If You Survive Read online

  I was furious. The guy back in his CP was asking the impossible. It was crazy.

  Then the bearers arrived with bandoliers of ammunition, and somehow we took on new life. Lieutenant Caldwell laid down some more artillery ahead of us, and we moved out again. Just before dark we knocked out the last German breastwork and cleaned out that defensive line.

  The surviving enemy pulled back a few hundred yards into the woods where the pines were very close together, leaving us in a relatively open area of scattered hardwoods.

  Darkness came quickly in the forest, and we had to stop and dig in for the night while we could still see what we were doing. Because of the German artillery and mortar fire we had to get below ground and also get a log roof over our heads. The Germans, of course, did the same thing, and whenever their abandoned shelters fit into our line we used them gratefully. Most of us weren’t so lucky, and so, after an exhausting day, we had to start digging. Such is life in the infantry.

  Our advance for the day had been about five hundred yards, and E Company on our left had gained about the same. It was extremely costly yardage, possibly the most expensive real estate in the world, and we never could have gone the other 1,500 yards to our original objective.

  During the night we received a few riflemen and three officers as replacements. One officer had some experience, another was a former sergeant who had earned a battlefield commission, and the third was a very big, rough recruit; Second Lieutenant Smith.

  Young Smith kept me awake quite a while that night. He had probably heard plenty of the truth about our losses, and he was so nervous he couldn’t stop talking. Rather than try to turn him off, I let him wind down. There was plenty of shelling to keep me awake anyway.

  At daybreak I got up and made my way along our lines, checking every man. Mortar shells continued to drop in our area, most of them bursting overhead in the treetops as I made my rounds. It occurred to me that this business of being up and around checking on the men and showing them that you were still there was one of the reasons casualties were so high among officers.

  I came upon one man lying face down, dead, in the bottom of his foxhole. I didn’t know who he was, so I reached down inside his shirt for his dog tags, and my hand came upon a gruesome mess of cold blood. He was one of the replacements who had arrived after dark. He had died even before he had a chance to fight. Many never made it up to the front lines due to the heavy shelling that hit in the rear areas. This was the Hürtgen.

  By now our supply lines were in a terrible mess. The jeep trails were mined or so muddy as to be impassable. All our food and ammunition had to be carried, and this meant that the recruits joining us after dark were loaded down with boxes of supplies.

  Our medical staff also had taken a severe beating, with most of them killed or wounded. The few remaining stretcher bearers were ready to drop from exhaustion.

  The German mortars continued to drop in relentlessly. Some became deadly tree bursts, and some made it to the ground; since they were coming straight down and faster than sound, there was no warning. By the time you heard the explosion you were already hit or else had escaped.

  During one of my rounds I was caught in the middle of a barrage, with one shell exploding in a large oak directly overhead. My right arm stung, and I looked down. A sliver of shrapnel was sticking out of my right forearm. It was about a quarter inch thick, and a half inch protruded. When I pulled it out I found that about an inch had been buried below the surface. The medic sprinkled sulfa powder on the wound, then bandaged it up. At the time it didn’t particularly bother me; that came later. I must have been pretty stupid, because it simply never occurred to me to go back to the aid station, about five hundred yards to the rear.

  One of the new men asked if he could try out his rifle. He hadn’t had a chance to zero it in, and he asked if there were some Germans he could get a shot at. I assured him there were indeed Germans in the woods ahead and told him if he went to our outpost fifty yards in front he might well get a shot.

  A short time later he returned excitedly and bragged that he thought he’d gotten a couple of Germans. That would have been over two hundred yards through thick woods, so I rather doubted it.

  Later that morning we were ordered to continue the attack eastward toward the far edge of the woods, our original objective. Companies E and F were still to lead the way.

  I called my new officers together and explained that we would attack in column of platoons. I emphasized the importance of speed, because we had to move in close to the Germans to get out of the shelling. I thought we could knock a quick penetration through the German defenses and continue to drive hard for the edge of the woods. This would undoubtedly make the Germans slip off to our sides, particularly our open right, and also to our rear, and I strongly warned against a possible German counterattack from any quarter.

  To guard against probable enemy reactions, I assigned defensive positions for each platoon in our new area at the edge of the woods. I didn’t think we would have time to mill around, so I told each platoon leader in advance exactly where he should have his men dig in and clear out fields of fire to his front; they were to cut off tree limbs that might obscure or obstruct their view of the enemy to their front and flanks. Then I repeated everything, particularly about the Germans’ custom of counterattacking. By then I seemed to be respected as a veteran.

  Both companies jumped off on schedule, and the shelling picked us up at once. As the artillery screamed into the treetops above us I pushed my company right out to the front. Evidently the Krauts were caught off balance by our rush, and they took for the rear with only a few shots at us. I knew the dangers of staying in place too long, so I whipped my men ahead even though I could tell by the sounds of firing that E Company was falling behind. They were probably being pinned down by heavy artillery barrages.

  They were being shelled from the front, just as I had expected. If they had moved out fast, the way we had, they probably would have escaped most of the shelling.

  We didn’t dare wait for E, so we pushed on rapidly and reached our objective, the edge of the woods, in about a half hour. We were about a half mile ahead of everyone and exposed on all sides.

  The three rifle platoons immediately began to dig in as arranged, and I assigned the weapons platoon and the headquarters section the rear of our lines. I also designated what would be the inner side when E Company joined us. We were in a rough square, about 150 yards to a side.

  The fir trees there had been planted very close together by the local foresters and had grown to a height of about twenty feet. We couldn’t see more than about twenty yards in any direction, except over the open farm land that was our front. I went around to make sure the platoon leaders were having their men cut off the lower limbs of the pines to give them longer fields of fire and prevent the enemy from sneaking in too close.

  I had just finished my rounds and was starting to help Lieutenant Caldwell dig our foxhole when the audacious young fellow who had so eagerly tried out his rifle the day before came charging wildly up to me and stammered, “Germans! Germans!” and pointed to the rear. If only he had fired that rifle at them, some of his buddies might have had enough warning to save themselves.

  Before I could move a step, the clatter of machine guns and the b-r-r-r-ip of burp guns sounded almost on top of us. The men on the rear line were only partly dug in, and they dove for the ground. These were mostly replacements, and they were shocked and nearly paralyzed by the suddenness and fierceness of their first action. Very few of them even attempted to fire back.

  Lieutenant Caldwell and I began firing our rifles and yelling at the men to start shooting. Then I told Caldwell to keep trying to get them to shoot while I went up to the front—actually back to the front—to get more men.

  Bullets cut through the branches and zipped all around me as I ran back. Every damned man I came upon was trying to hide in his foxhole or under a tree, making no attempt at all to fight back. I rousted a bunch of
them out and got them to follow me, running as low as possible under the whizzing bullets.

  It was easy to tell where the Krauts were from all their firing, and I led the dozen or so of my men out to the side and killed a couple of them, wounded three, and took a prisoner. A few managed to get away.

  Actually, it turned out to be only a combat patrol, but they were so heavily armed with automatic weapons that they sounded like a whole company. They sure raised hell with us for a time.

  With the excitement over, I got the men back to cutting branches to clear fields of fire. I told them that was far more important than digging foxholes. They had found out the hard way.

  Normally I would have continued to work on our defenses, leaving the wounded to our very capable medic, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. Then I heard muffled moans from a nearby foxhole and went over to find my new young Lieutenant Smith lying shot to death, with his body blocking the entrance. I tugged at his limp, two-hundred pound body but couldn’t budge it due to my bad arm, so I yelled for help. His body was riddled with German bullets; he must have died instantly. All our talking the night before would never serve any purpose, although I couldn’t help wondering if he might have had a premonition.

  Underneath Smith’s body was Sergeant Servat, who had been terribly wounded in the face. Somehow the gutsy sergeant was still conscious. A third man was at the bottom of the log-covered hole, and it was our missing medic. He was quite unhurt but completely pinned down by the other two. He quickly went to work.

  First we sent the walking wounded, including the Germans, toward the rear. Then the medic worked on a man hit in the gut, and I did what I could for Servat. I tied bandages around both sides of his face and asked if he thought he could make it back to the forward aid station some 1,200 yards away. He nodded, and so I pointed him on his way, telling him he was bleeding internally and that he mustn’t stop to rest but had to keep moving to save his own life. There were no stretcher bearers. Somehow he made it. It must have been the longest journey of his life.*

  The man with the stomach wound needed to be evacuated, but the stretcher bearers were all casualties themselves. I offered to rig up some kind of stretcher and send two men back with him, but he didn’t want to be moved. He said he was sure he would be okay until a jeep could get that far. I wish I had insisted, because he died that night from shock and loss of blood. The medic and I second-guessed ourselves and felt pretty sick about it.

  My arm was so sore that it was almost useless. I couldn’t grip a shovel handle, so I ordered the German prisoner to dig my foxhole. He was about forty, and a couple of times he wanted to stop and rest, but I was so damned mad at the deaths and wounds he and his buddies had caused that I took it out on him a little and wouldn’t let him stop. Then I had him cut some thick pine logs to make a frame for the top, and on this frame he spread big pine boughs, then his rain cape, and then a thickness of dirt as extra protection against tree bursts. About a foot of small pine boughs made a wonderful mattress at the bottom. This was the best foxhole I ever had, being high enough to sit up in and wide enough for two men to stretch out in. We weren’t used to such elegance.

  Lieutenant Bowman, heavy machine gun platoon leader from H Company, was sent up to us with his two sections and four water-cooled machine guns. They added tremendously to our defense. I let Lieutenant Bowman share my deluxe foxhole because Lieutenant Caldwell had decided to dig in closer to the open field in case his artillery was needed.

  Just before dark E Company made it up to our left. They had had a rough day. This left only our right flank exposed, and I had already moved our own light, air-cooled machine guns over there and cut some wide and deep openings through the pines for better observation of enemy movement. We were well dug in and could hand out a tremendous amount of damage if attacked.

  The fronts of both E and F faced eastward across big open fields, which were about halfway between Kleinhau on our southeast and Grosshau on the northeast. Both of these villages lay in the open farmland about three quarters of a mile apart, and we were about one quarter mile west of the main north-south road connecting them.

  First Battalion’s A, B, and C companies were all on line to the left of E; those companies had taken heavy maulings and were in very bad shape. We were all so short of officers and men that we made no attempt to move ahead for the next few days. We made ourselves as comfortable as possible, staying close to our foxholes because of the frequent systematic shelling day and night.

  Meanwhile, F Company received one hundred replacements and one officer, bringing us up to a total of 150 men, which was only about ten short of full combat strength. I was still shy a weapons platoon leader and an executive officer, and so I had to take on the executive’s job of assigning the new men. Each man was interviewed briefly to find out his MOS or Military Order Specialty; most turned out to be simply basic riflemen.

  * * *

  Both my radiomen had been casualties, so I quizzed each man on his knowledge of radios. Battalion had loaned me one radioman but wanted him back as soon as possible, and he sure was eager to return. Finally two men, who appeared to be buddies, told me they could do the job. It seemed they had been ham radio operators but knew nothing about military radios, and I decided to keep them in mind in case no one turned up.

  After the screening was over, I had to go back to those two. Then I told them to finish their foxholes and report to the regular radioman for instructions.

  I told the battalion radioman to teach them only the fundamentals and how to change batteries. He kept them busy the rest of the day and toward evening convinced me they could handle it, so I let him scamper back to his real assignment at battalion, where they’d been working short-handed; he had seen enough front-line duty.

  Day and night the shelling never ceased. The Germans, of course, knew exactly where we were regrouping, and they wouldn’t let us rest. Our log roofs could take care of any shrapnel, but two of our men were killed instantly, torn to pieces by a rare direct hit, as they slept.

  One day we were startled by the thunderous roar of what seemed like a freight train overhead, and a huge shell landed with a tremendous blast about seventy-five feet to my left side. It plowed a crater eight feet deep, ten feet wide, and fifteen feet long. This was within our lines; we were shaken.

  This was the biggest one that ever landed near me, and I reported it to battalion. Some artillery officers came up and measured the hole and calculated from its depth and angle that it came from a giant railway gun about sixteen miles back. They must have put some counterfire out there for we never got any more incoming rounds from that gun.

  We were lucky enough to have a rather quiet night, and I managed to catch up on sleep. Next morning Lieutenant Bowman and I were indulging in a K-ration breakfast when the smaller of the two new radiomen plummeted into our foxhole. He was shaking violently, and tears streamed down his face. His whole frame quivered with the spasms, and he was barely able to tell me between sobs that he couldn’t take it “up here.” He just had to get the hell out; I had to let him go to the rear. He sobbed like a baby during the entire outburst and beat his head on the ground.

  I tried to calm him down and reason with him, but all he could do was sputter through his broken sobs, “Please, please let me go.” He was beginning to get under my skin, so I dropped the soft stuff and told him angrily that I had been in front-line combat for over five months and no one would let me go back. Since he had just arrived, he sure as hell wasn’t going back.

  This only brought on more hysteria, and he said he would desert. I told him that was one way of ending it all quickly, because he would be shot as a deserter. He said he didn’t care. Then I told him how ashamed his parents would be, and he still didn’t care. Nothing seemed to work, though somehow he became a little calmer, and then he shocked me with his remark: “I’m just a dirty, no-good, yellow, Jewish SOB.”

  I didn’t give a hoot about his background but was horrified to hear a man demean himself so
abjectly. All this was enough for me, and I sat back completely stumped and let Lieutenant Bowman try his hand.

  I hadn’t had time to analyze, yet somehow this fellow didn’t ring true to me, and I was determined to get to the bottom. It was pure luck, however, that led me to a way to draw him out. With nothing particular in mind, I began to probe about his past. When I got into college sports, and he began to wipe his eyes, I knew this was the right track. He said he had played football in high school and had led his team to conference championships. I congratulated him on what must have been a fine job of leadership and followed up by remarking that he must have had a really great team for them to play together so well.

  Then I tried to tie it in to the present by suggesting that he think of combat as similar to football. Now, however, it was my turn to be quarterback, and our team really had taken an awful mauling in the first half. We had used up our entire bench and desperately needed every single man to help us win. I went on to say he might have to go out for a pass, or make an end run, or maybe just block on the next play. Right now I wasn’t sure where he would be needed most, but a radioman could be very important.

  By now he had quit crying, and in a perfectly normal voice he said that it had never occurred to him that this was a team effort, but he could see it and would try hard to carry out his assignments. Our talk ran on a little longer, and then I sent him back to his foxhole.

  It seemed he hadn’t quite given up the idea of leaving the hellish trap we were in, for he tried to get back to see me several times that day, but I wouldn’t let him in my foxhole. Once some shells landed nearby, and that sent him scurrying for his foxhole. Finally he stayed there.

  The dramatics weren’t quite over, however. Later that day the other radioman, a big guy over two hundred pounds, crawled into my foxhole, and he, too, was crying. On his hands and knees he blubbered and begged me to let him go to the rear. By now I had become something of a drama critic, and his performance was far inferior to that of his smaller buddy. I blew my top and shouted at him that the two of them were trying to play me for an idiot, and I’d had it with them.