I marched with patton, p.9
I Marched with Patton, page 9
Mr. Parker stiffened. “I got a girlfriend, you know.”
“My, my,” Al said. “Do tell.”
“She’s as pure as the driven snow,” Mr. Parker said.
“And I’ll bet about as cold!” Al quipped.
Mr. Parker’s face blushed.
The men laughed again.
Suddenly an explosion shook the house. We hit the floor. Another discharge rattled the windows and caused the table to slide. The men scrambled across the room to grab their helmets.
Another burst knocked the door open, and freezing air burst across the room. Shells were falling all around us.
A minute seemed like forever; five minutes felt like an eternity. And then it all stopped, and quiet fell over the town again.
“I thought the Germans were out of this area!” Mr. Dobson exclaimed.
“Sounds like they’s a-coming back,” said Snuffy.
Mr. Parker crawled to the window and looked out. “Don’t see no sign of the Nazis out there. No trucks. Tanks. Nothing but a couple of houses that got hit.”
“Must be shooting those Panzer IVs at us,” Walt said.
“We’d see one of them moving up if it was the tanks,” Parker observed. “I think it’s more long-range artillery.”
Dobson agreed. “A Krupp K5 railway gun fires off big shells from its twenty-one-millimeter-long barrel. The shells could reach up to a distance of around forty miles. They may be shooting from way out there.”
We waited awhile and then finally got back up to the table. Nobody was joking anymore. We finished up in a hurry and stationed a sentry by the door.
After the sun had gone down completely, we felt somewhat more secure, but we sure weren’t putting any lights in the windows. You didn’t have to look out but for a second to realize everyone in the town had the same idea. We wanted to be as invisible as ghosts.
As the evening progressed, we could periodically hear cannons firing. Somewhere out there, the Germans had the village of Trier in their sights. Maybe Mr. Dobson was right. They could be many miles away, but if their capacity to shell us was a fact, we remained in constant danger.
“How about a little poker?” Al suggested, deftly shuffling a deck of cards. “Anybody up for a little distraction?”
Everyone knew what he meant.
“Count me in,” Jack Postawaiet said.
“Me, too,” Snuffy added.
“We need one more player,” Al said.
“Okay,” said Parker. “I’m in.”
They shuttered the windows so that no light escaped and hunkered down around the wooden table. Al had a flashy, theatrical way of shuffling the deck, and the game was on. I watched for a while but knew I was too tired to waste a good night’s sleep in a real bed. After saying “Sleep well,” I clumped up the rickety steps. I barely hit the bed before I was far, far away in dreamland. Completely gone for the night.
A soft voice kept whispering something . . . something . . . from far away. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. But it seemed to be calling my name.
“Frank . . . Frank . . . wake up.”
I jerked. The voice was in my ear. I looked up. Mr. Dobson’s face was inches from my own.
“Don’t move,” he whispered. “Listen to me.”
“What?”
“You must tiptoe out. We’ve got to get out of the house. Now!” Dobson pointed to the middle of the room. A large round black projectile had lodged halfway through the floor.
I blinked several times and then realized that a 75-millimeter unexploded artillery shell was sticking up in the floor between our two beds. I stared up at the ceiling and could see a hole in the roof where the shell had burst through. I couldn’t believe that I had been so tired that I slept through the crash.
As gently as I could walk without shaking the floor, I got through the door and down the stairs like a cat bounding after a rat.
“Get out of here!” I shouted at the men. “There’s a shell upstairs about to go off!”
The men tore out of that house and into the street. We stood out there in the freezing weather that was as cold as any other day. This time we didn’t notice. We could have all been dead.
19
Staying Warm—and Alive
Nobody had seen a winter like the one we were living through. The cold seemed to go on forever. The thermometer read minus-twenty-two, although we later heard some forecasters said it was even colder. I guess when you get that low, nothing registers right. The snow kept falling like we were at war in the North Pole. Even with the thickest gloves and socks, my hands and feet stayed cold. At first, I thought they’d find my frozen body out there in the trees, but with the passing of the weeks, I somehow adjusted to the reality that it wasn’t going to get any warmer for a long time.
Even when the resistance was stiff, we continued to make progress. The Eleventh Armored Division in the west had contacted the Second Armored Division pushing down from the north. Troops of the III Corps had taken the towns of Wiltz and Diekirch—the latter less than ten miles from the German border—as well as cut the main highway in St. Vith, Belgium. This route was extremely important because we were closing in on Germany. The U.S. XIX Tactical Air Force had taken advantage of the now-open skies and really whacked the Germans, dropping 263 tons of bombs in front of our Third Army along the Our River in the Prüm area of Germany. Our bombers knocked out the bridge at Dasburg, giving the retreating enemy no place to cross the Our back into the Third Reich. We were hitting them from the air and pressing them on the ground. The Nazis were getting bottled up, their vehicles piling up near Eisenbach, and we were massacring them. The enemy was on the run. We were bombing them to pieces.
I’ve got to give the Germans credit, though, for putting up a stubborn resistance. They kept fighting in the north and the south flanks while their troop tried to withdraw. But by January 26, 1945, the III and XII Corps had taken the high ground west of the Clerf River in Luxembourg. Two German divisions were trying desperately to get behind the Siegfried line, Hitler’s fortified west wall, away from our advancing troops. With obstacles called “dragon’s teeth,” this barrier was intended to stop tanks and motored vehicles. Once we took this area, we could look down on all the pillboxes and defenses supporting the Siegfried area without them stopping us.
I believed that when General Patton looked back on the Third Army’s involvement in the Ardennes campaign, he would agree that it was the bloodiest fight of the war. Every inch of ground that was taken was bitterly contested. Back and forth we went. The Third Army would take an area and then retreat. The Germans would lose their position and then recapture it. But in the end, we ran over the Nazis. General Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division had roared in like a herd of dragons only to be repelled. The vital highway through Marnach and the critical route to Hosingen remained closed because of the fierce resistance that the Allies put up. U.S. troops denied the German attempts to take control of the Skyline Drive area, the ridge between the Our and Clerf rivers that would have led west to Bastogne. American tankers won the battle with the Lehr Division near Celles, Belgium. The German defeat marked the end of their drive to the Meuse River.
Our unit continued to move up the road. Nothing was slowing our progress. In fact, we often discussed why the Germans didn’t throw in the towel and sue for peace. We were knocking on the door of their Fatherland, and at least they could have salvaged something rather than see us go on bombing and strafing across their countryside. We suspected that Hitler might be as crazy as their General Dietrich von Choltitz thought when he refused der Führer’s command to destroy Paris.
Rolling on, we came to another town but weren’t sure what its name was. The village had probably been pounded already by both sides in the war. Rubble was everywhere, and the streets filled with debris. The trucks of our unit came rolling down the central street. On all sides stood the charred remains of destroyed buildings. Many houses had been blown apart, but one little villa stood untouched: a beautiful chateau with two stories and open windows at the top. Perfect for us.
The men dispersed through the village, looking for places to stay. We left our gear in the truck and decided to explore the house first. Not one villager was in sight, so we could roam around unnoticed. We walked in.
Whoever had lived there had left a clean, well-ordered house when they fled. Much like all the houses, this one had a big downstairs living room with a kitchen and an open hearth at one end. On the other side stood a large fireplace that undoubtedly warmed the entire abode. I followed Mr. Dobson upstairs, where we found a couple of bedrooms. We could only hope that the rest of our unit had found similar facilities. We took off our heavy overcoats and hung them on a coatrack in the hall.
“I think we can go back to the truck and pick up the rest of our gear,” Mr. Dobson said.
We carefully shut the door behind us to keep all the heat in the house. The truck we came in was still parked out front. We grabbed our shoulder bags and set them on the ground. Mr. Dobson climbed in to get his last duffel bag.
The electrifying roar of heavy artillery shook the ground. One hundred yards up the road, a detonating shell sent dirt flying. Another mortar fell in the wreckage of an already destroyed house. Pieces of splintered wood and shattered bricks fell around us. Without a second thought, my reflexes sent me diving under the truck. Bombs kept exploding with a deafening roar. I grabbed my helmet and crunched up in a ball. Another eruption pounded the street behind us.
I fumbled around in my shirt pocket until I found that little piece of paper with Psalm 91 on it. I read out loud, “I choose the God above all gods to shelter me.” I prayed those words over and over.
The blast sounded like it was only yards away. Fortunately, I’d clapped my hands over my ears, but I still couldn’t hear for at least a minute. The roar began to fade, and the rumble of boards hitting the ground and walls cratering slipped away. The bombing stopped.
After a few minutes, I crawled out from under the truck. I stared in disbelief. The entire top floor of our little la maison was gone. It had been completely blown away; our heavy overcoats cremated. I stood there staring.
Mr. Dobson hopped out of the truck and shook his head.
“What if we’d been in there?” I said.
Dobson kept shaking his head, saying nothing.
20
Outmaneuvering the Enemy
General Patton always said that the last great battle would be fought west of the Rhine. His conviction was that if the bulk of the German army could be captured west of the great river—which forms a natural border with part of eastern France but, as you go farther north, slices as much as a hundred miles into western Germany—only isolated military groups would be left to the east, and the rest of the conflict wouldn’t prove difficult. He seemed to be out to make his point.
Patton’s skill had already been confirmed. Despite everything, German General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army was making one last desperate attempt to take Bastogne. The Luftwaffe came blasting in on New Year’s Day. Of course, for us New Year’s was just another day with no celebrations. Unfortunately for them, Patton’s tanks came rolling in and beat back the assault. Patton’s sudden, unexpected arrival after having crossed a hundred miles had saved the day and virtually ended the German threat.
Following that encounter, we kept moving our troops back and forth across the battle plain in every possible direction. Our unit had little time to waste as our position seemed to be always on the move. The big guns would aim to the north and then suddenly shift to the east. Just about when the Germans were sure the Third Army was going to hit them in the center, we’d strike at one of their flanks. Back and forth, up and down, the Wehrmacht had no idea when or where we were coming from.
The enemy remained confounded by Patton’s strategy. The Nazis would be sure we were going to try an end run around them, only to discover that we came right down the middle. Of course, they couldn’t position their reserves correctly, and it left them vulnerable. I’m sure they must have thought they were chasing ghosts in a game that they lost every time.
Our troops broke through directly to the east and covered more than sixty miles, ending up on the edge of the Rhine. General Patton then dispatched two corps through that opening. He immediately regrouped the troops and sent the two corps south. The result again caught the Nazis off guard, and we overran their supply dumps. When the troops reversed course yet again, they cornered the Germans between two giant pincers. We either killed or captured practically all of their troops caught in that ploy. The Nazis were running scared.
By the end of January, elements of the Third Army had crossed the Our River and were inside Germany. We captured the town of Sinz and were facing the Siegfried line. Sinz, however, proved to be somewhat of an ordeal.
The battle went from house to house, with fighting in the streets and through shattered windows. The Nazis kept firing small mortars at us, but our troops didn’t retreat. The exchange was intense; men crawled behind any barriers they could find to keep from getting hit. Our boys didn’t back down an inch and kept working their way through the back alleys and down the narrow streets. The Germans kept retreating and were eventually pushed out of the town.
With snow everywhere, the world seemed to have turned white. The color of the day had become white, and that realization wasn’t lost on the Germans. We had already lived through the infiltration of our lines by Nazis wearing our uniforms and speaking good English. When such a German soldier was caught in one of our outfits, he was shot by a firing squad. The raids were commanded by one scary guy, Otto Skorzeny. The lieutenant colonel had a formidable reputation. A member of the SS, the political assassination arm of Hitler, he had been part of the rescue of Benito Mussolini earlier. Nazis who came strolling in in those albino outfits were walking murder machines.
As the Germans retreated, they left minefields that our soldiers had to uncover and detonate. The work was delicate and took a soldier with trained hands. When they retreated, one could bet that a trail of mines followed them. By this point, the Germans were short of manpower and equipment. They no longer had an effective defense but were compensating with those road mines. We just kept moving.
Crawling through a bombed-out and destroyed town like Sinz and the many other villages we worked our way through left an impression that wasn’t going away. The roofs of once quaint houses and buildings were now nothing but craters with timbers sticking out the front like bundles of scattered toothpicks. Windows were empty holes in the remnants of the once-proud stone walls. Pieces of what were once white fences were intermingled with rocks, bricks, and hunks of broken cement. Next to a deserted hovel might stand an ornate building completely untouched. What the propaganda of the U.S. War Department never told anyone was that when those bombs fall, they hit everything and everyone underneath. Sure, they hit enemy installations, but they also destroy innocent lives. That’s simply what war does.
Meanwhile, the German propaganda machine resounded with radio voices such as “Axis Sally” telling us that their previous losses were meaningless. Axis Sally was a woman who spoke English as perfectly as if she was from, say, Portland, Maine. Which, we later found out, she was! As we’d speculated, she was betraying her country in service to the Nazi regime as a propaganda-warfare operative. Her real name, it turned out, was Mildred Gillars. In her broadcasts, she kept predicting that a “great secret weapon” was coming that would allow Hitler to wipe us out in one fell swoop. Honestly, after awhile, Sally’s little chats became humorous. She was telling us how badly we were getting beaten while we were marching toward her doorstep. Captured after the war and sentenced to prison, she moved to Columbus, Ohio, when released and died there at the age of eighty-seven.
The truth was that many of the German people were struggling to avoid starvation. Food was scarce, and the Nazis carried off what they could find. When the doughboys showed up with chocolate bars, they were mobbed by the citizens—who quickly discovered we were a benevolent crew.
The Germans had camouflaged many of their forts to look like ordinary farmhouses and barns. Behind the wooden barn doors and frame façades stood walls of steel and concrete four to six feet thick. The actual doors were heavy steel that couldn’t be opened except with a burst from a bazooka. These fortifications made excellent fronts from which to blast away at us as we poured in. The only way to take these facilities was with hand-to-hand fighting. The Germans always built with accuracy and thoroughness, which made these structures appear to stand forever. You have to hand it to them, the Germans paid attention down to the last detail.
As we moved down these ancient roads, we saw plenty of fallen German soldiers who’d been left behind by their comrades. I saw one German soldier crumpled up in a depression where a cliff dropped off. He had been shooting an antitank rocket launcher called a panzerschreck. Somewhere in the conflict, we had hit him. He couldn’t have been dead very long. Not far away, a German machine gunner was lying facedown in the snow. His German MP 38 submachine gun stood in the snowpack beside him. The weapon could fire five hundred rounds per minute. The German looked like he might have ducked to avoid a bullet and got shot anyway. Snow had already begun to blow over his body.
We were sitting in one of those charming, picturesque little houses, keeping our feet and hands warm by the fire in the hearth and waiting for the trucks to arrive to pick us up. As always, Al Jackson had already smoked a cigarette or two and was starting in on the next round.
Snuffy Smith had that silly grin on his face that meant something was whirling around in his brain, but nobody could be sure what it was. He pulled out one of his own cigarettes and looked at Jackson.
“Tell me, Al,” Snuffy began. “Have you looked at that Betty Grable picture this morning yet?”
“Of course,” Al said. “I always start the day with Betty.”
