Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  [John “Dinty” Mohr remembered:23]

  We were fighting since the 18th of December. On Christmas day we needed supplies and they couldn’t get through with planes or anything. A few of our guys had gone somewhere to a special school, and on Christmas day our planes come in and dropped a lot of supplies. These fellas that went on special duty to England, I dreamed that night that one of these guys, Jake McNiece, was singing and coming through the barracks in England, and the very next day there he was.

  …That very day I seen him and 3 or 4 other guys that came to where we were in a little town where we had moved to after being in the Battle of the Bulge, Luzery near Bastogne. I thought that was something, dreaming of him and then he come.

  QUARTERS

  We had run those panels and CRN-4 sets all day long that first day. When it started getting dark, we had not even looked around for some place to stay. We found a big three-story chateau near there. We walked in and there was a major in charge of it. Those guys were not even paratroopers. There were a group of people who had been cut off in their retreat through Bastogne.

  So I told this major, “I’ve got eighteen men here with me and I’ve got some real special equipment here that’s got to be protected from the weather and artillery. I want to stay here tonight until I have time tomorrow to locate us some quarters.”

  He said, “You can’t stay here. We’re loaded.”

  I said, “You’re not that loaded. We can stay in the basement. You have no one in the basement. That’s where we will stay.”

  He said, “You ain’t staying here.”

  I did not have anything on me for rank and he asked, “Who are you?”

  I said, “I am Private McNiece, 506th Regimental Headquarters Company. I have a lot of pathfinding equipment here. That’s why you’ve been seeing all these damn planes coming in here today. I’ve got to protect it.”24

  He said, “Well, you can’t stay here.”

  I said, “I’ll tell you one thing. You get on that damn phone and call down and talk to McAuliffe and tell him that Private McNiece is here with the Pathfinders requesting quarters and that you don’t have room for him. I’m going to stay here but I don’t know what you’re going to do. Me and my men are going to stay here in this house tonight, I guarantee you.”

  He jumped on that phone and called down to headquarters, then he told me, “Well, you can stay here. That’s what they told me down at Division Headquarters.”

  I knew the basement was the safest place. It also had those big furnaces with heat rolling out of them. Those Germans were bombing and shelling all over the 101st area. We were not in there thirty minutes when those lousy-ass Germans came in there and hit that chateau roof with bombs. Down came the ceiling and dust. They blew the top two floors just about clear off, I mean just shredded it. It looked like the whole house was caving in on us and we were going to be buried alive. It was so scary that it made the hair stand up on my head. So we immediately scrambled to get out of there. It was so smoky and dusty that we could hardly see. There was just one little passage in which we could get out. Agnew found it and hollered. So we all assembled over there on his voice.

  There was a shell casing laying about four feet in front of this opening. I looked at that thing and thought, “That damn thing could go off any minute.” I said, “You guys follow me. We are going to get over that and get our asses out of here and down.”

  I made a run and dived over that shell casing. I will bet I slid twenty feet. Of course when I did, the others started crawling out of there.

  The next day when we got to checking things out, it had never gone off. It was what the Germans called a butterfly bomb. They would load those big casings up with grenades. Those grenades would have a ring on them. They would slide them on there like a string of beads. After the bomb would eject off the airplane, it would blow those rods out and scatter them like a covey of quail. That activated them. They were anti-personnel bombs. We would only have about five seconds to get under cover. They used them a whole lot on us.

  After we escaped from the basement, I told the guys, “Let’s get the hell out of here. The only thing to do evidently is get just as close to that German line of perimeter defense as we can.”

  It was still at night, sometime after nine o’clock. We took off from there. I started hunting around the perimeter to see if I could find any place where we could get in out of that weather. We came up on a little ole house. That thing was not a hundred yards from the main line of German resistance. So we moved in there, shook it down and checked it for booby traps. We did not find a thing.25

  Like most of those houses up there, it had a half basement. The yard had twelve chickens and a cow, a horse and an area that was walled off full of rutabagas. There was a feather mattress down there on the rutabagas. So I walked over there and got to feeling around through it for booby traps and mines. I felt this big aluminum tank about the size of a big platter and about four inches deep and it was full of water. It was a hot water box. I never had seen a metal one before. On checking it further I felt that the water in it was still warm. So I thought, “Shit, there has been someone here very recently.” So I put Majewski26 out on the edge of the building facing the lines. I also put someone else on the other end. The rest of us went in and went to bed.

  We could neither come nor go from that house to our position by daylight. So we would go out early while it was still dark. Everybody was going to man those machines. Then we would come back at dark. So early the next morning, I killed three of those chickens and skinned them out and put them in a pot to cook. We found some flour and ole George Blain was a good cook. He took that flour and whatever else he could find and started making everybody hotcakes.

  This old farm house was as rickety as shit. The Germans were still bombing and shelling all through there. This plaster would fall down from the ceiling into that pancake batter. George would just go ahead and fry it right up. There was not any way to prevent it. Someone was eating it and bit into one of those big chunks of plaster and asked, “What in the shit is this?”

  “It’s plaster.”

  He said, “Well, I’m not going to eat this damn stuff.”

  George told him, “Well, there’s half a dozen guys right beside you that would be glad to get it. If you don’t like it, why just pass it on.”

  He was cooking breakfast while I was fixing those chickens. The next thing that I knew it was time to get out of there. Then I heard ole George yakking over at the door. He spoke good French and Belgian. The two languages are just about alike. If you can converse in one, you can converse in the other. When I heard all this yak, yak, yak going on I walked over. There were two women and a boy about fourteen standing there. George was talking to them.

  I asked, “Who are they?”

  He said, “They own this house.”

  I asked, “What do they want?”

  He said, “They want to come in.”

  I said, “Ask them where they were last night.”

  They had a friend about two hundred yards from us who had a big deep wine cellar. They would go in there at night to get out of this shelling and bombing.

  I said, “George, you tell them women that they can come in here if they want to. You tell them this. We have three of their chickens cooking. We will share and share alike on that. We will not kill any more of their chickens.” Chickens were a very valuable piece of property in war. I said, “Tell them that they won’t be molested. They will be treated like ladies and we will not kill the boy. But tell them if they step a foot in this room they’re here to stay for the duration. They can’t leave tonight and go back up to this other cellar.”

  George said, “Aw hell, Jake. Do you think I’m going to tell them that?”

  I asked, “Why not? It’s the truth.”

  He said, “You’re just being too damn good to them. You’re going to let them eat some of their chickens. You ain’t going to rape them. You ain’t going to kill the kid and they ar
e your prisoners. They can’t leave once they come in here.”

  I said, “George, give it a little bit of thought. Do you want them to come in here with us all day and then tonight take off and go up there two hundred yards and tell them Krauts that all the pathfinders of this outfit that are bringing in all these supplies were in that farmhouse down there? Why, shit. Those Krauts would sacrifice two thousand men just to get rid of the nineteen of us. If we were Germans, them gals would be fucked before they could get through that front door and that kid would be killed. You know that is what the Germans did. They killed them kids. They won’t feed them. I’m giving them the very best deal I can.”

  George said, “Well, I guess you are, Jake. It does not sound like it’s very flattering.”

  I said, “It’s the only right deal. I think.”

  So he told them and they said they would love to. They came right in there and lived with us for another five or six days until the armor started coming in.27

  The civilians had evacuated the whole town. Of course they could not take their food and stuff with them. So every one of these units had canned food, a few potatoes, a few onions, and this and that.

  I had told those women that we would not kill any more of their chickens and that I would have meat there that night. That second day, I was just running through apartments picking up jellies and fruits and vegetables. I found a hog in one of those apartments uptown. They were three-story apartments, two above ground and one below. That hog must have weighed three hundred pounds. I shot him. Then I hung him up on the stairwell, gutted him and skinned him out, cut his head off and just kicked it all down the stairs. I saved the heart and the liver to eat that day. I put that heart and liver in a pillow slipper. I wrapped the hog up in a sheet and had another guy carry it back just as quick as it got dark.

  When I went in our house, the first thing I smelled was chicken cooking. I said, “Okay, who killed the chickens? All of you know what we agreed to this morning. Who killed the chickens?”

  They said, “Nobody.”

  I said, “Somebody killed chickens because I can smell them cooking.”

  They said, “Well, we did not kill any chickens. Them girls took them bones and beat them up. They’ve made a soup.”

  I said, “That’s something I’m going to have to see to believe.”

  I counted my chickens and still had nine left. Sure enough they had cooked up the bones. They put some potatoes and some green vegetables in the soup. I do not know whether they had them in the house or what. That snow was waist deep to an Indian. They had chopped up some of those rutabagas. That turned out to be the best soup that I ever tasted in my life. I learned that the marrow would cook out and that gristle would dissolve. I told my wife about it shortly after we were married and we have never thrown out the carcass of a turkey since. It was the best soup that I have ever eaten.

  We had borrowed a fifty-caliber machine gun from somewhere. I do not know how we got ahold of it but we used it for our defense. Max was on guard one night with that fifty caliber not a hundred yards from the German lines. All I wanted him to do was kill any Germans who moved forward. He was not on air raid patrol. The Germans still bombed us every night. Well, he opened up on those planes with his fifty caliber and shot up ten belts. He had gotten to be an impulsive guy.

  ATTACK ON THE FIELD HOSPITAL

  2200 Hours, December 19, 1944

  The rest of my demolition platoon fought out on the line. They had been there since the eighteenth. The Germans had a complete perimeter defense around the town of Bastogne. My division got so low on people and ammunition, they would just take up a defensive position anywhere out there. If the Germans hit heavy in one spot and a paratrooper lost his weapon, then he would just go find another and take up another position out there on that defensive line.

  After I had gone into the Pathfinder service they had promoted Keith Carpenter from corporal to sergeant of my section. They were up there on the front lines one day and Keith told Trigger Gann to do something. Trigger refused to do it. Keith told him, “Yeah, you’re going to do it. That’s our assignment and we’ve got to take care of it. If you don’t take care of your end of it, you may get thirty more people killed.”

  Trigger said, “Well I’m not going to do it.”

  Keith said, “Well, you will do it. I am the sergeant in charge of you and oversee your activities. I replaced McNiece and that’s the way McNiece would have done it.”

  Well, about that time Trigger got up there in that hole and the Germans dropped artillery within two feet of the edge of it. Well, he just went ape. There were a lot of boys that were going ape during the fighting at Bastogne. All anyone could do was send them down to the hospital and give them some pills and rest. The medics would take their guns away and confine the guys as hostile. Well as soon as the medics could get them back on their feet they would give them their guns and of course send them back to their officers. So Keith sent Trigger down there. He was not down there thirty minutes I suppose until the whole thing was machine-gunned.

  The Germans had seven divisions attacking the 101st at Bastogne. They had three regular infantry divisions, the 5th Parachute Division, and three armored divisions. They drove right straight in to the hospital before anyone could stop them. They went in there and machine-gunned the whole thing. They loaded the prisoners up like cord wood in their trucks and hauled them out of there. Doc Yeary28 happened to be in the hospital at that time. The Germans took him clear up into Russia. He remained a prisoner of war clear through to the end of the war.

  After the end of the war, Captain Browny came in and said, “Jake, I am getting a lot of letters from Trigger Gann. He said he survived that mess there in Bastogne as a prisoner of war. He’s got a terrible complex about this whole thing. Would you mind writing him a letter. You were about as close to Trigger as anyone. Would you mind writing him a letter? I’ll get it through. I’ll do the censoring.”

  I said, “Okay.” So I wrote Trigger a nice letter. I told him he did not need to have a guilt complex about it. Some people were out there under so much strain and stress that they will break, no matter how big, how tough or how rough they are. It will finally break your mind. Well, I tried to console him and then I received a letter right back.

  He wrote, “Jake, I guess that I got shell-shocked. I thought I was shell-shocked there when Carpenter was putting me in position. It looked like sure death. It really touched me off. I just went crazy. Then I got in the hospital. They took my guns away from me and my knives. They put me in there and kind of talked to me and gave me some medication. I was ready to go back to the unit. I told them, ‘I just flipped. I’m okay now. Can I have my guns and stuff?’ Right then the Germans attacked me in that hospital.”

  He said, “They came in and machine-gunned everything in that hospital. Then they loaded us on those trucks just like cord wood—just body after body after body. If you were laying there with your head in a pool of blood or in somebody’s guts and you tried to raise up, they would just get you with a gun butt and knock you right back in it. As we pulled out of course it had snowed chin deep to a gnome. We all ended up there in zero degree weather. As we rolled along, if a guy was dead or it was pretty apparent that he was dying, we just rolled him on through the stack and threw him out as we drove along.

  Boy, I had just thought I was shell-shocked. The shell-shock really hit me then. I had just reached the breaking point up there at the front lines but I’ve come out of it pretty good.”

  BARANOWSKI’S DOG

  Somebody gave Lieutenant Peter Baranowski a dog back in England. He went down to the riggers and had them make a parachute harness for him. He taught that dog to jump and it liked it. It would race him out the door. It jumped into Normandy and Holland. Everywhere someone saw Baranowski, that dog was with him. It followed at his heels. After they had been in Bastogne for two or three days it went nuts and they had to shoot it. That dog had survived two combat jumps but could not take it in B
astogne. That showed how bad it was up there.

  In the paratroops if a man began to hesitate or became unreliable in combat to where he gained a reputation, we would not fool with him any more. We would just send him back to the Repo Depot [Replacement Depot]. I do not think we had anybody who we had to send back but a couple came close.

  THE FIGHT FOR FOY

  We got together down on Tom Young’s ranch about fifty years after the war. One of the girls told Browny, “Browny, get rid of that garbage,” and was sort of rough about it.

  He said, “I will not. Give that to Private McNiece. Let him take care of it.”

  She said, “You get that garbage and you get it out of here.”

  He said, “Oh no, get McNiece or one of his boys to take care of it.”

  I told her, “He is the most bull-headed man that ever stepped on the range. He was shot four times over there. The last time he was shot, they took a 30.06 bullet out of him and he still wouldn’t transfer.”

  A 30.06 was an American bullet but I do not imagine anyone wanted to kill him. Everyone liked him. He was in a firefight and either took a ricochet or somebody mistook him for a German.

  It happened when he led the attack on that little village of Foy, right there on the outskirts of Bastogne. It was really a pretty important town with a lot of high ground. The Americans wanted it for an observation post. From there we could look right down in the Germans’ shirt pocket. The Krauts knew it was important too. Brown had been given command of a line company. After Brown rooted them out, in about an hour the Krauts came back in and kicked their asses out. His company would go back in there and take it, then they would drive him out, then he would go in and take it, then they would drive him out again.29

  At some point someone decided that they would establish a command post there. So they had a bunch of my demolition boys clear all the booby traps, mines, and stuff out of this one building. One of them found a dead Kraut in the snow. I guess when he was hit he reached out for the ground to break his fall. He just landed in that position and froze stiff as a board with his arm reaching out.