War Stories III

by Oliver North

  There were about 700 of us on the hill—from E Company, two platoons from G Company, my machine guns from H Company, and K Company from the 118th Regiment. But that wasn’t much to stand and fight against an entire Panzer Division.

  After the first probe we could hear the German tanks moving toward us—and then our artillery started firing. But in between each salvo we could still hear their tanks coming up the road.

  The artillery fire forced them to move in small groups of a couple of tanks supported by infantry. There was a lot of rifle fire from down below us in the town of Mortain and then we started taking heavy mortar fire. A round hit in the trees to my right and then another one to my left and I dove into a trench and the next round hit right next to my machine gun.

  The concussion shoved me from one end of the trench to the other and broke the legs on the machine gun tripod. The ammunition in the ammo can was pushed halfway through the steel can and the ammo belt that was on the gun was wrapped around a branch above us. My section leader, gunner, ammo-man, and runner were all dead.

  During the battle we found some water from a well, but no food. There was an attempt to drop food, medicine, ammo, and radio batteries by parachute, but it didn’t work. The wind took them away from our lines and most of it ended up with the Germans. Since we had no aid station, we had to tend to our own wounded. When our radio batteries died, only the artillery forward observer on top of the hill had communications. After six days, the Germans must have realized that they couldn’t take the hill and they began to retreat.

  The artillery forward observer on top of the hill was twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Robert Weiss. He had joined “Baker” Battery, 230th Field Artillery Battalion of the 30th Infantry Division, as a replacement. Like Garcia and Pulver, he had no idea that a German counter-attack through Mortain was in the offing on 6 August.

  SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT WEISS

  B Battery, 230th Field Artillery Battalion

  120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division

  Mortain, France

  22 July 1944

  I was a forward observer, the official title was reconnaissance officer, and my job was to go wherever I was assigned—which could be with an infantry or armor unit. Sometimes we would set up an OP—an observation post—in a church steeple or on top of a building where we could observe the enemy. If I saw a target I’d tell my radio operator and he’d call the battalion with the target and its coordinates. I’d also tell the type of target it was—like infantry, tanks, assault weapons, and so on.

  The area around Mortain was hilly country. The village was tiny—a little over 1,600 people—with a town hall dating back to the seventeenth century.

  On the afternoon of 6 August 1944, I was told to get a forward observer party together. The four of us in my party set out in a jeep and met a liaison officer, Lieutenant Lee, in Mortain. I remember he had a big map and we looked at it. And there was the obvious place to be—Hill 314. The number 314 on the map meant that that hill’s elevation was 314 meters. The hill was significant because it had a commanding view to the east and south and, to the west, was the village of Mortain.

  We were told that the enemy was retreating—and they had been. I expected we would just sit up there and if we saw any movement, we’d just call in fire.

  Sunday August 6 was our first day on the hill. E Company arrived and got into position. Our communicators came up to check out the telephone lines. The infantry brought a hot meal in—in containers that they carried in jeeps. Late in the afternoon we had seen dust being kicked up in the distance and I called in fire on some German patrols.

  But after dark, activity really picked up. We could hear the sound of German tank engines and the clanking of their treads on roads below us. And it didn’t sound like they were retreating—like we’d been told. Shortly after midnight, all hell broke loose.

  We weren’t equipped to dig in and hold out. The terrain was rocky, and impossible to dig down more than eighteen inches or two feet. In addition, the infantry on the hill weren’t equipped to do battle against armor.

  They had a few mortars, almost no bazookas, virtually no medical supplies, no mines, and no anti-tank guns—just rifles and machine guns and a limited amount of ammunition. But we did have artillery, with the CP five miles away—and we had maps. They were Michelin road maps—but that was better than nothing.

  Directing artillery requires a lot of precision—just as with rifles and pistols or even bows and arrows. There are people who are good shots and people who aren’t. I just was one of the fortunate ones who could estimate distances accurately and as it turned out, I was one of the better shooters.

  The Germans were to our east and north, and E Company took the brunt of the onslaught in the initial assault, but eventually all the infantry was heavily engaged. The Germans were from the 2nd SS Panzer Division, one of Hitler’s favored and most seasoned units.

  Early on the seventh, a German artillery officer in a jeep-like vehicle drove up to the base of the hill, reconnoitering a gun position and not really realizing what was going on. He was captured, along with his men. After that, every time a German unit approached the hill, they were blasted with my artillery.

  H Company was on the south slope of the hill, right in the path of the German onslaught. They were totally overrun and most were either killed, wounded, or captured. And a few straggled up that slope to the E Company position and were absorbed by E Company—but there were only a few of them. We didn’t really quite comprehend the immensity of the attacks until midday on the seventh. By then we realized we were surrounded, because now we were being fired upon from all directions.

  Every night the Germans would try to get close in so that we wouldn’t fire artillery for fear of hitting our own soldiers. And every time they tried this, they were pushed back. The infantrymen were holding on by sheer determination. It was essentially rifles against tanks as far as the infantry was concerned, plus of course, the artillery, which we were able to control and direct.

  We were determined to hold on until we were triumphant or destroyed. Only that determination—to not yield ground—stopped the assault—for a while.

  We never heard that reinforcements were on the way until the very end, and I think that’s probably because no reinforcements were available. Our company still had working radio batteries, so all the guns of the battalion were at my beck and call. Plus we could call for fire from the other artillery battalions with 105s, 155 howitzers, Corps artillery, the Long Toms—a total of thirty-six guns. At one point, we were shooting over 2,000 rounds a day. That’s a lot of artillery.

  The Germans countered with a mobile anti-aircraft weapon—their 88 mm guns—with a diameter of about three and a half inches. This weapon was useful not only for shooting at aircraft, but could also be used against targets on the ground. They used the 88s as mobile, self-propelled guns and mounted them in tanks—clearly outgunning our Shermans.

  On the second night of the fight, a German tank got almost into our position, very close to where we were, and fired a round over our heads that lit up the landscape. Then he called on us to surrender. The next day, the Germans sent an officer with a white flag to our lines and demanded that we surrender. Lt. Curly told him to go to hell.

  We started out with about 700 men, and by the time the battle was over, 40 percent were dead, wounded, or missing. The Division G2, from five miles away at the CP, made the assessment on the fourth day of the battle that the Germans were essentially defeated. Well, he was correct in that assumption—as far as the overall picture was concerned—but what that G2 officer couldn’t see was that they were still trying, fighting fiercely, to knock us off Hill 314.

  Water and food ran out and an infantryman came by and gave me a slice of a rutabaga—which I’ll never eat again. I had a single high-calorie chocolate bar, meant as one meal for a soldier. Five of us divided it, and that was our food for a day. And when that ran out, that was it.

  The battle was ov
er on 12 August, about noon as the Germans began withdrawing. The 320th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Division reached us later that day, and we were finally relieved. They had fought their way up, and got to us just as the battle was over. So we found our jeep, started it up, got in it, and drove back our battalion HQ.

  All told, the 30th Division suffered some 1,800 casualties. Of the 700 men who walked up Hill 314, only 357—about half—were able to walk down. There was almost nothing left of the town of Mortain, except the church. The streets were littered with the bodies of fallen German and American soldiers. But even before the people of the ruined village returned to help bury the dead on the afternoon of 12 August, Bradley was already moving to exploit his victory.

  The remnants of von Kluge’s 50,000-man army, now under relentless air attack, struggled northeast to escape the oncoming Americans. Meanwhile the British and Canadians broke through at Caen. Bradley, convinced that this was a “once in a century opportunity” ordered Patton to make a “sweeping right hook”—a boxing term—in an effort to cut off the German retreat before they could cross the River Orne, south of Falaise.

  U.S. troops walk through battered Mortain.

  Patton’s armor reached Argentan on 13 August—and held up as ordered—waiting for Montgomery’s 21st British/Canadian army to close the noose on the beleaguered columns of German Army Group B. Montgomery delayed long enough to bring up more artillery and pound the retreating Wehrmacht with air strikes, while Patton fumed as 40,000 Germans managed to slip through a six-mile-wide gap between the American and British lines.

  On 15 August 1944 the 7th Allied Army—three U.S. divisions, four Free French, along with U.S. Rangers and Canadian commandos—stormed ashore in southern France on Operation Anvil. That afternoon, a furious Hitler, calling this “the worst day of my life,” fired von Kluge, replaced him with Walther Model, directed a retreat to the Seine—and ordered that Paris be held.

  It was a flight of fancy. With more than 300,000 German soldiers trapped in the “Falaise Pocket,” the Wehrmacht in France was facing total annihilation. The once mighty Panzer columns had been reduced to fewer than 150 tanks. Tens of thousands of German wounded were being transported on anything with wheels—much of it horse-drawn. And on 19 August, Patton reached the Seine, twenty-five miles northwest of Paris.

  On 21 August, after three days of furious battle against the 12th SS-Hitler Youth Division, the 1st Polish Armored Division—one of the many expatriate units fighting under the British banner—managed to close the bottleneck at Falaise. The carnage was horrific. More than 50,000 German troops lay dead and another 200,000 were taken prisoner—most of them wounded or shell-shocked. While touring the battlefield on 23 August, Eisenhower remarked that, “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”

  All that remained now was the liberation of Paris. Though Hitler had ordered the city held, the French countryside was now up in arms. In Paris, resistance factions that rarely cooperated with one another began an uprising against the German occupiers on 19 August. Many of the French resistance units had been armed, trained, and equipped by British SOE and American OSS intelligence officers like French-born Rene Defourneaux. Rene’s parents had emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 to escape the menace of Nazism. Shortly before America entered the war, twenty-two-year-old Rene enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was subsequently recruited by the OSS to help train Resistance fighters.

  RENE DEFOURNEAUX

  Provence, France

  19 August 1944

  I parachuted into France on the night of 8–9 August, 1944. My assignment was to link up with a French Resistance unit and carry out sabotage and “dirty tricks” against the Germans: blocking roads, blowing up bridges or destroying communication, knocking off railroads, and so on.

  We did a lot of work in conjunction with the Air Force, because it’s nice to have bombs going off to conceal the things we were blowing up. If you blow up a railroad switch or a telephone center and there is no other activity around—the Germans very quickly figure out who’s doing it. So we liked to coordinate our effort with the Air Force.

  We did pretty well. Our biggest mission was to prevent two German Panzer divisions west of us from going after Patton and his southern flank. To stop them, we had to knock off bridges, cut their communication, and sabotage their fuel. The resistance guys I was sent to help were pretty good. We made life miserable for the Germans.

  I had started out in the Army as a POW interrogator in England. But one day, an officer came into my office, closed the door, and asked, “Defourneaux, how would you like to go back to France before anybody else?”

  I said, “Yeah? How do you propose to send me there?” He told me that they’d drop me from an airplane, and he gave me two minutes to make up my mind. So I said, “Okay, I’m game. I’ll go.”

  A few days later, I was in a castle, north of London. And there, they gave twenty-nine of us a series of tests—for two or three days. Afterward, they called us in and said, “The nine of you, over here—come this way. The rest of you, leave by the other way.” So, they took nine out of twenty-nine of us.

  All nine of us went to Scotland to learn guerilla warfare, dirty tricks, and all the “covert arts” for about two months. By the time we finished the Americans and British had just landed in Normandy. They told me, “We’ve got a job for you. You’re going to join a Frenchman who has already been trained—his name is Leon. You will recognize him by a small scar on his lower lip. He’s expecting you, so don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine.”

  We were then sent to Eisenhower’s headquarters in London and we were sworn in as 2nd lieutenants. Nobody ever told us about the bad things that could happen, and never mentioned any casualties. They had made a set of civilian clothing for each of us. Two tailors made us suits typical of the part of the country we were going to so that we could blend in.

  After we finished our training, they informed us that, “since most of you will be dropped, you’d better learn to jump out of an airplane.” Well, I thought, jumping out of an airplane is something anybody can do. It’s the landing that’s tricky—so most of the training was how to land properly.

  Then of course we complained about why we had only one parachute. We had heard that in America, you jump with a reserve chute. Their reply was, “We drop you so low, a reserve chute won’t have time to open anyway, so one chance is all you’re getting.”

  The night of 8 August, I got aboard a B-24 and when we got over the part of France where I was supposed to jump, the “dispatcher”—the guy who knows the mission—tells me to jump out of the hole where the belly turret was when the green light came on. So I did.

  A few seconds later I was safely on the ground and a little while after I landed, two men from the resistance unit I was being sent to help met me with the proper recognition signal and took me to the local head of the Resistance. He had been with the Vichy secret police and he defected. He went from France to Spain to England, and was trained like I was, and sent back into France.

  I started with this twelve-man unit, teaching them the basic fundamentals of guerilla warfare, making bombs, and how to help get downed airmen safely out of France. Within days I had fifty men with me. And within two months, I had a hundred. We were on our way.

  The OSS didn’t win the war—but we helped. As the Allies broke out of Normandy, we helped the French resistance go after the Germans—demoralizing them—and helping them to decide that they really didn’t want to stay in France after the fall of Paris. Our work undoubtedly helped save the lives of a lot of American soldiers.

  The uprisings in Paris and throughout the French countryside did indeed help the Germans decide that the French capital wasn’t worth dying for. On 22 August, Hitler reiterated his order to hold the city—or failing that—to destroy it. But the broken army that straggled back into Paris from the disaster in Normandy had lost the will to fight. As Allied forces closed in o
n the French capital—German soldiers were taking “French leave”—and heading home by whatever means possible. Nearly 100,000—many of them wounded—deserted the Wehrmacht in those last days of August, only to be rounded up when they arrived at the German frontier.

  Members of the French resistance celebrate.

  Late on the evening of 23 August, the lead elements of the 2nd French Armored Division, commanded by General Phillippe Leclerc, entered Paris. The next day the remainder of the division fought their way, with the help of several resistance units, through the last German defenders. On August 25—eighty days after the landings at Normandy—Charles de Gaulle, who had made his own way to France without the help of the British or Americans, made a triumphal entry atop a Sherman tank carrying the French tri-color. Hitler’s worst days were still to come.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE 1944

  Berlin by Thanksgiving—Home by Christmas. They were words none of Allied generals encouraged—but after the liberation of Paris on 25 August, more than a few GIs expressed words like these. The once mighty Wehrmacht was on the run. Many American soldiers—and even some of the war-weary British in Montgomery’s 21st Army Group—thought the war might actually be over before the end of 1944. They had reason for such hope.

  The Red Army was closing in from the East. Germany’s cities and means of production were being bombed around the clock—by the American 8th Air Force during the day and British Bomber Command at night in Operation Pointblank. By 4 September, the British and Canadians had liberated Brussels and Antwerp, Belgium. On 15 September, the U.S./Free French 6th Army Group—having marched more than 350 miles from their AnvilDragoon landing beaches in southern France—linked up with the right flank of Patton’s 3rd Army at Epinal. With all of Belgium and Luxembourg liberated, the Allies had a continuous front from the English Channel to the Swiss border.