Heroic Patience : Veteran Gets a Delayed Badge of Courage

Albert Bernstein is a war hero, and boy, is he surprised.

Forty-six years after his unit fought across Europe during World War II, the 67-year-old Studio City resident received the Bronze Star for heroism in combat, an honor he never knew he won.

“I guess they forget about us,” said Bernstein, proudly clasping the medal that he received in the mail in April without explanation. “I don’t know why it took so long, but at least I’m alive to receive it.”

A man whose powerful build reflects his days as a college football player and amateur boxer, Bernstein served with the 71st Infantry Division under the command of Gen. George S. Patton. His unit swept across France, Germany and Austria in 1944-45.

Bernstein took part in the Battle of the Bulge and was among the first soldiers to enter Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp in southern Germany. His unit, along with the more famous 4th Armored Division, advanced farther east than any other Allied forces in World War II, meeting the Russian army in Czechoslovakia in May, 1945.

When the war ended, Bernstein knew he was entitled to receive campaign medals, but he didn’t know he had been awarded the Bronze Star. Upon his discharge, at age 22, he didn’t give the matter much thought.

“We’d had enough of the Army, back when we first got out,” he said laughing. “We were too busy getting on in life--you know, going back to college, getting married, getting a job and, in my case, playing football.”

After four years of college and a brief stint in professional football, Bernstein settled in the San Fernando Valley, pursued a career in marketing and raised a family.

Only years later, after he retired with a partial disability, did it ever occur to him to investigate whether he was entitled to any medals.

“Now that I’m older and my health isn’t so good, I start to care more and more about these things,” he said. “You reflect on your life, and you want your grandchildren to know about these things.”

Last June, he sent a letter to federal officials at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis asking if he was entitled to receive any medals. In August, he received an unsigned postcard acknowledging his request.

“I was a little disillusioned,” he said, because he knew other veterans who had received their medals decades earlier.

Then in April, he received a box of medals. Along with the Bronze Star was a certificate dated Aug. 24, 1962, 17 years after he won the award. But there was no explanation as to why it took the Army so long to process the commendation and why he was never notified.

Federal officials were unable to explain the delay.

“It takes a long time to process all of these records. . . . I guess we’re a little behind,” said Gladys Maeser, public affairs officer for the Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis.

After World War II, there was little effort made to track down service personnel who had won medals but not received them, she said. Because of the backlog and a 1973 fire that destroyed millions of military personnel files, the agency has lost track of thousands of veterans.

“Unless there is a request, there would be no way of knowing if he received them before,” she said. “For people serving in World War II to receive a Bronze Star at this time is not so unusual.”

Bernstein, whose house is filled with athletic trophies, may never solve the mystery of his medals.

But apparently his talent for dodging tacklers also helped him dodge bullets.

His scrapbook shows both sides of the man. On one page, he posed next to newly freed concentration camp victims. Other pages show him in boxing trunks or football gear.

At Cleveland’s John Adams High School, Bernstein was a star football player and the city’s heavyweight Golden Gloves boxing champion.

After the war, he received a football scholarship to Loyola University, which had a highly regarded athletic program.

In 1949, he signed with the Cleveland Browns, then in the All American Conference--an upstart rival to the National Football League. Bernstein was a teammate with football legends such as Otto Graham, Lou Saban, Alex Groza, Marion Motley, Ara Parseghian, Alex Agase and Dub Jones.

After an injury during a preseason game cut his career short, he moved back to Los Angeles.

But Bernstein’s greatest run was on the battlefield rather than the football field.

His unit had been ambushed in northern France, and the men had taken cover in the woods beside a road, when Bernstein’s commander asked him to retrieve the colonel’s binoculars from his jeep, forcing him to run about 100 yards through enemy fire.

“I said to myself, ‘This is the end,’ but I couldn’t disobey an order. So I sprinted all the way there, grabbed the binoculars and sprinted back--you run a lot faster with a squad of Germans shooting at you.”

“When I got back, the colonel looked at me and said, ‘We’ll remember this,’ ” Bernstein said.

Clasping the Bronze Star in his beefy hands, he added: “I guess they did, even though it took 46 years.”