Revisiting the glory: World War II veterans return from trip to Europe

Last weekend was the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, one of World War II’s most famous battles. For over 20 trips since 2016, a Boston police officer has raised money to let veterans who fought there see the lands they liberated.

“They were treated like gold for seven days returning to all the places they fought,” Boston Police Officer Andy Biggio, stationed in East Boston, told the Herald of the latest trip he organized that brought five American WWII vets back to Europe.

Those men, Andrew Bostinto, Louis Brown, Ed Cottrell, Jack Moran and Lester Schrenk, are all now between 99 and 102 years old. They’re among the last of a generation of heroes who liberated Europe and secured American placement in the Pacific by beating back the Axis powers 80 years ago.

Biggio’s grandfather and grand-uncle fought in World War II and he is a veteran himself and wanted to give back.

He is named after his grand-uncle, Private First Class Andrew G. Biggio, who died in battle on the Gothic Line in Barberino, Italy, on Sept. 17, 1944. It’s in this memory that he does these trips and he told the Herald that this latest trip was bittersweet because there’s unlikely to be another one.

“To me, the 80th anniversary was a good number to hang up my foundation doing this,” he said of the trip funded in large part from $35,000 donated in a GoFundMe campaign and also by large private donors.

“What was important about this is that there isn’t going to be a 90th anniversary for these guys, same thing for D-Day,” he continued. “This was the last big anniversary for a big number of them.”

Fewer than 1%, or roughly 66,000, of the 16.4 million Americans who served during WWII are still with us today, according to statistics from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans counts 1,370 of them in Massachusetts as of some point this year.

But the living memories of the war were present in Europe for the veterans who took the trip.

Andrew Bostinto:

He served in the 26th Infantry Division during the war, which was made up of members of the Massachusetts Army National Guard. He got to see the Rein River where he fought in Germany. Biggio said that Bostinto was an early bodybuilder and an early trainer of Arnold Schwarzenegger — a fact apparently well-known in the region because his arrival won ample German coverage.

Lewis Brown:

He served as a truck driver in the Red Ball Express — a segregated unit tasked with rapidly supplying the Allied frontlines throughout Europe. He got to see a truck he drove during the war.

Ed Cottrell:

He was invited by a Belgian pilot during the visit to take a flight in an aircraft over his old battlegrounds. The flight was 80 years to the day that he was nearly shot down while flying the same route.

Jack Moran:

He served with the 87th Infantry Division. He got to revisit the foxholes he fought out of in the Saint-Hubert region of France, Biggio said.

Lester Schrenk:

He was a gunner in a bomber that was shot down during the war. He was captured and was a prisoner of war for 15 months. During the trip he got to see the tattered remains of a ball turret that may have been his, Biggio said.

Further reading

Biggio doesn’t just organize these trips to Europe. He’s also a published author of two books, beginning with “The Rifle” in 2021 and continuing with the book’s sequel “The Rifle 2: Back to the Battlefield” two years later. In each book, Biggio hands a WW II veteran a period M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle, which opens up their memories about their experiences during the war.

“When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years,” the first book’s description states. “On the spur of the moment, Biggio asked Drago to sign the rifle. Thus began this Marine’s mission to find as many WWII veterans as he could, get their signatures on the rifle, and document their stories.