Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Read online

  “The Sixth SS Mountain Division was undoubtedly the best German division in the fight for the Low Vosges; in fact it was probably the best German infantry on the entire Western Front in early January 1945. It had been fighting the Russians in Finland. When the Finns made their peace with the Soviet Union, it had withdrawn through Norway and was thrown, fresh, reequipped, and rested, into the Vosges battle.”

  The artillery support we’d awaited didn’t happen because the Seventy-ninth Division howitzers were rolling toward the rear. About the time we were charging across the firebreak, Able Company was getting the word of the withdrawal and had canceled its supporting attack. Sounds hopeless for Charley Company, right? But while not handicapped by the West Point tradition the German brass had its own supply of dimwits.

  In retrospect, I suspect the Sixth SS Division commanders were well aware that the Seventy-ninth was withdrawing. Thus it was preparing pursuit instead of defense and our misguided lunge across the snowy field, sans artillery preparation, smoke, tanks, or any sort of support, must have caused surprise and amazement. Whatever the explanation, we overran German positions and made it all the way to the railroad/highway objective at a cost of only twenty-six men.

  (More than forty years later Charley Company was holding its first reunion at a hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas; we Fourth Platooners were in a bar trying to get our war stories coordinated. To solve the problem we agreed to start the story of our daring dash at Sessenheim at the moment we rushed out of the woods past the body of Vincent Thornton, who had been a few steps ahead of us. That worked pretty well. One remembered seeing Vince fall. Another remembered the concussion of a mortar shell moving his body, and so forth. I remembered giving his corpse a passing glance as I sped past him. A bit later I went to the bar to get a round of beer. The bartender told me the customer a few seats down was looking for people from C Company, 410th Infantry. I went over and introduced myself.

  “I’m Vince Thornton,” he said. “What the hell happened to you guys? I remember running out of the woods there at Sessenheim, and the next thing I knew I was back in the hospital at Saverne.”

  So much for wartime memories.)

  But I do clearly remember the gray concrete pillbox the French had built to guard the junction we had taken. Company headquarters moved into it, while we grunts were sorted out into a defensive posture, dug ourselves a fresh set of foxholes behind the railroad, and waited for instructions.

  The snow began again and then turned into rain (Luckily for us because the Sixth SS Mountain Division was equipped with stark white winter camouflage.). C.J. and I had set up our mortar in a clear space behind the railroad and dug ourselves a foxhole behind it. A couple of men from the Intelligence and Recon unit had arrived after dark. They took the two Germans we’d captured and left behind the gossip they’d overhead at battalion headquarters. To wit:

  1. The Seventy-ninth Division had pulled back and forgot to tell battalion.

  2. Neeley was supposed to cancel yesterday’s attack but hadn’t gotten the word.

  3. Able and Baker had gotten the word and were now entrucked and riding happily rearward.

  4. Able and Baker were going to jump off tomorrow morning and would join us. The whole battalion would then push all the way to the Rhine, only two miles ahead.

  5. We were supposed to withdraw as soon as it got dark enough to be safe.

  6. Yesterday the idiots in the Forty-second Division had shot a bunch of German prisoners right out where the Krauts could see it happen. Remember that if you’re thinking of surrender.

  7. We were surrounded. Those really big shells going overhead and exploding way behind us were from German railroad guns across the Rhine.

  And so forth. Take your pick. Believe what you liked, or none of it.

  Meanwhile C.J. and I had inventoried what was left of our ammunition and found we had nothing to shoot except flare rounds (which, as we were soon to learn, were exactly what we needed). We devoted much of the night trying to build a little dam to keep a mixture of melting snow water, rain, and mud from draining down into our foxhole. Dawn was near. But what would the morrow bring? I had my helmet and my field jacket off, working with my trenching tool. We heard George Rice, who had his machine gun set up on the railroad track near us, shouting something in his Dartmouth College version of German. More shouting in German came in response. George’s machine gun fired a short burst. Very short since the wet canvas belt wasn’t releasing spent shells. A shower of German “potato masher” grenades come flying over the tracks, trailing sparks, making their ear-numbing explosions and sending fragments whistling around us. We heard one of the rifle platoon leaders shouting: “Pull back! Pull back!” A fine idea. Germans in their white helmets and snowsuits, visible even in the predawn darkness, were streaming over the railroad embankment. Much yelling, much shooting, more grenades.

  C.J. and I raced away from the tracks toward the road where the pillbox stood. Neeley and a lieutenant were there, organizing a stand. We heard the characteristic “chung, chung, chung” sound of a mortar being fired. Our mortar! The lieutenant looked at me—an accusing stare. But, thank God, the only ammunition we had were those flares. These exploded high overhead and drifted down—more help to us than the Germans. The plan seemed to be to make a stand along the asphalt road and I was signaled to hustle down it. I hustled, my model 1902 pistol in hand. I scrambled up the steep road embankment, flopped on my belly. Just as I did, a German hustled up the other side of the embankment, crouching, carrying a machine pistol. He pointed it at me. I shot him.

  I have relived that moment often. At first, with no particular emotion except relief, remembering him seeing me, jerking his machine pistol toward me, his body slamming backward from the almost point-blank impact of that heavy .45 slug. But soon my imagination gives him a personality. This was face-to-face killing of a man, not the impersonal killing we had done with the mortar, where the victims were an invisible enemy in a machine gun position, or some hypothetical person who might be on the street when you fired the required harassing rounds. Later, when what was left of Charley Company was back across the firebreak into the woods from which all this had started, I found myself engraving every detail of those few minutes in my memory.

  The German dropped into a crouch on the edge of the single-lane asphalt directly across from me and perhaps fifteen feet away. I seem to remember his face, although the dawn light made that unlikely. I was aware that I had three rounds in the pistol, having used the rest potting at running figures in our rush away from the railroad. I was also aware this didn’t matter. Luck gave me the first shot, but that’s all I’d get. He had the machine pistol.

  My shot hit him either high in the chest, the throat, or the face.

  The heavy lead slug knocked him backward and sideways, tumbling him down the embankment. From where I lay I could hear the shouts of his squad yelling for grenades. Jerry Shakeshaft was running along the embankment below me. He heard the shouts, too, and tossed me his grenade and a word of advice: “Don’t forget to pull the pin.”

  I pulled it.

  The grenades we were using had five-second fuses. I held it two counts to get the proper arrival time, then bounced it off the asphalt and over the road. It exploded out of my sight but in the air. We lay there a few moments, Shakeshaft beside me now with a carbine, and listened to the screams of those blown away by the grenade fragments.

  What happened next? End of memory. I vaguely recall recrossing the firebreak. I remember coming under artillery fire in our retreat. I remember passing a 60 mm mortar left behind by Baker Company when it jumped off in its day-late attack. I remember C.J. and me taking it along to replace our own. I remember walking through a little town with its inhabitants watching us sadly. And I recall meeting David Hubbell coming up the road from the opposite direction with a group of replacements. I remember thinking that was Dave’s third trip back from the hospital and that he was getting a very unfavorable impression of the war.
r />   The last time the hospital had sent him back to duty he’d found us sitting on a hillside in a heavy fog, burning K-ration boxes to heat water in a canteen cup to make instant K-ration coffee, killing time while Neeley organized to attack a little roadblock up the road. The rations/ammo/mail Jeep stopped down the hill and Hubbell limped up to be greeted. But we’d overestimated the fog, or underestimated German binoculars. Here came the mortar shells, breaking up our picnic. Down the hill we scramble and up the road into the attack. More shells, some shooting. Hubbell is hit. The same Jeep that brought him up takes him back to be patched up again. And now here he is again, meeting what’s left of us straggling down the road in defeat.

  “Fellas,” Hubbell shouts, “I just couldn’t wait to get back.”

  Shakeshaft’s ironic shout to me about pulling the grenade pin is another example of the ironic humor combat seemed to produce. The shout originated as a jibe at Gil Rodriguez, who had joined the platoon as a replacement just in time for the attack on Villa. In the street fighting there Rodriguez got himself into position to toss a grenade into a window from which a German machine gun was firing. He missed the window, the grenade bounced back to land amid his fellow grunts, producing about three seconds of terror before it was noticed he hadn’t pulled the pin. Thereupon Gil was greeted with that “pull the pin” shout at every opportunity. He was one of those killed crossing the firebreak.

  After that nothing much happened to Charley Company for a week. A lot of walking from one village to another. One hot meal. A chaplain came up from somewhere distant and held a memorial service for our dead, and we spent bitter-cold nights manning roadblocks.

  At one of these Tom Morick and I captured three prisoners the easy way. They walked up the road waving a white towel and shouting, “Kamarad.” (The surrender leaflets our Army showered down on us at Buschbach taught that was the politically correct surrender word.) The fellow in charge of this peace delegation spoke English. He said they didn’t mind fighting Americans but they had just learned their unit was being transferred back to the Russian front. They’d been there and done that and wanted no more of it. We swallowed that insulting comparison, searched them for souvenirs, and turned them over to company headquarters.

  The calm before another storm. Then came the wee hours of January 29, and an order to saddle up and entruck. We’d been living in a dentist’s home and office in Ingerwiller in the quiet luxury and bliss of Regimental Reserve. Our truck ride through the falling snow was alarmingly short. We piled off, trudged up the slopes of a wooded hill, looked down on a picturesque scene, church spires rising from a pretty village of stone houses and barns. Beautiful, but the pastoral mood was diminished by the sound of small arms fire, the zipper sound of German machine guns, and the thud of mortar shells. The Sixth SS Mountain Division, the same folks we’d encountered at Sessenheim, had smashed through Seventh Army lines and recaptured Schillersdorf, doing serious damage to our Second Battalion in the process. We grunts knew none of this, of course, only that the bad guys had captured the town and now we had to charge through that infinitely wide snow-covered hay field and recapture it.

  Able Company had already attacked, captured the first two houses on the road into town, and was now pinned down. That explained all the shooting we were hearing.

  I recall staring out across the field of snow with the same feeling of foreboding the Sessenheim firebreak had produced. Bob Lewis, my selection as the bravest man in the Fourth Platoon, was standing by me, carrying the Thompson submachinegun he had stolen somewhere to replace his .45. Lewis nodded at the snowy field and said: “This situation seems fraught with peril,” in a perfect imitation of W. C. Fields’s famous whiskey voice. Rice, my selection as our most lighthearted member, recalls joining some riflemen who were rolling in the snow, trying to apply self-camouflage to compensate for the West Pointers not knowing about snow in Europe.

  “At first I thought it would melt right off and just get me wet,” Rice recalled, “but then I thought: Better wet than dead.”

  The disasters one expects don’t seem to happen. We floundered through that snow, knee-deep in many places, without losing a man. Once in the buildings it got more exciting. The Third Platoon, with Rice and his machine gun attached, penetrated deep into the town and was almost immediately cut off from the rest of the company. Two tanks, which were supposed to be supporting our attack, finally arrived. Neeley told the lead tank commander where to go to break a way open to the Third. I wasn’t close enough to hear the exchange but the gestures made it clear that the tank driver was rejecting the idea. Neeley drew a pistol, pointed it at the tanker. Tanker dropped down into the turret. Neeley yelling. Tanker slammed the lid shut, slammed his steel monster into reverse, and backed away down the street.

  In fairness to tankers let it be known that the Germans used an antitank rocket which, in contrast to ours, actually destroyed tanks. The panzerfaust looked like a plumber’s helper—a large cone-shaped charge on the end of a sawed-off broomstick. It was a one-man weapon, trigger-fired, relatively short range, and with a huge punch. Ours was a long-skinny tube, with the shooter holding it and peering through his sight, and a second man sticking in the rocket, connecting wires, etc. Our advantage was longer range. Our disadvantages were: (a) unless the rocket hit just right it bounced off instead of exploding, (b) even if it did hit serious armor it didn’t have enough punch to get the job done, and (c) it was too awkward and clumsy to be much use in street fighting. Thus prudent tankers tried to stay off the streets unless escorted by infantry to protect them from panzerfaust holders in basements, upstairs windows, etc.

  With the tanks gone, Neeley tried other ideas to reach the Third Platoon. I was standing there with my mortar set up but nothing to shoot at until I knew who was where, so the captain sent C.J., Huckins, and me down the street on a recon patrol. About four houses down we noticed German hobnail boot tracks leading through the snow into a barn. We peeked in. Just inside the barn door were two of the cans that hold ammunition belts for the German machine guns. C.J. and Huckins were carrying M1 rifles. I had my .45, fully loaded again. No sign of the machine gunner but the rungs of the ladder into the hay loft had snow melting on them. We discussed this. Our man was probably an ammunition bearer. Even if he was the gunner he probably wouldn’t have hauled the gun into the loft with him and left behind his ammunition. On the other hand, he didn’t leave behind his pistol. We concluded that C.J. and Huckins would cover me with their rifles, I would clamber up the ladder taking my pistol where it would be close enough to count if necessary. I crept up the ladder, took off my helmet, and poked it up on the barrel of the pistol to see if it drew fire. It didn’t. Put it on again, peered over the edge, eyes at loft floor level. Nobody home. Just a great pile of loose hay against the back wall. I climbed out, pistol pointed at the hay pile, shouted the German phrases we’d memorized to encourage the bad guys to surrender. Nothing happened. I heard C.J. scrambling up the ladder behind me. I shouted again. No response. I fired a round into the hay pile.

  From behind and above comes a frantic shout. Our machine gunner had climbed up into a little attic in the eaves just under the barn roof. Given the choice of either surrendering or shooting a couple of us with his Luger and being shot himself he has chosen surrender. We tell him to climb down. He does. We take his pistol and his gas mask case (as usual a treasure of food) and frisk him. C.J. extracts a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket. “Nein, Nein,” he says, clearly angry, and tries to grab the pack back from C.J. A discussion ensues. It seems this fellow had been reading our surrender leaflets and was persuaded that we really did treat prisoners well. He wants his smokes back and, despite having three cocked weapons pointed at him, seems to be reconsidering his decision to become a prisoner of war. C.J. shrugs and returns his Camels. I take him back up the street to give him to the captain. C.J. and Huckins return and report Germans holding positions around the corner about two blocks away. We get other assignments.

  Mine was to be
part of a five-man patrol to find another way to reach the Third Platoon. Our leader was my very own sergeant, Walter Hitz, the boss of what was once a six-member mortar squad. He’d been badly wounded in our first days in combat and had just returned from the hospital a day or two earlier. Our plan is to skirt through an opening behind some battered houses into an apple orchard, then slide along a high stone wall of the cemetery beside the village church, and keep going until we either find the Third Platoon or run into Germans. Before we get to the houses we are spotted. Here comes the mortar fire. I dive into the snow beside a fallen telephone pole. I hear a round coming in, hear it hit, get some snow splashed over the pole onto my neck. The round is a dud. The next two explode with Germanic efficiency, reducing our five-man patrol to four as we scramble for a safer position. Sergeant Hitz now has Bob Lewis with his Thompson, a bazooka man from the First Platoon, and me. We reach the apple orchard and the cemetery and begin moving down the wall.

  Oops! The muzzle of a machine gun suddenly juts out from around the corner of the wall ahead of us. Its owner hasn’t seen us and is simply setting up for action. Lewis blazes away with his Thompson. The German jerks the gun and himself safely back behind the wall. We scurry for the only available cover—which is a large, snow-covered manure pile. What to do? The muzzle of the gun reappears with its owner trying to edge it around enough to get a shot at us without exposing himself. Hitz pops away with his carbine, me with my .45, and Lewis with his Thompson. The muzzle vanishes.

  Hitz decides the gun is probably still there, just waiting for an opportunity. We will see if we can hit the inside of the wall with a bazooka round, blowing a bunch of rock into the gunner. The bazooka man stands, tube on shoulder. Hitz inserts the round, Lewis and I providing cover. The bazooka man fires. The rocket soars over the cemetery wall, hits the inside of the wall as planned, neglects to explode, and bounces away. Time to try again. The process is repeated but the machine gunner has been alarmed. Just as the bazookaman fires the second round the gunner sticks his head and his hand out and snaps off a shot with his pistol. The bullet hits the bazooka man in the right shoulder. The bazooka rocket hits the inside of the wall, neglects to explode, and bounces away. The bazooka man, looking woozy with pain, sits on the manure pile, confirms the bullet has broken his shoulder at the joint, and hobbles off through the snow toward the rear, with Lewis and me firing a few rounds to keep the German from doing more damage. Time to try again. We load and wire the bazooka. Hitz stands behind the manure pile, aims. Before he can fire, the machine gunner sticks his pistol out and fires off another round. This strikes Hitz just where the tendon connects at the point of the shoulder, doing substantial damage to bone, tendon, gristle, muscle and morale. Hitz drops the still-loaded bazooka and sits bleeding on the backside of the manure pile.