The new tank crew were always reluctant to accept a tank in which crew members had been killed. We often painted the numbers on the transmission and changed the company and battalion designation of a particular tank. The tank was issued to another company so the new crew never knew its history, and we never told them.
After Smith had done his job, one of the officers asked him why he volunteered to help with the cleanup.
“I figured someone had to do it,” he replied. “I have a younger brother who’s a rifleman in the 1st Infantry Division somewhere forward of us. If he was killed, I would like someone to recover his body so he could be given a decent Christian burial. All soldiers should be entitled to this, at the very least.”
Great courage was not limited to the battlefront but was often found in quiet and unexpected places.
After the debacle south of the Paderborn airport, the remainder of CCA came in and cleaned up the situation. The remaining elements of Task Force Welborn regrouped and started moving north. Combat Command A was moving in the middle and CCR was coming up on the left. The VII Corps, with the 3d Armored Division leading, was now in position to make the final assault on Paderborn.
Roving bands of Panther and Tiger tanks with infantry were withdrawing from the city and concentrating around the airport and north of there. As our task forces proceeded to the airport, they encountered heavy fire from 88mm dual-purpose guns. Although these guns could be lowered from vertical to horizontal for use as antitank fire, their high profile made them difficult to protect. The Germans would stack sandbags about five feet high in a ring around each gun, but the tops were completely open and they were vulnerable to artillery fire. By rapid deployment of our M7s, we put a few rounds with proximity fuses over each gun emplacement. The downward blast killed the crew and neutralized the gun. With the 88mms neutralized, our tank columns enveloped the airport and proceeded into the city.
The youthful zeal of the cadets who had successfully crewed the Tiger and Panther tanks against our armored columns was contagious and filtered down to the lower ranks of the preteen Hitler Jugend. Some actually took up arms. One eight-year-old Hitler Jugend boy stepped out from a building with a panzerfaust and knocked out one of our Sherman tanks. He was immediately gunned down by the tank commander. The tragedy of war puts no limits on age.
The hangars around the airport had plenty of paved areas and appeared to be a good place to establish a forward VCP. As we examined this area, I noticed three German aircraft next to one of the hangars. Because we had been trained to be on constant alert for new types of enemy weapons, I was curious to examine these planes further. Low slung and streamlined, they had a two-man cockpit and twin engines. Slung low under each wing, the engines were long with a tubular exhaust going out the rear; however, they had no propellers. As I got closer, I realized that they were jets. These were the ME262s, the same type of aircraft that had bombed us so successfully when we were crossing the bridge at Düren. The planes appeared to be in good condition, although there had been a crude attempt to smash the instrument panels. I took brief notes describing the type and condition of the planes and also the map coordinates, and turned in the notes with my combat loss report that night. As far as I know, this was the first ordnance report made of an ME262 captured intact.
Closing the Ruhr (Rose) Pocket
Early on the morning of April 1, an order from VII Corps headquarters changed the division’s disposition slightly. The division was ordered to continue its assault on Paderborn and at the same time dispatch a task force to Lippstadt, about twenty miles to the west.
At 0300, Task Force Kane started toward Lippstadt. The 2d Armored Division had broken out of the bridgehead north of Wesel on the Rhine, about sixty miles to the west, and was proceeding rapidly across the northern flank of the Ruhr toward Lippstadt. The two units were to meet in that vicinity and close the pocket.
Both Task Force Kane of the 3d Armored Division and the 2d Armored Division task force had been driving relentlessly for several days. They had overcome mines and roadblocks and seen their lead tanks constantly knocked out. Their mission had been to plunge rapidly forward, bypassing any resistance and leaving their flanks exposed, hoping that high speed and rapid maneuver would protect them. They did have the advantage of air cover during daylight, weather permitting.
Both columns approached with considerable trepidation. The men were physically and mentally exhausted but at the same time so keyed up that they would fire at anything and ask questions later. They had each other’s radio frequencies and constantly tried to call each other; however, the combat radios had limited range, which was reduced further by the rugged terrain. To offset this, each task force commander sent his L5 Cub artillery spotter to try to make radio contact. Although the L5s had to dodge ground fire, they were able to make radio contact at 1520. About ten minutes later, the task forces met at Lippstadt.
The key to logistic support of a rapidly moving armored corps, rarely understood by military historians, was the capability of the lead armored division’s forward maintenance elements to assist the forward elements of the motorized infantry divisions. When VII Corps moved two hundred miles to form the pocket, it required not only the 4,200 vehicles of the 3d Armored Division but also another 10,000 vehicles to transport and support the motorized infantry divisions. A task force with fifty tanks moving thirty to forty miles a day will have between fifteen and twenty tanks drop out during the day just for maintenance and repair. These repairs could include everything from the minor changing of spark plugs and V belts to the actual replacement of a transmission or track suspension element. Tanks, half-tracks, and other armored vehicles are subject to extremely heavy wear and tear in normal, everyday operations.
The maintenance on the four-wheel- and six-wheel-drive vehicles is also extremely high. The demand for tires was unending, because they were constantly damaged by battle debris on the highways plus shrapnel fragments from mortar and artillery explosions. A two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck, moving over a combination of highways and cross-country in six-wheel-drive, would have to have a new engine approximately every ten thousand miles. Although two and half tons was the load rating, they normally carried anywhere from five to eight tons.
The maintenance problems on German tanks and armored vehicles were even greater than on ours. The metal-to-metal connection on their tanks was a high-wear item. With the rubber doughnuts and rubber tracks on our tanks, we could get about five times the track life of a comparable German part. With little or no maintenance support, the German units were at an extreme disadvantage.
The meeting of the 2d and 3d Armored Divisions in Lippstadt sealed the trap around the German troops in the Ruhr Pocket. The G2 grossly underestimated the number of prisoners caught in this trap. It was believed that the bulk of the German armies would withdraw and join a new army group in the Harz Mountains. Early estimates said there were 35,000 to 40,000 Germans in the entire Ruhr area. It turned out that the major elements of the German 5th and 15th Armies, including the headquarters of Army Group B under Field Marshal Model, were cut off in this pocket. When Model requested permission to withdraw, Hitler ordered him to stand and fight under penalty of death.
Model, true to the Prussian tradition that a German field marshal never surrendered, was determined not to breach this honor. After being driven to a wooded area, he got out of his Volkswagen, walked a few yards, and shot himself. The disintegrating German units eventually surrendered and yielded about 380,000 prisoners, the largest single group of prisoners ever taken. This site would later be known as the “Rose Pocket,” in honor of our division commander.
12
Final Thrust Across Germany
After the envelopment at Lippstadt, the 3d Armored Division withdrew. The 8th Armored Division and some infantry units cleaned up at Paderborn, and the 3d Armored Division headed eastward. On April 4, the division advanced rapidly in four columns to secure bridgeheads across the Weser River, about thirty miles to the east.
The river appeared to be the next great natural land barrier.
As we approached the foothills of the Harz Mountains, the terrain was still rolling, with many patches of dense woods. When the division encountered small pockets of resistance in an operation of this type, it would become stretched out. A tank platoon would drop off to take care of this, and the others would bypass. Whenever these voids occurred, the Germans would infiltrate across the columns and sometimes try to block the road again.
This situation was extremely risky for our liaison group. One of the division liaison officers and his driver had disappeared while following one of these columns. The next day his wrecked Jeep was discovered alongside one of the secondary roads and both bodies were in the ditch, their skulls crushed and their faces beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. When news of such atrocities filtered down to our troops, it created no incentive for compassion when our men captured German soldiers.
I told Wrayford that we had to stay on the ball. That afternoon we passed a scout car that had stopped along the road. A couple of men with rifles were apparently trying to spot a sniper in the woods. About half a mile farther down the road, we had a flat tire. I realized that we were in the middle of one of those voids, and we both jumped out of the Jeep and began to change the tire. We had just finished, and Wrayford was tightening the lugs, when we heard loud German voices coming from the woods. Then we saw that the Germans were coming out of a firebreak and were headed in the same direction we were. If they got to the intersection first, they would either shoot us or take us prisoner. We were determined to get there first.
The Jeep was in a defiladed position, so I didn’t think the Germans could see us. I got one of the M1 rifles out of the Jeep and sighted along the hood as Wrayford spun the lug wrench as though it was motorized. When he finished, we jumped into the Jeep and hightailed it down the road. As we screamed past the intersection, the Germans were about fifty feet back in the firebreak. I pointed my M1 rifle dead at them. They hollered something; I wasn’t sure whether they wanted to surrender to us or shoot us. We didn’t stop to find out. I assumed that the recon outfit behind us would soon clean them out.
The Germans had blown most of the bridges across the Weser. However, CCB, after a considerable firefight, managed to get a bridgehead across the lower section of the river. They made multiple crossings and either killed or captured those in the bridgehead, then proceeded rapidly eastward toward Northeim.
It was on this stretch between the Weser River and Northeim that our Super M26 tank finally got into action. Some of the German units that had fallen back from the bridgehead set up a few isolated strongpoints along our route.
One such position, on a wooded hill south of CCB, opened fire as the column passed. The Super M26, in the forward part of the column, immediately swung its turret to the right and fired an armor-piercing shot toward an object on the forward slope of a wooded hill about fifteen hundred yards away. A blinding flash of sparks accompanied a tremendous explosion as debris shot fifty feet into the air.
The unknown object was a tank or self-propelled gun; had it been a half-track or other vehicle, the flash would not have been as large. The rest of the column let go with a deluge of tank and automatic weapons fire, and the Germans soon broke off the action. Although we didn’t know what the Super M26 hit, we did know that a Panther or a Tiger would not have been knocked out by an M4’s 76mm at this range. No one was anxious to go over and check it out. The Super M26 had finally won its combat plaudit and as far as I know was never again engaged in any action.
The Tragedy at Nordhausen
Combat Command B entered Nordhausen early on the morning of April 11. The British had bombed the city the night before, and a large contingent of German troops had already withdrawn. Our tank columns wound their way slowly through the town, occasionally neutralizing a roadblock or flushing out snipers. City fighting was always a start-and-stop operation, but by this time our men had developed considerable experience and we were making progress through the city, block by block.
During one of these stops, Maj. Dick Johnson came up to my Jeep. “Cooper, we’ve seen a lot of grim things in this war together,” he said, “but there’s something in the next block that you won’t believe until you see it.”
I tried to find out more, but he just shook his head and went back to the T2 recovery tank to our rear.
The small-arms fire up ahead subsided and the column moved forward again. As we approached the corner of the next block, we saw a tall, frail-looking creature with striped pants and a white towel draped over the head. The exposed skin of his naked torso looked like translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone. There were no breasts, but the height indicated a male. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out from beneath the towel. The teeth were exposed in a broad, tragic grin, and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets.
“I never thought I’d see a live walking ghost,” remarked Wrayford.
As we proceeded down the road, we encountered several more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting, but most of them were sprawled on the road and sidewalk where they had collapsed. In their last struggle to survive, these tragic figures of skin and bone had attempted to walk as far as possible and when the last bit of energy had been wrung from their feeble bodies, they simply dropped dead.
Farther down the block, I noticed two warehouse-type buildings three to four stories high, separated by a vacant lot about a hundred yards wide. The doors and windows of the first building had been broken open, and German civilians were looting the warehouse. There must have been sixty people going in and coming out, mostly children and old men and women, each with armloads of bags or boxes filled with food. Several were pulling small sleds that dripped a red substance, which I later realized was frozen strawberry jam. The crowd was ravenous; they were pushing and shoving one another to get as much food as possible. They paid no attention to the pitiful wretches lying in the streets and gutters.
In the vacant lot between the two warehouse buildings was a barbed-wire enclosure that was split in the middle to form a partial gate. What appeared to be garbage was piled in three rows about six feet high and four hundred feet long. To my abject horror I noticed that parts of the stacks were moving. Suddenly, I realized that these stacks were naked human beings, writhing in their excrement and left in the open to die. The stench was overwhelming.
According to our medical officers, these slave workers could survive perhaps thirty to forty days without food under these conditions. They would lose 30 to 40 percent of their body weight, and their stomachs would be grossly bloated and distended due to the gases and the acid in their digestive systems. These people showed no such distended stomachs; they were nothing but skin and bones. They had been deliberatetly, painfully starved to death. Even our combat tankers, who had experienced much of the death and destruction of war, were horrified at the barbaric treatment that these people endured.
General Hickey was ordered by General Collins, the corps commander, to assemble every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the city to bury the dead bodies. Collins also called First Army headquarters and requested a field hospital be sent immediately to take care of any survivors who might be rescued from the piles. Engineers with bulldozers dug large mass graves about ten feet deep and three hundred feet long. German civilians made small wooden stretchers out of scrap lumber, picked up the bodies, and took them to the burial sites.
When I came back through Nordhausen on my way to maintenance battalion headquarters, I saw a steady stream of Germans carrying these lifeless skeletons, arms and legs dangling over the sides of the stretchers, to the burial sites. The whole scene reminded me of ghouls in a grave robbery scene from an old horror movie. The bodies were laid side by side in the mass graves. The army sent a Protestant and a Catholic chaplain and a Jewish rabbi to perform ceremonies as these people were finally laid to rest.
General Sherm
an once said, “War is hell.” The Nordhausen tragedy made one think there must be different degrees of hell. Although the terror and violence of war can harden a person to new terrors, an unusually traumatic event can still shatter this external protective shell.
The 3d Armored Division medical officers cared for the survivors of the death camp until they could be relieved by the army field hospital. Of the approximately three thousand bodies stacked in the piles in the open field, about 10 percent were alive. Captain Comar, our battalion surgeon, said that some would survive but that malnutrition had probably already caused severe brain damage.
The V2 Rocket Factory
One of the columns of CCB discovered the entrance to an underground factory in nearby Robla. It was located in an old, abandoned mine that had been extended considerably for the production of the V1 buzz bomb and V2 rockets. The Germans had also been working on a new secret rocket motor for an interceptor.
The factory was staffed by slave workers, primarily from eastern Europe. They lived in wire-enclosed concentration camps and survived under the most primitive conditions. Those who were recalcitrant or failed to do their masters’ bidding were transferred to another enclosure, where they were slowly and deliberately starved to death. This was the enclosure we had found in Nordhausen.
The underground factory was elaborate, with some tunnels up to two miles in length. The Germans, highly ingenious engineers and inventors, had organized and built this factory in spite of day-and-night bombardments by the American and British air forces. After examining this system, I could understand how the Germans produced the V2s in such mass quantity. After the parts were fabricated underground, they were taken to the surface and sent to small towns in the vicinity of Nordhausen for the final assembly, which took more space than was available in the narrow underground passageways.
Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II Page 32
