If You Survive (15 page)

A few minutes later our deer hunting ended abruptly when we ran into a German patrol larger than our hunting party. We fired a few rounds to scare them off and made a hasty retreat.

All my patrols of the past weeks had apparently impressed someone. Lieutenant Colonel Walker transferred me back to battalion headquarters and promoted me to the job of Battalion Intelligence Officer (S-2). I was now responsible for getting all possible information about the enemy.

Finding out enemy strengths and weaknesses, his gun emplacements, mine fields, recent changes in his defenses, was not a desk job. We had to dig up this intelligence ourselves, and the only firsthand source was patrolling.

I was not surprised, therefore, when Colonel Walker told me my first job was to capture a German soldier. I was to send out patrols day and night—and get a prisoner, no matter what. We had to find out what kind of unit was facing us. The colonel told me that division demanded the capture of a prisoner as our top priority.

He also said I could commandeer anyone in the battalion. In addition, I was in charge of an all-volunteer platoon that was used only for special patrolling. The men of the special platoon were expertly trained, and their patrols were led by an excellent staff sergeant.

Colonel Walker mentioned Gallagher of G Company as a top man. I had heard of “Gal” but had never met him.

The Colonel repeated that he must have a prisoner.
Nothing short of success would be accepted. Conspicuously absent from his orders were suggestions on just
how
to get the job done. He made it clear that that was up to me.

At first I was stumped. At least I knew I couldn’t sit and wait for a German to walk in and surrender, so I had to go out and find one. To get myself started, I studied the map diligently. This led absolutely nowhere, for I had used the map many times before and found nothing new in it now. Then I was hit by an inspiration.

It suddenly struck me that the German commander should be concerned with the routes we might take when we launched our inevitable attack. So how would
he
look at the map? I put myself on the other side of the map to try to get his viewpoint, asking myself which routes would be most likely for the Americans.

I examined wooded cover, natural draws, fence rows, buildings, open fields, roads, and any other terrain features. Several natural approach routes offered good cover, and the shortest one looked to be the best bet, since it would give the Americans the least exposure. This approach would require us to go over two hundred yards of more or less open ground to reach the head of a draw that led close into the German lines.

If the German commander read the map the way I did, then it seemed logical he would have an outpost at the edge of this draw nearest us. To prevent myself from jumping to conclusions, I carefully studied the other routes. In the end, I came back to the shortest one and also decided the Germans probably would have plenty of mines in front of the outpost. Also, I assumed, the commander would have at least one machine gun in the outpost.

By now I was planning as though this German position really existed, and I figured it would have to be taken by
surprise at night with a large enough force to do it quickly. Most importantly, I needed an experienced man to lead this expedition.

The best man available was First Lieutenant Gallagher, who was summoned to battalion headquarters. He was given an outline of his mission and an explanation as to why I had chosen that spot. He saw the logic, and we began to make final plans. We quickly agreed on limiting the force to one squad armed only with rifles and grenades. We wanted the men to be able to move freely, and Gallagher felt he could use his twelve best men and get the job done quickly.

We discussed enemy defenses and known mine fields. Both of us felt the ground immediately in front of the outpost probably would be mined, and therefore we decided the approach should be made from the flank, even though the route was longer. Gallagher hoped it might be easier to surprise the Germans that way.

We then estimated the time for getting out and back and allowed a half hour safety margin. Timing was crucial; since quite a bit of the route was open farmland we couldn’t afford to get caught out there in daylight.

The one-way distance from Gallagher’s G Company to the outpost was almost a mile. Most of the trip would be on the road in the woods, which led to open fields, and much of the last two hundred yards would have to be crawled, even at night.

We agreed Gallagher should start at 2:00
A.M
.and begin his return trip no later than 5:00
A.M
. That should get him back in the woods before daylight. We estimated the German outpost would have six to ten men, and Gallagher was confident he could take them if he and his twelve men could achieve surprise.

Gallagher now returned to G Company to work out the
details of selecting his men, briefing them on the mission, and working out signals and the exact plan of attack. Then they all tried to get some rest before the guard woke them at 1:30
A.M.

The night was clear with some stars and occasional clouds. Fortunately there was no moon. Gallagher had memorized the map, and he led his men right to the spot we had marked as the outpost, without being detected. They could make out the dim outline of a machine gun emplacement and were just able to make out a German sentry sitting against a tree facing his front.

Crawling forward very gingerly, Gallagher carefully positioned his men alongside the outpost. They came across a field-telephone wire and cut it, and then they waited patiently for cloud cover to move in even closer.

Gallagher then gave the signal to throw grenades and break into the outpost. The surprise was complete, but even then the Germans fought back until they realized the hopelessness of their situation and quickly surrendered.

The entire outpost of six men and a machine gun was captured, and Gallagher lost no time in disarming them and heading for home. As they moved out he made the Germans lead the way. Two of the wounded Germans were supported by their comrades.

In the darkness the prisonors didn’t recognize their own mine fields, and suddenly there was a tremendous blast a few yards in front. One of the Germans had stepped on a mine and had his foot blown off. Gallagher allowed the Germans to give him quick first aid and then had them pick up the wounded man and carry him along.

Time was getting dangerously short, and carrying the casualty slowed the patrol down, but there was nothing else to do. Gallagher found out that the German corporal spoke English, and so he told him that if the Germans led them
into any more mine fields he would shoot them all. There were no more mines after that, and the whole patrol made it back without the loss of a man.

I was delighted with our success on this first mission and told Gallagher what a terrific job he and his men had done. Colonel Walker thanked both of us for a job well done and said he would recommend Gallagher for a medal. I don’t know if he ever received it. Sweating out someone else’s patrol was a strange experience for me.

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.