By Mary Frances McCarthy
HERALD Staff Writer
(From the issue of 5/27/04)

"It’s bad to come from a war and say you had the time of your life, but I did," said Charles Lillis, a member of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Winchester.

Lillis joined the Virginia National Guard, 116th Infantry Regiment, in 1934 at age 19. Lillis said that was old in those days. Many boys were joining at 14 or 15.

"The thing that brought back more memories to me was 9-11," Lillis said. "It brought back the beginning of the war."

On Dec. 7, 1941, Lillis and his company were on their way back from maneuvers, near Fort A.P. Hill when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. "One of our kids had a radio listening to the Redskins game. Our commander couldn’t believe it."

A week after Pearl Harbor, Lillis was assigned to Moore Head City, N.C. "I would look out over the ocean and see a flash of light, and then hear an explosion," Lillis said. German submarines were sinking ships off the coast of North Carolina and most civilians did not notice, he said.

In 1942, Lillis married his wife Hilma in Alexandria. "All during the war, she never missed a novena," Lillis said.

He graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1944, and served with an Army division.

In 1945, the first of his five daughters, Barbara, was born when he was in Port of Embarkation in New York. His colonel saw the telegram come through informing Lillis of her birth. He was granted two 24-hour passes to go to Winchester to visit his wife and daughter before he left for Europe. He flew from New York to Washington, caught a cab from D.C. to Winchester, and the same cab driver took him back to D.C. He completed the trip in about 30 hours. He didn’t see his daughter again for about a year.

Lillis was sent overseas on the Il de France in 1945 and headquartered in Europe as a mess sergeant with the XXII Army Corps.

On his first trip to France the army was taking over an old castle. He used to walk along the canal reciting the rosary.

Lillis enjoyed being a Catholic in Europe. "It’s fun saying confession to a French priest," he said. "They were probably used to American sins by that time."

He also enjoyed visiting French cathedrals. Rheims was his favorite cathedral and he has returned to France to visit it twice since then.

While stationed in Germany, Lillis spent Easter in a bombed-out aluminum factory. He said there were "so many Catholics there, we didn’t have time for confessions so they gave everyone absolution."

In Hilden, Germany, Lillis’ company helped displaced persons by giving them jobs working on their base. One of the men spoke English and Lillis befriended him, calling him "My Man Friday."

During the war, Hilma cut out every article in the Winchester Star pertaining to service people and saved them in a scrapbook. The U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa., and Handley High School in Winchester have both copied Hilma’s scrapbook. Every fall Lillis takes the book to Handley to display it.

Last year, Lillis recorded his war experiences for Handley Library’s archives. "It’s important for some of this stuff to be written down," he said. "I understand that in Europe they fight some of the battles over again. I don’t know how they get the Germans to admit they lost some of them."

When Lillis returned from the war he rejoined the National Guard. He took a job in the Winchester office and was in the Guard for 42 years. Lillis was Chief Warrant Officer at the time of his retirement.

Lillis is proud of having served with the National Guard. "I didn’t graduate from high school, but they told me OCS was the equivalent of graduating from college," he said.

He found arithmetic difficult in school, but in the service he had to do trigonometry to figure out how to shoot a target. "I’m still proud of having accomplished that," he said.

Lillis was one of the original contributors to the fund to build to the World War II Memorial being dedicated in Washington this weekend.