Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq

by John C. McManus

  Klug grabbed his M1 carbine, raced outside, ran toward them, and called for them to halt. In response, they stopped, as if shocked. One of them gave a command in German and they began to disperse on either side of the tracks. First Sergeant Klug shot the one who gave the command, and he dropped dead right on the spot. The others dispersed into the darkness. Klug ran back inside. By now Lieutenant Brown was on the phone to battalion, reporting the presence of the Germans. He did not know it, but these were the lead troops of a two-company attack on Buckholz. Within a few minutes, the American chow line quickly dissolved as men ran every which way, finding cover, shooting, trying to figure out what was going on. “Part of the Germans took cover in a railroad car about three hundred yards south of the station,” one soldier recalled. “Others began to run towards this car and towards the woods to the south.” Actually they took cover in at least one car. The cars, and many of the German soldiers, were actually to the north of—or behind—the L Company men.

  Small-arms fire crackled as soldiers from both sides looked for targets and opened fire. A BAR man sighted in on one running figure, fired, and dropped him at a range of one hundred yards. The Americans fired several bazooka rounds at the trains but missed. Staff Sergeant Savino Travalini and two other soldiers unlimbered an antitank gun and shot at the boxcars, scoring several hits. The Germans, in or out of the boxcars, were in a difficult spot, exposed to American small-arms and mortar fire. Many of the enemy soldiers got hit and played dead in the snow. “I had a good position in the loft of . . . a barn,” Private John Thornburg, a rifleman, wrote. “I was able to see the smashing of the railway car by the artillery [sic] piece. I could also see small figures, discernable as our riflemen, crawling in the snow and firing occasionally.” An American M10 Wolverine tank destroyer rumbled up and fired several three-inch shells into the boxcars. A small group of enemy soldiers emerged from the trains and surrendered.

  Soon German mortar and artillery fire screamed in. One shell scored a direct hit on the railroad station. A fragment from the shell glanced off T/5 George Bodnar and ripped into the head of Private Joe Ryan, killing him at once. The shelling continued unabated, prompting all of the men inside the station building, including Lieutenant Brown, to take shelter in a concrete bunker next to the station.

  The Germans placed a machine gun atop a nearby water tower, as well as another one four hundred yards south of the station. The guns bracketed much of the open ground around Buckholz Station and the tracks with bullets. In the memory of one officer, they “beat the hell out of us.” This was the officer’s way of saying that some of those bullets struck men, usually with the now familiar sound of a baseball bat hitting a watermelon, spraying blood and tissue as they hit. The plaintive cries of the wounded rose above even the din of the shooting. “When you hear the painful cry of a wounded soldier,” Private John Kuhn, a runner in K Company, wrote, “and you see his life’s blood oozing out in the waist deep snow turning it to crimson red, whether he is friend or foe, it is not a thrilling experience or one soon forgotten.” Captain Charles Roland, the battalion operations officer (S3), watched in horror as “a young lieutenant danced rubber legged until he twisted slowly and revealed a blue bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.” Roland and Kuhn both saw the decapitated bodies—heads sheared off by shrapnel—of the regimental chaplain and his assistant, lying beside their jeep.

  Once again, Sergeant Travalini was a difference maker. Somehow, he crawled to within striking distance of the machine gun south of the station and killed the crew with a grenade. In addition, he went back to the antitank gun and fired at least one round into the water tower. As if that were not enough, he took action when he found out that German soldiers had moved into a roundhouse only a few hundred yards from the station. In the recollection of several soldiers in a post-combat interview, Travalini “fired [a] bazooka several times into the roundhouse. This . . . flushed some of the enemy and as they came into view Travalini picked up his M1 and fired into them.” For his exploits, he earned a battlefield commission. The fighting raged around Buckholz much of the day. The Germans were unable to dislodge the 3rd Battalion, so instead they found gaps in the thin American line and, dodging U.S. mortar and artillery fire, swung around to the battalion flanks, trying to cut the Americans off.3

  A mile and a half to the east, much of the 12th Volksgrenadier Division was launching, in broad daylight now, another such relentless push for the Losheimergraben crossroads. This objective was important for the Germans. Taking it would give them a good avenue of advance north, toward the important towns of Murringen, Krinkelt-Rocherath, and the Meuse. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Douglas, commander of the 1st Battalion, had placed all of his companies in and around the crossroads. Company A was on the battalion’s right, between Buckholz and Losheimergraben (which was little more than a cluster of farmhouses and barns on either side of the road). Company B was in the middle, astride the road. Company C held the east, or left, flank. Mortarmen and machine gunners from D Company were sprinkled around in support of the three rifle companies (lettered A, B, and C). The brunt of the attack hit the junction between B and C Companies. “ ‘B’ Company was overrun, with ‘Jerries’ all over the position using some of the foxholes which were in the area,” Douglas later said. “There were more foxholes than there were American infantry to fill them.”

  The chaos and confusion were almost indescribable. Private First Class Carl Combs, a rifleman in B Company, was in a well-camouflaged, log-reinforced dugout about fifty yards east of the road, covering a 57-millimeter antitank gun. In the hazy daylight, enemy soldiers brazenly approached, in distressingly large groups. “German infantry showed up to our front and we opened fire, getting quite a few. After three or four such incidents, a tank moved up the road and at close range the 57 knocked it out. It was quite a sight with its ammo exploding.” While the Germans were destroying some of the American dugouts, they had trouble locating Combs and his partner, Fred Robertson. Combs and Robertson kept shooting at large numbers of Germans who were crossing the road east to west, killing more than a few. “It was sort of like a shooting gallery.”

  Most of the defenders had a limited field of vision, obscured by the winter haze, the pervasive trees, and the myopic perspective inherent in any well-dug, fortified position. This created a sense of isolation, one so common to infantrymen in combat, who often see only a few yards to their left or right. At the crossroads (and, in fact, at many other spots along the northern shoulder of the Bulge), it was as if each group was fighting its own private war. The actions of NCOs were crucial. They were the ones who set the example, and they often did the fighting and dying. In one spot near the road, a squad leader saw his entire squad wiped out by a group of Germans. In a rage, he grabbed a BAR from one of his dying men and charged at the Germans, all the while firing the weapon on full automatic. The BAR’s dat dat dum cadence petered out as the clip emptied. A German soldier killed him from a distance of no more than ten feet. Elsewhere, Technical Sergeant Eddie Dolenc set up a machine gun in a shell hole and zeroed in on an attacking enemy platoon. In just a few minutes, bodies, clad in Wehrmacht field gray overcoats, were literally piled up in front of the shell hole. The German tide swept past the hole. No one ever saw Dolenc again. In another spot, a BAR man climbed atop a log cabin and kept up a relentless fire on any Germans who tried to move within his field of fire. Several other men scurried back and forth, resupplying him with ammunition.

  Much of the fighting was at such close quarters that mortarmen like Private Danny Dalyai pointed their tubes almost straight up, at nearly a ninety-degree angle, to hit Germans whom they could actually see, a rare thing for mortar crewmen. Dalyai’s 60-millimeter mortar tube was nearly buried in snow, with only the top sticking out. Overhead, he had just enough of an opening between pine trees to get his shots off. “I had only 6 or 8 shells. I had no trouble getting all the shells off.” They exploded among some Germans who were just beyond the tree line. In the next instant, as
Private Dalyai watched in horror, an 88-millimeter shell scored a direct hit on the log cabin that was serving as B Company’s command post. He ran over to check on the four men he knew were inside. “How I’ve wished to this day I never looked in! Blood was all over the place. Lieutenant Charles Butler got both legs blown off. You can imagine how very emotional and overwhelming this was for me.” Aghast, Dalyai hurried away, only to stumble over a dead body. Another 88 shell exploded nearby, knocking him unconscious and destroying his hearing.

  Not far from Dalyai, D Company’s 81-millimeter mortars were dug into the tree-lined backyard of a farmhouse near the road. Private First Class Bob Newbrough was in a foxhole, observing for his fellow crewmen, when he actually saw a German soldier through a firebreak in the trees, no more than fifteen yards away. The two enemies were startled to see each other. The German was poised to throw a potato masher grenade into the mortar position but he ducked down, as did Newbrough. The American grabbed a rifle and opened fire. Just then, the mortar crewmen began firing their shells almost straight up, at the closest possible range. “I can remember hearing the burst of the mortar shells coming down towards me, ducking in the hole when the shells struck the woods” but still encouraging his friends to keep it up. The Germans, including the potato masher-wielding soldier, soon melted away.4

  Although the Germans were hurling powerful forces at the 394th, their attack on the crossroads was bogging down. “The 12th Volksgrenadier Division was involved in heavy fighting for Losheimergraben, which was skillfully and bravely defended,” a I SS Panzer Corps report stated. By and large, their armored vehicles were road-bound because of the rough terrain and, in some spots, the prevalence of snowy mud. To the south, a destroyed bridge at Losheim kept some of those vehicles waiting in place for many hours. Others made it to Losheimergraben, only to become embroiled in close-quarters fighting with the Americans. Antitank guns were not as big of a problem for them as bazookas. These handheld tubes were the great equalizer in any tank-versus-man confrontation. Even though most infantrymen were trained to fire this weapon, the majority did not possess the kind of courage it took to wield one, in real combat, against an imposing tank. That hardly mattered, though. The bazooka only required a two-man crew. This meant that, under the right circumstances, a mere handful of stalwart souls, brandishing a few tubes, operating from some semblance of cover, could make life very difficult for enemy tanks. The shattered cluster of houses that comprised Losheimergraben made good hiding places for bazooka teams, mainly because they were so close to the road.

  Private First Class Ralph Gamber was in the cellar of one such house, facing the road. He and the men with him felt a rumble and saw a German tank right outside. In the basement was a bazooka with eight rounds. He loaded the bazooka while a forty-eight-year-old soldier, inevitably nicknamed “Pap,” aimed and fired, even as Gamber studiously avoided the considerable back-blast. The rocket streaked from the tube, sagged downward and struck the tank, stopping it cold. Pap fired again, scoring another hit. “When Germans crawled out, riflemen and antitank gunners shot them [with rifles].” Another tank tried to bulldoze the first one out of the way. “I told Pap [to] wait until it got broad side and then fire.” They hit this one, too. It seemed that smoke came from the second tank but they were not sure. A third one appeared within their limited vision. Pap fired at it. The rocket hit the tread, damaging it. The turret of the third tank swung in the direction of the cellar, but before the enemy crewmen could snap off a shot, their tank lost traction because of the damaged tread. “It slipped over the bank; the territt [turret] gun was pointing down.”

  In the basement of another two-story house that was literally next to the road, Sergeant John Hilliard watched as enemy self-propelled guns neared a hidden bazooka team led by Sergeant Mel Weidner. “Weidner’s platoon knocked out their vehicle first by making a direct hit on one of the treads with a bazooka rocket, and when the infantry unit moved forward to protect it, they were cut down by rifle fire and grenades. Weidner fired the rocket while one of his men [Private William Kirkbride] loaded.” The heavy American small-arms fire forced the German infantrymen to move away from their vehicles in search of cover. Far too many tanks and guns were on their own. One of the self-propelled guns fired several shells into that house until it came into the range of another team that got “a clear shot at it and eventually knocked it out.” Knocking it out, of course, normally meant setting it on fire, killing the crewmen, burning them, or forcing them to bail out so that riflemen could pick them off like clay pigeons.

  A few of the bravest (or most desperate) Americans, like Sergeant Milton Kitchens and several helpers, even launched direct personal attacks on the German armor. A lone enemy tank, in Kitchens’s recollection, “was upon us and firing one round after the other. Suddenly it stopped right in front of our position.” This was a terrifying but crucial moment. The first instinct for most of the infantry soldiers was to shrink deeper into their holes, as if they could cocoon themselves from the deadly peril the tank represented. That would have been the worst thing to do because it would have allowed the tank to blast their holes, machine-gun them, or even grind them into pulp. Instead of letting that happen, Kitchens and another man crawled out of their holes, working their way up to the tank. It was an act that required enormous courage, but they hardly thought of it that way. They simply knew that this was the best way to survive. After the tank fired, there was a slight pause as the gunner reloaded. During that time, Kitchens pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it in the muzzle of the tank’s gun. The other soldier “smacked that grenade with the side of his rifle butt and it slammed up the barrel and into the inside of that panzer. All we heard out of that grenade explosion was a muffled poof, then silence. Soon that tank began exploding and we crawled back in the foxhole for cover.”

  In spite of the determined resistance of soldiers like Kitchens, the Germans steadily made headway. Hour by hour, through sheer numbers and relentless attacks, they found holes in the American lines, cut off small groups, and threatened to destroy the entire 394th Infantry. Hundreds of Americans were killed or captured. Within twenty-four hours, Lieutenant Colonel Don Riley, the commander of the regiment, decided, with General Lauer’s permission, to withdraw. Riley ordered a fighting withdrawal to the north, in the direction of Hunningen and Murringen, for anyone who could still get out. The ultimate destination was Elsenborn Ridge, a prominent stretch of high ground several miles to the north.

  At the Losheimergraben crossroads, a mixed force of infantrymen and antitank gunners under Lieutenant Dewey Plankers kept up steady resistance, while survivors retreated. “Many men who became separated from their own units joined with other outfits and fought wherever they happened to be,” an after action report explained. “The situation was one of wild confusion.” One of Riley’s battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Wertheimer, added to the confusion through sheer cowardice. As the fighting raged, Wertheimer, a garrison martinet whose men disparagingly called him “Fainting Phil,” cowered in the basement of his command post, totally unable to function. Like many other training ground tyrants, his supposed toughness melted in the face of real adversity. “The chief didn’t know what to do,” Private Steve Kallas, a BAR man, later commented. “He was smoking, walking around like a stupe. He wanted to surrender.” Fed up with his cowardice and his whimpering entreaties to surrender, his staff effectively relieved him and continued the fight.

  The retreat was generally marked by privation, hunger, and cold. There were also sharp firefights in some spots, especially Murringen, where some Battle Babies of the 394th clashed with lead elements of the two enemy divisions. In one incident at Murringen, Sergeant Harold Schaefer saw a man squatting next to a hedgerow, plopped down next to him, and said hello. “I . . . was looking into the blue eyes of a Jerry soldier. It’s a tossup as to who was more surprised.” Sometimes in such confrontations soldiers would choose to go their separate ways, embracing a tacit truce rather than kill face-to-f
ace. Not this time, though. “The M1 is faster than the German rifle, or I was faster than ‘Fritz,’ because he got to die for his country.”

  One officer of the 394th bluntly, and aptly, summed up the regiment’s fight at Losheimergraben. “Everything was all fucked up, we were all scared to death, and plenty of mistakes were made.” In spite of these issues, the regiment, by fighting hard, held the Germans up for many crucial hours. The stubborn defense of the crossroads cost the I SS Panzer Corps, for the better part of two days, a badly needed route of advance north to Murringen, Bullingen, Malmédy, and points beyond. This job was mainly done by infantrymen, with some artillery, but little armored support.5

  Battle Babies Part II: The 393rd Infantry in the Krinkelter Wald

  Immediately to the northeast of the 394th, another Battle Baby regiment, the 393rd, also found itself in the crosshairs of the German offensive. These men, under pipe-smoking Lieutenant Colonel Jean Scott, were immersed, along a front of fifty-five hundred yards, in the Krinkelter Wald, a thick pine forest. From east to west, the forest had a depth of about four miles. Just to the west of the forest lay the vital twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath, farm towns through which an important north-south road ran. For the advance on the Meuse, the Germans had to control the road and the towns. First, though, they had to fight their way through the forest, and that meant assaulting the 393rd. The Battle Babies of this regiment, like their brethren elsewhere, were burrowed into the forest, manning a thin line of well-camouflaged dugouts, most of which had overhead log cover. Here and there, log cabins provided some semblance of warmth and shelter. All of the positions were oriented east, toward Germany.