It’s safe to say Veterans Day, Nov. 11, annually has added significance for the Grosclaude family of Butler.

War and its aftermath have shaped their destinies.

Pierre Grosclaude, 95, said his father and six uncles fought for France in World War I. His father, Edward, had four brothers killed in the fighting: Pierre, Henry, Rene and Joseph.

Of the three who survived the trench warfare, Edward emigrated to America with the help of two servicemen he met during the conflict.

Edward was drafted into the French Army when he was 17 and was wounded soon thereafter.

Pierre said his father was driven by a need to seek revenge on the Germans.

“He lived in the trenches for four years. He never went home for four years. He was so mad all he wanted to do was kill Germans. He was shot in the head and had a piece of his skull blown out. They put a plate in his head and sent him back,” Grosclaude said. He was gassed twice.

But his time in the trenches would greatly impact the rest of his life. During the fighting he met two soldiers, Joe Querry from New Jersey and George LeRoy from Butler.

His American friends helped Edward, soon to be known as “Frenchy,” his wife, daughter and 7-year-old Pierre move to the United States in 1927 and eventually Butler in 1928.

“We didn’t have anything. They paid for our rent in the South Street company house where we lived. They paid for our meals. They got my dad a job at the glass works on Zeigler Avenue,” he said.

But war was not done with the family. In 1944, the Germans claimed Frenchy’s final two brothers, George and Eugene Grosclaude, and their wives.

The brothers had been working with the French Resistance, Pierre Grosclaude said, to give guidance to a group of British paratroopers who were to be dropped behind enemy lines after D-Day. The brothers were betrayed and shot by the Germans.

By this time, Pierre Grosclaude was also a combatant.

He had been drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942.

“When I was drafted, they told me ‘You are not going overseas we need you to train recruits,’” he said.

Grosclaude spent two years training men at Camp McQuaide, an Army base in Santa Cruz County in California.

“I was immediately made a sergeant and chief of ammunition,” he said.

He said he taught 64-member classes hand-to-hand combat with a new class coming through every 18 weeks.

The fear of a Japanese invasion kept his artillery unit traveling the West Coast from California to Washington state.

“We had a battery of four 155 millimeter cannons. They went everywhere we went when they thought the Japs might invade,” said Grosclaude. “They used 95-pound shells. I set the fuse on every shell. That alone was a job.”

“When we were on the coast of Washington, we saw the fire balloons that Japan sent over. We were the first ones to know that a farmer was killed by one,” Grosclaude said.

In November 1944, the Japanese released thousands of bomb-carrying balloons that drifted across the Pacific Ocean. They were found in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Michigan and Iowa, as well as Mexico and Canada.

The balloons were relatively ineffective weapons but were used in one of the few attacks on North American soil during World War II.

Grosclaude was eventually sent to Italy.

On April 21, 1945, he said they were in the Po Valley in the Apennine Mountains southwest of Bologna when one cannon in his unit destroyed four tanks and four horse teams.

“I always felt I set the fuse of the shell that took out the German high command in northern Italy. It may have shortened the war in Italy,” he said.

Pierre claims he was one of the first to see Benito Mussolini’s body after the Italian dictator was executed by Communist partisans.

During the war, Pierre married his girlfriend Hazel Thompson of Chicora who worked as a secretary in the Bantam plant in Butler.

He came back to Butler in 1945 and had a very different take on the day Japan surrendered.

“I was on Main Street when the war ended,” he said. “I was in full uniform in front of Miller’s Shoe Store. I never got a hug or a handshake. I stood there in uniform and no one came up to me. I will never forget that.”

He went to work in his father’s autobody shop, which Frenchy had established in 1932.

Later he went on to the Snyder Pontiac dealership where he worked for two years before going out on his own in 1950 with West End Autobody at 445 W. Cunningham St, which led to Pierre’s Auto Sales.

He and Hazel, who have been married 73 years, had two sons, Jim and Thomas. Thomas died 10 years ago.

Jim Grosclaude spent his own time in the service.

“I spent two years in the Army. I went to Germany in 1968.

“I lived with all the stories. My grandfather used to tell me stuff,” Jim Grosclaude said. “I didn’t understand all that when I was little.”

“We’re tied into the two world wars. We have quite a history,” Jim Grosclaude said.