Mary Schmich
On a Sunday morning last summer, Pat Reidy, who lives near Wrigley Field in Chicago, received an email from a stranger in France.
“I allow me to contact you,” it began. “I am Anthony Paysant a 22-year-old French citizen and I live in the town of Mortain near Barenton, Normandy.”
The stranger went on to say that he and his family were very interested in the Second World War and always participated in local memorial celebrations to show their gratitude to the soldiers who had helped liberate France from the German N**is.
“May I ask you if M. William “Bill” T. SHANLEY (Army Serial Number: 0-1113438) was your father? If yes, do not hesitate to contact me as I would have some information to give you.”
Reidy eyed the email warily. Was this a s**m? She forwarded the message to a couple of her brothers. Should she answer? They decided it was worth the risk.
The stranger immediately replied to her reply.
“We are very glad to hear from you,” he wrote. “We actually have a very big surprise for you and it is a pleasure for us to share it with you and your family. Let me explain everything.”
A short history
of a long life
William T. Shanley — everyone called him Bill — grew up in a two-flat next to St. Gertrude’s Catholic Church in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood with his parents, two sisters and a brother. When he was 11, his father, a Chicago police officer, was shot to death by an associate of the infamous gangster John Dillinger.
That was in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, and young Bill, fatherless, helped the family by working as a grocery store clerk, a drugstore soda jerk and a newspaper delivery boy.
“I just wanted to get out of this town,” he would say later, explaining why at 18, with three friends from the neighborhood, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
Shanley imagined he’d serve only one year, but soon the United States was entangled in a great world war, and Bill Shanley was on a ship, sailing to Gibraltar, to Morocco and eventually to England.
In early June 1944, with the Battle of Normandy looming, his battalion was dispatched to the northern coast of France.
The soldiers of the Allied forces — which included Americans — landed on French beaches, parachuted into cow pastures, trudged past the hedgerows and apple orchards of the Normandy countryside with the goal of routing Adolf Hitler’s German army.
How many were k**led in the next few weeks may never be precisely known, but the U.S. government estimates that from June 6, immortalized as D-Day, through Aug. 21, more than 226,000 Allied soldiers died. So did more than 240,000 Germans, along with thousands of French civilians.
Shanley belonged to the 82nd Engineer Combat Battalion, and one of his jobs was clearing land mines. On the evening of Aug. 15, in the long twilight of late summer, he set out in a jeep, with a gunner and a driver, to look for German mines on three bridges near the village of Mortain.
No mine at bridge one. No mine at bridge two. On the way to the third bridge, a mine exploded beneath the jeep.
Years later, after he married Dorothy Ryan, a nurse, and while they raised eight kids in Chicago and nearby La Grange, Shanley didn’t talk much about what happened that day.
The story as t***smitted to his children Maryann, Bill, Joe, Marge, Kevin, Ed, Maureen and Pat was stripped to the basics: Dad was blown up in a jeep in France.
Shanley didn’t elaborate on the 13 surgeries to his right leg that left him with a lifelong limp, or linger on how the explosion had cost him part of his hearing, or dwell on the dental damage that required him to get false teeth and a bridge that he would remove before bed every night.
His kids, who knew him as a strict father who loved his family above all else, would come, as adults, to think he also suffered from PTSD, but men of his era didn’t think or talk that way about pain, grief or fear, the long tail of violence.
After the war, Shanley could never walk far. He couldn’t play tennis or baseball, though he tried. At night, after coming home from his accounting business, he would prop his damaged leg up as he read the Chicago Daily News and sipped a martini.
And for a long time, he wanted nothing to do with France. When his daughter Marge wanted to go there with her high school French club, he said no.
Then, nearly 40 years after D-Day, he started attending reunions with his battalion. There, in the company of other old soldiers, he felt the freedom to talk and remember. The camaraderie he found in their company, his children now say, helped to settle his soul.
At one reunion, he encountered the driver of the jeep, whom he hadn’t seen since the explosion. The driver wept.
“Lt. Shanley,” he said, “I thought you were dead.”
Twice, Shanley visited Normandy and searched for the site of the jeep explosion. It made him sad that in the miles of nearly identical narrow roads and high hedges, he never found it.
In 2013, at the age of 91, in his daughter Marge’s Wisconsin home, Bill Shanley died in his sleep. He was ready. More than once since the death of his wife four years earlier, he had told his children, “All I want is to be with your mom.”
A discovery
In the summer of 2018, in the French village of Saint-Clement-Rancoudray, a man named Michel Paysant was helping a neighbor clean out an old house.
The house was small and made of stone, with a wooden garage. It was not far from the tiny town of Mortain.
Since he was a boy, Paysant had been fascinated by World War II, particularly by the Battle of Mortain, a bloody fight sometimes described as the beginning of the end for the German army. He even owned a Willys jeep, like the one Shanley had ridden in, and he collected wh**ever war artifacts he could find.
Chaque objet possede une ame. That was his motto. Every object possesses a soul.
In his neighbor’s garage that day, Paysant spotted a small container covered in mud and moss. He picked it up, wiped it off.
Une gourde. A canteen.
Etched in the metal was a naked woman, one leg cocked, one hand on her bare hip while the other held a platter topped with the letters: BiLL
Just below the canteen cap was a carved signature: W.T. Shanley. Under that, a U.S. Army serial number: 0-1113438.
Paysant showed the canteen to his son Anthony, and Anthony, an engineering student who shared his dad’s fascination with all things World War II, set out to find the owner.
He consulted Army databases and genealogy sites. When he deduced that William T. Shanley had died, he searched for Shanley’s children. Excited to discover there were eight of them, he tried, in vain, to connect via Facebook and WhatsApp.
Finally, on LinkedIn, he found an email address for Patricia Reidy, who woke up one morning near Wrigley Field to his strange message.
Over the course of that day last summer, emails flew back and forth, as Anthony recounted discovering the canteen. He sent photos.
“It would be a true pleasure for us to send it back to you 74 years later,” he wrote, in English, with the help of his younger sister who is studying to be a travel agent. “We really wish we could have given it back to your father earlier but we are very happy to be able to get in touch with his children.”
Every object possesses a soul
In the mailroom of a Lake Shore Drive high-rise, Kevin Shanley opened the brown box with the French postmark.
“Louie,” he said to the mailroom manager, “do you want to see my father’s canteen from World War II?”
It was a small container, lightweight, an ordinary object that a young Chicago soldier had once held to his lips, carried on his belt, decorated with his fantasies.
Now, 74 years later, Bill Shanley’s son screwed off the cap and sniffed. Had his dad ever mixed Canadian Club whiskey into his canteen water to help him calm his nerves? He wondered.
Mostly, he felt grateful and relieved, and in the canteen’s musty odor he felt his father’s spirit.
Then he carried it upstairs, showed it to his wife and put it on display in the living room next to the Buddha. The eight kids have a plan to pass it around.
“The canteen connected me to the story I think my father was always trying to tell us,” Kevin Shanley says, “but it was a story that I don’t think he could tell us completely.”
Anthony and Michel Paysant have continued their investigation of Bill Shanley’s time in Normandy. Working with maps and local interviews, they discovered a man named Bernard who says he remembers the jeep explosion. Bernard, who was 12 at the time, led them to the spot, the one Shanley could never find.
They took a picture that corresponds to the official Army photo of the blast site.
And it’s there, next to the hedges and pasture, that the mayor of Saint-Clement-Rancoudray will conduct a memorial for Bill Shanley in early June as part of the 75th D-Day anniversary celebration. Twenty-one members of the Shanley family are going. The memorial will be followed by dinner for 150 townspeople.
“It’s important for each of us — particularly young people — to do the work of remembering,” Anthony Paysant says, explaining his efforts, “to never forget the blood that was spilled in the name of our liberty.”
How Bill Shanley’s canteen wound up in that French house will never be known. Neither will everything that he saw, felt, remembered.
Like him, most of the soldiers who landed in Normandy 75 years ago are gone now, but they leave behind their stories and their objects and something of their souls.
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
Mary Schmich br On a Sunday morning last summer, P... (
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