George Norman Anderson Jr., a retired civil engineer who was a decorated Army veteran and former prisoner of war, died of congestive heart failure Monday at the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation and Extended Care Center in Baltimore. The Towson resident was 89.
Born in Baltimore and raised on Allendale Road, he was a 1937 graduate of Polytechnic Institute, where he played lacrosse. His family owned and operated boys and girls summer camps in Vermont, where he learned horsemanship, became the riding instructor and gained an interest in polo.
He attended Norwich University, a military school in Northfield, Vt., and was a member of its ski and polo teams. He completed two years of college before enlisting in the Army in April 1942.
After basic training, he shipped out to England as part of a combat engineering group that built roads and bridges and performed other civil works to meet the infrastructure needs of the advancing American troops. Mr. Anderson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in August 1943.
On June 8, 1944, he landed during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He served in an engineering combat battalion and led a platoon of combat engineers who worked quickly to repair the Isigny causeway and a Vire River bridge. His unit fought continuously from Normandy to St. Lo, where a large battle destroyed the town. He disarmed enemy booby traps and land mines, built bridges and installed tank traps, family members said. He went through Paris and continued on to the Battle of the Bulge.
Mr. Anderson saw many of his troops and comrades killed and wounded by land mines and in firefights. He was promoted to first lieutenant and became a combat engineer unit commander. While caring for wounded troops in a defensive position during the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Anderson was captured by the German army on Dec. 16, 1944.
Family members said that until he was prodded by his grandsons to make an oral history, Mr. Anderson was largely silent about his experiences during the war.
They said that in recent years, as his health declined and he suffered complications associated with his war wounds, Mr. Anderson prepared a narrative of his service years, consulting reports he filed while in the Army.
After his capture, and after a five-day forced march in the cold and snow, he was interned in Oflag 13-B in Hammelburg in Bavaria. He said he was placed in a hut with no heat and given a single blanket. According to Mr. Anderson, "The prisoners were given only water, no food." After several weeks, and with the approach of the Allied troops, the prisoners were forced out of the prison and marched to an area near Nuremberg.
