A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It
528
A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698404977 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter I
THE INNOCENTS
PHIL HANNON, AGE TWENTY, had been assigned to the 81st Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 106th Infantry Division. “I grew up in Ripon, Wisconsin, had a year at the University of Cincinnati when my family moved to College Park, Maryland. I transferred to the University of Maryland right there.
“We were all in the ROTC, and our commander told us that the unit was going to be called up and we might be better off if we enlisted while they would give us an option of the branch of service. I signed up for the engineers, since I had heard that they got to ride much more than the infantry. I took my basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It was very good, I think. I learned to handle a variety of weapons, the demolition trade using explosives, how to build bridges and roads.
“I hadn’t developed any great hatred of the enemy we supposedly were about to face. When I was in high school I knew we were working up to a warlike confrontation with the Germans. President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was leaning to the British side and had gone out of his way to head the country towards the mess. As a result it had maybe come sooner but I’m not sure there was any way to avoid it. We were well on our way to getting into the war, it was a question of when.
“I was less aware of the problems with Japan. I remember in 1941, the year I graduated from high school, that our economics teacher remarked that he would be very surprised if we were not at war with Japan in six months. We looked at him astonished. What the hell was he talking about? All of our sights were on Europe where they were already fighting. When the Japanese then jumped us at Pearl Harbor, it was upsetting. The guys I knew always had more animosity towards the Japanese than the Germans.
“I heard that some civilians had a lot more feeling about the Germans than we did. In fact, there was a family in Ripon, of German background that supposedly was driven out of town by the local people.
“When the ASTP program (Army Specialized Training Program that sent soldiers to study on college campuses) opened up, I took placement exams at Georgetown. They put me in the advanced engineers’ course at the University of Maryland. There were only 200 of us in the course although the total number of ASTP men at Maryland was three or four thousand. Since we were a small, tightknit unit, we had a gorgeous time, particularly with my folks living right there. Girls had to sign out from their dormitories or sororities. Our house became a place where they could sleep over the weekend.
“I was not a very good student. All of my previous courses had been ones concerned with business. I had no background in chemistry, physics, calculus. Furthermore, I didn’t particularly want to be in college at the time. I wanted to be in the army and get things over with over there. My grades were so terrible I had to go before a review board to explain why I should not be thrown out. They asked me didn’t I like it there in college? Why wasn’t I doing the kind of work I was capable of? I had just met Jean and so I told them that I had met a girl with whom I was serious and that I was also distracted because my folks lived in College Park. They sort of accepted this as reasonable and figured I’d settle down now. They decided to let me stay, with a couple of remarks that my group wouldn’t be there much longer, anyway.
“When I got back to the others and told them what was ahead, the partying started in earnest. We had one great carousing time, every night. Half of us went to the 106th Division, and the rest I think to the 87th Division. In the 81st Engineers we participated in maneuvers in Tennessee for six weeks. I enjoyed it, even though it was nasty and cold. To prepare us for any eventuality, including shipment to the Philippines, we even had to use our mosquito nets during a snowstorm.
“Our outfit stayed intact, but they gutted the infantry regiments in the summer [after D-Day and the breakout in France]. They stripped them of maybe two thirds of their best trained guys and replaced them with newly drafted guys who had just completed their basic training.
“From Tennessee we had gone to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, and then to Miles Standish in Massachusetts in preparation for shipping out to Europe. At Miles Standish, an officer stood up and announced, ‘Every other one of you will either be wounded or killed.’ We just turned to the GI next to us and said, ‘That’s tough shit for you, fella.’
“We were eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old kids. None of us could believe anything that bad could happen to us. At most we thought of the million-dollar wound, getting hit in the leg and being sent home as a hero.”
* * *
On November 10, 1944, S. Sgt. John Collins from A Company of the 81st Engineer Combat Battalion, the same unit in which Phil Hannon served, sailed for Europe aboard the U.S.S. Wakefield. Collins grew up in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri. Although he had served in the National Guard from 1938 to 1940, squeezing in a year of college to boot, the Merchant Marine rejected him as physically unfit. The draft swept him up in 1942 when he was twenty-five years old and sent him to Fort Jackson and the combat engineers.
When the Wakefield docked, GI trucks hauled the troops to the small town of Blockely, about ninety miles north of London. It was the third week in November. He jotted down a present tense journal.
“We are about three quarters of a mile from the mess hall, located near the center of the town. The town is funny looking. It’s all crammed together with very narrow streets. We try out the ‘Pubs’ but none of us can take the bitters (warm beer or ale) or the cider (extremely sour). No dancing or singing in their Pubs. I did not see a woman in any of the Pubs. I like the USA style. We hike every morning. Then we clean equipment, clean our barracks, etc. The equipment [rifles, carbines and other gear made of metal] is packed with cosmoline [grease] and very hard to remove. It rains most of the time.
“Thanksgiving day!! Everyone agrees that we should be thankful we are Americans after a feast like we just had! Turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, carrots, coffee, bread, butter, sugar, cream, pumpkin pie and candy. My best dessert was a letter from home. My new son was born 6 Oct. and due to the intercession of Lt. Rutledge I had received a three-day pass. When I returned, my barracks bag was outside in formation with the rest of the platoon as we were loading for Miles Standish near Boston.”
The day after Thanksgiving, the 81st prepared for transport to the mainland. “Trucks and mobile equipment is all new and everything seems to be smoothing out. The men’s spirit is exceedingly high. A great bunch to be with.
“Thursday was Pearl Harbor day. A few of us talk about it, but it seems so distant and so long ago. We slept in the truck for these two days so our blankets could dry and because it was continually raining. Miserable sleeping but dry! Left Friday in convoy travelling across Belgium. Nearly all the towns are destroyed but we were welcomed by everyone we met.
“On December 10, I was in an advance party to Auw. Our unit is replacing the 2nd Division engineers at Auw. Their lieutenant showed us around and we found where to place our platoons and equipment. We understand that our division is to cover a front line of approximately 25 miles. We will be very thin. We were made welcome by the enemy with a couple of rounds from their 88s.
“The snow is fairly deep in places and the ground is frozen, making digging very difficult. The 2nd Division is moving out and banter is going back and forth between the troops. The front is very quiet. The infantry troops are deployed just below this ridge [the Schnee Eifel] and we are just below the troops. It is also known as the Ardennes Forest. In any other movie it would be a beautiful place.
“Auw is a small town of about 600 (pre-war) people. It is almost on a hill with a valley between it and the front which is about three miles. Once in a while we can hear rifle fire at night. The weather is sloppy, cold and snow about one foot deep or more, depending where you are. Lt. Woerner, Smitty, the jeep driver, Stanley, the toolkeeper, and myself stay with a German family of eight—five girls, ages 6 to 28, a lad of 12, their uncle and their mother. One tot was killed a few weeks previously by shelling. They seem aloof but that could be because of the language. At night, the Lt. and myself sleep between sheets—compliments of the German family.
“December 13 and 14 we are still working on repairing and building roads for the 422nd Regiment. The morale is very high and the men are having fun, so it seems. Pvt. Suckow wants to carry five rounds for shooting deer. Pvt. Skaggs stated he mistook a cow for a deer and shot it. It is against our policy to use other people’s stock for beef or shoot one. However, it had been done, but Skaggs knows what a deer looks like since he hunts them in Missouri where he hails from. How could one mistake a black and white Holstein cow for a deer?”
* * *
Three months after his eighteenth birthday, little more than a year after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1942, Richard McKee, a high-school grad from Akron, Ohio, volunteered for the army with the necessary signed consent forms by his parents.
“I enlisted in the Coast Artillery because my father George McKee had served in the Coast Artillery during World War I. I left Camp Perry, Ohio, for H Battery, Provisional Training Battalion at Fort Screven, Georgia, located on Tybee Island at Savannah. Two weeks later I spent my first army Christmas on KP. I also had KP on New Year’s Eve. In May, 1944, after completing NCO School, attending gas training courses for coast artillery noncoms, I volunteered to transfer into the infantry. I was sent to Camp Atterbury to join the 106th Infantry Division. I qualified as an expert rifleman with an M-1 and became an assistant squad leader, 3rd Platoon, Company A, 422 Regiment.
“We sailed from New York on October 20, 1944. I was seasick before we even got out of the harbor. At our Fairford, England, camp, we were billeted in metal Quonset huts. We spent many hours in training marches over the hilly countryside while here. There was little physical evidence of the war. We did get a few passes into the city of Oxford. We took a train into the town, which was always filled with soldiers. There were only a couple of places to hang out. Most of the time was spent walking up and down the streets and having a few beers.
“Before a four-day furlough to London, our platoon took up a collection to purchase a radio so we could listen to the Glenn Miller band. After looking all over London, we finally found one in a little shop on one of the side streets near Piccadilly Square.
“On December 1 after a very rough crossing of the English Channel we arrived at Le Havre, France. We debarked from the ship on unsteady LCIs. Le Havre had been leveled to the ground during the invasion. There was little left standing. As we walked up the long steep hill out of Le Havre, we carried everything; full field packs, rifles, ammunition, gas masks, knives and grenades. We marched twelve miles to board trucks during a heavy downpour.
“We spent six days, from December 1 to December 7, near St. Laurient, France. We lived in pup tents in mud and rain. It rained at least once a day every day we were there. Our mess sergeant Bob Richardson was an excellent cook who had worked at the Court House View Cafe in Rochester, Indiana, before he enlisted in the Coast Artillery with me. He always saw that I had plenty to eat.
“We left that camp in trucks on the ‘Red Ball Express’ [an army quartermaster transport outfit largely composed of African-Americans]. The sight of miles and miles of destroyed German war material burned and dumped into the ditches gave us some indication that we were changing from training to the real thing.
“We began to sense the war in the faces of the old women and men as our convoy moved through the gloomy forests around Malmédy and St. Vith, Belgium. Bastogne was just another town as we moved on, jammed together like sardines in a can.
“Cold, soaked and frozen, no change of warm clothing was available because our barracks bags had not caught up to us. But, we fell from the trucks and took over, man for man, gun for gun from the troops of the 2nd Division. Our destination, which we reached on December 8, was an area in the Ardennes along the top of the Schnee Eifel twelve miles east of St. Vith near Schönberg.”
The Schnee Eifel [snow mountain], mentioned by both Collins and McKee, consisted of a steep, thickly wooded half-mile-high ridge extended on a rough north-south line. A chunk of the West Wall, the German fortifications designed to bar invasion of the Vaterland, ran along the Schnee Eifel.
Chapter I
THE INNOCENTS
PHIL HANNON, AGE TWENTY, had been assigned to the 81st Engineer Combat Battalion, part of the 106th Infantry Division. “I grew up in Ripon, Wisconsin, had a year at the University of Cincinnati when my family moved to College Park, Maryland. I transferred to the University of Maryland right there.
“We were all in the ROTC, and our commander told us that the unit was going to be called up and we might be better off if we enlisted while they would give us an option of the branch of service. I signed up for the engineers, since I had heard that they got to ride much more than the infantry. I took my basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It was very good, I think. I learned to handle a variety of weapons, the demolition trade using explosives, how to build bridges and roads.
“I hadn’t developed any great hatred of the enemy we supposedly were about to face. When I was in high school I knew we were working up to a warlike confrontation with the Germans. President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was leaning to the British side and had gone out of his way to head the country towards the mess. As a result it had maybe come sooner but I’m not sure there was any way to avoid it. We were well on our way to getting into the war, it was a question of when.
“I was less aware of the problems with Japan. I remember in 1941, the year I graduated from high school, that our economics teacher remarked that he would be very surprised if we were not at war with Japan in six months. We looked at him astonished. What the hell was he talking about? All of our sights were on Europe where they were already fighting. When the Japanese then jumped us at Pearl Harbor, it was upsetting. The guys I knew always had more animosity towards the Japanese than the Germans.
“I heard that some civilians had a lot more feeling about the Germans than we did. In fact, there was a family in Ripon, of German background that supposedly was driven out of town by the local people.
“When the ASTP program (Army Specialized Training Program that sent soldiers to study on college campuses) opened up, I took placement exams at Georgetown. They put me in the advanced engineers’ course at the University of Maryland. There were only 200 of us in the course although the total number of ASTP men at Maryland was three or four thousand. Since we were a small, tightknit unit, we had a gorgeous time, particularly with my folks living right there. Girls had to sign out from their dormitories or sororities. Our house became a place where they could sleep over the weekend.
“I was not a very good student. All of my previous courses had been ones concerned with business. I had no background in chemistry, physics, calculus. Furthermore, I didn’t particularly want to be in college at the time. I wanted to be in the army and get things over with over there. My grades were so terrible I had to go before a review board to explain why I should not be thrown out. They asked me didn’t I like it there in college? Why wasn’t I doing the kind of work I was capable of? I had just met Jean and so I told them that I had met a girl with whom I was serious and that I was also distracted because my folks lived in College Park. They sort of accepted this as reasonable and figured I’d settle down now. They decided to let me stay, with a couple of remarks that my group wouldn’t be there much longer, anyway.
“When I got back to the others and told them what was ahead, the partying started in earnest. We had one great carousing time, every night. Half of us went to the 106th Division, and the rest I think to the 87th Division. In the 81st Engineers we participated in maneuvers in Tennessee for six weeks. I enjoyed it, even though it was nasty and cold. To prepare us for any eventuality, including shipment to the Philippines, we even had to use our mosquito nets during a snowstorm.
“Our outfit stayed intact, but they gutted the infantry regiments in the summer [after D-Day and the breakout in France]. They stripped them of maybe two thirds of their best trained guys and replaced them with newly drafted guys who had just completed their basic training.
“From Tennessee we had gone to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, and then to Miles Standish in Massachusetts in preparation for shipping out to Europe. At Miles Standish, an officer stood up and announced, ‘Every other one of you will either be wounded or killed.’ We just turned to the GI next to us and said, ‘That’s tough shit for you, fella.’
“We were eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old kids. None of us could believe anything that bad could happen to us. At most we thought of the million-dollar wound, getting hit in the leg and being sent home as a hero.”
* * *
On November 10, 1944, S. Sgt. John Collins from A Company of the 81st Engineer Combat Battalion, the same unit in which Phil Hannon served, sailed for Europe aboard the U.S.S. Wakefield. Collins grew up in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri. Although he had served in the National Guard from 1938 to 1940, squeezing in a year of college to boot, the Merchant Marine rejected him as physically unfit. The draft swept him up in 1942 when he was twenty-five years old and sent him to Fort Jackson and the combat engineers.
When the Wakefield docked, GI trucks hauled the troops to the small town of Blockely, about ninety miles north of London. It was the third week in November. He jotted down a present tense journal.
“We are about three quarters of a mile from the mess hall, located near the center of the town. The town is funny looking. It’s all crammed together with very narrow streets. We try out the ‘Pubs’ but none of us can take the bitters (warm beer or ale) or the cider (extremely sour). No dancing or singing in their Pubs. I did not see a woman in any of the Pubs. I like the USA style. We hike every morning. Then we clean equipment, clean our barracks, etc. The equipment [rifles, carbines and other gear made of metal] is packed with cosmoline [grease] and very hard to remove. It rains most of the time.
“Thanksgiving day!! Everyone agrees that we should be thankful we are Americans after a feast like we just had! Turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, carrots, coffee, bread, butter, sugar, cream, pumpkin pie and candy. My best dessert was a letter from home. My new son was born 6 Oct. and due to the intercession of Lt. Rutledge I had received a three-day pass. When I returned, my barracks bag was outside in formation with the rest of the platoon as we were loading for Miles Standish near Boston.”
The day after Thanksgiving, the 81st prepared for transport to the mainland. “Trucks and mobile equipment is all new and everything seems to be smoothing out. The men’s spirit is exceedingly high. A great bunch to be with.
“Thursday was Pearl Harbor day. A few of us talk about it, but it seems so distant and so long ago. We slept in the truck for these two days so our blankets could dry and because it was continually raining. Miserable sleeping but dry! Left Friday in convoy travelling across Belgium. Nearly all the towns are destroyed but we were welcomed by everyone we met.
“On December 10, I was in an advance party to Auw. Our unit is replacing the 2nd Division engineers at Auw. Their lieutenant showed us around and we found where to place our platoons and equipment. We understand that our division is to cover a front line of approximately 25 miles. We will be very thin. We were made welcome by the enemy with a couple of rounds from their 88s.
“The snow is fairly deep in places and the ground is frozen, making digging very difficult. The 2nd Division is moving out and banter is going back and forth between the troops. The front is very quiet. The infantry troops are deployed just below this ridge [the Schnee Eifel] and we are just below the troops. It is also known as the Ardennes Forest. In any other movie it would be a beautiful place.
“Auw is a small town of about 600 (pre-war) people. It is almost on a hill with a valley between it and the front which is about three miles. Once in a while we can hear rifle fire at night. The weather is sloppy, cold and snow about one foot deep or more, depending where you are. Lt. Woerner, Smitty, the jeep driver, Stanley, the toolkeeper, and myself stay with a German family of eight—five girls, ages 6 to 28, a lad of 12, their uncle and their mother. One tot was killed a few weeks previously by shelling. They seem aloof but that could be because of the language. At night, the Lt. and myself sleep between sheets—compliments of the German family.
“December 13 and 14 we are still working on repairing and building roads for the 422nd Regiment. The morale is very high and the men are having fun, so it seems. Pvt. Suckow wants to carry five rounds for shooting deer. Pvt. Skaggs stated he mistook a cow for a deer and shot it. It is against our policy to use other people’s stock for beef or shoot one. However, it had been done, but Skaggs knows what a deer looks like since he hunts them in Missouri where he hails from. How could one mistake a black and white Holstein cow for a deer?”
* * *
Three months after his eighteenth birthday, little more than a year after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1942, Richard McKee, a high-school grad from Akron, Ohio, volunteered for the army with the necessary signed consent forms by his parents.
“I enlisted in the Coast Artillery because my father George McKee had served in the Coast Artillery during World War I. I left Camp Perry, Ohio, for H Battery, Provisional Training Battalion at Fort Screven, Georgia, located on Tybee Island at Savannah. Two weeks later I spent my first army Christmas on KP. I also had KP on New Year’s Eve. In May, 1944, after completing NCO School, attending gas training courses for coast artillery noncoms, I volunteered to transfer into the infantry. I was sent to Camp Atterbury to join the 106th Infantry Division. I qualified as an expert rifleman with an M-1 and became an assistant squad leader, 3rd Platoon, Company A, 422 Regiment.
“We sailed from New York on October 20, 1944. I was seasick before we even got out of the harbor. At our Fairford, England, camp, we were billeted in metal Quonset huts. We spent many hours in training marches over the hilly countryside while here. There was little physical evidence of the war. We did get a few passes into the city of Oxford. We took a train into the town, which was always filled with soldiers. There were only a couple of places to hang out. Most of the time was spent walking up and down the streets and having a few beers.
“Before a four-day furlough to London, our platoon took up a collection to purchase a radio so we could listen to the Glenn Miller band. After looking all over London, we finally found one in a little shop on one of the side streets near Piccadilly Square.
“On December 1 after a very rough crossing of the English Channel we arrived at Le Havre, France. We debarked from the ship on unsteady LCIs. Le Havre had been leveled to the ground during the invasion. There was little left standing. As we walked up the long steep hill out of Le Havre, we carried everything; full field packs, rifles, ammunition, gas masks, knives and grenades. We marched twelve miles to board trucks during a heavy downpour.
“We spent six days, from December 1 to December 7, near St. Laurient, France. We lived in pup tents in mud and rain. It rained at least once a day every day we were there. Our mess sergeant Bob Richardson was an excellent cook who had worked at the Court House View Cafe in Rochester, Indiana, before he enlisted in the Coast Artillery with me. He always saw that I had plenty to eat.
“We left that camp in trucks on the ‘Red Ball Express’ [an army quartermaster transport outfit largely composed of African-Americans]. The sight of miles and miles of destroyed German war material burned and dumped into the ditches gave us some indication that we were changing from training to the real thing.
“We began to sense the war in the faces of the old women and men as our convoy moved through the gloomy forests around Malmédy and St. Vith, Belgium. Bastogne was just another town as we moved on, jammed together like sardines in a can.
“Cold, soaked and frozen, no change of warm clothing was available because our barracks bags had not caught up to us. But, we fell from the trucks and took over, man for man, gun for gun from the troops of the 2nd Division. Our destination, which we reached on December 8, was an area in the Ardennes along the top of the Schnee Eifel twelve miles east of St. Vith near Schönberg.”
The Schnee Eifel [snow mountain], mentioned by both Collins and McKee, consisted of a steep, thickly wooded half-mile-high ridge extended on a rough north-south line. A chunk of the West Wall, the German fortifications designed to bar invasion of the Vaterland, ran along the Schnee Eifel.
* * *
Pvt. Harry Martin, Jr., Company L, 424th Infantry Regiment, a soldier uncomfortable with authority, followed a bumpy military career before he arrived in the Ardennes. He was painfully shy, a child born out of wedlock, although his father after leaving town returned eventually to marry his mother. He describes himself as both physically and mentally abused in his early years. The death of his mother when he was only seven traumatized him; his father’s difficulties as a compulsive gambler who rarely held a job further damaged his self-esteem.
Growing up in Plainfield, New Jersey, Martin watched newsreels in the movie theaters that showed the Japanese invasion of China, the bombing of cities and soldiers bayoneting civilians. The last image particularly horrified him. He says he can still see Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, returning home to proclaim, “Peace in our time.” But as a twelve-year-old kid he believes he recognized Chamberlain as “weak and pathetic. I thought war was inevitable; just a question of Hitler choosing where and when.”
With the coming of the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, Martin saw the clips in the theaters where American soldiers trained with broomsticks while awaiting the production of genuine rifles. When Pearl Harbor came, Martin listened on the radio to his favorite commentator, Gabriel Heatter, an early devotee of the happy-talk approach, who almost inevitably opened his broadcasts with “Yes, there’s good news tonight.”
Martin was anxious to sign up once the U.S. entered the war. “Every time we had assembly in high school we sang the songs, ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along,’ ‘Anchors Aweigh’ and ‘The Marine Hymn,’ which was the most stirring of all. I hated school and was anxious to be inducted so someone else would make future decisions for me.”
But when he went for his physical along with others from his North Plainfield High class, he nearly flunked the eye examination after the examiners discovered he was practically blind in his left eye and glasses did not correct his vision. When the doctor stamped his papers “Insufficient Vision,” Martin despaired. He thought of his ancestral history that recorded family members in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and his father in the American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I.
To his delight, in spite of the physician’s notation, he was accepted, albeit with the classification of “Limited Service.” In army parlance that meant he would not be assigned to combat duty. However, he quickly discovered that the army was not the answer to his emotional problems.
“It was not long before I wanted to go home. I was afraid of everyone and everything. I was a typical Caspar Milquetoast, the fictional character the ‘Sad Sack.’ Oddly enough, hortatory letters from his father and warmer ones from his sister helped him persevere. And he also liked army chow, ‘which was much better than what we had been getting at home, especially the meat which we could not afford often.”
During basic training designed to mold him into a military policeman, he flopped dismally when he first tried to qualify as a rifleman. For five weeks, after supper and on Sundays, Martin received extra instruction. Over and over, noncoms drummed the phrase “Squeeze the trigger” into his head. He finally scored well enough on the range to achieve the middle level of proficiency, “Sharpshooter.”
One day, a corporal dressed him down for failing to perform housekeeping duties around the barracks. Martin, having been given extra duties that exempted him from these tasks, lost control of his temper. As much to his own surprise as that of the noncom, he raged defiance. From then on, Martin says he no longer blindly accepted authority. In succeeding days, he increasingly voiced his opinions, no matter how exalted the person issuing the orders. He learned to drink excessively, chased women, went AWOL, goofed off while guarding prisoners and earned a reputation as a troublemaker.
But Martin was bored with his life and outraged by what he considered the pampering of the prisoners who refused to work if the temperature fell below a certain level and who insisted on a holiday to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. When a notice on the bulletin board asked for infantry volunteers, Martin signed up.
He became a member of Company L, 424th Infantry Regiment, 106th Division. Forced to requalify as a rifleman, Martin shot so well he was upgraded to “Expert.” However, he discovered infantry life even more unpalatable than his previous experience. He continued to rebel, goofing off, challenging orders and embarking on another absence without official leave. When he returned from his illicit holiday, he escaped a court-martial only because the 106th was now ticketed for overseas shipment.
There was, however, a final physical examination. At issue was his “Limited Service” classification. Aside from Martin’s bad vision, what else was wrong with him? inquired the doctor. He explained, “My orders are to release only those who have two or more things wrong with them.”
“He almost put words in my mouth. He said, ‘Just tell me one other disability that you have and I will release you from the infantry.’ He was definitely on my side and I was moments away from getting out of the infantry, which I wanted so much. I just could not give him the answer he was looking for. I think I felt guilty about leaving the men I had trained with for the last four months. The men of the 3rd Squad were the best there was. I guess I really did not want to leave them.”
In England, talk among the members of the 3rd Squad focused on what lay ahead. “We all had to deal with our fears. One man in our platoon dealt with his by telling everyone he was absolutely certain that he would be killed. We would try to talk him out of it but that only made his conviction stronger.
“In the pubs we saw American soldiers wearing the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Purple Heart and campaign ribbons. We looked at them with awe and thought, ‘Look, there is a soldier who went through combat and survived.’ We talked with them and asked what it was like. But none of them offered advice or told us what combat was like. It was as if there were no way to explain it. You sensed that they did not really want to talk about it.
“The one thing that scared me most was the thought of being run through with a German bayonet. The thought of that long steel blade going through my body was bad enough, but the worst part would be when he would violently withdraw the bayonet, taking my guts out. I would be left to die an agonizing slow death.”
About six weeks after he arrived in England, Harry L. Martin, Jr., a soldier restricted to “Limited Duty,” moved into a position formerly occupied by the 2nd Division, facing the Siegfried Line, inside the German border. He had been cheered by the report from his sergeant that this was a quiet sector where combat troops were sent to rest and “green troops like us were gradually broken in. There had been no real activity in this area for nearly three months. In this quiet sector, we would earn our Combat Infantryman’s Badges and receive periodic passes to Paris. We felt we were lucky to be there.”
* * *
Clifford Broadwater received his form letter that began, “From the President of the United States, Greetings,” via the Selective Service Board in Washington, D.C., almost a year before Pearl Harbor, as the country began its first ever peacetime draft for military service.
Broadwater, an employee of the Retirement Division of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, entered an army desperately struggling to cope with the influx of rookies while maintaining some of its older graces.
“After a couple of days at Camp Lee, Virginia. where we were issued uniforms and equipment, attended a few training lectures and did some close order drill, we were loaded on a troop train. It had Pullman cars with upper and lower berths for sleeping at night, and Negro porters to make the beds for us. Soldiers had to sleep double in the lower berths and single in the uppers.
“We arrived in El Paso in the wee hours of the morning, just before daylight and unloaded to the sounds of martial music. The regimental band was there to greet us. Loaded into trucks, we rode to an area at Fort Bliss designated as the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Recruitment Training Center.”
The Fort Bliss that now housed Broadwater was rapidly expanding. The desert had just been bulldozed level, streets laid out, a mess hall erected and tents pitched. Broadwater and his comrades lived in sixteen-foot-square tents that held six men. They spent several days plucking stones “the size of our fists or smaller” from the pathways and parade grounds.
Between calisthenics, lectures or films, close order drill and training exercises, the men changed uniforms several times each day. The pay was twenty-one dollars a month with a nominal fee charged for clothes laundered by the quartermaster corps. The monotony of close order drill was relieved by the presence of the regimental band, blaring out marches that helped the recruits pick up the proper cadence.
Broadwater went through the drudgery of a three-day tour of kitchen police, did a stint with a 75-mm gun battery, worked in the supply room and at the motor pool.
“Then came December 7, 1941. I remember that Sunday, some time after lunch a number of us were playing volleyball in the street between the tents. When word came that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the volleyball game sort of faded out. Active service was supposed to be for one year. We had started to make plans for what we would do after we got out of the army. Now everything was changed to an infinite tour of duty.
“Martha Coble of Jay, Oklahoma, and I had been engaged for quite some time and had tentative plans to be married after I got out of the army. Now I wrote to Martha and asked her if her mother would permit it, would she like to come to El Paso for a while.
“I sent her the money for the bus ticket. I met her at the bus depot and she said later that she had been wondering what sort of a greeting I would have, whether I would hug and smooch her or what. She says I shook her hand. I don’t have a clear memory, but the shy, bashful country boy that I was, with dozens of other soldiers around, that seems likely.
“I took her to the Guest House at the training center and engaged a room for her. There I did smooch her; I remember that clearly and told her that if she was willing, we could get married while she was there. When she said yes, I made plans for the wedding.
“I had given this some thought and preparation. There had been military restrictions on soldiers getting married, so I had played it safe and asked my battery commander for a written, signed permission to marry. I had already bought her an engagement ring in Washington, D.C., that cost $35.00 and the wedding ring came to about $15. The wedding was held in the living room of some friends I had made in El Paso. I got two three-day passes with a four-day furlough between them to cover the time Martha was at Fort Bliss and our honeymoon.
“Someone suggested a trip to Carlsbad Caverns [New Mexico] and we borrowed a Buick from one of the sergeants. His requirements were that I be responsible for the car and we take his nine-year-old son along. With three of the other fellows, we became a party of six.”
Following his honeymoon, Broadwater and his fellow GIs shipped out to Bermuda to furnish antiaircraft defenses. It was early in 1942 and Bermuda was classified as a war zone. Panicky authorities absurdly worried the enemy might seize the island. Broadwater was issued a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) with live ammunition. His assignment was to defend headquarters if it came under attack. Others from the antiaircraft battery manned machine guns from foxholes dug on the beaches.
The hastily thrown up barracks lacked heat and fresh water. The men showered in cold, salt water until the army improved conditions. Gradually, the atmosphere became more relaxed; there was time for picnics on the beaches, bicycle trips around the island and swimming.
After a year, the authorities decided no real threat to Bermuda existed and Broadwater, who had advanced to the rank of sergeant major, returned to Fort Bliss as part of the permanent cadre. He found a place in town for his wife, Martha. However, in June of 1944, the top brass concluded that fewer antiaircraft units were needed. Broadwater received orders transferring him to the 106th Infantry Division, now stationed at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.
“There I was, a master sergeant from antiaircraft artillery serving in the infantry, assigned to an antitank company of the 423rd Infantry Regiment. I was excess rank, maybe excess person, and was to help 1st Sgt. Floyd Jesson with paperwork and details in his office.
“I trained with an antitank squad under a corporal and a sergeant. We had a 57-mm antitank gun which fired a cartridge weighing about 12 1/2 pounds. The fired projectile had a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second with an effective range of maybe 500 yards. On the firing range you could stand behind the gun and see the course of the shell. Supposedly, it could penetrate four or five inches of armor plate. The German tanks had as much as seven inches of armor plate. But the gun was capable of knocking off a track and disabling a tank.”
Broadwater shared one last furlough with Martha before he entrained to the staging area for the 106th Division at Camp Miles Standish. “We went to New York and loaded on the Queen Mary with all of our men, all of our equipment, trucks and guns included. There must have been 16,000 men on the ship.” [While the Queen Mary was probably carrying approximately that many troops, some units of the 106th sailed aboard the Aquitania and the Wakefield.]
“I was on the fourth deck down. There was a large open area with a row of steel-pipe posts set just far enough apart for the length of a bunk. The steel-frame bunks had hinges and a canvas stretched over the frame to sleep on. The bunks were five tiers high and on the other side of the posts were another five bunks. There was a narrow aisle and during the day the bunks were lifted up on their hinges and tied to the posts to make space on the deck. Above the bunks were slatted platforms where we stored baggage.”
Broadwater squeezed in a three-day pass to see the sights, London Bridge, the Tower of London, the changing of the guard. But along with Phil Hannon, Richard McKee and the remainder of the 106th, he soon found himself rolling over the Red Ball Highway, bound for the Ardennes.
“We moved in the positions and foxholes occupied by the 2nd Division. This was a ‘quiet sector’ and little action was expected. Our antitank company headquarters moved into a three-story duplex building in Bleialf, Germany. We had beds to sleep in.
“My watch post was at a window on the second story. My two-hour shift was in the middle of the night. A fellow I relieved said, ‘See that tree out there? After a while it will go over and speak to the corner of the house.’ One night one of the sentries was sure he had Germans coming in, so he fired away. Next morning they found a dead rabbit and a dead goat out there.”
* * *
Alan Jones, Jr., traveled a different path to reach the Ardennes as a member of the 106th Division. “I was an army brat. My father, Alan Jones, Sr., was regular army, although not a graduate of West Point. I was born in the Philippines, where I’ve never been back, but we lived all over. I attended a different high school every year, finally graduating in Washington, D.C.
“World affairs were a regular topic at the dinner table and I was very much aware of what was happening in Europe. Since my father was in the army, naturally there was a lot of talk about the state of the military. It was in awful shape, particularly the army. There had been so little spent on it that my father spent seventeen years in grade as a captain. In fact, my future father-in-law, a graduate of West Point, was a lieutenant for fifteen years.
“Still, the only thing I ever wanted was a military career. But I had graduated at seventeen, too young to enter the Academy. Furthermore, I couldn’t pass the eye test. So I went to the University of Hawaii for a year and did exercises to strengthen my eyes.
“I entered West Point in 1940 in what was to be the first of a series of three-year classes [a consequence of the war in Europe that began in 1939]. I think I was well trained during my time at the Point. When I received my commission, I took a basic officer’s course at Fort Benning [Georgia], then became a platoon leader in the 42nd Division.
“The word was that they were not going overseas but I knew from my dad, who had been the CO since its activation, that the 106th was bound for Europe. I wangled a transfer to the 106th in July of 1944. I don’t think there was anything wrong with joining the division commanded by my father. He didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t oppose it either. It was my choice.
“They cleaned us out in August. We lost our cadre, and we had to scramble to get the troops through maneuvers and teach the replacements how to handle themselves. We received a lot of men from the ASTP. They were smarter than the average troops, mostly under twenty-five, and physically fit. But they were untrained in infantry tactics. [The official figures show that the 106th lost 3,145 men in April, 877 in May, 331 through June and July and then 2,894 in August.] I had been made S–3 for the 1st Battalion of the 423rd Infantry Regiment, which made me responsible for plans and operations.
“We got to England in November. We had about a month there and we could only engage in basic stuff, physical conditioning with a lot of road marches, firing small arms and rezeroing weapons. The weather interfered with much of the range work. Other than that we conducted classes in first aid, map reading and similar exercises.
“In the Ardennes, we relieved elements of the 38th Infantry Regiment, part of the 2nd Division. Along with a few others I went up five days before the rest of the battalion. We exchanged range cards [data for weapons and fixed points] and they told us what it was like. The troops deployed in dugouts that had been covered with logs for protection against overhead artillery bursts. The battalion command post and company headquarters occupied pillboxes that had been part of the German defensive system, the Siegfried line or West Wall.
“There was some snow atop the logs over the dugouts but it was not that cold. I wore a field jacket when I moved around to the different companies in the battalion.
“We were led to believe that this was a quiet area. We thought of it as a place where we would have combat training, learn to use patrols and become accustomed to a combat zone. We used much of our time to calibrate our radios and check all of our guns.
“Our major concern was to readjust some of our defensive positions. While the switch with the 2nd Division was on a man for man, gun for gun basis [at dug-in emplacements for everything from machine guns to artillery pieces, the newly arrived troops swapped their equipment for that of the units they relieved], the 2nd Division was a battle-seasoned outfit. They had accumulated many weapons not formally listed in the table of organization. As a result, they had a helluva lot more machine guns than we did. With fewer guns, our weapons did not conform to the kind of defensive arrangement that the 38th Regiment had.
“We were aware of some enemy activity. We could hear trains in the vicinity of Prüm [a town several miles behind the German lines]. Our patrols reported one or two sightings of isolated tanks but we did not notice any increase in enemy patrols. We reckoned some unusual activity on the other side, but we had no concern for any massive attack.
“We could see the enemy in the distance and they could see us. Actually, they occupied other parts of the Siegfried line. There was a little bit of fire, sporadic rounds of artillery. We knew this was now serious business and you felt you had to sort of tiptoe around.
“Still, the word was this was a quiet area, it was our first experience on the line. People were a little uptight. We didn’t know what it was going to be like.”
* * *
Leo Leisse, a native of St. Louis, enlisted at the advanced age of thirty-three. “I wanted to be with my brother Robert, fourteen years younger, who had received his welcome from FDR on his nineteenth birthday. I started at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, with the 106th Division, which had just been activated. When I was on the rifle range, some guys warned me that if I qualified as an Expert, I’d be made a sniper, and that would be dangerous. But I was determined to do the best and got an Expert medal, which I prefer over the Combat Infantryman Badge because I had to earn the Expert medal, while just being there brought you a CIB.
“Our original cadre of noncoms and officers were very good but after they took away many of them to be replacements, we had mostly ninety-day wonders as officers when we went overseas. While at Miles Standish, one of my men tried dropping a large stone on his foot to avoid shipping out. He didn’t hurt himself that badly but Colonel Bloom, the medical doctor for the regiment, ordered him left behind as unreliable.”
Leisse was old enough not to look forward to combat. “I didn’t think much about being killed, wounded or taken prisoner but I hoped everything would be over before we had to go.” It was not and S. Sgt. Leo Leisse with an Ammunition and Pioneer Platoon for the 422nd Regiment reached the Ardennes along with the others from the 106th Division.
* * *
Frank Raila of Chicago, in contrast to Leo Leisse, had hardly passed his eighteenth birthday before being summoned to arms late in 1943. Son of a mailman and grocery checkout clerk, at the time the draft board selected him, Raila had finished high school and attended junior college for a few months. During the summer months he worked in a Studebaker factory which made engines for airplanes.
“I followed events in Europe, the stories about Hitler and his so-called master race. I was also aware of the situation in the Pacific. All of my peers knew about Hitler, the havoc of the war, his ruthlessness and the misery he inflicted upon people like the Jews. Some classmates left high school to enter service. When they came back, they had many stories to tell their friends. I knew sooner or later I’d be in the war.”
After basic training and assignment to the 423rd Infantry Regiment’s Company E at Camp Atterbury, Private Raila became a member of a .30-caliber, light machine gun squad. Following arrival in the Ardennes, he spent his first night in a hut, then moved into a tent erected at a spot where he cleared away the snow. “We used pine boughs to prop up the tent and pine needles to lie on. It gave reasonably good shelter and I lived that way for another three or four days. It was so cold, that only the roads where the tanks and trucks traveled were wet and slushy. Everything else was snow and frozen. I don’t recall any hot food for us after we left England. After the stay in tents, we lived in the open.”
Raila had little contact with the officers. With the exception of a lieutenant who received his Bronze Star while at Atterbury for bravery in Africa and seemed combat-wise, the others failed to impress the young soldier. “I thought they knew what they were doing, but they did not inform us of anything. We never were told where we were except somewhere in the mountainous part of Luxembourg and Belgium. We weren’t told whom we replaced or that we were on the Schnee Eifel. They didn’t seem to believe in communicating with the lowly dogfaces.
“I had contempt for the captain of my company when I saw he dug his foxhole next to the one of the captain from another company. Both appeared to lack leadership. They stuck together while we milled around without any direction. It seemed to me they should have been out directing us, advising us, encouraging us.”
Things seemed quiet for the first week but then a mortar round blew the head off a major. “I didn’t see it happen but news like that went around like wildfire. I dealt with my stress by recalling my home, my mother, father, sisters and my mother’s family.”
* * *
Jim Mills, born in November 1925, was raised by his grandparents in Des Moines, Iowa. When Mills reached his thirteenth birthday, his carpenter grandfather died and the family depended upon welfare, known as “relief” during the Depression days.
“I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the war when I was in high school. We didn’t take the newspaper for money reasons. I seldom went to the movies where there were newsreels. Mostly I heard about events on the radio and the only talk at home was about who was going into service, who had been killed.
“I turned eighteen in 1943 and three months later I was drafted, without even graduating from high school. Later, I received some credits for basic training to fulfill my high school requirements and was awarded a diploma after the War, in August 1945.
“After basic training at Camp Fannin, Texas, I joined the 106th Division at Camp Atterbury, where we were given additional instruction, spending two weeks in the field, two in barracks. I was not turned into a Rambo but I felt like I was a good soldier who could do what was required of me in combat. Hitler and his soldiers were running over everybody and it wouldn’t be long before he would try to take the U.S. I thought we were good enough to beat the Germans and that I was with a good bunch of men.”
Mills was assigned to Company I, 1st Platoon, 3rd Squad, 423rd Infantry Regiment. He had been trained to use the M-1 (Garand rifle issued to infantrymen), BAR, machine gun, bazooka, mortar, bangalore torpedo, flame thrower, plastic explosives and grenades. He was named assistant BAR man for the squad, which meant he carried ammunition and was expected to use the weapon if the GI designated as BAR man became incapacitated.
“Our company commander was a West Pointer and as GI as they come. We stood inspection every night in Atterbury and that was kind of a joke with the neighboring companies. But the captain did his best to see we were good soldiers.”
Company I entered its Ardennes positions on December 8, occupying dugouts constructed by the troops it replaced. “These dugouts were made of logs, mostly underground, and mounded over with dirt. Each dugout held several men with bunks for sleeping and a potbellied heating unit. One corner of the dugout had gun or vision ports on both sides of the corner where we took turns all night keeping a lookout for German patrols or whatever. There was a blanket hung behind the lookout to close out light so we could see better and no light could escape, revealing our position.
“We did not know at the time but we were atop the Schnee Eifel. There was a valley in front of us and similar mountains across the valley facing us. There were firebreaks through the pines on both mountains.
“We were served hot meals from a chow line set up between two trees, fairly close to the firebreak. We were green troops and the front in our area seemed quiet until men started to line up across the firebreak to get chow. About the second time this happened, a German tank pulled out into the firebreak on the opposite mountain. A few well placed shots messed up our chow line and prevented any further careless crossing of the firebreak.
“Cans were strung out on wires well in front of the dugout to pick up movements of German patrols trying to get through our lines. Too much shooting from any one dugout gave away its position in the dark and drew return fire.
“[One day] Captain Moe, the CO of Company I, ordered 2nd Lieutenant Blodgett, 1st Platoon leader, to take a patrol during daylight hours to see where the Germans were and see if we could obtain any information. The patrol was made up of Blodgett, Sgt. Elmer Shipman, Pfc. Robert Widdicombe and myself. There was snow on the ground and we were in olive drab uniforms so we used tree cover as much as possible.
“We got almost to the crest of the opposite mountain. There were mounds of dirt and straw with dummy poles stuck in the side to look like gun emplacements. As we got close to these dummy gun emplacements, we were spotted and drew small arms fire.
“We immediately started to withdraw and Lieutenant Blodgett instructed us to get out of the woods. We started walking through a snow-covered clearing near another woods, back deeper in no man’s land. As we were crossing the clearing, mortar shells began coming down all over the woods we had just left. Meanwhile, the woods were booby-trapped. The lieutenant saw wires just under the snow and grenades tied to the trees on each side. We followed our footsteps and returned safely to our lines.
“I was on guard in our dugout at 5:30 A.M. on the morning of December 16, 1944, when all hell broke loose. For a minute I thought the world was coming to an end.”
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