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

by John C. McManus

  As in other sectors, the enemy barrage inflicted few casualties on the 393rd, but it did disrupt communications. The real horror began just as the sun was slowly ascending over the eastern horizon, when soldiers from the 277th Volksgrenadier Division hurled themselves, under the cover of some supporting artillery fire, into the Krinkelter Wald. Many of the enemy troops wore white sheets to blend into the snowy surroundings. In the confusing half-light, they had little trouble, in most cases, penetrating to within a hundred yards of the American positions. “I had difficulty picking out targets,” Private First Class Lionel Adda, an assistant machine gunner/rifleman attached to B Company, later wrote. “Tracers and one or two flares revealed bodies crawling towards us. I was firing my carbine more rapidly than I had ever done before.” On either side of him, his squad’s machine guns were pouring out withering fire. From only a few yards in front of his dugout, he heard someone holler “Heil Hitler!” In the next instant, a grenade exploded, followed by burp-gun fire. “The bullets dislodged dirt and stones in front of my hole, and they struck me painfully in my face.” Then, after this near miss, the firing tapered off. As Adda’s eyes adjusted to the gathering light, he could see twelve dead enemy soldiers heaped in front of his dugout, including one so close that he could practically touch the body (this was probably the one who had thrown the grenade).

  Adda did not know it, but B Company and its neighboring unit on the right, C Company, were facing some of the most formidable German attacks. Colonel Hans Viebig, the commander of the 277th, threw the better part of two regiments into the fight. “Some of the Germans got into the same foxholes with our soldiers and several were bayoneted,” surviving American soldiers related to a historian in a post-combat interview. “Others occupied positions adjacent to and in rear of our foxholes. The defense was spread so thin that our line was mainly a series of strongpoints with gaps between each.” Consider, for a moment, what this really meant. Each foxhole contained, at most, three scared men. As the soldiers related, in some cases, Germans infiltrated the holes themselves, prompting a personal, bloody, ferocious struggle for life. They killed with rifles, pistols, bayonets, and even helmets. Here there was no retreat, no impersonal discharge of weapons at an unseen enemy. There was, instead, a personal struggle to the death, more akin to ancient combat than modern warfare. The vanquished lay bloody and bludgeoned in the snow. The victors were, in the short term, exhausted by their ordeal, owing to the post-combat depletion of adrenaline. Elation at survival quickly gave way to nausea at having to kill. In the long term, they would carry mental scars forever.

  In the majority of cases, the fighting was not quite that close. More often, the Americans stood against the parapets of their dugouts and shot at whatever they could see. In the recollection of Technical Sergeant Ben Nawrocki, platoon sergeant of B Company’s 2nd Platoon, he and his men “kept cutting them down. In many places, the Germans were piled on top of one another like cord wood.” In a few cases, they got close enough to throw grenades inside the American cabins.

  The BARs did tremendous damage. Nawrocki remembered seeing a buck-toothed BAR man, fighting barefoot in his hole—he apparently had his boots off when the attack hit—warding off the Germans with steady bursts from his fearsome weapon. “They were piled three and four feet high in front of his foxhole.” To Sergeant Bernie Macay “it seemed like there were thousands. We could see them against the skyline. They were dropping like flies. There must have been hundreds of German dead in front of our positions.” Macay’s BAR man, Clyde Burkett, like many others of his ilk, did much of the killing. “He personally took a tremendous toll.”

  Corporal Alvin Boeger, a BAR man in C Company, was at first literally scared into paralysis by the menacing, tromping sound of approaching enemy boots. He cowered in his foxhole and found that he could not move his arms and legs. “I thought of my mother—how she would react to my death. I saw a gold star in her window.” In World War II, a gold star flag signified the death of a loved one on some fighting front. Boeger was experiencing what one scholar called Condition Black, meaning a fear-induced shutdown of bodily functions. The limbs fail to respond. The heart rate shoots dangerously high. The blood vessels constrict, draining all color from the face (hence the term “white as a sheet”). Only the sight of German soldiers dropping grenades and shooting into nearby holes snapped Boeger out of Condition Black. He stood up, faced them, and pointed his fearsome weapon. “The enemy came on in waves and I fired my BAR until it was real hot. There were grey uniformed bodies everywhere.”

  Staff Sergeant Roy House, another BAR man, was part of a squad that was about to be overrun. He held off a company-sized group of Germans while his comrades withdrew. “I was able to hold off the attackers for about 10 or 15 minutes because they made no attempt at concealment. Finally one of the Germans was able to get to the left and shot me through my left arm.” In spite of the wound, House escaped.6

  The German attack had little ambiguity or complexity. They simply came forward in waves. Lieutenant Robert Dettor, a platoon leader in K Company, one of the hardest-pressed units, desperately tried to hold his platoon together in the face of a veritable avalanche of enemy soldiers. Small-arms fire was crackling everywhere. His communication wires to the company command post and his platoon outposts were completely out. In terse diary passages, he recounted the horror. “No contact with men except those in foxholes in immediate vicinity. Sgt. Phifer, Sgt. Surtorka, myself fighting from same emplacement. Sgt. Surtorka moved to foxhole on right to cover flank. Sgt. Surtorka yelled over grenade being thrown at my foxhole. Hunter hit by grenade. Sgt. Phifer wounded in the shoulder by rifle bullet. Enemy closing within 20 feet of foxhole.” They were almost out of ammo. Hunter caught a burp-gun burst and slumped over dead. Lieutenant Dettor ordered all maps burned and food distributed evenly. Finally, when the lieutenant and his men ran out of ammo, the Germans overran the position. They jostled the Americans around, took their wristwatches, pens, money, and other valuables, and sent them east, behind the German lines. Half of K Company was overrun in similar fashion.

  After such costly initial assaults against the American strongpoints, the German survivors began flanking them, taking advantage of many dead spots in the U.S. defenses, cutting them off. Units on both sides lost all cohesive-ness. Most were out of communication with higher headquarters. The battle degenerated into clashes between isolated groups bumping into one another in the dark, bewildering forest. German mobility was dramatically restricted by the sheer volume of U.S. supporting fire. Fighting from deep holes, the Americans did not hesitate to call down artillery on their own positions since they knew the shells would do much more damage to the unsheltered enemy than to themselves. In one instance, a company commander and a forward observer, knowing they were in danger of being annihilated, called down 105-millimeter howitzer fire, literally on top of themselves. “The rounds burst in trees above their heads, and sprayed forward, piling up so many Germans in front of their positions that the attack failed,” a unit after action report claimed. “It took guts, but it worked.”

  Mortarmen contributed their own fury. Working very carefully from their pits in firebreaks and clearings—mortar teams never set up their tubes underneath trees—they provided devastating close support for the hard-pressed riflemen and machine gunners. Sergeant Earl Wiseman and his 81-millimeter mortar crews from M Company laid down a steady curtain of shells in support of their buddies in the overwrought rifle companies. “I was proud then to be with these boys [of his crews] because the hotter the fight got, the better we functioned. Swinging one gun here, laying another there with azimuths continually shifting great distances and ranges steadily decreasing until they were down to 50 yards, and less.” One section was even firing straight up “to put them right on top of Jerry coming thru those woods.” The Germans breached the lines of Wiseman’s platoon area, capturing several men in their holes. At that point, the platoon became part mortar unit and part rifle unit. Some of the men were fighti
ng a deadly cat-and-mouse battle, stalking the Germans and vice versa. One man dropped a bloody enemy submachine gun at the feet of Wiseman’s crew and said: “Here’s a souvenir for you.” The crews kept firing, eventually stopping the Germans in their tracks. “We stood the ground for that day tho and I dare say the Germans lost heavily for every step they’d taken.” In fact, a company report later claimed that the unit’s mortars and heavy machine guns had killed between two hundred and three hundred German soldiers.7

  The 277th Volksgrenadiers utterly failed to take the forest by nightfall. They had breached the 393rd lines in many places, but had not dislodged the Battle Babies sufficiently to open the way to the twin villages. In snowy draws, and underneath snow-stooped trees, many maimed Germans lay fighting for their lives. Their anguished cries sounded like the wail of tormented souls. “The wounded could be heard hollering for hours and later a couple of German litter teams went out and picked up what looked like a number of bodies,” an American soldier recalled. Lieutenant Colonel Scott’s regiment was also in bad shape. The 3rd Battalion alone had already lost three hundred men. But, for now, the regiment was holding off the enemy. After the sun set, the fighting tapered off. Many of the dogfaces worried about a German night attack but it never came. Instead the Germans decided to bring up armor from the 12th SS Panzer Division and attack again at first light, mainly to take positions still held by the 3rd Battalion survivors. The Battle Babies had no tank support, no antitank guns, and a dwindling supply of ammunition. Artillery, mortars, and bazookas comprised their main weapons against the tanks.

  Five Jagdpanzer IV/48 tank destroyers, accompanied by elements of an infantry battalion from the 277th, hit M Company. American artillery dispersed some of the infantry, but the lead tank destroyer kept coming. “One of our [machine] guns opened up on the tank and buttoned it up,” one of the M Company sergeants wrote. “They also knocked out some of the infantry that followed the tank.” As ever, “knocked out” was a euphemism for killing. Needless to say, the German infantrymen were not subjected to a standing eight count. They were ripped open by high-velocity bullets. Their lifeblood drained into the snow, turning it crimson, then rust as the blood dried.

  The lead Jagdpanzer, invariably called a tank by the GIs, opened up with its own machine gun and a main-gun round, instantly killing one of the American machine gunners. The man next to him was, somehow, completely unscathed (and probably wondered for the rest of his life why). “The tank just kept coming, knocking out everything in its way,” the company history recorded. Several of the Battle Babies, including Private First Class James Langford, crawled forward in the snow, bazookas in tow, trying to get a shot at the German armor. “We hit [it] a total of nine times with bazooka rockets and didn’t even appear to slow it down,” Langford wrote.

  The other tank destroyers soon joined their leader. Together they spewed main-gun rounds and machine-gun fire at the GIs. “The bazookamen poured desperate shots [at the lead tank] and finally succeeded in hitting its tracks, immobilizing the vehicle. Otherwise it suffered no damage because the crew continued to fire their MGs.” The Americans did destroy one other Jagdpanzer (thanks to the heroics of Sergeant Vernon McGarity, who earned the Medal of Honor), but the enemy attack was simply too overwhelming. In this terrain, the German armor had enough maneuvering room, along with cover and concealment, to foil the bazooka gunners. Those gunners had trouble finding ways to get close enough to the tanks, into advantageous positions, to hit their vulnerable side and rear armor, not to mention their tracks.

  By now, Lieutenant Colonel Scott realized that the 3rd Battalion was almost surrounded. Against considerable odds, the 393rd had held off the enemy attackers for over twenty-four hours. With General Lauer’s authorization, Scott ordered his battalions to disengage under cover of jeep-mounted machine guns and withdraw west, to a new defensive line between Rocherath and the forest. As best they could, the Battle Babies trudged, almost continuously under fire, away from their enemies, out of the menacing forest. Like the battle itself, the withdrawal was anything but orderly. It was more like a latter-year Trail of Tears, with battered, weary, hungry, scared, bewildered, cold survivors making their way west, usually in small groups, all the while worried about the possibility of being overtaken by the Germans. They had no idea that reinforcements were already in place.8

  Enter the Indian Heads——3/23 Infantry in the Forest

  The soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division wore a unique Indian Head patch that portrayed a proud, fierce-looking Native American warrior adorned with battle headdress against the background of a large white star. The patch was the largest of any divisional unit in the Army. Somehow it symbolized the pride and resourcefulness of a division that had come ashore the day after D-day and had, for the most part, been in combat ever since. A hard core of experienced NCOs, staff officers, and commanders had held this outfit together through many waves of replacements. On the day the German offensive began, elements of the 2nd had actually been launching an attack of their own, at Wahlerscheid, just to the northeast of the 99th Division. In fact, officers of both divisions initially thought the German push was nothing more than an attempt to take the pressure off their comrades at Wahlerscheid. By December 17 they understood that they were facing an all-out, last-ditch enemy offensive that was coming right at them.

  General Walter Robertson, the 2nd Division commander, had skillfully broken off his attack and rerouted his infantry regiments to back up the 99th. He understood that the 277th Volksgrenadier and 12th SS Panzer Divisions would eventually push through the Krinkelter Wald and into the valuable twin villages. He simply needed to hold them off long enough to place his units in and around the villages. One of his battalions, the 3rd of the 23rd Infantry Regiment, had moved through Krinkelt and Rocherath on December 16. From there they tromped into the western edge of the Krinkelter Wald to take up defensive positions that allowed them to block two key roads that led out of the woods and into the towns. Some of the soldiers had settled into existing dugouts with overhead cover. Others tried to scoop out shallow fighting positions in the frozen earth (digging true foxholes with shovels in the frigid ground was an impossibility). They had come from a rear area and thus had only a basic load of ammunition. Such was the confusion of the moment that, during the night, these men initially believed they would attack to restore contact with the 393rd. Instead their mission changed by morning to “hold at all costs,” a desperate phrase that obviously held sinister connotations for the infantry soldiers, who might soon pay the ultimate price to fulfill the order.

  The entire 3rd Battalion was supported by one platoon of Shermans, under Lieutenant Victor Miller, from the 741st Tank Battalion. “We were one rifle battalion thrust into a densely wooded area, with no terrain features that favored the defender, with orders to ‘hold at all costs,’” Captain Charles MacDonald, the commander of I Company, wrote. “The defense was a single line of riflemen.” His company was on the left (northern) flank, along the main road into the villages. There was a fifty-yard gap between his unit and neighboring K Company on the right. He had seven bazookas but only three rounds for them. Two of the tanks were in place to support him. Artillery support consisted of a few tubes from the 99th Division, whose observers MacDonald, of course, did not know.

  As the sun rose, the 2nd Division men could hear sounds of shooting from the east, where the 393rd was fighting for its life. Soon, stragglers—both mounted and dismounted—from that embattled regiment began streaming through the makeshift lines of the Indian Head soldiers. The differing descriptions of this retreat are a classic example of the tendency of soldiers, even those with similar racial and cultural backgrounds, to perceive events according to their own assumptions, biases, and experiences. Nearly all of the 99th Division records and personal accounts speak of the 393rd’s exodus as a “withdrawal,” thus indicating some level of cohesion to the retreat with an ultimate purpose of setting up a new defensive line outside of Rocherath.

  The
2nd Division accounts, coming from a more blooded division whose members were likely to look down on the less experienced 99th, paint a more mixed picture. Private First Class Edward Bartkiewicz, a rifleman in L Company, watched “American vehicles go by, jeeps, trucks, kitchen trucks pulling stoves . . . and it looked like some officers in jeeps going . . . right through us.” Like many riflemen, he had no idea who they were, or what was going on. He just wondered why they did not stop and join L Company. Captain MacDonald, a bit better informed about the intense fighting to the east, saw them as the gallant survivors of a unit that had given its all. One of his platoon leaders, Lieutenant Long Goffigan, whose outfit was holding the extreme left flank, begged them for ammunition. Many of them complied, turning over grenades, ammo clips, and boxes of .30-caliber machine-gun bullets. Two of them even elected to join Goffigan’s platoon. Elsewhere, in K Company’s lines, First Lieutenant Lee Smith, a no-nonsense Texan with little appreciation for what the 393rd had just been through, saw them coming and tried to get them to halt and fight with his outfit. “They would not stop. They just seemed stunned.” Smith even ordered them to halt and fight with his company. “I did so, but the next big bunch that came by were being led by officers who paid absolutely no attention. They were headed for town like trail cattle after water.” Lieutenant Smith gave up, considering the effort useless, especially since “nearly all of them had thrown away their arms and equipment.” To his dying day, Smith maintained, quite unfairly and ignorantly, that “the 99th Division crumbled completely.” Such were the vicissitudes of just this one event.9