There were two possible weak spots in the defenses in and around the gatehouse, Lee and Basse agreed. The first was the area directly beneath the arched supports of the small bridge on the access road. Enemy troops who were able to work their way through the ravine and reach the base of the stone pier closest to the main gate would be able to cut through the concertina-wire barriers where they butted up against the pier while remaining almost impossible to engage: none of the firing loops in the gatehouse offered a clear line of sight, and the sloping shoulders of the small promontory on which the castle stood would block fire from the main walls. The second weak spot was the small arched doorway—the sally port[246]—at the base of the south foundation wall, right below the schlosshof’s guard tower on the castle’s south side. The door opened directly onto the sloping hillside leading down into the ravine. Built of thick, metal-reinforced timber, it was heavily barred from within and was overlooked by firing loops in the guard towers, but the placement of the openings in the curving walls of the towers would make it difficult to actually bring a weapon to bear on the slightly recessed door. Worse, small trees and underbrush on the hillside leading to the sally port meant that enemy troops who cut through the concertina wire might be able to make it from the ravine to the door unseen and blow it open before they could be stopped.
Standing before the front gate, Lee realized that the position of Besotten Jenny also presented a tactical problem. While his foresight in backing the vehicle up the access road spanning the ravine and parking it immediately in front of the gatehouse both protected its more vulnerable rear end and made any enemy assault up the approach road virtually suicidal, it also severely restricted the field of fire of the turret-mounted 76mm cannon and coaxial and hull-mounted .30-caliber machine guns. In order to ensure that the tank could cover the sally port and engage targets to the west and south of the schloss in addition to those immediately to the east, Lee ordered Rushford to move Besotten Jenny further from the gatehouse and park it just on the castle side of the bridge. Its engine roaring and with greasy smoke belching from its exhausts, the Sherman moved slowly forward. When it came to a stop, Rushford and the other crewmen jumped down and trotted back to the gatehouse, each man carrying his personal gear, a .45-caliber M3 submachine gun, and as much ammunition as he could carry.
Lee knew that repositioning the tank was a calculated risk: while the move would significantly increase the field of fire for the Sherman’s main and secondary weapons, it would also make the vehicle more visible to antitank gunners and increase the likelihood of attack by infantrymen wielding the fearsome panzerfaust. To help prevent the latter, Lee told Basse to emplace one of the tank’s machine guns in the gatehouse’s small upper level. By kicking out some of the ceramic roof tiles, the defenders could create a firing position that would cover Besotten Jenny and also provide an elevated—if somewhat exposed—position from which to engage enemy troops attempting to move up the hillsides on either side of the bridge over the ravine. Though Lee would have preferred to use the tank’s Browning .50-caliber for the overwatch task, its size and weight would make it too unwieldy to use in the gatehouse’s cramped attic space. And of the tank’s two lighter and smaller .30-caliber machine guns, Lee and Basse agreed that it made more sense to remove and resite the assistant driver’s hull-mounted M1919A4 weapon: it had a more restricted arc of fire than the coaxial next to the main gun in the rotating turret and was easier to remove from its mount. Whistling to get McHaley’s attention, Basse told him to go back to the tank, dismount the bow .30-caliber, retrieve its stowed tripod, and take the weapon and several cans of ammunition to the top of the gatehouse. Turning toward Worsham, Basse told him to help McHaley emplace the weapon and then act as the young tanker’s assistant gunner.
Leaving Basse to deploy Pollock, Petrukovich, and Sutton as he saw fit, Lee moved over to where Rushford, Szymczyk, and Seiner were crouched just inside the first set of gates. Lee told them that while he realized that Besotten Jenny was in an exposed position, he wanted at least one of them in the buttoned-up vehicle at all times. Turning to Seiner, Lee said that, since there was virtually no chance they’d have to tangle with German armor, he wanted the Sherman’s 76mm gun loaded with a high-explosive shell, which would be far more effective against troops than an armor-piercing round.[247] Finally, Lee said, at the first sign of a full-scale attack he wanted all three of them to get to Besotten Jenny as soon as possible; Basse would try to join them, but if the motor officer couldn’t make it out to the Sherman, the three enlisted men should keep it in action as long as they could.
With the defense of the gatehouse organized, Lee headed across the small courtyard toward the schlosshof, noting as he did that the wire-topped parapet walls on either side were not tall enough to offer complete protection from incoming fire. Making a mental note to remind everyone that in the event of a firefight they’d have to crouch when traversing the lower courtyard and the equally exposed terrace between the schlosshof and the main building, Lee hurried toward the Great Hall. It was just after nine thirty, the sun was starting to set, and he wanted to ensure that all the “tame Krauts” were in position and alert before nightfall.
As he crossed the terrace, Lee was pleased to see that Gangl had placed two of his men behind a low wall that allowed them to cover both the castle’s main entryway and the stairway leading up from the front courtyard. The soldiers saluted the American officer as he walked past them into the Great Hall, where Lee found Gangl and Schrader waiting for him. Together, the three men set off to inspect the defenses. Then it was down to the cellars to look in on the VIPs and Schrader’s family, followed by a drawn-out strategy session among Lee, Gangl, and Schrader that evolved into a remarkably open discussion of the war and the uncertainties of the coming peace. It must have been a truly odd sight: the brash tanker from upstate New York and two highly decorated German officers, sitting around a table in the candlelit great hall of a medieval castle, speaking quietly of their experiences in a conflict that each man fervently hoped would end within hours.
Finally, talked out, the enemies-turned-allies went in search of places to catch a few hours’ sleep. Lee ended up in what had until recently been the SS guards’ dormitory on the first floor of the keep. Setting his helmet and M3 submachine gun on a bedside table, he picked one of the narrow beds at random and lay down on the bare mattress still wearing his boots and pistol belt. His foresight would soon be validated, for it would be a very short night.
CHAPTER 7
A CASTLE BESIEGED
JUST AFTER FOUR AM Jack Lee was jolted awake by the sudden banging of M1 Garands, the sharper crack of Kar-98s, and the mechanical chatter of a .30-caliber spitting out rounds in short, controlled bursts. Knowing instinctively that the rising crescendo of outgoing fire was coming from the gatehouse, Lee rolled off the bed, grabbed his helmet and M3, and ran from the room.
The young tanker raced down the hallway, across the Great Hall, and out the front door. As he reached the arched schlosshof gate leading from the terrace to the front courtyard, an MG-42 machine gun opened up from somewhere along the parallel ridgeline east of the castle, the weapon’s characteristic ripping sound[248] clearly audible above the outgoing fire and its tracers looking like an unbroken red stream as they arced across the ravine and ricocheted off the castle’s lower walls. Almost immediately the German weapon was answered by the slower, deeper thumping of Besotten Jenny’s .50-caliber Browning, and, as Lee ran the last few feet to the gatehouse, he could see the M2’s own tracers stabbing into the trees near where the MG-42 must be. The German weapon quickly fell silent, its two-man crew no doubt seeking shelter from the .50-cal.’s deadly stream of thumb-sized rounds.
The big Browning continued to bang away as Lee reached the inner set of gates and yanked open the small wooden door leading to the guard tower on the west side of the gatehouse. Using his red-lensed flashlight[249] for illumination, he pounded up a flight of circular stone stairs until he reached the first firing
loop, through which Sutton was methodically loosing rounds from his M1. To Lee’s surprise the infantryman was firing not across the ravine but down into it, aiming into the darkness to the west of the tower. In response to Lee’s shouted query, Sutton said that he’d spotted four troops who had apparently cut through the concertina wire—Waffen-SS he thought, though with only moonlight for illumination it was hard to be sure—dashing the thirty or forty feet upslope to the base of the foundation wall. They looked to be carrying grappling hooks and ropes but were spotted before they could put them to use. When he opened up on the enemy troops, Sutton said, they had scurried back downslope under covering fire from the woods and gone to ground.
Telling Sutton to save his ammo until he had a definite target, Lee continued up the circular stairway to the small door leading into the gatehouse’s cramped upper level. Inside he found Worsham and McHaley lying prone behind the now-quiet .30-caliber, surrounded by spent brass and wreathed by floating dust kicked up by the machine gun’s firing. As McHaley fed another belt of ammo into the weapon, he told Lee that when Sutton had started shooting at the interlopers, the west side of the gatehouse had almost immediately come under rifle and machine-pistol fire from troops hidden on the upper floor of the small inn on the schlossweg. He and Worsham had laid down suppressing fire, aiming at muzzle flashes and the occasional shadowy figure they could see silhouetted in the building’s windows. Despite their somewhat exposed position, they themselves hadn’t been directly targeted, and when the MG-42 had opened up, it seemed to be aimed at Sutton’s position, not at them. When Besotten Jenny’s .50-caliber had gotten into the act, McHaley said, the enemy fire had briefly shifted toward the tank but then died out completely.
Cautioning the two young soldiers to stay alert, Lee descended via the circular stairway in the guard tower on the eastern front corner of the gatehouse. Emerging back in the courtyard, Lee knocked gently on one of the inner gates and then eased it open enough to squeeze through into the covered entryway. As he moved inside, he found himself looking down the barrels of Petruchovich’s M1 and Pollock’s BAR; recognizing Lee, the infantrymen lowered their weapons and turned back toward Basse and Szymczyk, who were crouched on either side of the small door that pierced the right half of the outer gate. The door was open just enough to give a clear view of Besotten Jenny, and, as Lee moved up beside him, Basse whispered that Szymczyk and Rushford had just traded places when the shooting started. When the MG-42 opened up, Rushford had popped up in the commander’s hatch, swiveled the big Browning around on its rotating ring mount, and started banging out .50-caliber rounds. Spent brass littered the top of the tank’s turret, its rear deck, and the ground around it.
Conferring in whispers, Lee and Basse agreed that the enemy was obviously looking for a way into the schloss that didn’t require a direct assault down the narrow, sloping approach road toward the sturdy and well-defended gatehouse. Since the Germans on the castle’s upper levels hadn’t fired when the GIs in the gatehouse did, the attackers might not yet have a clear idea of the defenders’ numbers. Given that a full-scale attack wasn’t likely until the besiegers had determined how many men and what type of weapons they were facing, Lee told Basse to rotate the GIs up to the main building in pairs so they could eat and clean up. In the meantime, Lee said, he was going to check on the “castle Krauts.”
When he reached the schloss’s Great Hall he was surprised to find most of the French VIPs gathered in front of the room’s huge, ornate fireplace. Several large logs were burning fiercely, and, in reply to Lee’s pointed query about why they all weren’t in the cellars as he’d directed, Augusta Bruchlen responded simply that they’d been driven upstairs by the cold. They’d emerged—shivering, though all were wearing coats—just after Lee had raced down to the gatehouse, and despite the sounds of battle they’d decided that warmth was a more immediate concern than safety. On behalf of the others, Bruchlen asked Lee if they could remain in the Great Hall; he agreed, but only on the conditions that they stay away from the heavily curtained windows, that no one leave the building, and that they all immediately return to the cellars if the firing resumed. As he moved toward the stairway, Lee also cautioned them not to give in to the temptation to go back upstairs to the relative comfort of their rooms, pointing out that Sepp Gangl and his men were stationed on the keep’s upper floors and that their defensive firing in the event of an attack would almost certainly attract a hail of enemy gunfire.
Heading up to the first floor, Lee found Blechschmidt sitting on a chair to one side of the French doors leading out onto the broad veranda that stretched the width of the building’s south side. With crenellated, five-foot-high parapet walls, the structure offered a relatively safe perch from which to observe the ravine below. Using hand gestures and a few halting words of English, the young German officer explained that he’d stationed a man in the small, circular turret that projected a few feet over the wall at the veranda’s eastern corner, from where the soldier could overlook both the front courtyard and the base of the south foundation wall. Blechschmidt then pointed to a man crouched in the shadows in the opposite corner, from where he could keep on eye on the large rear courtyard and the foundation wall to the west.
Lee clapped the German lieutenant on the shoulder and then moved down the hallway toward the heavy wooden door that led from the main building into the keep. Ascending the narrow stone stairs from floor to floor, he found two Germans on each, one peering out a window on the north side and the other on the south. Gangl and Schrader were on the fourth floor, standing just outside the door to Wimmer’s former suite and looking out one of the two windows on the keep’s east side. Joining them, Lee realized they were keeping an eye on two soldiers who had obviously climbed out the window and down onto the roof of the Great Hall. Gangl explained that he’d directed the men to take up observation positions behind the crenellations on the roof’s far corners. Schrader added that two more men were similarly concealed on the roof of the keep.
Lee smiled his satisfaction with the officers’ preparations. Noticing that sunlight was beginning to peek through the windows of Wimmer’s former room, Lee checked his watch. Even as his mind registered the time—six AM—he heard the unmistakable rattle of an MP-40 coming from the floor directly below. Taking the stairs two at a time with the German officers close behind, Lee emerged on the third floor and immediately saw one of Gangl’s troops—obviously the one who’d fired the MP-40—curled on the floor in one of the south-facing rooms. The man lay directly beneath a shattered window, and incoming bullets were making the curtains dance before thudding into the chamber’s ornate wooden ceiling. Dropping to their knees, Lee and Gangl scrambled across the floor, grabbed the soldier by his ankles, and jerked him out into the relative safety of the hallway.
Propping the man against the wall, Gangl grilled him in rapid German, turning every few seconds to give Lee a rough translation. The soldier—a young Austrian-born private—had spotted a small group of Waffen-SS troopers approaching the castle from the direction of Hopfgarten. The intruders had already gotten past the concertina wire and were running up slope toward the base of the foundation wall when the young soldier—who’d been drafted into the Wehrmacht just weeks before and had no combat experience—slammed the window open and in seconds emptied an entire thirty-two-round magazine at them. His rash action had had immediate consequences: in addition to rifle and machine-pistol fire aimed at the keep, an MG-42 had come briefly to life, raking the entire south side of the schloss before being suppressed by .50-caliber fire from Rushford in Besotten Jenny. And though Lee didn’t know it at the time, the enemy machine-gun fire had come very close to eliminating one of the French VIPs: several rounds had slammed into a wall just inches from the head of Édouard Daladier, who was taking his customary early morning walk in the rear courtyard in defiance of Lee’s order that all the French former prisoners remain inside the castle.[250]
Despite the heated response the young Wehrmacht trooper’s act had e
licited, his fire had also apparently succeeded in prompting the Waffen-SS men to pull back into the woods at the bottom of the ravine. Reports from Blechschmidt’s two lookouts on the veranda and from the men on the keep’s roof confirmed that no attackers had made it to the base of the foundation wall. Gangl and Schrader both concurred with Lee’s assessment that the aborted assault was another attempt to probe the castle’s defenses rather than to breach them, but all three officers also agreed that the coming of a new day—and with it, the increasing potential for the arrival of a significant Allied relief force—might well prompt the enemy to launch an all-out attack without waiting to find an exploitable chink in the castle’s defenses.
Though the schloss’s defenders had thus far managed to deal with the enemy’s initial probes, Lee and the two German officers knew that a determined assault by what might well be several hundred battle-hardened Waffen-SS troops could have but one possible outcome. Only the timely arrival of a major relief force could guarantee the survival of Schloss Itter’s French VIPs and their American and German guardians. And though Lee and his newfound allies didn’t yet know it, the two forces dispatched to rescue them would both be significantly delayed—one by enemy action and the other by military bureaucracy.
–———–
BEFORE LEE AND his mixed armor-infantry, American-German rescue party left Kufstein the previous evening, the young tanker had been assured by Colonel George E. Lynch that the 2nd Battalion of his 142nd Infantry Regiment would be “right behind them.” As part of the 36th Infantry Division’s advance from the Inn River valley eastward toward Kitzbühel, 2nd Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Marvin J. Coyle’s four rifle companies—E, F, G, and H—and their supporting artillery and tank units were to strike southwest from Kufstein to Wörgl on the morning of May 5, and after securing the latter turn southeast and move down the Brixental Valley toward Hopfgarten.[251] The advance would take the 2nd Battalion right past the base of the ridge atop which Itter village sat, and Lynch was certain that Coyle and his men would be able to quickly relieve Lee and his troops. But, as so often happens in wartime, Lynch’s plans were derailed and the 2nd Battalion’s advance delayed by unforeseen circumstances.
The Last Battle Page 17
