This was a nice facility, but their dental equipment was hardly state of the art. I sat down in the chair, and a very young dentist examined my teeth. He announced I was in the worst possible class as far as dental care was concerned. I asked what had to be done before they would let me go. He proceeded to tell me, and I said, “Let’s get at it and get it done.” He looked at me in a shocked way and asked, “You want all of this done today?” And I said, “Let’s get to it.”
It ended up that I had to have seventeen fillings and two extractions. The dentist took a break for lunch. It was harder on him than it was on me, initially anyway. They used a painkiller only for extractions, and these he did last. I sat through that full day of dental work while the dentist worked himself up into a very upset, nervous condition. By the time he got through with me, I think he was suffering from combat fatigue.
Meanwhile, the ward had gotten a little concerned, and had been calling down to see what was happening. I finally got back very late in the afternoon. That night and the next day, I was sick. My jaws were so sore I had to go on a liquid diet, and my head throbbed so much I thought it was going to break. So my release from the hospital was delayed one day for dental treatment, and another day to recover from it.
After I was discharged, I had the misfortune to go to a “repo depo” or “repple depple.” These had initially been called “replacement depots,” which had a sinister sound, as if you were replacing someone who had been killed. (You often were.) So the Army decided to rename them “reinforcement depots” instead, as if to give them some positive spin. Whatever their official name, to us they were the “asshole of the world.”
The depot was in or near Verviers. I here received new combat uniforms, a complete reissue of my B bag contents, and a new M1 rifle. The way they handled the rifles was a sore point with all the returning combat people. The Army was still preserving rifles in storage by stacking them in boxes full of cosmoline, which plugged up all the parts and holes. When they reissued the rifles, the whole thing from muzzle to butt, inside as well as out, was completely covered with gunk. So there we were, trying to return to our unit, standing out in the bitter cold in January 1945, and when we got our new weapons, they were coated in an inch of cosmoline and the internal parts were completely filled. Getting them ready for inspection on time was our problem. No cleaning material was provided.
We found the solution in the mess hall, where we used 32-gallon GI cans to wash our mess kits. We either managed to steal boiling water out of the last rinse, or made off with the heater and the can altogether. Then we disassembled the rifles and soaked them. We were careful to get all the parts dried and lightly oiled. The replacement company commander was surprised to see the rifles in such good condition at inspection. To this day, I don’t know why they didn’t get an extra heater and can and set up a cleaning station.
At the repple depple, we were in a “casual” status, waiting to be assigned. There had been a lot of complaints about this sort of limbo. Finally, someone took heed and sent officers from the Inspector General’s office down to talk to us. The IG had a lot of good reasons to perform these visits. At one time, the Army had thought to reassign casuals to whatever outfit needed replacements the most, and the men were ready to commit mutiny in order to be returned to their own units. The plan was quickly abandoned, because they had a mass of AWOLs when the men heard they might not be assigned to their own unit. They just left the depots and returned to their units on their own.
The day the IG came, we were ordered to stand by our bunks. He started a few aisles over from my cot. I could see he wasn’t going to get to me, so I jumped over a couple cots and got in front of him. Luckily for me, he had a sense of humor. He asked what I wanted, and I informed him I wasn’t happy about my progress in returning to my unit. He asked where I came from and how long I had been at the depot, then said he would look into expediting my movement. That same day or early the next morning, I was on my way back to the 505, which I rejoined on January 25, 1945. I had been away one day short of a month.
The company was in a battalion or regimental reserve area, billeted in the best civilian dwellings I could remember. But we had taken serious losses during the early counteroffensives of early January 1945, and many of my friends and platoon mates had been wounded or killed in action. To this day, I feel guilty about this. Maybe it is egotistical, but I always wonder if I could have prevented some of these losses if I had been there. Some of my best friends were among the losses suffered while I was away.
Among the casualties was my close friend Sergeant Francisco. They had run into heavy resistance in a forest, and although a tank had been attached to the company, the tank commander had buttoned up. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open his hatch to man the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the outside of his turret. So Francisco jumped up under heavy fire and proceeded to use the .50-caliber machine gun as fire support. He did a lot of good with that machine gun, but it wasn’t long before he was badly wounded and knocked off the tank. He died of his wounds on January 3, 1945.
My close friend and assistant squad leader Corporal Krueger died of wounds. My platoon sergeant, Sergeant Wright, died of wounds from artillery fire. My platoon leader, Lieutenant Hamula, died of wounds. Private First Class Robert Beckman, our rocket man, was KIA. During the Ardennes, a total of fifteen members of Company F were either killed in action or died of wounds. Five died when hit, and ten survived the hit but later died as a consequence. Add to these losses the critically wounded and lightly wounded, and medical evacuations due to frozen feet or illness.
While I had been hospitalized, the 2d Battalion, 505, had also lost our battalion commander. Major William R. Carpenter took over from Colonel Vandervoort, who was very seriously wounded in the Bulge on January 7, when he lost an eye and part of his face to mortar fire. The colonel was evacuated back to the States, putting an end to the possibility of my getting the direct commission he had spoken about to Francisco and me back at Camp Quorn. Colonel Vandervoort evidently had left no written record of his commitment. I had to start all over again in winning the confidence, respect, and recommendations of another battalion commander.
Upon my return I was promoted to platoon sergeant, replacing Sergeant Wright. At long last, I was platoon sergeant in name as well as fact. The company was little more than platoon size, down to forty or fifty men. This attrition resulted from the relentless offensive operations the 82d Airborne Division had conducted in early January 1945, and the brutal conditions of the weather and terrain. Many times, the fiercest battles were fought over hamlets and even shacks and barns, in the effort to gain protection, no matter how minimal, from the bitter cold.
Toward the end of January, we participated in operations heading for the Siegfried Line. The going was tough and the weather was bad. The incoming artillery was light to medium, sometimes heavy. We didn’t suffer many casualties. We always attempted to end up the day where we could get inside a house, a barn, or a chicken coop—any type of cover. We had lost so many officers I can’t even remember who was commanding. They came and went so quickly. At one time during early battles in January, Company F had no officers left at all.
We were in reserve for a day or two of rest, then we were alerted for another operation about thirty miles to the north. We were to move in the direction of Schmidt, going through Vossenack in the Hurtgen Forest. I believe the 505 had been made into a special regimental combat team prior to moving the remainder of the division, so we were to be in this area a few days longer than the rest of the 82d. We partly marched, and then were trucked. The date was February 7, 1945. I was heading into my most gruesome experience of the war, to the place we came to call Death Valley.
Our jump-off position in the Hurtgen Forest had been the scene of bitter fighting in the fall of 1944 that had resulted in very heavy casualties for all the participating divisions. We got to Vossenack, our line of departure, a few hours before the appointed time. The place was a sea of mud just emerg
ing from the winter’s snow. It was dark, and we had to lie down to try to get some rest in mud an inch to an inch and a half deep. There was very little cover and hardly any bushes as a result of previous heavy fighting. When daylight came, it was a discouraging sight. Only one house had been left standing, and it was a skeleton. Every other wall in town had been blown down. The tallest structures were a foot or a foot and a half high, and even they were few and far between.
Here and in every other village and town we encountered, the desolation was complete. But the biggest shock of all was the sight of hundreds of dead GIs, whose blackened bodies littered this barren wasteland. Six U.S. Army divisions had been successively committed to the area, the 9th, the 28th, the 4th, the 1st, and the 8th, with the Combat Command Reserve (CCR) of the 5th Armored Division, and all winter long their bodies had remained in the positions in which they had died. Those we passed were from the 28th Infantry Division and the 8th, which had come in to relieve it.
I never got over the initial shock of seeing friends and comrades lying dead. It didn’t matter if they were in my company or any other unit. Every time I was withdrawn from the front and then committed again, the first American body I saw always gave me a shock, and it was still a shock to see a dead GI even after I had been hardened by several days of operations. Even now, almost sixty years after the war, the sight of dead American soldiers remains vivid and traumatic in my mind. Never did I encounter more of them amassed in one place than near Vossenack in the Kall River Valley.
Vossenack was on high ground, and we had to go down a long slope to the wooded area of the Kall River Valley. By then, February 1945, the German Army had almost shot its wad in the Ardennes offensive. In this we were very lucky. Observation from the east and the northeast of the slope was nearly perfect. In clear weather you could see for thousands of yards.
The Germans were on their own soil, and they had had months to train their fire on different terrain objects. It was said they surveyed them with very accurate instruments, so they were able to get first-round hits with their artillery. The bodies we saw attested to German accuracy.
When we came upon it, the Kall River was only about the width of a large creek. Halfway down the long slope leading to the valley we had to go across open terrain. Here we passed many shot-up vehicles, their drivers still at the wheel. There were dead from two and three divisions, killed before they reached the top of the slope as they tried to escape the valley. We tried to get under cover of the forest. We moved in extended-order formation, taking no small arms fire and very little artillery fire.
As we moved down into the forest, we saw acres and acres of pines whose tops had been knocked off by enemy artillery fire. They were broken off at a height of ten to forty feet, as if a huge lawnmower had gone across the tops. As we got into the tree line, we found a trail leading down to the bottom of the valley. The banks of the valley were extremely steep, with sharp drop-offs on the side of the trail. This was apparently the only way to get supplies into the valley, and of course it had been under very heavy fire.
The bodies had been lying there throughout the winter, and when we arrived the snow was just beginning to melt. We could just about read the battle from the way the vehicles were scattered. A number of tanks had been knocked out from losing the tracks and rolling over the bank, or had been disabled and pushed over the sides. In the valley bottom, between the river and the end of the trail a hundred yards away, was a battalion aid station, full of rows of rotting bodies still lying on their litters. The station had been overrun and the wounded had been killed or left to die. Farther on by the river, we discovered the bodies of engineers who had been killed as they tried to repair a small bridge. They still wore their rubber boots.
The valley bottom and the opposite slope appeared to be the most strongly held defensive position, and most of our men had died in place. Tank destroyers and tanks littered the valley bottom. When the artillery reached its peak, the soldiers had evidently crawled under the tanks to escape the fire, and the Germans had moved in very close to their own artillery barrage, caught them lying beneath the tanks, and massacred them. Beneath every vehicle that could have given protection, there were three to half a dozen dead American soldiers.
A sober look at the statistics for the divisions that participated in the Hurtgen Forest reveals the monumental scope of the bloody debacle. The 9th Infantry Division was committed on October 6, 1944, but by October 11, all of the battalions of two of its regiments were down to less than three hundred men each. A single advance of 3,000 yards had cost the lives of 4,500 soldiers. The 28th Infantry Division was committed next. Between November 2 and 19, the 28th and its attachments suffered 6,184 casualties. Within the division, the 112th Infantry was hardest hit. The regiment crossed the Kall with 2,200 soldiers, but was eventually forced to withdraw after its initial success. The official death count was 2,093 lives.
In the 4th Infantry Division, the 12th Regiment, a unit that had come in on Utah Beach, lost 1,600 men. Between November 7 and December 3, the 4th Infantry Division lost 7,000 men. The next division to fight in the Hurtgen Forest was the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division, which attacked through the northern fringes on November 15. By November 29, it could go no farther. In a four-mile advance that had taken almost two weeks, it had suffered 3,400 casualties. On November 19, two infantry regiments of the 8th Infantry Division, with Combat Command Reserve attached, took over the defensive positions of the 28th Infantry Division. The division’s 121st Infantry made very little headway in four days of fighting while suffering 650 battle casualties and about the same number of non-battle casualties.
Units of all six divisions paid a bloody butcher’s bill for the errors committed at higher headquarters. In nearly ninety days, the duration of the campaign, 24,000 men were KIA, WIA, captured, or reported MIA. In addition, 9,000 men were victims of trench foot, combat exhaustion, and disease. After the war, I spoke with a few of the survivors of my old unit, the 112th Infantry Regiment. A number of them said the remnants of one of their battalions were loaded onto a pair of two-and-a-half-ton trucks. From a battalion that had been 750 to 900 strong, only about forty men remained.6
Colonel Peterson, the regimental commander and formerly my battalion commander, was relieved of his command. I think he got a very bum deal. He was an excellent officer who was not afforded the consideration he should have been given. I am not alone in thinking the blame for this carnage should be put on higher headquarters, from division to corps, right on up to First Army headquarters. The battle should be ranked as the stupidest, most unprofessional, and callous display of ignorance. They did not even conduct ground reconnaissance before issuing orders, let alone try to adapt our tactics to the terrain. Even MajGen Norman Cota, the heroic commander of the 28th Infantry Division, described the plan as having only a “gambler’s chance” to succeed. The lack of intelligence during the campaign borders on criminal neglect.7
I’ll never forget the moment we started up the opposite bank of the Kall River Valley and discovered the outline of the main American line of defense. Numerous 57mm antitank guns were still in position, and their crews were strewn on the ground, lying around their guns. Almost all of the vehicles, from the top of the slope down the side and right on up to the opposite slope, bore the inscription of the 112th Infantry of the 28th Division. Among them were many men from Company M, the unit I left when I transferred to the parachute troops. The sight of Death Valley moves me deeply still, and the memory of this experience was never far from my thoughts in the execution of my duties.
Chapter 26
The End in Sight: Through the Siegfried Line to the Roer River
We were glad to move out of Death Valley to continue our attack toward the Roer River, but my memories only begin a day or two later, as we were going up a steep wooded hill and began to take some pretty hot small arms fire. We threw off our sleeping bags and such to get ready for action, but the Germans must have withdrawn rapidly, because we didn�
��t encounter a lengthy battle.
That night we ended up in some very well-prepared defensive positions, including a pillbox that was completely blown apart. After I got my platoon in position, I decided to sleep in the remains of the pillbox. It was a well-prepared dugout with a big sheet of wood on the ground, so I lay down on it and covered up with my poncho. I detected a strong odor and wondered what it was. I should have known better. At first light I discovered I had slept on top of four dead German soldiers.
We took up the attack again, moving forward rapidly under little or no small arms fire and little artillery fire. We got up to a point on high ground where we could see for quite a distance and observed troops moving to our right. As I looked across that vast expanse of hills and valleys, I saw elements of three American divisions attacking at once. It was an impressive sight: units from the 82d Airborne and 78th and 9th Infantry divisions all were on the move toward the Roer.
References say our attack continued for two or three days, but sixty years later it seems to me that it was much longer. I remember one miserable day in the hard rain. We went into a hasty defensive position along a row of trees on a gentle slope with long, open hills on either side of the tree line. At the high end of the trees was a pillbox, a huge concrete bunker that was part of the Siegfried Line. It was big enough to have held two platoons. The company CP might have holed up in it, but my platoon was strung from the pillbox down the hill along the tree line. Sergeant Brown’s mortar squad from the 1st Platoon was inside.
Descending from the Clouds Page 27
