Borotra, bent as low as his lanky frame would allow, nodded and bolted up the stone steps. Dodging and weaving as he ran across the terrace, he made it into the Great Hall unscathed and, not surprisingly, unwinded. He was about to start up the interior stairway in search of Lee when the tanker, followed by Schrader and several of the “tame” Wehrmacht soldiers, hurried in through the doors leading from the small patio on the castle’s northwest corner, while rounds from the enemy 20mm anti-aircraft gun to the northwest gouged the exterior wall above the door. As Lee pointed out new ground-floor positions to the men, whom Borotra assumed had become too exposed on the patio, the tennis player quickly relayed Basse’s message.
Lee grimly acknowledged that everybody was running short on ammo and was about to say something else when the shrill ringing of the orderly room telephone echoed through the cavernous room.
AFTER DECIDING TO CONTINUE on to Schloss Itter without infantry and armor support, Major John Kramers had pushed his under-armed, two-jeep relief force hard. The two vehicles had roared along the south bank of the Inn River, occasionally spotting groups of armed German troops in the trees bordering the road but—much to the Americans’ surprise—encountering no roadblocks or resistance. As Meyer Levin recalled: “We whistled through the last 20 miles to Wörgl, which had still been unexplored on our side, and when we got to the place and saw a United States tank sitting there, we let out a joint gasp of relief.”29
The tank, of course, was Boche Buster. Bill Elliot and his crew had been anxiously awaiting some kind of reinforcement since Lee had left them in Wörgl the evening before to guard the bridge; whether the tankers felt that two jeeps—one of which bore only reporters—constituted that reinforcement is unclear. Nonetheless, Kramers was an officer, and, when he asked for a situation report, Elliot told him it had been a tense but essentially uneventful night. The tank crew had parked their Sherman between two buildings about fifty feet from the span, thus screening themselves from view while still being able to maintain overwatch. They had heard a lot of enemy vehicle traffic moving through the town in the dark and, once dawn arrived, had seen trucks and dismounted troops heading south out of Wörgl on a road that snaked through the mountains toward the crossroads at Neiderau. No enemy units had attempted to cross the small bridge, Elliot said, and his men had not fired their weapons, nor had the ten or so Austrian partisans who’d stood vigil with them.
When Kramers asked about the situation at Schloss Itter, Elliot—pointing at the castle, just visible atop the ridgeline to the southeast—said he and his men had been hearing heavy small-arms fire and occasional artillery all morning and assumed from the heavy black smoke that Lee’s tank had been destroyed. As Kramers, Levin, and the others trained their binoculars on the castle, noting the smoke pillar, several additional shells slammed into the schloss’s northern foundation wall. When the military-government officer asked if they’d been able to speak with Lee, Elliot said they’d been out of radio contact even before Besotten Jenny’s apparent demise. Kramers then asked if there was any other way to communicate with the castle, and one of Rupert Hagleitner’s partisans responded that the telephone connection from the town hall might still work. Leaving Elliot and his men with Boche Buster, Kramers, Lutten, Gris, Čučković, Levin, and Schwab jumped in their vehicles and, with one of the partisans sitting on the hood of the lead jeep giving directions, headed for the center of Wörgl.30
Roaring through deserted streets lined by buildings from which white flags fluttered, the jeeps made it to the town hall in minutes. Rushing inside, the men crowded around a small telephone booth tucked under a stairway and waited a few anxious moments while the young partisan dialed. To their surprise and relief, Lee picked up after only a few rings. Kramers took the phone, introduced himself, and then asked about the situation at the castle.
After telling Kramers that the castle’s defenders were perilously short on ammo, Lee added, “They’re shelling the bajabers out of us. Listen, better get some doughs [GIs] up here right away.” Before Kramers could ask any more questions, he heard an explosion, and the line when dead.31
Though he knew Lee and his men needed immediate help, Kramers also knew that without significant backup he and his little group would likely not even survive the trip to the castle. As he was wondering aloud where he’d find the necessary help, Eric Schwab ran in from the street, yelling that there was an American column rolling toward them. Kramers and the others rushed outside just as six M4 Shermans from the 753rd Tank Battalion clattered into the plaza in front of the town hall, followed by halftracks filled with men of the 142nd Infantry’s Company E. Quickly locating the unit commander, Captain Joe W. Gill,32 Kramers told him of the urgent need to get to Schloss Itter. Gill obviously had not gotten the word regarding his regimental commander’s earlier sanctioning of Lee’s rescue mission to the castle or of Lynch’s promise to provide a relief force, as Meyer Levin recalled:
“We’re just supposed to travel down this road and make a link-up with the Hundred and Third. That’s our mission. We haven’t got any order to move out and attack a castle,” [Gill said.]
“Who’s got to give you the order?” [Kramers asked.]
“Colonel Lynch.”
“Where’s he?”
“He’s just left us; he’s gone back up the road someplace.”33
Because Gill had more important things on his mind than chasing down his wayward regimental commander to ask about what most probably seemed to the young company commander a rather harebrained rescue effort, he tapped one of his platoon leaders, First Lieutenant Clifford J. Reinhard, to escort Kramers and his retinue. Then, Levin said, the group “chased off in search of Colonel Lynch. We burned up six miles of road in a style that would have gladdened the heart of Darryl Zanuck, and we caught up with a cloud of dust.”34
While we don’t know how Lynch reacted to the sudden appearance of one of his young lieutenants with Kramers’s party in tow, or to Reinhard’s news that Gill was unaware of the need to relieve Lee and his troops, we do know that the 142nd’s regimental commander immediately sent Reinhard back to Wörgl with instructions for Gill. The Company E commander was to leave enough men to secure the town’s eastern side and then assemble a relief force and move out for Schloss Itter following the Brixentalerstrasse through Söll-Leukental to Hopfgarten and then up the Ittererstrasse. Captain Carl P. Matney’s Company G, Lynch said, would advance on the castle from the north, via the village of Mühltal.35 Minutes later, Lynch added Company F to the mission, tasking Captain Glenn A. Goff to slot his men in behind Matney’s unit.36
Racing back to Wörgl, Reinhard relayed Lynch’s instructions to Gill, who tapped three Shermans of the 1st Section of the 753rd’s Company D—the same tanks that had been unable to cross the bridge with Lee’s party the day before—and Rushford’s Boche Buster to spearhead the move to Schloss Itter. One platoon of GIs would remain in Wörgl; three others, including Reinhard’s, would follow the Shermans in halftracks; and Kramers’s two jeeps would play tail-end Charlie.
The need to chase down Lynch and then put together the relief force meant that Gill and his column didn’t leave Wörgl until almost one PM. Finally on the road, the convoy moved through streets now lined with white flags and growing numbers of welcoming Austrian civilians—many of them wonderfully attractive young women, as Levin later noted—who offered the GIs bottles of wine and bouquets of early spring flowers. Once out of Wörgl, however, the Americans began encountering a rather different sort of people. As Levin recalled: “German [soldiers] began to leak out of the woods. Some were just boys of sixteen who claimed they hadn’t even fired their guns. Then there came older men, in twos, singly, in groups—all, of course, claiming they’d been forced into the fight against their will.”37 Consisting mainly of volksturm (elderly civilian militiamen) Hitler Youth and second-or third-line Wehrmacht reserve troops, most of those attempting to surrender to Gill’s infantrymen were simply disarmed and told to make their way toward the POW cage
being set up just south of Kufstein.
But not all German troops in Tyrol were ready to call it quits. As Gill’s men moved out into the farmland between Wörgl and Söll-Leukental—barely a mile from where they’d started—they began encountering Waffen-SS men who were vastly more motivated and obviously willing to fight. Sporadic sniper fire erupted, and, Levin wrote, “the old tense expressions settled in. [The U.S. troops] moved cautiously behind the tanks, taking cover in the field. Nobody wanted to get hurt on this day-after-the-last-day of fighting.”38 The GIs’ caution was more than justified, for as they dispersed on either side of the Brixentalerstrasse, they came under fire from two MG-42s hidden in log-and-sandbag bunkers on a hillside to their south. Though the American tanks quickly silenced the machine guns with HE rounds, Waffen-SS troops engaged the infantrymen with increasingly heavy small-arms fire.39
On the far left flank of the advancing column Reinhard’s platoon had crossed to the opposite side of the Brixentaler Ache via a small footbridge they’d found intact. This put the men a few hundred yards ahead of the lead elements of Company G, which was advancing southeast along the two-lane road that paralleled the river. Matney’s unit had encountered only sporadic resistance since leaving the outskirts of Wörgl; indeed, it seemed that most of the Waffen-SS men in the area immediately east of the town were concentrating their efforts against the American troops and vehicles that were obviously intent on moving toward Hopfgarten. That force, which now consisted of the bulk of Gill’s Company E bolstered by Goff’s Company F, was deployed across the southwest side of the valley between the bordering hills and the river.40
As Reinhard and his men moved forward in single file beside the trees lining the riverbank, the young lieutenant was probably beginning to think that crossing the Brixentaler Ache had not been the smartest idea he’d had that day. While doing so had allowed the platoon to largely avoid enemy contact and thus advance fairly quickly, the bank’s meandering curve to the southeast meant that the GIs were being steadily separated even more from the bulk of Company E, which was beginning to turn almost directly south along the road leading to Hopfgarten. Moreover, the character of the Ache—which flows northwest toward its rendezvous with the Inn—would also have given the infantry officer pause: though only about four feet deep, the river is fast flowing and constantly roiled by a rocky bed and dozens of small cataracts.41 Loaded down with weapons, ammunition, and personal gear, Reinhard and his men likely wouldn’t have been able to safely wade across.
As the young platoon leader was pondering his next move, several jeeps bearing soldiers of Company G’s small reconnaissance detachment rumbled across the field behind him and slewed to a stop. As Reinhard walked over to speak to the new arrivals, he noted that one of the men wasn’t carrying a weapon, nor was he wearing a regulation uniform. Glancing at a small insignia sewn to the man’s British-style field jacket, Reinhard realized that he was a civilian reporter. Though the young infantry officer didn’t know it at the time, the man was French-Canadian war correspondent (and future premier of Quebec)42 René Lévesque. The then twenty-three-year-old journalist had spent the previous months attached to various U.S. Army units and had witnessed the liberation of Dachau. He’d been accompanying the 142nd Infantry for several days and had chosen to ride along with Company G on the rescue mission to Itter.
As Lévesque later recalled in his memoirs,43 he was about to introduce himself to the men from Company E when a shout from the GI acting as point man for Reinhard’s platoon focused everyone’s immediate attention on a strange apparition: a tall, thin, and athletic-looking man—apparently an Austrian peasant from the look of his clothes—was approaching, “running at an unhurried pace, jogging before the invention of the word. Being a tennis buff I recognized him almost immediately,” Lévesque later recalled. “It was Borotra, an all-time champion. He was hardly winded and told us that he’d just walked out of the chateau-prison of Itter a few kilometers up the road.”44 Borotra, the famed Bounding Basque, had escaped from Schloss Itter yet again. But this time his goal was more than just his own freedom, he said; this time, he’d made it over the walls bearing both a message and a plan.
WHILE KRAMERS’S CALL to Schloss Itter from the Wörgl town hall had let the castle’s defenders know that help was actually on the way, it hadn’t improved their immediate situation. Their ammunition was perilously low, Gangl was dead and two of his Wehrmacht troops were seriously wounded, and though the Waffen-SS attackers hadn’t yet managed to breach the fortress’s walls, they were pressing their attack with what Jack Lee would later call “extreme vigor.”
At about the same time that Cliff Reinhard was relaying Lynch’s instructions for a rescue force to Company E commander Gill, Lee realized that he was running out of options. The telephone line had been Schloss Itter’s last communications link with the outside world, and it had been severed before Lee was able to give Kramers any intel about the location, strength, or weaponry of the attacking Waffen-SS troops. Without that information the relief force could well end up wasting precious time fighting enemies it might otherwise be able to avoid, and anything that delayed the advancing Americans only made it more likely that Schloss Itter’s VIPs and their defenders wouldn’t survive the afternoon.
At this critical juncture Jean Borotra stepped forward with an audacious—and quite possibly suicidal—proposal. He would go over the wall and make his way to the nearest Americans to both hurry them up and show them the quickest way to get to the castle. When Lee rightly pointed out that the tennis star’s chances of making it through the enemy cordon were slim, at best, Borotra replied that his previous escape attempts had given him a unique knowledge of the surrounding terrain and of several ways to leave the castle unobserved. He confidently predicted that he’d reach the advancing Americans “in no time,” and Lee, with no other options, reluctantly agreed to let the tall Frenchman try.
After disguising himself as an Austrian refugee—complete with ragged bedroll and gnarled walking stick—Borotra waited for a brief lull in the firing and then clambered over one of the low parapet walls on the castle’s north side. He dropped some fifteen feet to the ground, rolled easily, and in seconds was back on his feet. His daily training runs stood him in good stead, for he dashed quickly across forty yards of open ground, made it into the woods that bordered the castle’s northwest side, and started down the steep slope toward the river. After carefully eluding several groups of SS men, some of whom were firing upslope at the castle, Borotra burst from the trees at the bottom of the hill and came face to face with two soldiers manning an MG-42 machine gun sited so it could fire at both the castle and at any Americans approaching from the direction of Söll-Leukental.45
No doubt equally as startled by Borotra’s sudden appearance as the Frenchman was by theirs, the Waffen-SS men nonetheless held their fire, apparently taken in by the tennis star’s “harmless refugee” disguise. He reinforced their first impression by calmly bending down to gather some herbs and then relieving himself against a nearby tree. When it was clear that the soldiers had dismissed him as a possible threat, he sauntered to the bank of a large stream and, holding his bedroll and walking stick over his head, waded into the swift-flowing, waist-deep water. Though he slipped once or twice, he kept his footing and made it to the other side. Climbing to the top of the bank he looked back at the soldiers, tossed them a friendly wave, and started toward Söll-Leukental. As soon as he thought it safe, he began the slow and steady jog that ultimately led him to Reinhard and Lévesque.46
Within minutes of that meeting Borotra was talking to Lynch, who had set up his regimental command post in a farmhouse only a half mile away, from where he could see the castle silhouetted atop the towering ridgeline to his south. After delivering his message—that the situation at Schloss Itter was dire and help was needed immediately—the Frenchman presented his plan: he would lead the American infantrymen back to the castle via the quick route up the north slope and along the way point out to them all th
e German positions he’d observed. His only request was that he be given an American uniform and a weapon.
Suitably attired and armed, Borotra led Reinhard’s platoon and most of Matney’s Company G back across the open farmland toward Schloss Itter. After eliminating the MG-42 and its two-man crew, the Americans crossed the stream—aided by ropes—and started up the steep hillside, killing two more Waffen-SS men and capturing twelve without a single U.S. casualty.47 Borotra led the way, determined to be the first to reach his beleaguered comrades in the castle. Unfortunately, that honor would not be his.
When the bulk of Company E and all of Company G had turned south onto the road to Hopfgarten, the resistance that had bedeviled them on the way out of Wörgl slackened considerably. Though occasionally fired on by snipers and the odd machine gun, the column had been able to quicken its pace down the Brixentalerstrasse. Upon reaching the northern outskirts of Hopfgarten, Company G had dropped out to secure the town, allowing Gill and his company to start north up the steep and narrow Ittererstrasse toward the castle. It wasn’t a cakewalk; the GIs encountered several well-defended roadblocks, and at one point an antitank gun mounted on a halftrack fired at the lead Sherman. It missed, and one of the other M4s quickly knocked out the German vehicle with an AP round and then killed its fleeing crew with .30-caliber machine-gun fire.48 But Gill—now with his battalion commander, Marvin Coyle, riding along with him—was a man on a mission, and he pushed his men up the road as fast as he could. As Meyer Levin recalled: “There were short bursts of fire—machine guns, burp guns, ours, theirs. [But] the tanks reached [Itter] village. They let out a long roll of machine-gun fire, and presently a few dozen jerries came piling out of the houses, hands up. In a few minutes, the Joes were through the town.”49
The Last Battle: When U.S. And German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe Page 20
