“If they won’t give us a flag, we’ll make one,” said First Lieutenant Samuel Lombardo, platoon leader Second Platoon, Company I, 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division, during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The platoon made this United States 48-star flag from scraps of cloth sewn on a white German surrender flag.
When Company I crossed the Remagen Bridge, their flag, only one side completed, became the first American flag in the 99th Division east of the Rhine River. During breaks in the battle, working mostly by candlelight, the flag was completed after two and one-half months, on the banks of the Danube River.
The flag is in the collection of the National Infantry Museum, Fort Benning, Georgia.
Back Row: Left to Right: Pfc. Gordon Wetherby, Charlestown, NH; T/Sgt Isadore Rosen, Pittsburgh, PA; Pfc. George E. Bellaire, Dayton, OH; 1st Lt. Samuel Lombardo, Altoona, PA
Front Row: Left to Right: Corp. Cury Beauvais, Chicopee Falls, MA; S/Sgt William Junod, Wyandotte, MI
Published by Lombardo Books, Carlisle, PA 17013
Printed by Beidel Printing House Inc. Shippensburg, PA 17257
The Bulge with the 38th Cavalry Squadron and the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion
On the morning of 16 December 1944, the well orchestrated German attack in the Ardennes (Wacht am Rhein – a subterfuge hiding their offensive intentions behind a pretended defense) was launched. Because Hitler suspected a security leak within his Wehrmacht, he limited disclosures of the attack plans to only his most trusted generals. He was unaware that the British had broken his secret Enigma Code even though some of his advisors had suggested that this may have happened. “Impossible” said der Fuehrer.
There were so few radio intercepts concerning the upcoming Ardennes offensive that our high level commanders were caught completely off guard even though many of us at the line level were antsy about all of the enemy activity nearby along our front. In general, the Wehrmacht followed the mandated radio secrecy orders but there were enough slip-ups by their air force and civilian transportation units to have given our top-level commanders sufficient insight had they not been so over-confident that they discounted these critical intercepts.
At 1520 hours on 16 December, Colonel Pattillo from V Corps called Major Baker S-3 of the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion and ordered a company of engineers to be immediately attached to the 38th Cavalry Squadron at Monschau, to serve as infantry. “A” Company was in the line at 1700 that evening where they supported for the out-numbered troopers. The 38th Cavalry was at the northern tip of the Bulge and just north of Lt Colonel McClernand Butler’s 3rd Battalion, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division, at Hofen. (The 395th held their ground and so was not involved in a command restructuring which placed the remainder of the 99th Division under command of the 2nd Infantry Division.)
For several days this small force — including 3rd Platoon, “A” Company, 112th Engineer Combat Battalion, and attached 105mm and 155mm artillery fought off several attacks by vastly superior enemy forces. Several times they called artillery fire onto their own positions to thwart these attacks. Canister rounds were used with devastating effect when they were about to be overrun. For their stout defense all three units were awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. According to Cavalry on the Shoulder, the 38th Cavalry was the only mechanized cavalry squadron to be so honored in WWII. The 146th Engineer Combat Battalion had received a Presidential Unit Citation for their D-Day anti-boat obstacle demolition mission on Omaha Beach, so this added an oak leaf cluster of “A” Company’s PUC. “A” Company, 612th Tank Destroyer Battalion fought nearby and was told that they were awarded a Meritorious Unit Citation — Unconfirmed.
The battlefield success of the 38th Cavalry Squadron in the Bulge was due to a number of elements, including a seasoned cadre who had fought from Normandy, but probably the most important item being their commanding officer — Lt Colonel Robert O’Brien — a 1936 West Point cavalry graduate. He was fanatical in his dedication to patrolling the area forward of his lines — to the extent that the 38th came to “own the area between the fronts”! Initially, this was not the case, but came to pass after several fierce firefights that inflicted heavy casualties on enemy patrols.
This recounting of the Monschau defense is from Cavalry on the Shoulder: “An example of the quick and deadly fights initiated by patrols is the instance at the end of October, 1944, when a “B” Troop patrol lead by First Lieutenant Weldon J. Yontz, fought a sharp action against a German patrol in the thick pine forests of the Ardennes. The cavalry point man, Private Herbert H. Whittard, spotted the enemy first and motioned the cavalry men into position to spring an ambush. Waiting in cover, the cavalry troopers engaged the enemy patrol at close range that killed or wounded all 22 of them.”
“Prisoners later revealed that this enemy patrol was handpicked from the reconnaissance company of the opposing German infantry regiment. This type of aggressive acting was repeated often in the Monschau sector, causing enemy patrols to avoid contact and allowing cavalry patrols to make increasingly detailed reconnaissance reports and sketches of enemy positions. More importantly, it left the German commanders ignorant of the details of the cavalry’s defensive positions.”
“The preparation of the defense at Monschau may rank as one of the most thorough defenses by an American battalion – size unit in U.S. Army history. The cavalry men, taking stock of their equipment, time available, and the aggressive spirit of the troopers, quickly established the defense which made maximum use of all available assets. The defense was unique in many respects. First, the establishment of patrol dominance denied the enemy detailed knowledge of the squadron’s disposition and strength. Thus any attacking enemy would be forced to guess where the units were deployed, and where the squadron was weak and where it was strong.”
“A second aspect of the defense was the unusual attention to ensuring integrated command, control and communications. To this end the squadron employed 16 radio nets, incorporating over 60 radios. The high number of radios – several times the number found in an infantry battalion – supplemented a remarkable wire communications system consisting of 65 telephones, 50 miles of telephone wire, and six switchboards. The wire command and control system integrated all squads, platoons, troops and supporting artillery into a single web.”
“This effort is even more amazing, considering the fact that the squadron was not authorized communication specialists. The system was designed to function even if a portion of it were destroyed. It also permitted very small units, in some cases individual four-man machine gun positions and two-man artillery observer teams, to continue to function and receive orders even when cut off from their immediate headquarters. Additionally, all of the wire was buried deep to protect it from enemy infiltrators, accidental cuts and enemy artillery fire. Finally, the entire wire system was duplicated, so that each line had a back-up in the event of failure. This communication system would provide essential to the coordinated defense across such a large sector of front (about six miles) by so small a unit.”
“The third unique factor which characterized the defense of Monschau was the extremely precise and effective positioning of the available weapons, obstacles and units. Machine guns were one of the keys to the defense. The 38th Cavalry dismounted .50 caliber and .30 caliber machine guns from terrain surrounding the town. The weapons were carefully positioned so as to provide interlocking grazing fire along all of the likely enemy avenues of approach. They were further tied into obstacles of concertina wire and personnel mines along these likely avenues. Further, extensive use was made of trip flares to provide early warning of enemy approach. Flares were preferred because they prevented friendly casualties in case of mistakes and they did not give the false sense of security associated with extensive minefields.”
“All of the weapons were dug in, with overhead cover to survive artillery attack and they were carefully concealed so that an attacking enemy had to literally be on the position to recognize it as a machinegun position. Finally, the positions were integrated into the squadron command and control telephone net. A final point on the preparation of the Monschau defense was a typical characteristic of defense common to the U.S. Army — the thorough integration and abundance of artillery support — 105mm and 155mm howitzers, augmented by their organic 60mm and 81mm mortars.”
“The effectiveness of the artillery support was later verified by a German prisoner of war. He reported that German troops in the Monschau sector were forbidden to leave their bunkers and foxholes during the hours of daylight. The German troops were reduced to observing their sectors through the use of mirrors, in order not to attract rapid and deadly artillery fire. This dedicated defensive preparation was tested at 0545 on the morning of 16 December 1944, when the intense German artillery barrage announced the start of the Battle of the Bulge.”
At 1525 hours on 16 December, Colonel McDonough, the 1121 Engineer Group commander, called our headquarters and ordered another engineer company to be deployed as infantry. The three “B” Company platoons moved into position the following morning and for several days formed a barrier line a short distance behind the front between Monschau and Elsenborn. Our purpose was to slow the German advance should they manage to penetrate our lines. The 3rd Platoon patrolled a 2,000 yard front in the snow.
We set up three machine guns in defensive positions and patrolled between them, but being in a semi-wooded area we had inadequate fields of fire and would have been overrun or bypassed by any determined enemy attack in force. Sylvin Keck, from the 2nd Platoon, manned a daisy-chain road block on a nearby road. These are AT mines roped together so they can be quickly pulled across a road at the approach of enemy vehicles – but they are not very effective unless adequately supported by covering fire. A number of trees had C-2 explosives attached for potential road abatis.
While on outpost duty, the 3rd Platoon had no clue as to the German’s intentions. We were positioned in the woods away from our headquarters but the wealth of unverified rumors, the actuality of the paratroopers and the reports of Skorzeny’s men in American uniforms kept us alert. Unconfirmed rumors abounded! Anyone moving about was challenged and this included even easily recognized American generals. Our reconnaissance officer, Lt Leonard Fox, was taken prisoner by a patrol from the 38th Cavalry Squadron because he had not yet received that day’s password. After six hours at their CP while they checked on his legitimacy, he was released.
Lt Colonel von der Heydte’s parachute force was dropped nearby on the night of 16/17 December. Their initial objective was capturing the Baraque Michel, a road junction midway between Eupen and Malmedy and ten miles west of Monschau – a brushy, timered area with streams and swamps forming the head waters of the Roer River. The paratroopers were a day late because of glitches in delivering their gasoline and in getting their forces assembled and were also widely scattered because of inexperienced pilots and minimal advance information concerning their mission.
The initial plan called for the General Sepp Dietrich’s forces to link up with the paratroopers at this road junction on 16 December — an intended replay of their successful breakthrough in 1940. Had Dietrich been able to push his way through Monschau, he very well may have captured the big gasoline dumps near Eupen and then moved almost unimpeded north to Antwerp. That would have made the 101st Airborne stand at Bastogne a non-event!
The twin “Jumo” engineers of the German planes were unsynchronized, and so had a distinctive uneven “yummm-yummm-yummm” beat-frequency sound as they flew overhead at night. We believe that they were for aerial resupply of the paratroopers. We were itching to turn our machine guns on them, but this was specifically forbidden as it would have divulged our defensive positions. Several V-1s (Buzz Bombs) that landed nearby were said to have contained food and medicines instead of explosives but I saw one.
Early in the Bulge, Earl Buffington was riding in Blaine Hefner’s truck as they won the race with a German tank to a crossroad near Malmedy. The tank halted and began firing at them as they scurried away. Earl’s arm was injured by a low hanging tree limb that also knocked off his Omaha Beach “Trophy Helmet”, which sported two clean 8mm holes. The bullet had passed through the front and out the back of the helmet, nicking his ear and the side of his head. That he had not been seriously wounded was considered a good omen so he refused to swap it for a new one. However, his trophy helmet was never recovered! Earl was a volunteer from the 2nd Infantry Division for our anti-landing craft demolition mission and was wounded D-Day morning. He was the only 2nd Infantry Division volunteer who returned to the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion after his hospitalization.
Engineers have only occasional need for machine guns, but we had both the WWI vintage water-cooled .30 caliber Brownings as well as the newer air cooler version and the .50 caliber Brownings (ring-mounted on our truck cabs for anti-aircraft). Our .30s were light years behind the vastly superior German MG-42. During the early hours of the paratroop drop, one of our water-cooled Brownings fired just one round, and sat there mute – the water in the cooling jacket had frozen, jamming the action.
Lt Schindler, who spoke German, led a reconnaissance patrol on one cold winter day, seeking information for V Corps on a German Panzer Division: “The infantry said that we were stupid for going beyond their outpost. Claude Dobbs and Sergeant Roy Durfey were in Lt Schindler’s jeep, and Norman Lightell and the rest of the squad were in the truck driven by Robert Richardson. Tom Wilkins manned the ring-mounted .50 cal machine gun. As they approached a house they saw a German soldier run inside. The men in back jumped out while Rom remained on the machine gun.”
“Schindler’s jeep backed up and he called out in German for those inside to surrender. Thirty-seven of them did so and were captured without a shot being fired. They were then led away to a PW cage. Later Schindler, Cecil Morgan and Roy Durfey returned to a nearby house from where smoke had been seen coming from the chimney and where Durfey had noticed a mule hooked to a two-wheel cart outside. Morgan kicked in the door and stepped inside with a Thompson sub an 38 more surrendered. Not a bad for a lieutenant and one squad of engineers! Before taking the prisoners away, Durfey unhitched the mule and turned it loose.”
On 23 December, while working on a large anti-personnel minefield near Elsenborn, designed to deny the Germans access to a natural infiltration corridor, a flight of British “Typhoons” came roaring in and rocketed a woods 80 yards to the east. We were a bit jumpy as their path was almost directly overhead and we thought that they might have mistaken us for Germans. That would not have been too unusual, considering the chaotic conditions along the front at that time. We saw no indication of German forces before or after the strike; but since we were close to the front lines, there is a possibility that German armor was located there.
A prominent radiator bulge under their engines gave them a distinctive appearance, and their engines made an unusual roaring noise — not at all like the sharp exhaust crack of the Rolls Royce Merlins in Spitfires and Mustangs. I was told that these engines had 24 cylinders — compared to the twelve cylinders of the Merlin — and the 24 exhausts blended the sound into the unusual road. (Since verified)
Christmas Day 1944, on the way to our AP minefield, a doe and a yearling crossed in front of our truck so I told the men in back to shoot her. After a dozen or more rounds had been fired, at a distance of about 80 yards, I yelled “cease fire” as the deer disappeared into the brush. The firing might have been interpreted as a fire fight with a German patrol, initiating a wasteful response. The doe then sauntered back across the road so I shot her. There was one hole in her hide. That’s less than 10% accuracy for our “American Marksmen.” Our company cooks then served up the fresh meat, which was a welcome change to our regular diet.
Several weeks previously, “B” Company’s various work parties returned to the company bivouac area one evening with five hogs, two cows, and a deer. Someone had suggested that we have fresh meat, but had not coordinated the effort. The animals were a nuisance around our AP minefields, as they hit our trip wires and detonated the mines – killing themselves in the process. We only hastened their demise. The hogs were fried first, and the pork fat was then used in frying the rest of the meat. The meat was tough and chewy, but still much appreciated!
On the night of 26 December 1944, our bivouac area was shelled heavily for about 30 minutes. We were in an area of large pine trees, so there were many tree bursts. Heading for a safe refuge in a culvert (which he called a tin-horn), Sgt Jackson ran into a truck tailgate and chipped off the corner of an upper front tooth. I flattened myself on the ground at the base of a large tree away from the direction of most of the tree bursts, and was happy when the shelling ceased. We believed that the damage was done by our captured 105mm howitzers. The shelling probably stopped when the Germans ran out of ammunition.
Several trucks had flat tires and other holes, and the driveline of one truck was completely severed. A shell fragment smashed through the front panel of our headquarters desk drawer, and spinning around inside, made a mouse nest out of the papers within. A number of artillery fragments riddled the battalion aid station tent – one striking Ernest K. Hansen in the chest as he was holding a plasma bottle over one of our wounded.
Lt Colonel Isley was the most seriously wounded. The battalion was moved to Henri-Chapelle that night – per Isley’s orders before he was evacuated. Several of Colonel Skorzeny’s men who were captured wearing American uniforms after infiltrating our lines were executed by a firing squad at Henri-Chapelle a few weeks later.
I arrived late at our bivouac area, but the only cover I could find was in the haymow of a barn. I tried to find a spot to spread ut, but the space was completely filled with bodies. I did my best to find a bare spot, but after some offered to loosen all my teeth if I didn’t quite stepping on him, I crawled back out and shivered in the jeep until dawn. The next morning 3rd Platoon – and possibly all of “B” Company — returned to our original bivouac area, and we continued working on the AP minefield.
New Year’s Day morning was clear and cold. While we were adding the red triangles – indicating a minefield — to the barbed wire fence around the AP minefield, the sky was suddenly filled with 28 ME 109s flying northwest at 1000 feet. “Operation Bodenplatte” was the plan to attack our airfields and destroy our planes on the ground — a continuation of the Bulge. A number of airfields near our front were successfully attacked that day, and several hundred American planes were destroyed on the ground. German losses were only one-third of our but their losses — and especially their losses of trained pilots – were those that they could ill afford.
Luckily for us, our P47s were rendezvousing near the Liege air-fields for a strike of their own, and they caught these Germans by surprise as they were coming in. It must have been a dog-fight, but we saw only the tail end of the action from our work area. In 20 minutes, as we watched in fascination, five ME-109s were shot out of the sky. The first one fell 1500 yards away, and they kept dropping closer and closer until the last one was only 300 yards from our work party.
The story was almost the same in every case. The 109 pilots, who were flying southeast and very close to the deck heading for home, were being slaughtered by the P47s. Our pilots were definitely more aggressive, and must have had superior training and experience. We didn’t see any parts being shot off the 109s, but two were spewing smoke — before they crashed and sent up big black pillars. The third downed plane hit 600 yards away, and several of us headed out to see what we could find of interest, (read Lugers or P38s)! We had just started off, when another 109 came limping toward us, smoking and losing speed and altitude.
The P-47 kept boring in and firing short machine gun bursts. The 109 was hidden by a group of pine trees when the pilot finally hauled back on the stick in an attempt to gain some altitude to jump. His plane rose only a few hundred feet, coming back into our field of view, and then stalled just as he bailed out. We charged down the hill to the crash site, fully expecting to find a dead pilot near the wreckage, since we were certain that he had lacked sufficient altitude to eject safely.
The pilot could not be found, but the plane was on fire and its magnesium castings were burning brightly. We poked around in the wreckage until the machine gun and cannon shells began to cook off and then made our made exodus. We searched the surrounding area and finally found the pilot’s chute in a pine tree 100 yards back in the direction from which we had come. Landing in the tree surely saved him from severe injuries or death. He had slipped his chute and hid until we passed, and then backtracked in our trail in the snow. We followed his tracks, but lost them at dusk in the area where the snow had been heavily trampled.
After escaping death in such a remarkable exit by parachute, we were saddened the next morning to find the young pilot dead within our AP minefield. He crawled through our wire barrier and suffered modest wounds from an anti-personnel mine. We surmised that he believed he would freeze to death before morning, so he killed himself with his 9mm P-38.
The winter of 1944 was one of the coldest in many years, often dropping well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. We slept in pup tends in the snow and motored about in our jeeps with the windshields folded down to be out of the way in case of an ambush or a firefight and slithered around in the snow in lose foot-freezing GI leather boots.
Our battalion had few medical problems during this period, although some, who failed to change their socks frequently, contracted trench foot (but none were from the 3rd Platoon). Our armies lost many man/days to this malady during the Bulge. It was easily prevented by keeping spare woolen socks ducked in one’s pants. Body heat dried them out and they could then be swapped several times a day — meanwhile, giving the feet and toes an energetic massage. Infantrymen, occupying foxholes out in the open and under fire, did not always have that option and so suffered many cases if trechfoot. Dr Stanley Goodman treated several combat exhaustion cases with sedatives and rest — followed by several days of heavy labor. Having all of this happen within the sounds of artillery and other battle noise near the front apparently did the trick.
A group of “B” Company men built a cardboard warming shack with a diesel drum stove in the center. When one man tried to force his way in near the stove in an already full shack, he was unable to do so, and no one offered to swap places. Not be deterred, he yelled, “I’ll show you sons of bitches,” and threw a full clip of M-1 ammo into the fire. The mad scramble for the doorway almost completely demolished the shack — after which the perpetrator was run down and pounded.
We must have been a bit odoriferous as we barely had an opportunity to shower. “Whore baths” — water heated in helmets over an open fire was our only option for washing faces, ears, neck, underarms, crotch and feet — in that order. Our helmets then took on a dingy hue. We were usually able to shave daily — often in cold water — but our razors were not the sharpest ones on the planet. I often fantasized about luxuriating in a tub of steaming hot water followed by a professional barber’s shave. When the opportunity later arose for a German barber to do the job, I had to mentally restrain myself to keep from bolting from his chair when I realized how close to my throat his straightedge razor was operating.
Surprisingly, although we were often half frozen from riding in jeeps – with the windshield down – or from sloshing about in the snow, few of us were ever sick with colds or flu. After most of the Bulge fighting was over and the weather had improved, we were issued insulated shoe pacs in lieu of those foot-freezing GI leather boots. Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose noted that the American commanders gambled that the war would be over before we needed shoe pacs – in retrospect an error in judgment but “C’est la guerre” – you can’t win all!
My part in the Battle of the Bulge could be said to have started 75 miles north of Marche, Belgium, when my anti-tank platoon was attached to the thinned ranks of G Company, 2nd Battalion, 333rd Regiment, of the 84th “Railsplitter” Infantry Division.
We entered the front line into German-dug foxholes on the night of December 15, aided by low light of British searchlights playing onto the sky. I carried a bazooka, but had it knocked from my left hand when a piece of shrapnel hit the bazooka and the tips of my fingers, leaving my fingers numb for hours. We spent three days and three nights in those holes in 38° light rain and mud except to brave snipers and scattered artillery shells in order to evacuate wounded, bring up rations, or whatever. We were shelled heavily twice each day.
Some hours later, early morning of the 16th, Hitler’s armies launched their surprise attack through the Ardennes forests of Belgium, taking a heavy toll of our young soldiers. Our General Boiling got word to get the 84th to Marche and to hold the Marche to Hotton roadway “At all costs”. Bolling got there by 7 p.m. on the 20th, and the 334th Regiment began arriving by 10 p.m., followed by the 335th, and lastly by my 333rd, which had still been on the front lines near Geilenkirchen on the 18th. We were held in reserve until we got new men and re-organized.
General Eisenhower in his Crusade In Europe said “The northern flank was obviously the dangerous one and the fighting continued to mount in intensity.”
Author Charles B. MacDonald in his A Time For Trumpets adds that “As General Boiling readily deduced, the Germans needed Marche, for the town was as much a road center as was Bastogne.”
On the 22nd of December elements of our 2n Bn., 333rd, were strung out along a sloping road with five 57 mm anti-tank guns, dozens of bazookas, several 50 caliber machine guns, and several 30 caliber machine guns trained on a small bridge which had been mined to be blown if necessary. We were still holding that area on Christmas day and a few days afterward. The weather had turned terribly cold. Fires were forbidden except for small gasoline burners to heat coffee. Canteens froze solid and burst open. We tried to sleep, huddled together sharing blankets. We learned to keep an extra pair of socks tucked under our shirts to keep them warm and dry. It snowed and got deep. By some accounts the temperature dropped into the low teens.
Nights were long, starting about 4:30 p.m. and light came about 7:30 a.m., making guard duty trying and dangerous. Two hours on guard and four off was the usual, causing intermittent sleep, at best. Just keeping warm a problem. Sheets of newspaper slipped between layers of clothing were great windbreakers.
Germans in American uniforms and driving our vehicles were behind our lines. We were ordered to stop all vehicles and question the occupants about things we would know but Germans might not. We worked in pairs, one approaching the vehicle, the other hidden. Colonels and generals found themselves answering who was Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend. Then-we heard about the Malmedy massacre, and in our rage, we swore to take no prisoners. Actually, that didn’t hold later on.
When we first moved into Hotton, the enemy was close, but we didn’t know how close, so motor engine noise was kept low or off entirely and our 57’s were manhandled into position without talking and made ready next to one of the houses. Nothing. Next morning as we waited in the kitchen, an artillery shell blew in part of the wall and knocked over the pot-belly stove next to us. No injuries. At midnight of New Year’s Eve Jack and I were on guard nearby with a “daisy chain” of anti-tank mines. Tied about 18 inches apart they were in the ditch on the side of the road, and we had the end of the rope on the other side. If a tank came, we were to pull the mines onto the road, and run. No tanks, but exactly at midnight both our and German artillery let loose with a barrage at the other that was like nothing we had ever heard. Heavy artillery whistled over our heads in both directions. We heard the gun blasts and the explosions on both sides of us. By the 26th the whole front was quiet, and then the British came into Hotton and took our positions.
In his memoirs Winston Churchill wrote, “The wheel of the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies produced bitter fighting around Marche, which lasted till December 26, By then the Germans were exhausted, although at one time they were only four miles from the Meuse and had penetrated over sixty miles. Balked of their foremost objective, the Meuse, the Panzers turned savagely on Bastogne…..”
It took a few days to get re-organized, but on January 3, 1945, the 84th was paired with the 2nd Armored while the 83rd was paired with the 3rd Armored for the start of our-counter-offensive to choke off the tip of the German penetration. Our pincer move was to start at Manhay and end at Houffalize where we were to meet the Third Army coming from the south,, only about half our distance. The following days are confused in my mind, for we seemed always on the move from one short stay here or there to another place with a name. I remember Odeigne. During a lull we walked up a hill to a small one-room schoolhouse and just missed being hit by a mortar shell tree-burst. I took a little time to inspect the classroom. I found many French translations of our fairy tales and cowboy stories. In the cellar of the schoolhouse we found about forty civilians crowded into a space too small for ten. As I came down the path again I stopped to look at a dead G.I. nearly covered with snow. His arm and part of his head could be seen. I wondered whether his mother would ever see the watch still on his wrist. The next day it snowed and kept on snowing. Roads became almost invisible, and vehicles slid into ditches. Tanks made the hard surfaces slick as ice.
In a blinding snowstorm our E and F Companies launched an attack to take and secure the La Roche Road. No tank support. The snow was too deep and the terrain too difficult for them. An F Company patrol secured the vital crossroads where the La Roche Road and the Houffalize Road met. This feat had deprived the enemy of the only two first-rate roads to the east, and has been considered the turning point of the Ardennes operations. The enemy had been taken completely by surprise.
It was near here that a patrol of eight of us were sent to bring in a group of about 35 or 40 German prisoners being held by two GIs. I was the third man, sent along as interpreter. We waded through waist deep snow for some distance and then onto bare ground which had been blown clear. The Lieutenant, in the lead, saw the Germans just inside a grove of pine trees and started into the grassy area.. There was an explosion and I felt a puff-of air on my face. The sergeant two steps ahead of me had stepped on a German Shu mine and lost his foot. I backed out; the lieutenant re-traced his steps and got out. What to do? He ordered two of the biggest men to get the sergeant out. There was another explosion and another foot gone, while the third man had shrapnel up and down his right side. The second man was laughing. He was going back to a nice warm hospital bed. The lieutenant called for a jeep and they were all taken back to the Battalion Aid Station.
We found a path around the mine field and using my Pennsylvania German, I got the prisoners lined up, yelled some bad words at them, and marched them off to the La Roche-Houffalize crossroads, where the MPs took them back. Foxholes were not always safe havens. Just before the minefield incident
I vividly recall what it did to one’ German. He was no deader than many others, but his torso was frozen solid and half hanging on the edge of the hole. His head was gone, his insides had slid to the bottom of the hole, and his chest cavity was blown open. I couldn’t help thinking how nice and clean and pink and shiny the cavity was.
In Laroche, our squad found protection in the basement of a building mostly destroyed by artillery and by a fire. It had a concrete first floor and one wall in danger of falling down the stairwell, so we knocked more of it down and descended into the basement. Nice and warm from the heat of the first floor. Then we began to be too warm,, so we peeled off some outer clothing. Then our shirts. I don’t recall going any farther. Oh, but it was great to be warm for a few hours.
Again, we moved a lot. The war for the ordinary foot soldier is only just where he is and how far he can see around himself.
Battle in The Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge) ended officially on January 25, 1945. But the front line was still not back to where it had been before the 16th of December, 1944. So the 84th was put to work again to erase the holdouts east of Houffalize. Beho was our Battalion’s last objective to help in that effort. On the way there, through Bovigny, every vehicle in the convoy bogged down in the deep snow. It took hours to get to Bovigny and then start for Beho. There was still enemy resistance, but our slogging riflemen accomplished the task.
I can never say enough for those men who walked into the face of the enemy knowing they could be wounded or die at any time. They were the heroes. I was just one of the lucky ones. I can claim nothing spectacular; but I was there.
On December 16, 1944, I was in Reims, France as a member of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. On 20 December, 1944, I was in Arlon, Belgium, as a rifleman replacement as part of CCA (Combat Command “A”) of the 4th Armored Division “Old Blood and Guts’ had ordered Hugh Gaffey to haul ass up the Arlon-Bastogne road to break the encirclement of the 101st in Bastogne.
After a hellish ride from Reims to Arlon in a “deuce-and-a-half” we loaded in some half tracks and about 1600 hours started north out of Arlon on the Arlon-Bastogne road. Progress was slow and we did not close on the blown bridge over the Sure River at Martelange until about 1300 hours, December 22nd. We had covered about 20 of the 28 miles from Arlon to Bastogne. While we waited for the engineers to finish the bridge over the Sure, we had a feast when one of the guys pilfered a ten in one ration off one of the tanks. I drew guard duty about 0400 hours. It was a bright moonlight night – – I thought I would be less of a target if I stood in the shadow of a tree. While leaning up against a small tree I could feel this lump on my back. I found out it was about 10 pounds of TNT wired to the tree with primer cord so that in case of retreat the engineers could blow the trees as a form of a roadblock. I chose some other place to stand to finish out my tour of guard duty. As we were closing on Martelange in the half tracks, as we rounded a curve and climbed a slight rise, as we emerged from a cut in the road, it seemed like were a hundred 105’s on both sides of the road which all opened up at the same time. The sky suddenly became bright as day and the noise was deafening. It was at this time that I had the first of my laundry problems. To the uninitiated, that means that I was scared “s———.s
About 0800 hours we got across the Bailey bridge over the Sure and we fanned out. CCA was given the main Arlon-Bastogne road. CCB was on the left flank using the secondary roads as its route to Bastogne. CCB was flanked on its left by the green, newly arrived 76th Infantry Division CCA was flanked on its right by the ‘Blue Ridge Mountain Boys’ of the 80th Infantry Division. We rode along on the backs of the Shermans. I had on my G.I. “Long johns,” O.D. pants and shirt, two pairs of socks, jump boots, four buckle overshoes, knit sweater, banana cap, helmet, “tanker overalls,” and extra pair of socks under each armpit, my “K” bar knife, my G.I. gloves, I had thrown away my gas mask, I had an ample supply of toilet paper inside my helmet, and my pockets were stuffed with “K” rations, candle stubs, cigarettes, grenades, and 2-½ pound blocks of TNT complete with fuse to blow myself a hole in the frozen ground, if necessary. I had my good old M-1 with the regulation belt load of eight clips ball and two clips A.P. four and one on each side, bayonet, canteen, first-aid pouch, two extra bandoleers of ammo, and three bazooka rounds.
By now it had snowed and just about everything was hidden by this white blanket. As we rode on the backs of the Shermans, we stood on one foot and hung on with one hand for as long as we could stand the cold, and then we switched hand and foot and tried to get some circulation going in the hand and foot we had just used. This was made more difficult because the tank turret was being constantly traversed from right to left and left to right. The tank I was riding on and three others fanned out in the fields left of the main road. Suddenly the tank I was on, the lead tank, stopped and the sergeant “volunteered” another G.I. and I to investigate what appeared to be a squad of German soldiers moving along in extended order. “They” turned out to be a row a fence posts, but to this day, I was sure at first, that I had seen my first “krauts.” Another laundry problem. One of the other tanks broke through a barbed wire fence and a strand of barbed wire slapped a G.I. across the face, turning his face into raw hamburger. A G.I., wearing an unbuttoned overcoat, jumped off his tank and when the coat tails billowed out behind him they caught in the tracks and sucked his legs into the bogie wheels of the tank.
Suddenly the tank I was ridding on stopped and one of the other tanks fired a whole belt (200+ rounds) of tracer ammunition at a haystack along side a barn about 200 yards in front of us. No sooner did the tracers bounce off the haystack when the other two tanks opened fire and destroyed a German tank that had been trying to hide in the haystack. I guess that the tankers had learned from experience that tracers do not bounce of haystacks. We moved forward about another 20 yards and the tank I was tiding on got mired down in a small stream that had become hidden due to the heavy blanket of snow. All I could think of at the time was to get away from the tank and I took off running as best that I could with the way I was dressed, with what I was carrying, and the deep snow. (Oh, yes, by the way, it was a least 20 degrees below zero at the time.) I must have managed about 50 yards when the fire from a German Nebelwerfer began falling around the stuck tank.
They assembled us foot troops back on the road (there were 26 of us in this one bunch) and we started north again toward Warnaco, a wide spot in the road about two miles further ahead. We walked strung out in a line in the ditch on the right hand side of the road so we wouldn’t be such good targets for those damned 88’s. A little way up ahead was an American 2-½ ton truck nosed down in the ditch and it had a big red Nazi flag with a black swastika on it across the front of the radiator. We had to climb the road embankment to get around the rear of the truck and as I passed by the cab of the truck I could see another good Kraut sitting behind the wheel with the top of his head blown off.
About another 500 yards up the road we came upon three tanks surrounding a farmhouse where they had a sniper trapped. The sniper had already hit three GI.s and they said the sniper was a woman and by the way that she fired she must have an M-1 with plenty of ammo. The three tanks proceeded to blow the farmhouse into a pile of rubble. I don’t know if they ever got the sniper or if the sniper was a woman. Our orders were to “get to Hell to Bastogne” so we took a break in a pig pen to get out of the cold. There were a half dozen pigs and some sheep in this pen about 20′ by 20′. There was also a dead pig and two dead sheep in paid any attention. I mean the GI’s or the pigs.
The town of Warnaco was where the Germans had set up their command center. If you were passing Warnach in a car and sneezed, you probably would miss it altogether. To enter Warnach, you make a right turn off the main Arlon-Bastogne road. I was walking along behind a tank taking full advantage of the warm air from its radiator when suddenly I had this funny sensation in my ears and the sky turned red. (It was about 0400 hours) Then the same thing happened again. A Hidden German S.P. gun in an orchard ahead had hit the tank twice and set it on fire. I saw two GI’s jump into a ditch along side the tank and start to get one of those new folding bazookas ready to fire. They didn’t have much luck and one of them yelled, “Let’s get out of here,” and they jumped up and ran. I was young but my mommy didn’t raise no dummy so I proceeded to ‘haul freight,’ too. In the process, my feet became entangled in some old chicken wire in the ditch and when I started to run I fell forward on my face. To this day, I don’t know how I did it, but my guess is I broke that wire with my hands.
As I ran back toward the Arlon-Bastogne road along a brush filled ditch to my left, I heard somebody yell, “Hey, infantry.” I hope that that tanker realize how lucky he was that I didn’t shoot him, but he told me he had a fellow tanker man whose right hand had been almost severed and was only hanging by some skin. I put the wounded tanker’s left arm over my shoulder and his buddy did the same with the mangled one. We would walk three-four steps and the wounded tanker would pass out. We would drag him three-four steps and he would come to and take three-four steps and pass out again. We managed to get him to a medic.
I got back to my squad who had assembled along side a barn and when I got there I saw about a dozen German prisoners standing with their hands against the side of the building. All but one of the German prisoners were Wehrmacht soldiers but the one on the right end was an SS Panzer soldier dressed in black coveralls. He was a handsome S.O.B. with a head wound and blood running down the left side of his face. None of the Wehrmacht soldiers had guts enough to turn around and ask for some gloves to cover their hands, but not the SS Panzer soldier. He turned around and in perfect English demanded gloves for his hands. A small American G. standing close by said, “I’ll give you some gloves you Kraut son-of-a-bitch” and poll-axed the SS trooper. They all turned around and put their hands back on the wall. The GI with the Thompson offered to return the prisoners to a POW camp to the rear but they wouldn’t let him go because he had just gotten word that his brother had been killed in the South Pacific. Later we watched about 12-15 P-47’s doing their job on some German columns. They were too far away to hear but we could sure see them plain enough.
We were told we were going to spend the night here and by the time I got the message the only place I could find to lie down was at the top of the stairs. All I took off were my four buckle overshoes and I used my helmet for a pillow. It seemed like only a couple of minutes but was really several hours when a sergeant came running in yelling that a bunch of German paratroopers had landed to our rear. Everybody engaged in organized confusion (or SNAFU).
It was about 0400 so I sat up on the top step and started to put my overshoes on when I got the damnedest cramp in the calf of my leg that I have ever had. But being smart I figured that by the time I got the other overshoe on the cramp would have gone away. When I started to put the other overshoe on, I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a cramp in the calf of that leg. I beat on them with my fist to no avail and they finally went away. We were told that we were going to attack Warnach again. By the time we got started it was daylight and this 90 day wonder Louie wanted someone to use the .50 cal on top of the tank to rake the roadside and ‘scare the hell’ out of the Germans. I was getting smarter by the minute and I remembered the old Army adage ‘Don’t never volunteer for nothing.’ After about 100 rounds the .50 jammed and the GI bailed down off the tank. As we turned a corner to the right, there in the middle of the road sat one of those German motorcycles with tracks at the back as a sort of a road block. The 90 day shave tail told the sergeant that he would back off a bit and then blast the motorcycle out of the way just in case it was booby-trapped. No sooner did the tank fire when a hidden German S.P. gun to perdition. Suddenly somebody yelled and two Krauts broke out of a copse of trees about 200 yards further down the road where it took a half dozen steps and then retreated to the safety of the trees. The other one ran along the fence for about 200 feet, calmly climbed over the fence just as you or I might do it today, and started to run up the road. Another 20-25 feet and he would have been safe, but all of a sudden he went about ten feet in the air, came down face first and never moved. When the two German soldiers broke out of the trees, we all started to fire at them – -M-1’s, Thompsons, BAR’s, carbines, grease guns, and maybe a couple of.45’s, too.
An officer came running over and ordered two other GI’s and myself to search this farmhouse. As it turned out, I was the only one with any grenades left and I had bent the pins over to make sure one of them did not come out while the grenade was in my pocket. Because of my cold hands, I couldn’t get the pin out so I tossed the grenade to one of the other GI’s. He got the pin out, but as close as he was to the door, he should have lobbed it underhand but instead he threw it overhand and missed the doorway. The grenade hit the edge of the door and bounced back into the yard. The GI yelled, “I missed the door” and took off. I knew what to do, too, so I hauled ass behind a pile of rubbish in the corner of the yard. It seemed like forever and the grenade hadn’t gone off. I stuck my head up to see what was going on just as the grenade went off. I guess I was just plain lucky. I had an M-1, one of the other GI’s had an M-1, and the third guy had a Thompson sub. I was second through the door in front of me. The other M-1 emptied his through the door to his left and the Thompson emptied his clip up the stairway to his right, and there we three stood just like the Three Stooges.
As we stepped back out into the yard, a Sherman started to rake the side of the building with .30 cal starting at the eves and working his way across the building and then down and across again. Then all of a sudden when he was about six feet off the ground he quit and took off. I am almost certain that I managed to hide my whole body under my helmet while the tanker was hosing down the wall of the house. Suddenly, out of nowhere a cow came around a corner of a nearby burning building followed by an old woman who looked to be in her nineties and carrying a switch with which she was chasing the cow. The cow and then the old woman in pursuit disappeared around the other corner of the building and was gone. Where she came from I don’t know and where she went I don’t know.
I got mine on Christmas Eve; had to wait over four hours to be evacuated. I was supposed to be air evacuated back to England but the friggen fog had come back in so I wound up in a field hospital in Commercy, France on Christmas day, naked as the day I was born with a small Red Cross package sitting on my chest.
The records show that the taking of Warnach cost America five Sherman, 68 GI’s killed or wounded. The Germans lost 135 dead on the streets and in the houses with a like number either wounded or taken as POWs.
Subtitle: The End of the truck driver’s World War Two military service—The Beginning of the veteran’s civilian life.
Time: May, 1945 after surrender of Germany Places: Germany, France, USA War in the European Theater was finished. Hitler’s Nazi regime surrendered unconditionally on May 8, 1945. Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) was the cause for great celebration. The combat days of Cannon Company, 291st Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division were over—in this part of the world.
The first critical Allied task was restoring law and order in occupied Germany. Troops were assigned Military Government (MG) duties. The 291st Regiment (including Cannon Company) was stationed near the resort city of Bad Driburg, famed for mineral springs and baths.
In taking over its assigned area of control, the Regiment issued orders and instructions for the Companies to follow in their respective areas. Units were to establish Military Government by: appointing non-Nazi officials; posting and enforcing proclamations, laws and ordinances; enforcing curfew 2030 to 0630 military time (8:30 PM to 6:30 AM); collecting arms and ammunition; maintaining road blocks; establishing camps for displaced persons and Allied POWs and permitting no circulation outside the town limits without Military Government permits.
The truck driver and his buddies read through the precise wording of their MG duties. Carrying out those orders and instructions appeared nearly as difficult as fighting a war. They realized strict security measures were needed to protect the troops from Nazi sympathizers. Appointment of non-Nazi officials was the top priority.
Cannon Company’s assigned area included a German brewery that continued to operate. A 24-hour military guard provided security at the brewery, security against the thirsty Allied soldiers.
The truck driver’s Company chow line was set up on trestle tables on a quiet street. The aroma from the cooking food spread over the occupied German neighborhood. At chow time the soldiers walked down the chow line, filled their mess kits to overflowing and ate most of the contents. When finished, nearly every mess kit contained scraps and bits of food. Those leftovers were to be dumped into a large barrel for disposal.
As the truck driver and his buddies approached the disposal barrel, several small German children met them. Those children were holding little pails, pleading for the soldiers to dump leftover scraps into those pails. Those big, pleading eyes, framed by gaunt faces, were heart-rendering sights. The truck driver vowed that he never wanted his children or grandchildren to ever be in a similar situation, begging for food scraps. He also vowed to share this experience upon his eventual return to civilian life.
The duties of Cannon Company and 291st Regiment were changed a few weeks later. The troops were assigned new responsibilities. With the conclusion of the war in Europe, all efforts were directed westward to the Pacific Theater of Operations. The Allied forces had moved from island to island, ever nearer to the Japanese mainland, suffering many casualties during bitter hand to hand combat. Fresh troops in large numbers would be required to wage a successful campaign against the Japanese Empire.
Those millions of troops in Europe must be transported to the Pacific without delay. To accomplish this momentous task, the Army established the Assembly Area Command (AAC). Seventeen camps were built near the French city of Rheims for this purpose. The camps were named for American cities, such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, etc. The 291st Regiment, including Cannon Company, was assigned to Camp New York.
The AAC camps collected European based troops and processed them for Pacific duty. Soldiers with long military service, especially the D-Day survivors, were granted furloughs in the States and then shipped to the Pacific. Troops with less service were immediately loaded on ships and sent directly to the war zone. Everyone was thrilled that the war in Europe had ended, but preparing for the Pacific journey was quite sobering. No one would dare speculate as to the end of that war. The Allies were making some progress, however slowly, across the Japanese-held territories. Every day was critical in moving troops from Europe to the Pacific.
The truck driver’s location, Camp New York, was a ninety minute drive from Paris. Every evening he and his driver buddies provided transportation to the bright lights of Paris, returning before midnight. He strolled through the streets of Paris, often standing under the Arc de Triumph, to absorb the atmosphere and magnetism of the “City of Light”. He climbed the stairs of the Eiffel Tower to view the vast panorama. German soldiers had carved their names into wooden areas of the breathtaking structure. Paris museums were retrieving their valuable works of art from secure war time locations. An occasional visit to the interior of historic Notre Dame was another point of interest for American troops. Of course Paris’s Place Pigalle and Folies Bergeres were favorite destinations for the soldiers.
July 4th, 1945 was a unique opportunity to celebrate American Independence Day in Paris. French citizens reminded the American troops that French General Lafayette played a major role in the battle for Independence, serving as General Washington’s personal aid and advisor. The day gave everyone the excuse for an inebriated celebration—as if an excuse was needed.
July 14th witnessed major celebrations throughout France. Bastille Day, 1945 was the first opportunity for the French to celebrate this event since the liberation of Paris from the Germans. The reveling was beyond description. The truck driver had considerable difficulty in getting his passengers back on the truck for the return to Camp New York. Reporting in before curfew was critical. Curfew breakers lost many privileges, including that important Paris pass.
In late July, the truck driver was ordered to report to his Commanding Officer. With considerable trepidation, he promptly responded to the summons. Sensing his discomfort, the CO put the truck driver at ease and handed him an armband containing sergeant’s stripes. A very surprised truck driver accepted the stripes which identified him as “acting sergeant”. The company’s long time motor sergeant, a career soldier, was being sent to the States on furlough. He had recommended the truck driver be selected to fill that position. Without saying, the truck driver was quite appreciative of the new assignment.
Even though the armband designated “acting sergeant”, the truck driver was officially a Private First Class. The CO stated that all promotions were frozen until further notice. So the truck driver had the authority without additional pay. Some benefits came with the armband, including private quarters and being relieved of driving his truck on that evening trip to Paris, now riding in the passenger’s seat. He also was on 24 hour duty as the chief dispatcher of the company’s trucks to meet incoming troops at the rail station. Although with new duties, the acting motor sergeant would always be a truck driver at heart.
In early August, 1945, the truck driver and his buddies heard welcome news: two week furloughs were announced. They had the choice of the French Riviera or Switzerland. The truck driver selected Switzerland because he wanted to buy Swiss watches for his family. The soldiers were permitted to carry a maximum of $100. The reason given for this limit was to avoid inflating the Swiss economy with a sudden influx of American dollars.
The vacationing troops entered Switzerland at Basel and had a fabulous journey on the famous Swiss electric railways. Beautiful snow-capped mountains, verdant valleys and brilliant blue lakes were beheld by the travelers. What a contrast to the war torn cities of France and Belgium! Their final destination was the resort city of Wengen at the base of the famous Mt. Jungfrau.
Those two weeks in the Swiss Alps were amazing in many ways. The food and accommodations in the resort’s chateau were more than first class. The picturesque Alps could not be described in ordinary language. The snowy summit of Jungfrau was reached by an underground two mile cog railway. The truck driver celebrated his 22nd birthday on August 9th, 1945 on the peak of the mountain. He and his friend, Floyd, were photographed holding snowballs in August. They were standing on “The Top of Europe”.
The most astounding event on this trip was earth shaking news from the Pacific. The vacationing troops heard that bombs as powerful as 20,000 tons of dynamite had been dropped on two Japanese cities! The secret atom bomb had been unleashed!
Speculation was rampant. Would Japan surrender? Would this war finally end? Would the troops come home soon?
Returning from Switzerland, the truck driver heard more news: JAPAN SURRENDERED! The official ceremony would be held on the battleship Missouri on the 2nd of September. The Army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, contained pictures of great jubilation throughout the U.S. Times Square in New York City was the scene of parades, dancing in the streets and servicemen kissing available females.
Now the mission of the military quickly changed. A program for troops to return to the States for discharge from service was put in place. Points were awarded for total months of service, months of overseas service, designated awards and honors and specific battle campaigns. The truck driver learned that his Combat Infantryman’s Badge was worth considerable points.
With separation from service imminent, the troops realized they would be leaving their buddies. Tight bonds of friendship were formed when soldiers fought the enemy. They began discussing plans to continue those friendship ties as civilians. One method was to form an association of veterans that would hold reunions in years ahead. The truck driver was invited to participate in an association planning meeting of 75th Infantry Division troops. The two day meeting was convened at the French city of Chalons sur Marne. Returning to his Company, the truck driver explained the purpose of his trip. He began enrolling his buddies in the fledgling 75th Infantry Division Veterans Association.
Late December, 1945, found the truck driver on the first stage of his journey home. His accumulated service points placed him at the French port of LeHarve. “Camp Lucky Strike” was the assembly point for troops awaiting home-bound ships.
January 7, 1946 dawned. The truck driver boarded the “Gustavus Victory” for the Atlantic voyage. This Victory ship had huge rusty areas on its hull from many months of sea duty. Regardless of appearance, the vessel was heading in the right direction—home. Crossing the north Atlantic in January was an unforgettable cruise. Huge waves caused the small Victory ship to toss and tumble. The vessel seemed to ride over the top of every wave instead of slicing through the water.
Suffering considerable seasickness, the truck driver wondered if this journey would ever end. The troops had difficulty eating from their trays. Every time the ship rolled to one side, the food trays would careen to the low end of the counter. The next roll would bring them crashing back at high speed with food flying everywhere. The Army’s famous Spam was the main food item. The truck driver promptly lost his appetite for Spam—for years to come. He sought out a bunk in the deep hold of the ship. The pitching and tossing was tolerable in this location. Seasickness was soon forgotten. Next stop was the United States!
As “Gustavus Victory” approached the States, the truck driver yearned to see the Statue of Liberty again. He recalled “Wave Goodbye to the Lady” as his outfit departed New York harbor in October, 1944. He was prepared to lead more cheers upon sighting the Lady after fifteen months in Europe.
This Statue of Liberty sighting did not happen. The Victory ship came into port in New Jersey. Not seeing the Lady was just fine with the truck driver. He was now on American soil. Several hours later, he entrained for his separation center—Camp Grant near Rockford in northern Illinois.
Twelve hours on the Illinois-bound train afforded the truck driver considerable thinking time. Those thoughts first focused on his youth and the events leading to his military service. He recalled his father relating that World War 1 had not resolved the problem with Germany. While the Armistice of 1918 stopped that war, Germany was rearming under Hitler’s guidance. (Story #1.Bells of 11/11).
The bombing of Pearl Harbor and the launching of World War 2 was the second highlight. (#2. That Sunday in December). In a few months he was inducted into the military. His 75th Infantry Division headed for Europe. (#3. Wave Goodbye to the Lady). After arriving in Europe, that war took a turn. (#4. A Sudden Change of Plans). Hitler made a desperate move. (#5. Into the Heat of Battle). The war in Europe was finally over. (# 6. The Year 1945: More War? World Peace?) and finally (#7. The End…The Beginning) was in progress as the truck driver was approaching the end of his military service. (See Summary of Stories).
More recollections came to the truck driver while on that train. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean bound for Europe; driving into the dark and threatening Belgium battle front; freezing in the Ardennes cold and snow; retrieving the snow-covered bodies of fallen comrades; dining with Manny Knoops’ family in their Dutch home; milking the farmer’s cows in the war zone; seeing German children begging for leftover food; the trips to Paris; celebrating his 22nd birthday on the top of a Swiss mountain; the news of Victory in Europe and the surrender of Japan.
Completing several days of routine checkups, including physical exams, the truck driver was honorably discharged from military service. Length of service was three years minus five days. He boarded a train to Chicago, then another train to Springfield, Illinois. From there, a short Trailways bus ride brought the veteran to Jacksonville, Illinois where his family met him with open arms. His brother and sister had certainly grown in those three years. Brother Jim was now in high school, sister Evelyn was preparing to enter nurses training.
After a heartfelt family reunion with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, the veteran pondered options for his future. Should he resume his education at the University of Illinois? He had completed three semesters at Illinois in pre-veterinarian studies. Another option was to enroll at Illinois College in Jacksonville in a liberal arts curriculum. The “G I Bill” would pay for his education. College classes would start next fall, so it might be a good idea to find a job for the next seven months.
The veteran learned that two friends from a neighboring farm had recently received their discharges. On a cold January day, he drove over to see the Albers brothers, Russ and Jim. Russ had been stationed in the Pacific Theater for four years and most recently in the Philippine Islands. He had served those four years without having a home furlough since his induction in 1942. The bitter January weather in Illinois was a drastic contrast to the tropics of the Philippines. Russ spent several days hovering around the big heating stove in his family’s living room. His body was slowly becoming adjusted to the winter climes.
Russ’s brother, Jim, had returned from Air Corps duty in North Africa and Italy. The three veterans shared “war stories” and experiences while in the military. The Albers brothers’ goals were establish their own farming operations. Their father was an excellent farmer and had imparted those traits to his sons.
Back in the living room of his Illinois farm home, the ex-truck driver/veteran began the serious task of charting his future. His first goal was to purchase an automobile. To pay for this vehicle, he had deducted a war savings bond each month from his military pay. Perhaps the pages of his future would unfold in coming weeks. He was truly beginning a new life.
Finally, he was most thankful that the Lord has seen him safely through the events of the past three years.
Truck driver/veteran/narrator:
Frank Chambers, Cannon Company, 291st Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division
Dates and places of military significance were verified in official records relating to the 75th Infantry Division.
Frank’s comments: This concludes seven stories relating to my military service in World War Two. I dedicate the series to my wife, Doris, to my daughter and son-in-law, Marjorie and Bruce Duffield, and to my grandsons, Andrew and Timothy Duffield and their respective families. This is in memory of our beloved son, John Chambers, 1956-1984.
I also wish to honor the memory of my father, Wm. J. Chambers, who served in France in World War One with the US 58th Balloon Company, American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). He, too, was a military truck driver.
Final personal comment: My wife, Doris (Albers) and I were married in 1951. Doris is the sister of my neighbor friends, Russ and Jim Albers, mentioned in this final story.
The evening of December 17th was much like any other for John and the other paratroopers at Camp Mourmellon. It was cold and rainy (Critchell 210), so the guys in John’s barracks probably gathered around the inadequate coal stove in the barracks to play cards, dice, and pass those long, dark hours of the early evening. Some of them probably turned in early to escape the weight of the cold. As the night wore on, more and more of them settled into their bunks. The evening ended no differently than any of the others, the barracks dark and quiet save for the snores of sleeping men.
It must have been nearly morning when were awakened by booming voice of one of the C Company sergeants. “Fall out!” he shouted to the paratroopers as they sat up in the half-darkness, no doubt wondering if it was some kind of joke. “We’re going back into combat,” he announced. ‘The Germans broke through and they’re headed this way. Grab all the ammunition you can get.”
John must have been shocked. Headed this way? The Germans were on the run, and the war was all but over. What in the hell was going on? He quickly dressed, and threw his gear together. It didn’t take long, because he didn’t have much; whoever was in charge of supplies had also assumed that the war was nearly over, and the 101st had not been re-supplied with anything. His raincoat was the warmest piece of clothing he had, so he put that on, shouldered his rifle and pack, and headed out.
They milled around outside as they waited for the troop trucks to arrive. “Where in the hell are we going?” a paratrooper asked, his breath billowing in the cold morning air.
“To a town called Bastogne, in Belgium,” one of the officers answered. “Orders are to hold the town at all costs.”
When the trucks finally arrived, they climbed in and began the long drive into Belgium. There must have been slow going at times, with the long line of trucks backing up and stopping as they passed through towns and crossed bridges. When they were in the open country, they would have moved faster, and the paratroopers, huddled in the open beds of the trucks, did their best to ignore the throbbing cold. John was glad he had hung onto his raincoat; some guys had nothing but their jumpsuits. Some didn’t even have rifles.
Darkness fell, and they kept driving. In the cold and the dark, John would not have noticed when the convoy crossed the border into Belgium, but he must have noticed when all the trucks turned off their headlights. They were at Bouillon, Belgium, and though few of them could have read the sign and known that, they certainly knew that they were getting close. The trucks rattled on in the darkness.
After some time, the convoy slowed and stopped dead. While sitting and idling in the dark, the exhaust of John’s truck pluming in the headlights of the truck behind, they heard a commotion of voices approaching from in front of the convoy. As they peered into the darkness, they could see the silhouettes of hunched, exhausted men shuffling toward them out of the darkness. John and the others would have quickly recognized that they were American soldiers, but it may have taken them a few seconds to realize that they were retreating from whatever the 101st was headed toward.
Paratroopers were climbing out of the trucks ahead and taking whatever ammunition and supplies the retreating soldiers had left. John and the guys in his truck did the same. The soldiers willingly surrendered their ammunition, and some even gave up their rifles to paratroopers who needed them. “Where are you going?” one of the retreating soldiers asked.
“We’re going to meet the Germans,” a paratrooper responded.
‘There are thousands of them,” one of the retreating soldiers said, “and they have tanks.”
“We have these secret can openers,” one of the paratroopers responded. “We’ll just jump on the tanks, open them up, and take the Germans out.” The retreating soldiers probably didn’t laugh.
The trucks continued on. Progress must have been slow as they encountered more and more retreating soldiers, shuffling up the dark road like dazed refugees. Each time the trucks stopped, John and the others would hop down and take whatever ammunition the soldiers were willing to part with. Many of them, exhausted and shell-shocked from the sudden attack, were happy to give up every round they had left. As John climbed back onto the truck and watched them limp off into the darkness, he must have wondered what he was heading into.
After what must have been several more stops and starts, they were finally given the order to disembark. After grabbing their meager packs and climbing out of the trucks, they would have stood at the edge of the road, grateful to be out of the cramped truck beds, waiting for the next order. The countryside around them was open, though they would not have been able to make out anything more in the misty dark. If John expected a night march, he was surprised when the order came: they were to bivouac where they were for the remainder of the night (Critchell 214).
The weather was cold and wet, so it could not have been a restful night. As the eastern sky finally began to brighten, the officers ordered them up and onto the road. As tired as he must have felt after the long truck ride and his few hours of fitful sleep, John must have been happy to be moving. The 1st Battalion of the 501st – A, B, and C Companies – was to move through town and push up Longvilly Road into the outlying countryside (214). They marched through town, which must have been dark and shrouded in fog, and passed an intersection as they emerged into the countryside. After marching for quite a while, they were ordered to turn around and head back toward town; they had taken the wrong road (Rappaport and Norwood 444). They marched back to the intersection, and took the other road.
As they marched, John must have been struck with how much C Company had changed since those early days in the States. Bobby Harwell had not been with them since the jump in Normandy. Francis Beavers and Lieutenant Jansen were no longer there. There were several new faces, including a fellow named Barney Momcilovich, who had transferred to C Company, and who John liked quite a lot. Most noticeable of all. Captain Phillips was not there. Without him, it must have felt like a different company altogether. Still, many of John’s old friends were still there. Bill DeHuff, John Simmons, and Hank Centrella were all there. So were Harold Paulsen and Emo Cassidy. That wasn’t bad for a company that had seen so much combat. Longvilly Road led them into a wide valley broken by sparse stands of spruce (Critchell 215). Low hills, still blurred with fog, rose to their left (Rappaport and Norwood 445), and to their left, the road ended at the edge of a small gully, in which they could hear the burbling of a creek (446). They would have walked along quietly, scanning the distance ahead, but seeing little besides the uncertain contours of the hills and dark shapes of trees. On a sunny day in peacetime, it would have been a lovely place, but as the dark shapes of trees loomed out of the gray mist, with the Wehrmacht somewhere just ahead of them, it must have felt more like a scene from a Bela Lugosi movie.
The crash of machine gun fire splintered the quiet, sending everyone to the ground. Up ahead, they could make out the shapes of two Mark IV tanks on the road ahead (Critchell 216), and could see the muzzle flashes of machine guns through the fog. After several uncertain minutes, during which they must have sporadically returned fire, they were ordered them to deploy across the open hillside to their left (Rappaport and Norwood 446). They managed to do this without a great deal of trouble – no doubt some of 1st Battalion’s machine guns and mortars were laying down suppressing fire -but as they tried to probe forward toward the German position, it quickly became apparent that they were not going to be able to crack it. It was also apparent, however, that the Germans could not move forward either. They dug in and waited.
At nightfall, they shifted position (Critchell 219). C company moved into a wooded area just off the road and began to establish their new position. John was with Simmons, so the two of them began digging. Though John must have been happy to be up and moving, and warming up a little, the digging could not have been easy. The soil in any woodlot is woven through with sinewy roots, so any digging is a combination of shoveling, chopping, and pulling. As they dug, a few soldiers from the 28th Infantry Division and other outfits that had been overrun by the German onslaught, may have approached their lines. Many were dazed and listless, and wanted nothing more than to leave the fighting behind them, but some of them, after a tin of rations and a cigarette, asked where they should dig in (Rappaport and Norwood 475).
The weather grew colder through the night, but the ferocious attack that many of them must have expected did not materialize. As news began to trickle in the following morning, John and the others must have begun to understand the larger, strategic picture. The Germans had launched a counterattack that had taken everyone by surprise. Bastogne was at a crossroads that the Germans needed to control if they were to continue their advance. The 101st had arrived just in time. There had been pitched engagements all around Bastogne the previous day, but the 101st had kept the Germans out of Bastogne. Their job, for however long it took, was to keep doing the same thing until the Germans gave up or reinforcements arrived.
Captain Owens must have sent out patrols that morning to locate the German positions, but John must have spent most of the time in his foxhole, shivering, cursing, and scanning the distance for the attack he knew was coming. As the day wore on, other bad news trickled in. Company I, of the 3rd Battalion, had been completely wiped out the previous day in a village named Wardin (Critchell 220). They had driven a handful of Germans from the village and begun to solidify their position when the Germans hit the village with a force of tanks and a battalion of infantrymen. Only a handful of men made it back to Bastogne; the rest, including the CO, Captain Wallace, never made it out. Another piece of bad news, even more troubling to John, also arrived that day:
Father Sampson was missing. He had left Bastogne in a jeep to aid some wounded paratroopers on the outskirts of town, but had not returned (Grayson).
The attack did not come until 7 PM that night (Critchell 227). John must have crouched in his foxhole as the tree bursts cascaded through the forest, as splintered limbs spun to the ground, shells exploded thickly in the snow, and terrified cries for a medic filled the short silences between bursts. When the barrage slackened, John must have steadied his rifle on the bank of dirt in front of his foxhole, looked down the barrel and waited until an uneven line of white silhouettes advanced through the haze, picking their way through the rubble of trees and battered ground. The paratroopers’ ammunition was limited, so they would have waited as bullets snapped through the air and chipped into trees, until the Germans were within range. Then, the crackle of small arms fire, and the clatter of machine gup fire, would have washed down the line. Some of the figures must have spun violently and toppled to the ground, thrashing and kicking, while others slowly sank to their knees, slumped forward and lay still, as if sleeping. The other German soldiers would have dived for cover, returned fire, and moved forward again, as C Company’s mortars flashed and plumed around them.
The fight went on for hours. The Germans would have fallen back several times to regroup, after which the cries of the wounded quickly filled the silence that the guns had left behind. It would not have surprised John to see a man staggering armless through the trees, or another lying helpless in the frozen pine duff, slowly suffocating on his own blood. Others were not wounded as severely, and sat quietly, numbly awaiting a medic. It must have felt much like the orchard battle in Holland, only colder, and even more desperate.
John, like most soldiers, viewed a wounded man with a mixture of pity, relief, and envy: pity for his pain and terror; relief that it was someone besides himself who was wounded; and envy that, should that man recover and be shipped home, he would no longer have to suffer and kill. He may have left his foxhole to help the medics who were sprinting back and forth through the woods. He would have helped to slide them onto stretchers and hoist them into the backs of jeeps, so they could be transported to the aid station in town. After the jeeps left, the woods would fall quiet, and John would be left with the dead. As he walked back to his foxhole, John would have seen men lying huddled in their foxholes, as if sleeping, while others lay sprawled on the ground, staring blankly into the treetops.
During those interludes, John would have been able to hear the muted boom and clatter of engagements to his left and to his right. The Germans were attacking all along the line. The heaviest volume of fire was to John’s right, along the road where they had first encountered the Germans. Over and over, the sound of gunfire and artillery swelled and ebbed as the Germans advanced and the paratroopers drove them back. There were several artillery pieces in Bastogne that were zeroed in on the road, so the whoosh and thump of shells must have punctuated the clangor of machine gun and small arms fire.
The attacks finally ceased at midnight (230). John and the others would not have known that immediately, and would have kept waiting for the next wave of attackers. Finally, however, as the night wore on, they would have decided that it was over and tried to sleep, huddling in their foxholes, shivering in their meager clothing as the uneasy silence closed in around them.
The following morning, it began to snow. John was used to snow-there was usually snow on the ground in Rochester from late November until March – but in the current circumstances, he couldn’t have welcomed yet another dimension of misery. As the snow began to collect on the ground, some of the men went out on patrol, while the rest waited in their foxholes, scanning the distance as the snowy haze thickened like some white glaucoma. As the day wore on, some guys returned wearing white bed sheets they had cut and stitched into makeshift ponchos. Little happened that day. The snow continued to fall, and John and the others continued to wait.
At 5:25 PM, the shriek and whump of nearby artillery broke the silence (Rappaport and Norwood 515). John would have been able to tell that the Germans were shelling the American position immediately to the right of the 501st. He must have been grateful that the shells weren’t falling on him, but he certainly felt for the guys who were at the receiving end of the barrage. Gunfire broke out soon after as the Germans began to advance. As the battle ebbed and flowed, John and Simmons must have scanned the trees and braced for an attack on their sector. They both must have known that if the Germans failed to break through quickly, they would shift their attack to another sector, and that could very well be theirs.
An attack did come, but not the overwhelming assault they were expecting. Given the poor visibility, the Germans must have been close before John and the others were able to see them, but once their silhouettes appeared through the curtain of snowfall, C Company’s machine guns and mortars quickly drove them back. There were several more probing attacks along the 501st main line of resistance throughout the night (Critchell 234), but the paratroopers drove them all back. The main thrust of the attack was clearly to their right.
The fighting, and the snow, continued into the night. In between attacks, John and Simmons must have tracked the sounds of battle anxiously, hoping that the clangor of battle would not drop too far behind them, a sure sign that the Germans were breaking through. Fortunately, the Germans did not break through, and the clamor of battle finally faded into the silence of the nighted woods. John and Simmons settled in to doze and shiver as the bodies of fallen Germans in the woods before them faded into the snowy ground.
As the feeble winter sunrise began to brighten the snowy murk of the forest, John and the others began to stir from their foxholes. Normandy had been brutal and difficult, but at least it had been warm. He had thought those last weeks in Holland were cold and miserable, but as John huddled in his foxhole with nothing but a raincoat to ward off the bitter, Belgian winter, he must have felt almost nostalgic the mud and rain that he had endured on that miserable spit of land north of Nijmegan. The throbbing cold made the simplest task difficult, if not or impossible. Opening a can of K-rations, retying a boot lace, or feeding rounds into a clip with thick, numb hands could be infuriatingly difficult.
Clambering out of the foxhole to take a leak, especially on windy nights, was a hellish ordeal. Water froze in the men’s canteens, making it tough to even take a drink. Many of the men shuddered so violently all night that sleep was impossible. Add to this the fact that each man’s body, in its struggle to continue generating heat, was consuming more calories than he was able to eke out of his thin rations, and one can imagine the deep, bone-weary fatigue that afflicted each soldier, and added to his suffering.
As the day wore on and the snow continued to fall, news began to make its way up and down the lines. Some of it was good. The outfit to John’s right was the 2nd Battalion of the 327th Glider Regiment, and it had held its ground through the night against that fierce attack that John and Simmons had heard. Patton’s 4th Armored Division was fighting its way toward Bastogne, and was expected to arrive within a few days (Rappaport and Norwood 528). Other news was not so cheerful. Though it could not have been surprising, the news that they were surrounded could not have been welcome (502). Athough they had held out thus far, ammunition was running dangerously low (527). As determined as they were to hold out, they couldn’t hold off the Germans without bullets and artillery shells. If they weren’t re-supplied soon, the gig would be up.
As the afternoon began to fade into evening, another piece of news reached them: The Germans had asked General McAuliffe to surrender, and he had refused. The idea that the Germans thought the 101st was ready to surrender must have seemed ludicrous to John, given that every attack the Germans had launched at Bastogne had failed, but that only made General McAuliffe’s response that much more amusing. The note that he sent to the Germans had only one word: “Nuts!”
The men’s mood was lightened further when they awoke on the morning of the 23rd to a clear, frigid day. Each of them knew, as soon as they saw the blue sky, that it was finally clear enough for Allied planes to reach Bastogne and re-supply them. It wasn’t long before they heard the drone of American and British fighter planes. John, Simmons, and the others must have cheered as the fighters swooped in, strafing and bombing the German positions relentlessly. Even if John wasn’t able to see them through the trees, he was able to hear rattle of the guns and the hiss of rockets from the Typhoons, and feel the dull concussions of the bombs (Critchell 239). All around Bastogne, the paratroopers must have cheered wildly.
Around 11:50, they heard the low roar of hundreds of C-47 supply planes (240). As the fighters continued to strafe and bomb, the C-47s came in low to drop the supplies and equipment that the 101st so desperately needed. Some men from C Company may have been selected to report to the drop zone and help with retrieval. Throughout the day, as parachutes plumed down onto the drop zone by the hundreds, the paratroopers hauled and sorted equipment as the fighters continued to pound the German positions. By nightfall, they had the food and ammunition that they had been waiting for. They also had blankets, which must have been most welcome of all.
The next day, Christmas Eve, the equipment drops continued. John must have heard that two sticks of Pathfinders had landed and set up radar beacons, which continued to guide the planes in to Bastogne and to the drop zone (Killblane). As the supplies grew, so must have their confidence. Properly supplied, they could take anything the Germans threw at them.
The equipment certainly cheered everyone up, but the fact that it was Christmas, and he was not only far away from home, but fighting a desperate battle in the frozen woods still made John depressed and miserable. He and a few buddies decorated a scrubby spruce with foil from their cigarette packs, lids from their K-ration tins, empty shell casings, anything that could brighten up the bleak landscape of drifting snow, steel-gray sky and ravaged forest. While the pleasant work of trimming the tree distracted John temporarily, he still faced those long hours in the foxhole, with nothing to do but think of all those Christmases in Rochester, of the snow falling outside a window steamed with the warmth of people chattering and laughing over hand after hand of penny-ante poker while a heavy pot of sauce bubbled on the stove. Sometime after eleven o’clock, everyone would leave to sit through the sleepy solemnity of midnight mass, after which they would return home again to fry skillet after skillet of Italian sausage, drink homemade wine, and play more poker until the sky grayed with impending dawn. A few hours of sleep and then Christmas morning, followed by another feast in the early afternoon, this time of spaghetti, meatballs, Italian bread and ham. The cold K-rations, the stiff slices of Spam and the gummy cheese that John subsisted on at Bastogne were a pathetic substitute for those Christmas feasts that he had always taken for granted.
The Germans tried to take advantage of that homesickness. Sometime during the day on Christmas Eve, John heard the whine of incoming 88s. They all would have dived for their foxholes, and braced themselves for the inevitable crash and boom of exploding shells. Instead, there was nothing. All duds? Then papers began sluicing down on them. Propaganda flyers. One had a picture of a little girl. “Daddy, I’m so afraid,” it said underneath. Next to the picture was a note intended to make the men homesick: their families and sweethearts missed them; Christmas was a time to be with those people, not in no-man’s land so far away from home. “Man, have you thought about it, what if you don’t come back… what of those loved ones?” the note ended. “Well soldier, PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TOWARDS MEN… for where there’s a will there’s a way… only 500 yards ahead and MERRY CHRISTMAS.” (Rappaport and Norwood 544).
John was not quite homesick enough to surrender to the Germans. The other paratroopers felt pretty much the same way.
That night, John and Simmons were allowed to leave their foxhole and find someplace to warm up. The men rotated in and out like that regularly, a few at a time, so that everyone would have a chance to stop shivering for a short while, and perhaps even have something hot to eat or drink. As John and Simmons toward town, they came upon a small cluster of houses, one of which had smoke curling from the chimney. The windows were dimly lighted, and they could probably hear the quiet mutter of voices inside. One thing was certain: it was a lot warmer inside that house than outside on the road. John and Simmons walked up to the door and opened it.
The house was filled with Belgian civilians. John and Simmons couldn’t have been the first soldiers who had come upon that house and gone inside to escape the cold, so the civilians would not have been overly startled to see them, and probably welcomed them inside. There were people in every room, including the basement, so John and Simmons may have had to shift around to find a few feet of floor space. Once they did, however, they must have felt like they were in heaven. The fire in the hearth and the warmth of all those huddled bodies must have made the house luxuriously warm, at least in comparison to their foxhole in the woods. As exhausted as he was, John may have dozed off as he sat there listening to the quiet chatter of the civilians and the crackle and hiss of the fireplace.
The shriek and thump of distant artillery suddenly broke through the quiet. John would have been able to tell instantly that the Germans were shelling Bastogne. If he counted himself lucky to be on the outskirts of town, that luck suddenly swirled down the drain as the whine of one of those distant shells crescendoed into a deafening shriek. A booming crash, as the windows flashed and rattled and the civilians cried out in fear. Through the window, John could see that the house next door had taken a direct hit. John and Simmons excused themselves and headed back to their foxhole. As nice as the warmth was, it was not worth a direct hit by an 88.
The shelling continued into the night as John shivered and cursed in his foxhole. It must have seemed an apt way to celebrate Christmas in what seemed like an increasingly brutal and futile war. When in the hell would it end? France was free, Hitler had been on the run, and the end had seemed near. Now they were stuck in some godforsaken woods outside of some little town in Belgium, surrounded by the Germans and battling hypothermia just as hard as they were battling the Wehrmacht.
There were no major attacks on Christmas, but as John crouched in his foxhole and scanned snowy distances, he could not have felt cheerful. The homesickness that he felt that first Christmas back in Toccoa must have seemed almost quaint to him. That Christmas he had been safe and warm, and had enjoyed a nice dinner with that kind waitress and her family. This Christmas there was no comfort of any kind, only the relentless snow, the seething cold, and the constant threat of the Wehrmacht just beyond the distance.
December 27th arrived like any other day, the distant sunrise blowing its dusty light across the clouded sky, whirlwinds of snow roaming through the creaking trees. A pretty picture, John may have thought, except for the cold and the corpses. John and Simmons rotated to the roadside and took over a foxhole there.
Late in the day, as John was pacing the edge of the road while Simmons huddled in their nearby foxhole shivering over a cigarette, John heard what sounded like a distant rumble. At first, he thought it might be planes, or the wind rising into another damn storm, but as it deepened into a steady thrum, John realized that something was coming up the road. Soon, a dark shape became visible up the road behind him, followed by another dark shape, and then another. Tanks. They were Shermans, and they were moving out of Bastogne. The lead tank stopped a hundred or so feet up the road as a soldier stepped into the road.
“Come out and be recognized,” a soldier up the road shouted.
A man’s head popped out of the turret. “We’re 4th Armored,” he shouted through a cloud of breath.
“The road’s mined,” the soldier on the ground replied. “We have to clear them.”
The tanker nodded and dropped back into the tank. As men began to emerge from the tanks and the woods, milling about and talking as they prepared to clear the road, John watched a man, clearly an officer, climb from the third tank in the line and stride up the roadside toward him. The officer stopped in front of the foxhole and scowled down at Simmons, who was hunched in the same spot he had been before the tanks’ arrival.
“Soldier,” the officer barked, “what are you doing in that hole?”
John studied the man’s face intently. He looked awfully damn familiar. As his gaze shifted from the officer’s face, John noticed that the man was wearing an ivory-handed revolver on each hip.
“If you were here, sir, you’d still be digging,” Simmons replied. He obviously had no idea who he was talking to.
“Bah!” The officer spat into the snow. “If you guys keep moving, you don’t have to dig holes.” He spun and stalked off.
“Do you know who that was?” John asked as he watched the man disappear up the road.
“No,” Simmons replied.
“That was Patton.”
Simmons’ face went ashen. “Patton?” he stood up and strained to get another look, but the general was gone. “I’m lucky he didn’t slap me silly.”
Patton rode victoriously into Bastogne that afternoon while infantry dug in along the road in order to ensure a safe corridor into the town. John must have been ecstatic. They were no longer surrounded, and supplies and reinforcements could finally be brought through. There must have been a good deal of celebration along the line that night.
Despite Patton’s breakthrough, however, John’s day-to-day situation changed little. While food, ammunition, medical supplies and, most welcome of all, winter gear, finally began to flow into Bastogne, the Germans kept resolutely to their foxholes on the thick hillsides, and continued to harass the beleaguered town. Thus, when Patton moved on, the corridor was secure, but the surrounding countryside was not. Since no one had arrived to replace the 101st, the exhausted paratroopers stayed on the line.
The days wore on, each seeming colder and more endless than the last. They must have patrolled extensively, in order to map the German positions and track their movements as closely as possible. When they weren’t patrolling, they must have spent most of their time huddled in their foxholes, waiting for their turn to plod into town to warm up for a few hours.
The Graves Registration Service had begun to collect bodies (Rappaport and Norwood 600), but they had a lot of work ahead of them, as the dead were everywhere by then. John had gotten used to living with the dead a long time ago. A corpse was simply that: a corpse. John, like so many others, did his best to ignore the dead, to think of the stiff, broken men who lay scattered throughout the woods as little more than windfall. Some men managed to find humor in the human waste: the trail to C Company’s command post had been stomped out next to a frozen German who lay in the snow with his arm outstretched, as if he were reaching toward the treetops; someone had attached a small sign to his crooked fingers, which read, “CP ->.”
Sometimes, however, the position of a body, the expression on a dead man’s face, would remind John that the litter of corpses had once been men. One gusty afternoon, John was sent out on patrol. They spread out and began moving toward the German line, stooping and crawling beneath low branches, ducking between narrow places in the brush, painfully aware of how easily a musette bag or ammunition belt could snag a limb and upset the delicate balance of snow piled high on the tree’s branches; the cascading snow could easily be seen from German lines, and would probably bring on a crushing artillery strike. Unfortunately, their caution made tittle difference. John had just dropped to his knees in order to snake beneath some low brush when he heard the unmistakable shriek of incoming artillery.
The first salvo smashed into the treetops. John must have been able to hear the hum of blood coursing through his head as he dashed forward in a crouching run, frantically searching the snowy ground for a foxhole, a ditch, anything to protect him from the tree-bursts. He would have been able to feel the air shudder with each explosion, hear the whistle of shrapnel as it sawed through the air and thudded into the ground. He also must have been able to see the pulverized bodies of every friend and enemy who had been hit by a shell.
A helmet at ground level ahead of him. John took a deep breath of searing cold air, and sprinted for the foxhole as an avalanche of explosions rolled at him through the trees. The creak of a falling tree, a distant shriek, and John was wedged next to another soldier in a shallow shell-hole. As John shouldered himself between the other man and the side of the hole, he grabbed the man’s shoulder and shook him. “Buddy, give me a little room,” John shouted above the roar of artillery.
The soldier slumped forward, and his head fell heavily against the side of the hole. He was dead. Unlike the tortured looks that John had seen in the faces of most dead, there was a sad, tired expression in this man’s eyes. One of his legs had been blown off at the knee. His pant leg had frozen into a tangled nest of bloody tatters, from which a sharp splinter of bone protruded. His arms were clasped tightly to his chest, as if he were still trying to keep warm.
He had been caught beneath an artillery attack just like John was now. It may have been American artillery, or perhaps a stray German shell had hit him as he advanced on the American line or made his way through the snow back to the safety of his own foxhole. Whatever kind of shell it was, it had landed practically at his feet. He probably cried out for a medic, cried out to anyone who could hear him, and finally crawled into a shell hole as the last of his comrades disappeared into the trees. He must have hoped that he would live long enough for somebody to find him. The soldier must have died alone from blood loss and hypothermia long before anyone realized he was missing. As another salvo echoed off through the woods, John leapt out of the shell hole to seek shelter elsewhere.
There were some rare moments of levity. On another patrol, after they came under fire and dived into the snow, they began firing and advancing on the German’s position. John was toward the rear of the group, most likely covering some of the others as they advanced. Lieutenant DeFelice was just ahead of John, and as he scrambled forward, John saw some bullets plume into the snow next to him. As John watched, the back of DePelice’s pants began to smoke, and then burst into flame at the edge of one of his buttocks. A bullet had grazed his pocket and hit his cigarette lighter. John burst into laughter.
Defelice, still unaware that his pants were on fire, heard John and turned. “What in the hell are you laughing at, Cipolla?” he asked.
“Sir,” John replied, still convulsing with laughter, “your ass is on fire!”
Defelice promptly rolled in the snow to put the fire out, and continued advancing.
As Patton pushed on, the fighting continued around Bastogne. John must have been numb by this point, not just from the cold, but from the deadly repetition of battle. He must have lost count of the times he fired at shapes moving through the trees, or fired into the cold mist as the bazooka teams moved forward. Every time the shells slammed down around him and ripped through the treetops, sending white-hot shrapnel spinning down onto the foxholes. Men screamed and cursed in English and German. At every instant, death was only a split second away, but each time John somehow managed to survive, and each time they managed to beat the Germans back. As the battles ground on, and the cold tightened its grip on the countryside, John must have wondered how much more he could take.
One night, shortly after Christmas, it nearly broke him.
John shuddered into wakefulness as Simmons slid into the foxhole next to him. He hadn’t really been asleep – he couldn’t remember the last time he had truly slept -but the combination of cold, fatigue and hunger had dazed him into a bleary stupor. He hunched forward, straightened, and climbed out of the foxhole, his feet thick and numb, as Simmons pulled on his raincoat, hugged his knees to his chest, and settled in for his hour of rest. John stomped his feet, took a deep, shuddering breath of cold air, and started circling the foxhole. This was the routine on outpost: an hour of pacing and watching, followed by another hour in the hole listening to Simmons huffing and muttering, and then back out, again and again through the dawn.
A whisper of movement. John stopped his pacing, knelt down behind a tree and peered into the tangle of shadows beyond the outpost. He could see the dark shapes of broken limbs littering the ground, the silhouette of a dead German slumped against a tree, the curved back of a man curled totally in the snow. Nothing else. John waited, wondering if it had been a trick of the falling snow and shifting moonlight.
Then they were there: dark figures in long coats moving toward him through the trees. John heard the snap of his M-l unroll through the woods, felt the heavy stock slam into his shoulder, before he realized that he was firing. His sights had been dead on the lead figure, but instead of slumping into the snow, the man stopped, swayed drunkenly, and pressed on. John took a deep breath, set his bead directly beneath the man’s upper torso, and squeezed the trigger. This time the figure didn’t even waver.
“Did you get him?” Simmons was peering over the edge of the foxhole, frantically scanning the woods. Was he half asleep already? Why couldn’t he see them?
John steadied his breathing and fired two shots at a second figure. Nothing. John fired again, swallowed a wave of panic as his shot echoed uselessly through the woods and the figures moved closer and closer. Was something wrong with his ammunition? What the hell was wrong with Simmons? They were going to be overrun and killed, and Simmons still hadn’t fired a damn shot.
A hand on his shoulder. John spun around, half expecting a knife in the kidney, wondered how in the hell a German had gotten around behind him. It wasn’t a German. The man’s face was clearly visible in the pallid moonlight: it was the lieutenant.
“What the hell’s wrong Cipolla? What do you see?” Like Simmons, he peered into the woods as if he couldn’t see anything.
“Look,” John said. “Right in front of us.” He turned and pointed at the dark figures still shambling soundlessly toward them.
“What do you see?” the lieutenant squinted, darted a confused look at John.
“Germans!” John snapped. “They’re coming!” Why couldn’t anyone else see them? As John raised his rifle, he felt the lieutenant’s hand on his arm.
“You’re pretty cold and sleepy, aren’t you? You’re firing at trees.”
Trees? John swept his gaze across the woods, expecting to see the figures looming directly in front of him. They were gone. Where the lead figure had been, John could make out nothing but a narrow spruce sapling. The other figures, too, had dissolved into the uneven shapes of the forest. John lowered his rifle.
“I want you to go back to company headquarters and spend the night over there.” The lieutenant put his hand on John’s shoulder. “You’re just half-asleep and you’re seeing things.”
“I guess so,” John muttered. He rose and followed the lieutenant through the trees toward the main line of resistance and, beyond that, the relative warmth and security of headquarters. As John struggled to keep pace with the lieutenant, his legs aching with the effort of plunging through the deep snow, he realized that he was exhausted. A warm night away from the line would be a good thing. Although John was still confused about what he had or hadn’t seen, the sense of relief, which deepened with every step he took away from the line, drowned out anything else he might have been feeling. Within a few minutes of arriving at the CP, John was warm and asleep.
It wasn’t until the next day, when John awoke feeling more rested than he had been in weeks, that he felt embarrassed. As he returned to his hole, he found himself glancing at the other guys in the company, wondering if they knew. His shots must have woken every one of them up and put them on alert. He had seen men do things that were far worse, such as throwing their guns down and running away, but he still couldn’t help feeling like a nutcase.
He need not have worried. Everyone was in the same place, fighting fatigue and hypothermia and simply hoping that they could hold on. Though they could not have known it, the winter of 1944-45 was one of the coldest on record in the Ardennes. Everyone was suffering, soldiers and civilians alike.
1945 came in with a flourish as the American artillery hammered the German positions with a sustained artillery barrage (Rappaport and Norwood 612). John must have sat there listening to the hiss and roar of the barrage, and watching the dull flicker of the explosions through the trees. It was a little more than four years since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and it had been nearly three years since John had boarded the train forToccoa. He must have been aware of how much he had changed since then, how the training and the war had shaped him and transformed him into something more than the reckless young man he had been before the war. John had seen more combat than he ever imagined, and all of it had been within the past year. He must have felt as if he had lived an entire lifetime in 1944. John also must have hoped that 1945 would be the last year of the war. It could not have seemed likely just then, after nearly two weeks of desperate fighting, but John was so exhausted, so sick of fighting and killing, that another full Year of war must have seemed unimaginable.
Things were quiet in the first days of 1945. Although the paratroopers must have welcomed the quiet, it was apparently worrisome to the officers at Company Headquarters, because on the morning of January 3rd, one of C Company’s lieutenants knelt down at the edge of John’s foxhole and told him that he was going on a two-man patrol. The men on outpost had reported hearing voices and vehicles beyond a knoll that rose several hundred yards beyond the OP. The lieutenant suspected the Germans were planning an attack, so John was to take another man, climb the knoll, and report what he saw.
“Who’s going with me?” John asked. He ground his cigarette into the side of the foxhole and pulled the wool blanket more tightly around him.
“We’ll get you another man,” the lieutenant replied.
“Do I get to choose him?” John asked hopefully.
“No,” the lieutenant replied, rubbing his hands together vigorously, “we already got you a man.”
“Okay, who is he?” John asked suspiciously.
“He’s a replacement. Private Cutarus. I don’t know if you ran into him. He’s been staying close to Company Headquarters,” the lieutenant said absently.
John’s previous experience with patrols, particularly the bayonet fight in Holland, had given him a healthy respect for the dangers. The idea of approaching the German line with only an inexperienced replacement for backup scared the hell out of him. “No, I don’t know him,” John answered.
“We’ll get him over here,” the lieutenant said, turning. ‘Tell Cutarus to get over here,” he shouted into the woods. John stood up reluctantly, but kept the blanket draped over his shoulders
A moment later, a soldier stumbled out of the trees, looked around until he caught sight of the lieutenant, and started stomping toward John’s foxhole. He looked young, no more than eighteen or nineteen. It wasn’t so much his physical appearance that made him look young, but the expression on his face: he looked eager, which told John that he had not seen much in the way of combat
‘That the one?” John asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Yup,” the lieutenant nodded.
“Oh my God,” John meant to mutter under his breath, but the words came out louder than he intended.
The lieutenant spun his head around and smiled. “What’s the matter?”
“He just doesn’t look like somebody I’d like to have come with me on a patrol.”
“Well,” the lieutenant replied, reaching under his coat and pulling out a pack of cigarettes, “we picked him because he needs some combat experience.” He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and put it in his mouth. “I told you what the mission is, so you can explain it to Cutarus. He’s all yours.” He lit the cigarette and stood. ‘Take him somewhere away from the other men and brief him.”
“Okay,” John said. As the lieutenant headed back toward the CP, Cutarus came huffing up and stood, staring at John. Cutarus was lanky, his face dark and angular. John wadded up his blanket and climbed out of the foxhole. He clapped Cutarus on the shoulder. “Come on Cutarus, let’s go”
“Let’s go,” Cutarus nodded, and followed John as he headed toward a quiet place behind the foxholes.
John stopped in a small clearing a few hundred feet away and turned to Cutarus. “Cutarus, I’m John Cipolla,” he said.
“Ya. See-polla,” Cutarus replied, nodding.
“No, John Si-pole-uh,” John corrected him.
“See-polla,” he repeated.
“All right,” John said, reaching for a cigarette, “that’s good enough.” John studied Private Cutarus closely as he lit his cigarette. Not only was he young, but he just didn’t look like much of a soldier. He was slouched over, and his uniform was baggy and unkempt. John couldn’t imagine this untucked, uncoordinated kid moving faster than a slow shuffle, let alone fighting.
As John tucked his cigarettes back into his pocket, he realized that Cutarus was staring at him expectantly. “You know what we’re gonna have to do, don’t you?” John asked.
“No, I don’t know what we’re going to have to do,” Cutarus replied.
“We’re going on patrol.” John lit his cigarette.
“Patrol?”
“Yes, patrol.” John pointed. “See that clearing over there?” Several hundred yards beyond the line of foxholes, the trees opened into a wide clearing. Beyond the clearing, the sparsely wooded ground began to rise into a low knoll.
“Clearing?” Cutarus asked, sniffing.
“No trees, no nothing,” John explained, wondering how was he supposed to brief the kid if he didn’t speak English.
“Oh, yes.” Cutarus nodded, wiped his nose with his sleeve.
“We’re going to go past that clearing,” John explained. “Come here,” John said, pulling Cutarus next to him. “Look through these trees. See that knoll, “John pointed, “that hill?”
Cutarus nodded. “I see hill.”
“Beyond that hill, they expect there’s Germans there. There’s activity.”
“Activity?”
“Activity,” John repeated. He was too exhausted to feel frustrated. “Noises and movements. We’re gonna have to go over there and see what we can and come back and report it to our commanders.”
“Oh, yea,” Cutarus nodded excitedly, “report it to our commanders.”
John took a long pull on his cigarette and shook his head. “And Cutarus, do me a favor. Don’t repeat everything I tell you.”
John laughed, but it sounded more like a cough. “Where’s your weapon?” he asked.
“Weapon?”
“Your gun,” John said, feeling slightly like a thesaurus. “Boom boom. Your gun.”
“Oh, gun. Ya, ya,” Cutarus nodded, unslinging his rifle.
“Is it loaded?” John could see that there was no clip in the gun. Cutarus slid back the bolt to reveal that the chamber was empty. “Cutarus, load that gun,” John ordered.
As Cutarus pulled a clip out of his belt pouch and began fumbling with the rifle, John felt a rising wave of apprehension, which turned to alarm as Cutarus leveled the rifle at John’s chest while he struggled to load it. After a short lecture on gun safety, most of which Cutarus probably didn’t understand, he figured out how to work his weapon, and John went on with the briefing. “Now,” John explained carefully, “when we leave the line, I want you to stay twenty paces behind me.”
“Twenty paces behind you.”
“You know, paces.”
“No.”
John took a step. “One,” he counted, and took another. “Two.” He took a third step. “Three. Do you understand?”
“Oh, ya,” Cutarus replied, nodding his head vigorously. He began walking and counting just as John had done, but when he hit three he kept on going. “Ten, eleven, twelve…”
“God damn, Cutarus, get back here,” John snapped, not sure whether to get pissed off or laugh. “You don’t have to go all twenty paces right now. Just stay behind me twenty paces, like from here to that tree. You understand?” When Cutarus nodded, John continued. “Now, if I go like this,” John motioned downward with his right hand, “I want you to hit the ground.”
Cutarus crouched. “Ground,” he repeated, looking up at John and nodding.
“Down, like get your face right in the snow. When I go like this,” he motioned again. “I want you to get on the ground, stick your face in the snow and not get up until I tell you, okay?”
John still wasn’t sure whether or not Cutarus understood enough to approach enemy lines, but if the Germans were gathering for an attack beyond the knoll, speed was crucial, so John unslung his Thompson, chambered a round, and began moving cautiously through the trees. As he came up behind the American outpost, he stopped and turned toward Cutarus, who he expected to see twenty paces behind him. Instead, he saw the butt of Cutarus’ rifle as it smacked him in the face. John staggered backward a step or two, grabbed the branch of a pine tree to keep from falling on his ass. Cutarus stood there and looked apologetic.
“Damn it, Cutarus,” John hissed, “I told you to stay back twenty paces. Twenty paces!” Cutarus took a step backward, nodded, and turned.
As Cutarus shuffled away, John turned to the two men on outpost and described his orders to them. As he moved on into no man’s land, he felt his breathing tighten, his hands close tightly around the Thompson. He skirted the edge of some blowdown, dropped to one knee, and looked over his shoulder to make sure that Cutarus was still twenty paces away. He was. John rose and moved carefully through a narrow thicket. As he reached the edge of the clearing he motioned for Cutarus to stop, knelt behind a thick spruce, and scanned the area ahead. The morning sun reflected brilliantly off the deep snow, so brilliantly that John had to squint and shield his eyes in order to see anything besides white. The clearing was a few hundred feet wide, and ended at the foot of the knoll; it was clear. The knoll itself was fairly open, with a few shrubby trees lining its flank, and a few ragged, broomsticked spruces outlined along the crest. So far as John could see, the hill was clear, too.
John rose to his feet, motioned to Cutarus, and began to move slowly along the edge of the clearing. Perhaps, John thought, we won’t see anything; the woods beyond the knoll will be empty and we can go back and have some Spam and cheese. A slight breeze rattled the trees as he reached the far end of the clearing. A shot rang out.
John instinctively dove to the ground. He looked up, swiped the snow from his face, and scanned the hillside. Shimmering snow and the twisted shapes of trees, but nothing else. A few seconds of quiet and he rose slowly to his knees. Nothing. In the empty woods, sounds can seem much closer than they really are. John brushed the snow off of his gun, checked the muzzle to make sure it wasn’t clogged with snow, and stood up. As he stepped forward, he heard the sharp pop of a second shot, then a third, and a fourth. Who the hell was shooting? John was still glancing frantically across the hillside when he heard a voice call out in thickly-accented German, “Come out with you hands up.”
John followed the voice and spotted him: a solitary figure silhouetted at the top of the knoll, pointing some kind of handgun down the hill at John. “What did you say?” John shouted back.
“Come out with you hands up!”
A lone German firing a handgun was unusual. If the Kraut was on patrol or outpost, he would be armed with a rifle or at least a submachine gun. A soldier who was lost or separated from his company would never open fire, especially at such long range, on a pair of enemy soldiers who were better armed and quite possibly the spearhead of a larger force; any man in his right mind would run or hide. The only explanation that made any sense was that the German was battle fatigued, that he had become confused and delusional and wandered away from his company.
John heard the fourth round plunk into the snow a few feet behind him before he heard the report. Before he could react, before he could even register the fact that he had almost been hit, his right arm was wrenched violently backwards. He felt himself spinning, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground as a fifth shot rolled down the hillside.
“Jesus Christ,” John gasped. His hand was tingling and throbbing, just like the time when, during a boyhood snowball fight, his friend had hit pelted his numb hand with a chunk of ice. He could see a hole in his glove, some frozen blood at the edges.
John picked up his Thompson, but he couldn’t move the fingers on his right hand. He choked back a wave of panic, cradled the gun in the crook of his right elbow, fingered the trigger with his left hand, and aimed at the German. The Kraut fired again, and again, but the bullets went high and thumped through the trees behind John. John steadied his breathing, took careful aim, squeezed the trigger and held it. The gun bucked up and to the right as the crash of six, seven, eight rounds rolled across the hillside. John brought the gun back down, aimed, waited. After what seemed like several seconds, the German lowered his gun, bowed his head, and toppled face-first into the snow. As he hit, his helmet came off and tumbled downhill, finally coming to rest in deep snow several feet below him.
Cutarus. Those shots that went high, John realized, may not have been meant for him. He stood and spun around, hoping to God that the kid wasn’t hurt. Cutarus was standing at the far edge of the clearing, about twenty paces behind, holding his rifle and staring up the hill with a puzzled look on his face. John motioned for him to get down, and as Cutarus belly-flopped into the snow, John turned and started up the hill. His heart was battering itself against his ribs, his gut aching with fear. If there were Germans on the other side of the knoll, they had heard the shots, and were on their way up the other side. He couldn’t turn back and tell the lieutenant that he’d shot one man and run away without finishing the job, couldn’t face the other guys if they were surprised with an attack he could have alerted them to. He started up the hill.
John plunged uphill through the knee deep snow as quickly as he could, taking the most direct, open line he could see. The gunfire had alerted everyone within miles, so there was no longer any need for stealth. He paused when he reached the corpse. The German’s face was buried in the snow, and John could tell that at least three of his rounds had hit: the back of the Kraut’s coat was soaked with blood. In two spots, and his lower right arm, which still clutched a Luger, was bent backwards at a sickly angle. Guys always talked about meeting Jerry face to face and killing him in a one-on-one duel as if that was the highest form of combat, but strangely, John felt no elation, not even a hint of satisfaction, at having fought and killed so well. He shook the body to be sure that it was dead and moved on. When John neared the top, he dropped to his stomach and crawled onto the narrow crest to peer over the other side.
A few hundred yards away, John could make out the unmistakable shapes of four Tiger tanks idling in the woods, the smoke of their exhaust rising through the cold air above them. As John looked closer, he was able to see a long line of men standing and sitting among the trees. It was a full company at least, and since they were deployed in a skirmish line, it wasn’t hard to see that they were getting ready to attack. John turned and crawled back into the lee of the hill, stood, and dashed downhill toward Cutarus and the safety of the American lines.
John had to collect the dead German’s papers, so he stopped again, knelt down and laid his Thompson in the snow. He grabbed the German’s coat with his left hand, wedged his right elbow into the armpit, and pushed the corpse onto its side. John let the body’s limp weight rest on his knee as he fumbled awkwardly through the coat pockets with his left hand, all the while trying to avoid looking at the face. When he found his identification papers, John tucked them into his own pocket and let the body flop back onto its stomach. John paused a second, and then pried the Luger from the German’s fingers and tucked that into his pocket as well. He stood and continued down the hill. The drum of a Tiger’s engine ground through the monotony of John’s huffing and stomping. He had to hurry.
John glanced at the helmet lying upside down in the snow as he passed it. The thought of the German’s bare head in the snow flashed through John’s mind, then the image of him dropping soundlessly to the ground as the last of John’s spent cartriges hissed into the snow. As the low growl of the Tigers’ engines grew closer, John retraced his steps to the helmet, picked it up, and walked back up the hill. He knelt down, lifted the German’s head, and brushed the snow off his face. The thin blond mustache did little to disguise how young he was. Before the war, John had always imagined the Huns as grizzled, bloodthirsty veterans, but each time he looked closely, he was confronted with young men his age, boys who might have sat across from him at school and played against him at baseball during the muggy Rochester summers. There was still the hint of bewilderment in his gray eyes. John put the boy’s helmet back on, stood, and started back down the hill.
As John plunged through the snow as quickly as he could, he saw Cutarus still sprawled face down in the snow at the far edge of the clearing. John worried that perhaps he had somehow been hit by one of the German’s bullets, although he wasn’t sure how, since Cutarus had been standing after the German was dead. John post-holed across the clearing, glancing over his shoulder several times at the crest of the knoll, knelt down next to Cutarus and shook his shoulder. “Cutarus. Cutarus!” John shook him harder.
Cutarus lifted his face out of the snow. “Ya?”
“Are you all right? Are you hit?” John asked.
Cutarus climbed to his knees and sat back in the snow. “I no hit,” he replied. “I’m all right.”
As John began to brush the snow off Cutarus’ face with his left hand, Cutarus grinned. “I like you See-polla,” he said.
Perhaps it was the grin, or the way that Cutarus sat there with his legs splayed out in the snow, but as John brushed the last bit of snow from Cutarus’ forehead, he was back in Rochester, dusting the snow off a little boy’s face. A light snow drifted down Jay Street as the voices of other children rang out through the shrill air. At that moment, the melancholy, the cold sense of loneliness that John had felt for so long seemed to dissipate. John smiled. “I like you too, Cutarus.”
The chugg of a Tiger’s engine shook John from his reverie. He grabbed Cutarus by the arm. “You listen to me and listen good. Did you hear all that shooting?”
“Ya,” Cutarus replied, “I hear shooting.”
‘The Germans heard it, too. They’ll be coming down over that knoll after us, so we’ve got to get the hell out of here, and get out of here fast. And one other thing I’ve got to tell you – I got hit.”
A look of terror washed over Cutarus’ face. “You got hit?”
“I got hit in my right hand, so I have to use my left hand to shoot. Use your weapon if you have to.”
Cutarus was visibly shaken. “You got hit?” he repeated. “You got hit?”
“Quit your whining,” John snapped. “I’m all right. Now this time, no more twenty paces. Let’s get the hell out of here into the woods as fast as we can, because they’re going to come after us.”
“Okay!” Cutarus replied. He turned and bounded into the woods like a deer. As John struggled to keep up, huffing and kicking through the snow, he couldn’t help but wonder what else he had misjudged about the kid.
John and Cutarus reached the outpost safely. John paused to warn the two men of the impending attack while Cutarus kept running toward the main line of resistance. When John arrived back at the line, the lieutenant was waiting for him. John briefed him as well, and soon found himself bouncing down a narrow road in a jeep, bound for the field hospital. After he repeated his story a third time, John handed the German’s identification papers to the lieutenant, who looked them over and grunted in surprise. “He was a captain,” the lieutenant said, and tucked the papers into his own coat. John shook his head, and glanced out into the woods, not as happy as he thought he would be about killing an officer.
A few minutes later, as John sat at a table in the field hospital while a medic pulled the bullet from his hand and carefully bandaged the wound, John realized, with a start, that he was in a good mood for the first time in almost a month. He was finished, at least temporarily, with Bastogne, finished with the cold, the killing, the misery of the foxholes. He had a warm bed, hot meals and pretty nurses to look forward to. Maybe the war would even end while he was laid up, and he could go home to Rochester.
As nice as all that would be, it wasn’t why he was smiling.
We were on the crest of high ground at the edge of a forest A sportsmen’s club was there, with a chain-link fence all around. Our company commander set up his headquarters in the building, and the medics, that was their place too. When we looked out, we could see this little German town in front of us — Steinshardt. That’s what we were going after. It was the town the Germans were shooting at us from. We were supposed to have support on both our flanks, but there were no other outfits with us — a goof on somebody’s part. You never saw a bunch of guys dug foxholes so fast as we did that morning with shells coming our way. But it was quiet in die afternoon from about 2 o’clock on. And it was a nice day — clear, not cold.
We were supposed to have support on both our flanks, but there were no other outfits with us — a goof on somebody’s part. You never saw a bunch of guys dug foxholes so fast as we did that morning with shells coming our way. But it was quiet in die afternoon from about 2 o’clock on. And it was a nice day — clear, not cold. I was equipped with a sound-powered telephone that I could keep in touch with the guys in charge. I got this message to come over to die building, and I went over and they gave us the orders for what we were going to do that night. Get into groups and set up a guard.
Then I went back to where the guys were dug in, about 20 different places, and I told those guys what the boss wanted them to do. After that, I went back to my hole to relax for a while. It was about 4 o’clock. I didn’t relax too long. I sat down with my back against the dirt wall, completely underground, pushed my helmet back and lit a cigarette — I believe it was a Lucky Strike. I don’t know if I even had tone to put the lighter down. That’s all I remember till I came to and found myself on my hands and knees outside of my hole, blood flying everywhere. My blood. I looked up and one of the closest guys to me — about 50 feet away — ran over and said: “Stay put, don’t move. I’m gonna get an aid man.” He came back with one in a hurry. The aid man said, “We gotta get you out of here.” Both of them took a hold of me and we went aver to die headquarters where die captain and die medics were. I wasn’t in pain, I had no problem walking. And I could hear and understand what they were saying. But I couldn’t answer them. My lower jaw was gone.
There was just one big open hole, and I was bleeding all over. The interior of my mouth was all busted out Half my tongue was gone, and all but three of my teeth that were all the way back in the upper right. It was shrapnel that got me. An artillery shell shattered in the trees. It happened so fast this fella who was the closest one to me, Oakley Honey, said it burst right overhead when: I was. He told me the Germans put a few shells over the top — they were realty chopping roc trees down — but no one else was hit. 1 expected to see you going around to make sure everybody was OK,” Honey said. “I didn’t hear anything out of you, so I got up and I was on my way over and there you were on your hands and knees.” He said he heard some noise like a chicken squawking, and it was me.
The Germans must’ve had an observation post out there someplace and were watching us. I think they saw me go over to that building and then go around to where the other guys were dug in. They must’ve figured I was some kind of a leader and thought there’s a guy we need to hit. At the first aid station, I was hurting. They gave me something for the pain and bandaged me. The medic, Fred Tate, took one look and came over, and there was a chair, and he told me to sit down. He said to take my hands on both sides and press my fingers behind my jaw, put pressure on the arteries and the bleeding will stop. I had to do it, he said. If I didn’t, I was going to bleed to death. That was the first I realized how bad it was.
The captain was there and I can hear him yet. “I thought you knew better to keep your head down,” he said I knew he was kidding me. He laughed when he said it. I couldn’t answer but I thought: Yeah, keep my head down, but that’s where I had it. Tate said I only stood one chance of getting out of there, and that was walking out— he knew how robust I was, and in good shape. They had 16 or 17 casualties waiting to be taken out by vehicle and they couldn’t do that because the Germans had us covered in the rear,
He told the captain there wasn’t much choice if I wanted to live. “If we don’t get him out of here, he’s not gonna make it” The captain asked me: “You want to go?” I nodded. Tate reminded me to keep my fingers on the two points behind my jaw. “I’m gonna send somebody with you,” he said. “If you get back to when; we took off from last night, you’ll be OK. Now get going!” The way we went the night before was like starting out in Easton and coining all the way up to the top of Morgan’s hill in Williams Township}. That was a couple miles.
An aid man went with me and we got at least halfway back when we heard a motor. ‘Stay right where you arc tin I get back,” the aid man said. He took off and intercepted this guy who had one of these jeeps with a rack to put the wounded guys on. The driver had two people aboard, not badly hurt. “C’mon,” they said, and grabbed a hold of me on each side and boy we took off We went back across me Rhine on a pontoon bridge. My hands were getting numb from pressing the back of my jaw all the time. The only thing that kept me going was that my life depended on it.
We came to a pretty big field hospital, and they got me in there. I’d been holding the points behind my jaw for about an hour. The bleeding had eased up somewhat I got a shot that knocked me out for three days. When I came to, I was bandaged up and had tubes going up my nose. Then they loaded me up and sent me back to another hospital, a real one. A nurse took me for walks outside for exercise. The doctor told me, “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
I got shipped across the Channel to England, and that’s when they first really did some work on me. But they weren’t equipped to do what they needed to do and decided I was belter off going back to (he States, so they flew me to New York. From the time I got hit till when I came home was 30 days.
I couldn’t talk for the better part of a year, but I could write. One day at the hospital where I was staying in New York, a lieutenant told me I should pack up my things because I was going to another hospital, and I wrote down: “Where?” This fella said, “These papers say you’re going down to Mississippi.” I wrote, ”NO WAY” He said, “Why?” Another fella had told me, “If you go to Valley Forge General Hospital, you won’t be far from home.” So I wrote “Valley Forge” on the papers. The lieutenant said, “Its filled up, but I’ll see what I can do,”
My wife and my dad and my sister’s husband came to see me. They were talking to me in my room when the lieutenant came in and said, “I’ve got news for you. Does Valley Forge ring a bell?” That’s where I ended up. I was there for two years and seven months. It was a good hospital. It had everything you needed, and they took care of you in getting you fixed up. But for a while they were afraid they weren’t going to be able to do much of anything for me. My lower jaw had to be rebuilt. They had to do little things in steps. The main thing was to put the framework in first, and that meant replacing the bone So they took chunks of two of my ribs and fastened them to the bone I still had on both sides, and it all grew together. That bone graft took quite a while.
It was something to go through, a little tiresome, and sometimes I wonder how I ever did it But I was good and healthy at the time — I was a country boy. The doctor I had, I wouldn’t exchange for anything. He was so good and kind and would do anything for you. He bad a lot of help from his father, who was a doctor too, and did a wonderful job putting the jaw together—I know what it looked like because I’d looked in the mirror. I’ll tell you how nice a guy the doctor was. He would schedule an operation or whatever he was going to do for Monday morning, first thing. And by the time Friday came, if I felt well enough I could go home for the weekend. Believe it or not, in the beginning I hitchhiked home. I looked awful, all bandaged. People would stop and ask, “Where arc you going?” And I had a pad and I’d write down where. They’d say, “I’m going to such and such. You want a ride?” They were nice people that treated me half-decent. Other people would look at me and say, “Man, what happened?” “You can’t talk? I feel sorry for you.” And some would shake their heads and walk away. All the while, anything I ate had to be liquid. For the longest time, that liquid was going into my stomach through tubes down my nose. That’s the way I ate for the first year. It was even longer than that before I could sip out of a glass.
They couldn’t do anything about teeth, so I don’t have any — the three way in die back weren’t around too long; they went bad. To this day, I can’t eat any solid food. It has to be soft. I can’t chew anything. Oatmeal is what I eat for breakfast. Lots of time for lunch, I’ll have soup. If I want to eat any kind of meat, I have to grind it up. As far as my not being able to talk, my wife, Betty, was terribly concerned about that and it bothered her a whole lot when I was in the hospital- But I ‘wrote that the doctors had a good hope that I would regain my speech.
It was a year-and-a-half before 1 could start to hold a conversation. Oh, I could talk, but it was a crazy type of thing — I couldn’t pronounce things right, but people could understand what I was saying. It took years before 1 could speak like this. Betty told me once that she hadn’t expected to see me looking the way I did. She said it took her the longest time to accept that that’s the way it was going to be. And she said she knew that I could go on, and she was going to help me however she could. She couldn’t do enough for me. My mom and dad helped me all they could, too.
I was never afraid for the future because Betty was here and my daughter Linda was here. I had the feeling that I would have to get to the point where I could take care of them. I felt that I had that responsibility. And as long as the VA was helping me get back to where I wanted to be, I was going to do it.
On March 15, 2012 a tour of the US Army Quartermaster Museum was well received by the members since it has so many displays of these men’s memories, Patton’s jeep and Ike’s van etc. An article by T. Anthony Bell, Fort Lee Traveller, is well written and I felt it told the story of the Crater Chapter of the Battle of Bulge in such a good matter you would appreciate reading the same.
Mr. Bell and I knew each other from some years back when he teased me about leaving this same Museum and after over 20 years as curator of education there. Times have changed I love history but today its games, electronics and theater, that’s not for me.
The members of this chapter or fine folk and are kind and caring of those who cannot do this simple task they used to. Each of those who attended the March meeting was sent a copy of the newspaper article. Some who could not attend also received the newspaper article. I have not been a member of this chapter long and joined the national only recently thanks to a VBOBer giving me a page in his bugle.
I so enjoyed the memories shared by others that I sent my son’s name and he also joined. I copied the Uncle Sam cover and carried it to display it at March meeting. A retired General also attending the meeting asked me to get information from other parts of the Bugle and I did. He was seated next to one of the sisters whose father was at Malmedy
World War II was unique among Wars. It was a war against tyranny as never could be visualized. The Germans had built a war machine that nearly conquered the entire Western world and with the intention to include our country in their plans to conquer the world. We became involve in the war against Germany after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
We are the members of the G. I. Generation – children of the depression, who saved democracy in World War II. There was a sense of shared sacrifice during World War II. We had the draft, everybody was in it together. At home there was rationing of gasoline, shoes and meats.
It was 68 years ago that we faced our worst enemy in mortal combat in World War II. Today we are old men, and our memories after a half century are sometimes a little faded but they remember the cold, hunger, confusion and they remember the dead. The veterans wants this generation to know the suffering of war. At the age of 20, I was drafted into the Army on Dec. 12, 1942 and was assigned to the Tank Destroyer training center at Camp Hood, Texas. This was a new type of military unite, to be used specifically for combating and destroying enemy armor. The logo of a Tank Destroyers, is a orange circle containing a Black Panther crushing a tank in its teeth.
After extensive training, I was assigned to the 893rd Tank Destroyer Battalion. The Battalion had approximately 640 officers and enlisted men assigned to three Tank companies. Reconnaissance company. Medical and Headquarters. I was a staff Sergeant responsible for the Battalion communications.
The Battalion departed for overseas from New York City on Jan. 9, 1944 on the British ship the Mauretania. It was formally a Cunard Line passenger ship that was converter to a troop ship. This ship held the trans-Atlantic speed record and we were able to go without a convoy. There was five thousand troops aboard from all branches of the service. Our Battalion had the assignment to man all the ships weapons (3 inch canons and 50 caliber machine guns) and submarine watch from the bridge, bow and stern areas of the ship. It was a great feeling when the ship docked in Liverpool, England on January 18th.
FOUR CHAPLAIN’S- Feb. 3rd marks the 68th anniversary of the USAT Dorchester sinking 120 miles south of Greenland and the heroism of Four Chaplains- The Dorchester departed from New York bound for St. John’ s, Newfound Land on Jan. 22, 1943. disaster struck at 1:00 AM on Feb. 3, 1943 when a torpedo from a German U-boat hit the Dorchester. Only 2 of the 14 lifeboats successfully launched. The Chaplains moved among the panicking troops and to help to organize an orderly evacuation. They handed out life jackets and when they ran out, gave their own to four soldiers. As the ship went down, they were last seen in prayer together. Of the 902 soldiers and crew aboard the Dorchester, 675 died. In 1944 the four chaplains were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart. The four chaplains were, George Fox-Methodist, Clark Poling- Reformed, Alexander Goode- Jewish, Rev. John Washington- Catholic.
In England the Battalion was assigned to the 1st Army, 5th Corp in the south of England (Dorset county, town of Bridport). At times we lived in tents, barns, castles and we had the pleasure of living with English families. During the months of April and May, training became more intense, including boarding landing crafts on the English Channel and making dry runs out a few miles and return to port. This was intended to throw the Germans off and to keep them guessing on the invasion date and place. On April 28, 1944 EXERCISE TIGER the war’s most deadly U.S. training exercise accrued as a dress rehearsal for D-Day, it ended with 749 U.S. soldiers and sailors dead in the English Channel. Infantry Divisions, 893rd Tank Destroyers, 3000 ships combat and soldiers in full battle dress in their final drill. But the drill became a death trap, when a pack of nine German torpedo stumbled onto eight (LST’s -Landing Ship tanks). Two LST’s were sunk and a third was damaged in 30 minutes. The news of this attack’ was kept secret from the British and American public.
D-DAY – June 6, 1944- Operation Overflord Before dawn, 68 years ago, the greatest seaborne invasion in history began on the wind swept Normandy coast of France. June 6, 1944 is now known as D-Day – military jargon for starting and the beginning of the end of World War II. In overall command was 53 year old General Dwight Eisenhower who launched the attack by telling his forces “you are about to embark upon the Great Crusade”. The unprecedented operation brought 3 million soldiers across the English Channel. Also that day 1,000 American bombers were pounding Hilter’s Altantic wall. In Normandy the 893 Tank Battalion was assigned to support the 1st Army, 2nd Infantry Division. By the time “Operation Overlord”, as the invasion was called, was over. Allied losses were estimate at 37,000 dead and another 172,000 wounded or missing. But the Germans also suffered 200,000 casualties and 200,000 troops captured.
We participated in every major battle through France, Belgium, Luxembourg and southern Germany. After five months of combat the Battalion was assigned to support the 28th Infantry Division in the Hurtgen Forest. This was a designated rest area for the Battalion to repair its equipment and our troops to recover their strength. The rest did not last long. The German’s launched a major counter-attack. B & C Tank Companies took the blunt of this attack and suffered heavy casualties and loss of equipment. I was awarded a Purple Heart during the action in the Hurtgen Forest.
On November 18th the Battalion was assigned to support the 78th Infantry Division (their first combat assignment). Our mission was the attack on Kesternich, this town meant control of the Roer River. This was a heavily fortified area including the Siegfried line, bunkers and anti-tank obstacles (Dragon Teeth).
Battle of the Bulge On December 16th the start of the Battle of the Bulge and our Battalion had not recovered from the German counter attack in the Hurtgen Forest. This Bulge attack was Hilter’s plan to split the bond between the Allied forces of the British, Canada and the United States. Hilter was also hoping to buy time on further development of secret weapons that they had been working on (Buzz bombs and Jet fighter planes).
Problems at the Start of the Bulge- -A “Ghost Front” A frozen Hell
-275,000 Germans against 83,000 Americans
-Spread out 2,000 square miles in Beligum and Luxenbourg.
-60 miles of front lines.
-Bone chilling cold and dense fog.
-Difficult terrain, heavily forested Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg plus the German fortifications of the Siegfried Line and surrounding bunkers and anti-tank obstacles called “Dragon Teeth.
Malmedy Massacre on Dec. 17, 1944, elements under command of SS Peiper encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered. A single SS officer pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer and then shot the next soldier. Other German SS soldiers joined in with machine guns, killing all the captured American soldiers.
Bastogne By Dec. 21, the German forces had completely surrounded Bastogne, which was defended by the 101st Airborne Division. Conditions inside the perimeter were tough, most of the medical supplies had been captured. However, despite German attacks, the perimeter held. General McAuliffe was asked by the German’s to surrender, he wrote on the paper delivered to the Germans “NUTS”. That reply had to be explained to the Germans and to the non-American allies. On Dec. 23 the weather condition started improving, allowing the Allied air forces to attack. They launched devastating bombing attacks on the supply points and decimating troops on the roads. On Jan. 12, The last German left the Bulge and on Jan. 15,1945 the Battle of the bulge was over.
CONCLUSION OF THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE After 41 days, the Battle of the Bulge, broke the back of the German’s. Within 6 months, more than 120,000 lost their lives. Four months latter. Hitter was and Germany surrendered. Those unsung heroes If there ever was Unsung Heroes of the Bulge, they were the Replacements. They would be parceled out to the units as casualties would occur Most came with very little training and some would be only a few days from the states. If they survived the first 4 days, they probably will get by for a while. If we get 20 replacements before an attack, the next morning. 5 might be alive
When the Battle of the Bulge (also known as the Ardennes Campaign) started on December 16, 19441 was training troops as a Second Lieutenant instructor at the Fort Riley Cavalry Replacement Training Center in Kansas. I received orders for overseas duty just before Christmas 1944, with a five day leave to visit my family in Westfield, Massachusetts on the way to the port of embarkation in New York harbor. I left on January 1, 1945, along with some 13,000 other G.I.’s, on the Queen Mary I which had been converted to a troop ship. Aboard the Queen Mary, to gain space, they had drained the swimming pools and set up hammocks there!
We debarked in Glasgow, Scotland, took a train across the British Isles to Southampton, England, and took an LST (Landing Ship Tank) across the English Channel to LeHavre, France. We then went by rail (40 & 8 cars) to Fontainebleau and finally to Longwy, France. It was in Longwy, France, as part of the Replacement Depot System, that I was assigned to the 6th Cavalry Group, VIII Corps to replace officers killed or wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. (Some 19,000 men were lost in that battle.) We drove in an open Jeep to Wilverwiltz, Luxembourg where the 6th Cavalry Group was headquartered. It was about January 24 and cold! I was 22 years old. I was assigned to Troop B, 28th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, 6th Cavalry Group. The people I remember best were these two: (1) 6th Group C.O. Colonel Joe Fickett, complete with handlebar mustache and always packing a 45 cal. pistol in a holster on his hip and (2) Sergeant Bill Gleffe from Tennessee, lead sergeant in Troop B.
At that time the front along the Our River was quiet. That river runs out of the north to meet the Moselle River and forms the boundary between Luxembourg and Germany to the east. The dreaded Siegfried Line was positioned along the eastern side of the Our River, complete with fortified pillboxes.
On the night of February 1-2, 1945 our Troop B was not on line but in reserve. Since we were in reserve, we furnished the personnel for patrols that night. Night patrols were sent out every night in order to keep track of the enemy. I got to lead the officer-led patrol that night. I met with Major Parody, Squadron S-3 (plans and operations) in a farmhouse kitchen between the village of Hosingen and the Our River. He told me that I would lead a 10 man patrol to reconnoiter the Siegfried Line. Fortunately, I was shown an aerial photograph taken the day before. It clearly showed the area power lines, tree lines, roadways and the Our River. This was so important because with the help of this aerial photograph, I felt I knew the area!
There were conditions put on the patrol leader, like we would leave at 7 PM and return by 5 AM so the artillery could throw rounds into the area at dawn. We were given a radio designed for use in a Jeep, which consisted of three parts: aerial, battery pack and radio. Members of the patrol would carry these separate parts. We were directed to stop every hour, assemble the radio and give a progress report back to Major Parody. I asked how we were supposed to cross the Our River, which was a wide stream. Major Parody was not very helpful! He answered “Oh, swim or build a raft.” They made Sgt. Bill Gleffe second in command for the patrol. That made sense since he was combat-wise having been in combat since the previous July without a scratch! And I was a green Lieutenant, new to combat. We wore white camouflage suits so we blended into the snow, but our boots were black.
We got off on time at 7 PM heading east in single file. We couldn’t send flankers out, to the right and the left, for fear they would get lost in the darkness. The snow was probably 4″- 6″ deep, wet and slippery because it had rained the night before. The temperature was about freezing. The sky was overcast and there was no moon. Progress was pretty slow and we had not yet reached the Our River by about 2 AM. I suggested via radio that perhaps we ought to turn around and return, clearing the area for the artillery fire at dawn. Major Parody instead directed me to keep going until we reached the Our River and he would withhold the dawn artillery barrage.
Soon after that I got the word passed to me that someone had lost the aerial and we couldn’t make any more radio reports. I asked Sgt. Gleffe if the guy who lost the aerial was some kind of a “goof-off who might have lost the aerial “on purpose.” Sgt. Gleffe said no, he was a good guy, and probably lost it out of his mittened hand and didn’t sense its loss. So we stacked the remaining two parts of the radio next to a large evergreen tree, with the intention of picking it up on our way back. So now we were out of radio contact. We finally came to the Our River about 3:30 AM and we could hear the river running full. It was an old river geologically, with steep banks. There was a farmhouse off to the right with haystacks in the back yard. I told the patrol to wait there for me, while I went around the farmhouse to the south to see if there was a better place to cross the river. (At least I could pass this information on to another patrol which might be out the next night.)
I had taken only a couple of steps when we were challenged by a guttural voice (probably their password for the night) which sounded like the German equivalent of “You Son of a Bitch!” There was no way of knowing exactly where the challenge came from, so we all took off running for cover some 50 yards away, where the ground dropped away and you couldn’t be hit by flat arms fire from a rifle or a machine gun. I believe it was a semiautomatic rifle firing and not a machine gun.
I could hear the bullets whizzing by me as I ran and decided I should start to zig and zag in my running, so they wouldn’t get a bead on me! Then I fell head first into the snow and thought what a terrible time to fall! Then I could feel my left leg stinging below my knee and knew I had been hit and driven to the ground by a bullet. I looked up and saw that the other 10 men had made cover and I was the only one hit. Now what do I do? I tried to crawl away on my hands and knees, but they fired (fortunately, over me) every time I moved. I felt that they wouldn’t take wounded Second Lieutenants as a prisoner, so I had to get to hell out of their on my own! I decided to move away on my elbows and ass, leaving my black boots in the same relative position. That seemed to work and I moved away in the darkness without them firing again!
Fortunately, I had seen the aerial photograph the night before and knew where Lt. Lieser and the Outpost Line of Resistance was dug in. I couldn’t walk because my left tibia had been broken by the bullet. I decided to put a tourniquet on my left leg pressure point to stop the bleeding and crawl my way to our lines. I tried to fashion a crutch out of some tree branches which might help me walk some. But that was not successful. So I was stuck with crawling on my hands and knees. It was now daylight and the only thing I had to eat was a Powerhouse Candy Bar which happened to be in my jacket pocket! I ate snow for my water needs. (I found out later that Sgt. Gleffe came out between our lines and the German lines with a patrol during daylight looking for me. We both were being careful during that day – February 2 – and never connected. Eventually the leg froze, because the tourniquet had cut off all blood movement. And that turned out to be a good thing!
As I crawled along I could hear a slight banging noise. I had to stop and find out if there was someone else in the area causing the noise. I crawled in the direction of the sound and finally found the answer. There was an abandoned farm wagon there with metal wheels. The wind had come up and the wind was blowing the evener against the metal wheel. No one here except me and an old wagon! Also while crawling I encountered a small concrete bridge over a small stream, now filled with water from melting snow. It was decision-making time! In crossing to the other side of the stream, I had two choices. I could crawl across the small bridge which was there evidently for the use of cattle. But we were always told to avoid bridges, since they may have been mined by the Germans. The other choice was to drag myself through the small stream, get wet and perhaps freeze to death! The second was no choice at all! So I crawled across the bridge on my hands and knees and it didn’t blow up! Some days you are lucky!
I crawled all day long – mostly up hill – to reach an evergreen woods by nightfall. In the woods the trees were planted in neat rows, with pine needles but no snow on the ground. Decided I c, would try to cover myself with needles and get some sleep. Lcold and got precious little sleep. One surprising thing about that night of February 2-3 was that I could hear bombers going over Germany from England and then returning all night long. Those were big air raids and I felt not so alone – some others were in this war along with me!
When dawn came, I could see our Outpost Line of Resistance where Lt. Lieser was dug in – but I still had a long ways to go! I started down the hill on my way to our lines. But I found I was out of energy and couldn’t crawl any further. So I decided to call for help. So in midmoming I fired my carbine in volleys of three so it wouldn’t be mistaken for combat firing. Then I called, “Send help, Send medic.” I think I did this three times. So I sat on the hillside in the snow, eating snow, and I had kind of “lost it.” I saw no evidence that anyone other than me was in the vicinity. About midaftemoon of February 3 – now 36 hours after I had been wounded -1 heard footsteps behind me in the direction of the German lines. Oh, Oh, remember they don’t take wounded Second Lieutenants as prisoners! I turned in the direction of the foot steps – and joy of joy – it was Sgt. Gleffe with a litter team of four men. They had heard my call for help! The medic among them gave me a shot of morphine. If you ever have had morphine, you know how immediately your cares are gone!
They carried me back on that litter over some high ground, where we could look back and see the pillboxes in the Siegfried Line. They didn’t fire at us – either they didn’t see us or they were short of ammunition. And I had had that shot of morphine so I didn’t worry that much! By the time I was picked up, my wounded left leg was frozen and had increased markedly in size. At the aid station I got good news! The doctor there was sure they could save my leg – no gangrene. I talked with Major Parody and gave him the information we had gained in our encounter with the German outpost in the farmyard haystacks. We had been told before leaving on the patrol that the Germans had withdrawn over the Our River and no longer held ground on the Luxembourg side. We certainly found that to be incorrect intelligence! Major Parody did not seem to be unhappy that we had been unable to reconnoiter the Siegfried Line! I talked to Sgt. Bill Gleffe and he told me how he had led a small daylight patrol on February 2 into “no man’s land” looking for me.
The medical evac system was excellent. They took me by British ambulance to a field hospital in Ciney, Belgium, arriving about midnight. The operating rooms were in the basement of a school house and the recovery rooms were former class rooms. They had used a “mild” anesthesia (sodium pentothal) for the clean up operation and put my left leg in a long leg cast. The next day, February 4,1 was in fairly good shape and able to think. The army nurse caring for me suggested I send a V-mail letter to my mother to try to beat the inevitable War Department telegram she would receive. I also sent a V-mail letter to my girlfriend – later wife -Lila Mae Weaver in Topeka, Kansas. It turned out that my V-mail letter had gotten to my mother 24 hours after the War Department telegram which said that I had been slightly wounded!
After some days in Ciney, Belgium I went to Paris by 40 & 8 car, which had been fitted with litters attached to the car walls as sort of a medical transport vehicle. I got my first glimpse of Paris and the Seine River though the back door of an ambulance. Then I soon moved by air from Paris to a station hospital in Salisbury, in the south of England. That hospital in Salisbury had X-ray equipment and in an X-ray of the wounded leg they found a piece of the German bullet was still in my leg. They decided not to go in to remove it and make the wound unsterile again! In a recent X-ray of my left knee, the bullet is still there! It doesn’t seem to ring bells in scanning equipment at airports! Salisbury, England in late winter (about February 24) has quite mild weather. In wheeling me from ward to ward outside, I noted the grass was green and needed mowing!
At that point in the war, if wounds took longer than 90 days to heal, they would send you back to the USA. If you healed in less than 90 days, then you were eligible to return to combat! At the Salisbury hospital they determined it would take longer than 90 days to heal my wound and I would be sent home. Great words, “sent home”! At Salisbury they decided to send me back to “the zone of interior” (USA) by air because I am 6’4″ tall and the litters on hospital ships are only 6′ long. So I got to go home by air because I am tall!
They flew me first to Prestwick, Scotland to await a plane to fly “the great circle route” back to the USA. This route normally went from Prestwick, Scotland, to Iceland, to Stephenville, Newfoundland to New York. But in the winter time the Iceland stop is changed to one in the Azores. So on February 27, 1945 I flew the “southern route” home in 24 hours. In that 24 hours we went from cold Prestwick, to 72 degrees in the Azores, to canyons of snow thrown up by plows clearing the runways in Newfoundland, to cold Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island. I had been overseas for one month and 27 days!
At Floyd Bennett Field they asked each patient what Army hospital they would like to go to for recovery. I inquired of hospitals close to Topeka, Kansas where my girlfriend Lila lived. The closest was Fitzsimmons in Denver. Then I chose Lovell General Hospital in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, less than 100 miles from my family home.
Lila announced our engagement (with my Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity pin) at her Alpha Phi Sorority at Washbum University on May 7, 1945. The next day. May 8, was V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day). So our engagement was announced on the social page of the same Topeka Journal issue that told the good news of the end of the war in Europe. We still have a copy of that newspaper! A diamond ring for Lila followed! I went to visit Lila in Topeka in June via the railroad. I was on crutches with a long leg cast at the time. In August I met Lila in Chicago and came with her via rail to visit Westfield, Massachusetts over her 21st birthday. By that time, the cast on my leg was gone and I wore a brace. We were married on November 3, 1945 in Grace Cathedral in Topeka, Kansas and I walked down the aisle without brace or cane! We honeymooned in New York City. After Thanksgiving in Westfield, Massachusetts, we took an one room apartment in a home in Shirley, Massachusetts. We do remember that the home was near the Boston and Maine Railroad! Shirley was adjacent to Fort Devens and Lovell General Hospital.
Now enters the question of my receiving the Silver Star Medal for gallantry in action on February 1-2, 1945. It had been 10 months since I had been wounded and I was now a married First Lieutenant and an outpatient at Lovell General Hospital. In early December we went to the records room at the hospital to update my Army records. One gets additional rental and food allowances when married! In the record room the clerk handed me a copy of my officer’s personnel file 201. hi the awards section it said I had received a Silver Star Medal from Headquarters VIII Corps, General Orders No. 40, dated 23 March, 1945.1 returned the 201 file to the clerk and said that I had never received the Silver Star Medal. Her response was, “Did you deserve one?” I had no answer to that question! She went back through my file and found that I had indeed been awarded a Silver Star Medal for my February 1-3, 1945 action. (Only the Army had never told me about it!) The citation reads in part, ” After a period of 36 hours of exposure to extreme weather, exhaustion and severe pain. Lieutenant Bush reached a friendly outpost where he gave a detailed outline of important enemy information before allowing himself to be evacuated. The courage, skill and disregard for personal safety displayed by Lieutenant Bush constitute the finest traditions of the Armed Forces…”
I was surprised to have been honored with this award and I am certainly proud to have been so honored.
When in early 1994, 9th Armored Division veteran Frank Noe presented some of his medals and ribbons, earned during WW2, to a young Luxembourgish boy, no one could imagine how much this small but very meaningful gift would affect the life of that 10 year old child.
This little boy is me, Daniel Reiland, born in 1983 and living in the small town of Huldange, in northern Luxembourg. Before the German army started the Battle of the Bulge on 16th December 1944, Mr Noe’s unit had been staying for several weeks in northern Luxembourg. In the 1980s, on a trip back to the villages and places he had been to during the war, he also came through my hometown and got in touch with my parents, whom since then he visited every time he came back to Luxembourg.
Hearing Mr Noe’s memories about what he and his buddies had to endure during those hard times I was shocked on the one hand that in the peaceful village I was growing up and playing with my friends, only a few decades ago a terrible battle was spreading destruction, agony and death. On the other hand I was amazed that Mr Noe came back to see what the places, he had been to during the war, look nowadays and I was glad to hear that veterans like him get a warm and thankful welcome during their visit. The memories and stories he shared fascinated me in such a way that I wanted to get to know more about that Battle of the Bulge and especially about the men who had to fight it. I started then reading books and publications about the Battle of the Ardennes and the wartime in Luxembourg and became more and more interested in that topic.
At the same time the medals, Mr Noe had presented me, also made me become interested in the daily items the American soldiers were using at that time and so I started collecting all kinds of military uniforms, equipment and items from those days. Touching and looking at those genuine military artefacts helped me getting a more detailed and realistic view of what the daily life of an American Gl must have looked like in 1944 and 1945. At the age of 14, when I started learning English in High School, I was finally able to communicate myself with Mr Noe and another veteran, I got to know by then. Through all my teenage years I was able to share my intense interest for the Battle of the Bulge with a few friends and I went on collecting more military artefacts, which I was often able to still recover or purchase from farms and houses where the actual battle took place at the time.
After I graduated from Police Academy in 2005, I even purchased a restored and running WW2 Willys Jeep, which in a certain way became one of the symbols of the liberation of Europe after the war. The same year I also became a member of the “US Veterans Friends Luxembourg”, a non-profit organization run by volunteers, which helps erecting monuments and organizes ceremonies throughout Luxembourg and tours veterans and their relatives around over here. Especially the annual American-Luxembourgish Friendship Week gave me the opportunity to meet and get in touch with many veterans and their families and people who had lost a relative in Europe during the war.
The memories they shared and the many unanswered questions they often had made me start researching what actually happened to certain soldiers or units on certain dates and with the help of military records from those days and studies on the former battlefields, I was even able to retrace some cases.
Meeting a veteran out on the former battlefield and getting to know his personal story is not only a fascinating but also very meaningful experience to me. I don’t think it is even possible to touch history in a more realistic, genuine and living way. Quite often people ask me why a 28 year old man is so interested about the Battle of the Bulge, collects military artefacts from that period, does research about certain events and helps touring veterans and their families around.
The answers to that question are very simple: First of all the personal encounter with Mr Noe became a strong and lasting experience which made me want to get to know more about him and his comrades. In addition to that I consider it very important to make every possible effort to prevent our common history from being forgotten once the people who were part of it will be gone.
The most important reason however is to thank and honor the returning veterans and their fallen comrades and make sure that their sacrifices, made during the liberation of Luxembourg and the other European countries, were not in vain and will be remembered.
I do not know the date in early December 1944 when one of our officers came to Section 240. D Battery of the 387th AAA Auto Weapons Battalion. This was the gun Section for which I was the Sergeant in charge. He came to tell me. or order me, over my objections, to gather all of my personal belongings as I was being assigned to R&R (Rest and Recreation). I suggested that I would rather another member of my gun section, other than myself, be sent on R&R. He responded with “Sergeant, that is an order!” So I gathered up all of my belongings, except the German Mauser rifle with the nickel plated action and red wood stock which I had strapped to the side of our equipment trailer. I found this rifle in Cherbourg, France about eight months earlier. I said goodbye to the men of my gun section and I was driven by Jeep to Eupen, Belgium for R&R. While on this assignment, we were assigned work during the daytime and had the evenings to ourselves to do as we wished. I was assigned to a Foreign Exchange Bank operated by the United States Armed Forces.
A First Lieutenant was in charge and was responsible for this operation. He was also responsible for the thousands of currency with which this bank operated. After being introduced to the Lieutenant, 1 was instructed on the duties for which I was responsible. Since this was a new operation, none of the teller’s windows or the glass in the doors to the office were marked or identified. My first assignment was to appropriately letter each one. I was given the paint and brushes with which to complete this assignment. Having done this. I was then instructed on using the conversion charts for converting the various nations currencies to that which the customers requested. This I found to be quite interesting as not only did the GIs use this bank, so did the members of the Red Cross, U.S.O., medical personnel, etc.
I enjoyed this experience of converting the currencies and meeting so many different people from the various units. Among these people was a person from the U.S.O. show by the name of Marlene Dietrick. I have a Belgian monetary note with Marlene Dietrick’s signature on it, compliment of my commanding Lieutenant. The evenings were ours to relax and enjoy. There were some stores in Eupen (Eu is “Er”) in which we could buy food or treats, and visit with other GIs from different units that also on R&R.,
At this time I met T/5 Corporal Foster Powell, a member of the 387th A.A.A., A.W. Battalion, Battery B, who was also on R&R. Foster and I were both billeted in the lower level of the building which housed the Foreign Exchange Bank, We each were given an Army cot to sleep on. Of course we each had our own two Army blankets. I do not recall what we used for pillows. This was a luxury compared to our “beds” on, or in. which we had slept for the past seven months, Foster was a very nice “kid” and was from the town of Piqua, Ohio. We spent the evenings together “doing the town” and enjoying what treats we could find. After several nights of our R&R, Poster received a large package at “Mail Call”, this turned out to be a very nice sleeping bag. His family sent it to him, probably as a Christmas gift. He was naturally elated to have something so nice and warm instead of the issued two Army blankets. He slept very well that night in his cozy sleeping bag and got up the next morning with a big smile on his face.
We both reported to work at our jobs for the day; I do not know to this day what his assignment was. Having completed our day’s assignment, we were again free to do as we wished in the evening; the date was December 15. 1944, the day before the infamous “Battle of the Bulge” of which, at that time, we had no knowledge. Neither did our military high command have any knowledge of this impending attack by the German Army. Christmas music was broadcast throughout Eupen’s business district and we were under the impression that we had the war well under control. The music consisted of all of our usual Christmas songs, “Silent Night”, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, “Jingle Bells”, etc. Little did we know that many of us would not be living for this Christmas Holiday; among them Hupp and Powell. Foster and I met a young Ranger (we had no marines in our area of combat) and .struck up a Friendship with him. He was wearing an Army Field Jacket that was heavily stained with blood. We asked him why he was wearing this stained jacket while on R&R. He replied that his unit did not have a new or clean jacket with which to replace the jacket he was wearing. We then asked him the source of so much blood on his clothing.
He proceeded to explain that his unit was engaged in combat with the Germans which was close in and required bayonets. During this struggle he bayoneted a German soldier and then attempted to withdraw his bayonet from the enemy’s body, but it was imbedded, and he was unable to retrieve it. At that point he stated that he turned his back to the body of the German soldier and, pulling the rifle over his shoulder, thus pulling the enemy’s body against his back, managed to retrieve his bayonet. This caused the blood from the bayonet wound to be smeared over the back and shoulders of his jacket. It was not a pretty sight!
We decided to attend the USO show which was on stage that evening. The star of the show was Marlene Dietrick, an actress who, as I understand, was an immigrant from Germany to the U.S.A. Also in the show was a male comedian and dancer; he received more applause from the audience than Marlene Dietrick. The songs that Marlene sang were those for which she was famous: “See What the Boys In The Back Room Will Have”, “Falling In Love Again”, “Li Li Marleen”, etc. At this time the man. presumably her manager, took the microphone and announced that Ms, Dietrick expressed the hope that we GIs appreciated her coming to entertain us. With that, a chorus of “boos and cat calls” filled the theater. The comedian went into his performance and the GIs applauded loudly. Soon after these events, we heard a German airplane over the Theater; suddenly a bomb from that airplane struck the building next to the Theater. Marlene and her “manager” disappeared immediately; so did the comedian. We left the Theater and ” reported in” to our officer in charge.
The first day of the Battle of the Bulge we were assigned to guarding the Bank Building. Army trucks passed through the village of Eupen loaded with rifles stacked in the beds apparently recovered from casualties. About mid-morning a German ME 109 made two strafing attacks through the business district. We heard of no serious damage or injuries incurred. We were informed about the attack by the Germans and what was taking place in our area; this was quite a surprise. We had been under the impression that we had the war under control. The day passed without any serious problems. Of course, we did not venture out in the evening as we had before this day. Corporal Powell had received an early Christmas package containing a very nice sleeping bag and he slept in it that night. It would be the last time.
On the morning of the second day of the Bulge, December 17, we resumed our assignment to guard the bank building. Our Lieutenant approached us, T5 Foster Powell, T5 Hupp, and myself, and stated that he wanted three volunteers to go to the town of Malmedy to obtain ammunition. The saying in the Army is “Never volunteer!”, but we three did! The Lieutenant presented us with his written orders, a 45 caliber pistol for T5 Hupp, our driver, an Ml Carbine for T5 Powell, and a Thompson Submachine-gun and his good watch for me. For each weapon we were given one clip of ammunition. We were then assigned a Jeep and away we went fully confident of completing our mission. We drove to the outskirts of Eupen, to the road to Malmedy, where we were stopped by an MP who read our orders and waved us on. As we traveled, we observed the countryside. On the right it was somewhat elevated to what, I recall, appeared to be a hedgeline and though I could not see over the rise, it appeared to be open land. On the left side of the road it was about level with the road, sometimes dropping of to small depressions and was covered with brush and second growth trees.
As we were traveling on a slight downgrade, we approached a densely forested area when suddenly a group of about a dozen well armed German Paratroops came out of the forest and formed a line blocking the left lane of the road. At this time we were “had”, we had no chance of doing anything but to surrender. I told T5 Powell and T5 Hupp to remain motionless; not to attempt to raise their weapons. The German Non Corn with the ambushing troops walked towards us arid raised his hand in a manner for us to stop, After we complied with his order, he was accompanied by a very young German Paratrooper who approached the driver side of the Jeep and ordered Corporal Hupp to move into the back seat, and he took over the drivers seat. The German Non Com then ordered me into the back seat and he seated himself in the right side front seat. This placed Corporal Powell in the center of the back seat. I mention these facts because it determined who was struck and who was not in the following gunfire.
This ambush had been set up at the junction of a side road and the road to Malmedy. Now we proceeded on this side road. We had gone a short ways when we crossed a small bridge over a creek, which ran parallel to the Malmedy road. Suddenly the driver hit the brakes and we were stopped in the middle of the road with the forest to our right. Unknown to the German Troops, a large Gl Wrecker was parked behind a very large tree on the right berm adjacent to the trees of the forest. When they saw the Jeep approaching with German soldiers in command of the vehicle, they opened lire with the ring mount 50 caliber machinegun. The German driver exited the Jeep and ran to the left rear of the Jeep directly behind Corporal Hupp. The German Non Corn exited the Jeep and ran to the cover of the forest on our right. The 50 caliber rounds struck the Jeep at the right headlight area and exited out the left taillight area. This caused Corporal Hupp to be wounded near the groin and killed the young German behind the Jeep. Corporal Powell was wounded in the lower leg and the middle finger on his right hand was severed. The rounds went through the Jeep with a sound of “Chunk-Chunk-Chunk”! Not having been hit, I signaled to the German Non Corn that I was going to jump into the deep ditch in the right side berm. He nodded his approval and I headed for the ditch. The 50 caliber machinegun was still firing so I lay as flat as I could in the very bottom of the ditch. Having seen me go to the ditch, the machinegun was turned to the ditch. The first round struck the snow kicking up dirt and snow at a distance of about thirty feet in front of me. Then the rounds progressed toward me at about ten feet per round. I was perfectly located for the last round so I hugged the earth as tight as I could and wished that I could crawl into my helmet That last round struck so close to the left side of my head that it numbed my face and I felt warm liquid coming out of my left car, I thought that it was blood, but it was fluid from my ear.
Having heard the gunfire, the German ambush group came to the site and silenced the machinegun. They approached the Wrecker and returned with one GI captive. I do not know if there were other casualties on the wrecker. About this same time my wounded comrades were calling out to me “Help us Paul” over and over. I motioned to the German Non Corn that I wanted to help my comrades and he nodded his approval. I went to the Jeep and carried Cpl. Powell and Cpl, Hupp, one at a time. to the edge of the forest, where (laid them on the snow. The Germans took Cpl, Hupp’s .45 caliber pistol and held it up saying “Nicht Gute” C*no good”) and fired a round into a small tree; they drew their Lugars and fired into the same tree and said “Gute” (“good”). My spelling in German may be in error, so overlook it if you will! [ knelt down beside my two comrades and attempted to examine their wounds. The Germans said “Nein” (“no”) and pressed a gun on my back and motioned for me to stand. As I complied, they said “Hand in Hoch” (“hands up”); then they said “Mans” (“march”) and off we went leaving my comrades behind.
I never saw them again. After a rather short walk, we came to the German’s bivouac area deep in the forest. I noticed that there were about ten Gl captives already at this site; they were leaning against trees, some squatting down on their haunches, and others just standing there in the snow, A German guard was with us at all times. We looked down the muzzles of many weapons that day. When they came past us with trenching tools and a weapon we did not know if we would see another day. In fact, I thought that this was my last day to live. So I prayed and prayed all day that something would happen to save all of us, I made many promises to God about my life in the future should f survive this day. I did feel that, at least, I was prepared for the worst, having been to confession while on R&R. in Eupen. I am a Catholic and this is in line with our belief. How well I have kept my promises must be judged by those who know me and not by me. While observing our uncomfortable position in the snow, I used sign language to ask our guard if I and my fellow prisoners could break the tow hanging branches on the trees to form a mat on which we could rest. He nodded his approval and I asked my fellow captives to gather the limbs from the trees. We ended up with a nice, thick carpet of green on which to rest.
All day long we could hear ambushes of vehicles on the road to Malmedy just as happened to us. The Germans had a lookout high in a tree he would call down to alert the troops of the approach of vehicles. We could hear the vehicles: then we heard gunfire, then all was quiet. Soon after that, we could hear the vehicles being removed.
Conversation was very limited between we captives. However, I was told by one 01 that he was taken prisoner before we were, and that he was with the Germans on the right side of the road and witnessed our capture, He said that we were very lucky to have survived the capture, since there were German paratroopers on the right side of the road with weapons trained on us. Should we have made any attempt of resistance, we would have been killed. A small group of Germans passed by our group and looked us over; then they came over to me saying “too young” and felt my face for whiskers repeating “too young”. At no time did the Germans mistreat any of us,
Late in the afternoon Just as the light began to fail in the forest, a young paratrooper approached our group. He stopped and announced in English that his Colonel wanted to talk with our ranking officer. Not knowing the rank of the other captives, I waited and looked for a movement since I was only a Sergeant. When no one answered the call I got up and accompanied the messenger. There stood an officer who, by appearance, left no doubt who was in control. He asked me “where are you from Sergeant” and I answered giving my rank and serial number. Four or nve tunes this was repeated. Then the Colonel said “no. Sergeant, I want to know where in the United States you are from”, I answered, I am from the State of Ohio. Sir!” “Where are you from in the State of Ohio, Sergeant?” he asked. I am from the City of Defiance, Ohio, Sir” I answered. He smiled and said ll have gone through your town many times to visit my relation in Fort Wayne, Indiana”, Me then said “Now, Sergeant, some of my men have been wounded, or injured, and cannot continue on.
I want them to have good care and I know that they will receive good care in your Evac. Hospital. Sergeant, 1 am asking you, will you escort these men to your officers to have them placed in your hospital? If you will do this. Sergeant, you may take your comrades with you.” I answered, “Yes Sir, I will do this”. Then I said, “Sir, may I request a favor? Certainly, Sergeant, what is it?” he answered. I asked “Sir, my two comrades were wounded when we were taken prisoner. Would you have them laid out beside the road that they may also be taken to the hospital?” He answered, “Sergeant, I will do my best, but I cannot promise”. I said “thank you. Sir” and saluted him; he returned the salute. Then he said, “Sergeant prepare your men to move out”, I walked over to my fellow captives and told them of the generosity of this Colonel and that we were ail being set free. Then he said “Prepare to move out!” At this time the wounded and injured German paratroopers were presented on stretchers and some walking with assistance and off we went. There were only three or four Germans to be evacuated, but several more guided us out of the forest and to the road where an American truck met us. On the way out of the forest, we were stopped a couple of times with a sharp “Halt!” by patrols in the forest. The Germans who were guiding us would answer the call and show them the pass which the Colonel wrote to explain our mission and to do us no harm. We were quickly loaded into the truck, and after our German escorts said goodbye to their injured comrades, we were on our way.
Before long we pulled up in front of a building occupied by MPs and Military Intelligence. We entered the building and approached a table at which sat two Military Intelligence Officers. They separated the German and GIs for interrogation. One young German patted me on the back and shook my hand. Then he pulled on a lanyard on his belt and out of his boot came a paratroop knife with blade on one side and strong pick type blade on the other side. This he handed to me, then they took him away. I was completely exhausted, somewhat in shock, and I sat on the floor and up against a wail and fell asleep. I was awakened to undergo questioning by Intelligence. They wanted to know how many troops the German Paratroops had; what type of weapons they had, how we were treated, and what direction I thought they would take when they left their bivouac area. As we approached the truck, which was to take us to Eupen, f noticed the road behind the truck was laid out in a long sweeping curve. Also» the land was bare of trees for quite a distance within this large curve. Another identifying feature in the area was a large billboard. While I was being interviewed the phone rang; it was the top commander of the infantry unit which was assigned the task of catching this German Paratroop unit. He wanted Intelligence to allow me to accompany him in his Jeep to track down and attack the Germans, Intelligence Officers told him that I was in no condition to do this after my release from captivity. The officer was very unhappy about the decision made on my behalf by the Intelligence Officers,
I was billeted in a very nice place for about ten days. One morning two Officers came to this location to speak to me concerning my military future. They told me that the German Paratroop Colonel who wrote my pass to freedom had surrendered to the GIs who were pursuing him and his paratroops. They had asked the Colonel about his agreement with me to lay Cpls. Hupp and Powell by the side of the road so that they too were taken to the Rvac. Hospital, He answered that he had done his best to comply, but his men got out of control and had shot both Cpl. Hupp and Cpl. Powell in the head, killing them instantly. Colonel Von Der Heydte was at this time being treated at this same Evac. Hospital. Then they told me that I had an important decision to make. One was to be sent back to the U.S.A. for reassignment. The second choice was to be sent back to my A.A.A.A.W. Bn. Unit and to my gun section. I was told that there was something that I should know before I made my decision, and that was having been taken prisoner once, and having been released by my captors, a second capture is automatic death. My decision was to be returned to my unit and to continue combat with my gun section. Upon returning, we resumed our duties as if I had never left.
There were many battles and much territory yet to be taken before the War ended. Then we were assigned to the occupation of Germany.
[submitted by Doug Dillard, 82nd Airborne Division]
In 1943, I left New York Harbor with thousands of fellow GI’s. I boarded the Queen Elizabeth as a young, idealistic 17-year-old boy fresh out of High School …
