The McDonald Windows Project

Frederick McDonald’s Remembrances
of Collecting Shards in 1944-45

U.S. Army Chaplain Frederick A. McDonald collected shards of stained glass from damaged and destroyed sanctuaries in 1944-45 while serving General Omar Bradley. Except for some unidentified shards, the glass is organized according to where he found it. In the last years of his life he recollected the circumstances in each place he visited and set them down. His remembrances of each place are being etched or painted on the window for that site. The text for all the windows follows.

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1. Introductory Window

A number of stained-glass shards Chaplain Frederick A. McDonald collected remain unidentified. One of his favorites is used in the opening ‘window,’ a three-dimensional glass piece, with the shard on the right side of an opened ‘book.’ He wrote the following words as an introduction to the windows built around the shards from sanctuaries that had suffered the toll of war.

The fragment by your right hand is the appropriate one for you to see first. We see a door within its frame, we discern a shadowy figure seeking to come through.

Who is he? Why is he emerging? Does he have a message for us?

Can he in any way clarify the bafflement we feel for that great irrationality we call “War”?

The first target of the Luftwaffe’s Baedeker raids in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, this ancient Cathedral was visited by a number of chaplains after their arrival from New York in 1944. Totally destroyed, the ruins became an anteroom for entrance into the new Cathedral built in the 1950’s, a moving illustration of England’s rise after the war to newness of life.

3. St. John’s, Red Lion Square, London

This church, obliterated during the Battle of Britain in August, 1940, was a favorite of high church Episcopalians from the Pacific Northwest. In 1933 I had worshipped there many times, a special wrench to find this favorite “Fortress of the Faith” gone.

4. Periers, France

I had just arrived in Normandy. There was an apple orchard where our Army headquarters was tented. In the evening I walked into the flattened town spread out around a badly bombed church. A ghostly silence covered the deserted area except for the shoveling noise of a lone man trying to uncover his house. He saw me and glared. I represented the war, which had brought ruin to his house and home. I picked up some of the church glass and moved on.

5. Coustances, France

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Coustances was the first great Gothic church we saw in our army advance. It was famous for the “dim religious light” of its sparkling windows. Blasting bombs had shattered every one and the interior was bright under the August sun. This made the architectural excellence more plainly seen since it was first built 700 years ago.

6. and 7. Verdun, France

Window A – A light rain muddied the streets as we entered the ancient fortress town of Verdun on September 18, 1944. We saw a shattered synagogue by the north gate. Later we found a modest Cathedral on a hillside. I got a few pieces of glass from each. The synagogue was opened up and our rear headquarters remained there for six months. There was also a small Protestant Chapel that we used for choir practice.

Window B – We entered in mid-September 1944. This is the martyr-city of World War I where some report that nearly one million men died in the four years of fighting. The fine words of Marshall Petain, “Ils ne passeront pas,” are engraved in stone on a statue on the hill top of the city center. From a chamber here the President of France chose 1 of 4 corpses, all nameless, to lie beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. At the foot up a grand escalier lies a modest Protestant chapel (temple). Not far away is the Cathedral, some parts of which are as old as the 11th century. We entered the town by the “Vie de la liberte,” the very important supply route in World War I. Every mile post were marked by a monument.          

Near the entry gate by the gare was the synagogue. The fighting by the retreating German was light so what damage there was, was from World War I. I got bits of glass from all three places. I attended a touching funeral service in the cathedral for about 30 persons whose mass grave had just been discovered. They had been rounded up and secretly executed by the Germans. The bugle calls for the dead echoed in my heart as I looked for the glass bits.          

The synagogue we quickly cleaned up for Jewish soldiers, lead by a Cyril Jaffe from Cincinnati, Ohio. As the non-Roman Catholic chaplain, I was responsible for all Hebrew services, but willing Jewish army men made this easy. We arranged a Seder the following March when I sat next to Jack Warner, head of the famous Warner brothers film company.

8. Church of the Holy Ghost , Aachen, Germany

On or about October 23rd I entered the first German city to fall to our forces, the imperial but now roofless city of Aachen, a good thousand years old. A very new Church of the Holy Ghost on the outskirts had been the scene of a firefight and a wrecked tram stood by the forlorn and empty church. Down by the Cathedral, I saw an aged woman lugging two suitcases as she crawled over stone pilings. Where was she going with her pitiful burden?

9. Cathedral of Aachen, Aachen, Germany

The story about Aachen, of course, is the Cathedral. Eleven hundred years ago the most important personage in Europe was Charlemagne and Charlemagne ruled from Aachen. He established the Holy Roman Empire, uniting Europe. After his death he was buried in the Cathedral of Aachen.          

The Germans had enough of a sense of history that when the war broke out they knew they ought to preserve the remains of Charlemagne. So they hid his casket somewhere in the woods. After the war, we learned where it was and someone in the Transportation Section just ordered a soldier to go and bring his corpse back. Returning with the most revered person for centuries in Europe, he came to the Cathedral and said, “Where do I dump this?” And it’s there today, the bones of Carlus Magnue, the first man to unite Europe, now encased in a shrine.

10. Maastricht, Holland

I have no memory of this church located near the huge military cemetery of Henri-Chapelle. The overseas cemeteries for the War dead have a quiet, solemn grandeur, but to see the raw, earthen graves after hostilities, untended, quickly dug is sobering and troubling.

I was asked to visit one of our radio units near this town of about 70,000, which had been heavily fortified by the Germans and vigorously defended when General George Patton appeared to attack them in October 1944. After fierce fighting he succeeded but was not able to secure three strong points, really three separate forts, which held out courageously for many months.           

Rather than the costly effort of directly over-running them, Patton decided to let them die on the vine.           

Leaving Verdun 2 km south over a hill. From the top you had a great view of the town with a river running alongside. We continue on to Pont-a-mousson where there was a bridge to cross the river. Bridges are very important in combat. As we neared the town we heard our artillery attacking the forts with an occasional German shell in reply. The Germans had to hold their fire because they needed to keep their arsenal for a final response. It was then that a passenger in my jeep said, “Are those guns speaking in anger?” and of course, they were. Only much later, starved of food and ammunitions, did the forts give up.           

In the town, I visited the Cathedral of St. Stephen, built in the 14th to 16th centuries, where glass was very much admired by the Michelin Guide. We were cautious because of the guns and because the Germans owned the province from 1870 to 1920, and there were many Nazi sympathizers. It was a cold, gray day.

12. Malmedy, Belgium

Returning from Aachen I drove through Malmedy in eastern Belgium, an area that Hitler’s Reich had early claimed. As I continued on a road map outlined for me by our planning section, I rounded the brow of a hill to get information from an Artillery Unit. Looking down on the valley near Monschau I saw a pillbox surmounted by a windblown Nazi flag. On the advice of an artillery officer I altered my return route. If I had continued I would have run right into German forces.

This church with its striking cupola is on the east bank of the Meuse River. It has been easily overrun in 1940 when I picked up these slivers of glass, but was not quite reached by the Germans in 1944.

14. St. Hubert, Belgium

The church was a shrine to the joy of the hunt, but its beauty was frozen in the cold winter of 1945. The town was on the southern shoulder of the “Bulge.”

15. Bastogne, Belgium

On Christmas Day 1944, during the “Battle of the Bulge,” Germans surrounded Bastogne, a center of road crossings vital to Hitler’s success in his drive to the Meuse River. When they demanded its surrender, General McAuliffe replied contemptuously, “Nuts.” During the battle the church was the center caring for the many wounded.

16. Thionville, France

Thionville is northwest of Metz on the way to Luxembourg City, in Lorraine. I used to drive through the town. Then all of a sudden there was the Battle of the Bulge and it was heavily bombarded. When I drove through again everything was in ruins. Nobody was there.

17. Veviers, Belgium

I was billeted for the night in a house overlooking this church. The mistress of the house gave me her son’s room. He was a slave laborer in Germany. It was a strange feeling, seeing his photograph, favorite books and athletic gear stacked on shelves. Would he ever return?

18. Liebefrau Kirche-Trier, Germany

On my way to Koln on March 8, 1945, I saw over the Moselle River the ancient Roman city of Trier. American soldiers were combing the rock piles that were once buildings and churches. The walls of the gothic Church of Our Lady were standing, but the wooden doors of the entrance were blasted. A sign in English forbade entrance. It had been placed there by Target Force who moved in front of the soldiers to save important artistic works. I entered and contemplated the fallen Crucifix, with the statue of the Holy Mother, prone on the floor, looking towards her prostrate son.

19. Kolner Dom, Germany

On May 30-31, 1942, a force of one thousand British bombers hit this third largest city in Germany. Incendiaries were mixed with the explosives. The city center was burned to the ground. Only the Cathedral survived, burned and baked, but standing tall. When the 104th Infantry division entered, artillery fire was needlessly directed against the west entrance Rose Window. The superb medieval stained glass windows had been removed to safety in 1941 and the remaining pieces were of more modern craftsmanship. When I entered the cathedral, only one-eighth of the residents remained on the western bank of the Rhine and white sheets hung from nearly every window.

20. The Russian Chapel, Weisbaden, Germany

A nineteenth century Duke of Hesse married a Russian princess of great beauty and charm. To make her happy in his own Martin Luther land he built her a chapel of Eastern Orthodoxy. Bombs damaged the windows on the night of February 1st when a third of Weisbaden disappeared in twenty minutes time. This was the war’s only mark. A cleaning woman told me she was rushing to a shelter when a blast blew the child from her arms whom she never saw again.

21. Church of St. Augustine, Wiesbaden, Germany

I went to Wiesbaden for the first time with an exploratory group picked by General Bradley who commanded the main American forces fighting against the Germans in April of 1945. We came into a city that had been one-third destroyed in a twenty-minute raid on the night of February 1st or 2nd. I went quickly to the English church to see if I could use it for our services. When I got there I asked an engineer to come and see it with me. He told me, “Chaplain, put your helmet back on your head.” We’d taken them off because it was a church. And, he said, “the roof may fall on top of us any minute.”           

Many chairs had been piled around the altar and there had been some inner destruction, I was told, by elements of the Hitler youth who were angry at the enemy forces that had been bombing their city. But I picked up these shards of glass from the floor of the church.           

I wasn’t able to use the church at all. Instead, I took over the big casino they had there and used that. I held my services in a reading room where I had a great deal of unwanted competition because on the ceiling of the library there were undressed copies of Grecian goddesses. It’s not easy to talk to a congregation when they look up.

22. Frankfurter Dom, Germany

The Main River flowed with lordly indifference past the rubble of this ancient imperial center of the Holy Roman Empire and the Cathedral where some of its emperors had been crowned. Again, a great structure of the Middle Ages stood tall against the fallen building of later centuries. The Cathedral sacristan asked me if I would like to see the scalp of St. Bartholomew and pulled out a drawer for me to see. If such it was, I can only tell you that he had a good head of yellowish- grayish hair.

23. Nuremburg, Germany

In September 1942 I was ordered to the Chaplain School at Harvard University. Every morning the Episcopalian Clergy gathered for communion before a copy of the massive reredos of Saint Lorenz Nuremburg. I saw the original in May of 1945 behind a bullet-pocked altar with crumbling stone and split timber debris in the sanctuary. Today the whole church has been restored.

24. Berghaus Berchtesgarden, Germany

On the 26th of May 1945 I passed through the dead city of Munich to reach the idyllic beauty of the Bavarian site of Adolf Hitler’s mountain villa, called the Berghaus in the town of Berchtesgarden. Heavily bombed, French troops reached the burned house shortly before VE Day, wrecking and looting the area. My glass comes from a corridor reached by going through the large living room to a stairway, smoke from the fire marking the glass.           

When Hitler was living in Munich he used to stay in the hotel, Platterhof, in Berchtesgarden. As his movement grew more of his associates would go there too until they took over the whole hotel. Later we used that space for teaching.

25. St Andrews English Church, Biarritz, France

A warning raid on the resort town of Biarritz on 28 April 1943 was meant to threaten any move to fascist Spain and an alliance with Hitler, but resulted in the immolation of seven English airmen. Their carbonized bodies were carefully buried in the cemetery, and I laid a wreath there on Armistice Day in 1995. The beautiful church of St. Andrew suffered major damage then. The Army University was temporarily set up there to further the education of soldiers who had to wait transportation home at war’s end. They could not use this church, but used the Casino Theater instead.