Until his death this month, John Valancius, who lived most of his life in the Baltimore area, had been one of about 112,000 surviving veterans of the Second World War.
In the final weeks of his life, 99-year-old John Valancius received a beautiful medal for what 19-year-old John Valancius did as an American soldier in France.
On April 8, in a brief ceremony in a Pennsylvania restaurant, a French diplomat presented him with the Légion d’Honneur, pinning the medal to his lapel and thanking him for his role in liberating France from German occupation during World War II.
Little more than a month later, early on May 11, the old soldier died, three months short of his 100th birthday.
Until his death, John Valancius, who lived most of his life in the Baltimore area, had been one of about 112,000 surviving veterans of the Second World War, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Some 16 million Americans were in the armed forces during the height of the wars in Europe and the Pacific. The farewell to the Greatest Generation has been a long one. And while the war has started to become distant history — June 6 will mark 80 years since D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy — it serves the nation to remember now, perhaps more than ever, the sacrifices made for freedom, to vanquish a violent dictator and to save liberal democracy for the following generations.
This Memorial Day, the story of John Valancius emerges from the many that could be told because of his recent honor and death, but also because you can track much of 20th-century American history through his family’s experiences.
John’s father, Walter, was born in Lithuania and joined the great waves of Europeans who emigrated to the U.S. during the early years of the century. He first set foot on American soil in Baltimore, then went to Chicago to work in the infamous stockyards.
By 1920, when he would have been 26 years old, Walter had lost his first wife and infant son to influenza. The pandemic of 1918-1919 left 50 million people dead around the world. Close to 700,000 died in the U.S., where life expectancy dropped by 12 years.
Walter married his second wife, Veronica, also from Lithuania, and the couple settled in Monessen, a busy manufacturing town full of immigrants along the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania. Walter found work in a steel mill. He and his wife had four children, all boys.
John, their third son, was born on Aug. 2, 1924.
During the Great Depression, between 1929 and 1939, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Walter was one. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal employed people to improve the nation’s infrastructure through the Works Progress Administration. Walter was a WPA worker on a road crew. The 1940 census listed him as a highway laborer with an annual income of $900.
By then, war was on the dark horizon: Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939; France, in May 1940.
In Monessen, John was a high school student. In December 1941, during his senior year, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declared war on Japan.
John left school and found a job as a welder in a shipyard near Philadelphia, on the Delaware River, where the government had launched an emergency shipbuilding program.
But John was not long a welder. Like his older brothers, Stanley and Walt, he was drafted into the Army. He was assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One, and trained in Mississippi before being sent overseas in 1943. His regiment was first stationed in Swanage, on the coast of England, one of several places where Allied forces prepared for the June invasion of France.
John and his company landed in the second D-Day wave, on Omaha Beach.
“One soldier in each platoon was assigned to carry the almost 20-pound Browning Automatic Rifle,” says John’s son-in-law, David Ditman, who lives in Catonsville. “Heavy and cumbersome, it required someone young and strong to carry it. John Valancius was [the BAR] man in his platoon.”
The Big Red One liberated French villages during the summer of ‘44 and continued to fight German units to the east. By September, the Americans reached the Hurtgen Forest east of the Belgium-German border. The battle there turned out to be one of the longest in Army history, lasting within a few days of Christmas. The Battle of the Bulge, the last major German offensive, followed.
Wounded by shrapnel, John recovered in the Army’s field hospital at Fontainebleau. He rejoined his unit in March 1945.
In the decades after the war, he rarely spoke of his time in combat.
“He would allude to seeing the wounded and dead, but he would never go into detail,” says Ditman. “He would speak of one incident where his platoon was going house to house in Germany. He’d yelled a warning down cellar steps and was just about to pull the pin on a grenade and toss it down, when some inner sense made him pause. He’d seen an old, ticking watch on a table. The pause was just enough time for an elderly couple to come slowly up the steps, arms raised.”
While recovering from his wounds at Fontainebleau, John and his roommate sneaked out and took a train to Paris. “It was fun, but they got caught and got in trouble,” Ditman was told. “John enjoyed talking about the fun part, but he would not say anything about the troubling part.”
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, John and the Big Red One had reached what was then Czechoslovakia. The 1st Army liberated hundreds of starving women from two Nazi concentration camps where they had been forced to make aircraft parts.
John received the Purple Heart and returned to Monessen. His brothers also survived the war in Europe and came back to their hometown.
Stan, like his father, found work in a steel mill. But neither John nor Walt saw much of a future in Monessen. They both ended up in Baltimore — Stan as an accountant with a concrete company, John as a welder at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point shipyard, making 97 cents an hour.
According to his family, John moved in early 1947 to the General Motors plant on Broening Highway because the automaking giant paid $1.05 an hour. He took a job on the paint line.
In June 1955, he and Sylvia Danielczyk, of Dundalk, were married. A couple of years later, they bought a house on Joplin Street and started a family. They had two baby boom daughters, Denise and Karen.
John spent four decades on the paint line at General Motors. His life exemplified the American dream of the Greatest Generation — serving your country, coming home and working hard, owning a home, raising a family, saving for retirement.
John and his wife built their retirement home in Delta, Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River, and moved there in 1989. Sylvia died in 2014. John lived another 10 years, in his final days honored for having helped liberate an allied country from Nazi tyranny.
“John Valancius was a good, decent man,” says his son-in-law. “I never once heard him raise his voice. He loved and took care of his family. He served his church loyally — Our Lady of Fatima in East Baltimore and St. Mary of the Assumption in Pylesville, after moving to Pennsylvania. He proudly raised the Stars and Stripes over his home, but he refused to overstate his role in the war. He often would say, ‘I was just a 19-year-old kid doing what I was told.’”
