Early the next morning, I started back to the maintenance battalion headquarters, located in Meaux, to deliver my combat loss report. As I approached Villers-Cotterêts, I could not decide which road to take. According to my map, there were three possible routes: the main paved highway to the left, the central road running through the woods, which we had taken the day before, and another main highway to the right.
I wasn’t about to take the road through the woods that we had been on the day before. It would have been foolish for two men in a Jeep to take a chance with all those snipers. My choice was one of the other two roads.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by a group of French civilians screaming, “Vive l’Amérique” and “Vive la Libération.” Then a GMC truck appeared with a hundred German prisoners aboard. An MP sergeant riding a motorbike was in charge, and two MPs were in the cab.
The sergeant came up to my Jeep. “Lieutenant, I have a hundred prisoners here that I’m supposed to take back to Meaux. I don’t know where in the hell I am. You’re the ranking man; you’ll have to take charge.”
The last thing I needed was to be slowed down with a truckload of prisoners when I was trying to get back with my combat loss report as quickly as possible. But I knew that the sergeant was right. A cardinal principle in the army is that vital decisions must be made by the ranking man.
“Okay, let me find out what’s going on,” I said. “I have to go back to Meaux, too, so you can follow me.”
There they were, a hundred German POWs packed in the back of an open-top truck like sardines in a can. There was just enough room for them to stand up. Some had been there so long that they had wet their pants, but the sergeant knew that if he let them out, he would never get them back. I felt little compassion for them, because I’d heard many stories of what American prisoners were made to suffer.
Vernon had taken the map out of its case and spread it on the hood of the Jeep. I assumed that the elderly Frenchman who was the most verbal in the group was the mayor of the village.
“Parlez-vous Anglais?” I asked.
“Non,” he replied.
I explained in my best French that I was trying to find out which of the two roads might be clear. I knew that the Germans often closed in and blocked the roads after an armored column passed through.
The mayor kept saying, “Non compris, non compris.” I knew he didn’t understand a word I was saying. I had studied French for three years in high school and two years in college. “Cooper, if you had not been such a dumb butt and paid more attention to what was going on in class, you would know what these people were talking about.”
Suddenly, a young German lieutenant leaned over the side of the truck and said to me in perfect English, “Lieutenant, I speak French, German, and English fluently and will be glad to act as your interpreter if you’ll let me out of the truck.”
The two MP drivers with their carbines stood behind the truck gate and the sergeant positioned himself there with his tommy gun as the lieutenant got out of the truck and stood beside me. I could tell by his bearing and the way he spoke English that he was well educated and probably from an upper-middle-class background. I also suspected that he was a dedicated Nazi.
He looked at the map. “I do not know about the road on the left; however, I do know that the road on the right would be unsafe for you now.”
He pointed to a small, wooded hill about half a mile out of town and told me he had been captured there the previous day after a heavy firefight. He said that even though the Americans had knocked out his roadblock and captured him and some of his men, there were at least two more tanks and a couple of half-tracks filled with infantry that had disappeared into the woods undetected.
I knew that if one of our columns had overrun the roadblock, they would not pursue the Germans into the woods. I also knew that our infantry would not arrive until later that afternoon. If the German was telling the truth, the roadblock could have been reestablished.
Was the man lying or telling the truth? I tried to put myself in his position. If I could get the Americans to go down this road and get shot up, it would give me a chance to get rescued by German troops and free me to fight again for the Führer. There might be some embarrassment for surrendering to the Americans; however, this would be outweighed by the fact that I had misled them in order to get myself free again.
On the other hand, if we went down that road and the Germans spotted us, they would certainly see the high profile of the truck and open fire. They would not immediately know that the truck was full of German prisoners. I would have a good chance of getting my butt shot off and having a lot of my men killed. At the same time, the American lieutenant in the low-profile Jeep might escape the fire and get away. In addition, I was at least safe as an American POW. If we could get back to the POW enclosure, we had a good chance of surviving the war.
At this moment, my thoughts were interrupted by a French schoolgirl about fourteen years old who stepped forward from the crowd of French villagers. She spoke some English and appeared to understand my poor French. She confirmed what the German lieutenant had said. Some of the villagers who had returned that morning reported that the Germans had blocked the road approximately where the German prisoner had indicated. She didn’t know the situation on the left-hand road but thought the Americans had been up the road the day before.
“Merci beaucoup,” I said to her many times.
I made my decision and hoped I was right. I told the sergeant we were taking the road to the left. I wanted the truck to follow about sixty yards behind me and I wanted him to ride behind the truck on his motorcycle. I instructed the two MP drivers to watch for any hand signals that I might give. If I encountered a roadblock or any other resistance, I would hit the ditch on the side of the road; the truck driver was to do likewise.
Everybody mounted up and we started toward the road. By this time, the French crowd was screaming and yelling obscenities at the prisoners, giving the well-known singlefinger salute.
The road was a main highway, paved and in good condition but somewhat hilly and curving for the first mile or so. As we started up a small hill curving around a high embankment, I saw on the crest of the hill a Panther tank with its gun pointed straight at us. Vernon hit the ditch and we scrambled out of the Jeep, expecting to be blasted at any second. The truck driver saw what was happening and pulled into the ditch to the left.
I grabbed an M1 rifle and a high-explosive grenade from the grenade box. Vernon grabbed his M1 carbine and we started crawling back down the ditch to the bottom of the hill. I had heard no shots from the tank and didn’t hear the motor running, so I motioned to Vernon. We circled around the back side of the hill and started up the slope through the woods to a point that I thought would put us above and slightly to the rear of the tank. As we approached the crest of the hill, I could see the top of the tank turret through the woods. The cupola doors were open. I had my hand on the safety and was ready to toss the grenade into the turret when I realized that the back of the tank was completely blackened by fire. The tank was gutted. I felt a tremendous sense of relief.
From the top of the hill we could see no signs of any Germans, so we ran back to the Jeep and motioned the truck crew to move out. We went around the tank and headed down the road at top speed. Seeing the burned-out tank now appeared to be a sign that one of our columns had gone up the road the day before, but I was not sure that the Germans hadn’t come back and blocked the road again. Although we proceeded with extreme caution, we felt that speed was our best defense.
About halfway between Villers-Cotterêts and Meaux, we came upon a straight, clear stretch of road about a mile and a half long. Just as we entered one end of this stretch, I saw another vehicle enter the other end headed in our direction. It appeared to be either a Jeep or a Volkswagen. We both seemed to slow down simultaneously. I was holding my rifle and told Vernon to be ready to hit the ditch at any moment.
Finally, both vehicles reached the point wher
e we could recognize each other. I was relieved to find out that it was an American Jeep. A major and his driver were headed north and wanted to know the situation between there and Soissons. I told him that the division had occupied Soissons the night before; I also told him the route I had taken from Soissons to this point. I explained about the German snipers in the woods on the logging road and about the supposed roadblock on the west highway on the other side of Soissons. He thanked me and told me that the road to Meaux was clear as far as he knew.
When we arrived at Meaux, I turned over the sergeant and the truckload of soldiers to the POW enclosure in division trains, went to the maintenance battalion headquarters and turned in my combat loss report, then went to division trains headquarters and told them about the possible roadblock on the west road. I was told that they had already received confirming information on this roadblock and that about fortyfive minutes before I came through Villers-Cotterêts, an American ambulance half-track with red crosses painted on the front and both sides and filled with wounded men was ambushed at this same roadblock. All personnel had been killed. I realized what a narrow escape I’d had.
This incident had a profound effect on me, and it is with a deep sense of humility that I recall it. I realized how life takes strange turns and how seemingly unimportant things can become of paramount importance. In all those years I studied French, I felt it was a waste of time, but I realize it was probably the very margin that saved my life and the lives of those with me.
I was reminded of this several years later when I came to Birmingham, Alabama, for an engagement party for me and my fiancée at the home of Frank Dixon, the former governor of Alabama. Dixon was the law partner of my fiancée’s father. During the course of the evening, I chanced to step into the den and was immediately drawn to a map on the wall. It was of Villers-Cotterêts. The town didn’t seem to have changed much from the way it looked on the map I had used in World War II and still had in my possession.
I told Governor Dixon that I was interested in the map because I’d had an extremely narrow escape in this town during the war. I wondered how he happened to have a copy of it. He told me that he’d also had a narrow escape in this area, and he pointed to an open field about three miles east of the town. This was where he’d been shot down as an observer in the Army Air Corps during World War I. His leg had been shattered, and he lay in a shell hole in no-man’s-land for twenty-four hours before the medics could get to him. As a result, gangrene set in and he lost his leg. He said the map had been in his pocket when he was shot down, and he’d kept it ever since.
Soissons and Laon: Battleground of World War I
I arrived back at Soissons about noon that same day and immediately went to CCB headquarters, located in a villa on the west side of town. As I was coming out of the villa from a liaison officers’ briefing, I was met by a crescendo of ack-ack fire. There were several M15 and M16 half-tracks from the 486th Antiaircraft Battalion protecting the headquarters, and all of the armored vehicles and some of the GMC trucks had .50-caliber machine guns. They seemed to open up simultaneously.
We had two L5 Cubs aloft observing artillery fire north of Soissons. As I took cover, I looked up and saw what I thought at first were P47s diving in on the area, but I realized as they got closer that they were FW190s. I assumed they were going to strafe CCB headquarters, but instead they went after the two observers flying about a thousand yards to our left at about fifteen hundred feet. They were fighters, and they came in single file one after another.
As the fighters approached our planes, our antiaircraft fire ceased to avoid hitting our own people. One of the L5s was hit and exploded in midair. The flaming wreckage plummeted to the ground. The other pilot immediately put his plane into a steep dive; he barely pulled out and skimmed the treetops before hitting the ground. The FW190 on his tail was going too fast and had to pull out. The second L5 escaped and was covered by the antiaircraft fire that started up again.The German fighters did not stay around long enough to strafe our headquarters.
I finally got out of my cover and went to see if Vernon was okay. One of the other men said that the last time he saw my driver, he was making a beeline for one of the concrete culverts under the road. That’s where I found him, about ten feet inside—a much better hiding place than I’d had.
The next morning, with enemy resistance around Soissons neutralized, the division started north to Laon. By that time, C Company Maintenance Battalion Headquarters Platoon had joined Combat Command B, and Captain Sam Oliver asked me to take the company through Soissons and meet him on the other side.
We finally arrived at a straight stretch of road about half a mile outside of town, where I stopped the column. The men were stretched out at normal march interval. I told Sergeant Fox to pass the word for everybody to be on the alert. The column, headed by an armored scout car with a .50-caliber machine gun, was followed by fifty-four vehicles, including thirty GMC trucks. Every ninth truck had a ring mount with a .50-caliber machine gun. This gave us seven .50 calibers, a 57mm antitank gun, and two hundred men equipped with M1 carbines.
I stood on the road beside my Jeep with my map case on the hood and was discussing the route with Vernon and one of the C Company platoon leaders. Bitch was in the backseat next to my maintenance manual box. On our right was a cornfield with a gently rising slope that crested about three hundred yards away. The cornstalks had been harvested and stacked neatly in rows.
Suddenly, our tranquillity was interrupted by a series of sharp cracks, which I knew immediately was sniper fire. I hit the road. The fire became a regular fusillade. We crawled across the road on our hands and knees and dropped into the ditch on the opposite side. Bitch saw us crawling and jumped out of the Jeep, but instead of running at her full twelve-inch height, she got down on her knees and elbows with her little belly dragging on the pavement, crawled across the road, and snuggled underneath my armpit. I wondered if she thought she was a human being.
Sergeant Fox immediately swung the .50 caliber to the right and let go with several short bursts. The fire from the other side stopped immediately. From the field slightly to our rear and to the right came a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier with a 37mm antitank gun mounted on the back. The gun swung toward the top of the hill. The sergeant in charge asked what we were shooting at. I told him we had received some fire from the other side of the hill. Captain Oliver arrived, got in the scout car with Sergeant Fox, and, because the firing had stopped, told me to proceed.
We left C Company and headed toward Laon at top speed. We had gone about half a mile when the road curved to the right and started down a hill. A dozen French underground fighters had congregated at the edge of the road just around the curve and waved me down. As I came to a stop, they pointed toward a World War I–era concrete bunker that had been reinforced and rebuilt. They wanted me to go in the bunker and get a couple of German soldiers who were holed up there.
“You go in there and get ’em,” I said. “It looks like you’ve got about a dozen men, and you’ve all got German rifles.”
There was always a language barrier between my poor French and their understanding, and I could hear many statements of “non compris.” I could see what was bothering them; they had absolutely no desire to go into that pillbox and face a couple of armed men in the dark. I felt the same way. We had been instructed to move as rapidly to the target as possible and not allow ourselves to be delayed or sidetracked by events that could be easily handled by others. The mission of the infantry, supplemented by the Free French, was to mop up stragglers. In my judgment, this situation was pretty well in hand.
I pulled out a white phosphorus grenade, gave it to one of the men, and explained how to hold the safety, pull the pin, throw it into the bunker, then hit the deck fast. A broad grin broke out on his face. “Oui compris, oui compris.”
The Frenchman got around the bunker and yelled in French and German for the two German soldiers to come out. When there was no response, he pulled th
e pin and tossed the grenade down the stairway. There was a muffled explosion, then white smoke began to come out of the bunker. As I started down the highway in my Jeep, two German soldiers came screaming out of the bunker with their hands over their head. I realized that it was the fire from these Free French that had been enfilading our column.
A few miles north of Soissons, we passed through a major World War I battleground. On the right was an American cemetery with a large statue dedicated by the French government to the American war dead. The statue, which stood in the middle of the cemetery, was eighty to ninety feet tall and was made from white Italian marble. It was a Statue of Liberty holding a dead American soldier in her arms; her head was drooped and she was crying. On the base of the statue—a block of granite fifteen to twenty feet square—was an inscription with the names of all Americans killed in that area.
German stragglers were running through the cemetery trying to take cover from the Free French who were following close behind them. There was a considerable firefight in the cemetery before the Germans were rounded up.
I’ve thought many times of this terrible irony. Here was a beautiful memorial, a symbol of the men who sacrificed their lives in World War I, desecrated by the failure to keep the peace afterward. This profoundly sad moment made me realize that nothing appeared sacred anymore.
We bivouacked in a large, open cornfield outside of Laon. We were on high ground above the city with only the neatly stacked rows of cornstalks available for camouflage. Each vehicle parked as close as possible to a large stack, then spread a camouflage net over both the stack and the vehicle. Vernon drove the Jeep right into the middle of the stack so that it was almost completely covered. We placed our bedrolls as close to the stack as possible and turned in. It was a clear night with plenty of starlight but fortunately no moon.
Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II Page 13
