We got into a circular, all-around defensive position. I was underneath a small tree, whose lower branches were about four feet from the ground. We were on full alert. After about half an hour, I had to pee badly. I also had an apple in my pocket, and I was hungry. I had to make an important decision: should I pee first, then eat the apple, or eat the apple and then go take a leak? With long, boring hours ahead of us, we often went through this kind of thought process. The first objective was to keep awake, the second to pass the time.
On one hand, I thought I would enjoy the apple better if I emptied my bladder first. On the other, since I could get killed at any minute, I reasoned I should eat it immediately because I otherwise might never get the chance to enjoy it. Why deprive myself of the pleasure of a good apple? Finally, I got up, crouched with my head between the lower branches, peed as fast as I could, then returned to the prone position.
Within minutes, all hell broke loose. At least three enemy machine guns, rifles, and burp guns opened up on us, and there was also incoming mortar fire. The enemy had evidently laid out an excellent ambush position. What saved us was that the fire was going about three or four feet high. I think some of us tried to get lower by digging a slit trench with our noses. The tree I was under lost all its branches, and the trunk, which was about two inches in diameter, was severed by machine gun fire.
We didn’t do anything for the first few minutes, and they couldn’t maintain that rapid rate of fire indefinitely. When it slacked off, Lieutenant Hamula passed the word to move back and assemble around a farmhouse fifty yards to the rear. We moved back individually, crawling or sometimes in a crouch, timing our movements with momentary lulls in the fire. The decision to assemble around the farmhouse was a good one. It was a recognizable point and provided some cover from the front. We got into a hasty all-around defense as best as we could and awaited further orders. Either Lieutenant Hamula contacted the company CP or his initial orders gave him the authority to withdraw on his own initiative, for we were allowed to withdraw.
Lieutenant Hamula thought the Germans were starting to move in on us. He decided to give them a hell of a lot of fire from our rifles, machine guns and BARs, firing a fixed number of rounds each before we withdrew. He gave this order to me, the squad leader and second in command. I asked him to reconsider, saying that our muzzle flashes would give us away immediately. I suggested we all lob a couple grenades to the front, and then withdraw. It took a little persuasion, but he finally accepted. Cpl J. E. Jones backed me on how to get the hell out of there.
We got everyone into position so we could all sling grenades as far we could throw them. When they detonated, we got up and ran like hell back to the main line, where we reassembled and got back into our fighting positions on the dike. We escaped without any casualties, but it was pretty rough going.
This episode gave me a lot to think about. The enemy wasn’t stupid. We had violated normal tactical principles by going out and coming back from the same outpost area on a regular basis. We should have changed our routine, using different routes and different outposts, as we had been taught. The only thing that saved my life was the decision to pee first and eat my apple second. It was dumb luck and the grace of God.
Finally, after we had spent fifty-some days on or near the front line, the Canadian III Corps relieved us just after midnight on November 12. We got the company and battalion marching to the rear at approximately 1:00 A.M. It was about a sixteen-hour march to our bivouac area at Oss, where we would stay for several days. It was twenty miles, but it felt like fifty. It took us all day until dark or a little bit after to get there. And of course it rained.
Many trucks passed us by as we marched down that long road in the rain toward the rear. I didn’t understand why they hadn’t arranged to truck us. We were not in the best physical condition. Being on the line for so many days, we had not exercised much, and poor diet, long hours, and lack of sleep had taken their toll. But as I watched the trucks pass us by as we marched down that long road toward the rear in the rain, there was one happy thought in my mind: For once, we were going in the right direction.
During those long weeks on the dikes and outpost, I had stared into the blackness night after night, knowing nothing was between me and the enemy. The loneliness and vulnerability of a front-line soldier in a defensive position are almost impossible to describe: there is fatigue, physical discomfort, psychological distress—but above all, you are conscious of being the point of the whole U.S. Army in your theater of operations.
You look to your front, and the only thing that may be there is an outpost or a listening post. You look around to your left, to your right. What do you see? If you’re lucky enough not to be on an outpost or listening post yourself, you see your fellow soldiers on line with you, and they are part of your unit. But you see only those close enough to be in your range of vision. Yet there were 6,500,000 to 8,000,000 people in the Army during World War II.
As I looked into the night, straining my ears for the slightest noise, my mind racing, I began to formulate what I now call the “Wurst Theorem” of combat and combat support: As the linear distance increases between the front-line combat soldier and the rear, the number of military personnel per mile increases exponentially. A simple way of stating the same thing is, the farther back from the front you get, the greater the military strength.
Of course, there is another way of looking at this: this massive military presence is all in support of the front-line soldier. But I’m trying to convey the extraordinary psychological state, the point of view of the combat soldier himself, who lives with death, who eats, sleeps, and shits with it for weeks and months at a time. Never knowing if—or when—it will be your turn, you think about what is behind you, and who can come to your aid. There may be a squad or a platoon of your company. If you are lucky, they will be very close behind waiting to help if you need them. But the front is often so wide that the platoon leader has to employ all three squads on the forward lines.
The next people behind you are your 60mm company mortarmen. They are your buddies; they are part of your company or your platoon and they are in support of you. Behind them is the company CP group. This is where the groups start enlarging. The company commander is there with a limited number of support people, the supply sergeants, the communications sergeants, and so forth.
Behind them you may have your battalion support weapons. You may have a heavier group of 81mm mortars giving you support. They are good people, willing to help you out, but they are still behind you. Behind the heavier mortars you may have your battalion reserve company. If you are fortunate, you take turns rotating this duty. If not, all the companies of the battalion are on line, and no one is in reserve behind you.
Next may be the battalion command group. The numbers are starting to get bigger now; you have your battalion commander, your executive officer, and your four staff officers responsible for the support of the battalion, broken down into various tasks: S-1 is a personnel officer; S-2 is intelligence; S-3 is operations; S-4 is supply. Each member is needed, and if you are lucky, you will end up in one of those positions. Nevertheless, for now they are behind you.
After you leave the battalion area, you may or may not have the regimental reserve. The Army tries to keep one third of the regiment in reserve, but many times, especially in a parachute infantry unit, this is impossible. In Holland, only one battalion was reserved for the whole division. Farther back is the light artillery support, division troops who are very helpful, especially in a regular infantry division. But sometimes a parachute or airborne division does not have them because their weapons were scattered on the drop and only one or two guns are available.
Next is your division headquarters. There are a hell of a lot of people here, which is about as far back as the regular infantry gets. To a front-line infantryman, they are as distant as New York City is from San Francisco. Around and behind the division headquarters are thousands of support troops—supply, maintenance, a
mmunition, you name it. Maybe you have your medium artillery there. They are good people. They shoot. They help you out, but not all the time, because other outfits on the line may have priority of fire.
Next we go to corps headquarters. These are not as large as division headquarters, for they are only responsible for operational control. Going back from there to army headquarters, where you encounter a whole logistical command, next is an Army Group that directs a number of field armies. This is getting back to the whole heavy mix: the logistical areas, quartermasters, engineers, military police, military government.
From there, your mind takes it one step farther back to SHAEF—thirty, forty, or fifty miles behind the front lines. In addition to Eisenhower’s headquarters, logistical support people set up in places like Paris or Brussels. There are good reasons for this: transportation hubs are at these sites. But as a combat solider, when you finally pull a three-day pass to such cities, which are very few and far between, the massive military presence exceeds your wildest expectations. Walking in Paris, you become overwhelmed with the number of Army people in the streets. On the front-line with no one out in front of you, maybe a squad to your left and to your right that you can see, the sights are a hell of lot different from what you see back in Paris.
Going one step farther, you hop back to England and then to the United States. Now you are getting into masses of warm bodies. They are doing a lot of jobs that may be necessary for the war effort and probably are, but they do not go under-staffed or under-strength for days, weeks, or months at a time.
The 505 was supposed to be in combat for less than two weeks in Holland. According to all the guidelines for specialized forces, we should have been relieved, at the latest, after our eleven-day stint in perimeter positions around Nijmegen. But during the entire mission, we were assigned to the British Second Army. From Montgomery on down, commanders were reluctant to give up our services. And so we remained, guarding the dikes and patrolling for a long, miserable month as our casualties mounted.
After finally being relieved, we stayed in the bivouac area for three days. We had minimum security and got the best sleep we could, given the horrible weather. Then we loaded onto trucks. We camped one night in Belgium before we arrived on November 17 at Camp Suippes, France, near Reims. The British had given us a double ration of rum as a parting gift at Oss, but all of us were more than ready for champagne.
Chapter 24
The Ardennes Campaign: From Camp Suippes, France, to Trois Ponts, Belgium
At Camp Suippes we were billeted in French Army barracks dating back to World War I. Other than Quonset huts in Northern Ireland, this was the first time our quarters had had a real roof since we’d left the States in April 1943. The barracks had very high ceilings, which made them hard to heat—for what heat there was, and there wasn’t much. The battalion mess section cooked a garrison ration, the first we enjoyed since we had left Camp Quorn. Reims and Soissons had seen terrible trench warfare in W.W.I, and the countryside still bore the scars. It was even possible to pick up relics in the surrounding fields.
As soon as we got some money in our pockets we put in for three-day passes to Paris. I went with J.E. Jones and had a pretty good time, from what I can remember of it. We also went into Reims on afternoon or all-day passes, with a curfew of 10:00 or 11:00 P.M. Here I got my lifetime fill of champagne, which we downed in place of our usual beer.
From mid November to mid December 1944, we didn’t do much training. There were no immediate airborne missions in the works and life was pretty routine. We were way back from the front, in theater reserve for the European Theater of Operations. With the exception of England, we were as far back as you could get and still be in a theater of operation. As far as we knew, we were there for the winter.
It was at Reims that I first heard the word “rotation.” The big, generous rotation policy the Army started up was no rotation policy at all—it provided thirty days leave or TDY for selected personnel. In the entire 2d Battalion, 505, the quota was only two men. How the hell can you select two people from a battalion of more than five hundred soldiers? Finally, Company F got a quota of one man for the entire company. In the end, two soldiers had to draw straws because the company commander was at a loss to decide between them. The draw of the straw truly could mean whether you lived or died. We had been overseas for nineteen months straight, and there still were only two ways to get out of combat—a million-dollar wound that sent you home an invalid, or the grave.
After fifty-some days on the line, everyone’s nerves were on edge, and we sometimes had trouble sleeping because of the schedule we had had to keep for so long on the front. Usually a couple of bottles of champagne would help me sleep better, but like just about everyone else, I was in a nervous, edgy mood. One day I was in the NCO room with my buddy Francisco and a couple other men. I’d piled my clothes on a chair in front of me, and was changing uniforms. My back was to Francisco, who could never resist a joke. I’d just leaned over to slip on a clean pair of shorts, when he reached over and pulled some hairs on my private parts. Just that quick, I grabbed the chair, swung it over my head, and swirled around. It was sheer reflex. That chair was halfway down on Francisco’s skull before I caught myself. I stopped just short of clubbing one of my closest friends to death.
During our stay at Camp Suippes, I got detailed on city patrol or CP duty. The better part of the 82d and the 101st Airborne divisions were billeted in the area with numerous black service units—a mixture that always led to problems in a segregated army. It was an absolute necessity for airborne units to have their own soldiers in town to keep a lid on things. Otherwise, fighting, drunkenness, and a whole lot of trouble that combat soldiers get into behind the lines when they’ve had a lot to drink would get out of hand. We weren’t armed; we wore a side arms belt designating we were on duty and an armband with the letters CP on it. Both airborne divisions also had their own military police companies. We had our hands full, as did the regular MP units. One night, I had to pull a couple officers from the 101st out of a very wild house of prostitution. They were so drunk that they resisted our efforts to get them on a truck and back to their camp, so we were forced to arrest and physically drag them out of the brothel and into our detention center at Reims. We locked them up, waiting for them to sober up so they could report back to their unit.
We couldn’t drink on CP duty, a problem we solved by reserving a café or tavern, and going after curfew when we had cleared the town. That night, we got back to the billets from the tavern well after midnight. I had just fallen asleep when I was suddenly awakened by the CQ, or charge of quarters. He and the first sergeant were shaking us out of our bunks, yelling “Everyone up!” I was sure this did not pertain to me, because those of us on CP duty were excused until the next day. So when the CQ grabbed my shoulder, I tried to shake him off, saying I’d been on CP and had just gotten into bed.
This was not a practice alert, but a real one. It was 2:00 A.M. on December 18—and the first time any of us had heard of the Ardennes, later known as the Battle of the Bulge. I started that battle with a very big champagne hangover.
Our unit had a tough time getting ready to go back on the line. When we pulled back to Reims, the Army was in no big hurry to get us refitted to go back into battle or on an airborne mission. We had turned in just about all of our crew-served weapons for ordnance checks and third- or fourth-echelon maintenance, and there were practically no ammunition or rations on hand. Nor did we have any winter clothing to speak of, a problem that would take on terrible proportions once we got to the Ardennes.
The Army had to draw down hard on some of the rear units to provide winter combat gear for the front-line troops. Luckily, after Normandy, the 505 had exchanged the old lightweight jumpsuits for heavier M-43 combat suits. Without the newer and warmer suits, we would certainly have frozen to death in the Ardennes. All we had for protection was our field jackets, and we did not even have the liners for these. We also lacked protecti
on for our jump boots, which were some of the coldest footwear you could ever find. The drawing of ammunition and combat rations all had to be accomplished very rapidly. One day’s worth of K and D rations was all we had. We literally went into the Ardennes with nothing much to eat but candy bars.
We also quickly had to get our men out of the hospitals, aid stations, and guardhouse. This may have saved the careers of the two officers from the 101st we had pulled out of the whorehouse that night, provided, that is, they lived through Bastogne. I heard arrest reports were “lost” when the divisions moved to the Bulge. After all this hectic preparation, we were loaded onto vehicles we called “cattle trucks,” which offered no protection from the weather. We moved out at 10:00 A.M., December 18, 1944. As usual, we didn’t know what we were heading into. If we had had a better idea of the situation, we would have had a lot more security out on the road march. No one was even riding shotgun ahead of the division columns.
We could have been in for a big surprise even before we climbed off the trucks. A lag of two days had occurred between the break out of the battle on December 16 and the time the 82d and 101st divisions moved out of theater reserve. Hitler had launched an unexpected offensive through Belgium to retake Antwerp, using his new Sixth Panzer Army and the reconstituted Fifth Panzer and Seventh and Fifteenth armies. Many gallant actions fought in the Ardennes are now legendary, as are the freezing weather and the rugged terrain that created some of the most horrendous battle conditions in the ETO. The dramatic story of the 101st, the “Battling Bastards of Bastogne,” who repulsed German attacks for several days even when completely surrounded, is particularly famous. But it was the immovable defense on the northern shoulder of the Bulge and the decisive stand at St. Vith, where the 2d, 99th, 1st, and 9th Infantry divisions held firm, that halted the Germans in their primary objective. It was to this northern arena that the 82d Airborne was sent.
Descending from the Clouds Page 24
