The soldier’s concern is with death, not life, with destruction, not construction. The ultimate destruction is killing another human being. When snipers hit a German on the other side, they would shout, “I got him! I got him!” and dance for joy. Pvt. Roy Cobb spotted a German walking impudently to and fro before a cottage a couple of hundred meters away. He hit him with his first shot. Pvt. Clarence Lyall, looking through his binoculars, said the hurt, perplexed expression on the German’s face was something to see. As the soldier tried to crawl back to the cottage, Cobb hit him twice more. There were whoops and shouts each time he got hit.
As always on the front line, there was no past or future, only the present, made tense by the ever-present threat that violent death could come at any instant. “Life has become strictly a day to day and hour to hour affair,” Webster wrote his parents.
• • •
Replacements came in. This was distressing, because when an airborne division, which was usually brought up to strength in base camp in preparation for the next jump, received reinforcements while on the front line, it meant that the division was going to continue fighting. At OP 2, “four very scared, very young boys fresh from jump school” joined the squad. Webster commented: “My heart sank. Why did the army, with all its mature huskies in rear echelon and the Air Corps slobs in England, choose to send its youngest, most inexperienced members straight from basic training to the nastiest job in the world, front line infantry?”
One of the replacements was 2d Lt. Hank Jones, a West Point graduate (June 6, 1944, John Eisenhower’s class) who had completed jump school at Benning in late December. He left New York in mid-January, landed at Le Havre, and arrived in Haguenau in mid-February. As Lieutenant Foley commented, “Teach them how to say ‘Follow me’ and ship them overseas was the quickest way to replace the casualties.” Jones was cocky, clean-cut, likable. He was eager for a chance to prove himself.
He would quickly get his opportunity, because the regimental S-2, Captain Nixon, needed some live prisoners for interrogation. On February 12 he asked Winters to arrange to grab a couple of Germans. Winters was still a captain, a distinct disadvantage in dealing with the other two battalion commanders, who were lieutenant colonels. But he had friends on the regimental staff, where Colonel Strayer was X.O. and Nixon and the S-4 (Matheson) were old E Company men. Matheson scrounged up some German rubber boats for Winters to use to get a patrol over the river. Winters picked E Company for the patrol.
It would be a big one, twenty men strong, drawn from each platoon plus Company HQ section, plus two German-speaking men from regimental S-2. Lieutenant Foley picked Cobb, McCreary, Wynn, and Sholty from 1st platoon. Once across the river, the patrol would divide into two parts, one led by Sgt. Ken Mercier, the other by Lieutenant Jones.
The men selected for the patrol spent two days outside Haguenau practicing the handling of the rubber boats. On February 14, Winters and Speirs visited OP 2, much to the dismay of the 1st squad, because they stood in front of the OP studying the German position with binoculars, gesturing with their hands, waving a map. “We inside cursed heartily,” Webster recalled, “fearing that a German observer would spot them and call down artillery fire on our cozy home.”
The plan Winters and Speirs worked out would call on Easy to display many of its hard-earned skills. The lead scout would be Cpl. Earl McClung, a part Indian who had a reputation for being able to “smell Krauts.” The patrol would rendezvous at a D Company OP, where the men would drink coffee and eat sandwiches until 2200. They would come to the river under cover of darkness and launch the first rubber boat. It would carry a rope across the river to fasten to a telephone pole on the north side so that the others could pull their boats across. Once in the German lines the patrol would split into two sections, the one under Lieutenant Jones going into town, the other under Sergeant Mercier to a house on the bank of the river suspected of being a German outpost.
Whether or not the patrol succeeded in capturing prisoners, it would have plenty of support for its retreat back across the river. If either section ran into trouble, or got its hands on prisoners, the section leader would blow a whistle to indicate that the withdrawal was under way. That would be the signal for both sections to gather at the boats, and for Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Malarkey to start the covering fire.
The covering fire had been worked out down to the smallest details. Every known or anticipated German position was covered by designated rifle fire, machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire. A 57 mm antitank gun was borrowed from Division and emplaced to shoot into the basement of a house that could not be hit by indirect artillery fire. D Company had a 50-caliber machine-gun (stolen from the 10th Armored at Bastogne) set up to rake the German positions. The 1st platoon would have its 30-caliber machine-gun set up on the balcony of OP 2, ready to spray the German dwelling across the river, if necessary (the crossing would be made right in front of OP 2).
The night of February 15 was still and dark. The German mortars shot only a couple of flares and one or two 88s fired. The American artillery was silent, waiting for the whistle. The searchlights were out, as Speirs had requested. The Americans shot no flares. There was no small arms firing, there was no moon, there were no stars.
The first boat got across successfully. Two others made it. The fourth boat, with McCreary and Cobb in it, capsized. They drifted a hundred meters or so downstream, managed to get out, tried again, only to capsize once more. They gave it up as a bad job and returned to OP 2.
Jones and Mercier gathered the men who had made it over, divided them, and set out on their tasks. With Mercier was a just-arrived replacement from Company F. Without Speirs or Winters knowing it, the young officer—gung-ho and eager to prove himself—had attached himself to the patrol. As he followed Mercier up the north bank of the river, he stepped on a Schu mine and was killed. He had been on the front line barely twenty-four hours.
Mercier continued toward his target, eight men following him. When he got close enough to the German outpost, he fired a rifle grenade into the cellar window. As it exploded, the men rushed the building and threw hand grenades into the cellar. As those grenades exploded, Mercier led the men into the cellar, so close behind the blast that Pvt. Eugene Jackson, a replacement who had joined up in Holland, was hit in the face and head by fragments of shrapnel. In the cellar, the Americans found the still-living Germans in a state of shock. They grabbed one wounded and two uninjured men and dashed back outside. Mercier blew his whistle.
The signal unleashed a tremendous barrage. It shook the ground. Heavy artillery from the rear was supplemented by mortars and the antitank gun. Webster, watching from the balcony of OP 2, described the scene: “We saw a sheet of flame, then a red ball shoot into the basement of a dwelling across the creek. The artillery shells flashed orange on the German roads and strong points. Half a mile away to our direct front a house started to burn. D Company’s 50-caliber opened up behind us in a steady bark. A solid stream of tracers shot up the creek, provoking a duel with a German burp gun which hosed just as steady a stream of tracers back at D Company from the protection of an undamaged cellar.”
Mercier and his men dashed back to the boats, where they met Jones and his section. As they started to cross, they decided that the wounded German soldier was too far gone to be of any use, so they abandoned him by the river bank. One of the replacements, Pvt. Allen Vest, drew a pistol to kill the man, but was told to hold his fire. The wounded German was not going to do them any harm, and there was no point to revealing their position. Some men swam, using the rope to pull themselves back across; others used boats.
Once across, the patrol members ran to the cellar at OP 2, pushing the two prisoners in front of them. As they reached the cellar, German artillery shells exploded in the backyard, the beginning of a barrage by the Germans all across E Company’s line.
Down in the cellar, the patrol members crowded around the prisoners. The Americans were excited, many of the men chattering—or
rather shouting over the tremendous noise—trying to describe individual experiences. Their blood was up.
“Lemme kill ’em, lemme kill em!” shouted Vest, rushing toward the prisoners with his pistol drawn. Somebody stopped him.
“Get outta here, Vest. They want these bastards back at battalion,” someone else yelled.
The prisoners, according to Webster, “were a pair of very self-possessed noncoms, an Unteroffizier (buck sergeant) and a Feldwebel, or staff sergeant. They stood calm, like rocks, in a hot, smelly room full of men who wanted to kill them, and they never moved a finger or twisted their expressions. They were the most poised individuals I’ve ever seen.”
As the explosions outside increased, Private Jackson, who had been wounded on the patrol, began screaming, “Kill me! Kill me! Somebody kill me! I can’t stand it, Christ I can’t stand it. Kill me, for God’s sake kill me!” His face was covered with blood from a grenade fragment that had pierced his skull and lodged in his brain.
Sergeant Martin related, “Of course no one was going to kill him, because there is always hope, and that goddamn prisoner made me so goddamn mad I started kicking that goddamn sonofabitch, and I mean I kicked that bastard every way I could.” He concluded lamely, “Emotions were running real high.”
Someone telephoned for a medic with a stretcher, quick. Roe said he would be there in a flash.
Jackson continued to call out. “Kill me! Kill me! I want Mercier! Where’s Mercier?” He was sobbing.
Mercier went to him and held his hand. “That’s O.K., buddy, that’s O.K. You’ll be all right.”
Someone stuck a morphine Syrette in Jackson’s arm. He was by then so crazed with pain he had to be held down on the bunk. Roe arrived with another medic and a stretcher. As they carried the patient back toward the aid station, Mercier walked beside the stretcher, holding Jackson’s hand. Jackson died before reaching the aid station.
“He wasn’t twenty years old,” Webster wrote. “He hadn’t begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making their greatest profits in history, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn’t get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We read of black-market restaurants, of a manufacturer’s plea for gradual reconversion to peacetime goods, beginning immediately, and we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war.”
During a pause in the German barrage, guards escorted the prisoners back to Captain Winters at battalion HQ. Mercier was smiling from ear to ear as he handed over the two live prisoners. The buck sergeant talked a lot, the staff sergeant remained silent.
• • •
The night was no longer peaceful. Both sides fired everything they had. Fires blazed up and down the river. Tracers crisscrossed over the water.
Whenever there was a lull, the men at OP 2 could hear a wheezing, choking, gurgling sound from across the river. The wounded German soldier abandoned by the patrol had been shot in the lungs. Webster and his buddies debated what to do, kill him and put him out of his misery or let him die in peace. Webster favored killing him, because if he were left alone the Germans would send a patrol to fetch him, and he could report on all the activity around OP 2. “Then they will shell us even more,” Webster predicted.
Webster decided to haul himself across the river, using the rope, and knife the man. McCreary vetoed the idea. He said the Germans would use the wounded man as bait for a trap. Webster decided that he was right. A hand grenade would be better.
Accompanied by Pvt. Bob Marsh, Webster moved cautiously down to the river bank. He could hear the German gasping and slobbering in ghastly wheezes. “I pitied him,” Webster wrote, “dying all alone in a country far from home, dying slowly without hope or love on the bank of a dirty little river, helpless.”
Marsh and Webster pulled the pins on the grenades and threw them beside the German. One exploded, the other was a dud. The wheezing continued. The Americans returned to their outpost, got more grenades, and tried again. The wheezing continued. They gave it up; let him die in his own time.
When the shelling finally ceased, just before dawn, the wheezing went on, getting on everyone’s nerves. Cobb decided he could take it no more. He grabbed a grenade, went to the river bank, heaved it over, and finally killed the German.
• • •
During the night Sergeant Lipton had been hit by a mortar shell, one fragment on his right cheek close to his ear and the other in the back of his neck. He went to the aid station and got patched up. (Thirty-four years later he had the metal in his neck removed when it started giving him trouble.)
The following day, February 16, Winters called Lipton to battalion HQ, to present him with his Honorable Discharge as an enlisted man, effective February 15, and a copy of the orders awarding him a battle-field commission as a 2d lieutenant, effective February 16. “When I was wounded I was a civilian!” Lipton remarked. “I had already been discharged, and my commission had not yet been effective. I’ve often wondered how it would have been handled if I had been killed by that mortar shell.” He added, “I have always felt that the battlefield commission was the greatest honor that I have ever had.”
• • •
Lieutenant Jones, by all accounts, performed well on his first patrol—meaning, apparently, he wisely let Mercier make the decisions. Within a week, Jones was gone, having been promoted to 1st lieutenant. “After one patrol!” Lieutenant Foley commented. “Jones was a West Pointer, a member of the WPPA, the West Point Protective Association, known by the ring they all wore. ‘It don’t mean a thing if you don’t have that ring!’ ” Jones moved on to a staff job at regiment. Malarkey wrote, “It was rumored that the conclusion of the war was fast approaching and that West Pointers, who would staff the peacetime army, were being protected.”
• • •
Colonel Sink was so delighted with the successful patrol, he ordered another one for the next night. In the meantime, however, it had snowed, then turned colder. The snow was frozen on top, crunchy, noisy. The cold air had cleared out the sky and the moon was shining. Winters thought a patrol under such circumstances was suicidal, so he decided to disobey orders.
Sink and a couple of staff officers came to 2d Battalion CP to observe. They had a bottle of whiskey with them. Winters said he was going down to the river bank to supervise the patrol. When he got to the outpost, he told the men to just stay still. With the whiskey working on him, Sink would soon be ready for bed. The patrol could report in the morning that it had gotten across the river and into German lines but had been unable to get a live prisoner.4
Some of the men wanted liquor too. Cobb and Wiseman went out on a daytime scrounging mission, even though orders were never to show yourself in daylight. They found a cellar filled with schnapps. They grabbed two bottles each and, shot at by German snipers, ran down the street like schoolboys with stolen apples.
Wiseman got hit in the knee. He stumbled and fell, breaking his bottles. Cobb saved his. The two men ducked into a cellar and started enjoying the schnapps. “You take a bunch of G.I.s,” Martin pointed out, “there is no such thing as just taking a shot of schnapps. You have to drink the whole goddamn thing before you quit.” Wiseman and Cobb drank a bottle each. When they got back to 1st platoon HQ, roaring drunk, Cobb got into a fight with Marsh.
Lieutenant Foley separated the men. He chewed out Cobb for being off-limits, disobeying orders, being drunk and disorderly, and so on. Cobb became enraged and began mouthing off. He ignored Foley’s direct order to shut up. Instead, he charged Foley. Two men grabbed him and threw him down. Sergeant Martin pulled his .45 pistol. Foley told him to holster his weapon, ordered Cobb arrested, and had him taken back to regiment for lockup.
Wiseman, meanwhile, loudly rejected Medic
Roe’s order to evacuate. He said he was staying with his friends.
Foley got his platoon settled down, then went to regimental HQ to write up court-martial papers for Cobb. It took him several hours. He took the papers to Colonel Sink and told him the details. As Foley was leaving, Sink said to him, “Foley, you could have saved us all a lot of trouble. You should have shot him.”
Wiseman, still drunk, refused any aid for his wound. He said he would talk to Sergeant Rader, no one else. Rader tried to talk some sense into him, without success. He too was court-martialed. “This ordeal was another blow to my mind,” said Rader, “after Hoobler died and Howell was injured at Bastogne.”
• • •
On February 20, Easy went into reserve, as the 3d Battalion, 506th, took over its position. Within hours of Easy’s departure, the Germans scored a direct hit on OP 2. Winters got his promotion to major that day. On February 23, the 36th Division relieved the 101st. The airborne division moved to Saverne, in the rear, in preparation for a return to Mourmelon.
The 101st had seldom been in a rear area. What the men saw there made them wonder how any supplies ever reached the front line. Twice in Haguenau they had received a beer ration of three bottles each. The cigarettes they got were Chelseas or Raleighs, much despised. No soap, an occasional package of gum, once some toothpaste—except for C and K rations and ammunition, that was all that reached the front lines. Being near a supply depot in the rear, the men learned why. The port battalions unloading the ships coming from America got their cut, the railroad battalions helped themselves to Milky Way candy bars and cases of Schlitz beer, chalking it up to “breakage,” the truck drivers took the cartons of Lucky Strikes (by far the favorite brand), and by the time division quartermaster and regimental and battalion S-4 skimmed off the best of what was left, the riflemen on the front line were fortunate to get C rations and Raleigh cigarettes.
• • •
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys Page 27
