I don’t know why we were put in this position. Maybe it was an economy-of-force move to try to cover maximum territory with minimum troops. No one ever came out to inspect our positions. We were left to ourselves, and if we were attacked we would be on our own. Our only option would be to stay and fight, because once we got out of our foxholes there was little cover for withdrawal.
I asked for protective artillery fire at and around our roadblock, and finally got someone to listen to me. I was told, “You adjust the fire,” so I became the forward observer. This was 105mm howitzer stuff, glider field artillery or British field artillery. We adjusted with one gun, which was normal procedure. After it obtained hits on target, the other howitzers could lay their guns on the same area.
They gave me on-call, close defensive fires and I called the fire in as close as I could without risking casualties. I knew we would have to have a lot of close-in fires if we were to survive a determined enemy attack. Before I adjusted the fire, I hollered: “Everyone deep down in your holes.” They fired a round and I adjusted, saying “drop fifty” to pull it back in. I think I got most of the artillery barrages or pre-planned fires within seventy-five yards of our holes, which is very close. The mortar fire was a little bit closer.
I felt a lot better when we had pre-planned concentrations. We numbered them, so all we had to do in an attack was call for barrage “one” or “two.” We didn’t have many fire-fights; it was a “you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you” situation. That’s the way it went for a couple days.
We had a fellow called Hubert Pack in my squad, a very good combat soldier from Tennessee. After a few days in the foxhole, he got bored. In fact, we were all getting a bit bored. Pack had figured out a covered approach to one of the houses that contained a German machine gun, so he approached me with an idea. He wanted to crawl out around four hundred yards to our left front, get within range of the house, and take it under fire with our 2.36 inch rocket launcher. I wouldn’t have ordered anyone to do this, but since it was Pack’s idea, I approved it.
Pack got together a two-man rocket launcher team, and one other man. The four of them crawled out, finding cover until within good rocket-launcher range of the house. In order to explode, the rockets had to hit their targets at a 0-degree angle, or awfully close to it. I could see Pack and his team very clearly. They fired the first rocket at seventy-five to a hundred yards from the house. It bounced off the wall and never did explode, but the second one went right through a window.
It was like hitting a beehive with a stick. It burst alive instantly, shooting out a great deal of fire from the house and the positions around it. We also received artillery and mortar fire. Luckily, the Germans did not pick up Pack and his group. They started working their way back under fire, and the only way we saved them was by telling the FO from the 81mm mortar platoon to fire smoke rounds. They dropped dozens of smoke rounds between us and the house, as close to the group as possible and in front of the enemy position. The wind was right; Pack and his men made it back without casualties. After that, I don’t think we got bored much. I said, “No more of this crap! It’s live and let live as long as we’re out here in this exposed position.”
It seemed like we were on the roadblocks forever, but it probably was only ten days before we were relieved. We got a few days rest in company support or battalion reserve, but we were still well within artillery or mortar range. I learned Francisco had been ordered to lead an attack on the houses near his front. He got close, but was forced to withdraw when the Germans counterattacked and his group suffered casualties. One of these was the rocket-launcher man, a young private named Percy Altman, who was killed.
The reserve area was in a lower position than the surrounding terrain, and had many trees. We received heavy mortar fire, and I’ll always remember the incoming sound—swhoosh! swhoosh! I called this “whispering death.” There was very little time to take cover, much less than when an artillery round came in. We dug in deeply, but were still endangered by mortar rounds that hit trees. This produced very effective air bursts that could rain down on us regardless of the depth of our slit trenches. We could not go into the cellars and wait out the attack because they were already packed with headquarters personnel from platoon on up. The only way to protect ourselves against the air bursts was to have a substantial cover over our slit trenches. We stripped the houses in the vicinity of every door, table or other material that could support a layer of dirt and be used for covering.
We next moved into a defensive position on a dike. I believe this was still south or southeast of Nijmegen proper. The left flank was on the river. Another company was defending from the river to the west-southwest, and Company F tied in. The 3d Platoon was the right flank of Company F’s defensive position, and our right flank was open. This was a bad position. We had a very large area to cover. Rather than trying to cover it all, we just wrapped the right flank around a little to the right rear and learned to live with it.
Most of our fighting positions were dug in on the dike near the top or the rear, so we could fire over the top of it. We tried to construct two-man foxholes lower down on the friendly side, and dugouts to give us overhead protection. These were just wide enough for two soldiers in the prone or sitting position, and provided overhead cover from the weather and artillery and mortar fragments. They were very primitive, although they were bigger than our two-man foxholes.
From time to time, we rotated for a few days with other 505 units, moving from the dikes to evacuated houses on our left rear. These were closer to Nijmegen and safer than positions on the dike. They were still within mortar and artillery range, but it gave us the opportunity to get out of the weather and let up on the rigid security we had to keep on the dikes.
Generally, we rotated when we had been up on the dike for a week or a little longer. We were always happy to get into a civilian home and out of the weather. Our only duty was to provide local security around the houses we were occupying, so we could relax a little and keep warm and dry after having maintained a twenty-four-hour, seven-day week. We still were never very far from the front: from our comfortable beds, we could look out the window and see German territory across the river.
We observed quite a distance into enemy territory from the dikes. We saw manufacturing complexes with high smokestacks. We had been taking accurate artillery fire, and someone finally realized the enemy was using the smokestacks for observation posts. Eventually, British artillery got rid of them. Instead of using a forward observer, they moved some guns right up and fired over the barrel; they made a direct lay on the stacks and knocked them down. They tried to start as low on the stack as they could so they wouldn’t have to waste shells, but they had to take most of them off in two or three pieces, working their way down. This was quite a sight. After that, enemy artillery fire was much less accurate.
Once we had been on the dikes for some time without much action, we had to be on guard against becoming careless. The more careless we got, the more the NCOs and the officers had to enforce noise and light discipline and make sure people kept awake on watch. We had to keep at least on 50 percent alert at all times. We were short of men, so it became pretty monotonous and tiring, especially at night. We also got orders to provide work details in the rear areas to establish a second line of defense. This is the first time we had ever been in a defensive sector long enough to prepare dug-in positions to our rear. Higher headquarters as well as the front-line units were nervous about the thinness of our front, and decided we needed to prepare fallback positions in case we had to withdraw.
Throughout this entire period, I cannot remember our newly appointed company commander ever inspecting our positions. Some of us lost respect for him. He had a company CP set up behind the front in a nice, warm farmhouse, which I thought was too far back. The platoons were on line in all kinds of weather, and we could have stood some morale-building visits by senior officers.
The Army supplemented our defenses by giving us
a water-cooled .30-caliber medium machine gun. This was the gun I grew up with in the 112th, and I thought I knew quite a bit about it. After a few more days on the line, we got a little bored again. They had pounded this indirect-fire business with the .30-caliber into my head during peacetime, so I decided to try it out. We removed the gun from a direct-fire position and placed it in a defilade, or hidden position, behind the dike.
I made some calculations and figured out how to fire on the Germans and fool them about where it was coming from. So we fired off a couple of 250-round belts of ammunition. Things started heating up right away; we instantly got return mortar, artillery, and small arms fire at our front. Then the Germans dropped a few artillery rounds around the company CP. This is what really stopped the thing. In no time at all, someone got on the horn from the company CP, chewed us out for firing, and ordered us to stop. This ended my experiment in indirect fire with the water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun.
During this period, Colonel Vandervoort had members of the 2d Battalion execute a kind of combat patrol modeled after the raiding party or trench raid of World War I. The objective was to capture enemy soldiers to learn about the enemy’s identity and strength. An objective area would be selected and the patrol members would be brought forward to study the enemy terrain from the closest front-line position. Then they planned a route over and back. All the members took part in the planning and knew the terrain, the routes, and the enemy situation. Next, all supporting weapons—artillery, mortars, and in some cases machine guns—were zeroed in on the objective area, but in such a way that the enemy was not alerted to its importance.
At the stipulated time, always after dark, the patrol would slip out and get as close to the objective area as possible without placing itself in danger of supporting weapons. All supporting weapons would then open up, fire for a fixed period, then stop at a precise time. The patrol would rush in right after the fire lifted, grab a couple of the enemy if any were still alive, and hightail it back to the friendly lines.
In a static defensive position, it’s unusual to take many prisoners unless the raid or patrol actions on the enemy position are very extensive. The raids were successful, though. The first two or three grabbed their POWs and got back before the Germans knew what hit them. Then the Germans learned the trick and took counteraction. We stopped the raids after the third or fourth one.
After that, the word was passed down that anyone who took a POW would get a three-day pass to Brussels, and we heard some pretty wild stories about people putting themselves in harm’s way. In one case, a couple of troopers from the 504 ran out of their position in broad daylight, grabbed a German, and got him back before the enemy reacted. No one in my squad, including myself, was quite that eager for a three-day pass to Brussels.
There was a lot of looting of civilian property in Holland. We heard rumors of grand-scale looting, but not by front-line troops, who were already heavily loaded with equipment. While we were fighting at one end of the town, British officers were busy setting up their Officers’ Club on the other end, and they made no bones about collecting expensive furniture and decorations. I actually saw British armor going down the road with overstuffed chairs on them, mounted so they wouldn’t get in the way of the turret. Furniture and other civilian items were roped and tied down onto the decks.
Eisenhower issued special orders to both our divisions stating that any officer could require a bill of sale for any civilian item in our possession. If we had no bill of sale, we would be subject to court-martial and severe punishment. Like rape, looting carried a maximum penalty of death in the Articles of War that governed military conduct during World War II and the period immediately following. We used to laugh and make up all kinds of possible offenses mocking the wording of the Articles, such as, “Throwing a cigarette butt on the ground instead of field-stripping it: punishable by death,” or “Failure to salute an officer: punishable by death!” The official definition of rape as “any penetration, no matter how small,” was the subject of many jokes.
Nevertheless, the warning about looting was repeated so many times that it convinced us Eisenhower was not kidding, and we started throwing away a lot of our civilian souvenirs. Because the higher brass never got down to the front lines, the junior officers enforced the order, but instead of making a big deal of it, they just told us to get rid of the stuff and not collect any more without a bill of sale.
And so we took the order against looting to heart—except when it came to getting something to eat. Mostly we ate British 10&1 rations, but we also always managed to acquire some chickens or rabbits somehow. Then one day, a cow stepped on one of our antitank mines, resulting in instant shredded beef. We soon realized that to have fresh beef legally, all we had to do was challenge a cow after dark as it approached our position. When the cow did not answer, we shot it.
One day Krueger decided to put on a full-fledged, three-course dinner for the squad, having met a cow that couldn’t learn the countersign. We got a British half-track and a rope to drag the carcass to a tree and we had fresh meat for a couple days. Since we had no refrigeration, we distributed it around to make sure it didn’t go to waste.
Krueger worked pretty hard at our dinner. He insisted on having fresh baked bread or biscuits to go with the beef. We went into a store near the civilian area, but we couldn’t read Dutch. We came across packages of white powder that Krueger figured must be flour, so he baked us up some biscuits to go with his nice dinner. As it turned out, the bags were full of plaster of Paris. Those biscuits were so rock hard we probably could have used them as weapons.
But Krueger tried his best, and we had a real nice dinner that night in spite of the biscuits. We had candles on the table, and somehow we’d gotten a ration of beer. It was drawn out of a huge barrel, and we had to find a container big enough to hold the entire squad’s ration. We sent a couple of men off with a washtub, and they came back with it full of beer. The tub was sitting in the kitchen during dinner, and we supplemented the beer with wine and brandy.
We still had W.A. Jones, our Texan, in the squad; and our BAR man, John Corti, a Jewish fellow from New Jersey, had rejoined us after recuperating from the wound he’d gotten at St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte. After those two got to drinking, they got into a knock-down, drag-out fight. One of them stepped into the washtub and knocked the beer over. What a crying shame! A whole tub of beer KIA! But we got Corti and Jones settled down, and there were no hard feelings when everyone sobered up.
During this time they tried to rotate a few men back to Nijmegen, which was nearby, for showers and a change of clothing. The lucky chosen were really clean, and this helped boost morale. On the front line we had a lot of water, but the weather was so brisk it was difficult to wash. In the houses in the so-called rear area, we managed to improvise sponge baths in our helmets or large civilian containers. We had the relative luxury of emptying the water in our helmet whenever it got dirty, and filling it up again as often as we liked.
One of the most miserable nights I ever experienced occurred after we had been off duty for two or three days, and were moving back to the front line on the dike. It was stormy and wet, with freezing rain and winds of around fifty miles per hour. We had to brace ourselves and lean into it; otherwise, it would have blown us over. After marching for three or four miles we were all soaking wet and freezing. Our dugouts were wet, and the foxholes were half filled with water. Before we could use them, we had to empty the damn water out with our helmets.
Sometime after the fight in Hunner Park, the 3d Platoon of Company F got a new platoon leader, Lt John Hamula. He knew his business but lacked combat experience. He was a good platoon leader and a good officer, and was usually willing to listen to his experienced NCOs. After we had been on the dike for a few days, he came to check the machine gun’s field of fire and the final protective line. This requires grazing fire, meaning fire not higher than six feet, or the height of a man, out to seven hundred yards.
I said I didn’
t think we could fire a very good final protective line from up on the dike, where the gun was mounted four or five feet above the field in front of us. Since I had cut my teeth on machine guns, I thought I knew what I was talking about. All he said was, “I don’t think the dike is that high. Sight level on it, and we’ll check it out.” Before I could stop him, he jumped out of the hole and down in front of the dike, and started walking the protective line in plain view of everyone—Americans and Germans alike. He started across the marshy area to our front, hollering back, “Have you got me in your sights yet?” or words to that effect. I quickly said: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come back in, Lieutenant. Yeah, you’re right.” He got back into position without getting shot, but he was very lucky not to get riddled with bullets. I knew we still couldn’t shoot grazing fire, but he was bound and determined to prove we could.
While we were manning the dike, the duty of establishing a strong combat outpost was rotated by squads within the company, with each squad taking its turn. The combat outpost force consisted of a reinforced rifle squad of about fifteen men, located about three hundred and fifty yards out from Company F’s left-flank dike position. My platoon or squad position was on the right flank. There was a farmhouse with outbuildings, trees, and other concealment in the general area of the outpost. The duties of our outpost force were to move out at first dark, go into position at 100 percent alert, listen, observe, and repel enemy attacks or patrol operations. We returned to the dike before daylight. The whole operation was tricky. We didn’t know the exact enemy position, but we knew the outpost was close to it. We also knew we could be cut off from our dike position if a strong enemy force moved in between the dike and the outpost.
My squad, reinforced by a few other men from the 3d Platoon, finally drew this duty. Lieutenant Hamula was the outpost commander. The best approach to the outpost area was to the left flank of Company F, but we still had to go across a long open area, crawling on our stomachs before we gained concealment. We then went into a low crouch and moved to the objective area. It was very cold that night, and the grass was wet from recent rain. By the time we had crawled to the outpost, we were cold, wet, and miserable. The night was quiet, and we got into position without enemy action. We were too close to the enemy to dig in, because digging noises would have pinpointed our position. Even if we had been allowed to sleep, a single snore would have given our position away—we were that close to the enemy.
Descending from the Clouds Page 23
