For World War II vet, it was finally time to tell his story
WESTON - From Bunker Hill to Baghdad, veterans handle the memory of combat in different ways. Some speak of it incessantly, some not at all. Putnam Flint was the latter kind.
In 1944 he landed in France with the US Seventh Army, and fought a long and bloody swath through France and Germany, ending in the Austrian Alps the following May. Then he came home to his wife, raised a family, and had a long career in business. He hid his keepsakes and never talked about the war. And he didn't want others to talk about it. "It was understood that we were not to speak about the war," said his daughter, Margi Flint of Marblehead, "and we were not allowed to watch war movies."
The silence ended at last. Now 89 and widowed since 2002, Flint is the main character in a new book, "Panther Soup: Travels through Europe in War and Peace," in which the old soldier revisits the violent past in word and body.
John Gimlette, an English barrister and travel writer, met Putnam Flint in London in 2003 over dinner with mutual friends. Learning that Flint was a veteran of World War II, and not knowing his history of silence, Gimlette prompted him to talk about the war for the first time. The writer smelled a book. A few weeks later he wrote to Flint and proposed that they meet in France and retrace the battle road. At first, there was silence.
"I was very reluctant to support John in this idea," Flint said in an interview at his home. "But there are very few of my age left, and those that are left are dying off very quickly." Eventually he consented. In 2004, along with his grandson, Jeffrey Bartley, he went back to the scenes of his service for the first time, and the trio followed the path of the Seventh Army.
Putnam Flint is a courteous and slightly built man with a clear voice and a sharp mind. His family is traceable to the 1640s in Massachusetts. One ancestor was wounded in the battles of Lexington and Concord, and killed two years later in the battle of Stillwater, in northern New York. One was aide-de-camp to General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican war, and another lied about his age to fight in the Civil War. One great-grandfather was the first president of Andover-Newton seminary, and another made a fortune in burlap and life insurance.
Though gifted at mechanical things, Flint was dyslexic and a poor student, and flunked out of Bowdoin College in 1938. He joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, was assigned to the tank-destroyer service, and sent to officer candidate school in Texas. The tank-destroyer was a kind of armored car with a 76mm cannon. "There was dire need of second lieutenants," Flint said. In Texas he met and married his wife, Dorothy-Ann, and in October 1944 the 824th Battalion, known as the Panthers, shipped out.
The invasion of Normandy and the battles that followed are the better-known stories of World War II. But the parallel thrust from the Mediterranean was nearly as bloody. Beginning in Marseilles, the southern campaign roared up the Rhone Valley from Dijon to the Vosges Mountains, through bitterly contested Alsace and Lorraine, into Germany. The Panthers turned southeast across Austria to the Inn Valley and into the Tyrolean Alps.
Awarded the Bronze Star, Flint came home and took a sales job with a food-machinery company, patented two lucrative inventions, and eventually bought the company. He and Dottie had four children. He kept bees and was a pillar of his Episcopal parish.
"He is impeccably honest," his daughter said, "with a wonderful sense of humor, and devoted to his family. I had friends who would have loved to be adopted into my family."
Flint said that his long silence was not caused by emotional trauma. "It was a closed book," he said of his experience. "I did not glorify war in any way, shape, or manner. That was a justifiable war. We had a terrible enemy, and we took care of that situation. Every war that has followed since then, I cannot justify at all. I feel strongly about that."
Secret in the gun cabinet
John Gimlette, 45, has written travel books about Canada and South America. Interviewed by phone in London, he explained that he had wanted to write about the war from an American, rather than a British, point of view. The latter, he said, "felt like a well-trodden path," whereas with the American story, "I had to look at things with a whole different perspective, especially the scale - this enormous army of 2.7 million men, rolling over Europe." His book is one part Flint and the 824th, one part Gimlette's separate exploratory trips, one part histories of the areas visited. Battles are described with few graphic details. Gimlette was amazed by Flint's memory, but the veteran avoided talking about comrades or enemies who were killed.
But there was one chilling exception.
As the Panthers pulled into the Austrian town of Telfs, only days before the German surrender, Flint heard a bullet whiz past his head. Looking up, he saw a civilian in a second-floor window with a gun. He spun the .50-caliber machine gun around and blasted the sniper. Then, because he knew from its sound that the bullet that had missed him had not come from a military rifle, he sent a man up to get the gun. It proved to be a beautifully engraved Bavarian Drilling, a three-barreled sporting gun with side-by-side 16-gauge shotgun above and a 7/57mm rifle centered below, and a Zeiss telescopic sight. Flint put it in his footlocker. He still has it.
During the interview, he led the way to a locked gun cabinet and took out the Drilling. He broke it open - "My father always taught me to break a shotgun before handing it to someone" - and began to demonstrate its fine design and engineering, like a young man poking under the hood of a BMW. Of course, it was unloaded. At his direction, the gun was closed, a trigger pulled, and the clack of the firing pin in an empty chamber was heard. "Now, when you open it, you see it ejects only the shell in that barrel," he said, "but the [unfired] other shell would still be in there. When you want to switch to the rifle, you slide this catch and the leaf-sight pops up on the top. It must have cost a fortune." He took it back, turned it over, and opened a small compartment in the stock, with slots for spare cartridges. One discolored round remained, put there by the previous user.
"Did it ever bother you to have this, knowing how it had been used?"
"Not a bit."
"Why did you keep it?"
"Because I love guns, and Father had a gun made to order in Germany in 1910. It's in my cabinet, too. A beautiful gun." He took it out and showed off its fine workmanship, just as he had the other. The two have stood side by side for 63 years.
Holding this luxurious sporting piece, one could not help but wonder about the identity of the man in the window. But Flint had not dwelt on that, because he could not know. "A Nazi civilian, taking a pot-shot at me," he said. The soldier had done what he had to do. In his mind, the gun was separate from the would-be killer. And yet, he never told his children how he got it.
Return to the past
As they traveled, said Gimlette, he would sometimes feel a relief in Flint where past met present. "We came through the Saverne Gap in the Vosges," he said, "and you could sense the tension. The last time he saw Alsace, it was littered with junk ammo boxes, bodies, and burning farms. It was now this fantastically green, rich landscape."
To Margi Flint, a therapist using herbal medicines, it is clear that a burden has been lifted from her father. "When people reach their 70s and 80s," she said, "these ancient memories come out in their dreams. He was definitely back in the war - he would become violent at night. You have to reach an age when you can talk about it, before it is too late."
Flint said of his return, "I think it was good for me. I probably should have done it many years earlier. It was nice to see everything beautifully rebuilt, and the healthy people. There was some closure."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 