War Stories III

by Oliver North

  The Germans usually stuck a machine gun right in a corner of the field opposite the hedgerow we were trying to get through, over, or around. The machine gun field of fire would cover the entire open field between them and us. And they knew we’d try to cross that field.

  I developed a way of dealing with that. As we got ready to cross a field toward the next hedgerow, I’d call up a tank and have it stick its gun through the hedge and blast the corners of the hedgerow on the far side of the field. I would do that each time, regardless of whether we saw anything there or not. More often than not, the tank rounds would take out a machine gun that would have cut us down.

  Eventually some bright soldier developed what we called the “Dozer-Tank”—it was a Sherman tank equipped with a bulldozer blade. With a couple of those we could punch holes right through the hedgerows for both the tanks and the infantrymen to go through.

  When we got to the base of Hill 192, I deployed my platoon in a skirmish line and hunkered down while the forward observers called in fire. The barrage must have lasted an hour—with 105s, 155s and 8-inch guns blasting the hillside—over 20,000 rounds I’m told. But as soon as it stopped and we launched the attack, the German machine guns and mortars opened up on us. I had two killed, and two wounded. Some of the other units had ten or fifteen killed and a whole lot more wounded. We ended up taking Hill 192 by brute force.

  Between Hill 192 and the center of St. Lô there was about eight kilometers of hedgerows and little villages. We had to take every hedgerow—and every house on the way into St. Lô—one at a time and the Germans fought back at every one of them. I lost one of my sergeants, a squad leader, when he got shot after climbing up on a hedgerow to shoot down on some Germans digging in on the other side.

  As we got closer to St. Lô, the Germans were employing mines in the edges of the narrow roads to take out our tanks. The only way to deal with that problem is to have infantry out in front of the tanks to check for mines. As we approached one of these little villages outside of St. Lô I was walking point in front of a “buttoned up” Sherman—meaning all his hatches were closed—when I spotted a German Mark IV Panzer up ahead. I ran back to our lead tank to point out the German tank and was right in front of him when an enormous explosion went off just over my head. My helmet went flying and so did I. The gunner, who hadn’t seen me—or the German tank I was trying to point out—had fired the main gun at a sniper up ahead. I can’t believe it didn’t blow out my eardrums. I couldn’t hear for a while.

  It took us eight days to take St. Lô—and by the time we got control of the city, it was in ruins. We all knew then that kicking the Germans out of France was going to be a very tough fight.

  St. Lô was liberated on 18 July—the day after Rommel was severely wounded by an Allied air attack near Caen. Though Bradley wanted to press on, his 1st Army had suffered some 40,000 casualties in two weeks of combat. He had no choice but to pause the offensive while reinforcements, replacements, and fresh supplies were sent forward to the spent troops.

  Some in Hitler’s entourage claimed that the hiatus was proof that the Normandy landings could be contained and defeated. But others, including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, saw the Allied build-up at Normandy and the Red Army “Bagration” offensive on the Vistula east of Warsaw for what they were—the beginning of the end. He and a handful of senior officers decided it was time for a military coup—after which they would sue for peace.

  On 20 July, von Stauffenberg planted a small bomb beneath the conference room table at Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia. The blast wounded but failed to kill the Führer—who launched an immediate purge against any and all suspected of being part of the plot. Over the next nine months, some 5,000 Wehrmacht officers and civilians—most with no connection to the attempted coup—were rounded up by the Gestapo and summarily shot. Others—including the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel—were forced to commit suicide.

  U.S. troops advance at St. Lô.

  Four days after the assassination attempt, with the British and Canadians still heavily engaged in the bloody fight for Caen, Bradley was ready to launch an American breakthrough from the Cotentin. Dubbed Operation Cobra, the attack was to commence immediately after 3,000 bombers and fighters from the 8th and 9th Air Forces “carpet bombed” German positions facing the four American infantry and two armored divisions west of St. Lô.

  But Cobra had an inauspicious beginning. On the morning of 24 July the bombers dropped 4,000 tons of bombs through the heavy overcast—hitting the American lines with almost a third of the high explosives, killing thirty U.S. troops, wounding another 150, and causing Cobra to be postponed for twenty-four hours. The following morning, with Bradley and Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair looking on, the waves of B-17s returned. This time they swept over the American lines—instead of parallel to them—and again they dropped 4,000 tons of bombs, hundreds of which hit the U.S. jumping off positions—again.

  McNair and nearly all of his staff were killed outright. Another 400 GIs were killed and wounded. Bradley, watching from a café on a nearby hillside, barely escaped with his life. The 30th Infantry Division took the brunt of the casualties from the errant bombing, but still managed to get up out of their shallow fighting positions and launch the attack. Twenty-five-year-old Lt. Murray Pulver, a farm boy from upstate New York, a replacement in the 30th Division, was one of those who saw it happen—and still carried on. His resolve would be severely tested in the weeks ahead.

  LIEUTENANT MURRAY PULVER, US ARMY

  Company B, 120th Infantry,

  30th Infantry Division

  Near St. Lô, France

  27 July 1944

  We looked up and saw the B-17s coming from behind—instead of across our front. And then the bombs started to fall—and we all took cover. It seemed like they took forever to hit—and the explosions went on and on all around us. I guess I repeated the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm a half a dozen times. General McNair was just off to the left side of my platoon when he was hit.

  After the bombs stopped going off, everybody was in shock—we were like a bunch of zombies. But even as the medics were treating the casualties, we were ordered to advance. I don’t know how we did it, but everyone fell in and away we went.

  I was new, having arrived on Omaha Beach on D + 6 as a replacement. A few days later I was assigned as a rifle platoon commander in B Company, 120th Infantry Regiment, located near St. Lô. There was only one officer, besides the company commander, left in the company. After a few weeks of fighting through the hedgerows around St. Lô, there were probably only twenty-five to thirty men left in each of our three platoons.

  The first time that I made contact with the Germans was when we made the first attack, along with A Company on our right. We had moved across two hedgerows, which was probably just 100 yards. And we were receiving heavy artillery and small arms fire. Then somebody hollered, “There’s a tank coming down the road at us!”

  I hollered for the bazooka man, and a young fellow by the name of Werner Yurtz—a German-American kid—came running up to me with the bazooka. I said, “Fire at that tank.”

  He looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to fire it. I’m the ammunition carrier. The man that fires it was killed.”

  I’d had a dry run with a bazooka in England, during training—but I had never fired one before. But with Yurtz guiding my shot, I fired the bazooka, hit the tank, and it exploded. Within half an hour, I could hear someone from A Company calling for, “Bazooka, bazooka!” That time I got another tank behind a wall, about fifty yards in front of me. So now, I’m the bazooka man. In fact, I continued to be the bazooka man for the rest of the war.

  During Cobra we were supposed to move rapidly through the hole that the bombers made in the German lines and attack St. Giles, just west of St. Lô. Once there, the 3rd Armor Division would pass through our lines and head south.

  On the way, we ran into more German tanks and paratroopers. The bombing ha
d hurt them, but they fought hard. The German paratroopers were among the best soldiers in the war.

  A few days later, at the town of Tessy-sur-Vire, I took over Company B. The captain went back to become a battalion commander. That’s how bad the casualties were. At that point, I had 140 men in my company and I was the only officer.

  On August 6 we reached the town of Mortain and B Company relieved elements of the 1st Division on Hill 285. When we took over their position, they said they hadn’t seen any Germans in days. There was just twenty-nine feet difference in elevation between Hill 285 and Hill 314. The 1st Division pulled out and left the 30th Division strung out across the two hillsides. By nightfall on the sixth it looked like we had the Germans on the run. But all that was about to change.

  What changed was Adolf Hitler’s belief that a surprise Panzer counter-attack could somehow stop the American advance. With George Patton’s newly formed 3rd Army dashing into Brittany and Courtney Hodges’s 1st Army headed east, Hitler ordered Gunther von Kluge to send four Panzer Divisions—the 1st and 2nd SS, the 2nd, and the 116th—on a sweep south, then west to smash through the American lines and cut off Patton’s rear at Avranches.

  As the Führer conceived Operation Lüttich, the 300 tanks and 50,000 troops commanded by von Kluge would be reinforced in the battle by 1,000 more tanks from the 9th and 11th Panzer Divisions coming from the south of France and the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions presently engaged at Caen. It would have been a brilliant strategy but for three factors: first, Allied bombing of the French rail and road networks made movement of armor on the scale envisioned impossible. Second, Ultra intercepts of German high command communications eliminated the element of surprise. And finally, for the German armor to get to Avranches, the Panzers would have to get through the 30th Infantry Division at Mortain—a quiet little village known for the Camembert cheese made on the dairy farms in the nearby rolling hillsides.

  On 6 August 1944, as the German tanks started moving into position for the attack, Murray Pulver’s Company B, 1st Battalion of the 120th Infantry Regiment occupied Hill 285, one of the two prominent terrain features in Mortain. Spread between 285 and the other commanding high ground, Hill 314, were Companies E, G, and H of 2nd Battalion, and K Company of the 118th Infantry. Staff Sergeant Angel Garcia—the son of an alfalfa farmer from Los Angeles, California—led a machine gun squad in H Company and had his men deployed at the base of the hill. Second Lieutenant Robert Weiss, an artillery forward observer, was hoping for a quiet night when he climbed to the peak of 314 to establish an observation post late that afternoon.

  Within hours, all three men would play key roles in the largest tank battle on the Western Front.

  LIEUTENANT MURRAY PULVER, US ARMY

  Company B, 120th Infantry,

  30th Infantry Division

  Hill 285, Mortain, France

  7 August 1944

  At 0430, just before dawn, a Sherman tank, guided by two French civilians—a man and a woman—approached the roadblock I had set up below my CP near the top of Hill 285. They spoke a little English, and they told my sergeant at the roadblock that the American tank had gotten lost and they were guiding it back into friendly territory.

  But it was a trick. It was a captured British Sherman. The crew was German—and so were the soldiers behind it. In the firefight that followed, I lost most of my first platoon. From then on, it was solid fighting for two days.

  I moved my CP behind some farm buildings so that I could be centrally located between my two remaining platoons. Later that morning, the Germans attacked with more tanks and motorized infantry and blasted holes in every farm building.

  At about dawn, I informed HQ that we were under heavy armor attack and that they were breaking through my roadblocks. We only had two anti-tank guns and the Germans managed to get a tank past them and it came down the road to about thirty feet from us, just crawling along in the fog.

  My first sergeant handed me a bazooka, and when I hit the tank, it stopped. But where it stopped, I could almost reach up and touch the muzzle of the 88 on that tank. That’s how close they came to the stone wall we were hiding behind. Our radio was knocked out by heavy mortar fire, and the Germans either cut our telephone line, or it was knocked out by artillery fire so I lost communications with the second and third platoons. In fact we had no communications with anybody.

  After we knocked off the tank, several Germans, came across the field yelling, “Americans! Kamerad! Kamerad!” They were surrendering!

  The good Lord was helping us that day. Though most of us were wounded that day, not one man in my company headquarters was killed—but a whole lot of Germans were.

  Fighting was sporadic during the night. The next day dawned clear and the Germans tried another tank-infantry attack across the open field. A British Typhoon fighter aircraft with a Canadian pilot saved us. He flew over and fired his rockets. They were so close that I could feel the heat from them—but it broke off the attack.

  The Typhoons and the artillery saved us but we were out of food and running low on ammunition. So in the midst of all the firing, my communicator and I took my jeep and drove back to battalion HQ. On the way we were hit by mortar fire. He was seriously wounded but I just got my teeth shattered. When I saw the battalion commander, he looked at me and said, “Where did you come from?” And I said, “From Mortain.”

  “Well,” he said, “they told me that all of B Company had been captured or killed.”

  I said, “No, we’re still there. All I want is some food, water, and ammunition.” I also got a few men from battalion headquarters and we went back with the munitions and food and water.

  I was called back to battalion headquarters on the third day, and we went to see the regimental commander. He could see that I was about done in, but he said, “I want you to take two platoons of your company and fight your way onto Hill 314, and deliver batteries and ammunition to them.” They had tried air-dropping supplies to the troops on 314 but it hadn’t worked.

  So my company pulled out in the dark the next morning and we went down into the valley, leapfrogging from one patch of woods to another. We ran into two German patrols, in strength, but we fought them off. At the crossroads we met our battalion’s anti-tank company and a small contingent of infantry. The captain commanding the unit beamed all over when he saw us, and said, “Oh, thank God we got help.”

  I said, “I’m sorry... I’m not here to help you. We’ve been ordered to deliver supplies up that hill.”

  “You must be kidding!” he said, adding, “Come with me.” We went up a little rise, where we could get a full view of Hill 314 and the road going up. There were hundreds of dead Germans soldiers and destroyed tanks and other vehicles. A lot of them had been knocked out by our air force and artillery. But in between, there were a lot of live Germans as well. When I called back to battalion HQ on the radio they cancelled our resupply mission so in the dark we moved back to where we had started and resumed our old positions.

  The fourth day was very quiet. But on day five of the battle we heard German officers giving orders from a tree line maybe fifty yards away as they got ready to attack us. I gave the signal for every man to fire at least two clips of ammunition, and toss hand grenades just when they started to advance in our direction. They must have thought we were a huge army, because the Germans pulled back and that finished ’em. Later that day we marched down the hill and into Mortain. The town was wrecked.

  STAFF SERGEANT ANGEL GARCIA, US ARMY

  Company H, 120th Infantry,

  30th Infantry Division

  St. Lô, France

  10 August 1944

  Operation Cobra started out with our air force bombing the German positions in front of us. Unfortunately, they also bombed us—twice.

  The bombers came right over top of us and I looked up and saw the bombs dropping and yelled, “Mother!”—I don’t know why—and ran to the other side of the hedgerow and jumped into an old German trench that was already
full of GIs. When the bombs hit, the ground and the trees flew up in the air and anyone who didn’t get to the other side of the hedgerow was killed or wounded. We lost almost half our company.

  The next day we were all ready to go again, and the bombers dropped bombs on us again. But this time they also got a lot of the Germans.

  As we were attacking past St. Lô, a German shell hit in front of me as I was running with my rifle up in front of me. Shrapnel hit my rifle and broke the stock and rifle into two pieces. The fragment also got me but if I hadn’t been holding my rifle up the fragment would have hit me full in the chest. But it hit the rifle first, so it was a minor wound. I didn’t bother to report it.

  On our way to Mortain, we were ambushed by a group of Germans from a cemetery beside the road outside this little town. The Germans were firing at us from behind the tombstones. I got mad—I got up—and ran towards the tombstones firing my rifle and the Germans ran.

  As we headed into the village there was a German tank sitting in the middle of a “Y” intersection, with its barrel pointed at us when we came around a bend in the road. We couldn’t get away because the houses are up close to the road on both sides. And so, instead of running back, we ran forward and got so close to the tank that it couldn’t depress its barrel low enough to hit us. It turned out that the gunner in the tank was already dead—but we didn’t know that at the time.

  When we got to Mortain, I was ordered to set up my machine guns along a road that ran along the base of Hill 314. We moved into some shallow foxholes that had been dug by the 1st Division and waited. None of us were told that the Germans were expected to counter-attack—though I learned afterwards that we had intercepted their communications to that effect.

  Early in the morning of August 7, well before first light, my machine gun position by the road started taking rifle fire, so they started firing back. I ran down to the gun and told them to wait until the Germans got closer so that we didn’t give away our position.