If You Survive (5 page)

Along with some tanks, we made our way to the first hedgerow on the edge of the apple orchard, about two hundred yards beyond the northeast corner of town. These tanks were from the Sixty-sixth Regiment of the Second Armored Division, and we had trained together as a team for breaking through hedgerows.

Our practice was for the tanks to fire all out at the hedgerow as they advanced, and when they got close
enough they would raise their fire and my platoon would duck under, rush in, and toss grenades over the hedge at any Krauts waiting to ambush the tank. This was the way our attack on the apple orchard began, but for some unknown reason the lead tank did not wait for our grenades but plowed right on through the hedgerow.

As the tank tilted upward on a small crest of dirt it had plowed ahead the waiting Germans hit it with a panzerfaust in the underbelly. The tank immediately burst into flames but continued to roll on for about thirty yards until it stopped against an apple tree. It was the second of our seventeen tanks to be knocked out by panzerfaust near Le Mesnil Herman.

The sergeant in command of the tank climbed out of the turret and, with .45 pistol in hand and bleeding from his nose and ears, he charged back at the hole his tank had made in the hedge, and captured the six Germans who had ambushed him and who were by then waiting for the rest of us to come through.

Without pause, the sergeant then asked for help to get his wounded crew out of the tank. Several of us rushed right out and got two of the crew out, but it was now too hot to go in for the driver and assistant driver. They both were dead anyway, the sergeant said.

After dragging the two wounded tankers back to our side of the hedge, we yelled for a medic—and the wounded medic himself came up to help. He immediately asked for an ambulance, and so the tank captain got on his radio. One of his half-track ambulances soon arrived and drove right out to the hedge where the wounded lay.

At this point the rest of us were ordered to fall back one hundred yards to another orchard and take cover with the remaining tanks. The captain thought we were too much of a target and would attract shelling up where we were.

So we watched from a distance as the ambulance driver
and the crippled medic tried to load the wounded tank men onto stretchers and then into the ambulance. The painful wound in the side prevented our heroic medic from bending much or lifting; he couldn’t help the driver, and so they had to call out for aid. The tank captain asked for volunteers, and four of my riflemen went right out.

The four of them worked as a team and quickly loaded the first wounded man into the ambulance. They were grouped around the next man, about to lift his stretcher, when a mortar shell—which came down vertically without a sound—exploded with a bright flash and sharp crack right on the stretcher. The wounded man was blown to bits; he never knew a thing. Our four volunteers were all hit badly, though they did manage to struggle aboard the ambulance with the driver’s help. Our medic was killed.

Later, when I got the chance, I wrote up the tank sergeant for a Silver Star and requested a posthumous one for the valiant medic. My four wounded volunteers were each put in for a Bronze Star. It seemed so terribly little to do for them.

I happened to exchange glances with the tank captain, a really huge man, and then quickly looked away. He was crying. My own emotions weren’t any too strong. It sure was tough to lose good men, and you never can get used to it.

After the ambulance pulled away, we went right on through the apple orchard and by this time found no more enemy troops. On the way back we heard a moan coming from one of the farmhouses near the edge of town and found a badly wounded young German soldier lying on a pile of blood-soaked bedding in the middle of the bare floor. It seems one of our planes had strafed his unit the day before, and a fifty-caliber machine gun bullet had entered the top of his right shoulder and gone out under his arm after puncturing a lung.

Air sucked through a large hole in his side each time he took a breath. Judging from the amount of blood caked on the bedding and on him, I didn’t see how he could still be alive. I covered his wounds to try to stop the air from sucking in too much dirt, and our ambulance team took him to the rear. They thought he would pull through, but I never heard any more about him. We hoped our wounded might get the same kind of humane treatment from the Germans.

With Le Mesnil Herman secure, we dug in for the night along the road on the southeast side of town. The Germans were watching us, of course, the whole time, and we soon received some very concentrated shelling. This was my personal introduction to the famous German 88mm artillery piece. The shells traveled faster than sound, hitting the ground all around us before we heard their incoming whistle.

This time we were very lucky, simply because a great many shells did not explode. Later we learned the French Resistance had been sabotaging 88mm shells. I counted eight duds sticking in the ground within thirty yards of my foxhole. So thank you, Mr. Frenchman.

That night, as usual, I went around a couple of times to check my men and found one asleep on guard. When on the actual front we always kept half the men on guard at all time, following the buddy system—one man on guard while his buddy slept. I really gave the soldier hell, trying my best to scare the life out of him. He assured and reassured me it never would happen again, so I let him off. Perhaps some may say I should have court-martialed him, but we all were on our last legs, and I felt he deserved another chance. As it turned out, he later proved himself a good soldier, a man I could always count upon.

As my second day of combat came to a close I found my casualty list very high. Of my original forty men, three
had been killed in my presence and fifteen others were wounded, although this last was optimistic in that it included the eight men on the burning tank.

Totally exhausted by two endless days of fighting, I quickly fell asleep in the shallow foxhole I had managed to scoop out. It was about eighteen inches deep and barely wide enough and long enough to lie in. The ground was hard and damp, and we didn’t have a blanket, so we just lay down with our clothes on and used our helmets for pillows. Only a man completely done in could manage to sleep like that.

Our combat fatigues were chemically impregnated to keep out enemy gas, but they also kept in all the July heat and body odors. Fortunately, we were in the open air and rather busy, for we were becoming a bit fragrant. It was a good thirty days before we got a change of clothes, and what a relief! The Army Engineers set up hot showers in the open fields, and they were really great, but they never had them very close to the front.

Now, at the end of the second day of a great drive, we were a solid six miles deep into enemy territory. We had no idea what units behind us might be doing, but our great hope was that General Patton’s army might have started through the gap we had opened.

A
fter an unexpectedly quiet night at Le Mesnil Herman, we climbed aboard the tanks again and moved toward the rear over the very same road we had fought along coming into town the day before. At the first crossroad we turned eastward toward some high ground. This maneuver puzzled me, as did most of our other movements during the day, but frontline junior officers rarely knew the picture beyond their own necessarily small operations maps.

We came to some farm buildings off to our left, and my platoon was ordered to go out there and search them. We found no Germans but did come across something interesting. We heard a wireless operator sending a message. The
dit-dot
of his signals carried loud and clear all over the farmyard. In the middle of the yard was a huge old dry well, and we easily traced the sound to there. I carefully peeked in but could see nothing in the dark depths, even though the sound now almost jumped at me.

I was not about to go blindly down that well or send
anyone else, and since we had to move on quickly we sent a message of our own. We dropped a grenade down the shaft. That ended all transmissions, though we had to rejoin our unit and never got a chance to check out the wireless gear.

A short time later, as we got closer to the ridgeline ahead, we got off the tanks and went into positions along a hedgerow on the right side of the road. We waited there until the rest of the company caught up to us. I don’t know what happened to Captain Holcomb, but Lieutenant Tawes appeared to be in command of the company.

My platoon went through the first hedgerow and into an open field beyond, with our tanks all around us. One of the tank captains was standing up in his turret looking to our right front through his field glasses when a German high-explosive (HE) shell whipped in and exploded just below the turret. The captain was killed instantly, and all of the tanks pulled back through the hedgerow to reorganize.

The situation was now thoroughly confused, so we also went back to the hedge and awaited orders. During this interlude we had our first psychiatric case, when one of my men lost control completely. His body began to shake violently, and he broke into loud sobs.

This was a genuine medical emergency and I just did not know how to cope with it, but realizing its frightening effect on the rest of the men, I had to do something quickly. So I simply turned the man over to the medic and told him to evacuate him immediately.

It was too late, however, to keep the fear from spreading. My men looked sick, and they wouldn’t look me in the eye. In a little while we were ordered to try to cross the field again but this time without the use of tanks. Not one of the men would volunteer to go out in front as the lead scout.

I had to do something at once to get my men moving, so I stood in front of Private Phearson, a soldier I had noted before, and told him I’d promote him to sergeant on the spot if he’d lead one half of the platoon while I led the other. At this point we were down to half strength, nineteen out of the original forty, with no sergeants at all. I don’t know why Sergeant Reid was gone. He was back with us a few days later, and was wounded at Saint Pois. Sergeant Anders was on special patrol duty at Battalion. He also rejoined the platoon before Saint Pois.

The private had no desire to take the lead, and he certainly didn’t care about being a sergeant, but he finally agreed. So my new Sergeant Phearson took the lead on the left, close to a neighboring unit, and I took the right flank, which was completely open.

We ventured out across the field in two columns about one hundred yards apart, with no man directly behind another and with ten yards between men. As we crossed the open field and I came to within ten yards of the next hedgerow a German popped his head up, took a quick look, and ducked.

I instantly hit the ground, quickly threw a grenade over the hedge, and then got up and ran forward to dive behind the base of the hedge for cover. My men quickly joined me on each side, and we all threw a few more grenades for good measure. Then I took a very cautious peek through the hedge and saw an apple orchard about fifty yards wide and three hundred yards long. There were several pieces of German equipment on the ground nearby and in among the apple trees, but no other sign of enemy soldiers.

At this time Lieutenant Tawes came running up and, without knowing the situation before me, told me to get my men over the hedge and get on with the attack. I couldn’t understand the great hurry; we had been there only a few
minutes, and since we knew the Germans were close, I wanted to check around a little. I just didn’t feel safe going into that orchard. About thirty yards to my left was a gate through the hedge into the field just to the left of the orchard, and I asked if we could try that way. He agreed, saying, “Get moving right away.”

So we went quickly through the gate and moved ahead, staying close to the hedge that bordered the left side of the orchard. It was a good thing we did, because the Germans had moved to the parallel hedge opposite us across the orchard and would have hit us from the side had we gone right on through from where we’d thrown the grenades.

They fired at us with rifles and threw some potato masher grenades (grenades with handles about eight inches long to give leverage to the throw). The small depression behind the hedge gave us cover from the rifle fire, and most of their grenades fell in the orchard or struck tree limbs and never reached us. Of course, we would have been easy targets if we had gone into the orchard.

No one was hurt, so we kept on moving along the hedge toward the next cross hedgerow in front. When I looked through this next hedge I could see some farm buildings about three hundred yards ahead and, about a mile farther, another small town—probably Moyen.

At this far point in our advance, we were pulled back abruptly. I never did understand why, since the few enemy I could detect ahead did not seem capable of stopping us.

We mounted the tanks and went back along the same road we’d advanced along earlier, but when we reached Le Mesnil Herman we kept right on going a good four miles to the ruins of the small villege Villebaudon, which had been torn apart by a savage battle. Knocked-out tanks, German and American, lay all over the place, and some were still burning. Houses had walls knocked down, and furniture
spilled out. Many homes were totally destroyed.

Perhaps we had been intended for reinforcements, but by the time we arrived the battle was over. I can’t say I was disappointed.

It was getting late in the day, so we were ordered to set up our defensive positions on the edge of town and spent the next few hours digging our two-man foxholes. Mine was next to a knocked-out Sherman tank. The night was blessedly quiet, without any action in our sector.

As I lay in my foxhole the unexpected calm gave me time to mull over some impressions of combat. At first glance the Army’s infantry training had been very thorough and practical, yet now that I had some actual battle experience I had come across some serious gaps in the training. Three incidents during the day had caught me without warning or preparation.