Beloved figure in Hunterdon named Basilone parade grand marshal

Archie Fagan, a World War II veteran who became a beloved figure in Hunterdon County a half century later, has been named the grand marshal of the 2023 John Basilone Memorial Parade.

The parade, the only one in the United States honoring a World War II hero, will be held Sunday, Sept. 24 in Raritan Borough.

Everyone in Hunterdon County knows Fagan as the official greeter at the ShopRite in Raritan Township where he said hello to every customer entering the store. Because of the pandemic, he was forced to retire from the job three years ago at the age of 93.

While most people knew Fagan from his job, few realized he was a veteran of World War II and witnessed the horrors of the war and the Holocaust.

During World War II Fagan saw combat and interrogated enemy soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge, was on hand for the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and attended the Nuremberg Trials.

He was born in 1927 in Philadelphia to a large Jewish family. When the family fell on hard times during the Depression he was sent to live with his grandparents. Thanks to a rich uncle, he was able to attend an elite high school for boys.

One week out of high school he was drafted into the Army which he entered on June 6, 1944, D-Day. He had basic training for 16 weeks at Camp Wheeler in Georgia and in December 1944 he was sent overseas.

Because he spoke Yiddish, a language that is a combination of German and Hebrew, Fagan was assigned the job of interrogator as he was able to communicate with the Germans who had been taken prisoner. The most vital piece of information that the American interrogators were able to extract from the German prisoners was that they were running out of gasoline, used in the strategy against the last German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge.

After his brief stint as an interrogator, Fagan was sent into the battle.

More:Basilone Bowl all-star football game canceled

In one battle, Fagan was injured by a German mortar shell. The doctors behind the lines fixed him up and sent him back to the front with shrapnel still in his back and a visible wound on his palm.

Because he was Jewish, Fagan was warned that should he be taken prisoner, he had to get rid of his dog tags because they had his religion printed on them and the Germans would likely execute him immediately.

A few weeks before the end of the war in Europe, as American troops rolled through Germany on their way to Berlin, Fagan's unit came to Dachau.

"The images will haunt me till the day I die," Fagan said.When Fagan was still in Germany after the war he was asked if he wanted to attend the Nuremberg Trials. He remembers looking down from the balcony at the “faces of evil” – Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Jodl, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz and others.

Fagan was offered a promotion, but he had enough of Army life, and he knew it was time to return to his family.

When he arrived in New York Harbor, he cried when he saw the Statue of Liberty.

Basilone, a member of the U.S. Marines, received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his action during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942 and the Navy Cross posthumously for more heroism in the Battle of Iwo Jima where he was killed in 1945. He is the only Marine to have received both honors as well as return to action and then be killed in action.

Email: mdeak@mycentraljersey.com

Mike Deak is a reporter for mycentraljersey.com. To get unlimited access to his articles on Somerset and Hunterdon counties, please subscribe or activate your digital account.

.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: John Basilone Memorial Parade 2023 grand marshal is Archie Fagan