If You Survive Page 12

  Most of the next day was spent with an interpreter from battalion, trying to dig information out of the prisoners. The division intelligence officer (G-2) was elated with our catch, and he sent up a team of interrogators.

  One of the prisoners was a Pole who had been forced into the German Army and been told to help fight the Americans or else be shot. He had been waiting nervously, eager to be captured. Meanwhile he made a real effort to learn as much as possible about his unit so he could pass it on to us if the time ever came.

  He told us everything he knew, marking defensive positions on the map, locating the mine fields, and naming many of the officers, their ranks, and their commands. He also marked in gun positions, supply dumps, and pillbox locations, and he told us the food was poor and that a lot of the men had dysentery.

  The German corporal in charge of this outpost was quite interesting. He was a Regular Army man and a staunch Hitler fanatic, a genuine Nazi. He spoke English rather well, though he had to stop and think first, and this made it a little difficult for him to be as arrogant as he tried to appear.

  At first he would give us only his name, rank, and serial number in curt, clipped words. Gradually he became more relaxed and gave us more indirect information than he realized. When I asked him about the Germans’ food situation, he replied; “What in hell do you expect after five years of war?” The Polish soldier had already told us how poor the food was, and this remark confirmed it for us.

  The corporal asked me one question I have never been able to forget. He wanted to know whom we had elected as our new president. I told him the election wasn’t until November (the conversation was in October, 1944), and I asked why it was important to him whom we elected. He said he hoped we would elect a new president because many Germans felt the war might not last so long if we had a new leader.

  I wasn’t quick enough to ask him to explain just what he meant. My only conclusion was that the Big Three—Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt—had agreed to accept nothing short of total unconditional surrender, but that many Germans might be ready for some sort of conditional surrender very soon.

  With all the new information provided by the captives, division G-2 set out on a wide-ranging propaganda attack. They printed leaflets bearing the names of German officers and described how well the officers were eating and what a good time they were having with the fräuleins.

  The leaflets said that many Germans would be killed or wounded in a few days when we attacked. The propaganda people suggested the best way for a German soldier to survive the war and get back home to his family would be to bring in the pamphlet and surrender.

  Pleasant music was played to the Germans over loudspeakers, along with persuasive talks in German. The pamphlets went over in artillery shells, and the wind scattered them all over the enemy area. As I recall, over one hundred Reich soldiers came in with the pamphlets and surrendered.

  * * *

  A week or so later the sergeant who led battalion’s special patrol platoon was sent out through G Company to check out the exact location of several pillboxes and a long row of dragon’s-teeth concrete tank obstacles.

  The tooth-shaped, reinforced cement blocks were about three feet at the base and tapered to a point about four feet high. They were built in rows about three feet apart to a depth of twelve feet and stretched across many open fields adjacent to roads. Tanks thus were forced to use the road; this made them easy targets for the antitank guns in the pillboxes near the road.

  The intelligence the sergeant brought back from his night patrol did not agree with what Colonel Walker already had, so the colonel ordered me to personally check it out. Apparently, aerial photos of the area did not agree with our maps. For some damned reason, I was ordered to go out and get the answer in broad daylight.

  The sergeant who had led the patrol the night before went with me, and we made our way through G Company to a fence row at the edge of the woods. The next five hundred yards were open fields clearly visible to the enemy, the only cover being the grass itself, which was a foot high.

  It was midday as we crawled out into the tall grass, cradling our rifles in our arms. For what seemed hours we squirmed forward through the grass on our stomachs and elbows, covering well over five hundred yards, scared as hell all the way. Finally we could see the pillboxes slightly to our left and only two hundred yards away, across a small ravine.

  We could see the Germans very clearly as they moved about in the open areas around the pillboxes, and several other pillboxes were nearby. Fortunately, our hiding place was about ten feet above the enemy’s ground level, and we stayed as motionless as possible in the tall grass.

  I slowly edged my map out from inside my shirt and carefully drew in the pillbox locations, raising my head ever so gradually, just enough to see. To mark points on the map I used back-azimuth, or reverse compass readings. I simply picked two spots on the terrain in front of me and found them on my map. Then I sighted these two objects through my compass and used compass readings to draw a line from each object back toward my position. The intersection of these two lines had to be my position on the map. Once I had my spot located, I could draw in all the fortifications.

  I stuffed the map back into my shirt, and then we very carefully crawled back to the woods, expecting machine gun bullets any second. When we reached the woods, we breathed a sigh of relief and made our way very quickly back to battalion headquarters.

  A World War II battalion headquarters in combat is difficult to describe because they varied so much. Typically, the actual headquarters was where the commanding colonel set up his command post (CP). He might use a tent about twelve feet square or a log-covered bunker. Headquarters personnel might consist of the battalion commander (usually a lieutenant colonel), his executive officer (a major), and captains for administration (S-l), adjutant in charge of operations (S-3), and supply (S-4), with a first lieutenant for intelligence (S-2).

  The battalion command post would usually be surrounded by a headquarters company that provided clerks and personnel for mail, supply, communications, medical support, cooks, pioneers, drivers, radiomen, and others. Also found at headquarters were officers from the various units that might be attached to the battalion; e.g., tank units, tank destroyer units, artillery, engineers, chemical warfare units, etc. The battalion commander’s staff saw that the line companies and units attached to the battalion were supplied as needed.

  Many times a battalion commander would have a moving or forward command post, which might be only a foxhole from which he and his staff worked with his two radiomen. The forward command post might be almost on the front line and was usually within a thousand yards of it. The forward CP would move with the front line.

  My report confirmed the sergeant’s earlier one, and Colonel Walker was pleased with the extra details on my map. It also confirmed that certain aerial photos were up to date. This was valuable information because, even though we never did get to attack there, it later became useful to our successors.

  Then it happened. My short term as S-2, as part of the elite, abruptly ended. Colonel Walker called me in and told me he was sorry, but it was necessary to transfer me back to a line rifle company. He was well pleased with what he called my outstanding job as S-2, but my combat experience was needed desperately in the F Company because Captain Clang and some of his officers had met with a freak accident. He also mentioned that Captain Newcomb had wanted me back in E Company and had offered to trade two of his officers to F for me. I don’t know whether this was blarney or not, but it did make me feel a little better. I had been S-2 on the battalion staff for only ten or twelve days.

  The freak accident that eliminated those officers was not only tragic, it was downright stupid: one of the lieutenants was demonstrating how to fire a rifle grenade, which is very much like an ordinary hand grenade except that it is fitted at the muzzle end of the rifle so that it can use the gases from a blank cartridge for propulsion of about two hundred yards. A blank is used because
the bullet from a live round would explode the grenade right at the end of the rifle. And that is exactly what happened. Luckily, no one was killed.

  Now I was a platoon leader again in a new company with a new captain and not a single man I knew. I hated to start all over again, but I tried hard not to let it show. The captain was a big man who appeared to be experienced, but I never really got to know him. I believe his name was Captain Flanigan. This time around I, at least, was experienced myself, and the men were aware of it.

  At about this time I heard of another serious accident, this time with men from my platoon in E Company. The last to leave the front lines, a whole squad of them hitched a ride in a single jeep, piling on top of one another inside and hanging on to the fenders and bumpers outside. The driver had to use the cat’s-eye slits on the headlights, and he did not see a bomb crater at the edge of the road. When one wheel went over the edge, the unbalanced overload tumbled the jeep to the bottom of the crater, on top of the men. The driver was killed, and many of the men were badly injured. Jackson, the old reliable BAR man who had gone through so much combat, broke his back.

  I was gradually getting better acquainted with the new platoon, though it was awfully hard to stop comparing them to the men of my old platoon, because we had been through hell together so many times and knew what to expect from one another. But these new men also proved out.

  One day some of the men found a cultivated field nearby and dug up some nice large white potatoes. Then they scrounged a large can and some cooking oil from the kitchen, rigged it over an open fire, and soon filled the air with the delicious aroma of french fries. After weeks of K rations, they were the freshest, most tasty food ever ereated —and some of us couldn’t stop eating. The grease was a little too much for us, and we paid for it later one way or another.

  Somehow I managed to come up with a severe sinus infection, and my face and ears ached until I could hardly bear the pain. The doctor gave me pills and nose drops, and after a few terrible days, it all suddenly cleared up. This was fortunate for me because the weather was turning cold, and soon we would be in the Hürtgen forest. We didn’t know what that name would come to mean.

  We had been in the inactive area for almost a month, and the change had been wonderful. Actually, we were getting in top-notch condition for our next battle. We would need that conditioning, and then some. For that particular engagement, nothing was sufficient.

  XI

  SLAUGHTER IN THE HÜRTGEN FOREST

  Long after darkness on about November 10, 1944, the Fourth Division leapfrogged some thirty miles farther north along the German-Belgian border. This was to be a highly secret maneuver, so elaborate pains were taken to erase all signs of our identity. Divisional and regimental numbers were blocked out on all vehicles, and the green four-leafed ivy shoulder patches of which we were so proud were removed from our uniforms. All personal letters bearing the division number were burned.

  Our blacked-out trucks took long, confusing detours to the rear to mislead local enemy agents, and we arrived at our new post before dawn, sleepless and miserable. It was something of a shock early that morning to pick up the English-language propaganda broadcast of Berlin Sally, welcoming the Fourth Division to its new position in the Hürtgen Forest. Actually, the deduction was simple: They knew where the Fourth had been, they knew when it left with erased identity, and they knew when an unidentified unit arrived thirty miles north. Berlin Sally broadcast daily to us in English, trying to pack all the propaganda she could into a few sentences. We could occasionally pick up her program on our walkie-talkies.

  We bivouacked in very rugged, roller-coaster terrain deep in the forest east of Zweifall, Germany, near the middle of the Hürtgen, a one hundred-square-mile forest of extremely steep hills, rough ridges, and deep ravines covered with oak, maple, birch, scrub oak, white pine, and jack pine. Some growths of hardwood were over one hundred feet tall; pines of mixed heights of about ten to fifty feet were planted in closely packed rows. Now and then we would see a giant stand reaching up almost one hundred feet.

  The country was obstacle enough in itself, yet the Germans had two additional advantages. They always knew exactly where we were, having just left there themselves, and thus easily called down shelling on us. They also had prepared in advance a series of defensive positions. After they had made our attack as costly as possible, they simply pulled back a few hundred yards to their next emplacements—and bombarded the ones left to us

  Their new line usually gave them command of everything in front, being perhaps on an upward slope or near the lip of a ravine. Their bunkers were made of thick logs with a few feet of dirt on top. The bunkers were almost immune to artillery, which had to arc in overhead. They might as well have been concrete. Tree bursts bothered them very little, and there was no chance of our tanks getting anywhere near them for direct fire. The infantry had to take them the hard way, going in after them one at a time, sometimes through barbed wire.

  Why the Hürtgen forest was not bypassed is still a major question. Possibly the Allies feared the Germans would open the floodgates on the Ruhr dams just to the forest’s south. Opening the gates would have flooded much of the land to the northeast. Some experts feel that the dams could have been captured and the forest still bypassed, but it is possible that the Allied leadership felt that the forest could also have been used as a base from which the Germans could launch a major counteroffensive.

  At that time, none of the officers I spoke to raised any question about the Hürtgen’s strategic value. We were ordered to fight there and assigned sectors to take. We knew the going there had been very difficult. Several American divisions had fought there for almost two months, and none had been able to make a complete breakthrough. We were told that a breakthrough to the Cologne Plains was essential in order to allow our tanks to move across open ground and on to the Rhine, about thirty-five miles away.

  It was decided that another major effort would be made. This time the battle-hardened Fourth, Twenty-Eighth, and Ninetieth Divisions, with extra tank and artillery support, would attack abreast. The main effort was concentrated to the front of the First Division, just north of the left flank of the Fourth Division. The attack would begin with a very heavy bombing mission designed to wipe out the Germans facing the First Division.

  The German High Command was, of course, aware of our objectives and ordered us held up at all costs. Several experienced German divisions were sent in along with masses of artillery. We heard there were as many as seventeen battalions of artillery. Later we had reason to believe it.

  The days had been growing shorter right along at that time of year and in the tall, dense forest daylight faded away around five in the afternoon. The blackness lasted until almost eight in the morning. Winter also came early that mid-November and proved it with dreary rain, a dousing of early snow, and a miserable chill.

  Normally, each man carried a blanket and shelter-half (half of a canvas tent), so that he and a buddy had a complete tent and two blankets between them. But the weather was so bad we had the men set up in three’s so each could share a tent, an extra shelter-half to lay on the ground, three blankets, and the warmth of three bodies. We also always slept in our woolen clothes, and even through them the ground felt rough and was piercingly cold.

  While waiting for the weather to clear for our bombers we rechecked weapons, stored up some rest, and also received enough men and officers to bring the unit back to full strength.

  We awoke one morning to a deep hush and crawled out to find two inches of new snow. The ground we had been scuffing up was hidden under a pure white blanket, and the gaunt, leafless hardwoods now sported limbs topped with soft ermine. Our world was suddenly clean, fresh, and uncorrupted, and it seemed senseless that we were not deer hunting back home in Michigan but at war with people on the next ridge.

  November 16 came clear and cold, and masses of our heavy bombers did their jobs on the Germans some five miles northeast. This was beyond our d
ivision’s zone so it did not help us directly, but we must have received some side benefits from the reduction of the enemy’s overall strength.

  While the bombing was still underway, my platoon moved out by itself ahead of the battalion. We followed a two-lane track to the north and ran into no opposition. The only sign of danger was a few booby traps strung in the trees to the right of the trail. The trip wires were in plain sight, but if we had been a little careless or come through at night we would have triggered them. I radioed back to the captain to warn him.

  After about a quarter mile, we turned to our right and formed a long defensive line along the ridge, facing north. Once we were in position, the rest of the battalion advanced straight ahead behind us, so that we were strung out defending the left flank of the whole battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Walker.

  Second Battalion immediately ran into a tough German defense, veterans who fought savagely from thick log bunkers and gun emplacements protected by barbed wire. From dug-in positions facing us, they put down brutally accurate mortars and artillery on our men out in the open and chewed us up with direct machine gun and rifle fire. Our casualties were dreadful. Most of our losses were inflicted by artillery and mortar shells exploding in the trees above us.

  Normally, artillery shells come into the ground at a sharp angle, and their shrapnel fans out and slightly upward to the front, much of it going harmlessly into the ground or straight up into the air. When a shell explodes overhead in a tree, almost half of its shrapnel spreads out and downward like rain, and it is infinitely more lethal.

  The best defense is to stand upright against a big tree, thus exposing mostly your helmet and shoulders. Instincts are strong, however, and many men could not stop themselves from hitting the ground as usual. Actually, it didn’t always make much difference, because mortars drop straight downward, and their steel splinters fan out in all directions. Thus you get hit from all directions, even from below with mines.