Nerstrand, Minnesota

Carl Bonde, Sr. is the boy in the white shirt, standing in front of his childhood home near Nerstrand, Minnesota.

July 30, 2015

Tomorrow I go to Nerstrand, Minnesota, to visit the farm house where my mother’s father was born. At least I think he was born in the house. Nobody ever told me. About 1885, give or take. He had many brothers and sisters, more than 10. Again, I don’t know how many. Another fact worth knowing. Don’t we make fun of redneck families whose family trees look like a broom. Tosten and Ingabor Bonde made their family tree look like that.
The stone house Tosten built has been fixed up, added onto, fortified with an I beam, but is mostly like it was. My 89-year-old cousin Earl Bonde, who died since the last reunion, said he nearly burned the insides of the house when he was a kid. I could tell he still felt shame after so many years, even though things turned out okay. They had candles and lanterns in 1930 and he started a fire. I forget the details, but obviously the house is fine. Sure it is made of stone, but the floors and walls and ceilings were wooden.
My grandfather’s only son, Carl Ralph Bonde, Jr., probably never visited Nerstrand to see the stone house. Other than a few school-sponsored debate trips around Montana, Carl’s travels in the USA were for military service. Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, New York. He did visit a relative in New Jersey en route to England during World War II.
World War II was practically over by the time Buddy got sent to England. By then, France, Italy, and Spain had been liberated from the racist Nazis and the remnants of his army seemed about to accept defeat. Probably Carl’s 66th Panther Army Infantry Division was a kind of insurance to make certain that Hitler would lose the war.
I imagine that many of the American GIs looked forward to loving up the British girls and going pub crawling. This was 1944, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when they arrived at Southampton, headed by train to their quarters near Dorchester in the hinterlands of England.
They had celebrated Thanksgiving on the troopship, George Washington, eating their holiday meal in shifts, standing up. The Division had four regiments with support personnel and foot soldiers. Bud was a soldier, a member of a machine gun section. Bud was an ammo bearer. He was also very bright, had a couple years of college, and among many friends who also had been college students prior to being made infantry soldiers, private soldiers, so-called “grunts.”
Anyhow, as World War II was winding down the Nazis were losing ground and no longer had much of an air force. They still had submarines, U-boats. Damned effective. One of those ended up killing almost 800 soldiers, including my uncle Carl Ralph Bonde, Jr. just as his troopship, the SS Leopoldville, came in sight of the French port of Cherbourg.
Hitler, exactly one week earlier, had launched a massive counter-offensive in Luxembourg. In return, Eisenhower was cashing his insurance policy, his cache of troops that he kept in England just in case. My heroic uncle Buddy Bonde.