Fighting Hitler at the Battle of the Bulge until Liberation

Robert Elwood Conrad was born in 1919 on a farm in Northwest Ohio. In June 1944, this father of three children was drafted into the United States Army. Six months later, he joined the 2nd Infantry Division in Belgium amidst the colossal Battle of the Bulge and survived to see defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945\. On V-E Day, Robert Conrad was in the Czechoslovak city of Pilsen, after having helped liberate the western portions of that country from six long years of Nazi German oppression and occupation. Using the wartime letters of his late father, Dr. Conrad has compiled a book which takes the reader on a journey from civilian life through stateside training as a soldier and across the battlefields of Europe during World War Two. Like so many other members of the “Greatest Generation,” Robert Conrad rarely talked about his wartime service. After Robert’s passing in 2009, his son Richard (Dick) came into possession of his father’s wartime letters. Reading his father’s letters prompted Dick Conrad to research further into his father’s unit and even undertake a journey of his own to retrace his father’s footsteps across Europe. The result is a book which offers the unvarnished perspective of a U.S. Army foot soldier in the closing campaigns of the war in Europe. Unfortunately, Dick Conrad passed away in the final stages of the project, so this book was completed by Dick’s son / Robert’s grandson, LtCol Robert Conrad, USA, (Ret.) and his nephew Bryan J. Dickerson.