MOUNT VERNON — The War Department telegram was brief.
“The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your husband Technical Sergeant Granville D. Pritchett has been reported missing in action since Twenty September in France,” the document said.
The telegram sent to Pritchett’s wife Maxine was the first word that the family received about his harrowing prisoner-of-war experience. Months were to pass before they knew what had become of him. Pritchett’s odyssey began during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. It was an ominous turn for a soldier who had almost completed his service before the war began. Pritchett had been only one month away from completing his Army enlistment as a private serving in Panama in late 1941 when the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, bringing the United States into the global war. The West Virginia native, who preferred going by his middle name, Dean, was one in a long line of family members who had served in the military, stretching all the way back to the Revolutionary War. Before that, the deep American roots of the family stretch back to Jamestown, Va., according to Pritchett’s son Willis.
Serving in Gen. George S. Patton’s 38th Armored Infantry Division, Pritchett was in the fifth wave to hit Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. As the Allied forces pushed east toward Germany, fighting was intense. Pritchett’s stepfather, Willis Norman Butcher, was involved with the Allied capture of the bridge at Remagen, the only bridge over the Rhine River that the Germans were unable to detonate during their retreat.
Then, in December, the Germans mounted a surprise counterattack through the Forest of the Ardennes during the height of winter. This counteroffensive became popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge due to the large dent it put in the advancing Allied line. Pritchett was one of 13 men serving in an armored half-track vehicle. As the half-track advanced across the battlefield, Pritchett was manning the large swivel-mounted 50-mm gun in the back of the truck, which could rotate to cover almost every spot around the vehicle, except for a small blind spot near the very front.
Pritchett spotted a German soldier peeking over a snowbank a short distance in front of the half-track. The German ducked down as Pritchett whirled the gun around. As the German rose again, shouldering an anti-tank rocket launcher, Pritchett discovered that the Nazi soldier was in the half-track’s blind spot. Before evasive action could be taken, the German launched the rocket straight at the truck. The explosion pierced the half-track, knocking it over sideways on the ground, and killing 11 of the 13 soldiers on board. One man was unhurt and was shot down by the Germans when he ran.
That left the wounded Pritchett as the sole survivor.
Pritchett was spared because his cartridge belt took the brunt of the large piece of metal which was flung at him by the explosion. The metal snapped the cartridge belt in two, and wounded Pritchett as well. The Germans promptly removed him from the battlefield in a motorcycle side car and tended to his wound at a field hospital. Soon they sent him to a prisoner of war camp. After recovering, Pritchett and two other men escaped from the stalag and fled east into Poland. Pritchett was helped out in that country by a Polish family who gave him food and shelter. Pritchett, like many fleeing POWs, was picked up by the Russian army and forced to drive tanks for them. To his dismay, he found that he was treated far worse by the Russians, supposed allies, than he had been by the Germans. Thus he had to escape a second time.
After making his way back to safety, Pritchett returned home to Charleston, W.Va. The family soon moved to Mount Vernon, where Pritchett worked for several years at PPG as a glass cutter. A friend at PPG named Poljak would translate letters for Pritchett, allowing him to keep in touch with the Polish family who helped him survive during his escape from the Germans. For years he sent them care packages. For years, Pritchett served in the National Guard, starting as a second lieutenant thanks to the delayed designation of a battlefield commission, and rising to the rank of major, commanding Company D of the 166th Regimental Combat Team 1956-57 which became the 537th Transportation Battalion.
“He’d roll over in his grave if he knew they wanted to sell that building now,” Pritchett’s son, Willis, said about recent announced plans to liquidate the old National Guard armory in Mount Vernon. Willis himself served in the military, as his son did later, as well.
Pritchett was one of only a handful of Knox County residents to have received the Silver Star medal. He also received a Purple Heart, a POW medal, and medals honoring his service in the African Campaign and the European Campaign. Those medals were buried with the fiercely loyal Pritchett when he passed away from a heart attack on Oct. 22, 1966, aged 45. He is buried in Mound View Cemetery in Mount Vernon.
“My father was a hero,” said Willis Pritchett. “My hero.”
