We Who Are Alive and Remain (23 page)

A lot of the struggle in Bastogne was trying to keep your feet dry and warm. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day exercise. If you weren’t vigilant you had trench foot within hours. I was a bit lucky because I had been previously issued galoshes, rubber overshoes, with clips. They weren’t perfect. Your feet would sweat in them because they were enclosed, and get wet from the inside out. But they did keep the snow off and keep your feet from being soaked from the outside in. I never wore the burlap bags a lot of guys put on their feet.

If you changed your socks three to four times a day, you could keep your feet pretty dry. You dried your socks with body heat by putting them in your helmet or wrapping them around your waist. I had six to eight pairs of socks. I kept them with me all the time and never put them back in my personal bag. You wouldn’t wash them—hell, no; you just dried them. It was hard to get water because you had to melt snow to get it, and fires were too dangerous. You couldn’t even keep water in your canteen at night because it froze. One of the things I learned back at the Blue Ridge [in training] was to always have a needle and thread with me to repair gloves. That proved handy at Bastogne because your gloves stuck to the rifle barrels and ripped because of the cold.

I was wounded when an artillery round landed next to me. Both my legs were broken. I spent three months in skeletal traction. They drill a hole right through your knee, put a wire through all the bones, then put a U-shaped brace over that. At the end of that brace they hook up a wire. That goes up over the end of the bed and put weights on it to keep your legs set straight. Talk about painful. You’ve got to realize that by now all of us have tremendous leg muscles. We’ve been running, hiking, climbing, exercising—it takes a lot of weight to overcome your thigh muscles so the bones can set properly. If you ever want to interrogate an enemy soldier, just put him in skeletal traction. About the third day he’ll tell you anything you want.

They used maggots on my legs to eat away the dead flesh. I guessed it worked, because I kept my legs. At one point they had talked about amputating them. Altogether, I was in the hospital for eighteen months—three months in traction, then another six months in bed, then months of rehabilitation after that. It took a long time before I could set a foot on the floor. The first day I did, I stood up. The next day after that I walked across the damn hospital floor on a pair of rolling parallel bars. Ten days later I was out on a weekend pass. They fitted me for a set of braces that I wore for about three months after that. I worked at rehab eight hours a day until I finally healed.

I rejoined the company in Mourmelon, right before Bastogne. Driving up to Bastogne, I thought, “Well, this is the way to go—on trucks—no jumping this time.” I had no idea what was ahead. I was put with regimental headquarters and stationed on the edge of Bastogne across the paved area from McAuliffe’s headquarters.

To explain our position as medics a bit more—we really didn’t receive much medical training. It was almost the same training I had received back when I was a Boy Scout. When we were out in the field or in combat and a guy got hurt, we just used our heads and tried to figure out how to best help him. One time a guy was in a tree using Composition 4 [explosives]. It went off. I rode to the hospital with him with my hand on his chest to keep him from sucking air. What else could I do? You really didn’t know a lot of the time. You had your equipment—your morphine, your penicillin, your bandages—but that was it.

For some time in Bastogne a guy tried to install a communications line on a wall. A shell came in; he got knocked off the wall but went right back on the wall. Another shell came in and knocked him off the wall again. He went right back. That happened several times—I don’t know if he ever got the line installed.

Another time I was in a room and bent down to tie my shoe. A German artillery shell blasted right into the room, flew over my head, and landed close by. It was a dud. I never could explain that one. In fact, there were plenty of things in combat I could never explain. Once I saw a guy get hit in the head with a mortar shell. It bounced off him and exploded. Bang, he went down, stunned but not a scratch on him. Another guy was shot through the forehead. The bullet traveled up and around his scalp, over his hairline, and out the back side of his head. He had a concussion but was otherwise fine.

No matter how crazy it got I always tried to keep a sense of humor. In Bastogne we had captured a German kid. He was about seventeen and spoke some English. One day I was joking around with him and said, “Hey, why don’t we change uniforms. Think about it: if I wear your German uniform they’ll send me to the States as a captive—then I’ll be home. If you wear my American uniform, we’re going to go to Germany, you know that, then you’ll be home.”

He thought about it for a moment and smiled. “Ah, the hell with you,” he said. “I want to go to America. You go to Germany.”

They backed up the trucks and said, “Get in.” They drove us to Bastogne and dropped us off at the crossroads.

We could hear the rumble of heavy artillery, big explosions, and small-weapons fire as we advanced into the woods. We dug foxholes as fast as we could. Herb Suerth and I ended up digging and sharing one foxhole together. We were together until Herb got hit by shelling. I was out on patrol at the time and didn’t know it until I got back. Some of my other good buddies were Don King and Babe Hendricks. I didn’t spend much time in a foxhole, just during the shelling.

I remembered what my father had said once about how to keep your feet warm in cold weather: “Keep your feet dry and your footwear loose.” So I found a rubber boot on a German foot sticking out of the snow one day. It was that old-fashioned kind of boot that had metal snaps all the way up. I dug around until I found the other. I cut the bottom of my wool coat off, took my leather boots off, and wrapped my feet in strips of wool from my coat. I put on those rubber boots and had no trouble with my feet being wet or cold from then on.

Bastogne was hell. In places the shelling was so intense that there were no more trees, only tall stumps with jagged tops. Whenever the shelling stopped we had to be ready to shoot because German soldiers would attack on the ground under the shelling. We watched German tanks roll in behind heavy shelling—the tanks hovered over foxholes and pivoted back and forth, crushing the bodies of screaming men—you thought you would lose your mind. Other times the enemy captured, tied to a tree, and tortured a man out on patrol, trying to get someone to come out and help him so they could spot and kill the unit. We knew there was no surrendering. It was kill until you are killed.

One day we were fighting an advancement of German soldiers that had come in behind their tanks. They were dressed in white outfits that camouflaged them in the snow. All we could see was moving snowbanks coming toward us, except for what appeared as black sticks moving toward us, too. They were the Germans crawling on their bellies with white sheets on and their rifles in front of them across their elbows. I shot into them steadily with my Thompson submachine gun. We were all doing the same when I noticed that the foxhole to the right of me had stopped firing. I hollered over to them, “What’s wrong?” I wondered if they were out of ammo. No one answered. I kept firing until I was out of ammo, then jumped into the foxhole and found a soldier slumped over his machine gun. I pulled him away from it and saw that he had been shot in the neck clear through to the back. I was sure he was dead. I hollered “Medic!,” grabbed his machine gun and ammo, and jumped back into my own foxhole. I figured that a German had a fix on him and would keep shooting in that direction. The soldier who was shot got help from a medic and was taken back to England for medical care. He was later sent back to the States and lived a long life. I didn’t know that he had survived until I was reading Ambrose’s book. I was happy to know that I had taken part in saving a man’s life.

I was injured in Bastogne but not enough to ever be pulled out of combat for medical help. One day, during a confrontation in the woods, I was crawling on my belly like a frog, my rifle cradled over my elbows in front of me. Suddenly I felt a very warm spot on my butt. Someone hollered, “You’re on fire.” I looked to see my back pocket on fire and felt my flesh burning. A medic crawled over and pulled a large chunk of burning metal out of me, cut the cloth away, and poured sulfa on my butt. The fire from the shrapnel that had landed and embedded in me was out, so I just kept crawling. Later, I was awarded a Purple Heart for that injury—and I do have a chunk of my butt missing to this day. Other than the shrapnel in my legs from a lot of other shelling that I was in, I was never injured bad enough to be out of combat. I never lost a day on the job.

General McAuliffe got a letter from the German commander telling him to surrender his troops because they had us surrounded. McAuliffe answered with one word: “Nuts.” When the German officers who had delivered the message asked what it meant, Colonel Harper, who had delivered the message to the German officers, said, “It means ‘go to hell.’ ”

We soldiers felt the same way. The Germans had surrounded the wrong outfit.

Blood

On January 13, 1945, word came down to leave Bastogne and go into a defensive position around Foy, a small village six miles northeast of Bastogne. It was all still part of the larger Battle of the Bulge.

We moved toward Foy, walking through the woods. We started at daybreak and moved out of our old positions, getting ready to attack the town. Everything was covered with snow. Just at daybreak the platoon ahead of us came across a big log-covered bunker with somebody undoubtedly sleeping in there. They threw a couple grenades in. As this was happening I looked to my left and saw something move about twenty-five to thirty feet away. I realized it was a German in a foxhole covered with a blanket. I did a dumb thing. I had my tommy gun, and still moving forward, I pumped about three rounds into him and finished him off. What I should have done was take him prisoner and ship him back to Headquarters for interrogation. It would have been nice to find out what we were up against.

We moved on through the area. It was very quiet as morning grew to afternoon. I walked over to the side to our right flank to see what was going on there and met up with some troopers from another company. As I stood there talking to them, a couple shots rang out, just random. One caught me in the leg and I went down; that was the third time I was wounded. They took me back to the aid station and loaded me in an ambulance that evening. In many ways that was the end of my career with Easy Company. A few hours later that night—they call it the night of hell—the Germans really bombarded the company with artillery. That’s when several of the fellows were killed; Herb Suerth was wounded in both legs. I was back in the aid station that night when it all broke loose.

The bullet that hit me had torn into the nerve that went down to my foot. It didn’t sever it completely, but the wound took forever to heal. I spent eleven months in the hospital and rehab. From the aid station they took me back to England, then shipped me back to a hospital in the States. I had one operation in the general hospital in England, then another operation in the States. For a long time I had no feeling in my foot; it was all numb. After a while I could hobble along. In the end, the nerve pretty much healed.

This incident is strange: a guy in the 2nd Platoon, Frank Mellett—he and I didn’t get along real well. We never fought or anything, it was just a conflict of personalities. He was a good soldier and all, but he was a Yankee and I was a Southerner. So it was just a conflict we had.

Easy Company was getting ready to take this little town of Foy. Each night we covered our foxholes with pine boughs. The night before the attack on Foy, it snowed. Early the next morning I crawled out of my foxhole, looked around, and couldn’t see a soul. I was the only person standing. The only thing I could see were mounds, just like I was standing in a cemetery. In a few minutes somebody popped out of one of those mounds just like he was coming up out of a grave. At least I knew then I wasn’t all alone. Then another guy came along and said, “Who was doing that shooting last night, Shifty?”

“I didn’t hear any shooting,” I said, but when he said that it reminded me of a dream I had had during the night. In my dream Frank Mellett was behind a tree and he and I were shooting at each other. I could just about picture where he was.

I had to think about that. I had a little old .62 pistol, and when the guy left, I pulled it out of its holster and looked at it. Rounds were hard to get for those, so I knew exactly how many I had. Sure enough, the pistol had been fired twice during the night. I had no idea what I had shot at. I got to worrying that maybe I had shot Frank Mellett in my sleep. Finally, Frank popped up out of one of those holes. I was tickled to death to see him. But later that day, when we took the town of Foy, Frank Mellett was killed in the attack.

We were told to attack and clear Foy.

Taking Foy, I had some bad thoughts. We were going across a wide-open field. About halfway across the field I started to sweat. The Germans were dug in with their foxholes and tanks. They started firing at us. It was like cutting grass. You could hear the zing and the tang. That’s one of the goddam scariest times I’ve ever had, taking Foy.

Foy is where Lieutenant Norman Dike was relieved of his command. Now, you have to understand Dike. Out of West Point, he was assigned to the regiment. He had never had a combat command, never even been in combat, but for him to get a rank he had to lead a combat company. So battalion sent him to Easy Company. Thank God he wasn’t around very much. Anytime he was around, it was awful. He was shot in the shoulder while taking Foy, near a haystack. That’s when Ron Speirs came running across the field, like you see in the movie. Winters had sent him in to relieve Dike.