Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  The combined team spread out to take up firing positions on the southern perimeter. The tanks battered at the town continuously for more than an hour, while foot soldiers of the 409th Infantry Regiment fought their way through the high grounds on either side. Reisdorf fell to this joint assault; the team next assaulted and successfully destroyed a series of enemy pillboxes northeast of town.

  Charlie's actions along the Niederschlettenbach–Erlenbach road had forestalled any possibility of relief for the now-embattled Germans. Continuing on past Reisdorf, the task force split into two columns—one headed along the narrow unpaved road toward Birkenhardt, the other along a well-paved road toward Bollenborn. The 409th's foot soldiers riding astride the tanks looked watchfully in every direction around them. The tankers and infantry had been instructed to fire at any- and everything that moved along the way: They were advancing in conjunction with a push to their left (west) by the 42nd Infantry Division and to their right (east) by the 36th, and a halt by any of these units would greatly endanger the others.

  The column advancing on Birkenhardt was stopped at the northeast edge of town by a heavy barrage of antitank fire. Lt. Colonel Bates pulled them back from this potentially suicidal charge and called for preparatory artillery. When communications with the American forward artillery observer were disrupted, the 761st's Russell C. Geist moved up in a light tank, directly exposing himself to incoming enemy artillery to adjust and call back coordinates for the American guns. The Shermans then rolled through, firing at all possible machine-gun and antitank positions—but the artillery had done its work well, leaving the town little more than scattered piles of rubble. The infantry fanned out through the smoke-filled streets to solidify their hold.

  The column moving along the better-paved road to Bollenborn had met with obstacle after obstacle. The Germans, anticipating a major armored push along this route, had positioned a series of dragon's teeth and an extended roadblock, which combat engineers moved forward to clear. A concealed 75mm gun on the outskirts of Bollenborn opened fire as the team was preparing to resume its forward thrust—destroying two of the 761st's Shermans (though both crews managed to evacuate safely). The remainder of the Bollenborn team withdrew to join the already progressing Birkendhardt column. The combined team's immediate objective was the town of Silz, located in the middle of some of the toughest Siegfried defenses in their sector.

  Night was falling as the task force rolled on. Bates had been told that his team would meet up at Silz with elements of the 10th Armored Division, a stalwart of Patton's Third Army, advancing from the opposite side of town. But Bates's forward scouts were unable to catch any sign of the division's tanks. The 10th Armored had in fact—owing to a communications error not uncommon in wartime—never been given any such orders.

  All Lieutenant Colonel Bates knew was that his team had unexpectedly found itself without support in the center of the Siegfried Line. He conferred with Baker Company's 1st Lt. Harold Gary and Sgt. Ervin Latimore, both of whom wanted to go forward. In the situation as they understood it, it was imperative for the success of all units on the line that they continue their advance.

  Night fighting in Sherman tanks was an intense, surreal experience. Sherman battalions generally used night for maintenance work and sleep. Approaching Silz, the 761st's drivers bulled their way forward through the darkness without benefit of headlights, which would only have made them targets, desperately scanning the ground for potentially ruinous mines and bomb craters. The tank commander, gunner, and bow gunner anxiously searched for their next targets, helped only by stray flares and the ghastly uncertain illumination of incoming artillery or whatever it was they themselves had last struck and set on fire. As they rolled forward into Silz, Lieutenant Gary and Sergeant Latimore dealt with the situation by unleashing ammunition in every direction at once and so changing night to day.

  The tanks and infantry sped forward in the eerie, surging light of countless fires, with the foot soldiers joining in, shooting steadily into the ditches and hills beside the road. The tankers for the most part could hear only the rattle of their engines, the boom of incoming shells, the crash of their own cannon fire, and the endlessly barked coordinates on their headsets, but the unceasing cascade of noise gave them a sense of the violence occurring outside the tanks.

  Just beyond Silz, tank fire set off an enemy ammunition dump; shells continued exploding in the inferno for hours after they had passed. The task force continued its race east toward the town of Munchweiler. Leading the attack, Sergeant Latimore encountered a vast retreating column of enemy trucks, towed guns, and horse-drawn artillery. Latimore and his lead tanks had taken this column by surprise: Determined to eliminate the enemy guns before they could engage the American column in a firefight, Latimore's Sherman tanks charged forward. What followed was a virtual slaughter, with the Germans managing to get off only scattered return fire.

  The 761st's tanks pushed directly into the German troops, reducing the column to a series of burning metal hulks. Terrified German soldiers ran toward the Americans, pleading to surrender. Sergeant Latimore was wounded in the fray, but refused to be evacuated.

  Farther on, the tanks were met with a heavy barrage of antitank fire. Latimore located the German emplacements by their gun flashes against the darkness, directing his team to overrun the positions. The tanks sprayed the posts with machine-gun fire; the enemy crews fled.

  Lieutenant Colonel Bates had been knocked off his feet earlier in the attack by the jolt from an 88mm artillery shell. Warren Crecy dismounted his tank amid a continuous rain of incoming fire and ran forward to carry Bates to safety.

  THE TASK FORCE CONTINUED EAST from Munchweiler, reaching the outskirts of its final objective of Klingenmunster shortly before 2 A.M. The tanks and infantry were pushed back by intense fire from permanent German artillery and machine-gun installations around the city. The American team had outrun its artillery support, but the men had no intention of stopping and chose to make do. The 761st's tanks and assault guns regrouped and took up positions in the countryside surrounding Klingenmunster. They unleashed a punishing barrage until fires raged throughout the city.

  The tanks and infantry then moved forward again, meeting this time with only sporadic mortar and sniper fire. The burning city had been reduced to an empty, almost apocalyptic landscape. As they advanced, the German defenders broke ranks and ran, retreating into the night; those few resisters were killed in brief, bloody engagements. Klingenmunster was fully cleared by 4:35 A.M. The 761st and the 103rd Division had successfully completed their assignment: They had blasted a path in their sector leading through some of the most entrenched defenses of the Siegfried Line to the open Rhine plains beyond.

  THE 761ST MOVED EAST as far as Insheim, taking numerous German POWs—finding that many of the German soldiers, aware that the vaunted Siegfried had been breached, were now quite willing prisoners. Back on the road between Silz and Munchweiler, American units advancing along the battalion's path were shocked at the level of violence in its wake: So dense was the wreckage that before the rear elements of the task force column could pass, a tank 'dozer had to be brought forward to push the still-smoking vehicles and countless bodies of horses and German soldiers off the sides of the road. In the final tally, between March 20 and 23, the 761st was credited with clearing seven towns; destroying more than 400 vehicles, 80 heavy weapons, and thousands of machine guns, mortars, and rifles; as well as inflicting over 4,000 casualties against soldiers of fourteen different German divisions.

  The punishment taken by American units and the ground gained as they fought all along the Seventh Army's front succeeded in forming one edge of a pincer around German Army Group G. Closing the pincer from the north, in the space of just ten days, Patton's Third Army claimed an estimated 37,000 enemy soldiers killed or wounded, captured 81,692 prisoners of war, and was firmly established along the banks of the Rhine. In the 103rd Infantry Division's zone, elements of the Seventh Army's 14th Armored Division pu
shed forward through the break Task Force Rhine had created (advancing as well through a parallel break in the 36th Division's zone) and prepared to cross over.

  10

  THE RIVER

  You will wait there for the Russians.

  —FINAL ORDERS, 761ST TANK BATTALION

  MAY 5, 1945

  Leonard Smith caught his first glimpse of the Rhine River on March 30, 1945, near the battle-scarred city of Oppenheim, Germany, looking out the top hatch of his M-4 Sherman tank. It was, as perhaps it was bound to be, an anticlimactic moment. To reach this mythic gateway into the heart of Hitler's Third Reich, Smith had logged well over a thousand combat miles, had watched several of the best men he would ever meet lose their lives, and had killed so many German soldiers that he'd lost track. The Rhine, by this point, had cost so much in spirit and blood that for the twenty-year-old it had no meaning or value; it was just another river. Smith was simply trying to survive.

  The territory the battalion's tanks traversed along the west bank of the Rhine in their road march from Insheim had been captured by American troops one week before. The unit's veterans nevertheless looked out their hatches with the cautious stance they termed “half-in, half out, mostly in”: They had learned that anything, from snipers to mines to stray mortar and artillery teams, was possible at any time.

  The battalion had unexpectedly received its orders two days before to attach to yet another division for another campaign, its seventh division for its fourth campaign in five months. This was surely to be the last; but then, the men had thought so on almost every prior occasion. Their instructions were to travel north on the thirtieth to Oppenheim, there to cross the Rhine and roll on to Langenselbold, where they would attach to the 71st Infantry Division. The 71st Infantry, which had fought two divisions west of the 103rd in the Seventh Army's recent assault on the Siegfried Line, was itself on the move that day to Langenselbold, with orders to transfer from the Seventh to the Third U.S. Army. The 761st was thus to complete the war with a reunion of sorts, a return to Patton's command, fighting in the general direction that had in one way or another defined their every waking hour since the first artillery blasts in the predawn darkness of November 8 in France: east.

  The battalion's new orders had again cut short its maintenance period; maintenance crews, working around the clock with inadequate supplies, finagled elaborate deals for replacement parts. The tanks were a patchwork of spare machinery that somehow, someway, most of the time, kept moving. Most of the men were still wearing their uniforms of months before, and could not remember the last time they'd had a chance to bathe. Based on their prior experiences of unit transfer, they could expect on their arrival to be viewed by the majority of this latest infantry division with suspicion and unease. Though they knew to prepare themselves, knew to expect this initial attitude toward the fact that they were African American, it had never entirely lost its power to surprise and sting.

  But in all of this, the men had come to feel a peculiar, contrary sort of pride, an even stronger sense of identity the more ragged, rejected, and uprooted they became: They were, as they often wryly repeated among themselves, indeed a “bastard battalion.”

  THE UNIT'S MASSIVE ARMORED VEHICLES crossed the wide span of the Rhine on a heavy pontoon bridge previously erected by Third Army engineers. This crossing had been secured in secrecy on the night of March 22 by the 5th Infantry Division—an action that was, as Patton and Bradley both later gleefully announced, the first assault crossing of the Rhine in modern times. The Third Army had beaten Montgomery's troops across the river by the space of a single day. Patton himself first traversed the river on March 24, commemorating the occasion with his usual flair by stopping in the middle of the bridge at Nierstein to “take a piss in the Rhine. I have been looking forward to this for a long time.”

  Had there been any slight doubt remaining as to the inevitable outcome of the war in Europe, it should at this late date have disappeared. By the time the 761st reached its banks a week later, the supposedly impenetrable Rhine had been bridged along over two hundred miles of its length by numerous divisions of six Allied armies, and American armored spearheads had smashed their way to positions as far east as Fulda and Kassel, two hundred miles from Berlin. To the east, elements of the Russian army had liberated Poland and were building up arms and men for their direct assault on Germany's capital city. But Hitler, increasingly removed from reality in his Berlin bunker, kept waiting for a miracle.

  With the Führer's fixed refusal to surrender, the final contours of battle were set: The war would continue until American and British forces moving east met up with Russian troops moving west somewhere in Germany. Eisenhower's plan of action called for Montgomery's First Canadian and Second British Armies to push toward Bremen and Hamburg; the Ninth and First U.S. Armies to fight in concert to encircle the Ruhr industrial region and then drive east; and the First French and elements of the Seventh U.S. Armies to push east toward Nuremberg and south to meet up with Allied forces battling through northern Italy. Patton's Third U.S. Army was to push as far east as possible across Germany toward Austria and Czechoslovakia.

  THE 761ST TANK BATTALION reached the 71st Infantry Division's headquarters at Langenselbold, outside of Frankfurt, on April 1. Its road march of 134 miles from Insheim had for the most part been uneventful, though Able Company's Floyd Dade encountered a small patch of resistance he found comical, if only in retrospect, when his tank became mired in the mud. Dade, looking out to see a fence fifty yards away, decided to venture forth to see if he could gather some of its posts to brace his spinning tracks; his crewmates refused to go with him. Muttering to himself, the ever-industrious Dade placed one post under the right-side tracks and went back for another. On this second trip, a concealed German 88mm antitank gun announced its presence—one shot rocketed directly over his head, a second falling short. Remembering that the Germans bracketed targets like clockwork, he dove away just as a third shell crashed where he'd been standing. The tank itself, fortunately, was beyond range; Dade crawled back and waited with his crew until an ordnance unit came to retrieve them.

  On their arrival at Langenselbold, the battalion's letter companies were split up, with Able, Baker, and Charlie assigned, respectively, to the 71st Division's 5th, 14th, and 66th Infantry Regiments, and Dog assigned to the 71st Reconnaissance troop. Their initial orders were to eliminate a stubborn pocket of resistance in the woods near Leisenwald, Waldenburg, and Budingen, composed of elements of the crack 6th SS Mountain Division Nord.

  Almost utterly surrounded by American forces, the SS troops still refused to surrender. On April 1 and 2, the 761st's tanks and accompanying infantry spread out over a wide area to complete the unit's encirclement. They faced a furious series of attempts to break out all along the pocket's perimeter. Able moved through the woods to circle Waldenburg, and spearheaded for the infantry in taking the towns of Buches and Budingen; Dog Company aided the 71st Reconnaissance Troop several miles away in capturing two armored supply dumps near Lake Rotenbach; the 761st's Assault Gun Platoon supported elements of the 66th Regiment at Speilberg, Streitburg, and Leisenwald. Outside of Leisenwald, several of the battalion's assault gun tanks were saved by the actions of a private in the 71st—who spotted four German soldiers with Panzerfausts and ran across an open field under enemy fire to warn the tanks of their location.

  Baker Company supported the 14th Infantry Regiment in advancing north across a ravine in the face of small-arms fire. Infantry Pfc. Irving Boone was amazed to see one of Baker's officers dismount to guide the unit's tanks with hand signals in the midst of heavy firing. Farther on, in a desperate firefight to stop an SS convoy on the Nieder Mockstadt–Ober Mockstadt road, two of Baker's spearhead tanks were hit by artillery fire crossing an open field. Both crews abandoned their Shermans. Later, the driver of the second tank reentered his smoking vehicle to back it out of the line of fire so that it could be repaired for future use.

  Charlie Company took up strategi
c positions along the southern and eastern edges of the pocket to forestall the escape of SS troops. Charlie's tanks waited patiently just beyond a thick woods. A group of German soldiers attempting to break out had been cut off from behind by elements of the 71st Infantry: Sighting the imposing line of Sherman tanks, they realized that they'd be slaughtered if they tried to advance. The Germans were stuck just inside the forest, but they gave no sign of willingness to surrender. Pop Gates ordered his tanks to fire into the woods; still the Germans refused to come out. Then Gates had an idea to end the standoff: His tanks had been firing low, but he told Leonard Smith and his other gunners to raise their fire to explode the treetops, unleashing a fury of shrapnel and falling branches. After only a few minutes of this treatment the Germans finally emerged, waving white cloths and calling out, “Kamaraden.”

  What followed as the Germans walked toward the tanks spoke to one of the 761st's more curious experiences on the battlefields of Europe. Some of the troops they'd faced had seemed utterly terrified of black soldiers (a fear that was due, they had learned from civilians, to the savage reputation of French Senegalese soldiers fighting in World War I; a common question asked by German soldiers relieving fellow soldiers in the trenches was “Are there any Africans opposite?”). Gates had ordered his tank crews to stay buttoned up inside their vehicles until the SS troops reached them, then to direct them back to surrender to the 71st Division's white infantrymen.

  One of Charlie's tankers mistakenly opened his hatch when the troops were still a short distance away. The Germans saw him and called out, “Schwarze Soldaten!” running and stumbling back toward the woods. After a warning volley, the Germans realized they had no choice. One of the captured officers, whose men had encountered the 761st's widely dispersed tanks in every direction for miles around, asked a bemused Pop Gates, “How many Negro Panzer divisions are there?”