Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (29 page)

After Smith had done his job, one of the officers asked him why he volunteered to help with the cleanup.

“I figured someone had to do it,” he replied. “I have a younger brother who’s a rifleman in the 1st Infantry Division somewhere forward of us. If he was killed, I would like someone to recover his body so he could be given a decent Christian burial. All soldiers should be entitled to this, at the very least.”

Great courage was not limited to the battlefront but was often found in quiet and unexpected places.

After the debacle south of the Paderborn airport, the remainder of CCA came in and cleaned up the situation. The remaining elements of Task Force Welborn regrouped and started moving north. Combat Command A was moving in the middle and CCR was coming up on the left. The VII Corps, with the 3d Armored Division leading, was now in position to make the final assault on Paderborn.

Roving bands of Panther and Tiger tanks with infantry were withdrawing from the city and concentrating around the airport and north of there. As our task forces proceeded to the airport, they encountered heavy fire from 88mm dual-purpose guns. Although these guns could be lowered from vertical to horizontal for use as antitank fire, their high profile made them difficult to protect. The Germans would stack sandbags about five feet high in a ring around each gun, but the tops were completely open and they were vulnerable to artillery fire. By rapid deployment of our M7s, we put a few rounds with proximity fuses over each gun emplacement. The downward blast killed the crew and neutralized the gun. With the 88mms neutralized, our tank columns enveloped the airport and proceeded into the city.

The youthful zeal of the cadets who had successfully crewed the Tiger and Panther tanks against our armored columns was contagious and filtered down to the lower ranks of the preteen Hitler
Jugend
. Some actually took up arms. One eight-year-old Hitler
Jugend
boy stepped out from a building with a
panzerfaust
and knocked out one of our Sherman tanks. He was immediately gunned down by the tank commander. The tragedy of war puts no limits on age.

The hangars around the airport had plenty of paved areas and appeared to be a good place to establish a forward VCP. As we examined this area, I noticed three German aircraft next to one of the hangars. Because we had been trained to be on constant alert for new types of enemy weapons, I was curious to examine these planes further. Low slung and streamlined, they had a two-man cockpit and twin engines. Slung low under each wing, the engines were long with a tubular exhaust going out the rear; however, they had no propellers. As I got closer, I realized that they were jets. These were the ME262s, the same type of aircraft that had bombed us so successfully when we were crossing the bridge at Düren. The planes appeared to be in good condition, although there had been a crude attempt to smash the instrument panels. I took brief notes describing the type and condition of the planes and also the map coordinates, and turned in the notes with my combat loss report that night. As far as I know, this was the first ordnance report made of an ME262 captured intact.

Closing the Ruhr (Rose) Pocket

Early on the morning of April 1, an order from VII Corps headquarters changed the division’s disposition slightly. The division was ordered to continue its assault on Paderborn and at the same time dispatch a task force to Lippstadt, about twenty miles to the west.

At 0300, Task Force Kane started toward Lippstadt. The 2d Armored Division had broken out of the bridgehead north of Wesel on the Rhine, about sixty miles to the west, and was proceeding rapidly across the northern flank of the Ruhr toward Lippstadt. The two units were to meet in that vicinity and close the pocket.

Both Task Force Kane of the 3d Armored Division and the 2d Armored Division task force had been driving relentlessly for several days. They had overcome mines and roadblocks and seen their lead tanks constantly knocked out. Their mission had been to plunge rapidly forward, bypassing any resistance and leaving their flanks exposed, hoping that high speed and rapid maneuver would protect them. They did have the advantage of air cover during daylight, weather permitting.

Both columns approached with considerable trepidation. The men were physically and mentally exhausted but at the same time so keyed up that they would fire at anything and ask questions later. They had each other’s radio frequencies and constantly tried to call each other; however, the combat radios had limited range, which was reduced further by the rugged terrain. To offset this, each task force commander sent his L5 Cub artillery spotter to try to make radio contact. Although the L5s had to dodge ground fire, they were able to make radio contact at 1520. About ten minutes later, the task forces met at Lippstadt.

The key to logistic support of a rapidly moving armored corps, rarely understood by military historians, was the capability of the lead armored division’s forward maintenance elements to assist the forward elements of the motorized infantry divisions. When VII Corps moved two hundred miles to form the pocket, it required not only the 4,200 vehicles of the 3d Armored Division but also another 10,000 vehicles to transport and support the motorized infantry divisions. A task force with fifty tanks moving thirty to forty miles a day will have between fifteen and twenty tanks drop out during the day just for maintenance and repair. These repairs could include everything from the minor changing of spark plugs and V belts to the actual replacement of a transmission or track suspension element. Tanks, half-tracks, and other armored vehicles are subject to extremely heavy wear and tear in normal, everyday operations.

The maintenance on the four-wheel- and six-wheel-drive vehicles is also extremely high. The demand for tires was unending, because they were constantly damaged by battle debris on the highways plus shrapnel fragments from mortar and artillery explosions. A two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck, moving over a combination of highways and cross-country in six-wheel-drive, would have to have a new engine approximately every ten thousand miles. Although two and half tons was the load rating, they normally carried anywhere from five to eight tons.

The maintenance problems on German tanks and armored vehicles were even greater than on ours. The metal-to-metal connection on their tanks was a high-wear item. With the rubber doughnuts and rubber tracks on our tanks, we could get about five times the track life of a comparable German part. With little or no maintenance support, the German units were at an extreme disadvantage.

The meeting of the 2d and 3d Armored Divisions in Lippstadt sealed the trap around the German troops in the Ruhr Pocket. The G2 grossly underestimated the number of prisoners caught in this trap. It was believed that the bulk of the German armies would withdraw and join a new army group in the Harz Mountains. Early estimates said there were 35,000 to 40,000 Germans in the entire Ruhr area. It turned out that the major elements of the German 5th and 15th Armies, including the headquarters of Army Group B under Field Marshal Model, were cut off in this pocket. When Model requested permission to withdraw, Hitler ordered him to stand and fight under penalty of death.

Model, true to the Prussian tradition that a German field marshal never surrendered, was determined not to breach this honor. After being driven to a wooded area, he got out of his Volkswagen, walked a few yards, and shot himself. The disintegrating German units eventually surrendered and yielded about 380,000 prisoners, the largest single group of prisoners ever taken. This site would later be known as the “Rose Pocket,” in honor of our division commander.

The Tragedy at Nordhausen

Combat Command B entered Nordhausen early on the morning of April 11. The British had bombed the city the night before, and a large contingent of German troops had already withdrawn. Our tank columns wound their way slowly through the town, occasionally neutralizing a roadblock or flushing out snipers. City fighting was always a start-and-stop operation, but by this time our men had developed considerable experience and we were making progress through the city, block by block.

During one of these stops, Maj. Dick Johnson came up to my Jeep. “Cooper, we’ve seen a lot of grim things in this war together,” he said, “but there’s something in the next block that you won’t believe until you see it.”

I tried to find out more, but he just shook his head and went back to the T2 recovery tank to our rear.

The small-arms fire up ahead subsided and the column moved forward again. As we approached the corner of the next block, we saw a tall, frail-looking creature with striped pants and a white towel draped over the head. The exposed skin of his naked torso looked like translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone. There were no breasts, but the height indicated a male. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out from beneath the towel. The teeth were exposed in a broad, tragic grin, and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets.

“I never thought I’d see a live walking ghost,” remarked Wrayford.

As we proceeded down the road, we encountered several more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting, but most of them were sprawled on the road and sidewalk where they had collapsed. In their last struggle to survive, these tragic figures of skin and bone had attempted to walk as far as possible and when the last bit of energy had been wrung from their feeble bodies, they simply dropped dead.

Farther down the block, I noticed two warehouse-type buildings three to four stories high, separated by a vacant lot about a hundred yards wide. The doors and windows of the first building had been broken open, and German civilians were looting the warehouse. There must have been sixty people going in and coming out, mostly children and old men and women, each with armloads of bags or boxes filled with food. Several were pulling small sleds that dripped a red substance, which I later realized was frozen strawberry jam. The crowd was ravenous; they were pushing and shoving one another to get as much food as possible. They paid no attention to the pitiful wretches lying in the streets and gutters.

In the vacant lot between the two warehouse buildings was a barbed-wire enclosure that was split in the middle to form a partial gate. What appeared to be garbage was piled in three rows about six feet high and four hundred feet long. To my abject horror I noticed that parts of the stacks were moving. Suddenly, I realized that these stacks were naked human beings, writhing in their excrement and left in the open to die. The stench was overwhelming.

According to our medical officers, these slave workers could survive perhaps thirty to forty days without food under these conditions. They would lose 30 to 40 percent of their body weight, and their stomachs would be grossly bloated and distended due to the gases and the acid in their digestive systems. These people showed no such distended stomachs; they were nothing but skin and bones. They had been deliberatetly, painfully starved to death. Even our combat tankers, who had experienced much of the death and destruction of war, were horrified at the barbaric treatment that these people endured.

General Hickey was ordered by General Collins, the corps commander, to assemble every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the city to bury the dead bodies. Collins also called First Army headquarters and requested a field hospital be sent immediately to take care of any survivors who might be rescued from the piles. Engineers with bulldozers dug large mass graves about ten feet deep and three hundred feet long. German civilians made small wooden stretchers out of scrap lumber, picked up the bodies, and took them to the burial sites.

When I came back through Nordhausen on my way to maintenance battalion headquarters, I saw a steady stream of Germans carrying these lifeless skeletons, arms and legs dangling over the sides of the stretchers, to the burial sites. The whole scene reminded me of ghouls in a grave robbery scene from an old horror movie. The bodies were laid side by side in the mass graves. The army sent a Protestant and a Catholic chaplain and a Jewish rabbi to perform ceremonies as these people were finally laid to rest.

General Sherman once said, “War is hell.” The Nordhausen tragedy made one think there must be different degrees of hell. Although the terror and violence of war can harden a person to new terrors, an unusually traumatic event can still shatter this external protective shell.

The 3d Armored Division medical officers cared for the survivors of the death camp until they could be relieved by the army field hospital. Of the approximately three thousand bodies stacked in the piles in the open field, about 10 percent were alive. Captain Comar, our battalion surgeon, said that some would survive but that malnutrition had probably already caused severe brain damage.

The V2 Rocket Factory

One of the columns of CCB discovered the entrance to an underground factory in nearby Robla. It was located in an old, abandoned mine that had been extended considerably for the production of the V1 buzz bomb and V2 rockets. The Germans had also been working on a new secret rocket motor for an interceptor.

The factory was staffed by slave workers, primarily from eastern Europe. They lived in wire-enclosed concentration camps and survived under the most primitive conditions. Those who were recalcitrant or failed to do their masters’ bidding were transferred to another enclosure, where they were slowly and deliberately starved to death. This was the enclosure we had found in Nordhausen.

The underground factory was elaborate, with some tunnels up to two miles in length. The Germans, highly ingenious engineers and inventors, had organized and built this factory in spite of day-and-night bombardments by the American and British air forces. After examining this system, I could understand how the Germans produced the V2s in such mass quantity. After the parts were fabricated underground, they were taken to the surface and sent to small towns in the vicinity of Nordhausen for the final assembly, which took more space than was available in the narrow underground passageways.

On the western edge of Robla was a schoolhouse with fruit trees planted in a geometric pattern behind the playground. Among the rows of trees were pyramid-shaped stacks of aluminum fuel tanks covered with camouflage nets. They were apparently meant to appear from the air as just more trees. This careful camouflage must have been effective, because there were no signs of bombing.

We broke into the schoolhouse and discovered a small but self-sufficient assembly plant with workbenches, cabinets, and parts for V2 rocket motors. In the larger rooms, the parts were being assembled and tested.

There were three subassemblies, each approximately five feet in diameter and ten feet long. The forward section contained a pointed nose cone, which flared to a bulletlike shape that contained the warhead and inertial guidance section. The midsection contained the large tanks for the fuel and the oxidizer. The rear section contained the rocket motor, piping, and pumps for the fuel and the oxidizer, and the controls for the rocket motor. The rear section was tapered from the main diameter and sloped back in the tail section, which included large fins to guide the missile.

Each section was assembled and mounted on heavy wooden pallets made from six-by-six rough-cut timbers. After the motors were tested, the pallets were enclosed in large eight-by-eight frames covered with black tar paper. The doors at the end of each pallet were hinged at the bottom and held in the upright position with simple screen-door-type hooks.

The boxes were taken to a mobile launch site on three separate trucks. A crane was used to set the sections on the ground and line them up properly. The end doors were lowered and removed, and the three boxes were joined with additional hooks. A missile crew could thereby assemble the sections completely under cover. The boxes also provided some camouflage from the air.

Once the assembly was completed, the crews released the hooks, and the tops and sides of the boxes folded back. A crane then erected the missile on a launching tripod. Fuel trucks pumped the fuel and oxidizer into the tanks and the missile was ready to be launched. Once the launch was completed, another missile could be launched from the same position, or the tripod could be moved to a new location. The ability to use mobile launch sites was one advantage that the V2 had over the V1. The V1 required a long track at a fixed launch site, which was vulnerable to air attack.

Our ordnance reports came to the attention of Col. John Medaris, First Army’s chief of ordnance. Medaris sent a group to study the V2 installations. They found the Germans had developed a truly amazing organization, and that the underground plant was a lot more extensive than we had thought. Not only were some of these tunnels more than two miles long, but they extended in layers some 600 feet below the surface, completely impervious to bombing.

When we captured this plant, the V2 was in full production and they had turned out thousands of rockets. Although there were many of these rockets in the distribution pipeline, all the launching sites in France, Belgium, and Holland had been taken. Prior to this, London and the south coast of England had suffered devastating damage from the rockets. Colonel Medaris became extremely interested in the V2 rocket system. After WWII he was promoted to major general and commanded the German rocket team who established the Army Ballistics Center at Huntsville, Alabama.

That evening I returned to battalion headquarters to deliver my combat loss report. It was during breakfast the next morning, April 12, that we heard a BBC broadcast that President Roosevelt had died and Vice President Truman had been sworn in as our new president.

Although I never agreed with much of Roosevelt’s domestic policy, I always felt that we had been extremely fortunate to have a president who clearly saw the danger of Nazi and Japanese aggression long before we got into the war. I sensed that the troops felt that Roosevelt’s death was a great loss. He had been president throughout this worldwide crisis and had experience dealing with our allies. Truman, on the other hand, was relatively unknown.

Later that day, Truman spoke to the American people and particularly to the armed forces overseas. His speech was rebroadcast over BBC. I was impressed with his humility, especially when he asked for our prayers to guide him during his hours of great decision. I instinctively felt that anyone with such basic simple faith would be guided in the choices he would make.

Some of the German troops who escaped the Ruhr Pocket headed eastward and established themselves in the heavily wooded Harz Mountains north of Nordhausen. This posed a serious threat to the northern flank of VII Corps. General Collins dispatched troops northward to join with troops from XIX Corps and the Ninth Army coming southward. They surrounded the Harz Mountain Redoubt and penetrated its outer defenses. In certain local areas, the fighting became extremely heavy; however, we gradually isolated the German troops into smaller pockets. Here again the original estimates of some 20,000 to 30,000 Germans in the pocket turned out to be in gross error. The final count was 84,000 Germans.

With this threat to our northern flank neutralized, we proceeded eastward toward Sangerhausen, twenty miles away, to join the column; the division trains moved forward to Duderstadt. As we came downhill into the small village, we saw a Panther tank that had just been knocked out. We stopped a moment to check it out, and Wrayford climbed on the glacis plate to look into the turret. There were no bodies in the tank or lying on the ground, so we assumed that the crew had survived. Before I could stop Wrayford, he crawled inside the turret through the cupola hatch. I was leery of getting inside German tanks because of the possibility of booby traps; however, the crew apparently had abandoned the tank too rapidly to think about this.

Wrayford soon poked his head above the cupola. I knew from the broad grin on his face that he had found something interesting. When he was back on the ground, I noticed a bulge beneath the hand-warming slot in his combat jacket. He pulled back the edge of the slot.

Out poked the head of a small hound puppy, no more than two to three weeks old. He had found her in a shoe box in the sponson. He had also found a complete set of electric train equipment. It appeared that some German tanker had picked this up and was taking it home to his young son.

There wasn’t room in the Jeep for the trains, but Wrayford put the puppy in his pocket and away we went. He named the dog Jeannie, and she immediately became a full-fledged member of our crew. Wrayford thought of her as Private Jeannie; he wanted to outrank at least one member of the crew.

I couldn’t help but think that somewhere in Germany a small boy was going to miss getting a puppy and an electric train from his daddy. In fact, there was a strong possibility he might not get his daddy back. I was sad for the child, in spite of being hardened by stories of children in the Hitler
Jugend
who killed American soldiers. They were no longer innocent children; they had become pawns of a vicious despot.

We were now approaching the heart of Germany. Within sixty miles there were three major metropolitan areas: Berlin, Dresden, and Halle. Once the heavy bombing of German cities started, the Germans began to develop a highly concentrated and well-organized antiaircraft defense system. In addition to the numerous fighter fields in this area, there were also antiaircraft guns. The key weapon was the dual-purpose 88, which was located in large clusters along the bombers’ approach routes.

One of these 88mm gun clusters was on a hill just north of Sangerhausen. The division’s main line of advance was now northeast toward Eisleben. The main tank elements of the lead column passed this point without noticing it, but as soon as the half-tracks and trucks loaded with infantry started passing, the German guns suddenly opened fire.

Several trucks and half-tracks were hit and set on fire, which resulted in heavy casualties. Fortunately, our 391st Armored Field Artillery Battalion had not passed this point. Within a matter of minutes, the entire eighteen-gun battalion went into position and started firing for effect. Using proximity fuses, and firing at a rate of ten rounds per minute per gun, they laid three thousand 105mm shells on the target before a cease-fire was ordered. The entire cluster of twelve to eighteen 88s was devastated. This was actually overkill, but we did not realize the true nature of the target.

The next town we came to was Polleben. It was declared an open city, and we captured it without further ado. We found a British POW camp there and liberated 450 British soldiers, some of whom had been there since Dunkirk. One British major reportedly broke down and cried when he saw the first Sherman tank come into view.

The next town of Koethen had a large German air base, which was also a Luftwaffe training ground. There were hundreds of fighter planes and light bombers there and at other nearby airfields. The Germans not only faced a severe aircraft fuel shortage, but pilots were virtually nonexistent; air force ground crews, along with officer candidates and naval personnel, had been combined to form infantry divisions.

For the 3d Armored Division, the war was now reaching a critical and final stage. The division had advanced rapidly and was now spread over a front of some forty miles. We had bypassed numerous small towns where enemy troops were dug in, and our infantry divisions had not had time to come forward and clean out these pockets of resistance. The supply convoys and liaison officers had to be on constant alert; even though townspeople may have put out white flags and surrendered when the troops came through the first time, there was no assurance that German soldiers hadn’t reoccupied the town and blocked the entrances to it again.

In anticipation of such moves, SHAEF had printed a bulletin in German, English, French, and Russian and posted it on the door of the
burgermeister
’s office of each small town that surrendered. The bulletin stated that once a town surrendered, it came under the protection of the Allied occupation forces, and all weapons, including firearms, swords, daggers, and any other military paraphernalia were to be turned in within twenty-four hours. Once the white flags had been put out, any attempts to rearm or generate further resistance either by civilians or military would be dealt with severely.

Just east of Koethen, I stopped at a task force headquarters, and a messenger on a motorcycle came in. He had just returned from a column on the other side of the next village. He excitedly reported that the village, which had put out white flags and surrendered, had opened fire on him.

The task force commander called a light tank company commander and told him to send a platoon to retake the town. The platoon leader had new M24 light tanks with 75mm guns and took along a platoon of armored infantry. He moved the tanks five hundred yards south of town. Although there were several white flags still hanging from the upper windows of the farm buildings, the troops started receiving fire immediately. German soldiers came out of the basements and fired some
panzerfaust
s, but they were out of range.

The platoon fired a salvo of white phosphorus into the village. Several of the buildings and some of the adjacent haystacks caught fire, and the civilian men, women, and children together with some German soldiers came screaming out of the village with their hands up. That ended the resistance there, and I’m sure the word got around to other villages.

This highly fluid situation presented opposing contrasts. When a major German combat group was defeated, some of the soldiers would surrender and others would break into small task groups. At the same time, we had overrun many POW camps with Russian, Polish, and other east European prisoners of war. After suffering years of deprivation in these German camps, the men readily vented their spleen against all things German, both military and civilian.

We were traveling east on the road from Koethen. The countryside was flat, open farmland, and the road was straight as an arrow with a few occasional trees on either side. As we approached a clump of trees, I noticed two figures; one appeared to be jumping up and down, raising his hands, and hollering. I told Wrayford to slow down. The man yelled for us to halt. He was dressed in heavy gray German infantrymen’s trousers and heavy black infantry combat boots. He had on an old, worn farmer’s coat and a farmer’s hat. The other man, who was much larger, wore a tattered Russian uniform.

The Russian had the German by the scruff of his neck and was shaking him violently. The Russian had a bayonet in his hand and threatened to kill the German. As we approached, the Russian lowered the bayonet but maintained his grip on the German’s collar. The conversation that ensued was a mixture of English, German, and Russian. It did not require expert knowledge of the languages to grasp what was going on.