Someone tried the door of the closest house and found it securely locked. The next walk leading to the front of a building was even farther forward, in the direction of enemy fire. The thing that saved us was an outside cellar entrance with steps that led down to a locked door. Both squads pancaked into that open cellar way. There wasn’t even space for four or five men, but we managed to get twelve or more packed in almost solid, out of the light and dancing shadows cast by the burning building, which now was only a house or two away.
All firing had stopped when the tank withdrew. It was difficult to know what to do next. I moved out nearly to the front of the burning building to assess the situation and try to find more cover. The next day, we discovered the park was loaded with German troops in dug-in trenches and foxholes. There must have been two hundred pairs of eyes on me. Maybe they had orders to cease fire and see what happened, or maybe they didn’t want to give away their positions, but why those Germans did not shoot, I will never know.
I went forward but saw nothing to my front except some tall trees. Then someone lobbed a grenade at me. I beat a hasty retreat and got back in the entrance way along with all the other packed-in bodies. We had one or two wounded men in there with us. One was DeFoggi, our assistant machine gunner, who later told me Lieutenant Holcomb had dragged him out from behind a tank back at the roadblock. He must have been wounded when the tanks took off and left us.
As we waited in the deepening silence, a terrible scream came from a house across the street. It lasted for thirty seconds, but seemed like it would never stop. Someone must have been bayoneted or knifed in the lower extremities, because no one could have screamed that long if the wound had been to the chest cavity. The sound cut through the silence, annihilating our morale. We never found out who that man was. He could have been German, English, Dutch, or American. Screams have no nationality.
We had been in the cellar way anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour when we heard German voices, very close and loud. Then the Germans started throwing grenades that landed in the street and sidewalks in front of us. The only thing to do was return the favor. As long as we were stuck in the cellar way, this was our only option. Small arms fire would have given our position away, and I guess the same could be said for the Germans.
A pin-pulled grenade remains safe as long as the safety lever is held against the grenade body. When thrown, the safety lever snaps off, arming the grenade, which explodes five seconds later. We were packed so closely there was only enough room for one man to heave the grenades. So we got one out, pulled the pin, then handed it up to Fabis, who was at the front. As soon as he lobbed it out on the street, we handed up another one. I don’t know if he got elected because he was in front or because he had a good pitch.
A brief quiet followed our shower of grenades. We decided to make a break for a house, hoping to get through a doorway and into the back yard, then work our way back to friendly positions to our rear. One or two men went down the street a couple of houses and managed to get through a door. The rest of us followed, passing through the house and out the door to the back. The yards were small and surrounded by fences four to five feet tall. They made hard climbing with our full combat gear. The going was slow as we helped the wounded.
We climbed through several back yards before we stopped for a rest. Here, I discovered to my amazement that a squad member was still holding a pin-pulled grenade! The man had pulled the pin, thrown it away, and was about to hand the grenade up to Fabis when we took off. The whole time we had been going over those fences, he had been holding that grenade in his hand.
I told him to lob it, and pointed to an eight-foot wall separating us from a house facing the other street. But instead of throwing it far over the wall, he just flipped it over the top. Lo and behold, a single strand of wire ran a foot and a half above the solid part of the wall. The damn grenade hit the thing and fell right back into our yard.
When that grenade fell back on top of us, everyone knew what had happened. It was so silent, we heard the safety lever pop the five-second fuse. By the time it exploded, we were huddled in a crouch at the farthest point in the yard. Miraculously, no one was hit. I guess this doesn’t speak much for grenades—they usually do a better job than that one did.
We moved back through the yards until we made contact with elements of Company F. We assembled in a house two or three blocks away from the park, close to our starting point. No sooner had we arrived than Lieutenant Carroll ordered us to go right back up the same damn street to establish an outpost at the roadblock we had encountered.
I didn’t refuse an order, but we sure discussed it. I replied I doubted I could lead, or that my men would follow me that far. We had been on the go for a good number of hours, under very heavy fire during much of it. We were dead beat, we had taken casualties, and we didn’t want to go too far up the street with British tanks still in the vicinity. This led to a compromise that allowed us to move only part way up. We found a building that looked like a school with trenches in the yard, positioned so we could occupy them and still cover most of the street that led up to the park. It was a very tiring time. I never heard anything from Lieutenant Carroll about my reluctance to move back up the street, and the position we occupied allowed us to be just as effective as if we had moved closer to the park.
I don’t remember any outstanding events in the early morning of September 20. It seems to me that we moved one street to our right, facing the bridge, went up that street, made a left turn, and went up another street. We were still taking artillery fire. This was larger than 105mm, and could have been 155mm, and it was coming in at a steady pace.
As we searched for a better approach to our main objective, we found ourselves on a street of commercial stores with big plate glass windows on the front and sides. We heard a large-caliber shell come in, and a bunch of us dived for the farthermost recesses of a storefront. The shell exploded too close for comfort, almost in the center of the street. The entrance we were sheltering in was surrounded by plate glass windows, and all of them shattered. Glass went flying everywhere, but again we experienced a miracle. Eight or even more of us had crowded up in that entrance, but only one man was seriously wounded.
This was Lieutenant Carroll, who was hit by a shell fragment; it was a very painful and serious wound. The splinter broke the main bone running from his knee to his ankle. We gave him a shot of morphine from a first-aid packet. When the medic came up, the lieutenant asked for another shot, but was told he couldn’t have a second right away. The pain was bad, very bad, and the first shot hadn’t taken hold, or wasn’t going to.
We now had a wounded platoon leader on our hands. We couldn’t afford to leave someone with him, and we didn’t want to leave him lying where he could be hit again. Yet if we hid him, it was possible no one would find him. Finally we decided to put him in a house with a cellar window facing the sidewalk. We manhandled him down and placed a big white sheet of something on the sidewalk to indicate a wounded man was under cover in the cellar. I had to use some of my persuasive powers to kill the idea of leaving a second man with the lieutenant. If we left someone with everyone who was hurt, we would lose two men for every one wounded. So we left Lieutenant Carroll in the cellar, and moved forward until we again hit the street to our right that led up to the park.
As we tried to organize our approach, we were able to make a little reconnaissance. I put my machine gun crew in the second story of a building that looked almost directly up the street towards the park. They were to cover us as much as possible as we moved up the street. Both rifle squads of the 3d Platoon were on the right side of the street that led towards the park. A lot of heavy small arms fire began to come in again. Worst of all were the 20mm anti-aircraft guns. We worked our way up and through the houses, and sometimes out on the sidewalks, advancing towards the end of the street to get into assault position.
I don’t recall who was commanding the platoon. We had gone in with two officers, but I think they
both had already been wounded.
We had a hard time moving up the street. We tried to take cover by going through back yards and passing from the windows of one building into another. In this type of fighting, the regular infantry would do what they call “mouse holing,” getting into a house and blowing the wall into the next, continuing down the row instead of going out in the streets. We unfortunately lacked the explosives, and the damn picket fences kept us from sneaking along the house fronts. We had to climb over them, and there was just no good way to do it. The spearheads kept catching us and hanging us up. Finally we managed to work our way up to the house on the right-hand corner, overlooking the park, and take cover. This was at the end of the street, directly opposite the house that had burnt the night before. The fire had died out, but the house was in ruins.
We now were very close to the park. We had to exit the house, go past the picket fences, turn right on a wide street, and there we’d be. When we reached the corner, Captain Rosen appeared; he said we were going to assault the park. I’m not sure about the 2d Platoon, but by now the 1st and 3d were on line at the end of their respective streets. We didn’t question Captain Rosen’s order, but I think we should have. To assault Hunner Park, both we and the 1st Platoon had to come out of our shelter, go fifteen or twenty feet to the sidewalk, move up the street that ran perpendicular to the park, cross the street that ran parallel to the park, and force our way into it.
Captain Rosen led the attack with his Tommy gun, crying “follow me!” I passed the word that the captain was going to lead, and came out of the house at the head of my squad. Most of the troopers followed me out. We got to the street and started into the park under direct small arms, grenade, and machine gun fire at ranges of fifteen to seventy-five yards. We formed a crude line on the run and assaulted across the street. The enemy was well dug in, fighting from foxholes and trenches located between the sidewalk on back to a hundred yards into the park.
Just as we got into the skirmish line, a crucial thing happened. A very big, scared German soldier—I only saw him flash in my mind—leaped up from a foxhole just inside the park. He lifted his hands up over his head as he ran across the sidewalk toward us. There was absolutely no doubt about his intentions. He had his hands up high over his head, very evidently wanting to surrender. But as he leaped up, many men fired on him. In combat you must react instinctively and quickly. This is what we did, and the man was practically a sieve before he hit the ground.
Years later, I wondered why he had waited so long to give himself up. No doubt, if he had attempted to surrender earlier, he would have been shot by his own men. The park was manned by SS troops, die-hard Nazis, some of the toughest the Germans had. Nevertheless, if that one man had only waited to be dug out of his hole and then surrendered, or if he had jumped up and run toward us before we began the assault, the battle might have been less ferocious.
Because this incident occurred in full view of everyone in the park, I believe it resulted in many needless casualties. We took very few German prisoners. SS troops were very determined fighters in any case. We were facing the 9th SS Panzer Division Reconnaissance Battalion. At least five hundred of them were manning the bridge defenses. Where regular German Army troops might have given up, the SS simply would not. But when they saw us shoot that unarmed man, they thought they didn’t have the option to surrender. Our casualties were heavy, but the Germans’ were worse. At the end of the day, only sixty were still standing to be taken as prisoner. Around a hundred more escaped, but the vast majority had been killed or wounded.
I don’t know how many men from either platoon made it across the street on the first assault, but we took many casualties. I got across and into the park. Just before I took cover, I saw Captain Rosen run back down the middle of the street. He passed me going full speed to the rear, holding both his hands over his mouth. He had evidently been shot through the face, and he later died of this wound.
I was just inside the park, near the sidewalk leading around the edge. I dived into a bus stop enclosure with glass on the top half and some other material about halfway up. I took concealment, but there wasn’t much cover. I glanced down the street and saw Germans coming into the park a little beyond the 1st Platoon area. As I attempted to take them under fire, my rifle jammed on me. It absolutely froze.
I knew I couldn’t stay in the enclosure, which was quickly becoming shredded by small arms fire. I crawled out on the sidewalk. Six or eight feet away I saw a hole, dug very nicely and surrounded with fresh earth that the Germans hadn’t had time to carry away. I crawled over to it, dropped down in, and attempted to clear my rifle. No sooner had I got in the hole than a rain of bullets impacted the dirt piled up around it. I looked out and discovered one or two other men from our platoon going back across the street into the houses.
Although the firing never stopped completely, it sometimes slowed down a little. During one of these lulls, I hollered across to the corner house for my squad to cover me, saying I was going to dash across the street. I was closer to a whole lot of Germans than I was to my squad, and if any SS happened to understand English, they would have been alerted to my movements.
I jumped up and ran across the street. Rather than expose myself on the sidewalk, I attempted to vault a picket fence. I didn’t do it very gracefully, but I got over and made it into the corner house we had occupied before the assault. There I immediately cleared my rifle. It was filled with plaster dust and other dirt from the houses we had gone through.
Suddenly, a question dawned on me: “Where the hell is my machine gun?” The crew had failed to displace forward from the house we had placed them in an hour or more before. In the excitement and confusion I’d forgotten it! Captain Rosen had been in a big hurry to assault the park, so he hadn’t given us much time to follow correct troop-leading procedures. Nevertheless, it was standard operating procedure for the machine gun to displace forward and take up a new position whenever its fire was masked by an advancing squad. I got word back to them to displace forward into our house. I was upset, especially as the machine gun should have been put in position before we assaulted the park.
When I got back from the park, I also discovered we had lost a man by the name of Hall, who had joined us at Quorn. He’d been killed near the entrance of the house, and still lay dead on the sidewalk. Neipling ran out, removed Hall’s wristwatch and then dashed back. He assured me he had loaned the watch to Hall the night before, when Hall was next in line for alert status. Neipling considered the watch a valuable personal possession, but I didn’t care how valuable it was. I could neither understand nor accept him exposing himself in plain view for the sake of a damn watch.
I moved into a position outside the house, where a vestibule that stuck out offered some protection from the front, then I exited the vestibule and made a sharp left turn behind it. Quite a ways up, a ledge jutted out about a foot from the wall. I climbed up and had a pretty good view all the way to the far end of the park. It was obvious to see the enemy was bringing in reinforcements.
I got into the best firing position I could and took these men under rapid fire. I had to shoot around the corner of the vestibule, thereby exposing my head and upper torso. I also had to lean to the left from the waist up, a very unnatural, cramped position, while I kept my feet in place, planted on the ledge. The enemy was only visible for a short period of time. I fired rapidly, first as they were exposed, and then to cover the area where they might be hidden. The more I shot, the more of them I saw coming up over the bank.
I soon expended all the ammunition in my cartridge belt. I hollered down to the men in the house to throw some more up, and I continued with my rapid fire. My rifle barrel got so hot that it heated up the forearm and front guard over the barrel. It actually boiled the oil residue out of the wood, and probably some of the cosmoline too. I continued to fire, and got a lot of fire in return. All the while, this stuff was bubbling out of the wooden hand guard.
Lieutenant Holcomb came up
and gave us a short briefing. “Little Joe,” as we liked to call him, had taken command of the company after Captain Rosen was hit. Being a more experienced commander, he didn’t try anything spectacular. We were to undertake a new assault of the park as soon as the entire 1st and 2d Platoons came on line, and Company E had worked into the near edges of the traffic circle. The assault would be coordinated either by radio or timing. At the very least, we knew that when we went into the park the second time, the coordinated force would be larger than the first assault, in which only the 3d Platoon and elements of the 1st had participated.
As we got ready to go for the second attempt, Lieutenant Holcomb calmly walked out on the street and gave the order to assault. I followed him with the survivors of my squad behind me. We came out of the house on the double and got into a rough skirmish line, formed on the run. I glanced to my right and left, and what a sight I saw! A nearly perfect, coordinated attack by two infantry companies on line. Our companies were probably about 90 to 95 strong at the time, so going in we totaled 180 to 190 men. Our alignment was very good, well formed to my right and left, with everyone going in on the double to get into cover in the park. It was a very grand sight to behold.
The enemy’s fire combined with our own was deafening. It was the hottest, heaviest fire I had ever encountered. We took heavy casualties. A 20mm round killed Lieutenant Dodd on this or the first assault. The 1st Platoon medic went over to him, but he was killed in the attempt. Lieutenant Holcomb was seriously wounded, my close friend Fabis was wounded and later died, and many others were fatally hit or wounded before we reached the middle of the park.
The small arms fire was so overwhelming that it momentarily stopped us. It appeared to me that I could reach out and grab the bullets as they flew. I took cover in the prone position behind a very large tree. I fired as fast as I could, and many rounds of enemy fire burrowed into that tree trunk. They were shooting anywhere from six inches to a foot and a half high. I can’t describe the intensity of the fire we were receiving. It’s a miracle anyone lived though this short period. A British tank had moved in shortly after the assault, although I don’t remember any British tanks in the area before we began. We were firing, the tank was firing, and the enemy was firing. It was one huge, deafening racket.
Descending from the Clouds Page 21
