Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  Our regiment fought its way down to the bridge area. The demolition platoon fought as infantry in front of the Regimental CP which followed the lead battalion. The houses came right to the edge of the sidewalk. The sidewalks were maybe three feet wide and then there was a gutter. We fought our way down the street lying on our bellies working from building to building. As we were fighting down those streets, every door we passed would crack open and the Dutch would slide us out a big ole chunk of cheese, a chunk of black bread, or a glass of gin. From every door we passed they would feed us. Later that night the citizens of Eindhoven fed us a big meal just like a smorgasbord.6

  There were three small bridges on the Eindhoven Canal about a block apart on the northern outskirts of Eindhoven. We captured them, then attacked right down the gut of Eindhoven and saved the main bridge that went over the Wilhelmina Canal. The Wilhelmina Canal ran right along the outskirts of Eindhoven.

  We took that main bridge intact and everything around it. We found and dismantled the charges on the bridges. The bridges had been wired for demolition but fortunately they had not been manned. We took the city of Eindhoven within thirty-six hours. We had her, boy, locked down knuckles and bolts and were working on clearing the highway.

  We then waited there for the British Second Army to move on up. It was probably down the road another fifteen or twenty miles. They opened a corridor and came on up. They reached Eindhoven on the second day and entered on the third. I had never seen anything like it. The British had trucks, called lorries, loaded with ammunition and gasoline and everything just bumper-to-bumper up and down those roads. That same day Kraut planes flew in there and hit one of them, which caused a chain reaction of explosions.

  After the British reached Eindhoven, they turned the 101st loose and sent it right on up along the highways to push the Krauts back and establish a stronghold. Our division was supposed to clear the highway up to Veghel for a width of about two and a half miles on both sides, depending upon the terrain. Meanwhile they left my demolition platoon in Eindhoven to guard the three bridges. Lieutenant Edward Haley had been assigned to my section to replace Lieutenant Mellen but he was pulled away the first day to fill in for other officers who were killed. I never had an officer over my section after that. Neither did I see much of my platoon leader, Shrabel Williams, throughout Holland. He was also needed elsewhere.

  Regimental Headquarters Company had a heavy weapons platoon that we could draw from depending on the mission assigned. In Holland, they gave me one bazooka team to hold the bridge with. The company also gave Myers and Davidson a bazooka team each and all three of us were issued thirty-caliber machine guns.

  So I was left in Eindhoven along with the two other demolition-saboteur sticks to guard three bridges. Eight or ten German tanks were off about a hundred and fifty yards north of us in a heavily wooded area where we could see them but they would not fire at us. We had knocked out so many tanks that they were pretty well depleted in that area. They just waited for the opportunity to come on in. We just sat there watching them. The rest of the division had moved further on up the highway to secure the small bridges and root out the Krauts that were close enough to threaten the road from either side. As the British end moved on up, why they would just occupy all the space the paratroopers had taken. We stayed on the bridges for two more days.

  APPLES AND PEARS

  We had very little Allied bombing accompanying our jump. We had some P-38s fly escort but none of the livestock was killed like in Normandy. We were pretty poorly supplied with food. I had not taken any K rations in on this jump either. I still thought I would find some food in there.

  Our three bridges were out in the country and all we had to eat was what we could get off of the orchards. They had a lot of apples and pears but they were not ripe. Every time we would pass a tree we would pick us a piece of fruit, eat it and see if it was any different than what we had been living off for the last two or three days. It got to where every time someone handed us a pear or an apple to eat we could identify which tree it came off of because we had tried it a dozen times.

  GERMAN BOMBING

  8:45 P.M., September 19, 1944

  Well, we got beat up pretty bad down there. Our platoon had a lieutenant named Eugene Dance. He and I were sitting there talking when here came four Messerschmitts right up the canal.

  He said, “Look, that plane’s on fire.” He could see parachute flares coming out of it. Of course they looked like little balls of fire.

  I said, “He isn’t on fire. He’s going to give us a light up job here. He’s going to light this place up like Christmas. Them three tailing him will bomb these bridges.” So I said, “Let’s get out of here.” I had Paul Zemedia and “Ink” Ellefson with a bazooka up on the second floor. I hollered at the guys and told them to come on out of those houses.

  This lieutenant said, “Everybody stay where you are! We’ve got orders to guard these bridges against those tanks.”

  I said, “Lieutenant, you don’t believe for a minute those tanks are going to come in under their own bombs!”

  He said, “We’ve got orders to hold these bridges. That’s what we are going to do.”

  I again hollered back at the boys, “You better get out of there, if you want out! They are going to bomb us here in about a minute.”

  He said, “I’ll court-martial any man in the morning who leaves his position.”

  I kind of grinned, “You won’t be here in the morning if you stay on these bridges.” So I yelled, “All you guys who want out of there come on out now! I’m leaving. We’ll get out of here about a block from this place and find cover.” So we did.

  The lieutenant went on down to the second bridge where Myers’s section was. Davidson also came over. Bill Myers and Jim Davidson were trying to get him to quit and withdraw to some shelter. Dance was sticking to his ground. Those bombs that came in blew up Myers’s bridge and killed both of those sergeants.7

  It also busted up a lot of other guys. Tom Young and Steve Kovacs had been standing there at the same time. Tom Young was thrown up against a building. He was later evacuated back to the United States.8

  Steve later told me, “Jake, do you remember how they always told you to take care of your rifle? Don’t get separated from your instrument. Keep it within reach. Eat with it. Sleep with it.”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “Jake, when that bomb dropped down there, it picked me up and blew me across the street through a plate glass window and over to the wall. It rattled me. I kind of lost consciousness, but when I came to my senses, I guess thirty to forty-five seconds later, I still had that M1 in my hand!”

  I said, “No kidding.”

  He said, “Jake, I swear it is the truth. I held onto that thing all the time the bomb blew me across the street through the plate glass window and up against the wall!”

  The other bridges remained standing. Dance was only with us one day on that bridge before they needed him somewhere else. I later asked Top Kick Miller where that lieutenant came from. He told me, “He transferred in from the Rangers.”

  I said, “You’d better send him back there before he gets more of our men killed.”9

  DEAD MAN’S COFFEE

  Sergeant Jim Davidson was a real character. He had been a coal miner and an alcoholic before he came in the army. He and his wife had a lot of problems. They had two or three children and lived in the same town that her mother and dad did. When Jim would go out on those big drunks, she would get mad, pack up the clothes and kids and go home. They had been going through this for quite a while and then Jim tried to quit drinking. He worked for three or four hours overtime there one day. Well, he came home and she was gone. He guessed she evidently thought that he was out on another big binge.

  He became infuriated to think that she had run off and taken the kids with her so he started going all through the house. All her dress clothes were all hanging in the closet. He ran into the room, got his knife and cut and slas
hed everything that was hanging there. Then he remembered that there was a quart of buttermilk in the ice box. He thought, “I might have missed something that she could salvage.” He went back in and got that quart of buttermilk and poured it all over them. Then he started cleaning and dressing up to go out and party. When he stepped out, there was a note on the front door that read, “Jim, I’m going to shop a little bit and do this and that and I’ll be back at such and such a time.”

  He said, “It took me nearly a year to replace her clothes.”

  Well, I liked coffee very much and so did Jim Davidson. In a day’s K rations they had these little bitty packets of instant coffee for breakfast. For lunch the rations had a pack of instant lemonade and some more crap. Then for supper, it had cocoa mix. So it amounted that a person only received one cup of coffee a day.

  They came in white tin foil that was flat and square. One could carry them real easily in the top of his boot along the side of the calf of the leg and ankle. It would keep them dry and that way they would always be easy to get to even if wounded.

  After a pretty hot firefight when we could move around, Davidson and I would start looking for dead paratroopers. We would grab our trench knives and rip their bootlaces open to get at their coffee. If a guy was not yet dead but it was very obvious he was dying, we would take his coffee, too. So Jim and I had coffee all the time. This one cup a day stuff was ridiculous. We had plenty of coffee and some to spare.

  We would sit down to make us a cup of coffee and everybody would be trying to drink that cocoa or lemonade but could not swallow it. We would jokingly ask, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  They would answer, “We don’t want any of that damn coffee.” They knew where we were getting it.

  Ole Jim did not know how hot a canteen cup could get. That cup would burn his tongue. We would be sitting around there drinking that coffee with everybody watching us and he would give a blow on that coffee and then say, “Lordy, Lordy! This is good coffee.”

  Years later, one of the guys asked me what was the most disappointing thing that ever happened to me or affected me the most during the war.

  I said, “I guess it was that stinking bombing there at Eindhoven.”

  He asked, “You weren’t even touched, were you?”

  I said, “No, I wasn’t, not by the bomb. It was when we went to help the guys who had been hit. There was Sergeant Davidson out there without any arms and legs, just elbows and so forth. I ran over to him to get his coffee but I never could find his legs. They had been blown out of the area. I imagine that was the most disappointing thing that ever happened to me. I’ll bet he had two hundred of those instant coffee packets in his boots.”

  AMBUSH ON THE WAY TO VEGHEL10

  September 22, 1944

  After guarding the bridges for about five days, our division sent orders for us to move on up and join our original outfit since the British had secured the city. They told us to come on up and we did.

  We had been very successful with our mission. Although we had only lost two men killed, we had a lot busted up. I was the only section sergeant left out of the three sections. Davidson and Myers had both been killed by the same bomb. Many of those wounded were corporals. The new platoon sergeant, Earl Boegerhausen, had survived only to be wounded later. We really did not have much sergeant material left. The division farmed the rest of the platoon out through Regimental Headquarters Company. They told me to requisition a truck to bring the platoon on up, so I picked out a German truck that had been left behind. Lieutenant Haley had been left in charge of a rear detail and also left with us.11

  About 9:00 in the morning we loaded up and drove on up the highway. We anticipated that we would probably contact the division at Veghel, which was about twenty-five or thirty miles to the north. This was winter, the latter part of September. It was an open truck and cold as ever.12

  The national drink in Holland is gin. Every Dutch man in Eindhoven was so happy to be liberated that he would give a paratrooper any amount of gin he wanted and they also had schnapps and cognac. Every door we came to someone would hand us a bottle. We were all drinking and in various stages of getting drunk. We were just happy and singing and drinking and living it up. We passed British troops all along the road. We just continued driving along with no fear of enemy resistance or attack.

  The 101st had taken Veghel and secured it. Then they got orders to push on up the road to join the 82nd. The 82nd was supposed to have jumped in right close to Veghel and clear the road on up to Nijmegen where they would take the bridges and waterways and then continue north toward the city of Arnhem. This they did.

  When the 101st moved up, the British took over what they left but all the British did was drink tea! They sat there making tea all day long and would not fight. Unknown to us, those Germans had come back in from the north and pushed the English out and retook Veghel. The British line ended only a few miles short of the town and Veghel was a pretty good-sized town. The main thoroughfare was about four or five blocks long.

  I guess those Krauts did not mind letting a German truck come up that highway but they finally figured out it was a truck load of drunk paratroopers. They let us drive right up into the middle of that town, then they opened up on us from every direction. Boy, they fired at us from every window and door.13

  There was one boy in our platoon named Winsor “Ink” Ellefson, who did not drink or gamble. He was a sightseer. He would go visit libraries and monuments and all that. He was not drinking but was in a sock-type sleeping bag that zipped clear up to his chin. I do not know where he stole it because it was not issued to paratroopers. Anyway, he was sitting right beside me. We had the side seats running the full length of the bed with a banister on it.

  When the Krauts fired into us why, I grabbed the side rail and threw myself over into the gutter. Boy, we bailed out of that truck. We were right downtown. I then thought the safest place in the world was right in that building with them. I just raked the building in front of me with my Thompson submachine gun then picked out a door that I thought I could crash through to get in with the Germans. By the time I made one arc with that Tommy gun, Ink Ellefson was down in that gutter with me, still in that sack, and he was tearing it apart, boy, just trying to get out it.

  The sidewalks were not very wide and the Krauts were firing out of every window and door along there. I thought all I could do was rake that wall and go through the first opening I could find. After I raked it one time and backed them off from the window, I jumped right in there with them. From then on we just fought from house to house, building to building. We just pushed and pushed and fought right up that street.

  In door-to-door street fighting we would usually just throw in a hand grenade, then whip in there and kill everything as quickly as we could. We had to crawl in there on our hands and knees just spraying. Those hand grenades would stir up so much smoke and dust in those old houses, just like an Oklahoma sandstorm. We could not see. We very rarely had two men go in together like the army does today. It was usually just one guy at a time. A guy could do it pretty quick with a Thompson submachine gun. Then the next guys would move up. There were anywhere from one or two on up to six Germans in a room. The most I ran into personally were three. They were more frightened of us. They feared paratroopers. After Normandy they called us the “Big Pocket Butchers.”

  Every time that I would clean out a bunch, the other guys would close up on me. Another or two would hop on up ahead and we would just leap-frog on up through town. We used hand signals an awful lot. We were in close proximity to one another. We would not crowd up enough to where the Germans could ever get us with a grenade. If I was having trouble in the house I was in, then another group would sweep around me and go in it. We were attacking both sides of the street at once, moving as a group. If a bunch were killed, then one or two of our guys would go over there and fill in. We worked our way toward the edge of town.

  I entered one building where furniture was made and
stuff and found a hen’s nest with six eggs in it. Boy, eggs were hard to come by over there. I thought, “I don’t know how in the world I’ll ever get out of here with these eggs intact but I’m not going to leave them. I’m going to take them with me.”

  I put those suckers in my thigh pockets and grabbed an old newspaper or magazine and stuffed it in for padding. Every time I had to hit the ground, I would roll over on one side. I got clear out of that town and into this coverage and only broke one of those eggs. I got out of there with five good eggs!

  We wanted to escape out the north end of town to the west. When we reached the edge of town an hour and a half later, the Germans had about ten tanks on that side of town. We then started fighting these tanks and knocking them out as soon as they started working on us. TNT was ideal for blowing off tracks. A grenade would also take a tank’s track off. If you get one track off, that is all you need. That is all we wanted to do was immobilize them. You got someone to set the TNT or grenade down on the track then someone else could kill the tank with a flamethrower. I guess we knocked out three or four of those tanks.14

  Three of us had to run about forty yards to get to a defiladed area, a big drainage ditch there. There was brush out there about midway and the three of us made it to it. These tanks did not know what we were doing. When they saw three men charge out of a building still firing, they were not very anxious to go in where we might hit them with a grenade. Those German tanks were not going to come out of that town except if immediately attacked.