Brothers In Arms

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  BY APRIL 4, AFTER THREE DAYS of intense fighting, the pocket of holdouts from the 6th SS Mountain Division had almost all been killed or captured. The battalion and the 71st Infantry received orders to head toward Fulda and Meiningen, mopping up any forces encountered on the way.

  For Leonard Smith, looking cautiously out the top hatch of “Cool Stud,” the landscape all around contained a paradox. The battalion had entered combat during the bleakest of Novembers and fought its way through brutal winter months into a dreary March. But here, just when they were entering into the ultimate heart and source of every anguish they'd endured, there flourished a sheer beauty and variousness of nature the likes of which Smith had never seen. The sky each day was tinctured a different blue, and valleys drenched with emerald green turned to fields of countless frail flowers and burgeoning woods threaded by cool streams. This, somehow, was “enemy” country. Even the generally taciturn William McBurney was moved by the breathtaking sights.

  The direction in which they were moving was, as ever, east; by April 7, they had already crossed the north-south centerline through Germany. In these final weeks of war, the battalion's tanks were more dispersed than they had been in any prior campaign: Their initial mission with the 71st Infantry Division was to secure the wide swath of territory left behind the advancing 11th Armored Division (which had matured from its baptism of fire near Bastogne into an accomplished unit). Patton, believing that the swiftest advance would bring the swiftest end to the war, had ordered his armored divisions simply to smash forward as far and fast as possible without concern for securing territory or flanks. In their wake, the armored spearheads left a kind of no-man's-land where the unexpected was to be expected even more than usual. This was the terrain the tanks of the 761st, often moving by ones and twos along with groups of infantry, were fanning out to clear. Everywhere, quiet mild towns alternated unpredictably with scattered snipers and larger pockets of determined holdouts. On the road near Meiningen, the 761st's Sgt. Jonathan Hall faced the disturbing spectacle of a wounded SS officer slashing his own throat with a razor, gasping and choking to death yards from Hall's tank, rather than endure surrender.

  For the gentle-hearted Preston McNeil, the mystery and strangeness of war was evident even more in Germany's civilian population than in the landscape. The battalion's tanks, following their daily assigned trajectories, moved through countless small towns never knowing their precise locations and only rarely learning their names; tank crews often caught only the slightest glimpse because of their ongoing wariness of snipers. These were “cow towns,” small collections of neat, squat stone houses with firewood stacked along their outer walls. In one of the first such towns his tank helped to clear, Preston McNeil stopped in the middle of the market square for a break. The streets seemed utterly deserted. The infantry had already been house to house; McNeil enjoyed the chance to stretch, and he leaned comfortably against the side of his tank as he ate his rations.

  When he finished, he threw his food scraps into what seemed to be a garbage pile. He turned back when a quick movement caught his eye—a frightened, hollow-cheeked child was pulling out the food that he'd just tossed aside. It disturbed McNeil to see a child going through garbage while he himself had food. He called to the boy to come over; the boy started backing away until McNeil held out more food. The boy took it and ran off. Gradually, a small group emerged from the seemingly deserted houses and shops. They'd been scared into hiding, it seemed, as much by the rumor of savage “Schwarze Soldaten” as by the recent fighting; most of them had never before seen anybody with dark skin.

  In town after town, McNeil found the same pattern, an initial fear and suspicion replaced by a startling and genuine warmth, glimpses of a vast, struggling humanity where he had expected to find only enemies. It made the reasons behind the carnage he had seen, and the horrors he would soon witness, an even greater and more troubling mystery.

  THE MEMBERS OF THE 761ST had begun to sense that the end could not be too long in coming. With the exception of the few days of violence surrounding Task Force Rhine, it had been some time since the unit had encountered anything like the fire of its initiation to combat in France or the well-armored opposition in the Ardennes. The farther the men pushed into Germany, the more rapid seemed their advance, the farther apart the ongoing pockets of resistance, and the greater the number of willing prisoners they took. The soldiers they captured were nothing like those they had earlier faced, but rather a testament to just how far the Reich had fallen. Leonard Smith was amazed to see increasingly haphazard units of old men and boys so young that many of them didn't shave yet.

  On April 11, the battalion's separate units and the 71st Infantry began closing in on the medieval town of Coburg, a scant fifty miles from the eastern border with Czechoslovakia. On Coburg's outskirts, they encountered the stiffest resistance they had faced in days from scattered machine-gun nests, Panzerfausts, mortar fire, and a period of harrassment by Luftwaffe planes. The 11th Armored Division had moved east of the town the day before; the 71st Infantry, 761st, and Combat Command B of the 11th Armored fought their way to a complete encirclement of Coburg, and the mayor finally surrendered. Dog Company's light tanks and a group of infantry were ordered forward the following day to clear Coburg of snipers, shooting out a number of upper-level windows.

  That afternoon, the 761st enjoyed a rare break in the now-secure town—in a comfort aided by their commandeering of all the fresh chicken and eggs they could find, several feather beds, and a vast quantity of cognac. Preston McNeil admonished his men to save some of the cognac for later, then sought out Charlie Company and spent time catching up with his friends Smith and McBurney, whom he hadn't seen for almost two weeks. But like most of their rests, this one proved shorter than hoped or expected: The men were soon ordered to advance to the southeast.

  On April 14, they attacked the town of Kulmbach, fifteen miles north of the city of Bayreuth. Working closely together, the Shermans fired on targets signaled by the infantry as the 71st Infantry spread out within the town—fortunately discovering no hidden snipers.

  Just outside of Kulmbach, Cpl. Fred Brown's tank of Baker Company stopped for a moment. As Brown was climbing up to reenter the turret, a sudden burst from a concealed enemy 88mm exploded directly overhead. Brown, a Bronx native who had been with the battalion since its earliest days, later died of his injuries.

  The 66th Infantry Regiment, supported by Charlie Company, was moving to attack an airfield and aeronautical school in a wooded area north of Bayreuth. Charlie's tanks fired on a series of machine-gun nests positioned across a field while the infantry, with extraordinary courage, crossed the open ground by alternately running and diving to their stomachs amid a hail of German bullets.

  In the thick of the firing, Charlie Company's 1st Sgt. William Burroughs dismounted his tank to locate a hidden machine-gun position that was devastating the infantry. Burroughs, a replacement who had given up rank to join the unit and who had earned special mention in Task Force Rhine, was shot above his left eye. Evacuated to an army hospital, Burroughs survived but lost his eye.

  The 761st and the 71st Infantry advanced to the outskirts of Bayreuth, where fanatical holdouts had previously refused to consider a surrender ultimatum. Together with elements of the 71st and 65th Infantry Divisions and 11th Armored Division, the 761st shelled the city continuously for two days. The shattered city's defenders finally surrendered on April 16.

  NEWS TRAVELS STRANGELY through a battalion—often with amazing rapidity, but occasionally, in a group as dispersed as the 761st was at this time, by fits and starts. For much of the battalion, the news of President Franklin Roosevelt's death on April 12 was delayed. Able Company's Walter Lewis was rolling along a road in the second half of April, past a large group of German POWs being shepherded by American infantrymen. A few of the GIs spotted Lewis's fifty-gallon canister of raw cognac from Coburg, which he'd strapped to the rear of his Sherman. They asked Lewis for a taste, and he told them
to jump on and help themselves. One of the GIs said, “Too bad about Roosevelt, isn't it?” This was the first Lewis had heard of the President's fatal cerebral hemorrhage.

  Quite by accident, one of the first Americans in Europe to learn of Roosevelt's death had been the Third Army's commander: In bed at his headquarters, Patton had just tuned his radio to the BBC to set his watch when the news broke. Patton immediately woke Bradley and Eisenhower, who happened to be staying with him; the three had “quite a discussion as to what might happen,” but agreed that the tragedy was unlikely to have any marked effect on Allied battle plans.

  Hitler, hearing the news that night inside his Berlin bunker, reached a different conclusion. This was the miracle he had long been expecting: This great event would somehow compel the Americans to withdraw from the war, the British would follow, and the Third Reich would be saved. Hitler ordered renewed resistance, delusional in his overestimation of the number of German troops remaining.

  There was no possibility that any of the Allied armies would withdraw. The Red Army had entered Germany and by April 11 was approximately thirty miles from Berlin. Montgomery's forces were simultaneously clearing northern Holland and heading east toward Bremen. Elements of the First and Ninth U.S. Armies had sealed off the Ruhr pocket and were successfully subduing the 325,000 German troops contained within; other elements were pushing east, with the 2nd Armored Division reaching the Elbe River at a point fifty-five miles from Berlin. By April 12, the Third Army's advance teams had traversed most of Germany's width, with the 4th Armored driving past Jena and the 6th Armored capturing a bridge over the Weisse-Elster River.

  For some time, the real question had been not what would happen in Europe but rather how it would happen—more specifically, how far the American and British forces would push in their advance toward the Russians. At February's Yalta conference, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin had agreed on rough spheres of influence, with the city of Berlin being granted to Stalin. But by early April, the Red Army's advance had been slower than expected due to ongoing resistance, while the Americans and British were gaining ground faster than they'd planned. Churchill urged Eisenhower to continue east as far as possible and attempt to beat the Russians to Berlin. In light of the Cold War, the justification behind and ramifications of Eisenhower's ultimate decision will forever be debated by historians.

  Eisenhower based his decision in part on a belief that the Russians had already paid for the city in lives: Eight out of every ten German soldiers killed in the war had been killed by members of the Red Army in the brutal battles of the eastern front, and the Russians had taken more casualties than all other Allied countries combined. Further, Omar Bradley had cautioned Eisenhower that subduing the entrenched defenders of the city could cost as many as 100,000 American casualties (it did, in fact, eventually cost 300,000 Russians killed or wounded); and there was no guarantee that the United States would not afterward be forced to give it back. Eisenhower was also concerned about the possible existence of a “National Redoubt,” a secret cache of arms somewhere in southern Germany and northern Austria where intelligence reports indicated that fanatical holdouts might wage an ongoing guerrilla war.

  The Supreme Allied Commander ordered a stop line for the Allied forces roughly following the contours of the Elbe and Mulde Rivers. The Third Army was instructed to halt its eastward advance toward Czechoslovakia and turn south to take out the rumored National Redoubt.

  THE SHIFT SEVERAL DEGREES FARTHER to the south of their axis of advance did not have an immediate, appreciable impact on the enlisted men's day-to-day existence. The 761st continued rolling rapidly forward day after day, firing in support of the 71st Infantry wherever resistance was encountered. Smith's tank was most often assigned to ride beside McBurney's; the two friends became ever closer, looking forward to bivouacking at night, when they could kick back, rib each other, and talk about what they were going to do when the war was over. They weren't planning future careers. After five months on the front, their goals were simpler and more concrete: specific lists of hot foods that didn't come from C-ration cans, hot showers whenever they wanted them, and the freedom simply to sit still without worrying about snipers and artillery fire.

  On April 17, as the Third Army began its reorienation to the south, the 71st Infantry Division and 761st were shifted from command of the army's XII Corps to XX Corps and ordered to push south-southeast from Bayreuth toward the city of Regensburg. The 11th Armored's spearheads had remained with XII Corps; in their southward attack, the 761st and infantry were now both claiming and mopping up new territory as they went. They advanced rapidly down the autobahn toward Amberg.

  The badly damaged Luftwaffe had been using the pavement along the highway's centerline as a landing and takeoff strip: The battalion's Shermans shot down a number of planes and destroyed landing lights as they went, while firing on enemy soldiers in the adjacent woods. Fanning out to claim a number of small towns, they were soon spread over such a wide area and moving so quickly that supplies became a problem. The men were forced even more than usual to supplement their meager rations by living off the land. They discovered, as did many hungry GIs throughout Germany, that a grenade strategically dropped in a lake or stream would serve up large quantities of fish. By this point, anything beat their C- and K-rations staple.

  On April 18, near the town of Neuhaus, the Able Company tank commanded by S. Sgt. Johnnie Stevens was called to support a group of infantrymen pinned down by a machine-gun emplacement on a hill. Stevens left his Sherman and crawled fifty yards forward to scout out the enemy position. He looked up to see that the machine-gun nest was much closer than he'd realized, in fact just yards away. There was no way he'd make it back to the tank unseen. He took a deep breath, jumped up, and charged directly at the emplacement, throwing his grenades. A nearby infantry lieutenant, who had watched Stevens's solitary advance in disbelief, immediately leapt up and ordered his men to charge along with him. Stevens's actions, as well as the covering fire provided by his crew and the support of the infantry lieutenant, allowed the Americans to take the position without another American casualty; nine Germans were killed and thirty-six captured.

  Charlie Company worked closely with the 66th Infantry Regiment in assaulting Neuhaus and clearing portions of the surrounding Veldensteiner Forest. Hitler's propaganda minister, Hermann Goering, had a castle on a high bluff just beyond Neuhaus. Several of Charlie's crew members, including Christopher Navarre, headed back after piecemeal fighting in the surrounding woods to tour the castle. The Germans had already removed most of Goering's treasures, but Navarre looked in wonderment at a series of secret passageways, an elevator leading to the dining room, and the marbled walls of the huge master bath.

  The Allied tanks and infantry continued their forward push—claiming, against scattered resistance, the towns of Auerbach, Schwandorf, Burglengenfeld, Regenstauf, Kurn, Pirkensee, and Zeitlern. Moving through the astonishing beauty of the Sulzbach Valley, they were fast approaching their objective of Regensburg, at the meeting point of the Regen and Danube Rivers. The Germans had heavily fortified the city and refused a demand that they surrender it. The 65th Infantry Division advanced to take up positions beside the 71st Infantry and the 761st. The battalion's light and medium tanks, 81mm mortars, and 105mm assault guns worked alongside division artillery to rain fire on the city's inhabitants. With no secure crossing into the city, their role was confined to a peripheral, supporting one. Infantrymen crossed the river on assault boats and spread throughout the streets in fierce house-to-house combat. Regensburg finally surrendered on April 26.

  THE BATTALION'S TANKS CROSSED THE BRIDGE at Regensburg over the opaque brown waters of the Danube and rapidly advanced, their operations now almost entirely confined to mopping up. Early on the morning of May 2, Able Company tanks were the first to reach the Inn River—the boundary line, in their sector, between Germany and Austria. Able fired across at enemy positions on the opposite side, destroying two machine-gu
n nests and clearing the way for the infantry to advance over the bridge. The bridge, however, was too weak to hold the weight of the M-4 Shermans. Able's members waited impatiently in the town of Ering for two days before receiving permission to move upriver to the dam at Egelfing. The battalion's other companies were already there, anxiously waiting for the go-ahead to proceed across. If the forced move east had been the sole defining mission of their lives through some of the war's most brutal moments, then here, when they could all feel that the end was close, the men were not about to put up with being stopped: They thoroughly intended to go east as far as they possibly could. At 7:30 A.M. on May 4, Charlie Company's Shermans became the first of the 761st to start across the Inn River.

  Egelfing was not the safest of bridges. The span of the tanks' tracks was wider than the road across the dam and there were no guardrails; it was a considerable drop to the river's icy waters below. Pop Gates instructed tank commanders and drivers to stay inside their vehicles and the rest to walk behind—but if Leonard Smith had come this far in a Sherman, he was determined to go all the way. Gates could only smile and shake his head, glad that Smith, though more somber and guarded than before, still had some of that willfulness and high-spiritedness Gates had always admired even when it drove him to distraction.

  THE TANKS ALMOST IMMEDIATELY encountered scattered fire as they fanned out and pushed forward to support the advancing infantry. In a small woods that was most likely situated in the vicinity of Lambach and Wels, Leonard Smith's “Cool Stud” tank and William McBurney's tank accompanied a squad of infantry. The foot soldiers encountered intense fire from an enemy machine-gun position in a clearing up ahead. The infantry commander called back for the two Shermans to eliminate it. Advancing into the field, McBurney saw a long fence with an enemy team firing from a machine-gun nest beside a high gate. He called coordinates to his gunner, who took out the emplacement with a high-explosive blast.