A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking

by Samuel Fuller;Christa Lang Fuller;Jerome Henry Rudes

  The siege of Aachen would be long and brutal, unlike any battle we'd ever fought before. Before it began, General Huebner sent word to the German commanding officer, Colonel Wilck. If Aachen didn't capitulate, it would be reduced to rubble. Colonel Wilck rejected the ultimatum. His orders were straight from Hitler. Aachen would be defended to the last man. American shells and bombs started to hit the city, destroying half its buildings and badly damaging the rest. When the dust had settled, the historic cathedral and the ancient town hall were left standing, barely. Still, Colonel Wilck refused to surrender, instead launching counterattacks against our positions on the ridges to the south and east of the city. The final assault began when General Huebner gave the order to send the Big Red One into the heart of Aachen to root out and destroy every enemy soldier. None of the forty thousand civilians in the city were to be harmed, making our mission trickier than ever. Never before had we fought in a battlefield of avenues, streetcars, sidewalks, sewers, and rooftops with so many civilians present. We had to wipe out enemy sniper nests stashed in what was left of shops, offices, cafes, and hotels. It was confused slaughter on both sides. Unfamiliar with urban fighting, dogfaces shot other dogfaces. Many civilians were accidentally killed in the cross fire. The streets of Aachen ran red with blood.

  When we took a building, we'd scurry up four or five flights of stairs to the rooftop to check it for snipers. Once it was secure, we'd shoot enemy on top of the next building, tossing grenades into the top-floor windows to cover our soldiers advancing in the street down below. On one rooftop, I confronted a German sniper who'd already unfurled a white cloth, as if to surrender. I motioned to him with my rifle to move forward. As he reached me, he pulled out a Luger and squeezed the trigger. It jammed. I lunged at him and swung the butt of my rifle at his head, knocking him over the edge of the roof. He fell five floors to his death.

  Back in the street, we dashed past burning trucks and buses. At the town hall, we came face-to-face with a group of SS who'd taken cover behind some women and children. We stopped dead. The standoff lasted only half a minute, but it seemed endless. Suddenly, the SS started shooting at us. A couple of our soldiers were picked off. Still, not one American GI wanted to shoot German civilians to get at the real enemy. Only our sergeant knew that that was the only way out of the jam we were in. Before our horrified eyes, he fired rapidly, wounding two women and a child, killing five of the SS.

  "Oh, my God!" cried a wetnose.

  The SS were surprised, too. They shoved the civilians toward us and scattered. We screamed "DOWN!" at the women and children and shot every one of the bastards as they tried to escape.

  That incident would inspire a scene many years later in Forty Guns (1957), when Barbara Stanwyck becomes a human shield for her nasty brother at the end of the picture. Instead of doing what everyone expects in that situation-holding his fire-my hero surprises everyone by wounding Stanwyck in the leg, then shooting the startled brother, who is suddenly vulnerable. Audiences always laugh nervously at that scene. It was an original way to handle a timeworn device. People are horrified by the violence to Stanwyck, but love the hero's line to her: "It's only a flesh wound."

  Die-hard defenders were still hiding out in residential buildings and factories all over Aachen. The still-intact public library was bristling with them. Cannon Company blew out the front door, creating a gaping hole through which a light tank could have driven. We swept into the library building, tossing grenades, firing our rifles, stepping over gruesome corpses whose hands had been blown off by the direct shelling. From between the bookshelves, enemy soldiers fired at us. We pursued them down into the cellar, where we caught them in a cross fire among stacks of forgotten books. After it was over, I moved cautiously through the long rows of crowded bookshelves, searching for any last defenders. They'd all been killed. In the tomblike silence, I looked at all those books gathering dust. I prayed no book of mine would ever be used to stop a bullet.

  Back in the city streets, we spotted some German soldiers slipping into one of Aachen's biggest cinemas. We ran in after them. The hall was pitchblack. Suddenly a blinding beam of light from the projection booth filled the screen. We bellied under the movie seats. German machine guns burst the glass window in the booth next to the whirring, white-hot projector, firing down at us. We all dashed out except for a soldier named Johnson, who stayed down during the flurry of bullets. A few of us ran around to the alley, scurried up the iron-wrought staircase, and got the snipers in the projection booth. Meanwhile Johnson was down in the theater, tossing grenades into the aisles and using up every bullet in his clip. The movie theater fell silent as a tomb.

  We slipped back in there cautiously. Johnson had single-handedly massacred fourteen enemy soldiers. They were slumped over the remains of the red velvet seats, their blood oozing down the raked floorboards. Stunned, Johnson walked wordlessly up the center aisle, staring ahead as if in another world. We found him outside the theater hypnotized by a big movie poster. It was for a coming attraction, with a couple of cowboys in a violent fistfight while a beautiful gal looked on. As if nothing had happened, Johnson said, to no one in particular, "I love action movies!" We thought he'd lost his mind.

  It had taken thirteen long days of intense fighting, street by bloody street, for us to take Aachen. The final blow came when our doggies loaded an abandoned trolley car with TNT and rolled it down the tracks on a steep street, crashing it into a couple of Nazi tanks positioned near their big ammunitions dump. The resulting explosion was enormous and sealed the city's fate. Already deprived of food and water, and now without ammunition, the city was defenseless. The enemy capitulated on October 21.

  When the mortars and machine guns fell silent, civilians emerged cautiously from their underground shelters into the rubble-strewn streets. The last couple weeks must have been a living hell for them. Some wept with hysterical joy and thanked us for coming. Most were a filthy mess, hungry, dehydrated, suffering from shell shock. Dogfaces from my outfit found a strange-looking man wandering the streets and picked him up for questioning. The fellow wore a dirty robe and had that crazed look in his eyes that we recognized in people who'd been in close contact with total war. We rolled our eyeballs when the old guy said he was a bishop, even if he did have a certain dignity about him. Battalion HQ was radioed for advice. What should we do with the screwball who claimed to be a bishop? They told us to treat him like one, so we escorted him to the Aachen Cathedral, where he set to work cleaning up the mess of rubble and broken glass. He turned out to be Johanes van der Velden, bishop of Aachen.

  The main altar inside the historic Aachen Cathedral after the German surrender of the city.

  A formal surrender ceremony took place a couple days later outside the cathedral. It was late afternoon. A few hundred German prisoners had been herded into the main square. Thousands of their fellow Nazis had died in the defense of the city. Over five hundred Big Red One soldiers from all three battalions surrounded them. We'd lost hundreds of our boys, dead and wounded. Civility in that situation was tough, but obligatory. General Huebner allowed Colonel Wilck to speak to his men over some crackly loudspeakers. His words were translated into English. Wilck explained why he hadn't fought to the last man. They were still German soldiers, and he reminded them to behave as such.

  "I wish you the best of health and a fast return to the Fatherland," he concluded. "We need you to help rebuild Germany."

  Wilck wanted to give his men a Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler. But Huebner wouldn't allow it.

  "I can't lead you in a salute to our Fi hrer," concluded Wilck. "However, we can still salute him in our minds."

  Taking the microphone, General Huebner announced that we were being relieved by the 1o4th Infantry for some well-deserved rest in preparation for the next advance. That gave us something to cheer about. The general concluded by reassuring every man of Jewish faith in our outfit that, in response to a special request, they'd have the chance to participate in a makeshift service for Yom Kipp
ur, the Jewish high holiday, which happened to fall that evening. With Bishop van der Velden's blessing, the Yom Kippur ceremony would take place inside the Aachen Cathedral. First, a replacement had to be found to sub for the Jewish chaplain, who was too busy burying all the dead. A doggie named Katz from the Bronx stepped forward and volunteered to lead the service.

  "Every man of Jewish faith," announced General Huebner, "who wants to take part will immediately proceed with Private Katz into the cathedral."

  The defeated Nazis watched us contemptuously. They were waiting to see how many Jews were wearing the Big Red One. Our sergeant, who was about as Jewish as a pork chop, turned and followed Private Katz inside the cathedral, as if to say, "Stick that up your Mein Kampf, all you Nazi mongrels fed on the bone of fear, hatred, and stupidity!" Every other dogface in the square followed Katz and the sergeant into the cathedral, too. On that occasion, everybody was Jewish.

  Our next objective was the Roer River crossing, east of Aachen. We moved into the Hurtgen forest near the town of Hamich. Besides the enemy's fierce resistance, the two biggest problems we had to confront were our ears and our feet.

  See, the sound of artillery, both outgoing and incoming, was constant day and night Ack.!Ack.!Ack.- replaced every hour or so with planes flying overhead. Maybe there were a hundred Allied bombers on their way to Germany, or maybe it was a single Jerry plane coming in at us. American arty would open up andAck.!Ack!Ack! you'd dive for your miserable life because some of that friendly fire might kill you. The Jerry plane would be driven off, and we'd sigh with relief. However, before we had a moment's calm, enemy artillery started up again-Ack! Ack! Ack! The interminable artillery was ear-shattering. First Battalion Commander Colonel Edmund F. Driscoll filed the following report at that time:

  The men here are going crazy. They are getting pounded day after day and attacking day after day. They are going wacky. It is real and not put on. I know the real thing. The Doc ought to make a report to Division. It isn't just one man, it's many of them.

  As for our feet, the never-ending rain made life outdoors miserable, dramatically increasing the number of cases of trench foot. Want to know what trench foot was like? When you wash clothes by hand, you know how soft and wrinkled your hands become from the water and soap? Well, it was identical to that, only your feet slowly become paralyzed. I was lucky, I suppose, because I hadn't gotten it yet. It was only a matter of time.

  No matter what we were going through in the Hurtgen forest, you had to realize that somewhere there were plenty of other doggies going through ten times worse. They too had to accept the fact that elsewhere, GIs were suffering even more than they. The only thing that kept us going was the realization that somewhere else, another dogface was worse off than you. Our psychology was vacuous, but it somehow worked in those trying days and nights.

  The winter of 1944 kicked in early in Germany. It got much colder. Then the first snows fell. The ground turned white and the bitter cold kept it that way. We lost many, many men in the ferocious fighting in the snowbound forest. Fresh replacements took their place. Blood from wetnoses turned the snow the same shade of red as that of battle-weary veterans.

  Like enraged dogs, the Germans fought on. Their entrenchment, the encroaching winter, and the counterattacks threatened to paralyze our advance. Our worst nightmare was that of being frozen in, encircled, and cut down before realizing the victory that seemed closer than ever. Our hands and feet were blue with cold. Now frostbite became an ever-present danger. But we had to press on. To hesitate was certain defeat. Fear made us that much more determined.

  One of the rare moments of joy we experienced was when mail from home somehow reached us, even in Hurtgen forest. After they passed out the precious envelopes and care packages, we read our letters while wrapped in blankets like mummies, one hand turning the pages, one hand on an ice-cold rifle. In Hurtgen, I received an allotment of cigars and chocolate from any mother, along with a letter in an abnormally thick envelope that, like an exploding shell, sent a shockwave through me in the snowy woods of Germany. Howard Hawks had ended up paying fifteen grand for the movie rights to The Dark Page. Charlie Feldman had brokered the deal and paid my mother the money, as I'd requested, so that she could make ends meet while I was away playing war games. Rebecca had included a wad of cash, one thousand bucks! One of my buddies asked what I was going to do with all that money, since it was completely useless for the time being. Out of the blue, I announced that I was going to throw a private party as soon as we got some R and R. At the time, I must have been feeling pretty high. Why not share my good fortune with the other guys? It could be the last party some of us would ever attend.

  Word got around that I was planning a big shindig, and guys in every battalion wanted to come. I insisted that each guest had to dream up his own sex fantasy. My event was going to have lots of willing girls ready to help us realize our wildest dreams. Lack of originality was the only obstacle to an invitation. Sex, after all, was only a mental game for us, because the chow had been laced with so much saltpeter that we'd forgotten what a hard-on was. Just the prospect of a party generated a running banter of crazy, lusty speculation and macho gibble-gabble. The sergeant wanted a naked girl to put on a steel helmet and wear a cartridge belt and bandoliers. Another dogface wanted a woman to get on his back and ride him like a horse. Another fantasized about a gal's ass against a frosty window.

  Several guests wouldn't make it to my party, killed in Hurtgen by snipers, artillery, or, believe it or not, wood splinters. When enemy shells came down in the forest, trees exploded and a deluge of sharp bits of wood came raining down on us. During one such attack, Captain Thomas O'Brien, the wonderful guy who was so important to us on Omaha Beach, two-time winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, commander of Cannon Company, hit the ground and never moved again. A six-inch shard had been driven through his heart. O'Brien had played along with our shindig plans, fantasizing about breaking a half-dozen eggs on the hot belly of a gal at the party. He was going to eat them off her, one at a time.

  My party would happen faster than anyone imagined. We got pulled off the front line for a week in mid-December and sent back to the Belgian village of Herve for some dearly needed recuperation time. I found a lusty little hotel in town run by Madame Marbaise. Madame was in her fifties, weighed about 250 pounds, and hated Nazis. She claimed that she always knew the Germans were going to lose the war, so she never despaired during the occupation. Projecting brighter days ahead, she'd stashed away an ample supply of liquor and wine in her secret stone cellar. Now that the Germans had been pushed out of Belgium, Madame Marbaise's fortunes were already improving. GIs crowded the hotel bar, drinking anything that was wet, playing the piano, singing rounds of "Roll Out the Barrel," and renting rooms when they got lucky with local girls. The place was the perfect setup for my party. The kicker was that the village butcher was a drunk. With her limitless supply of booze, Madame Marbaise could get a limitless supply of steaks.

  Women were on our minds, but never in our arms.

  I met with Madame Marbaise late one night in her kitchen. With the help of my sergeant, who acted as interpreter, I explained to her that I was inviting my buddies to one night with all the booze, steaks, and women they wanted. Madame was dubious, to say the least. Did I even have a clue what such an affair would cost? It was out of the question. From the inside pocket of my GI overcoat, I pulled out the envelope with the thousand bucks and carefully laid out the greenbacks on the kitchen table like a cardshark at a carnival spreading a deck of cards for the suckers. All that moola, I explained, was for her, with the understanding that she'd provide us with whatever we wanted to eat and drink as well as some willing women to participate in special sexual antics. I'd sworn to myself back in Hurtgen that, in honor of O'Brien, some sonofabitch at my party was going to eat eggs off a woman's belly. It was done, just like every other sexual escapade that guys had dreamed up for their invitations. Several of my guests, like O'Brien, wouldn't make it
to the fete.

  Madame grinned her Cheshire cat smile.

  "Vous etes fou, fou, foul" she said, scooping up the dough and placing it inside her brassiere for safekeeping.

  "Yeah, we are," I replied. "But we're still alive."

  A River of Tears

  20

  Rumors of the next German counterattack were flying, and this one was supposedly bigger than anything we'd seen previously. The enemy had been piling up an attacking force, getting ready for a massive attempt to smash through the Allied front. An ambitious operation, its goal was to recapture Paris, now hundreds of miles away. The offensive would become known, at various times, as "Breakthrough," "Battle of the Ardennes Salient," and, finally and forever, "Battle of the Bulge."

  With very little rest, we were back in action by early December, as word had come down that the thinly held American line was being shattered by the new and powerful German thrust. Our outfit was moved to the town of Faymonville, Belgium. Our objective was to contain the strong enemy contingent that had moved back there, stopping them from overrunning any more Allied positions. News of the Nazi massacre of American POWs at Malmedy had reached us, along with other atrocity stories. Evidently, the Germans would stop at nothing to make this final effort succeed. Gas masks were passed out. Since the enemy had violated every other rule of warfare, it seemed probable that the bastards would end up using poison gas, too.

  The most maddening trick that the Germans played on us was masquerading as war-weary dogfaces. Wehrmacht dressed as GIs, complete with American dog tags and legitimate-looking papers, infiltrated our lines, and threw us off-kilter at first. Fake doggies appeared out of nowhere, scouted our positions, then brought the death-dealing intelligence back to their artillery gunners. Some even opened fire on our soldiers before we caught on. Now, every GI who approached our position was suspect.