Grunts (23 page)

Much of the fighting was at such close quarters that mortarmen like Private Danny Dalyai pointed their tubes almost straight up, at nearly a ninety-degree angle, to hit Germans whom they could actually see, a rare thing for mortar crewmen. Dalyai’s 60-millimeter mortar tube was nearly buried in snow, with only the top sticking out. Overhead, he had just enough of an opening between pine trees to get his shots off. “I had only 6 or 8 shells. I had no trouble getting all the shells off.” They exploded among some Germans who were just beyond the tree line. In the next instant, as Private Dalyai watched in horror, an 88-millimeter shell scored a direct hit on the log cabin that was serving as B Company’s command post. He ran over to check on the four men he knew were inside. “How I’ve wished to this day I never looked in! Blood was all over the place. Lieutenant Charles Butler got both legs blown off. You can imagine how very emotional and overwhelming this was for me.” Aghast, Dalyai hurried away, only to stumble over a dead body. Another 88 shell exploded nearby, knocking him unconscious and destroying his hearing.

Not far from Dalyai, D Company’s 81-millimeter mortars were dug into the tree-lined backyard of a farmhouse near the road. Private First Class Bob Newbrough was in a foxhole, observing for his fellow crewmen, when he actually saw a German soldier through a firebreak in the trees, no more than fifteen yards away. The two enemies were startled to see each other. The German was poised to throw a potato masher grenade into the mortar position but he ducked down, as did Newbrough. The American grabbed a rifle and opened fire. Just then, the mortar crewmen began firing their shells almost straight up, at the closest possible range. “I can remember hearing the burst of the mortar shells coming down towards me, ducking in the hole when the shells struck the woods” but still encouraging his friends to keep it up. The Germans, including the potato masher-wielding soldier, soon melted away.
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Although the Germans were hurling powerful forces at the 394th, their attack on the crossroads was bogging down. “The 12th Volksgrenadier Division was involved in heavy fighting for Losheimergraben, which was skillfully and bravely defended,” a I SS Panzer Corps report stated. By and large, their armored vehicles were road-bound because of the rough terrain and, in some spots, the prevalence of snowy mud. To the south, a destroyed bridge at Losheim kept some of those vehicles waiting in place for many hours. Others made it to Losheimergraben, only to become embroiled in close-quarters fighting with the Americans. Antitank guns were not as big of a problem for them as bazookas. These handheld tubes were the great equalizer in any tank-versus-man confrontation. Even though most infantrymen were trained to fire this weapon, the majority did not possess the kind of courage it took to wield one, in real combat, against an imposing tank. That hardly mattered, though. The bazooka only required a two-man crew. This meant that, under the right circumstances, a mere handful of stalwart souls, brandishing a few tubes, operating from some semblance of cover, could make life very difficult for enemy tanks. The shattered cluster of houses that comprised Losheimergraben made good hiding places for bazooka teams, mainly because they were so close to the road.

Private First Class Ralph Gamber was in the cellar of one such house, facing the road. He and the men with him felt a rumble and saw a German tank right outside. In the basement was a bazooka with eight rounds. He loaded the bazooka while a forty-eight-year-old soldier, inevitably nicknamed “Pap,” aimed and fired, even as Gamber studiously avoided the considerable back-blast. The rocket streaked from the tube, sagged downward and struck the tank, stopping it cold. Pap fired again, scoring another hit. “When Germans crawled out, riflemen and antitank gunners shot them [with rifles].” Another tank tried to bulldoze the first one out of the way. “I told Pap [to] wait until it got broad side and then fire.” They hit this one, too. It seemed that smoke came from the second tank but they were not sure. A third one appeared within their limited vision. Pap fired at it. The rocket hit the tread, damaging it. The turret of the third tank swung in the direction of the cellar, but before the enemy crewmen could snap off a shot, their tank lost traction because of the damaged tread. “It slipped over the bank; the territt [turret] gun was pointing down.”

In the basement of another two-story house that was literally next to the road, Sergeant John Hilliard watched as enemy self-propelled guns neared a hidden bazooka team led by Sergeant Mel Weidner. “Weidner’s platoon knocked out their vehicle first by making a direct hit on one of the treads with a bazooka rocket, and when the infantry unit moved forward to protect it, they were cut down by rifle fire and grenades. Weidner fired the rocket while one of his men [Private William Kirkbride] loaded.” The heavy American small-arms fire forced the German infantrymen to move away from their vehicles in search of cover. Far too many tanks and guns were on their own. One of the self-propelled guns fired several shells into that house until it came into the range of another team that got “a clear shot at it and eventually knocked it out.” Knocking it out, of course, normally meant setting it on fire, killing the crewmen, burning them, or forcing them to bail out so that riflemen could pick them off like clay pigeons.

A few of the bravest (or most desperate) Americans, like Sergeant Milton Kitchens and several helpers, even launched direct personal attacks on the German armor. A lone enemy tank, in Kitchens’s recollection, “was upon us and firing one round after the other. Suddenly it stopped right in front of our position.” This was a terrifying but crucial moment. The first instinct for most of the infantry soldiers was to shrink deeper into their holes, as if they could cocoon themselves from the deadly peril the tank represented. That would have been the worst thing to do because it would have allowed the tank to blast their holes, machine-gun them, or even grind them into pulp. Instead of letting that happen, Kitchens and another man crawled out of their holes, working their way up to the tank. It was an act that required enormous courage, but they hardly thought of it that way. They simply knew that this was the best way to survive. After the tank fired, there was a slight pause as the gunner reloaded. During that time, Kitchens pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it in the muzzle of the tank’s gun. The other soldier “smacked that grenade with the side of his rifle butt and it slammed up the barrel and into the inside of that panzer. All we heard out of that grenade explosion was a muffled poof, then silence. Soon that tank began exploding and we crawled back in the foxhole for cover.”

In spite of the determined resistance of soldiers like Kitchens, the Germans steadily made headway. Hour by hour, through sheer numbers and relentless attacks, they found holes in the American lines, cut off small groups, and threatened to destroy the entire 394th Infantry. Hundreds of Americans were killed or captured. Within twenty-four hours, Lieutenant Colonel Don Riley, the commander of the regiment, decided, with General Lauer’s permission, to withdraw. Riley ordered a fighting withdrawal to the north, in the direction of Hunningen and Murringen, for anyone who could still get out. The ultimate destination was Elsenborn Ridge, a prominent stretch of high ground several miles to the north.

At the Losheimergraben crossroads, a mixed force of infantrymen and antitank gunners under Lieutenant Dewey Plankers kept up steady resistance, while survivors retreated. “Many men who became separated from their own units joined with other outfits and fought wherever they happened to be,” an after action report explained. “The situation was one of wild confusion.” One of Riley’s battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Wertheimer, added to the confusion through sheer cowardice. As the fighting raged, Wertheimer, a garrison martinet whose men disparagingly called him “Fainting Phil,” cowered in the basement of his command post, totally unable to function. Like many other training ground tyrants, his supposed toughness melted in the face of real adversity. “The chief didn’t know what to do,” Private Steve Kallas, a BAR man, later commented. “He was smoking, walking around like a stupe. He wanted to surrender.” Fed up with his cowardice and his whimpering entreaties to surrender, his staff effectively relieved him and continued the fight.

The retreat was generally marked by privation, hunger, and cold. There were also sharp firefights in some spots, especially Murringen, where some Battle Babies of the 394th clashed with lead elements of the two enemy divisions. In one incident at Murringen, Sergeant Harold Schaefer saw a man squatting next to a hedgerow, plopped down next to him, and said hello. “I . . . was looking into the blue eyes of a Jerry soldier. It’s a tossup as to who was more surprised.” Sometimes in such confrontations soldiers would choose to go their separate ways, embracing a tacit truce rather than kill face-to-face. Not this time, though. “The M1 is faster than the German rifle, or I was faster than ‘Fritz,’ because he got to die for his country.”

One officer of the 394th bluntly, and aptly, summed up the regiment’s fight at Losheimergraben. “Everything was all fucked up, we were all scared to death, and plenty of mistakes were made.” In spite of these issues, the regiment, by fighting hard, held the Germans up for many crucial hours. The stubborn defense of the crossroads cost the I SS Panzer Corps, for the better part of two days, a badly needed route of advance north to Murringen, Bullingen, Malmédy, and points beyond. This job was mainly done by infantrymen, with some artillery, but little armored support.
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Battle Babies Part II: The 393rd Infantry in the Krinkelter Wald

Immediately to the northeast of the 394th, another Battle Baby regiment, the 393rd, also found itself in the crosshairs of the German offensive. These men, under pipe-smoking Lieutenant Colonel Jean Scott, were immersed, along a front of fifty-five hundred yards, in the Krinkelter Wald, a thick pine forest. From east to west, the forest had a depth of about four miles. Just to the west of the forest lay the vital twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath, farm towns through which an important north-south road ran. For the advance on the Meuse, the Germans had to control the road and the towns. First, though, they had to fight their way through the forest, and that meant assaulting the 393rd. The Battle Babies of this regiment, like their brethren elsewhere, were burrowed into the forest, manning a thin line of well-camouflaged dugouts, most of which had overhead log cover. Here and there, log cabins provided some semblance of warmth and shelter. All of the positions were oriented east, toward Germany.

As in other sectors, the enemy barrage inflicted few casualties on the 393rd, but it did disrupt communications. The real horror began just as the sun was slowly ascending over the eastern horizon, when soldiers from the 277th Volksgrenadier Division hurled themselves, under the cover of some supporting artillery fire, into the Krinkelter Wald. Many of the enemy troops wore white sheets to blend into the snowy surroundings. In the confusing half-light, they had little trouble, in most cases, penetrating to within a hundred yards of the American positions. “I had difficulty picking out targets,” Private First Class Lionel Adda, an assistant machine gunner/rifleman attached to B Company, later wrote. “Tracers and one or two flares revealed bodies crawling towards us. I was firing my carbine more rapidly than I had ever done before.” On either side of him, his squad’s machine guns were pouring out withering fire. From only a few yards in front of his dugout, he heard someone holler “Heil Hitler!” In the next instant, a grenade exploded, followed by burp-gun fire. “The bullets dislodged dirt and stones in front of my hole, and they struck me painfully in my face.” Then, after this near miss, the firing tapered off. As Adda’s eyes adjusted to the gathering light, he could see twelve dead enemy soldiers heaped in front of his dugout, including one so close that he could practically touch the body (this was probably the one who had thrown the grenade).

Adda did not know it, but B Company and its neighboring unit on the right, C Company, were facing some of the most formidable German attacks. Colonel Hans Viebig, the commander of the 277th, threw the better part of two regiments into the fight. “Some of the Germans got into the same foxholes with our soldiers and several were bayoneted,” surviving American soldiers related to a historian in a post-combat interview. “Others occupied positions adjacent to and in rear of our foxholes. The defense was spread so thin that our line was mainly a series of strongpoints with gaps between each.” Consider, for a moment, what this really meant. Each foxhole contained, at most, three scared men. As the soldiers related, in some cases, Germans infiltrated the holes themselves, prompting a personal, bloody, ferocious struggle for life. They killed with rifles, pistols, bayonets, and even helmets. Here there was no retreat, no impersonal discharge of weapons at an unseen enemy. There was, instead, a personal struggle to the death, more akin to ancient combat than modern warfare. The vanquished lay bloody and bludgeoned in the snow. The victors were, in the short term, exhausted by their ordeal, owing to the post-combat depletion of adrenaline. Elation at survival quickly gave way to nausea at having to kill. In the long term, they would carry mental scars forever.

In the majority of cases, the fighting was not quite that close. More often, the Americans stood against the parapets of their dugouts and shot at whatever they could see. In the recollection of Technical Sergeant Ben Nawrocki, platoon sergeant of B Company’s 2nd Platoon, he and his men “kept cutting them down. In many places, the Germans were piled on top of one another like cord wood.” In a few cases, they got close enough to throw grenades inside the American cabins.

The BARs did tremendous damage. Nawrocki remembered seeing a buck-toothed BAR man, fighting barefoot in his hole—he apparently had his boots off when the attack hit—warding off the Germans with steady bursts from his fearsome weapon. “They were piled three and four feet high in front of his foxhole.” To Sergeant Bernie Macay “it seemed like there were thousands. We could see them against the skyline. They were dropping like flies. There must have been hundreds of German dead in front of our positions.” Macay’s BAR man, Clyde Burkett, like many others of his ilk, did much of the killing. “He personally took a tremendous toll.”