If You Survive Read online

  “Somebody changed the goddamn wire, and I can’t find my foxhole,” complained Hill.

  Sergeant Anders then told him that no one could have touched the wire and that he should go back to the very end of the wire, make a sharp left, and take one big step, and he’d fall right into his foxhole.

  Hill retraced his steps, grumbling all the way. Shortly we heard a sharp crack and then a wild yell from Hill; he had been afraid to let go of the wire when he came to the end of the line. Rifle slung over his shoulder, he held on to one end of the wire with one hand and groped for his foxhole with the other. He reached too far, the pine bough holding his wire snapped, and Hill plummeted headfirst into his foxhole.

  Nothing but his feelings were hurt, and Hill eased them by letting out a torrent of purple cusses. Sergeant Anders went out to check, but Hill was so mad he wouldn’t talk. I don’t think I ever laughed so hilariously in my life. We all were a little close to hysteria at times, and the episode was a great release.

  During the night a German walked in alone and surrendered to the outpost. Some of the men hung the German’s coat and helmet on the bushes in front of Hill’s foxhole. When he saw them he wouldn’t come out of his foxhole all day. In fact, he just dug it deeper.

  This had gone far enough and probably would get worse, so I had Hill transferred to the rear with regimental headquarters, where he should have been in the first place. In his new assignment he managed to survive the war.

  Meanwhile our penetration of the Siegfried was not exploited. We stayed put for over a week with neither the ammunition nor the gas to continue.

  In early February 1945, we had to retake the exact same ground.

  We stayed in the defensive positions for another week with nothing much happening. The shelling continued, but it all went over our heads and on to the rear. The only things that really scared us were the German “Screaming Meemies,” or Nebelwerfer, six-barreled 150mm rocket launchers that seemed to crank up with a high-pitched metallic scream. The sound was so intense and nerve-shattering we couldn’t tell where the rockets were going to hit.

  After about a week we were pulled back through the hard-won Siegfried territory and moved northward a few miles, still in the Schnee Eifel forest. A change in position is always stimulating, and this time we had a wonderful bonus; the kitchen trucks were able to join us. We had hot food for the first time in over a month. It was an almost-forgotten luxury. No one griped to the cooks.

  Once again we had the Siegfried in front of us, and this time there were many acres of thick woods between us and the enemy. The neutral zone could not be neglected; in fact, it was made to order for one of the most hated and dangerous chores of the foot soldier, a chore which requires exceptional skill—patrolling.

  A patrol is a moving outpost without an outpost’s defenses. Its only real defense is luck. Of course, the men can move from tree to tree, from cover to cover, but they do have to keep moving, and that means that sooner or later they will come upon the enemy—and may allow him the first shot.

  Each patrol had a mission, usually to find the enemy and determine his strength. To find out anything about the enemy, one had to approach him. You might run into total ambush and get wiped out, and you might only draw a single shot. Ideally you would see the enemy and gather information without being detected.

  If you kept spread out, you had a better chance of avoiding ambush. And you also had a better chance of losing track of your men, and of losing control. In the end, you varied your methods according to terrain and visibility. Night work hid you from the enemy; it also hid the enemy.

  Patrolling required the utmost teamwork. Each man knew he might be the first to spot the enemy, and each knew he depended on the others for help. Visual and vocal signals were essential to keep us in touch, and at the same time the signals could not give us away to the enemy.

  There was very little chance of surprising the enemy because he expected us to be out there and because he had patrols of his own.

  I usually had the men move in a staggered line, with a man on each flank and one in the lead. I would be close behind the lead scout. Actually, all of us were scouts—playing Indian for real.

  Night patrols had hazards of their own. In all patrols we were shown on the map where we were and where we were supposed to go. We quickly learned to distrust the maps, to use them only as a guide. Enemy positions are not always marked accurately on the map, and of course the enemy may move.

  We relied heavily on our compasses to give us the right direction at night. Sometimes we found the landmarks shown on the map; sometimes we had no way of knowing distance and had to pace it off ourselves.

  It would have been very easy to goof off on patrol, because you were out there all by yourself and no one could check on you. In fact, at times all you could think of was how nice and safe and comfortable the rest of the people were back in their foxholes, not to mention those in rear headquarters.

  So it took extra discipline and extra-steady nerves while you waited for that first shot or your first glimpse of the enemy.

  Sometimes we were sent out with the general mission of trying to locate the enemy and learn what he was doing. At other times my patrols were supposed to find out if a certain bridge was still intact, the exact location of a German gun, the location of German outposts and their frontline positions, the strength of their units, the location of pillboxes, the accuracy of a certain aerial photo.

  Apparently our work was satisfactory, because we seemed to be getting most of the new patrol work.

  My platoon had three squads of a dozen men each. Each squad had ten men plus a sergeant and corporal. I seldom employed more than a squad of men on patrol, and to keep the risks fair I rotated the squads. The only thing that didn’t rotate was the leader of the patrol. The platoon leader led every patrol. That was one time when none of the men envied the officers’ privileges.

  There were times when I led one patrol during the day and another at night. In one stretch I had patrols of one kind or another for eight consecutive days. It was a great relief when another company finally took over the patrol work. I admit I was close to exhaustion.

  Way back in the swamps before Saint Lô, Colonel Lanham had promised us promotions if we survived our first major engagement, and my promotion to first lieutenant finally came through while we were in the Schnee Eifel. Lieutenant Piszarak also was promoted at this time.

  Captain Newcomb made something of a ceremony out of presenting us with shiny new silver bars to replace the gold ones of second lieutenant. The date was September 29, 1944, which also happened to be my twenty-third birthday.

  I was proud of the promotion but was careful to conceal the new silver bars under my collar, since the Germans liked to pick off officers and I didn’t want to advertise. All of my men recognized me by then, bars or no bars.

  It seems I was now considered a true veteran, having survived both the Saint Lô and Siegfried Line campaigns. At about this time the division historian came up to interview me and took a lot of notes about our combat experiences, but I never saw any of it in print.

  My platoon had lost four sergeants, a medic, and two privates during our month in the Siegfried, the only men lost since Saint Pois. Replacements again brought us back up to forty men.

  We didn’t know where we’re going. The next day we were due to be relieved.

  X

  SIEGFRIED.… AND MINES!

  A new phase of the war began when the GI’s met stiffened enemy resistance at the Siegfried Line and at the same time ran perilously low on gas, ammunition, food, and other necessities. The rugged terrain of the Schnee Eifel forest, with its dense woods, steep slopes and ravines, poor roads, and strategically placed pillboxes, gave the Germans a telling tactical advantage. From behind these natural and manmade defenses, a very few Germans could pin down a great many attackers.

  While we had indeed made some ‘pencillike’ penetrations, we did not have the backing to expand them, and we were fo
rced into a holding operation. Both sides used the time and circumstances to bring up fresh troops and supplies and to redeploy units along the line.

  About October 10 our regiment was trucked thirty miles north of Brandscheid to the vicinity of Bullingen. Here we were told that our mission was to break through the Siegfried once again. This time, however, we had plenty of materiel.

  Our trucks had barely stopped and had just gotten our feet on the ground when I was ordered to take my platoon out on a combination reconnaissance and combat patrol. Somehow I was neither elated nor flattered to be hand-picked for such a challenging assignment.

  My recon job was to approach the Siegfried and check the roads and bridges to ensure our tanks’ safe passage. The combat assignment was to seek out the enemy, engage him in a fight, and try to estimate his strength, and then make it back alive to report the information. At times I couldn’t help thinking it would be nice to work in some headquarters thinking up that sort of assignment for someone else. A sign of fatigue, I suppose.

  We moved out from town in an open column about 10 A.M. on a sunny day and took the road eastward. Wide-open stretches of farmland on all sides gave the enemy a clear field of view and made us nervous, and so we were grateful for the row of pines that bordered the road and gave us some cover. After about a mile of semiexposure, the road entered a dense pine forest, and we were able to get off the road itself and keep to the woods alongside.

  After about another half mile we slowed down and made our way from tree to tree with extreme caution because we were getting close to a crossroad that showed on our map. Suddenly Crocker, as always the lead scout, opened up on some Germans he spotted at the intersection.

  The Germans promptly returned fire with heavy machine guns and a fusillade of rifle. We took cover behind trees, bushes, and small depressions and fired a few rounds back. The crackling exchange kept up for a few minutes, but the woods were too thick to allow much accuracy. We never got a good look at the Germans, but they seemed to have at least two machine guns, a few squads of infantry, and what was probably an antitank gun emplacement.

  I decided the roadblock was much too difficult and costly to attack with only one platoon, so I brought my men back and reported to Captain Newcomb. I told him that all bridges and roads looked safe but that it would probably take at least a rifle company to knock out the roadblock.

  When I returned to the platoon I was met by a very grim-looking Sergeant Anders who, as staff sergeant, was my second-in-command. Sergeant Anders said that one of the privates was missing. None of the men could remember having seen him since we had left the roadblock.

  The only thing to do was go back and look for him, so Sergeant Anders and I and five volunteers took off again. We spread out and crawled all over the area but found no sign of the missing man. If he had been wounded, he might still be alive if we found him in time. In the back of our minds we also knew he could have been killed or captured. After a while we gave up and returned to camp. We had been careful, but the Germans should have seen some sign of our search, and I was surprised they hadn’t fired on us.

  Staff Sergeant Anders was quite upset about losing a man needlessly. Anders was a very tough, raw boned man from the hills of Arkansas. He reminded me of what I had read of the rugged Army scouts in the days of the Indian wars out west. He often volunteered for patrols and other hazardous ventures not expected of him as a platoon sergeant. He and Crocker were of the same genus; they both really enjoyed a fight, and they both knew how to win.

  All of the men respected Anders. I know he could have led the platoon in any kind of combat.

  As we walked back to the company area I did my best to assure him that the soldier’s loss was not at all his fault. But when we arrived home, there was the man, who said he had run into a problem faced by all frontline troops, the sudden call of nature; while the patrol was firing at the roadblock, he dropped back into the woods to relieve himself.

  We were gone by the time he tried to rejoin us, so he made his way back to the company alone. He must have gotten lost for a while because he reached town just after the search party left.

  Sergeant Anders gave the fellow hell, telling him that if it happened again he might better fill his pants than let seven men risk their lives trying to find him. Nobody talked to him for a while; nobody saw much humor in his goof.

  Early the next morning, the Second Battalion moved out in attack formation with E Company in front and the other companies following. Naturally it was my platoon’s turn to lead again, since we knew the terrain. We approached the roadblock very, very gingerly—only to find the Germans gone.

  The two other platoons of E Company turned right at the crossroads and headed for the company objective, over a mile away at the edge of the woods overlooking the Siegfried Line near Miescheid. The little hamlet was about two hundred yards away, across open fields beyond the edge of our woods, and the Siegfried was just behind it. Our company was another three hundred yards back in the forest, and that is where we dug in awaiting the big jump-off into the Siegfried.

  Our E Company was spread out in defensive positions on the left of the road and F Company continued the defense to the right. Lieutenant Piszarak’s First Platoon was dug in nearest the road, and my platoon was to their left. Lieutenant Mason’s Third Platoon was on the left flank, and Lieutenant Lloyd’s’s Weapons Platoon filled in the rear, with company headquarters in the middle. We placed a pair of men every ten to fifteen yards, covering between three hundred and four hundred yards along the front.

  My platoon had just begun to dig in when we were suddenly attacked by about forty Germans, who ran at us shooting, taking cover behind trees as they moved in.

  We instantly dropped our shovels, lay down in the shallow beginnings of our foxholes, and fired back with all we had. All they seemed to have were single-shot, bolt-action rifles, and these quickly proved no match for the volleys of our Browning Automatic rifles (BARS) and semiautomatic M-ls. The Krauts were stopped about seventy five yards in front of us. They probably came upon us by accident, and they didn’t seem organized. It now looked as though they might be regrouping to continue the attack, so I called for artillery.

  Our artillery forward observer, a very young chap who was new to us, started off by giving us a real thrill. His first rounds were not the standard High Explosive. They were lethal white phosphorus, designed to burn through anything. They also fell short, hitting high up in the huge maples directly overhead. Smoking hot metal rained down all around us.

  I screamed at him to cease fire and raise his guns, and his next rounds were right on target, bursting in the trees just over the Germans, seventy five yards out from us. About a dozen of the 105s blasted in over the Germans with a thunderous racket, and that ended any attack plans they might have had. They collected their wounded and took off to the rear.

  The forward observer apologized for the short rounds. He actually had called for smoke shells to point out the target but got thermite instead, and thermite sometimes does fall short.

  It was there in that green forest that we ran into the most frightening weapon of the war, the one that made us almost sick with fear: antipersonnel mines. By now I had gone through aerial bombing, artillery and mortar shelling, open combat, direct rifle and machine gun firing, night patrolling, and ambush. Against all of this we had some kind of chance; against mines we had none. They were vicious, deadly, inhuman. They churned our guts.

  They were planted a few inches below the soil and covered by leaves or natural growth that left no sign. Not a bit of ground was safe. They went off if you stepped on them with as little as five pounds of pressure, or if you moved their invisibly thin trip wire. The only defense was to not move at all.

  A mine usually blew off one leg up to the knee and shattered the other, which looked like it had been blasted by a shotgun at close range. If the man was not killed instantly, he needed immediate attention due to shock and loss of blood.

  Soon each of the line c
ompanies had lost men to mines, and the rest of us were afraid to walk anywhere. A call went out to the engineers and the pioneer platoons, which had specially trained men, who cleared paths through mine fields. Each path was about three feet wide and was marked by white tape. The specialists used mine detectors very slowly and deliberately; yet despite their care, an engineer lost his leg in one of the cleared paths.

  After that tragedy they began to probe every inch of ground with trench knives, gently working the knives in at an angle, hoping to hit only the sides of mines. This way they came upon many devilish little mines handmade from cottage cheese-type crocks and sealed with wax. Their only metal was the detonator, which was too small to be picked up by mine detectors.

  The engineers and pioneers worked day and night for several days on what had to be one of the nastiest jobs of the war; each probe could be a man’s last.

  One night the captain of H Company, the Second Battalion’s heavy weapons company, came up to our area. He was a big, heavyset, dark-complexioned man, and he was very concerned about his company’s mission. He was looking for advance positions for his heavy machine guns so they would have clear lanes of fire on long-range targets behind the enemy’s lines. This overhead fire was intended to harass the enemy during the rifle companies attack on the Siegfried.

  The captain went about his task conscientiously, even though it was somewhat disheartening: he never could see where his bullets were landing. Heavy machine guns were much more effective on defense.

  The captain talked about his plans perhaps a bit more than necessary and paced about in what seemed a nervous manner. Less than ten minutes after leaving me, he strayed off a marked path and had a leg blown off up to the knee. At least he was alive, we figured gratefully, and he would be going home.

  A few nights later, just as I was getting ready to lead a reconnaissance patrol into the Siegfried, Captain Newcomb and I were told to report at once to battalion headquarters; Colonel Walker had some new ideas to give me for the patrol, and a short delay wouldn’t make any difference.