle of the Bulge.

The battle began Dec. 16, with the Germans attacking along a front the Allies held thinly in the Ardennes. The U.S. had 3½ divisions fighting to hold the front, including the 28th Infantry Division, which fought valiantly east of Bastogne, McManus said.

The men were trying to buy time for future U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, the commanding general for the Allies in Europe, to send reinforcements such as the 101st Airborne Division. “The 101st has to be seen in that context,” McManus said. “They’re one of the reserve units Eisenhower has to throw into the maw.”

Buford had been at a military base in France when he got the call around 4 a.m. one day to grab his combat gear. He crawled with other men onto a flat bed truck that had its sides removed. Roll was not taken.

“A buddy of mine I went through jump school with was a musician, a trumpet player and he was in the band,” Buford said. “He didn’t have real combat gear. He just put what he had on. Came down and crawled on the truck with me and they didn’t know he was there.”

They were heading for battle.

Surrounded at Bastogne

By the time Buford got his orders to head to the Battle of the Bulge, he was part of Easy Company of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment.

McManus said this was one of three parachute regiments in the 101st Airborne Division. The 2001 HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers” centered on one of the 101st’s other parachuting units, Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The miniseries included an episode title “Bastogne.”

McManus wrote a 2008 book about the scramble for Bastogne from Dec. 16-20, 1944, “Alamo in the Ardennes.” He said the 501st reached the area of Bastogne either late Dec. 19, 1944, or the next day. Buford said his truck drove all day and night from France and that at about midnight, they parked in a forest on the outskirts of Bastogne.

The Germans began laying siege on Dec. 20 and soon surrounded the 101st Airborne Division, including the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment that Buford was in. McManus said the 501st’s “job is basically just to, at that point, fight a defensive battle to hold on as best they can.”

Conditions for the Allies were rough. The battle was fought during one of the coldest European winters on record. Worsening weather made it difficult for resupply drops by air in the battle’s early days. The men faced snow. There were also shortages of ammunition and medical staff, as many of the latter had been taken prisoner by the Germans, McManus said.

At one point, Buford went into a farmhouse with other men. They used a wood stove to build a fire to get warm. Buford’s boots had gotten soaked. He placed them too close to the fire and accidentally melted part of the toe, which he had to make due with for a couple of days until he could get replacement boots.

While Buford had trained as a parachutist, jumping six or eight times in practice, he did not do this at Bastogne. Instead, he was in the infantry. He spent time in the forest around Bastogne and in foxholes. He and other men dodged German shrapnel and mortar fire, even if they didn’t always know where the enemy was.

“When you’re an infantryman, you don’t have a lot of control over what’s going on and you don’t always know what’s going on,” Buford said.

He described the experience of coming face-to-face while in a forest with a German soldier who was as surprised as he was, Buford said. Buford quickly took cover and came under fire. “This is not the movies,” Buford said. “You don’t stand up. Where you’re safe is flat on the ground.”

Buford isn’t sure if he killed anyone in the war. He wasn’t wounded, though men near him were. One time, a fellow soldier came by to chat, “just the BS of soldiers and all,” Buford said. The man moved back and promptly had his leg blown off by a shell.

“Crap happened all around you and somehow I keep coming out of it okay,” Buford said.

Sometimes, the soldiers would get a break and move a quarter mile back.

“We built big bonfires to get warm,” Buford said. “Now, we’ve been up in the front and they’re firing at us. Some of our buddies are getting hit. What the hell do you think we talk about back there? Girls. We don’t talk about the war. We talk about girls.”

On Dec. 23, a German courier went to Brig. Gen. McAuliffe requesting his surrender and that of Bastogne. McAuliffe’s one-word response of “Nuts!” — a succinct and non-profane way to tell the Germans to get lost — provided a morale boost for the Allies and is famous in military circles to this day.

The Allied soldiers also got a special Christmas dinner, which was a point of focus for the U.S. that year. Men got turkey dinners with all the fixings, McManus said, though he added this wasn’t possible at Bastogne. Buford remembered getting a special meal, but doesn’t remember what it was.

In general, dinners would come at times that were dark and cloudy, Buford and other men walking together, holding onto the shoulder of the man in front of them for guidance. When receiving their dinner, they’d get to a man distributing jello.

“He scoops up a big scoop of jello and dumps it on there, but it probably goes on top of beans or something that’s hot,” Buford said. “We don’t give a s--- because we’re hungry.”

The day after Christmas, Gen. George Patton’s Third Army arrived, breaking the siege. The battle lasted a few more weeks, though the tide had shifted. Curatola said the 101st Airborne would claim it didn’t need the help from the Third Army.

“It’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek pride thing for those men in the Airborne,” Curatola said.

The secret to Buford’s longevity

Buford expressed modesty about his service in World War II.

“I’m glad I was in the Army,” Buford said. “I felt like it was an obligation. It was a worthwhile experience and all that. But if you look at my uniform, you don’t see any medals.”

He added, “I was a good journeyman soldier, combat soldier.”

After the war, Buford and his first wife, Rita Buford, who he married in 1947, had four sons. He moved to Ventura in the early 1950s and did surveying work for highways. Rita Buford died in 1997. Howard Buford’s second wife, Elizabeth Buford. died in 2013. Three of his sons are living — his youngest died earlier this year.

In Ventura in recent years, Howard Buford lived next door to Laurie Meyer. She was impressed by his willingness to welcome people of all stripes into his life.

“He never let his beliefs get in the way of his relationships,” Meyer said.

Tom Buford, who retired last December from being a planner for the city of Sacramento, is one of Howard Buford’s sons. He said there were two secrets to his father’s longevity: Exercise and his love of people.

“He’s happy and satisfied and keeps working at making friends,” Tom Buford said. “And I think that’s kept him going.”

Howard Buford hasn’t shied away from discussing his service at the Battle of the Bulge. In 2019, the 75th anniversary of the battle, the Best Defense Foundation, a Southern California charity founded by former NFL player Donnie Edwards, flew Buford to Europe for the first time since World War II.

Amanda Thompson, the executive director of the Best Defense Foundation, said Buford no longer travels. She worked with him in recent years on helping the Army and Nike design special uniforms for the Army-Navy game to honor the men of the 101st Airborne Division who fought at the Battle of the Bulge.

“He’s so happy,” Thompson said. “His laugh gets me. I love him.”

Buford walked away from the Battle of the Bulge feeling lucky to be alive.

When he received his discharge from the military at a base in San Pedro in 1946, he wondered when he walked out the gate if he might be called back. He rode a red car trolley into central Los Angeles, then boarded a yellow trolley for the ride to East L.A. From there, he walked roughly a mile home.

“I walked in the front door and I stood in the living room,” he said. “I took all the military stuff off, every bit of it, just threw it on the couch that was there. Then I walked in the bedroom and put my civilian clothes on, went out the door, went down and found some of my buddies.”

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