The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (41 page)

“I can’t see!” he cried out. “I can’t see! Oh, my God, I’m blind.” He never saw again and the war was a long way from over.

Sleep deprivation was a universal experience. Two, three, at the most four hours of fitful sleep was about it. But no matter how sleepy a man was, he lived in constant tension. The men in the front line shivered in their foxholes, attempting to stay alert, straining to see, straining to hear, straining to stay awake. They would chew gum or tobacco. Pvt. Ken Russell of the 82nd Airborne remembered chewing one or the other “very slowly. I didn’t want to finish too quickly and have nothing to do but think of the precarious position I was in.” Lt. Glenn Gray calls this “the tyranny of the present.” In a foxhole, the past and, more important, the future do not exist. The only thing in the world that matters is the moment. Gray says that there is “more time for thinking and more loneliness in foxholes than [anywhere else] and time is measured in other ways than by clocks and calendars.”

Pvt. Dave Nutt of the 99th Division recalled, “The cold, the snow, and the darkness were enough to set young nerves on edge. The thud of something as innocuous as snow plopping to the ground from a tree branch could be terrifying.  Was it snow? Was it maybe a German patrol? Should you fire at the sound and risk giving away your position, or worse hitting one of your own men? But did the Germans have us surrounded?”

Lieutenant Otts heard a “thud” one night and went out to investigate in the morning. He found a dying German soldier who murmured over and over, “Oh God, I meant no harm, I meant no harm.” The boy was unarmed and wore no helmet, so he may well have been coming in to surrender when he set off the booby trap. But the Germans often went on patrols unarmed so if they were captured they could say they were coming in to give up. Otts commented, “I imagine quite a few [Germans] would have surrendered but it was impossible in the daytime, as their own men would shoot them, and at night they were afraid to try and run our gauntlet of booby traps and machine guns.”

An experience shared by many foxhole soldiers was the screaming of a wounded man in front of the outposts. Otts recalled “a helluva night. . . . Someone out in front of us was screaming, ‘Help! Help! Can’t anyone hear me? For God’s sake help!’ This went on all night. You can’t imagine what it does to you to be sitting in a foxhole with the black night all around and someone yelling for help in a mournful voice.” Otts knew that there were American wounded out in front, but he also knew that the Germans used such calls to trick the GIs and would ambush anyone going out to give aid, so he ordered his platoon to stay put.

Tension was at its most pronounced when changing guard. Every two hours the platoon sergeants would get two men from a foxhole and lead them to the outpost position, to relieve the men on duty. “The trip out to the OP was always eerie,” Sgt. Burton Christenson of the 101st Airborne remembered of his nights outside Bastogne. “You eyed all silhouettes suspiciously, skeptical of any sound.  Reluctantly, you approach the OP. The silhouettes of the men in their positions are not clear. . . . Are they Germans? The suspense is always the same . . .  then finally you recognize an American helmet. Feeling a little ridiculous, yet also relieved, you change the guard, turn around and return to the main line, only to repeat the entire process in another two hours.” “You always slept with one eye open,” Pvt. Arnold Lindblad of the 104th Medical Battalion recalled. “Unless you were on duty, you hit the hole when it got dark and stayed there till full light. There was no walking around in the dark, no talking from hole to hole. You never got used to it.” On his first night in a foxhole, Pvt. Richard Heuer, a replacement with the 84th Division, was suffering with dysentery. “I didn’t want to crap in my helmet,” he related, “so I decided I’d crawl outside at night.” As he wore two pair of long johns beneath his wool pants, “it was a real chore getting down to the point where I could do my duty. As I was doing my duty I heard some noises behind me.  I thought they were Germans. I jumped into the hole without pulling my drawers up. That really startled my foxhole buddy. I had crapped in the first pair of drawers, so I had to stand there in the middle of the foxhole and cut it out.  This wasn’t easy, because I had to do the cutting with my bayonet.” Shelling made foxhole living worse. Mortars and artillery could come in at any time. The Germans would watch the GIs take up a position at the end of a day, mark it on their maps, and shell it at night. Pvt. Arnold “Ben” Parish of the 2nd Infantry Division remembered a night during the Bulge when he and a buddy had dug a hole long and wide enough to accommodate both men, but only about eight inches deep. As they worked on it, shelling began. “It was raining shells and they were exploding all around our hole. The air was full of shrapnel and spent pieces were hitting us as we laid on our backs with our helmets over our faces. The noise was unbearable and the ground was shaking and we were shaking from fright and cold. We didn’t dare raise our heads. It would have been impossible to survive outside of the hole.”

Cries of “Medic!” Tree limbs hurtling through the air. The smell of powder. The bangs and flashes and booms and screams, red-hot bits of metal zooming through the air. The only movement you could make was to press ever closer to the ground. Those who endured such a cataclysm were forever scarred by it, even if untouched by shrapnel.

“We were helpless and all alone and there was nothing we could do, so I prayed to God. . . . The time went by very slow. I tried to keep warm but that wasn’t possible. I thought about my mother and hoped she didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. . . . Maybe this is the end of the world, I thought.” Feelings of helplessness were universal. Cpl. Stanley Kalberer, a college student at the beginning of 1944, was by December a replacement in the 84th Division. During the Bulge he, too, got caught in a shelling and described his experience: “I never felt so alone, frightened, forgotten, abused and degraded.  . . . I truly believed I would never survive, or if I did I would be maimed by the weather or killed by the enemy, or both.”

When men got out of the holes, they looked like slaves coming up from a coal-mine shaft. In February 1945, C Company of the 395th Regiment “was relieved in position by the 69th Division after living in holes in the ground for almost three months,” recalled Pvt. Vernon Swanson, 99th Division. “When we popped out of the ground, some of the green 69th Division troops passing by were convinced that they were relieving an all black infantry battalion.” God-awful though the conditions were, men endured and prevailed. How they did so differed with each individual. But all had a sense of fatalism. Pvt. Ken Webster expressed his feelings and insights in a letter to his mother: “I am living on borrowed time. . . . If I don’t come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It’s not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected.” (“There was no time to mourn the dead,” Capt. John Colby remarked, “even if they were good friends.”)

When his mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this attitude, Webster replied, “Would you prefer for somebody else’s son to die in the mud? .  . . Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy. Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroops. If the country all had your attitude, nobody would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of a country would that be?”

Carwood Lipton was a sergeant in the 101st Airborne on D-Day, a lieutenant with a battlefield commission during the Bulge. By the end of the war he had been involved in many different kinds of combat. Asked to comment on how he managed to cope with the challenges of combat, and insofar as he felt he could to speak for others in his answer, Lipton said, “When men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become calloused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger. Enemy bodies and wounded don’t affect them.

“Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment that it was not them. There is still work to be done, a war to be won, and they think about that.”

According to Lipton, it was only later, when a man got off the front line, that he had time to think about how buddies were killed or wounded, or about the times when he personally was inches from death. Out of the line, far from combat, “death and destruction are no longer inevitable-the war might end, the missions might be canceled.” Such thoughts made men nervous about going back into the line. But, Lipton insisted, once back in it, all doubts and nervousness disappear. “The callousness, the cold-bloodedness, the calmness return.” Fifty years later I remarked to Lipton that in December 1944 the stockade was preferable to a foxhole. He turned on me and snapped, “Come on, Steve. No man would choose disgrace. If the stockade was preferable the stockades would have been full, the foxholes empty, and we would have lost the war.” Just there is the point. In the face of conditions scarcely equaled anywhere for fear, degradation, and misery, the great majority of front-line soldiers in ETO in 1944-45 stayed in the line and did their duty, and prevailed.  There are no unwounded foxhole veterans. Sgt. Ed Stewart of the 84th Division commented decades after the war that he had “never known a combat soldier who did not show a residue of war.” Stewart’s mother told him that he “left Europe but never arrived home.” Sgt. George Thompson said that when he came home the sounds of war came with him. Decades later, “when I’m home by myself, at nighttime, it all comes back. I’ll hear the noise, the shells exploding. I stay awake thinking about it. I guess it comes from being in a foxhole-the long hours of nighttime.”

17 -    The Rhineland Battles

THE GERMAN RETREAT out of the Bulge was slow, stubborn, and costly to the Americans-but to the Germans also. Hitler, always insistent on holding captured ground, refused to consider pulling out of the Bulge and returning to the Siegfried Line, as his generals urged him to do. Instead, he ordered a “hold to the last man” policy in the Ardennes, and an offensive in Alsace with the idea of preventing further American reinforcements from moving north to the Ardennes.  Operation Northwind, starting January 1, hit Lt. Gen. Alexander Patch’s U.S.  Seventh Army. Eventually a total of fifteen U.S. divisions with 250,000 men were involved in the fighting, which took place along a front that ran almost 150 kilometers from Saarbrücken in the north to a point on the west bank of the Rhine south of Strasbourg. This was a natural salient along the bend of the Rhine, so the battle was something of a mirror image of the one going on to the north in the Ardennes.

Behind the salient, the Alsatian Plain stretched westward from the Rhine to the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. It was unsuitable to the defense. The textbook response to the Northwind attack would have been to fall back on the rough country and leave the plain to the Germans. That was what Eisenhower wanted to do, but politics intervened. French leader Charles de Gaulle told the Supreme Commander that if they were cadets at military school he would agree with Eisenhower’s opinion, but as the French leader he absolutely could not accept abandoning Strasbourg, not only for reasons of national pride but also because of the fearful reprisals the Gestapo was sure to take on the citizens of Strasbourg. Eisenhower reluctantly agreed and the order went out to Seventh Army: hold your ground. As a result, bitter battles were waged through January at Wingen, Philippsbourg, Herrlisheim, Rittershoffen, and elsewhere.  Col. Hans von Luck’s 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division had the mission of breaking through the American lines on this northwestern base of the salient, cutting across the eastern foothills of the Vosges, and thus severing the American supply line to Strasbourg. That required, of all things, breaking through the Maginot Line. It ran east-west in this area, following the Rhine River bend. The Maginot Line, built at such great expense, had seen no fighting to speak of in 1940-the Germans went around it-but in January 1945 a part of the line was used for the purpose it had been designed for and showed what a superb fortification it was.

On January 7, Luck approached the line south of Wissembourg, at Rittershoffen.

“Suddenly we could make out the first bunker, which received us with heavy fire.  Our leading men and the accompanying SPV landed in thick minefields; the artillery stepped up its barrage of fire.” The Americans, composed of men from the 79th Infantry Division, the 14th Armored Division, and elements of the 42nd Infantry Division, utilized the firing points, trenches, retractable cannon, and other features of the line to the fullest. They stopped the Germans cold.  Over the next two days the Germans reinforced the attack, with new 88s and some tanks, along with the 25th Panzer Division. They again assaulted the line. At one point they managed to drive the Americans out by getting close enough to throw grenades into the embrasures, but they were immediately driven back by heavy artillery fire.

Still the Germans came on. At times the battle raged inside the bunkers, a nerve-shattering experience made worse by the ear-shattering noise of explosives. Eventually Luck got through. On January 10 he moved his regiment forward for an attack on Rittershoffen, preparatory to assaulting another part of the Maginot Line from the rear (the French defenses were all pointed east), in order to widen the breach. That night he got into the village but was not able to drive the Americans out. They held one end, Luck’s men held the other.  The situation in nearby Hatten village was similar. There then developed a two-week-long battle that Luck, a veteran of Poland, France, Russia, North Africa, and Normandy, characterized as “one of the hardest and most costly battles that ever raged.”

Both sides used their artillery nonstop, firing 10,000 rounds per day. The shelling was a curse to both sides, as the lines were never more than one street apart, and sometimes they were on the same side of the street, occasionally in the same house. Pvt. Pat Reilly of the 79th recalled, “It was a weird battle.  One time you were surrounded, the next you weren’t. Often we took refuge in houses where the Germans were upstairs. We heard them and could see them and vice versa. If they didn’t make a move we left and if we didn’t make a move they left.” Flamethrowers were used to set houses afire. Adding to the horror, the civilian population had hidden when the battle began and now the women, children, and old folks huddled in the cellars. There was no electricity. The pipes had frozen so there was no water. The soldiers, on both sides, did what they could to feed and care for the civilians.