If You Survive (26 page)

Finally, on Christmas Eve, we were replaced, and my frozen, exhausted men happily marched the quarter mile back to Osweiler. To us it was the best possible Christmas present. There we packed the entire company—all twenty-three of us—on one two-and-a-half-ton truck and my jeep, and we moved back some two and a half miles to the little village of Berberg that we’d come through earlier.

It didn’t seem much like Christmas Eve. There were no Christmas lights at all in the settlement, no lighted Christmas trees, not a cheerful note or carol in the air. We
moved quietly into unheated, deserted buildings and were grateful to be out of the wind and snow. And then, marvel of marvels, our cooks had arrived ahead of us and provided a nice warm meal with plenty of hot coffee.

After dinner the men were trying to get settled in various houses and I was reading some mail from home by candlelight when Christmas came early and Providence gave us an enormous present—one hundred new men and three new officers.

Several trucks delivered the new replacements—raw recruits direct from skimpy basic training and three partially trained officers. The officers were all emergency transfers into the infantry from other branches. They had been given two weeks’ basic training then declared infantry officers. They were nice guys, and I hoped they would live long enough to discover what the infantry was really about and not take too many men down with them while they were learning. It was bad enough to be a green front-line officer, I knew, but to be green to the infantry as well must have been hell. They had been trained in antiaircraft or other Army branches and so were not familiar with infantry procedures. It was as if they didn’t speak the same language of the rest of us.

The enlisted men were even worse off, for only a little over six weeks before they had been civilians. After five weeks of condensed basic infantry training at Camp Blanding, Florida, and a week on trains, ships, and trucks, they had been thrown out into the cold at Christmas time.

Lieutenant Lloyd and I divided up the new men among the new officers and assigned everyone places for the night. This took several hours, and we didn’t bother trying to do any more than get them all bedded down.

Our great cooks meanwhile worked through the night to surprise us with a full-scale Christmas dinner with all the
trimmings. It was almost too rich for those of us accustomed to K rations; some of us ate too much. I don’t know how the cooks managed to include all the new men, but they did, and we complimented them.

The replacements had been thrown into the breach so unprepared because of the Army’s crippling, debilitating losses in the Bulge. We discovered that these men had been on the rifle range only once; they had never thrown a grenade or fired a bazooka, mortar, or machine gun.

Company F was in deep trouble. It was tough enough sending thoroughly trained men into combat. When I thought of all the training and experience I’d been blessed with, if that’s the word, I was sick about those poor men.

Lieutenant Lloyd and I talked it over and decided that, even though we were in reserve and were supposed to be recuperating, we had no time for rest. It would be suicidal to take those men into battle. We had to give them some intensive training while we had the chance.

So we had the supply sergeant scrounge up several extra boxes of .30-caliber ammo, hand grenades, bazookas, and mortar shells. We set up our own firing ranges, and everybody, including the new officers, got a chance to fire a rifle, throw a live grenade, shoot a bazooka shell, and try out a machine gun and a 60mm mortar.

Then we had classes and work sessions on the absolutely essential basics. We told the men how important their foxholes were for survival, that they had to start digging in almost every time they stopped. We talked about how to protect against tree bursts, about the care of feet. In short, we reviewed all the tricks we had learned about survival in battle. We also got into how to use fire and movement in attack and the great importance of grenades in close action.

The men responded well, being keen to learn and eager to try out all the weapons. We used up a lot of ammo, but
that wasn’t as important as saving lives. Lloyd and I did not see how we could have done without this interlude of intensive training, and each new officer told me privately how much he appreciated it.

While none of the new men was in top condition, one had a physical handicap that I thought was just too much, so I sent him to the rear despite his protests. I admired his spirit and assured him they needed good men back there. The guy had a birth defect in his right shoulder that prevented his raising his rifle more than belt high.

One side effect of having so many green men was that our Non-Battle Casualties (NBCs) rate began to rise. Our first loss was that of a man whose rifle fell over while he was going to the latrine. The bullet ripped a hole in his thigh. It is difficult to imagine how this could have happened, but there were no witnesses, and we had to take his word.

Rumors are an inevitable part of Army life. One that came along seemed to have official backing, and it put us a little on edge. We were warned to be on the lookout for English-speaking Germans dressed in American uniforms. We were to challenge any strange Americans at all, asking for the password, which was changed more frequently than usual. We were to ask questions about baseball and politics, things the average GI would know. The ersatz Americans were said to be spies parachuted behind the lines. None of them showed up in our zone. However, they did show up and cause a lot of problems near Bastogne, where they directed traffic onto the wrong roads, blew up bridges, etc.

On December 29, after our battalion had been in reserve a scant five days, we were sent up to the front again. Our new position was between Osweiler and Dickweiler, slightly to their rear. Since we now were the reserve company,
we were able to make our command post in an isolated farmhouse and keep our kitchen in the same building.

Most of the men had to stay in foxholes; at least they didn’t have to chip them out of the frozen ground, since they could use holes already in place. They quickly learned the rigors of outdoor living. Our strongest outpost was near the river southwest of Dickweiler; because of all the open ground to be covered, the only way for the twenty-man complement to reach it was after dark.

That meant the men had to stay in place for twenty-four hours before their relief. As soon as they got back they headed straight for the kitchen, which was the only warm place in the house. At times, the 15 × 18 room was impossibly crowded, but the cooks were good sports about it. Usually they had some hot food available and lots of hot coffee, so the men lingered as long as they could.

One evening after I’d checked the crowded kitchen I joined Lieutenant Lloyd, First Sergeant Nagel, company clerk Francis Thiefels, our medic, and a couple of other men in the next room, where everyone was sprawled about writing letters in the light of a gas lamp. I had just started to write my own letter when the room shook and the air was split by a tremendous crackling explosion from the kitchen area. My first thought was that somehow one of the gas stoves had blown up.

Lieutenant Lloyd jumped up and ran into the kitchen, and at the same moment one of the men burst into our room from the kitchen. He was hysterical, and blood squirted from a small hole in his neck. Fortunately, he was a little guy, and I was able to force him to the floor, where I sat on him and held my thumbs tightly over his wound.

The medic moved over to help, but I yelled at him to get out into the kitchen to see if anyone else needed help. I continued to compress the neck wound, and soon the man quieted down. Finally the blood began to clot, and his
bleeding stopped. Then I got a tight bandage over the wound and told him to lie still.

Lieutenant Lloyd came running back and told me we had a whole roomful of wounded. “It’s a terrible mess, and we’re going to need help. Better send for some ambulances and medical supplies.”

As First Sergeant Nagel called the battalion aid station I went with Lieutenant Lloyd to assist the medic in the kitchen. It was indeed a terrible mess. The floor was covered with bleeding, groaning wounded men.

We grabbed first aid packs and began cutting away clothing to get at the wounds. Three of the men, apparently those closest to the blast, had deep, very dangerous wounds. Some of the men had so many wounds they looked like they’d been hit by buckshot. Our bandages were limited, so the medic had to weed out the most serious cases first, which was quite a problem in such severely cramped quarters.

Soon the battalion medical units began to arrive, and they quickly moved out the most seriously wounded as we continued to work on the remainder. There weren’t enough closed ambulances, so we had to tie stretchers across open jeeps, wrapping up the victims in as many blankets as we could find.

The explosion had occurred around 11:00
P.M
., and it wasn’t until 3:00
A.M
. that everyone was evacuated. It was very cold, so I was glad it was only a mile back to the aid station. Those of us who had worked frantically for those four hours were just about ready for stretchers ourselves.

Once the excitement was over and the wounded—all seventeen of them—were gone, I tried to piece together exactly what had happened. I’d heard a few things from some of the wounded before they had left, and I began to question the few lucky ones who had been in the room but somehow had not been hit.

All the havoc had been caused by one fragmentation rifle grenade that had been dropped accidentally. One of the recruits at the outpost had pulled the pin on his rifle grenade, apparently to be ready for any attack. He had forgotten to replace the safety pin when he returned to the company. The grenade was carried on his cartridge belt, and somehow it slipped out and hit the floor, detonating on impact.

It blew a bowl-shaped hole six inches deep in the paving-brick floor. Grenade shrapnel and fragments of shattered brick ricocheted off the stone walls and the floor and peppered some of the men with dozens of wounds.

Of course, I had to make a lengthy report explaining the seventeen non-battle casualties. I could very easily imagine the nervous strain on a green recruit on the front line for the first time. Yet forgetting to replace a safety pin is inexcusable. At the same time, there was no way I would have wanted to keep the crowds out of their only warm haven.

I was very much surprised about three years after the war to receive a letter from General Lanham, our old regimental commander, then stationed at the Pentagon. The general wrote that a man from my old F Company had written him asking for his help in getting “the Silver Star medal ‘Captain’ Wilson” had promised him.

According to the man’s account, “Captain” Wilson had promised him the Silver Star if he wiped out a certain German machine gunpost. He went on to claim he’d been seriously wounded, had lost the use of one leg and partially lost his sight due to a German grenade, but that in spite of all the wounds he had managed to go ahead and knock out the Jerry position. He’d earned that medal, and even though he’d heard that “Captain” Wilson was dead, he thought he still ought to get it.

I wrote to General Lanham that First Lieutenant, not
“Captain,” Wilson was very much alive. I then referred him to my long report of January, 1945, on the seventeen NBCs we’d had in F Company from a rifle grenade accident, pointing out that the man who was asking for the Silver Star was the very one who had dropped the rifle grenade; that tragedy had been his only “enemy” action while at F Company.

I imagine this sorry individual had built up quite a story to explain his wounds to friends and relatives. The effects must have been serious, since he was closest to the grenade. Perhaps he had made up the story to bury his feelings of guilt.

Since our company was still in battalion reserve southwest of Osweiler, Colonel Kenan decided we could spare some men for patrolling. One of my new retread lieutenants who had begun to impress me drew the assignment of leading the patrol up through one of the line companies and then onward toward the enemy lines. His mission was strictly intelligence gathering, to see if he could detect any shifts or buildups in the German positions. He was very careful to inform our front line company exactly when and where he was going through their line, and also about when he expected to come back through the same spot. The current password was also verified.

The patrol went out on schedule and later returned to the same point at the expected time—and was greeted by a blast from a Browning Automatic rifle. The marksman was so scared he emptied the whole twenty-round clip at them as they yelled out in panic, “We’re Americans, you damn fool!” Fortunately, because of the darkness, only one man was hit—the lieutenant, who was probably leading. He got a bullet through his hips. Thus all our recent casualties had come at the hands of our own people, and I was almost beginning to wonder who was fighting whom.

As we sent out more patrols so did the Germans—but they added a new wrinkle we were forced to copy. There was still about a foot of snow on the ground, and this white cover captured whatever light there was and made a fine background for spotting the dark, moving blotches that were a patrol. So the Germans draped their men in white sheets and their rifles in white clothes. Dressed in white, they were camouflaged beautifully by the snow at night, which gave them a dangerous advantage.

We asked headquarters for sheets and white cloths from the people of Luxembourg. Once our men could blend into the white background they felt reasonably secure, and the patrols continued.

One night I sent out our white-clad patrols led by another new young lieutenant. They came upon an enemy patrol near the river in the valley before Dickweiler. Our men had all the advantage this time, however, because the Germans were making so much noise that our patrol simply lay in ambush awaiting the enemy’s approach. As it turned out, our very inexperienced recruits soon lost the upper hand with all the commotion they made getting into place, and it was the Germans who opened fire first. Our boys didn’t fight back very well, but they all managed to escape back to the company, except for the lieutenant, who was wounded and captured. The men all felt pretty rotten about it.