Once we crossed the river, we came into the back yards of some of the houses on the valley road. The backs of these houses faced east. We should have used them as cover, going in the back door and out through the front. Instead, we walked by one of them outside. Just as I was about to turn left at the right front corner, a German to our rear, up on the side of the mountain, let rip with a long burst of machine gun fire. The bullets almost tore the top off a utility pole eight or ten feet to my right front.
We did lose some men on the mountaintop. One of the KIA was a recent replacement. I’m sorry to say I don’t remember his name, he was with us for so little time. Others were killed in Company F, and I later heard the battalion had sent us replacements in the middle of the fight. This was highly unusual, which only indicates just how badly we needed them. Where these replacements went or what happened to them we never learned. They were assigned, sent up, and lost before we ever saw them.
On the evening of December 21, the 307th Airborne Engineers blew up the last remaining bridge over the Salm at Trois Ponts. We holed up for a while along the bottom of the valley in one of the houses with the road in front. The river was forty yards from the back door, and the mountain rose quite sharply from the riverbank. At least two of our wounded were in the house to our right, which was occupied by friendly civilians and another squad from the 3d Platoon. Together, we formed a strong combat outpost.
We were confined indoors during daylight because the Germans on the mountain slope to the east could look down on these houses very clearly. Every time we tried to step out, we got fired on. We attempted to get the wounded out under a Red Cross flag, but the Germans opened up on us. I had my entire squad in the house, although by then we were at reduced strength. We took turns on watch, leaving two men on alert during daylight from good observation points inside. The previous day, the squad next door had driven off a German patrol, which made us even more alert. We were constantly searching the landscape for any signs of movement and looking at suspected enemy positions.
One of our alert positions was in the second-story bedroom in the back of the house, facing east. We had a very good view of the back yard, the terrain along the riverbank, and the side of the mountain where the enemy was in position. This particular bedroom had double windows that swung out like shutters. I took this position and opened the windows, swinging them out very, very slowly. I then pulled the bed as far from the window as possible, leaving just enough room to get behind it and observe all movements to the east. I now could shoot from deep within the room, and the muzzle flashes would be less visible than if I were leaning over the sill or close to the windows. I piled some extra blankets and pillows on the bed, making myself a shooting rest that was every bit as good as the sandbag rests we had used to zero in on the rifle range.
I sat on the floor and rested my rifle on the support on the bed. It was very early in the morning of December 23. We didn’t have any heat, but I draped extra bedding over my shoulders to keep warm. For a combat position, it was very comfortable. At first light I glanced out, and much to my amazement I observed a German two hundred yards up the mountainside. He rose above the ground just like a pop-up and performed one of the longest possible stretches, as if he’d become cramped lying in the hole. This was one of the best open daylight targets I ever had. His whole torso was exposed from the waist up. He was right in line with the open windows, so I could shoot straight through without hitting the glass. Before he completed his stretch, I had him with the first shot. Immediately after he dropped, another man, possibly from a shallower hole, jumped up to help his buddy or to get in his hole. This man went down on my second shot.
I did not see any more Germans there for the remainder of the day. Later on, however, from the same shooting position, I observed a German coming down the mountainside, carrying what appeared to be a large box of our K rations on his shoulder, probably delivering them to his front-line buddies. There was some concealment in his path—bushes, rocks and small trees. The range was about two hundred fifty yards up to my right front. I had to swing my body a little to the left, but I was still shooting through the open window. This man went down on my second shot. To make sure, I emptied my rifle with six more shots. The M1 had an eight-round clip, and we always liked to keep it full. The company saying was, “One round to put him down, and seven to keep him down.”
I’ve spoken of these shootings on very few occasions. They came up only once or twice in all these years, and only after I had been drinking too much. I don’t look with respect on men who shoot off their mouths about shooting other men, but I feel I should relate these events to give an accurate account of my experience and describe the horrible duties required of soldiers in infantry combat and all other warfare.
It’s also true that before these events, we had been told stories of various massacres the German Army had committed. Malmedy, where one hundred and fifteen American POWs were lined up and shot, had just occurred a few days earlier on December 17. Headquarters made sure the news immediately got down to all U.S. troopers. This was to warn us, first, but also to instill further hatred of the enemy. I can tell you, it worked.
I’m not trying to justify shooting these men or any of my other actions. The things I did were legitimate acts of war. But looking back upon it as an old man, I regret the death of any person. I think to myself, “I killed three men just after my twentieth birthday, December 19, 1944.” Happy Birthday and a Merry Christmas.
After dark on December 23, we left the house and put out local security. We had received word that General Gavin had ordered the 2d Battalion, 505, to be relieved by elements of the 504. We had held the defensive perimeter and the Germans had given up on trying to break through the 505’s line. But the 508 and 325 were getting a lot of pressure, and Gavin thought our regiment might be needed to bridge a break in the line farther south.
A battalion aid station jeep drove directly up to the house next door. The vehicle was equipped with a frame so they could lay at least two wounded men on stretchers and evacuate them. We helped load up the wounded after dark. By the time we were able to get them out they were really hurting. We then withdrew from the houses, moving back to the ridge we had previously occupied. From this point, the 2d Battalion, 505, was trucked back to division reserve. Company F went into a wooded bivouac area with minimum security. This was far enough back to give us relief from the 50 percent alert order and maybe allow for some sleep. If, that is, we could sleep in a snowstorm in temperatures well below freezing.
Chapter 25
From the Battle of the Bulge to the Hurtgen Forest, Germany
Our relief at Trois Ponts slightly preceded Montgomery’s order for a general withdrawal of forward elements, the 7th Armored Division and its attached units, from St. Vith on December 24, as he characteristically “tidied up the lines.” Surprisingly, at the same time, Peiper withdrew from Stoumount. Out of gasoline, he abandoned his tanks and other vehicles along the way.
Back in division reserve, Company F tried to rest up and get some sleep. We had our sleeping bags, but they were just GI blankets sewn up with a very light cover over them. They were water-resistant, but not waterproof. It was a hell of a job to get into them and harder still to get out, especially dressed in field jackets and boots. We usually didn’t crawl all the way in unless we were in a relatively safe area. And we never, ever fastened them up if we were near the front.
The weather was very cold, and on December 23 it took a turn for the worse, with heavy snowfall and plummeting temperatures. If we did get into our bags, we often had to crawl out again to stomp around and get the blood circulating. I would awake from a few hours of sleep to find a blanket of snow on my bag. After spending a couple nights in an open field with snow blowing in my face, I often prayed for a nice wooded area to break up the wind. We may have gotten some hot coffee and supplements to our K and C rations, but that was about it.
I had been feeling terrible for three or four days just before Christma
s week, as though I had recurrent malaria. Lieutenant Hamula sent me to the battalion aid station, where the surgeon diagnosed me as a bad case of bronchitis going into pneumonia. I was confined to a litter and evacuated to a collecting station by a quarter-ton ambulance, a jeep that had litter racks mounted on the sides and back.
It was after dark on Christmas Eve when I arrived at the collecting station, a large, barn-like building housing up to seventy-five litter patients. The whole place looked like a scene from hell. The medical personnel were past the point of exhaustion, working by lanterns amidst terrible moaning and groaning. As we were brought in, the staff checked our emergency medical tags and gave us a quick examination, grouping arriving casualties by the severity of their wounds or illnesses, according to the practice of triage. Those with little or no hope of surviving were low priority, while those who had severe wounds but could be saved by an immediate operation were moved to the top of the list.
Horrific pictures of this collecting station remain in my mind to this day. There was little or no heat. People were dying all around me. There were some very badly wounded, and many burn cases from armored outfits where the tanks had caught fire. All of them had bloody clothes. I felt guilty as I lay there, because so many were much worse off than I was. There were also many cases of trench foot, who were maybe as “well off.”
Eventually I was loaded on an ambulance headed for the 102d Evacuation Hospital in Verviers, Belgium. It was a nicely heated building. The care I received all the way back was as good as could possibly be expected under the circumstances.
In Verviers, I was on the receiving end of what the Germans called Vergeltunswaffen or “V” weapons, named for Vengeance. We called them “buzz bombs.” The Germans never used these in forward combat areas; they always passed right over our positions up on the front. In the fog we couldn’t see them, especially if we were in a forest, but we could hear them well enough. They sounded like an old Model A Ford putt-putt-putting along. But Verviers was one of the target areas, a main logistical and supply point for forward troops with large depots of gasoline and quartermaster supplies, as well as hospitals. Even inside the ward, the noise was loud. As long as we could hear the buzz bombs we were relatively safe, but silence meant they were on a downward path. And when they hit, they made quite an explosion.
The Germans sent quite a number of these bombs in the general direction of the hospital. I don’t know how effective they were, but I can attest that they were bad on morale. They caused a lot of concern among the seriously wounded, especially amputees who, in the event of evacuation, had to depend on others to save them amidst the explosions.
I now was exposed to another of the wonders of modern science, but luckily, this one was a force for good. If I hadn’t already been started on penicillin back in the collecting station, I was started on it in Verviers. The treatment involved massive doses, applied every two or three hours. It seemed they were always waking me up at night to give me a shot. They also started feeding me intravenously. But best of all, I was bathed and dressed in clean pajamas, and put in an actual bed with sheets. It even had a mattress. Buzz bombs or no buzz bombs, with the heat and the sheets and the bed, I thought I was in second heaven.
Since the forward units were completely overloaded, the Army processed the ill and wounded to the rear much more quickly than usual. I was soon put on a hospital train to Paris, a regular old-fashioned coach, gutted out with double bunks built into the sides two or three high. The U.S. Army had taken over the former mental hospital, a very large complex on the outskirts of the city, turning it into the 191st General Hospital. I was hospitalized until January 18, 1945, a total of about three weeks.
The stench from the amputees was almost overwhelming. They attempted to segregate them in a single room, because the odor was so nauseating. The blood would often soak completely through the heavy casts on their amputated limbs, where it couldn’t be washed away. We also had many cases of trench foot. These soldiers had gotten their feet wet and couldn’t dry or warm them, resulting in frozen or frostbitten feet and toes. Some cases resulted in amputations of toes and even part of the foot.
Trench foot was something the Army hadn’t foreseen, and it was a large drain on our manpower. We were simply told to keep our feet warm and dry, which is very difficult in combat. They later issued the forward units extra socks. The 82d Airborne Division combat units were particularly affected, because we were exposed to the cold, wet weather in the Ardennes in our leather jump boots. Later, they issued galoshes to wear over them, which was a big improvement.
Soon I was well enough to become interested in watching the doctors perform diagnostic tests. One method for those with trench foot was to uncover the foot of the bed, take out a pin, and stick it in the patient’s toes. If the doctors got a reaction, they figured he wasn’t too far-gone. If not, they continued to move the pin up toward the ankles, to discover how far he had lost feeling. Pretty crude as a diagnostic tool, I thought, but no one could afford to spend much time on any single patient.
In a few days, I was allowed out of bed and permitted to roam the ward. I slipped out and tried to find people from my unit to catch up on what we called “the news from home.” We tried to read The Stars and Stripes, but our best source of information was newly arrived patients. Some men from newly committed infantry divisions told me about their first battle experiences, and I walked away shaking my head. They hadn’t received the best training for the conditions they had had to face. Again, it seemed their casualty rate was much higher than in the old veteran divisions.
Before long, a couple of us took to bugging the doctor for a pass. We finally bullshitted him enough to get our way, and left the hospital legally. They warned us to stay close by, saying there were several good cafés within a few blocks. Money, however, was a problem. I hadn’t been paid since my three-day pass to Paris in November 1944, but I had squirreled away an American gold seal five-dollar bill, the first currency we had received in Africa in 1943 before military scrip came along. In the first bar, I got three or four times the official exchange rate, which amounted to fifteen or twenty dollars in francs. It was enough to get started on.
We proceeded to hoist a few, and the next thing I knew, I found myself in the heart of Paris. Cultural excursions were not on the agenda. Our priorities were booze and women, or vice-versa, and Paris had a lot of both. As a whole, American GIs, myself included, made friends quickly with the French. We wanted to forget the dreadfulness of war and relax to the fullest. The price we paid was often a terrible hangover or a much sadder outlook, or even mental depression. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” sums up our attitude.
I hadn’t been out on the streets for long before the MPs picked me up. I was pretty far gone, so I couldn’t understand why they were picking on me. They got me on a uniform violation charge because I wasn’t in Class A uniform. I gave them a pretty hard time, saying they couldn’t expect a combat unit soldier with a pass from the hospital to be in a Class A uniform, but my argument fell on deaf ears.
Soon I found myself in a cell, a dungeon-like room in an ancient building. By this time, I was sobering up pretty quickly. I would have sworn I was locked up in the Bastille in the days of the French Revolution. After a couple hours in this dreary hole, I was told to appear before an MP first lieutenant, a duty officer. He agreed to let me go on condition that I either report directly back to the hospital, or stay within a very short distance of it. Of course I agreed.
An MP escorted me to the metro system, offering very strong suggestions along the way, and directed me how to get back. By the time I got to the train, I wasn’t feeling too bad, so I got off at the third station. Evidently, I still had enough money to start all over again, because I found myself very late at night a long distance from the hospital. How I found my way back again, I do not know. It must have been pure homing instinct.
Luckily, I encountered no more MPs on my travels, because it was past midnight and I w
as in violation of my pass. But entering the hospital now became a problem. First I tried to go over the wall, but I couldn’t quite make it. Then I thought, “What the hell, they can’t shoot me for being late,” so I went in the main gate. The guard stopped me, and I delayed a minute or two, fumbling for my pass. When he stepped back to look at it under the light, I took off. He challenged me to stop a few times, but I kept going, knowing he couldn’t leave his post. But he had my pass, so he knew who I was. In all probability, he also had live ammunition in his pistol.
I had just gotten nicely settled in back at the ward when a big commotion erupted at the front nurse’s station. There was loud talking, then shouting. Before long, the nurse, someone from the MP station, and the officer of the day all appeared at the foot of my bed. There the nurse held the others off and was very emphatic about the kind of care I should receive. Sending me to the guardhouse wouldn’t improve my condition. Evidently, she was more persuasive than the MP lieutenant, because they left. I got a good chewing out the next morning by the ward doctor and the nurses. They kept me in bed for the next day or two, but there were no serious aftereffects. I’ve always been grateful that guard didn’t have an itchy trigger finger.
After this adventure I started complaining about wanting to leave the hospital and get back to my unit. Especially in the combat zone, our unit was our home. I learned that Company F and the 505 had taken heavy casualties in the early January offensives that closed the Bulge, and I felt very guilty about sitting back in the hospital while my friends were taking a beating. Finally the doctor signed my form, and I was to be on my way the next day. Meanwhile, someone found a regulation saying no patient would be released unless he had visited the dental clinic, and all corrective measures had been provided. This was a blow, because brushing our teeth in combat had not exactly been a priority. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at my teeth, so I knew I was in for some additional pain. I don’t know if it was at my insistence, or if they just wanted to get rid of me, but my dental appointment was set for the following day.
Descending from the Clouds Page 26
