Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  BY NIGHTFALL, THE FUHRER BEGLEIT BRIGADE had started slowly falling back from Tillet: The 761st and the 87th Infantry Division had won. Amid the ravaged craters of snow and burning equipment, no precise tally of the carnage on both sides was made. The engagement had been fought ridge by ridge, each separate tank and squad of infantry waging its own individual and often seemingly futile campaign but continuing to push on. Able Company of the 761st was credited, among other successes, with knocking out an 88mm antitank gun and a self-propelled 75mm; Dog Company with killing fifty enemy soldiers and capturing ten; Charlie Company with destroying multiple self-propelled guns and machine-gun emplacements. But though the Battle of Tillet stood as a crucial victory toward the objective of the St. Hubert–Houffalize road, it had been so savage and costly a fight for the Americans that its successful conclusion did not bring any real sense of triumph.

  When Leonard Smith, William McBurney, and Teddy Windsor returned to the American lines after three miles of running and crawling, they were met with faces almost as grim and utterly exhausted as their own. There was no break; surviving was the break they got. By the time Willie Devore's body was pulled from the remote forest clearing, the 761st's remaining M-4 Sherman tanks had moved on, fighting miles away.

  THE COMBAT ON THE GROUND for the enlisted men continued for three more bitter weeks—but for the commanders involved, after January 9 the Battle of the Bulge was essentially over. At his Aldershorst (“Eagle's Nest”) headquarters in Bavaria, Hitler tacitly acknowledged the ultimate inevitability of an Allied victory, ordering the withdrawal of the Sixth Panzer Army from the northern shoulder of the salient. The Fifth Panzer Army had already, the morning of the ninth, begun executing its own reluctantly given orders to retreat. Beaten back without securing their initial objectives, facing nightmarish supply problems, and taking casualties beside which the gruesome toll on the Americans paled, Hitler's leading generals saw the withdrawals as long overdue. General von Rundstedt and General von Manteuffel hoped, by pulling back to Germany, to preserve as many troops as possible for the decisive battle to be fought on the Russian front.

  By January 9, Patton was also certain of an American victory. Looking beyond the Bulge, he told his staff to start poring over “those German maps again” for the plans for the Saar–Siegfried Line Campaign he had had so suddenly to abandon in December.

  BUT FOR ALL THIS FUTURE PLANNING by the generals—and for all the crucial early command decisions like Eisenhower's immediate dispatch of the 7th and 10th Armored and Patton's lightning drive to the Ardennes to forestall disaster—the victory at the Battle of the Bulge belonged first and last to the enlisted men. American soldiers had died by the thousands holding off the initial German push in the north; thousands more had died in the furious fighting around Bastogne; and for nineteen straight days after January 9, Americans continued to take casualties in the unceasing cold.

  The Germans in the north and south held to a policy of strategic withdrawal—fighting and inflicting the highest possible number of casualties as they went, placing countless roadblocks and mines in roads and fields likely to be crossed by armor, stationing heavy artillery in the high grounds to exact a punishing toll. The 761st supported the 87th Infantry Division between January 10 and 13 in heavy fighting as it advanced to seize Bonnerue, Pironpre, St. Hubert, Amberloup, and Sprimont. On January 14, the 761st was ordered to attach to the 17th Airborne Division.

  Spearheading for the 17th Airborne—another young division that had suffered its own brutal baptism of fire on January 4 outside Bastogne—the 761st continued its northeastern drive toward Houffalize and St. Vith. With elements stopping only briefly for emergency maintenance, the battalion and the intrepid 17th Airborne fought from Wicourt to Vaux, Tavigny, Hautbellain (with Charlie Company there crossing briefly into Luxembourg, the fourth country in which its Shermans had seen combat), Gouvy, Thommen, and Wattermal. Leonard Smith, returning after Tillet to act as gunner with “Cool Stud”'s crew, no longer felt any sense of glory in the fight. Combat had been reduced to a set of habitual motions. Town blended into town and valley into valley; the only shift was from snow to a period of rain in which tanks and infantry alike bogged down.

  The Americans were winning, but many German troops escaped east into Germany, where they would have to be faced and fought in yet another campaign. On January 26, the 761st shifted back from the 17th Airborne Division to the 87th Infantry, driving ever farther to the northeast. On January 28, the Americans regained the initial line of the German jump-off point, thus officially ending the Ardennes campaign. Sixteen thousand Americans had been killed in the Ardennes fighting, and 60,000 wounded or captured.

  “THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE” WAS A TERM no American soldier would hear until long after the battle was over, a name that entered legend through Hollywood films and thousands of history books. For the enlisted men, the experience was one continuous fight that did not stop on January 28 but only pushed on farther toward Germany. After relieving elements of the 7th Armored Division at St. Vith, the 761st supported the 87th Infantry in attacking Schierbach, Huem, and Schonberg.

  Every night in bivouac, Leonard Smith thought of writing a letter to Willie Devore's family in South Carolina, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Devore's mother how Willie had died. He couldn't bring himself to put to words the moment of his best friend's death alone in a frozen field 4,000 miles from home. Smith did not understand himself just what had happened. It was possible the impact of the Tellermine that had so rocked the tank had been more severe in the driver's front compartment than in the turret. Through forty straight days of combat in the Saar, through the initial week of fighting in the Ardennes, Devore had developed a reputation as one of the battalion's best drivers. Smith couldn't get his mind around the question of why Willie had seemed so confused, had hesitated and died in terror in that clearing on that bitter cold day. He would never know the answer.

  9

  TASK FORCE RHINE

  You have fought gallantly and intelligently,

  and you have led all the way.

  —MAJOR GENERAL ANTHONY C. MCAULIFFE, MESSAGE TO THE

  COMBINED ATTACK TEAM OF THE 761ST TANK BATTALION

  AND 103RD INFANTRY DIVISION

  In February 1945, American soldiers everywhere in Europe were faced with a peculiar situation: Though they were winning the war, the Germans did not seem to be losing. The Allies clearly had the upper hand: German armies in the west would engage in no further offensive operations after the Ardennes, and the eastern front was collapsing as well under the weight of a massive Russian attack toward Berlin that began on January 12. The Russians, having absorbed a German blitz in 1941 and taken millions of casualties in continuous combat, had since the spring of 1944 been mounting a skilled and merciless counteroffensive that brought the Red Army to the doorstep of Germany itself.

  Even the most uninformed of American soldiers on the ground in western Europe had begun to realize, through their inexorable forward movement, that victory was at hand and that they were engaged in “mopping up” remaining pockets of resistance. But mopping up had perhaps never before occurred on such a grand scale, against such a determined foe, and at such a price. Hitler refused to concede defeat, ordering instead that the boundaries of the Reich be defended at all costs. The border of most importance to him was that of the Rhine.

  The Rhine River runs from southeast Switzerland to the North Sea in the Netherlands, passing for most of its 820-mile length inside the German border. Given the almost total disarray of the German forces in the west in the wake of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler's top generals argued that the best course of defense would be to withdraw the main body of their remaining troops to positions just behind the Rhine, using that natural barrier to aid in their guarding of Germany's prime industrial regions. But the Rhine had been a symbol of national identity and strength since the earliest-known German myths and legends, of a psychological importance to the German people something on the order o
f the Shenandoah River, Rocky Mountains, and Statue of Liberty combined—and Hitler, with his delusions of a historically determined destiny, insisted that the Rhine remain sacrosanct with his armies standing firm before it. This insistence, in turn, dictated that the “last killing ground in the west” would be that section of Germany to the west of the Rhine and east of the borders with the Netherlands, Brussels, Luxembourg, and France, a region known as the Rhineland.

  The 761st would play key roles with a dizzying number of units in this final campaign, serving with four different divisions in three different U.S. armies in the fifty days between the beginning of February and the first large-scale penetrations of the Rhine—a jockeying that was not unique to the battalion but rather reflected the ever-shifting agendas of and conflicts between the leading Allied generals. In the final months of the war, as victory became ever more certain, clashes in personality and ambition within the coalition emerged with such persistence that Eisenhower likened his role to “trying to arrange the blankets smoothly over several prima donnas in the same bed.” Eisenhower had chosen to pursue the “broad front” strategy he had favored ever since the breakout from Normandy, with the 21st British, 12th U.S., and 6th U.S. Army Groups attacking the Rhineland along a front measuring 450 miles; the generals involved argued bitterly against this, each one urging instead that a “single, full blooded thrust” be made in his own sector. The harshest conflict was, as usual, that between Patton (supported by Omar Bradley) and Montgomery.

  According to Eisenhower's final plan for the campaign, no Allied forces would cross the Rhine until all armies had gained the river's west bank. But the priority of troops, air support, and supplies in the first phase would be given to Montgomery's 21st British Army Group (with the Ninth U.S. Army attached)—both in the interest of holding together the ever-grumbling coalition, and because Montgomery's troops held the northernmost position, closest to Germany's critical Ruhr industrial region. Patton, with his Third Army holding the middle sector of the line along the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg, raged even more fiercely than he had the previous fall at the secondary role given to U.S. troops, wondering “if ever before in the history of war, a winning general had to plead to be allowed to keep on winning.” He intended to return to the “rock soup” tactics of his Lorraine campaign, moving forward whenever possible despite orders from the high command.

  THE 761ST HELD ITS POSITION with the 87th Infantry near Schonberg, Belgium, less than a mile from the German border, until the morning of February 3, 1945. Its forward drive had been halted by Eisenhower's decision to give priority to Montgomery and his 21st Army Group; on the third, the battalion received orders to turn and head northwest to Hermee, Belgium, there to attach to the 95th Infantry Division with the Ninth U.S. Army. This was the first time since their arrival in Normandy that the men would find themselves operating outside of Patton's command.

  The battalion rolled 140 miles north through the battle-torn landscape along narrow roads clogged with army traffic, setting up headquarters just across the border from Hermee in the town of Jabeek, Holland, near Sittard. William McBurney, though generally cautious, was by this point tattered, gunpowder-stained, and exhausted beyond care about the potential consequences of his actions: He cursed out and threatened to beat up the battalion's diminutive supply clerk, whom he suspected of selling off unit supplies to other Allied soldiers and local civilians. He successfully managed to obtain his first change of clothing in well over a month; the new uniform felt so good to him his only regret was that he hadn't done it sooner.

  Hearing McBurney describe this encounter, Leonard Smith cracked a smile for the first time in almost a month. McBurney owed his life to Smith's refusal to leave him at Tillet, and continued to try to lift his friend's spirits. Smith had always looked up to McBurney's maturity and intelligence; McBurney's ironic humor was one of the few things at this point that could alleviate his grief and sense of loss since the death of Willie Devore.

  The 761st's assignment in Holland was to relieve elements of the 21st British Army Group as they prepared for the Rhineland offensive scheduled to begin on February 23. A second, concomitant assignment was to train the sizable number of replacements who were, at long last, arriving.

  Replacements were a problem for both sides in the wake of the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans, with high losses in the Ardennes as well as staggering casualties against Russia, faced by far the worst manpower crisis: Entire German units were already being created of men previously disqualified from service because of stomach ulcers and hearing impairment; in January, Hitler ordered that all men up to forty-five years of age be shifted from industry into army roles. The Allies also faced dire shortages of troops, and finding replacements for specialized units like the armored forces, which normally required months of training, posed a unique problem—a problem of even greater severity for the 761st.

  The Armored Force Training School had continued to train replacement tankers throughout the fighting in Europe, but none of these men were African American. The segregated Army had no choice but to put out a call among African American soldiers in service units for volunteers to fight in tanks. It was amazed at the high rate of response. Like Smith, McBurney, and McNeil when they first signed up years before, many of these volunteers were aching for the chance to fight for their country and willingly took reductions in rank to join the 761st. Christopher Navarre, who at the age of twenty-four had risen in the 590th Ambulance Company to become one of the youngest first sergeants in the Army, resigned his status to become a private in the battalion because he had found his previous work deeply troubling: On many occasions, white soldiers who were being ferried to safety by the black medics objected to being handled by African Americans. Navarre joined the 761st to fight and to avoid having to endure the insults of soldiers whose lives he was risking his own life to save.

  What the fresh replacements found, when they arrived in Jabeek, was far from the gung-ho unit of old. None of the battalion's veterans had any remaining illusions about the glories of war. The 761st had only twenty operational M-4 Shermans coming out of the Bulge, and William McBurney and the others were at a low point, unable to see any end to the conflict.

  Though exhausted, the men nonetheless summoned the inner strength to rise to their work, helping the overworked maintenance teams to service and repair their vehicles; training replacements in the mechanics of driving, loading, and bracketing targets; and fighting with remarkable courage when called on to support each other and the units with which they served. They were to perform with extraordinary distinction, in particular in the operation known as “Task Force Rhine.”

  EVEN THE MOST BATTLE-WEARY battalion members agreed that there was one bright spot in the otherwise dreary month of February—the return to the unit, on February 17, of an officer who had recently recovered from extensive injuries suffered on November 8: Lt. Col. Paul L. Bates. Bates, with his pick of assignments, had chosen to come back to the 761st. Bates's presence did not materially change conditions for the men, who had been on the line now for more than a hundred straight days; but the return of the unit commander who had shown them the highest degree of respect and honor from the time of their earliest training in the States through their first day of battle did considerably lift morale. Preston McNeil felt a spark of life return to his platoon for the grueling tasks ahead.

  ON FEBRUARY 20, THE 761ST received orders to shift yet again and attach to the 79th Infantry Division, in Corps reserve with the Ninth U.S. Army. Preparations for Montgomery's “Operation Grenade” attack from Holland into the Rhineland were intensifying. On February 23, Baker Company, with the greatest number of operational vehicles, was the first unit of the 761st to move back into combat, spearheading for elements of the 79th Infantry in an attack on End, Holland. This assault was an effort to divert enemy attention from the main thrust of the Ninth Army's offensive to their south; the Shermans nonetheless encountered pockets of enemy resistance. Baker, soon to be joined
by elements of Able and Dog, participated in an ongoing series of attacks to cut an enemy supply line in the vicinity of Milich, and on March 3 crossed into Germany, entering between Gangelt and Gilrath to assault the town of Schwannenberg. On March 7, the 761st minus Charlie Company worked with the 79th Reconnaissance troop to lead an attack on Kipshoven and Munchen Gladbach, twenty miles inside the Reich.

  Charlie Company—generally the most battered and besieged of the 761st's units—had received a stroke of grace toward the end of February and the beginning of March, a rest of sorts: orders to move back to Mheer, Holland, to continue working with replacements as a provisional training company with its own firing and driving range. Mheer was a quiet town, and though the men worked full days, William McBurney caught his first glimpse in months of life beyond the demands of war. He began to have the feeling that there might, after all, be an end in sight. The bitter weather had finally broken and turned mild. The Dutch citizens spoke perfect English. McBurney and Leonard Smith found themselves billeted with townspeople who treated them with genuine warmth, welcoming them simply as Americans—honoring them, moreover, as liberators from the German occupation forces.

  For Smith, such simple kindnesses were a welcome and pleasant surprise after the treatment he had experienced at the hands of some of the American soldiers. The men of the company joked together in the motor pool and on the firing range, and at night got together to play cards and tell stories. Smith ever so slowly began to relax and join in. Something had changed in him, he couldn't say just what. The dreams of heroic exploits that had defined his every waking thought since childhood had been stripped away with Devore's death. In Mheer, that lost hope for adventure gradually came to be replaced by the concrete present. Smith found solace in fleeting moments of shared humor around the campfire and in the presence of his friends, and otherwise resigned himself to the daily grind.