The Last Battle (23 page)

Formalities over, Gangl introduced Lee to Rupert Hagleitner and other key Wörgl resisters. The American officer told the Austrians that they were responsible for the town’s administration until U.S. troops arrived and that Gangl’s now-surrendered Wehrmacht soldiers would provide security. Then, turning to the matter of Schloss Itter, Lee asked Hagleitner to map out what he thought would be the safest route to the castle. Hagleitner instead offered to show him the way, and just before five thirty Lee, Gangl, Hagleitner, and Szymczyk set out in the kübelwagen, followed by Blechschmidt and several men in a small truck.

Though the distance to the castle was little more than five road miles, the need to take narrow dirt tracks and make several detours to avoid Waffen-SS roadblocks meant it took the party nearly forty-five minutes to reach Itter village. When they entered the small square in front of St. Joseph’s Church, they encountered Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, who was on his way home after his drawn-out meeting with the French VIPs. Schrader told Lee he’d taken responsibility for the former prisoners’ safety, and Gangl, seeing Lee’s obvious skepticism, vouched for Schrader, whom he knew from Battle Group Giehl. Lee then told the Waffen-SS officer to return to the castle with his family and explained that a U.S. rescue force would arrive soon.
²⁹

This latter statement was a bit misleading, of course, in that Lee would have to return to Kufstein to assemble the relief column. And before he could do that, he had to ensure that the situation at the castle was in fact as Gangl had represented it to be. He thus directed Hagleitner, who was driving, to continue the 150 yards on to the castle. As the kübelwagen slowly approached the gatehouse—presumably with one of its occupants waving a white flag—two armed Frenchmen
³⁰
stepped forward and leveled their weapons. Their understandable chagrin at the arrival of a German military vehicle would quickly have dissipated when Lee slowly stood up in the rear seat and announced himself to be an American officer.

Quickly ushered before the gathered French VIPs, Lee introduced himself and declared that he would return very soon with a sizable rescue force. While the tanker’s exact words were not recorded, we can be certain that they were greeted with relief and enthusiasm. But we can also be fairly sure that Lee expressed himself in his typically brash, straightforward way, and, while he impressed Reynaud as having the “fine figure of a football player,”
³¹
he didn’t make a particularly good impression on at least one of the other former prisoners. Though Édouard Daladier found Sepp Gangl to be “polite” and “dignified,” the American captain struck him as “crude in both looks and manners,” and the former French premier sniffed that “if Lee is a reflection of America’s policies, Europe is in for a hard time.”
³²

Daladier’s disdain was the least of Lee’s concerns, of course; he had a rescue to organize. Less than twenty minutes after arriving at Schloss Itter, and, after having directed Blechschmidt and his men to remain, Lee, Szymczyk, Gangl, and Hagleitner started back toward Wörgl in the kübelwagen, retracing their earlier route and again encountering no resistance. After dropping Hagleitner off, the other three continued on to Kufstein, where Lee sought out his battalion commander. Clow told him to proceed with the rescue effort but said that because CCR was already turning the area over to elements of the 36th Infantry Division, the only 23rd TB assets available to Lee were his own tank and one other—any additional men and vehicles would have to come from the 36th ID.

With Gangl in tow Lee rushed back to where he’d left his task force earlier in the day. He first informed his own crew—Szymcyk, driver Technician Fourth Grade William T. Rushford, loader Technician Fifth Grade Edward J. Seiner, and assistant driver/bow machine gunner Private First Class Herbert G. McHaley—of their new mission. He then asked his friend Harry Basse to take command of the second tank, Second Lieutenant Wallace S. Holbrook’s
Boche Buster
, whose crew included sergeants William E. Elliot and Glenn E. Sherman.
³³

Still needing additional firepower, Lee was able to dragoon five Shermans from the incoming 3rd Platoon, Company B, 753rd Tank Battalion. Lee then went in search of Colonel George E. Lynch, commander of the 142nd Infantry Regiment, which was moving in to assume control of the area. Fascinated by Lee’s tale of French VIPs in need of rescue, Lynch tasked three squads of infantrymen from 2nd Platoon, Company E, of Lieutenant
Colonel Marvin J. Coyle’s 2nd Battalion to accompany the column. Lynch also pointed out that his regiment’s planned axis of advance would take it toward Itter and pledged that the bulk of his battalions would be “right behind” Lee and his column.

That column rolled out of Kufstein just before seven
PM
. Lee and
Besotten Jenny
took the lead, followed by
Boche Buster
and the five 753rd TB Shermans. The infantrymen from the 142nd were spread among the tanks and riding atop the rear engine decks, and taking up the rear of the column was Gangl in his kübelwagen, the white flag on its radio antenna now supplemented by large white stars crudely painted on either side. Despite the apparent ease with which Lee and the others had managed to drive to and from Schloss Itter earlier in the day, the young officer was under no illusions that his considerably larger column would go unnoticed or unchallenged. Die-hard Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht units remained throughout northern Austria, and they could be expected to be well-equipped with the lethal panzerfaust antitank rockets that Allied tankers had learned to fear.

It quickly became obvious that panzerfausts were not the only thing the American tankers had to worry about. Almost immediately after leaving Kufstein, the relief column had to cross a small and obviously old bridge over an Inn River tributary known as the Brixentaler Ache. Lee’s two tanks and two of the 753rd TB Shermans made it over the span without difficulty, but the structure began to collapse when the fifth tank attempted to cross. Lee had no choice but to order the last three 753rd vehicles to return to Kufstein with their embarked infantrymen.
³⁴

Further complications awaited the rescue force when it reached Wörgl at about eight
PM
. The same roving bands of die-hard troops that worried Lee were also of great concern to Rupert Hagleitner and his fellow resistance leaders, and they pleaded with the young officer to bolster their defenses. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Lee agreed to leave the two remaining 753rd TB tanks and their accompanying infantrymen in Wörgl. However, Gangl offered to make up the deficit with more of his men, and when Lee agreed, the Wehrmacht officer called together two of his officers—Captain Dietrich and Lieutenant Höckel—and several additional enlisted men. When the relief column left Wörgl to continue the journey to Schloss Itter, Lee commanded two Sherman tanks, fourteen American soldiers, and a kübelwagen and small Mercedes truck carrying a total of ten Germans. It was certainly a first for an American officer in World War II.

The rescue force initially headed due east out of Wörgl but turned southeast when they hit the village of Söll-Leukental and then followed the two-lane Brixentalerstrasse south along the west bank of the Brixentaler Ache. At the small hamlet of Bruggberg they found a bridge that Lee determined would bear the weight of the tanks as they crossed to the other side of the small river, but it had already been wired with demolition charges. Realizing the span might be the only route back to U.S. lines with the evacuated French VIPs, Lee decided to leave
Boche Buster
and its crew—minus Basse—to disarm the explosives and protect the structure.

Continuing on with
Besotten Jenny
and its crew, with Basse and the four remaining 142nd infantrymen—Corporal William Sutton and Privates Alex Petrukovich, Arthur Pollock, and Alfred Worsham—riding on the back deck and Gangl and his men following in their vehicles, Lee continued along the east bank of the river. The road was hemmed in on the east side by a steep mountainside, forcing the column to continue almost due southward toward the market town of Hopfgarten until they came to a sharp left-hand curve onto the Ittererstrasse, the road leading uphill toward Itter village and the schloss. Lee could now see his objective, perched atop the hill barely a mile directly to his front, and he ordered his driver to move out carefully.

His caution was justified, for within minutes of turning onto the Ittererstrasse the column rounded an S-curve in the road and almost drove over a squad of Waffen-SS troops trying to set up a roadblock. The infantrymen riding on the tank’s rear deck quickly opened fire, as did bow gunner McHaley and Gangl’s troops in the truck, and the Waffen-SS men scurried into the surrounding woods without firing. Lee ordered Rushford to “open her up,” and the tank slewed around another corner and up the twisting Ittererstrasse with the Wehrmacht vehicles close behind.

The mini convoy roared through the narrow streets of Itter village and then turned west onto the schlossweg, the narrow lane leading toward the castle. The schlossweg ended at the bridge leading to the castle’s main gate, where Lee ordered Rushford to pull
Besotten Jenny
as far over to the side as possible and then motioned Gangl and the driver of the truck to move ahead and cross the bridge. As the Wehrmacht vehicles eased past the Sherman and on toward the gatehouse, Lee told the four infantryman atop the tank’s rear deck to jump down and take up defensive positions. Turning to Rushford—who’d driven the several hundred yards from Itter village with his head and shoulders out of his hatch—Lee said to back the tank up
slightly until it was in the center of the road and then turn it 180 degrees so the front of the vehicle would face toward the village. The turn was a delicate operation on the narrow roadway, but, by moving the steering levers in opposite directions and applying power, Rushford was able to rotate the tank in place.

Lee’s rationale for the maneuver became clear moments later, when he told Rushford that they would be backing
Besotten Jenny
up the curving, sixty-foot-long access road toward the gatehouse. In response to quizzical looks from both Rushford and Basse, Lee quickly explained that during his brief earlier visit to the castle with Gangl, he’d realized that the access road was narrower than where the vehicle now sat and that the gatehouse’s arched entryway was too low to allow the tank to move all the way into the schloss’s lower courtyard. He wanted to get the tank as close as possible to the gatehouse, both to block the entry and to ensure that enemy troops couldn’t get between the vehicle and the gate. While backing
Besotten Jenny
up the access road to the gatehouse would be challenging, Lee said, it would also ensure that enemy gunners couldn’t get a shot at the tank’s most vulnerable spot: the less heavily armored lower rear hull. With the plan agreed on, Lee ordered everyone but Rushford out of the tank and then climbed atop the turret and dropped into the commander’s hatch.

Because the Sherman’s rearview mirrors had been damaged several days earlier, Rushford had to rely on Lee’s voice commands for guidance. As
Besotten Jenny
began creeping backward, so slowly that its movement was at first barely discernable to the anxious soldiers looking on, Lee relayed small course corrections via intercom. The initial half of the access road was relatively straight, but it also included the potentially most dangerous hurdle the tank had to surmount: the twenty-foot-long bridge spanning the ravine separating Schloss Itter from the rest of the ridgeline. The metal-reinforced concrete span was supported at either end by what appeared to be fairly robust, arched, dressed-stone piers, but the Sherman would undoubtedly be pushing the bridge well beyond its design limits. Should the span give way under the tank’s immense weight,
Besotten Jenny
would drop some twenty-five feet to the bottom of the ravine—a distance that would disable the vehicle, rob the rescue force of its biggest gun, and almost certainly kill or severely injure Lee and Rushford.

When the Sherman backed onto the bridge, the span literally started to groan as the interior metal girders supporting the length of the structure
began to bend. Chunks of the stone façade popped out and dropped into the ravine, and hairline cracks opened in the macadam road surface. Art Pollock, crouched nearby with his BAR
³⁵
pointing back toward the village, turned at the sound, and was stunned to see that the bridge was actually swaying slightly from side to side.
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Despite the obvious signs of distress, the span held, and after nearly a minute of high anxiety for Rushford, Lee, and the watching soldiers,
Besotten Jenny
rolled safely across—only to face another challenge. At the castle end of the span the roadway turned left toward the gatehouse at about a 15-degree angle, narrowing from twelve feet to just under eleven. The turn would be a tight one, with the nine-foot-wide tank having less than a foot of clearance on either side. If Rushford misjudged the angle of his turn or inadvertently applied too much power, the Sherman would smash through the low, cinder-block and wooden-plank guard rails lining the roadway and might well go tumbling down the slope on the other side. But again, Lee’s precise instructions and Rushford’s steady hand averted a possible disaster:
Besotten Jenny
made the turn with inches to spare and covered the remaining distance to the gatehouse without incident.

When Rushford had backed the Sherman to within a few feet of the arched gateway—through which the German vehicles had already passed—Lee told him to shut the engine down. Both men then climbed out of their respective hatches, jumped to the ground, and lit up celebratory smokes as Basse, Szymcyk, Seiner, McHaley, and the four infantrymen left their defensive positions on the village side of the bridge and trotted to join them. The Americans then moved through the open gates and into the snow-dusted lower courtyard, where Schrader and Gangl were waiting. With daylight fading, Lee was eager to organize the castle’s defenses. But before he could begin issuing orders, the schlosshof’s small arched gate swung open, and he and his men were engulfed by a wave of Gallic congratulations.