If You Survive Page 9

  I called my sergeants together, brought them up-to-date, and had them get their men ready to move out. Then one of my most experienced men crawled out of his foxhole, got to his feet, and fell in a heap. His body shook with convulsions; he was a total wreck and had to be evacuated. Apparently the stress and worry in anticipation of our attack, after witnessing the terrifying slaughter the day before, was too much for him.

  Captain Newcomb apologized because he had only one map for the entire company, and it was a 1914 edition. He warned us to be cautious because he was sure the roads and trails in the wooded area and other landmarks had changed since 1914. He then told me to lead off with my platoon and said that he would be in close contact by radio.

  The company moved out in column of platoons. We picked our way cautiously through the thick stand of pines on the right side of the road. These pines had probably been planted shortly after World War I and were about thirty feet tall. The underbrush was thick and tangled, and it was enough trouble to struggle through without worrying about the enemy. What had been a dreary mist turned into a drizzle and soon became a downpour as we slapped and pushed our way through the wet branches.

  We had worked our way ahead for about a mile when Captain Newcomb radioed us to hold in place because there was some confusion over our route. So we stopped where we were and sat down to rest with our backs against trees. In about ten minutes Captain Newcomb plowed his way up through the brush, looked at his map, and told us to continue on again in the same direction.

  I got the men on their feet and signaled the two scouts to move out ahead. Private First Class Crocker acknowledged with a wave. He and his partner stood up and immediately opened fire across the road to their left. The second scout emptied the eight-round clip in his M-l so fast it seemed almost like a machine gun. Then he turned and ran like the devil for the rear while steady old Crocker crouched in place, watching the road.

  The second scout told me they had spotted several Germans in the road not ten feet ahead of them when they stood up. The Germans had not returned the fire, so they had been killed or had taken off.

  The rest of us moved very cautiously and found three dead enemy soldiers in the road. Crocker was sure one or two others had gotten away. It looked as though we had been lucky enough to spot a German patrol just before they saw us.

  But as soon as we got up to move we were flattened by vicious machine gun fire. I was pinned down behind a small mound of earth while bullets whipped into the dirt in front of and just over my head. My knapsack got torn up, and the canteen on my hip took a direct hit and leaked water all over my back and legs. It was difficult to just lie there and not try to get up and run for cover.

  My radio was not touched, so I called our mortar squad to set up and fire a few rounds. I couldn’t see the Kraut machine guns, so we had to guess about where they were from the sound. It took a bit of adjusting, but after a few rounds we heard the wild screams of German wounded, and the machine gun was silent. Apparently we had achieved a lucky hit.

  After throwing in a few extra rounds to make sure, we were able to get up and continue our advance. I judged this to have been a small forward outpost, and I wondered just how far out the Germans were from their lines.

  We had made about another half mile into the woods without opposition when Captain Newcomb again ordered us to halt. This time he came running up with the map in his hand and told me we were about a half mile off course, and he said that he wanted us to make a sharp left and head up the hill through the woods to the next road and then turn right. According to the old map, the next road was much better than the present one, which was not much more than a fire trail.

  The left turn led us up a long hill deep into woods thick with tall white pines. We moved as quietly as we could, and our steps were muffled by the wet pine needles that were matted on the ground. They even seemed to absorb the downpour of cold rain. Crocker was the single lead scout, since the other man had had enough for one day. He worked his way up the hill about thirty yards ahead of me, with the platoon following close behind. Suddenly he dropped to the ground and waved me forward cautiously. I crawled up to him over the wet ground, and he pointed a few yards ahead to a collection of German rifles, machine guns, and other gear leaning up against trees.

  We lay quietly and could neither see nor hear any other sign of the Germans, who had apparently abandoned their weapons. The trees had thinned out there, and through the murky light I was able to make out a clearing about one hundred yards ahead. I told Crocker to keep low and go take a look. Some of the men had moved up close behind me, and we covered Crocker as he crawled forward through the rain.

  Crocker soon reached the edge of the woods and motioned me to crawl up beside him. Then he carefully pointed to a clutch of Germans standing around a shelter that was tied to a wide, bushy pine tree. They were only about forty yards in front of us across the road. We could see several groups of them all huddled up, trying to take shelter from the pouring rain.

  I couldn’t conceive how blockheaded or green those troops might be, leaving their weapons a good hundred yards away. They were sitting ducks on a pond in the rain, with no idea we were near. Maybe the rain had blotted out the sound of gunfire less than a hour before, yet only a half mile from them. Perhaps they thought the downpour had canceled the war for the day.

  My ever-aggressive, impulsive Crocker wanted to open fire, but I was able to restrain him. The closer I looked, the more Germans I saw. There seemed to be a whole platoon of them scattered along the edge of the road for about one hundred yards to my right. I signaled my platoon forward and carefully positioned them along the edge of the woods parallel to the road.

  About this time Captain Newcomb came up to find out the reason for the delay. I showed him the situation and told him I planned to attack in a few minutes. He asked if we needed any help and quickly agreed to my request for another platoon to assemble to the right of mine and for a third platoon to protect the right flank. Captain Newcomb said he would send up Lieutenant Mason with his Third Platoon and told me that I should tell Mason where he should place his men. He said, “Go ahead whenever you’re ready, and I’ll take care of everything else.”

  While we waited in the rain for the Third Platoon to come up, we had a brief scare. A German corporal stood up and stretched, threw a rain cape around his shoulders, and walked out into the middle of the road. I froze in step between two pines as he looked out our way. One of my men lying on the ground near me wanted to shoot, but I whispered, “No.” I was proud of the control of my men, for not one of them moved, and the corporal was lucky he walked away.

  A few minutes later Lieutenant Mason signaled he was ready, and our two platoons, eighty men on line, opened up on those poor Jerries who were stupidly lolling under the trees only forty yards across the road. All those M-l rifles, plus six Browning Automatic, rifles, blasted away at once into a continuous crackling din. They were throwing almost one hundred rounds a second into the screaming, bellowing, scrambling Germans. Not a single shot was fired in return. After a few minutes, I led the men in a wild charge across the road to the stricken enemy.

  Our attack was so sudden and such a brutal surprise that not one of our men was touched. We did not know how many weapons the Jerries might have had with them, and of course we couldn’t take a chance. Most of the fifty or so Germans were dead, and we found only one man among them who was not wounded or dead. He was about eighteen and so scared he couldn’t talk. I took his new Luger pistol as a souvenir and sent him to the rear. He and the corporal who had walked down the road were the only lucky ones.

  We had very little time to exult. In fact, even before I had time to report to Captain Newcomb or confer with Lieutenant Mason, the Germans hit us with a full-platoon counterattack. They seemed to come from the woods directly across the field from us.

  I instantly ordered my men back across the road and into the ditch where they had some protection. The Jerries would fire at us as they ran toward us a
nd every few seconds they would hit the ground and fire some more. We tried to pick them off every time they got up to rush us, but the rain continued steadily and the visibility was poor.

  Some of them made it up behind the pines and fired rapidly enough to pin us down. I yelled at my men to throw grenades and return the fire. Then Captain Newcomb ordered me to withdraw into the woods and rejoin the rest of Company E, so I moved along the line and got each squad to pull back two men at a time.

  Between the woods and the road was a strip of a hayfield about thirty yards wide. The hay was two feet high, and most of our men crawled back safely, though the last squad lost two men. Sergeant Williams, the same man who had been shot through the neck around D day and who returned to action only to get paralyzed at Le Mesnil Herman back in July, had a grenade land by him, and he became paralyzed again. Apparently his old neck wound could not stand the shock. So we had to drag him back into the woods.

  I yelled at one of the sergeants to hurry and get his men out of there. The sergeant thereupon stood right up in the open, for no reason at all that I could figure—and immediately was cut down by a German burp gun, a small machine pistol that fired so fast it sounded like b-r-r-r-r-ip.

  To my mind, the sergeant’s girlfriend was responsible for the naked carelessness that caused his death. Just the day before he had shown me a Dear John letter he’d received from her. It was the most wickedly cruel letter I had ever read, and it morbidly depressed the sergeant. He was from the south, and this little wench told him, among similar tidbits, that she had been sleeping with a Negro and that he was twice the man Sergeant Hester was.

  The rain still came down in torrents, and the Germans made no attempt to follow us into the woods. We had seen enough action for one day, so we dug in for the night among the tall pines. Each foxhole had to be big enough for two men, with one being on guard while the other slept, taking turns every two hours all night. The tree roots gave us plenty of trouble, but we managed with a few axes.

  The rain finally stopped sometime during the night. Shortly after daybreak the next morning I was shocked at the actions of a lieutenant from Captain Clang’s F Company, which had moved in on our left. This lieutenant walked right out onto the road we had been shooting over the night before. His .45 automatic was still in its holster, and he stood all alone waving his arms in the air as he harangued the Germans in their own language.

  My interpreter told me in hushed whispers that the adventurous lieutenant was urging the Germans to surrender, saying that the war was almost over, that the situation was utterly hopeless for them, that they were about to be killed or captured anyway.

  I watched spellbound as several Jerries put their hands up and came forward to surrender. He searched each one, relieved them of a few souvenirs, which he stuffed in his jacket pockets, and then sent them to the rear. He continued the spectacle for over an hour, inducing at least a dozen Germans to surrender.

  At this point I asked Captain Clang why he didn’t haul the lieutenant back in, and he said, “Let the nut go on. It looks easier than fighting them.”

  We looked up when some of our men let out cries of warning and alarm, and we found the lieutenant now crossing the road and walking right into the hayfield amid the enemy. He had been there for almost two hours, and perhaps had become a little intoxicated with his own prowess and good fortune. He managed to entice three or four more Germans to cross over, and then suddenly it was all over.

  He finally hit one of the more vicious Krauts, and this one simply cut him down point-blank. We heard the b-r-r-r-r-ip and saw the lieutenant topple over, dead before he hit the ground.

  The Germans all withdrew the next day, and we recovered the lieutenant’s body. His chest and stomach were full of holes; his jacket pockets were crammed with pocket watches, German money, penknives, and photos of German soldiers and their families. Someone asked if we should send this junk home to his wife. No one bothered to answer.

  Most German units were composed of excellent troops—tough, well trained, and with good discipline. Luckily for us, this outfit was an exception. Some of the prisoners later told us they had not been trained for the infantry, and only a few of the officers and noncoms had seen combat. Most of the soldiers were emergency transfers from service companies, antiaircraft, and the air forces. They had been thrown together into an outfit and tossed out in front in the hopes that they could delay us long enough for the regular infantry to regroup from the cataclysm of Normandy and Saint-Lô.

  By this time our own forces had lost some of their thunderbolt punch. We were, in fact, too thin and spread out for a solid breakthrough. Our wild, thrilling rampage through France, Belgium, and into the Siegfried had been too fast and far for our supply lines. We were lucky to have enough ammunition and food for the day.

  We had no orders to move ahead, so we began to improve our defenses where we were, widening our foxholes, collecting logs for their tops and pine boughs for mattresses. Some of our boys, had they known this was to be their home for the next few weeks, might have built chalets. The Germans, meanwhile, pulled back some three hundred yards behind the hay field and also dug in.

  The Graves Registration people were slow in coming to collect the body of Sergeant Hester, and its presence was demoralizing; we had never actually had to bury one of our own, but I felt the time had come. We got the proper instructions from Graves Registration and went ahead quickly to get the job over with, marking the grave with his upright rifle bearing his helmet and dog tags.

  After a few days, our platoon was ordered into new positions about three hundred yards to the right rear. Captain Newcomb was adjusting the company defenses, and we were to be the reserve platoon. It was a very simple, quick move, but when I was assigning each squad its new area I was surprised to find that Sergeant Hood and some of his squad, the last ones in line, were missing. We had heard some incoming artillery a few minutes earlier, but it didn’t sound too close to our area.

  I walked back toward our old positions very puzzled. I was badly shocked to find several of my men on the ground. Sergeant Hood didn’t look hurt at all, but he was dead. A small fragment had severed his windpipe. Our medic, Grazcyck, had a hole in the back of his head; he looked gone.

  Another man, a big, burly former boxer, was in his foxhole screaming for a medic. I ran over there and found him frantically gripping what was left of one arm with his remaining good hand. The arm was gone, almost to the shoulder. I quickly put a tourniquet on the stump and helped him out of the foxhole. As he lay on the ground I sprinkled sulfa powder on his open wound and tried to cover it. It was a terrible, grisly mess, and I didn’t have enough bandages.

  Then our wounded medic, Grazcyck, somehow got up and came over to help me. He gave me some of his first aid equipment, including an ample supply of morphine, which he told me how to use on the wounded man. He also guided me on how to truss up the gory stump. Then both men fainted. I didn’t feel too well myself and certainly was grateful for the little bit of first aid training I had received at OCS. Both injured men were quickly evacuated by stretcher to an ambulance waiting below the hill.

  Grazcyck was recommended for the Bronze Star for actions beyond the call of duty, and I hope he received it; he certainly earned it.

  After our wounded had been cared for and our dead removed, we began to settle into our new area. Everyone dug foxholes, rushing to get them done before nightfall. The light was blocked out early in the woods, and the darkness was total blackness.

  While checking around I found that Sergeant Anders was not putting one of his men on guard duty because the man was too jittery. I told Sergeant Anders that the man, whom we’ll call “Hill,” would have to pull guard, at least in a rear area like this. We were over three hundred yards from the enemy and even had some of our own troops in front of us. That far back we posted only a few guards during the night, and I suggested that Hill be put on an early shift at the outpost only thirty yards beyond our foxhole.

  Soon Hill w
as carefully stringing #110 field telephone wire along the trees from the guard post back to his foxhole. The men were teasing him about it, though it wasn’t a bad idea, since it can be difficult to find your way in absolute blackness.

  “Hey, Hill, how are you going to get back to your foxhole if someone cuts your wire?” someone called out.

  “They better not, godammit!” Everyone laughed.

  Sergeant Anders and I shared a foxhole, and around 10 P.M. we heard someone stumbling along Hill’s wire, which passed about six feet from our foxhole. The footsteps came along in total darkness to almost opposite our foxhole, and then they suddenly stopped, and we heard Hill’s harsh, frightened whisper: “Who’s that?”

  We could almost feel the fear in Hill’s voice, and I was startled for a moment because I didn’t know what had alarmed Hill. Then a few yards away in the night came the dry response: “It’s Bill, goddammit. Don’t shoot!”

  The drama was so intense that neither Sergeant Anders nor I could take it. We burst out laughing.

  Meanwhile, Bill came up along the wire and told Hill that he had been trying to find his own foxhole for the hour since Hill had relieved him. Visibility was less than a foot, and Bill was thoroughly lost. Fortunately, I had noticed Bill’s foxhole and was able to direct him to it.

  It seemed almost natural for seasoned veterans to form a mental picture of where everyone was dug in. I don’t remember any training on that subject; however, I do know that many of the veterans were keenly aware of everything near them. Perhaps that’s why they lived to be veterans.

  Sergeant Anders then asked Hill if he thought he could find his own foxhole. “Yes, if somebody hasn’t changed the goddamn wire!” He groped his way off, muttering to himself. His foxhole was only about twenty yards away.

  After about twenty minutes we heard some shuffling back along the wire, and Sergeant Anders called out, “Is that you, Hill?”