Elizabeth Connolly: Did you mention the train at all? That was kind of interesting.
No, I didn’t tell him about the train.
Matthew Rozell: What was that?
Well, late in the war, again a nice, beautiful April day—we were shooting like crazy across the top of Germany, and Major Benjamin of the 743rd was kind of out ahead scouting a little bit—he came back to the battalion and he pulled my tank and George Gross’s tank [fellow tank commander] out. He told us to go with him. So we did.
We came to a place where there was a long train of boxcars. I can remember pulling up alongside the train of boxcars, Gross and I, and Major Benjamin. As it turned out, it was a train full of concentration camp victims, prisoners who were being transported from one of their camps… I think they had been in Belsen, on their way to another camp…
So there they were. All of these people, men, women, children, jam-packed in those boxcars, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And there they were! So, now they knew they were free, they were liberated. That was a nice, nice thing. I was there for a while that afternoon. You know, you got to feed these people! Give them water. They are in bad shape! Major Benjamin took some pictures, and George Gross took some pictures too…
‘That was a nice, nice thing.’ Later, this will strike me as the understatement of all time. Though we could not know it at that moment in the summer of 2001, we had just had a date with the cosmos. A portal across time and space had just unlocked, and if I went ahead to step across the threshold, our lives and the lives of hundreds of other people would change.
I record the end of the conversation, and with my curiosity piqued, I shake hands with Judge Walsh and head out the door.
CHAPTER TEN
A Time to Die
1945/Fronhoven, Germany
Red Walsh knew he was about to die.
It was his time. The tall, lanky Irish-American supposed that he and his four-man tank crew should have been killed weeks ago in this race to destroy the enemy, who had clearly not gotten the message that they were going to lose the war. Fighting or moving rapidly now for sometimes 18 hours at a stretch, being shot at or shelled even at periods of rest, had taken a heavy toll; the vow of honor of his 743rd Tank Battalion, ‘We Keep the Faith,’ had been upheld, and now he was resigned, serene, and at peace with the realization. He was going to die.
The jump-off time for the attack on the little town of Fronhoven, less than twenty miles into Germany, had been delayed. No wonders there. Army life did not suit the twenty-four-year-old sergeant from upstate New York. He railed, in his own way, against what he saw as the stupidity of regulation and regimentation. Just five months into heavy combat, he knew from experience that sometimes ‘the Army way’ got men killed.
His real name was Carrol, and with that easy laugh and red hair he had taken to courting a girl named Dorothy after moving to the state capital to enroll in law school, fifty miles from home. He was returning with Dorothy to her home for dinner on that Sunday afternoon when her father met them at the door with a troubled expression and asked if they had heard the news. After the initial shock, they all realized that no one knew where Pearl Harbor was. But the Japanese knew where it was, and December 1941 was not a grand time to be a first-semester Albany Law School student.
His friends were enlisting, and others were being called up. His parents urged him to stay in school. For a while he followed their wishes, but Carrol was antsy, so he scheduled a physical and enlisted in the Army the following August. The Army put him in the enlisted reserve corps, and told him to stay in school for the time being. He continued with school, but felt funny. They didn’t call. His friends went off to war. A bit of shame got the better of him, so he went down to the post office building in Albany, went into the Army office there, and told the officer on duty that he thought it was time that they called him up. ‘Listen, buddy, we’ll run the Army,’ was the reply. ‘You don’t run the Army. When we want you, we’ll tell you!’ Privately relieved, he continued his studies, but as his class shrank, he no longer made the trip home to Johnstown. He was too ashamed. He and another student were the only ones left in the class who were not classified as 4-F, or unfit for combat. This was serious. The stigma was such that college girls would not even date the young men who had been left behind. You had to have a really good reason for not being in the service—and even then, failing your induction physical was not a good enough reason.
Finally, the call came. Carrol and his friend took the bar exam at Albany Law School. Two days later they were in the Army and picking up cigarette butts on the parade grounds of Camp Upton, Long Island. He took his basic training and walked guard duty at Fort Knox, studying Army radio code, which he found interesting. He also took tank training, and his group was then shipped to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for more armored training with the 10th Armored Division—everyone except him and a few others, because alphabetically, his last name did not make the cutoff list. He was shipped instead to Fort Meade in Maryland, awaiting further orders as a future replacement soldier. It was March of 1944. Since late 1942, when the American fight forces landed in North Africa to fight with the British, costly and powerful lessons had been learned as inexperienced soldiers and their commanders garnered hard-earned experience through early setbacks. The momentum of battle was carried into Sicily and now into Italy, where near impossible German mountaintop defenses would be encountered on the road to Rome and beyond. Now, on the eve of Rome’s fall, the much heralded second front was about to open on the beaches of Normandy.
At Fort Meade, ‘Red’ had a final physical, the one that would determine whether or not he would go overseas. He was nearsighted and now required glasses. The kindly older doctor furrowed his brow as he gave him the results. ‘Young man, I have bad news for you.’ He paused, and Red thought, ‘Well okay, he's going to tell me there is a boat out there in the Chesapeake Bay ready to go to Africa or Italy or someplace, and I’m going to be on it in about ten minutes.’ But he said, ‘You'll never fight for your country.’ Red thought, ‘That might not be so bad, I'm not going to argue too much.’ But then the doctor said, ‘I’m going to do you a favor, I’m going to let you go overseas. Now they’ll have to find some kind of a job for you, but because of your eyes, you can never be in combat.’ Red nodded and thought, ‘Okay, maybe I will survive.’
So Red shipped out, and that conversation was the last time that he heard anything about being a ‘noncombatant’ even though it was stamped all over his records in bold print. Later, for fun, the 743rd Tank Battalion’s company clerk would wave Red’s service record aloft to the assembled grizzled tank crews and say, ‘Now, gentlemen, I want you to know that we have a real hero among us, someone who does not have to be here but who has volunteered to give his all.’ Wise guys. Everyone would have a hearty laugh, and Red would join in. To the Army he was just another warm body—for the time being, at least.
The top-secret planning for the ‘Operation Overlord’ was coming to fruition in a rapid full-scale frenzy of last-minute preparations. A million-plus men and supporting matériel from the United States had settled in Britain, so much that a wit remarked that if not for the barrage of balloons tethered to the ground, the island would have sunk.[40] Part of the grand strategy depended on a steady supply of replacement bodies for those killed or wounded in the Normandy landings, the largest combined land-sea-air assault in the history of the world. For sixteen days, Red and the convoy of soldiers sailing from New York City zigzagged across the Atlantic, wary of submarines and dodging seasickness. Landing in Liverpool, the replacements were sent south to the Salisbury Plain, and then down to Southampton, where they were greeted by nice ladies with coffee and donuts. In July, a few weeks after the initial invasion, they were taken across the English Channel. By this time, the division that his tank battalion was now attached to had fought inland about ten miles. At his landing zone off Omaha Beach, Red and the men waded to shore, which three weeks later had been cleared of bodies and much of
the detritus of battle. He looked up and he could not believe it. The bluffs of Point Du Hoc overlooking the beach had been scaled and captured by the Army Rangers with grappling hooks only a few weeks before in the heat of battle. On the high ground overlooking the draws and gullies leading off the beach, the sight of concrete pillboxes and machine gun nests with walls 10 feet thick filled him with a quiet awe for what the men who had landed that day faced and had to fight through.
The night before the D-Day landings, the Allies had dropped 13,000 airborne troops behind enemy lines to secure vital crossroads and bridges for the men who would come in after daybreak. Coastal defenses had been targeted by the air in massive aerial bombardments, though many bombs had gone astray. At dawn, Navy ships opened up and chinked away at the heavily fortified bluffs overlooking the landing areas at Omaha Beach but quieted as landing craft churned the rough surf toward the death zone. Some soldiers slipped over the side of the boats into water that was too deep to touch bottom; others were cut down as they waded in water up to their necks. Engineers were targeted as they tried to fix demolition charges to the various beach obstacles laid down as part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Nevertheless, the first tankers of the 743rd Tank Battalion did touch down on that bloody morning, and made it onto the beach and up to the seawall; one recalled hearing the machine gun bullets hitting the tank, a sound he likened to throwing glass marbles at a car. Explosions rocked the crew inside, and of the 15 tanks in Company A, only his tank and four others survived.[*]
Red and the men continued up the sandy path off the beach, now cleared and taped off in safe lanes where only a few weeks earlier 2,500 men had fallen, taking this ground by the square foot. German signposts on either side mocked him in ominous skull and crossbones declarations (‘Achtung! Mienen!’) as the men carried their packs on towards the replacement depot where they would receive their new orders. By now Red was one of a million men having arrived in Northern France, and the tank he was assigned to was one of the quarter million vehicles which had landed since June 6.
Red received his orders and joined the men of his tank battalion, which consisted of three companies of 15 medium Sherman tanks and one company of 15 more mobile light tanks. Unlike the armored divisions of World War II, the tank battalions were attached to and supported infantry divisions by working in tandem with the soldiers on the ground in fluid combat situations, and many an engagement was turned by the exploitation of the swift-moving and maneuverable Shermans.
Light tanks also had a crew of four, instead of the medium’s five: the tank commander, who directed all tasks and gave the orders in combat; the driver, who when confined to using the periscope probably found the experience like trying to steer a tractor on the battlefield through a viewfinder; the gunner, who had to accurately fix on a target as the commander called it out and fire the 37-mm cannon; and the bow gunner, responsible for the firing of the .30-caliber machine gun protruding from the front deck of the tank. In Red’s light tank, the tank commander also fulfilled the function of the big gun’s loader, slamming the shell into the breech so the gunner could ready the cannon to fire. The Sherman was the work horse of the American armor; by the time Red was assigned to 2nd Platoon, Dog Company, production rates were soaring back home in the States, and northern France was dotted with 4,500 Shermans as they tried to break through the German lines. The Germans, by contrast, had one-third the number of tanks available, but it was usually no contest if a battalion light tank, moving swiftly with the infantry soldiers, found itself one-on-one with more heavily armored German tanks; in fact, a light tank like Red’s, mounted with its already obsolete 37-mm gun, was known to have its rounds bounce harmlessly off the six-inch-thick rolled steel plating of some of these German monsters. The gasoline-powered Shermans could also burst into flames if an enemy round penetrated the engine compartment, touching off the fuel and rounds of shells and ammunition.[41] The Shermans, and the men in them, seemed to be expendable.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
We thought we were hit once. We had run into a situation where we did not know there was German armor, and we took cover in some woods. Of course, the Germans had the woods zeroed in! So the Germans are dumping all sorts of big shells into the woods. A shell had exploded on the right side of our tank, but artillery will not hurt you that much in the tank if you are buttoned up, although the concussion can hurt you, if it is close; the pressure created can kill you somehow. Did you know that?
But anyway, the shell came in and struck. Then all of a sudden there was a lot of smoke in the tank. Schultsie, the commander, said, ‘Jeez, we are hit! We got to get out of here!’ If a tank is hit, you have about three seconds to get out; the reason is because if the tank is hit, the ammunition in the tank will be set off and the tank will blow up! So we see all the smoke and we know what will happen. Naturally we would have to get out. So, remembering to open the hatch, I started out along with the driver. The tank commander and the gunner got out through the turret and scrambled behind the tank somehow. So Earl Dhanse, the driver, and I start up out of the tank, and here comes another shell! ‘KABOOM!’ It was very close! So we say, ‘Jeez, we have to get back down in! What are we going to do? They are shelling outside and the tank is going to blow up!’ So we backed down into the tank, looking at each other, and we panicked. We figured the tank was going to go up any minute. But it was not hit—fortunately, it was not any kind of direct hit; the shell had exploded next to the tank and had made it lurch. We realized that the tank was not hit because it would have been burning by then. So we just stayed in the tank and sat out the artillery barrage; [laughs] I think the only casualty from the entire group was a kid from Chicago who lost his hearing because of concussion. I thought, ‘What a lucky guy!’ They took him out of combat and he was going home. But he was still alive. You would give your hearing or anything to get out of combat alive! Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Million-dollar wound?’ You prayed for a million-dollar wound! Anything! ‘Well, I lost an arm but I’m alive. Hooray!’ [slaps knee, laughing boisterously] That is ridiculous, but that was the way it was!
*
The 743rd Tank Battalion was now attached to the 30th Infantry Division, and Red’s first major battle with the enemy was at the Norman town of Saint-Lô. The 30th Division, later christened the ‘Workhorse of the Western Front,’ had a history that dated back to the trenches of France in an earlier fight against the Germans, and it was now fully committed again in the ancient Norman hedgerows.[*] With centuries-old sunken lanes and earthen embankments, this terrain was a nightmare of ambush, attack, and counterattack at the hands of a determined enemy well-concealed behind the screen of foliage. The maze of hedgerows was dubbed ‘Green Death’ for the way it divided the battlefront into innumerable ‘small boxes, with each box a separate battle, a lone tactical problem on a checkerboard of fields, each in itself a single objective to be fought for, gained, or lost.’[42] But push on, they did. Casualties were high as they fought towards the west bank of the Vire River, and more replacements were needed.
By July 20 Saint-Lô had finally given way, and the men of the 30th Infantry Division, the 743rd Tank Battalion, and the attached 823rd Tank Destroyer Battalion were gearing up for the vaunted breakthrough just to the west. It would be rough, so the high command decided to coordinate the largest air assault in support of ground troops ever, waves of medium and heavy bombers winging their way from England over the target area five miles wide. At the jump-off point on July 24, soldiers and tankers looked up as hundreds of planes droned overhead and began to release their deadly payloads in response to the red smoke that rose to mark the target area. Tankers started their engines, and the infantry began to deploy. H-hour was here, but so was the south wind which carried the red smoke directly over their positions 1,200 yards behind the target area. Twenty-four men of the 30th Infantry Division were killed and more than five times that number were wounded, but Red and the men of the 743rd were relatively unscathed, though badly shaken. The atta
ck was called off, and postponed for 24 hours.
July 25 brought another clear day, and three miles up the bombers appeared again in their stately formations to rip their holes in the German lines. The men on the ground readied themselves and breathed a little easier as the first bombs hit their marks. Soon thereafter the second wave appeared, and the earth quaked as those bombers hit their marks. A sergeant of the 743rd looked up, watching the next wave of medium bombers, and saw that when the bombers were directly over their heads, their bomb bays dropped open and to his horror the bombs began tumbling out like peanuts coming straight down at the tankers. He dived under a bulldozer as the ground shook and the sky grew dark; dense smoke now covered the target area, and the red smoke was no longer distinguishable. As the day turned to night and the bombing intensified, men were buried alive or blown apart, including the Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, the commander of all ground forces who was visiting from Washington, D.C.—the highest ranking American officer to be killed in the European Theater of World War II. The 30th Infantry Division lost another 64 killed, with 324 wounded and 60 more missing, probably blown to bits.[*] An additional 164 men were classified with ‘combat fatigue’; nevertheless, the 30th was ordered to jump off as planned through the opening in the German lines.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 19
