On a sweltering July afternoon this past week at his home in Copeland, Pete Carroll’s thoughts were on something totally alien to summer: lots and lots of snow.

The 94-year-old hadn’t been overcome by the effects of heat or humidity at the time, but was recalling his most-vivid memories from a turbulent event in Europe more than 65 years ago during the harsh winter of 1944-45. In the sharp mind of Pete Carroll, the Battle of the Bulge continues to occupy a prominent place.

“It got down to zero a lot of times, and snow was about a foot deep,” said Carroll, one of only about two or three veterans of the key World War II battle still surviving in Surry County. He was a member of the Sixth Armored Division, also known as the “Super Sixth,” a unit of George S. Patton’s Third Army which was highlighted in the Oscar-winning movie about the eccentric general.

Carroll says most everything one might have seen in movies depicting the Battle of the Bulge is true — typically scenes of bundled-up soldiers trudging through snow in dense forests while fighting bitter-cold temperatures as well as enemy troops.

The Battle of the Bulge was the last major offensive mounted by the Germans, a surprise attack on the Allied forces through Belgium, France and Luxembourg. “We didn’t know a thing about it,” said Carroll, a sergeant in the Army whose job involved working on the tanks that made up the armored division.

When the Germans struck, they pushed into the Allies’ lines in a manner that resembled a “bulge” when the campaign was depicted in maps published in newspapers. Over some 40 days of fighting, 19,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in the single largest and bloodiest battle American forces would engage in during World War II.

However, the enemy advance would prove a failure, and soon the Americans “got them on the run,” said Carroll, who compared the situation to a rabbit hunt. “The infantry would jump them, and the artillery would keep them moving.”

His unit eventually pushed into Germany, ahead of the latter’s surrender in the spring of 1945. A black-and-white photograph in a plentiful collection Carroll has kept all these years from his military service shows a sign posted at the border which says, “You are now entering Germany through the courtesy of the U.S. Sixth Armored Division.”

Another of the division’s missions was to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp after invading Germany, where Carroll witnessed the horrifying treatment of Jews imprisoned there. “You couldn’t hardly believe it,” he said of what U.S. troops encountered.

Longevity A Family Trait

Not all of Pete Carroll’s life has been consumed by military experiences. He has become a fixture in the Copeland community of Surry County, where he operated a six-acre tobacco for some 40 years and has a long record of service with the local Ruritan Club and Masonic lodge.

But the presence in Surry County of the man born Osbon Gordon Carroll on Jan. 22, 1916 came via a circuitous route.

He actually is a Stokes County native, a member of a tobacco-farming family headed by Gaston and Ella Gentry Carroll. “Everybody raised tobacco,” he said of agricultural life in the North Carolina foothills at that time.

When he and his wife, the former Myrtle Bledsoe of Copeland, got married after the war, they initially lived in his home county. They raised one crop of tobacco, then relocated to Surry, but not because the soil was better. Carroll’s father-in-law (Richard Henderson Bledsoe) simply had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“He said, ‘if you’ll bring Myrtle back to Surry County, I’ll cut down the timber, build you a house and give you a farm,”’ Carroll remembers. “So I came back to Surry County, and have been here ever since.”

Myrtle was raised not far from Carroll’s present home, which the couple built in 1956.

Pete Carroll never knew his own father. “He died six weeks before I was born,” he said, falling victim to appendicitis and pneumonia. That made things rough on the family, which included three sons and one daughter in all. While his sister and one brother are deceased, Carroll still has an older brother, Robert, who is 102 and has authored multiple books on local history.

“My mother lived to be 104,” the Copeland resident said, also mentioning that he had two aunts, his mom’s sisters, who reached the ages of 106 and 103. Carroll says he’s never researched the matter, but believes that could represent a Guinness-type record for the number of people achieving the century mark in the same family.

While he also has been known by the initials “O.G.” the nickname “Pete” was one that Carroll was given at an early age and stuck. “My granddaddy done that,” he said.

And though he doesn’t seem to dwell on seeing himself as a 100-year-old, “I’m getting a pretty good start,” said Carroll, who exhibits the energy level of a much-younger man. This included constantly jumping up from his chair during an interview to grab an old photo or book, which along with the memories of events many decades ago were retrieved with equal ease.

Rigors Of War

There was a time when Carroll thought his future might not be so lasting, when the free countries of the world were fighting for survival against the Germans and Japanese in the early 1940s.

He entered the service shortly after his 26th birthday, on Friday the 13th, March 1942. “I was working with a building contractor for about two years,” Carroll recalled. “He said he would keep me out of the Army for 90 days.” That way, the young man would avoid basic training in wintry conditions.

Instead, Carroll found himself at Camp Chaffee, Ark., one of the training locations of the Sixth Armored Division. He later was sent to California, where the unit underwent dessert training with tanks, in addition to participating in other maneuvers as the division prepared to fight on the varying terrain of Europe.

Initially, Carroll’s group was dispatched to England, in February 1944, before reaching France in July of that year.

The Germans would play a role in deciding where he later ended up, after they launched the Battle of the Bulge on Dec. 16, 1944. “We started to Belgium the day after Christmas,” Carroll said.

At the time, he says, no one realized what a key battle it would become in World War II as a whole.

After the Nazis had been beaten back near the end of January 1945, and the Sixth Armored Division advanced into Germany, he saw the unspeakable inhumanity on display with the liberation of the Buchenwald camp.

Many images of bodies piled up and starving survivors at the brink of death were recorded on a camera he carried during the war. “I still got it,” Carroll said. “But the thing was, you couldn’t get no film.”

The local veteran says after witnessing the atrocities at Buchenwald, he has a hard time comprehending how critics can claim the Holocaust never occurred.

Gen. Patton ordered his men to have German SS officers bury the dead, and to shoot any who refused the grisly task, Carroll said, mentioning that Patton used a customary strong expletive to refer to those officers.

“After the war, he made a talk — spoke to the division,” the Surry veteran said in recalling that the first things noticeable about Patton were his familiar pistols. The Copeland resident said he once was asked by the late Mount Airy attorney Carroll Gardner, who was known for his wit, if he was the soldier Patton slapped in a hospital during an infamous episode.

The local man’s favorite figure in the war, however, is British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, because of the strength and character he displayed in helping England sustain Germany’s relentless air attacks.

Carroll left the military in October 1945 after both Germany and Japan had been defeated. He then married his sweetheart Myrtle, whom he had dated for six years. Also in his photo collection is the first picture of him and his future wife together, made in 1939.

The couple had one son, Dennis, who is now the vice president of High Point University. Carroll also has two grandchildren, one who is a teacher in Guilford County and the other a student at Harvard University.

Carroll did lose his wife, who served as a pianist at New Home Church of Christ in Dobson for more than 70 years, about 18 months ago. But he still attends church and drives himself to the store or to Dobson occasionally, although Carroll doesn’t spend much time behind the wheel anymore due to his age.

The veteran also lives by himself and still does much of his own yard work. Along with his historical interests, he likes to watch television, especially the series “In the Heat of the Night” and programs with Andy Griffith, along with sporting events.

Over the years, Carroll has given talks to local students, including at Surry Community College, about World War II and its importance to life today. He sometimes has shown the young people pictures of concentration-camp prisoners and reminded them that without people willing to lay their lives on the line for freedom, “it would have been you that was there.”

Next month, Carroll will mark his 50th anniversary as a member of Copeland Masonic Lodge No. 90, A.F. and A.M. He will receive a special pin and also will serve as honorary master of the lodge during the Aug. 12 meeting when it is presented.

“It doesn’t happen often,” present lodge Master Pat Guyer said of the 50-year milestone.

As for what has allowed him such longevity, Pete Carroll has no explanation, except for genetics perhaps. He says he likes to use the response that his older brother offered when asked about the secret to a long life.

“You know what he told them? You have to be born a long time ago,” the veteran joked.

Contact Tom Joyce at tjoyce@mtairynews.com or at 719-1924.