GORHAM – The recent blast of wintry Maine weather doesn’t halt a World War II veteran who suffered severe frostbite 70 years ago this month on a frozen European battlefield.

Horace “Bud” Fogg of Gorham, 90, still makes his daily rounds to join up with friends in Gorham, Westbrook and Windham.

Snow and cold trigger memories of the brutal 1944 battle of Hurtgen Forest in Belgium where frostbite claimed half of Fogg’s right foot and gangrene attacked toes of his left foot.

“Even my gun was frozen,” Fogg said. “I was lucky to get out of there alive.”

Fogg, born in May 1924 in Windham, grew up mostly in Gorham. He retired at age 62 from S.D. Warren, where he worked in material handling.

A widower and father of five children with numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Fogg lives with a daughter on Buck Street in Gorham and he stays mobile, whatever the weather. Each morning, Fogg can be found socializing at Thayer’s Store in Windham.

Jamie Quimby, the son of storeowners, said last week that Fogg, during a recent snowstorm, visited the store twice that day.

“He usually comes up for breakfast,” Quimby said.

It was outside the store where Fogg a year ago lost a gift cane, leaving it on top of his car before driving away. He returned but a search for the cane proved unsuccessful.

“Someone drove off with it,” Sgt. Ray Williams of Windham Police Department said on Tuesday.

After hearing about Fogg’s loss, Williams was instrumental in the Windham Police Association’s decision to replace it with a handcrafted cane made specifically for Fogg.

The cane is inscribed with his name and Army rank, and miniatures of medals he earned are embedded in it. Williams presented the cane to Fogg at Thayer’s last summer.

“He was speechless,” Williams said.

In Westbrook, Fogg stops regularly to visit pals at the Eagles Club and the Westbrook Memorial Post 197 of the American Legion. Beverly Preston, manager at the Legion hall, described Fogg as remarkable, and said he likes to chat with the guys.

“He amazes everybody, he enjoys the company,” Preston said.

Fogg, a staff sergeant, was a foot soldier in the 83rd Infantry Division that fought in Europe. In Belgium 70 years ago this month, he was sleeping outside in fields and forest, where temperatures dropped below zero with up to a foot and a half of snow. It was December and his unit was in St. Vith, a Belgium town near the German border.

“He had it rough there,” Quimby said. “He went through a lot.”

Fogg was a squad leader of 11 soldiers.

“I have the feeling he took good care of his men,” said Lane Hiltunen of Windham, one of Fogg’s breakfast buddies. “He’d give the shirt off his back,” Hiltunen said.

Hiltunen said that “with most people,” Fogg won’t talk about his war experiences. But Fogg recently shared with the American Journal some remembrances of the bleak battlefield.

In 1944, Fogg patrolled through the snow in fighting that preceded the so-called Battle of the Bulge. Efforts to dry his one pair of wet socks were futile and his combat boots were wet.

“The coldest G-d damned year they ever had,” Fogg said.

Details he related are telling. A German soldier Fogg saw “crawling” out of a foxhole had rags on his feet.

Fogg had an overcoat and a blanket. He recalled bunking under a makeshift shelter he made from fir tree boughs. One night, he and other soldiers, along with their six or seven prisoners, found a barn, a welcome refuge.

“It was warm in the hay,” he said.

In one enemy encounter, Fogg came face to face with a German soldier not 20 feet away. “His gun was frozen. Mine was frozen,” Fogg said. “He dropped his gun and ran like an SOB. It was my lucky day.”

For battlefield meals, Fogg dined on packaged K rations – corned beef hash and crackers. The container also had a pack of three cigarettes.

“They gave us a hot meal when they could,” he said.

Fogg and his men didn’t starve but the cold was a tough enemy.

“The weather was killing us,” Fogg said.

He recalled hearing tanks slugging it out a short distance away in the night.

“They were having a helluva fight,” he said, adding that the Germans shelled treetops to rain limbs down onto U.S. soldiers.

He and his men wondered whether “this shell would get me, this bullet get me.”

“I was damned scared,” Fogg said.

Suffering from frozen feet, he and some of his men were evacuated from the St. Vith area in mid December.

“That night Germans shelled the hell out of that place,” he said.

The shelling coincided with the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. But Fogg had been relocated to a field hospital on his way to a Paris hospital. Later, half of his right foot was amputated after returning to the states.

He underwent a series of surgeries. Doctors peeled skin off his left foot toes where gangrene had set in, but his left toes were saved.

At age 19, Fogg had been drafted in March 1943. He rode to England aboard a Liberty ship in a convoy. “All the ships you could see in the world,” he said.

And he was seasick in the rough Atlantic.

“I had my head over the rail,” he recalled.

In Europe, Fogg’s unit traveled to where it was needed most.

“I hit Normandy one month after D-Day,” he said.

His outfit was once even assigned to the Army of the legendary George Patton. In France, shrapnel hit Fogg in the neck.

For his duty, Fogg was decorated with the Purple Heart along with several campaign medals and the State of Maine Silver Star honorable service medal. “He’s got quite a service record,” Williams said.

But, Fogg shrugs it off. “I’m no hero, that’s for sure,” he said.

He’d like to return to see reconstruction at St. Vith, the town where his feet were frozen in that battle so long ago.

“They tried to kill me, but they didn’t,” Fogg said.

Horace “Bud” Fogg is a 90-year-old World War II veteran from Gorham.  Aided by a gift cane from Windham Police Association, Horace “Bud” Fogg of Gorham, who survived the battle of Hurtgen Forest in Belgium 70 years ago, stays on the go visiting friends in his daily rounds.