If You Survive (28 page)

The young woman and I talked for hours, and I gave her an idea of the realities of the front. She went on at great length about the ordeal of French families during the Occupation. Her only brother had been killed by the Germans, and her parents had kept her a virtual prisoner in the house the whole time so the Germans wouldn’t see her.

She excused herself just before midnight and took a cab home, saying her parents probably were beginning to get worried. We did make a date for lunch at my hotel the next day. Our trucks were due about one o’clock, and I didn’t dare miss them.

The next day she arrived on time, looking fresh and
pretty. It was fun watching her order our lunches, with wine—which I’d never had with a meal. I was pleasantly surprised. The arrival of the trucks cut short our luncheon and necessitated very quick farewells. I could only hope, and I did so fervently, that the future would turn out happily for the truly sweet little French woman. She left me with my only really pleasant memory of an interlude in Paris.

Our return trip was dismal and dull, if rather noisy. Some of the men were still high on drink and even higher on their memories of conquest. Most of them had indeed broken loose, and they could not stop talking about it. According to their unending chatter, they must have been the greatest studs ever on earth. On and on and on. At least the trip had been something of a change for them, and for a while they might not even mind the war so much.

The Second Battalion was still in reserve at Junglinster. Other elements of the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment had retaken some territory to our northeast along the Sauer and Our Rivers. We heard it had been pretty rough crossing the swollen rivers. Rumors also had it that General Patton himself had come up and personally pushed the attack forward, though I never did find anyone who had actually seen Patton.

The German breakthrough had driven a wedge between the Fourth Division and the remainder of the First Army, so we had been transferred to General Patton’s Third Army. The general’s influence was felt in many ways. Everyone was required to salute, and officers had to wear their insignia of rank at all times. Such civilities stopped, whether Patton knew it or not, the moment we got into action. Even the food, when we were off K rations, seemed better, and certainly we now could get necessities such as watches, compasses, and field glasses that we hadn’t been able to
order successfully in the First Army. I recalled my resentment back in September when I had read in
Stars and Stripes
that Patton had just received ten tons of new maps and aerial photos, while we in the First Army had to struggle with the maps of 1914.

I felt that General Hodges, commander of the First Army, was just as good a general as Patton, though he certainly couldn’t compete with Patton in charisma. The gains of the First Army in crossing France and Belgium in August and September, not to mention the D day invasion itself, certainly equaled those of the Third Army. They just didn’t seem as spectacular. There were times when we resented all this, and yet we certainly all rooted for Patton.

We heard Patton was the American general the Germans feared the most, and this we relished. We also heard that he had a very quick temper and that he instantly replaced officers who did not do what he thought were their jobs, so everyone around him feared him. We also heard that his type of leadership was vital to Allied victory, and for that, I think, most of us loved Patton. I think the Germans feared Patton because he was very aggressive and unpredictable. He made them worry about what he might do next, so they had to be prepared to defend their lines more carefully than would otherwise have been the case.

N
ear the end of January, 1945, the Fourth Division headed back northward, having completed its task of holding what turned out to be the southern flank of the Bulge, thus permitting Patton’s tanks to go inward behind the flank and then roll straight north to rescue the 101st Airborne in Bastogne. The first day of the trip north was routine convoy. The next day, which was about February 1, we reached Bastogne itself, though by then all the fighting was over.

We, who had done our share of attacking small towns, were nonetheless awed by the total destruction of Bastogne. Everything was leveled except for a few skeletal sidewalls. What had not been knocked flat by artillery had been gutted and hollowed by fire. The dust had not quite settled, and the smoke carried a stench like that of soggy burning mattresses.

The desperate Germans had attacked Bastogne viciously with what must have been overwhelming force. The defenders were shelled with furious barrages from tanks, artillery,
and mortars, and as they continued to resist the Germans were forced to bring up reinforcements needed elsewhere and to reroute panzers away from this vital crossroads near the middle of their breakthrough.

Delays would be fatal to the Germans because there were very few days of bad weather to keep Allied planes out of the skies. And the Germans had every military right to success at Bastogne. It was not their fault they’d come upon intrepidly stubborn troops with an indomitable commander, that the rubble from their shelling became breastworks, that the defenders would endure any privations and losses rather than surrender.

It was appalling to me to imagine the fighting that must have gone on there. Many bodies still lay where they’d fallen, partly covered by blankets of snow. One long, wide, gradual hillside was strewn with the carcasses of burned-out Sherman tanks and a few German Tiger tanks. Evidently our losses had been several times greater than those of the enemy, probably because of the powerful 88s mounted on their Tiger tanks. Further on it seemed that our Air Force had gotten in some good licks, for the fields were littered with the debris of German tanks and trucks.

We stopped for the night several miles northeast of Bastogne and were lucky enough to find a few vacant buildings as shelter against the cold. Standing nearby were several German tanks, apparently abandoned because they were out of gas. They seemed to be undamaged, and even in repose they were fearsome, with those wicked 88mm rifles sticking out ten yards, it seemed.

Although the fleeing Krauts had not had time to destroy them, they still might be booby-trapped, and the colonel had warned everyone to keep away. Left to themselves, our men just could not resist those massive souvenirs, and they began to nose around. Some of the bolder ones actually mounted the tanks as crowds of the more cautious gathered
around. As some of the curious explored deeper the inevitable booby traps blew up, killing and wounding several of the more foolhardy men. I was not on top of the scene and was grateful that at least none of my men were victims.

The terrain was becoming more and more familiar to me, and I realized we were retracing the route we had taken when chasing the Germans over four months before, in September. We learned that our overall mission was to penetrate the Siegfried Line at the very same spot we’d broken through before. We had first taken this sector in the middle of September, 1944; then the Twenty-second Infantry had moved north to the Bullingen area. From there, in November, we moved north again to the terrible Hürtgen, and then south, to Luxembourg and what turned out to be the Bulge. Now, in late January, 1945, we were headed north in December, again.

While the campaign maps would show that the Twenty-second Infantry did indeed, by some curious coincidence, revisit the same sector of the Siegfried several campaigns apart, in truth it was nowhere near the same Twenty-second Infantry. Most of the present Twenty-second were replacements; of the thirty-odd officers originally in the Second Battalion, I believe only three remained active—Captain Arthur Newcomb, Lieutenant Lee Lloyd, and myself. All the others had been killed or wounded. In addition, we had lost many replacement officers over the last five months.

We were on the same winding country roads through the lovely town of Houffalize on the way to Saint Vith. Back in September, Saint Vith had been a very charming little farming town left unmolested by the Germans, who had not tried at all to defend it. The only signs of war had been a few scars on buildings from stray rifle bullets.

I had been aware of the heavy fighting there during the
Bulge, but I still was not prepared for my next view of the town. Saint Vith was in an open valley, and from the approaches of its southern heights we got a clear view of its total ruin. All we could see were the jagged outlines of the shattered walls that had once been buildings. It was like a nightmarish surrealistic painting. Nothing was undamaged; there was no sign of life.

This time around the Germans had made innocent little Saint Vith a key supply and communications center, and as soon as the skies cleared our own bombers had made it a prime target. I hoped that if any natives had still been in town they had had some warning. Nothing could have survived that bombing. In one area of perhaps two hundred square feet, for instance, I counted five huge bomb craters with rubble all around. I was sickened by the destruction.

Somewhere among all the debris some GI had found a naked mannequin and placed it alongside the road, where it stood out starkly, ghoulishly. The humor might have been a little sick, but it certainly was a diversion wild enough to cling to the memory.

Other units of the Army had already driven the Krauts back into the Siegfried pillboxes, so we didn’t have to worry about ambush as we rolled along the winding roads from Saint Vith in Belgium across the German border into the town of Bleialf. This was something of an excursion compared to my small, motorized combat team that had probed the same paths in September, not knowing what the next turn in the road would bring and not even knowing exactly where the Siegfried was.

One could not help reflecting on the battles we had fought in the same area in September, 1944. We also wondered how many lives had been lost for what appeared to be no gain after almost five months of hell. How far could we have gone if allowed to attack back then? It is easy to
second-guess other people’s decisions, but the men responsible for the big decisions had a lot to worry about before and after any major campaign.

There was also a big difference in the roads themselves, for now they were solid with ice and snow. The retreating Germans had not had time to plow snow. Their tanks and trucks had just pushed ahead as fast as they could, and there was a six-inch base of ice and compacted snow.

Our tanks could negotiate anything but the steepest hills and sharpest curves, and one such obstacle came just east of the hamlet of Buchet, very close to the Siegfried. The rubber treads and steel cleats of the tanks could not get enough traction on the steep inclines and could not make the sharp turns because in changing direction one tread was braked to become a stationary pivot while the other tread kept moving. The trouble was that the pivot kept sliding on the ice.

The engineers had tried setting off primer cord explosives to break up the ice, but all that did was leave small burn marks. They then sent out a call for extra manpower to dig corrugations that would aid traction, and F Company was elected, since we were in reserve. I was told to have my men use their entrenching shovels to chop out small grooves or ditches across the road about every foot of the way. This particular hill was over a half mile long, so we were out there hacking away all night.

Every now and then we had to take cover against
Nebelwerfer
shells screaming overhead; but the worst discomfort, aside from fatigue and the cold, was the ice that kept getting chipped up into our faces and the occasional hitting of one’s own foot or shin with a shovel. It was a very tough night for us, but at least we had the satisfaction of seeing the tanks’ tracks biting into the ice trenches and pulling them up that hill before dawn. We were given the next day
off, away from the fighting, and we stayed in reserve slightly to the rear.

The Twenty-second Infantry, with its First and Third Battalions leading the attack, once again sliced through the Siegfried Line at the same spot it had before—just east of Buchet and slightly north of Brandscheid. The infantry advanced by fire and movement supported by artillery and the fire of tanks, and with the use of hand grenades and flamethrowers when the men got close enough. Some pillboxes had grenades dropped down their smokestacks; others had their apertures blasted by flamethrowers. At least one was plowed under by a bulldozing tank. The Germans never should have started this business. We proved once again that fortifications can be taken.

The Second Battalion moved on through our First and Third battalions and headed southeast, going into defensive position east of the fortified village of Brandscheid. This time, in contrast to its frustrating fight in September, the Third Battalion swept right into Brandscheid and took many of the pillboxes from the rear.

At that, Brandscheid was not a joyride for the Third Battalion, for even after they had taken the town and were being relieved after dark by a battalion from the Ninetieth Division, they were hit by a strong counterattack. The Germans swarmed in on top of the normal confusion of men trading places, and soon hand-to-hand combat was taking place in the darkness, with some Americans being killed by others. For a while our troops were afraid to move, but after a time the enemy was sorted out and driven back.

Next day the First and Second battalions continued the attack eastward toward Sellericher-hohe. Soon we came to the edge of some woods and looked out on a valley and
hillside that brought back a frightening recollection to a few of us. This was the place where the German artillery had massacred a battalion back in September. We had been up on the hill on what was now our left front, and we’d been helpless spectators in grandstand seats as the attack battalion had come out of those very woods and swept the Germans before them in what looked like a classic exercise in tank-infantry support. It wasn’t until they’d gotten way out into the open that the Germans brought down deadly barrages of artillery that tore the attackers apart and finally sent them in stampede back to the woods.