One harsh winter long ago, as he led an encampment of soldiers near a European forest, it never occurred to Alfred H.M. Shehab, then a brash young Army lieutenant, that he and his 30-man unit were a part of military history.
"A platoon leader is so busy thinking about what might happen and how to make things go right" that it's hard to grasp much of a broader perspective, says Shehab, a 91-year-old retired lieutenant colonel who lives near Fort Meade.
As it was, the 3rd Platoon of B Troop in the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized) held its ground during the bloody Battle of the Bulge of World War II, protecting 1,300 yards of front-line terrain over six weeks of fighting in one of the harshest Western European winters on record. Decades later, when he read about it in books, Shehab realized he and his men had played a notable part in repelling a German offensive that came dangerously close to changing the course of history.
"If we'd known how nervous Eisenhower, Patton and the big brass were" when the Germans launched the huge counteroffensive they called Operation Wacht am Rhein ("Watch on the Rhine") on Dec. 16, 1944, "we might have been nervous, too," Shehab says. "But we didn't. So we just did what American soldiers are paid to do: fought like hell."
In the living room of his two-story brick home in Odenton, the courtly Shehab — still vital, opinionated and every bit as sharp as the cavalry saber he keeps over his fireplace — took the time to do what he has done as often as possible during the years since: pass along the memory of what happened 66 years ago, during the biggest land battle the U.S. military ever fought, and to remind the rest of us why it still matters.
Rattling sabers
Like many a compelling American tale, the Alfred Henry Mahmoud Shehab saga started far outside the borders of the United States, in a world quite different from what would be his homeland.
He would never have been an American at all had his grandfather, Mahmoud Shehab — scion of a royal Middle Eastern family and an emir, or prince, of the ruling Quraysh tribe — not become angry when his own son fell in love with a commoner.
Mahmoud sent the young man, Emir Haleem Shehab, to America to get over his crush. There, he met a Lebanese-American woman named Marion, fell in love again and got married. Their child, Alfred Shehab, was born in Cape May, N.J., in 1919.
Because he's the son of an emir, Alfred Shehab, too, is a Lebanese prince by birth, possibly the only one to serve in the Army during World War II. The family never moved back to the Middle East.
Almost from the beginning, Shehab showed a keen interest in the military — no surprise, perhaps, for a young man whose ancestors include generals and military leaders dating to the Crusades.
Dapper in a navy blazer and 14th Cavalry necktie, he points to a blue banner with a white crescent, mounted on a brass staff. "That's the family battle flag. We carried it with us as we slaughtered the Christians," says Shehab, a Maronite Catholic, with a tongue-in-cheek laugh. (In 1187, his ancestors helped the sultan Saladin recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders.)
What clinched his career choice was the 1935 film "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer," starring Gary Cooper, and 1936's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," with Errol Flynn, which so romanticized the horse-cavalry soldier that Shehab decided to volunteer with the French Free Forces as a teenager.
His father put a stop to that adventure, but the younger Shehab went on to enlist in the Army in 1942, was commissioned a cavalry second lieutenant, and after a series of stops for training, found himself in the thick of the fighting in World War II Europe, where replacement leaders were desperately needed.
His command: a platoon within the 38th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron [Mechanized], a unit of the New Jersey-based 102nd Cavalry Group, better known as the Jersey Essex Troop.
Friends say Shehab — then 25, slender and debonair — never lacked for self-confidence, but he recalls the thoughts that ran through his mind as he prepared to join his men in Belgium during August 1944.
"Am I going to be wounded?" he wondered. "If so, how badly will it be? Will I turn coward in front of my men?"
You can only know such things, he says, when you're on the battlefield. It wouldn't take Shehab long to find out.
Devastating fire
You know you're at the front, Shehab says, when the "booms" of howitzers give way to the constant rat-a-tat-tat of small-arms fire.
That was the sound he heard as he first approached the 3rd Platoon, then largely occupied with running patrols that tested enemy positions.
"Unfortunately, the only way to learn that is to send people out yourself and see where the fire comes from," Shehab says.
On his first patrol, he took the forward position, unusual for a platoon leader. "I wanted to prove something to myself — and to my men," he recalls. Creeping through the woods, he found himself face-to-face with a German soldier.
Shehab drew his sidearm and killed the man. "It wasn't my finger that pulled the trigger; it was my training," he says. As he searched the body, he came across a photo of the soldier's wife and two daughters.
"He was a father, the head of a family, and in an instant, I had ended that," says Shehab, who later married and had a daughter of his own. "Of course, if I hadn't killed him, he'd have killed me. But knowing that element of things gave me pause."
In late November, as the harsh winter dawned, the entire 38th moved to the heavily wooded Ardennes mountain range, where they were given the task of defending the town of Munschau.
Shehab's platoon of 30 men was told to guard three-fourths of a mile along the Allies' easternmost front — about one-eighth the total length of that front.
His memories of the following days and weeks are keen. Perhaps to balance out the horror of a conflict that left more than 120,000 dead, he laces the retelling with humor.
There was the night of Dec. 15, when enemy planes suddenly filled the skies overhead, dropping hundreds of paratroopers. ("We captured two of them," he says. "Each one had a bottle of rum. My lads couldn't wait to go out and find more.") At 5:30 the next morning, there was the deafening barrage of German artillery and rocket fire. ("An ungodly hour to start anything, let alone a war!")
He and his men didn't know it, but the Battle of the Bulge — named for the shape of the German forces' penetration as seen on a map — had begun. Hitler, having lost Paris and more, had decided on a do-or-die strategy: to use half a million men to smash a hole in the American-British lines in the Ardennes, one of its weakest points.
His goal: to march on to the crucial port city of Antwerp, capture it and sue the Allied command for peace.
"The little corporal should have listened to his generals," Shehab says of Hitler.
Seated by a window that overlooks his front yard, he grows misty-eyed at the mention of the one man the platoon lost during those weeks. He seems chastened to recall the fierce combat and his own part in machine-gunning 14 enemy soldiers. "It's a difficult job, and you must harden yourself to do it," he says.
As the battle raged through late December and early January, Shehab's men — fortified by concertina wire, armed with a few 50-caliber machine guns and sleeping in ice-lined foxholes — held their ground, and so did the rest of the "38th Cav." Monschau was the northernmost Allied position to hold at the Battle of the Bulge.
The unit won a citation from 1st Army headquarters. "Although artillery observation posts were overrun, the personnel fought with small arms to maintain their positions and adjusted devastating fire upon waves of German infantry," it read. "The gallantry and combined skill of this force resulted in 200 enemy killed, 31 prisoners taken and countless casualties inflicted … and contributed largely to the ultimate defeat of the German offensive in the Ardennes."
One captured Nazi officer, asked why the offensive had failed, said, "because our right flank at Monschau ran its head against a wall."
Duty to history
Shehab's men had been among the first into liberated Paris, saw bodies stacked like cordwood in what remained of a German concentration camp and found themselves in Czechoslovakia on May 8, 1945, the day the war in Europe ended.
Shehab re-enlisted. The next 18 years took him to Puerto Rico, Monterey, Calif., and a variety of places in Europe and the Middle East, including Lebanon, where he was greeted by a cousin, Fouad Shehab, then commander of the armed forces.
"Glad to see you, cousin," joked Fouad, who would later became the Lebanese president. "But why in the hell did you bring the whole Army with you?"
Alfred Shehab's last assignment was with the 2nd Army at Fort Meade. He retired in 1963.
A tour of his immaculate home speaks of eclectic interests. Portraits of his wife, Betty — an Arkansas native who died of cancer in the early 1980s — are displayed near medals, citations and cavalry spurs, not to mention the Shehab family crest.
He flashes a few photos of a palace a great-great-grandfather built in Lebanon, a reminder of the royal lineage he views with not a little amusement. "As far as this 'prince' thing goes," Shehab says, "let's just say that when Sunday night rolls around here, I take out the garbage just like everyone else."
He brandishes opinions as a cavalryman might — with a blend of style and deadly directness.
But if there's one subject on which he feels most strongly, it's the need for any serious culture to preserve what it does well and remember how it does so.
Shehab, who has brought his often cantankerous views to civic organizations from the National Association of Arab Americans to improvement associations in Odenton, also helps lead several military service outfits and others that deal in patriotic education.
As president of the Battle of the Bulge Historical Foundation, for instance, he's an easy (and eager) target for students researching military history. He writes articles on the battle and lectures at elementary, middle and high schools.
What does he cover, this American descendant of Arab warriors? The dynamics of a vast battle in which the United States suffered 81,000 casualties while stopping Hitler — and the bigger principles he and his fellow soldiers were defending that frigid winter.
Sometimes he calls out the really big guns: He simply reads aloud from the Bill of Rights.
"No matter what anyone says about the United States, we have freedoms like no one else," he says. "Every citizen has an obligation to know where they come from."