If You Survive (16 page)

Then it happened. My short term as S-2, as part of the elite, abruptly ended. Colonel Walker called me in and told me he was sorry, but it was necessary to transfer me back to a line rifle company. He was well pleased with what he called my outstanding job as S-2, but my combat experience was needed desperately in the F Company because Captain Clang and some of his officers had met with a freak accident. He also mentioned that Captain Newcomb had wanted me back in E Company and had offered to trade two of his officers to F for me. I don’t know whether this was blarney or not, but it did make me feel a little better. I had been S-2 on the battalion staff for only ten or twelve days.

The freak accident that eliminated those officers was not only tragic, it was downright stupid: one of the lieutenants was demonstrating how to fire a rifle grenade, which is very much like an ordinary hand grenade except that it is fitted at the muzzle end of the rifle so that it can use the gases from a blank cartridge for propulsion of about two
hundred yards. A blank is used because the bullet from a live round would explode the grenade right at the end of the rifle. And that is exactly what happened. Luckily, no one was killed.

Now I was a platoon leader again in a new company with a new captain and not a single man I knew. I hated to start all over again, but I tried hard not to let it show. The captain was a big man who appeared to be experienced, but I never really got to know him. I believe his name was Captain Flanigan. This time around I, at least, was experienced myself, and the men were aware of it.

At about this time I heard of another serious accident, this time with men from my platoon in E Company. The last to leave the front lines, a whole squad of them hitched a ride in a single jeep, piling on top of one another inside and hanging on to the fenders and bumpers outside. The driver had to use the cat’s-eye slits on the headlights, and he did not see a bomb crater at the edge of the road. When one wheel went over the edge, the unbalanced overload tumbled the jeep to the bottom of the crater, on top of the men. The driver was killed, and many of the men were badly injured. Jackson, the old reliable BAR man who had gone through so much combat, broke his back.

I was gradually getting better acquainted with the new platoon, though it was awfully hard to stop comparing them to the men of my old platoon, because we had been through hell together so many times and knew what to expect from one another. But these new men also proved out.

One day some of the men found a cultivated field nearby and dug up some nice large white potatoes. Then they scrounged a large can and some cooking oil from the kitchen, rigged it over an open fire, and soon filled the air with the delicious aroma of french fries. After weeks of K rations, they were the freshest, most tasty food ever ereated
—and some of us couldn’t stop eating. The grease was a little too much for us, and we paid for it later one way or another.

Somehow I managed to come up with a severe sinus infection, and my face and ears ached until I could hardly bear the pain. The doctor gave me pills and nose drops, and after a few terrible days, it all suddenly cleared up. This was fortunate for me because the weather was turning cold, and soon we would be in the Hürtgen forest. We didn’t know what that name would come to mean.

We had been in the inactive area for almost a month, and the change had been wonderful. Actually, we were getting in top-notch condition for our next battle. We would need that conditioning, and then some. For that particular engagement, nothing was sufficient.

L
ong after darkness on about November 10, 1944, the Fourth Division leapfrogged some thirty miles farther north along the German-Belgian border. This was to be a highly secret maneuver, so elaborate pains were taken to erase all signs of our identity. Divisional and regimental numbers were blocked out on all vehicles, and the green four-leafed ivy shoulder patches of which we were so proud were removed from our uniforms. All personal letters bearing the division number were burned.

Our blacked-out trucks took long, confusing detours to the rear to mislead local enemy agents, and we arrived at our new post before dawn, sleepless and miserable. It was something of a shock early that morning to pick up the English-language propaganda broadcast of Berlin Sally, welcoming the Fourth Division to its new position in the Hürtgen Forest. Actually, the deduction was simple: They knew where the Fourth had been, they knew when it left with erased identity, and they knew when an unidentified unit arrived thirty miles north. Berlin Sally broadcast daily
to us in English, trying to pack all the propaganda she could into a few sentences. We could occasionally pick up her program on our walkie-talkies.

We bivouacked in very rugged, roller-coaster terrain deep in the forest east of Zweifall, Germany, near the middle of the Hürtgen, a one hundred-square-mile forest of extremely steep hills, rough ridges, and deep ravines covered with oak, maple, birch, scrub oak, white pine, and jack pine. Some growths of hardwood were over one hundred feet tall; pines of mixed heights of about ten to fifty feet were planted in closely packed rows. Now and then we would see a giant stand reaching up almost one hundred feet.

The country was obstacle enough in itself, yet the Germans had two additional advantages. They always knew exactly where we were, having just left there themselves, and thus easily called down shelling on us. They also had prepared in advance a series of defensive positions. After they had made our attack as costly as possible, they simply pulled back a few hundred yards to their next emplacements—and bombarded the ones left to us

Their new line usually gave them command of everything in front, being perhaps on an upward slope or near the lip of a ravine. Their bunkers were made of thick logs with a few feet of dirt on top. The bunkers were almost immune to artillery, which had to arc in overhead. They might as well have been concrete. Tree bursts bothered them very little, and there was no chance of our tanks getting anywhere near them for direct fire. The infantry had to take them the hard way, going in after them one at a time, sometimes through barbed wire.

Why the Hürtgen forest was not bypassed is still a major question. Possibly the Allies feared the Germans would open the floodgates on the Ruhr dams just to the forest’s south. Opening the gates would have flooded much of the
land to the northeast. Some experts feel that the dams could have been captured and the forest still bypassed, but it is possible that the Allied leadership felt that the forest could also have been used as a base from which the Germans could launch a major counteroffensive.

At that time, none of the officers I spoke to raised any question about the Hürtgen’s strategic value. We were ordered to fight there and assigned sectors to take. We knew the going there had been very difficult. Several American divisions had fought there for almost two months, and none had been able to make a complete breakthrough. We were told that a breakthrough to the Cologne Plains was essential in order to allow our tanks to move across open ground and on to the Rhine, about thirty-five miles away.

It was decided that another major effort would be made. This time the battle-hardened Fourth, Twenty-Eighth, and Ninetieth Divisions, with extra tank and artillery support, would attack abreast. The main effort was concentrated to the front of the First Division, just north of the left flank of the Fourth Division. The attack would begin with a very heavy bombing mission designed to wipe out the Germans facing the First Division.

The German High Command was, of course, aware of our objectives and ordered us held up at all costs. Several experienced German divisions were sent in along with masses of artillery. We heard there were as many as seventeen battalions of artillery. Later we had reason to believe it.

The days had been growing shorter right along at that time of year and in the tall, dense forest daylight faded away around five in the afternoon. The blackness lasted until almost eight in the morning. Winter also came early that mid-November and proved it with dreary rain, a dousing of early snow, and a miserable chill.

Normally, each man carried a blanket and shelter-half
(half of a canvas tent), so that he and a buddy had a complete tent and two blankets between them. But the weather was so bad we had the men set up in three’s so each could share a tent, an extra shelter-half to lay on the ground, three blankets, and the warmth of three bodies. We also always slept in our woolen clothes, and even through them the ground felt rough and was piercingly cold.

While waiting for the weather to clear for our bombers we rechecked weapons, stored up some rest, and also received enough men and officers to bring the unit back to full strength.

We awoke one morning to a deep hush and crawled out to find two inches of new snow. The ground we had been scuffing up was hidden under a pure white blanket, and the gaunt, leafless hardwoods now sported limbs topped with soft ermine. Our world was suddenly clean, fresh, and uncorrupted, and it seemed senseless that we were not deer hunting back home in Michigan but at war with people on the next ridge.

November 16 came clear and cold, and masses of our heavy bombers did their jobs on the Germans some five miles northeast. This was beyond our division’s zone so it did not help us directly, but we must have received some side benefits from the reduction of the enemy’s overall strength.

While the bombing was still underway, my platoon moved out by itself ahead of the battalion. We followed a two-lane track to the north and ran into no opposition. The only sign of danger was a few booby traps strung in the trees to the right of the trail. The trip wires were in plain sight, but if we had been a little careless or come through at night we would have triggered them. I radioed back to the captain to warn him.

After about a quarter mile, we turned to our right and formed a long defensive line along the ridge, facing north.
Once we were in position, the rest of the battalion advanced straight ahead behind us, so that we were strung out defending the left flank of the whole battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Glenn Walker.

Second Battalion immediately ran into a tough German defense, veterans who fought savagely from thick log bunkers and gun emplacements protected by barbed wire. From dug-in positions facing us, they put down brutally accurate mortars and artillery on our men out in the open and chewed us up with direct machine gun and rifle fire. Our casualties were dreadful. Most of our losses were inflicted by artillery and mortar shells exploding in the trees above us.

Normally, artillery shells come into the ground at a sharp angle, and their shrapnel fans out and slightly upward to the front, much of it going harmlessly into the ground or straight up into the air. When a shell explodes overhead in a tree, almost half of its shrapnel spreads out and downward like rain, and it is infinitely more lethal.

The best defense is to stand upright against a big tree, thus exposing mostly your helmet and shoulders. Instincts are strong, however, and many men could not stop themselves from hitting the ground as usual. Actually, it didn’t always make much difference, because mortars drop straight downward, and their steel splinters fan out in all directions. Thus you get hit from all directions, even from below with mines.

My platoon was very lucky to have a defensive job on a quiet flank that opening day. A few stray tree bursts came in, and they did give us our first two casualties, but we saw no other sign of the enemy. All day long we heard the heavy fighting behind our right flank. We knew the rest of the battalion was catching hell, and we were pretty jumpy.

At dusk, which was only a little after 5:00 in the thick woods, the fighting stopped, and my CO ordered me to
rejoin the company. By the time we assembled it was dark, and the only way we could get back was to trail one hand on the field phone wire. We stumbled along over roots and small depressions and slashed through the underbrush, and then we piled up against some barbed wire. It took some time to cut through the wire and bend it back in the darkness. We then followed the phone line and soon were with F Company again.

The company was digging in to the rear of the battalion as the reserve, and Captain Flanigan, F Company commander, said E and G companies were dug in a few hundred yards in front. “Have your men dig in along the right rear, and let’s hope for a good night,” he said as he went back to his command post, which was little more than a foxhole with his phone and radio nearby. Most commanders tried to locate their CP’s near the center of their company.

The dense pines ended a few feet south and bordered on a large, open stand of hardwoods. I decided to stay just inside the pines for protection. The pines were so thick that the lower boughs nearly touched ground, and at night they almost completely blotted out any faint light.

Very carefully I began to place my men in pairs about ten feet apart along a rough perimeter. This was difficult because I couldn’t see the ground. Then, suddenly there wasn’t any. I dropped several feet into a void and lay stunned at the bottom of an old German foxhole. My wind had been knocked out, my chest ached, and my teeth had been jammed. I couldn’t see a thing and must have been in shock as I dragged myself out of the hole. Then I had to go right back down again to grope around until I found my helmet.

After all the men were in place, my runner and I began to look for the German foxhole I’d found, so we wouldn’t
have to dig our own. We fanned out slightly and cautiously, felt our way but finally had to give up and dig our own shelter. At daylight we were pretty disgusted to find we had missed it by only ten feet, and then we learned how lucky we had been.

Some of the men were interested in my mishap and went down in the hole themselves to poke around. They quickly found something they hadn’t expected. The foxhole actually was the entrance to a dugout, and still inside were four terribly frightened German soldiers, who couldn’t surrender fast enough. They had spend a dreadful night fully aware that we were all around them and had hoped they would get a chance to surrender before someone as nervous as they were tossed a grenade in on them. For my part, I couldn’t help thinking how lucky I had been that they weren’t fanatics who would have finished me off as I lay stunned at their feet. I tried not to recall how hard my runner and I had looked for that hole with an eye toward using it as shelter.