“Bragg is back”

04th January 1945

Today’s jaunt into the Ardennes Forest with my wife was to the area the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge called “Dead Man’s Ridge”. This lies just 7 miles west of the market town of Bastogne, the dogged defense of which became a symbol of resistance during the fighting and vividly portrayed in Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers mini-series.

By the time the fighting that immortalized this valley began on 4^th January 1945, General George Patton’s Third Army had lifted the siege of Bastogne nine days before. The general Allied counter-offensive across the battlefield had begun immediately afterwards. It would see the Allies eventually commit more than 700,000 troops to force the Germans back to their original point of departure by end-January 1945. This resulted in nearly 83,000 casualties to the Allies and the loss of significant materiel. Although German official figures are lower, the U.S. estimates of German casualties exceed 100,000 as well as the loss of irreplaceable equipment for no strategic effect in what would be seen as Hitler’s last throw of the dice in the west. An estimated 3,000 Belgian and Luxembourger civilians were to perish too during this phase of the fighting.

The fighting to capture the two villages of Flamierge and Flamisoul in this southern part of the Bulge began on 4^th January 1945, in the middle of a snowstorm. The task had been given to the untested 17th Airborne Division, known as the “Golden Talons”. This would be their first day of combat.  The ensuing battle would be fought along two ridgelines bracketing the vital Bastogne-Marche road that would serve as a main artery for any withdrawal of German forces from the west. Over the course of the next nine days, against three Panzer Regiments well dug in, the Division’s casualties would be catastrophic and several battalions nearly annihilated.

It was also here in this valley that Maine-born Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a driver in HQ Company, 1/513^th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 17^th Airborne would be awarded a Silver Star, the U.S. Armed Forces third highest military decoration for valor in combat as well as a Purple Heart.

PFC Bragg’s battle would begin that morning around 08.15hrs when he would emerge from the treeline in which the 1^st Battalion had been sheltering around 400 yards to the south of the Bastogne-Marche road. At roughly the same time, German-born Staff Sergeant Isadore S. Jachman of the 1/513^th‘s Bravo Company would emerge but his life was soon to end barely 200 yards beyond the tree line in a bleak, exposed field. The foxholes once occupied by both men are still visible today in the treeline above Flamisoul.

Pinned down by German artillery, mortar, and small arms fire and with two Panzers approaching their position, Izzy Jachman left his place of cover and dashed across open ground through a hail of fire and grabbed a bazooka lying on the ground and began engaging the tanks, destroying one and forcing the other to withdraw. For this action, for which he gave his life, Izzy Jachman was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, one of only three Jewish soldiers to receive the award during World War Two.

Crossing the same field, PFC Roland Bragg was at some point wounded and taken prisoner. Along with four other paratroopers, he was taken back to a German aid station that had been set up in a stone barn amongst a cluster of farm buildings at Cochieval, a place that does not even feature on today’s maps. But his rather unremarkable story so far wouldn’t end there because, Roland Bragg, wounded as he was, struck up a conversation with one of his captors who turned out also to be a Freemason.

With this discovery, Roland asked his fellow Journeyman if he would let him leave and, given their bond, the other agreed if Roland first knocked him out with his rifle so it seemed like he had overpowered the German medic and escaped. After doing so and pondering his next steps, Roland espied an ambulance parked outside the aid station and, donning the jacket of the unconscious medic to blend in with others around him, he carried the other four injured paratroopers to the back of the vehicle and set off in the direction of Bastogne.

Inevitably, because of the vehicle he was driving and the jacket he had on, he was mistaken for a German and so had to run the gauntlet of American fire all the way back to the American lines where he was able to leave the other four to receive medical attention. It was for this action that he was awarded the Silver Star.

After just two years of service, Roland Bragg returned to Maine once the war ended and began a new life in the building-moving business before running a portable sawmill and owning a body shop until he died of cancer in 1999 in his native Nobleboro, Maine.

In every respect, Roland Bragg’s life, like so many returning from the war assumed some normalcy. It is a heart-warming story because Roland Bragg lived a quiet, hard-working life which had really only been punctuated by a brief and amazing act of bravery in far away Belgium. That is, until this week when the new U.S. Secretary for Defense, Pete Hegseth signed an order changing the name of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg in honor of PFC Roland Bragg that exhumed both his memory and his rather wonderful story. In every respect, Bragg was back.

Before it was named Fort Liberty in 2022, Fort Bragg had been named after Braxton Bragg, a Confederate General with few apologists it seems. When the decision was taken to rename the Fort in 2022, a Naming Commission was established and the public asked to submit suggestions. Some 34,000 suggestions were received including presidents, generals, civil rights leaders, Cher, the turncoat Benedict Arnold, Harambe the gorilla, and Chuck Norris. Of the names submitted, five had the last name Bragg:

• Edward S. Bragg, a “Wisconsin Civil War Officer, Lawyer, Politician, ‘War Democrat’, U.S. Congressman, and U.S. Ambassador”;
• Janet Bragg, a pilot instrumental in WWII in opening flight training for black pilots. at locations including the Tuskegee Institute;
• Someone called Matt Bragg;
• Thomas Bragg, a former North Carolina governor and U.S. Senator who became an attorney general for the Confederate States of America and Braxton Bragg’s older brother; and,
• Roland L. Bragg, our hero from Bastogne.

In the end, the Commission went with Fort Liberty, a name proposed by a Gold Star mother from Youngsville, North Carolina whose son had been killed in Iraq in 2011.

One can speculate on the motivations behind the decision this week to rename the North Carolina home to more than 52,000 personnel. But standing on the same ground today where Bragg fought alongside so many other heroes and seeing the barn from which he staged his daring escape rescuing four of his fellow paratroopers in the process, the debate seems secondary. Bragg’s story is one of extraordinary bravery, and whatever the politics behind it, his name now stands as a reminder of heroism in the face of impossible odds.

In my view, it is still a great story – with a date – that is worth telling.