As Saugus’ Bob Patenaude said this week, “funny things happen sometimes.” And this could very easily be one of them.
Patenaude and his wife, Linda, both accepted Medals of Liberty from the town the week leading up to Memorial Day on behalf of their uncles, Sgt. Kenneth Patenaude and Seaman Herbert Jackson, both of whom died in World War II.
That could have been where it began and ended. Except …
“We live in New Hampshire now,” said Carol Waterhouse, “even though I grew up in Lynn and taught school there. I was looking at a couple of obituaries online when I came across the story in The Item about the medals. I saw ‘Patenaude,’ and I got curious because my father (Palmer “Bud” Pearson) knew a Patenaude when he fought in the war, and spoke of him often.”
So, she read further down and saw that it was indeed Kenneth Patenaude.
“My God, what are the odds?” she asked.
Waterhouse got in touch with The Item, which — in turn — forwarded the message along to Bob Patenaude.
(Because of their ages, and that Waterhouse lives in Londonderry, N.H., as well as COVID-19 protocol, the two families have not had a face-to-face meeting.)
“It threw me for a loop,” Patenaude said. “I’ve always hoped to find an actual person who was with him. But given the actual ages they were at the time, I figured that would be remote. But I always hoped I’d come into contact with a relative of someone who was in his unit, but in all my research I never found one. This was very unexpected.”
Ken Patenaude and Bud Pearson met in the south of England, where troops were being trained for a secret mission that was later revealed to be “Operation Overlord,” or, as it has come to be known, D-Day, which occurred 76 years ago today, June 6, 1944.
“They went over on the same transport,” Waterhouse said, “and they marched all through France, and Germany, and into Belgium.”
Pearson, who died in 2018 at the age of 95, went through a long period of his life “with a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder,” his daughter said. “He couldn’t open up. And when he did, he didn’t express how he felt about the things he saw. It was more like ‘just the facts.’
“Late in his life, though, he saw a psychologist and it helped him,” she said.
One of the things her father told her, Waterhouse said, is that “the scenes in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ about landing on the beaches and climbing up the hedgerows were about as vivid as he recalls.”
Pearson, who was the sergeant in the First Division (The Big Red One), 18th Infantry, Third Battalion, became fast friends with Patenaude from the time they got on the transport that crossed the English Channel to Omaha Beach together. They made it off the beach, past the hedgerows and bunkers, and into town together.
“In fact,” Waterhouse said, “they were the first ones to liberate a town in France from the Germans.”
Pearson and Patenaude went all through France and into Germany before encountering the battle that would cost Patenaude his life.
It was in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, which is only about three miles in Belgium from the German border town of Aachen. Strategically, the forest was very important to the Germans, as they sought to use it as a staging area for the larger, and more historically chronicled, Battle of Ardennes (known more popularly as the “Battle of the Bulge”).
By the time Patenaude’s and Pearson’s unit got to Aachen and crossed into Belgium, it had the task of checking abandoned houses, from door to door, to make sure they were secure. It was in one of those that Patenaude caught a sniper’s bullet.
“He died in my dad’s arms,” Waterhouse said. “He always said it could have just as easily hit him.”
“That is something I’ve obviously never heard,” Patenaude said.
“The funny thing is that my father (10 years younger than Ken Patenaude) always said he was killed in Belgium, but his records say Aachen. I have letters that say Aachen, Germany. It’s interesting.”
It was Pearson who had the unenviable task, as platoon sergeant, of telling Ken Patenaude’s parents about what happened to their son.
“And,” Waterhouse said, “I remember as a child, every Memorial Day, my dad placed a geranium on Patenaude’s grave.
“Several years later, Dad met Ken’s parents at their son’s grave, and they told him that when they didn’t see my father’s Memorial Day flower, they would know something had happened to my dad,” said Waterhouse.
“The parents predeceased my Dad, but I know the Memorial Day tradition continued for decades,” she said.
