For Deephaven vet, 99, an orphaned baby brought joy amid the chaos of World War II

It's been nearly 80 years, but Harry Campbell still fondly remembers the 3-month-old baby he and his fellow infantrymen discovered in a bombed-out Italian house near the end of World War II.

"She had a lot of dark hair and dark eyes — a cute little baby with lots of opinions," Campbell, 99, recently said from his apartment at the Deephaven Woods senior community. "There were certain guys she liked and certain ones she didn't."

Born in 1923 and raised in Cloquet, Minn., Campbell was named for his father, a wood stick mill manager and former World War I infantry captain who died six months before his son was born. Mustard gas exposure in the trenches of French battlefields, his son said, led to the pneumonia that killed his dad at 31.

Two decades later Campbell himself was a sergeant in another world war, commanding 12 soldiers chasing the last German soldiers out of Italy.

"My men were young and mean as hell, real wild bastards, who'd been fighting for years and killing a lot of Germans," he said.

Scouting for a place to rest in the war's last winter, Campbell's unit came across a mountainside dwelling with a hay barn on the first floor and a family's bombed-out living quarters above. They thought everyone inside was dead.

"While their bodies were being removed," he recalled, "all of a sudden, we heard a baby crying and found her in her bassinet."

Campbell was going to radio his superiors to have the Red Cross take the orphaned infant. Then his battle-hardened band of soldiers came to him with a stunning request. "They wanted to take care of her," he said.

He initially bristled, knowing military law forbids civilians on the front lines. But Campbell's young soldiers — including a 22-year-old who had become a father just before joining the Army — persuaded him to let them babysit.

"They came up with all kind of suggestions for names and I said, 'No, I'm the sergeant here, and we will name her Maria because she's an Italian lady,'" he said.

For three weeks, the grizzled GIs tore up bed sheets for diapers and fed Maria coffee creamer and what milk they could spoon into her tiny mouth. Slowly, she gained weight. The soldiers would go out at night to wage war with their bazookas and machine guns, and then return from the chaos to care for the baby.

"They'd come back and get up and play with her, and pass her around and feed her with a spoon for, oh God, what seemed like hours," Campbell said.

Eventually, Campbell's captain came and transferred Maria to the Red Cross and an eventual foster home with nuns. But the men never forgot Maria. They passed around a barrack bag that quickly brimmed with Italian lire for the baby. The nuns said they'd use a little each month to pay for her needs and give her the remainder when she turned 18.

"I never knew what happened to her after the war," Campbell said. "But, oh God yes, she brought joy to my men for those three weeks."

After the war, Campbell resumed school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Living in a boarding house with others in their 20s, he met a government worker named Beverly Hock from Roanoke, Va., who worked as a budget analyst in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

They married in 1947 and raised two kids, Harry III and Mary, in the Minnetonka area. Harry worked as an insurance adjustor, and Beverly was a research analyst at Cargill. When Beverly died at 92 nearly seven years ago, they had been married for 68 years. "My wife was brilliant," Campbell said.

He still suffers from an old war wound left by a piece of shrapnel that made an 8-inch hole in his right thigh. Despite gangrene jeopardizing his recovery at a Naples hospital, Campbell returned to battle.

One of his best war stories was captured in a 2017 profile that Paige Kieffer wrote for the Sun Sailor west metro newspaper. During action in the Italian theater, Campbell spotted Germans on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and ordered the famous structure to be bombed.

The bombers never came, and Campbell instead received a thorough chewing out from three superiors that night. They threatened to have him locked up, according to the Sun Sailor, but finally said, "Just don't do it again!"

Asked what lessons we can take from his service, Campbell shrugged in his red-checked flannel shirt and suspenders.

"I'd just as soon forget what we saw," he said. "I wonder when I finally meet the good Lord what he'll think about all the people I killed."

Here's hoping he gets credit for helping care for the little baby he named Maria.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear every other Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.