NOTED WORLD WAR TWO COWARD RETURNS TO BATTLEFIELD HE ONCE SOILED

St. Eulion – France 7/30/07 Brushing away tears, retired dentist and former Army radio officer Abraham Kleindt gazed across these bucolic green hills where 63 years ago he ran from one of the most bloody and decisive battles of World War II, most certainly condemning many of his fellow soldiers to death.

“A lot of our boys fell here, never to get up,” said the grey haired Kleindt, who now walks with a cane. “I fell several times while running blindly, but luckily I always found my feet again.”

As a radio operator Kleindt was charged with calling in air support. But the Standstedt, FL, native says on August 11, 1945, when the first German tracer bullets flew over his head signalling the beginning of the Battle of St. Eulion, he promptly pitched his radio pack to a surprised medic, shit deeply into his fatigues and bolted from his trench like a terrified rabbit.

“I was young and green,” he told family members and a reporter on his visit to the battlefield where he had his first taste of war-time cowardice. “There were limbs and guts everywhere I assume. I suppose that the battle was fierce, with German mortars pounding our positions, ripping my friends literally to shreds, perhaps. I didn’t actually see any of the fighting.”

By the time the real fighting began Kleindt says he was already a mile behind allied lines, deep in the woods. “I lay under a log for a week. Could we look for that log?”

Kleindt has written a screenplay about his decision to abandon his post and the likelihood that he directly caused the death of dozens of his fellow soldiers whose heads were picked off by sniper fire or who had their guts run through by German bayonets as they waited for the back up that never came.

The screenplay, called “The Cowering Fields,” which has not elicited interest from any American or European studio, begins with Kleindt’s historic bail-out at St. Eulion, then takes viewers on what the veteran describes as a "2-year, hair raising tour of duty across half of Europe."

“At the Battle of Nimes I hid in a barn. It sounded terrible all around me. The screaming. At Gelsenkirchen I talked a sympathetic German baker into hiding me in her spetzle vats.”

A Normandy farmhouse with Radio Operator Abraham Kleindt, far right, disguised as a cow. He endured several allied milkings before rejoining his platoon for a rare week of R & R.

This past week at St. Eulion Kleindt paid homage to his slain comrades alone; the two men who survived the brutal massacre that Kleindt could have easily prevented by placing just a single call for help still hold a grudge, Kleindt acknowledges.

“I wish I could go back in time but I can’t,” he said, as his wife and two grown sons led him back to his car along a route not far from where his younger, yellow self ran to save his own ass. “Not all the way back in time,” Kleindt added, “ Just back to about 1946, to those gay post-war years when everyone was having a gas and no one was shooting at each other. That was the one part of military life I never got used to.”