The Victors Part 12

He was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, sensitive, level-headed, keenly observant, thoughtful, well educated. Here he was thrown into the most intimate contact (pressed together on an 144 open truck on icy roads in hilly country, sleeping in a foxhole with other enlisted men) with ill-educated hillbillies, Southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and so on among most of the enlisted men in the company. Of those who had been to college, most were business or education majors. In short, Webster was thrown in with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life, he just would not have known them.

Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friends.h.i.+ps and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others. His description of his truck ride with his platoon to Alsace deserves to be quoted at length: "We squished through the mud to our trucks and climbed in. McCreary and Marsh lit cigarettes. Martin made a wisecrack about a pa.s.sing officer. I asked what had happened to Hoobler. Killed at Bastogne.

Poor Hoobler, who got such a kick out of war, dead in the snow. And the others? Muck and his buddy Penkala, who had the deepest hole in one position, had been killed by a direct hit. Sowosko was shot through the head attacking Foy. And so on. Some replacements who had come in after Holland had also died. A lot of men had been evacuated for trench foot, too many, McCreary thought. The platoon wasn't what it used to be." Webster thought that it was. He had followed a long and complicated route through the Replacement Depots to rejoin the company, a time of frustration and loneliness for him among that host of khaki-clad look-alike soldiers. Now he was home, back with 1st platoon, back with Easy Company. "It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust," he wrote. "Listening to the chatter in the truck, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who had returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest."

There were missing chairs at home. They belonged to the men who had been killed, badly wounded, or had broken. But as Webster's reaction indicates, although Easy had lost many members, and gained others, thanks to the former E Company officers now on battalion or regimental staff and to the noncoms, it remained an organic whole.

Not all did. The 29th Division's saying-We are three divisions, one in the grave, one in the hospital, one at the front-could be applied to more than two dozen U.S. divisions in ETO, including the 101st. And the one at the front consisted of replacements who did not know what to do and war-weary veterans whose fatalistic att.i.tudes suggested that it did not matter what they did. Fortunately, there was that core of veterans who could teach as well as fight. It was critical to the victory because by the end of the war men who had been State-side on D-Day made up virtually the whole of the fighting army. The army was always learning. After the war it conducted surveys among the ETO veterans, including detailed material on their training, rightly figuring that it was the combat veterans who could best judge its effectiveness. A majority of the men surveyed had their training in 1944 and fought in the last six to eight months of the war. Perhaps half of them had been through Repple Depples. Every combat veteran I've interviewed, when asked about training, starts with some version of, "Nothing can prepare you for combat." Virtually all the men surveyed agreed. The paratroopers commented that they thought they had been put through a training regime so tough that "combat can't be worse than this," only to discover it was. There was a consensus among the GIs that training should be tougher, with more live ammunition, and the best way to prepare a soldier for combat was to improve his stamina and physical strength. The veterans pointed to many additional shortcomings in their training. About 80 percent said they did not know enough about German weapons, how to defend against them or how to attack them. They further felt their knowledge of German tactics was deficient. They wished they had been taught more aircraft identification. Ninety percent were unprepared for mine warfare. No one had said to them one word about trench foot, much less how to prevent it. No surprise: They felt all those hours spent doing close order drill and learning military courtesy were wasted. They felt their weapons training had been good. But they had not been taught to follow close behind supporting artillery fire, they tended to slow down on making contact, they allowed German indirect fire to pin them down, their noise and light discipline at night was poor, they 145 bunched together when fired on. Those that survived the first few days learned how to do better, but they could have been taught at far less cost back in the States.

Captain Roland remarked, "The marvel is that the draftee divisions were able to generate and maintain any esprit de corps at all. Formed originally by mixing men indiscriminately from throughout the nation, thus severing all personal, social, community, and regional bonds, identified by anonymous numbers and replenished through the notorious Repple Depples, their only source of morale, other than the shared experience of hazard and hards.h.i.+p, was the character and patriotism of the soldiers. Fortunately, that proved to be sufficient." In an article inArmy History, published by the U.S. Army's Center of Military History in 1994, Professor Francis Steckel indicts the army for two reasons: "First, the replacement system rushed men into combat without adequate preparation and created an unnecessarily arduous challenge of adjustment on the field of battle. Second, the small number of divisions required units to remain in the front lines without rest and beyond the limits of individual human endurance, thus causing an earlier than necessary breakdown of veterans whose invaluable combat experience and skills were lost prematurely." I'd add a third indictment: failure to pa.s.s on even rudimentary information. It was not the job of the front-line machine gunner or tanker to train replacements. The army was supposed to do that and it failed.

16 - Night on the Line

IN THE WINTER CAMPS of 1864-65, Civil War soldiers drilled, marched in closed ranks, built log shelters, repaired equipment, foraged for food. On outpost duty they swapped tobacco, coffee, and insults with the enemy. At night they cooked and ate, sang around the campfire, and retired to bunks.

Night was the best time for Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.

It wasn't like that at all in the winter of 1944-45 in Belgium, France, or Luxembourg. Night was the worst time.

The difference between 1864-65 and 1944-45 came about because of technological improvements.

Civil War cannon seldom if ever fired at night, as the main body of the enemy was out of range and anyway Civil War gunners could only fire at what they could see-and then inaccurately. World War II gunners could fire much farther, arching high-trajectory sh.e.l.ls in with precise accuracy to hit targets on the other side of the ridge, using a variety of exploding sh.e.l.ls. Civil War soldiers had only limited, crude mortars. World War II soldiers had a variety of relatively accurate mortars and their small arms were much more accurate, with much greater range and rate of fire. Civil War soldiers at night could light their pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, and gather around a campfire with total security. World War II soldiers hardly dared to have even the smallest fire at the bottom of their foxhole or smoke a cigarette. In the Civil War, communications between the front line and headquarters were by runner only. World War II communications were by handheld radio and, much better, telephone lines running from the front to the command post. Only the most primitive flares, and only a few of them, were available in the Civil War. In World War II, excellent flares and illuminating sh.e.l.ls were readily available. In 1944 small, handheld bombs-grenades-unavailable in any quant.i.ty or sophistication in the Civil War, could be thrown across 146 no-man's-land, which was in most cases narrower in 1944-1945 than in 1864-65. The internal combustion engine gave armies a nighttime mobility that was not possible with horses. Tanks and self-propelled artillery provided a nighttime firepower far in excess of anything possible eighty years earlier. Combined, the changes in weapons and equipment made World War II commanders far more aggressive at night than Civil War commanders. The people who paid the price for this aggressiveness were the front-line soldiers. In this chapter I attempt to give some sense of how it was for those who endured and prevailed in the dangerous environment that was life on the front line at night in World War II.

The only visitors to the front lines were sometimes a major or a lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion, less often a colonel commanding the regiment, very occasionally a brigadier general commanding the division. Reporters didn't go there, nor did the two-star generals and above. Neither did the traveling entertainers. "I never saw a USO show," Pvt. William Craft of the 314th Regiment remarked. "I heard they were good, but they didn't come to the front where I was."

The front line belonged to the men who worked there-riflemen and machine gunners, mortarmen, forward artillery observers, communications men, and medics. Its depth varied, depending on the terrain, but generally it was about one half a kilometer. Company CPs were 250 meters or so back from the main line of foxholes and were not considered front-line by the riflemen. Pvt. J. A. "Strawberry" Craft of the 84th Division defined a member of the rear echelon as "any son of a b.i.t.c.h behind my foxhole."

Outposts were anywhere from ten to fifty meters in front of the line of foxholes. The enemy outposts were sometimes almost within touching distance, more often up to fifty meters away. The friendly observation posts (OPs) were the edge of the known world.

Most of the time, the princ.i.p.al characteristic of the front line was how quiet it was. Artillery boomed in the distance and the "thump" of mortars sounded sporadically, but otherwise unless the enemy was sh.e.l.ling or attacking there was little noise.

Nor was there much movement. It was as if the earth had swallowed up all the human beings-as indeed it had, because on the front line men lived most of the time below the surface. Life-threatening violence was always present. Thousands of eyes searched their perimeters. Thousands of fingers were ready to pull triggers, thousands of hands were prepared to throw grenades or fire mortars at the slightest motion, or at night at the least noise or the light of a burning cigarette.

In early December the 84th Division was just inside Germany, near the border with Belgium, at Lindern.

Pvt. Chalmers Davis, a mortarman, found an OP on top of a wrecked house. From it he spotted a haystack moving across an open field. He got on the phone to tell the CP that there was a camouflaged tank out there.

Just then a German soldier jumped out of one foxhole and ran to another. Davis decided to have some fun. "He never should have been out in the daytime," he told his crew, down below behind the house.

"He made a mistake." The crew fired two mortar sh.e.l.ls and got a bracket on the foxhole. The third sh.e.l.l was a direct hit. A combination of luck and skill was involved, but whatever the cause the German paid for his mistake with his life. American artillery, meanwhile, got a bracket on the haystack, then knocked out the tank inside.

(Reading this story inCitizen Soldiers prompted one of the gunners on the 105s that did all the shooting to write. He said the gun crew thought it was all a joke and for the remainder of the war, and at postwar reunions, they would get a laugh from remembering the time they shot at a moving haystack. Not until fifty-three years later did they discover there really was a target and they had knocked out a German 147 tank.) The first rule of life on the front line: Don't move around because someone is watching. Stay in your hole whenever you can.

Depending on the length of the line a rifle company was holding, the foxholes were anywhere from a few to a hundred meters apart, occasionally even more. In this, World War II was markedly different from World War I. In the 1914-18 conflict, the trench line was continuous. You could walk from the Swiss border to the English Channel without ever showing your head above the earth's surface. The walls were lined with logs. Zigzag trenches ran back from the front to deep in the rear, so food, ammunition, and messages could be brought forward without exposure.

To man those extensive trenches, however, took hundreds of thousands of men, indeed millions. In November 1918 Marshal Foch had commanded three times more men than Eisenhower did in November 1944, on a front of approximately the same length. Hindenburg had commanded three to four times more men than Rundstedt. Necessarily, foxholes replaced trenches.

Soldiers in the Great War didn't know what a foxhole was. For all the terror of their daily existence, they at least had the comfort of being with comrades, seeing men around them, sensing their own power.

World War II soldiers didn't know what trenches were. In their foxholes they had one, at most two companions. Otherwise they felt isolated-as in fact in a spread-out company they were. Compounding the isolation was the unnatural situation of living below the surface of the earth plus the physical misery of digging a hole big enough for your coffin at the end of an exhausting day. But it had to be done, a lesson quickly learned.

Digging the hole was often arduous, sometimes exhausting. A typical position would be in or on the edge of a wood, which meant many roots, as most of the trees in Belgium were planted in rows, close together. During the second half of December, when the nighttime thermometer began to go down to near or below zero, the ground was frozen to the depth of a foot or more. Pickaxes were hard to come by on the front and even when available they weren't much help. Sometimes it took hours to chip away enough frozen earth to get to unfrozen ground. Men used grenades or satchel charges to blow away the frozen earth. Often it was just impossible. On the night of December 18-19, near Echternach, Sgt. John Sweeney of the 10th Armored Division tried to dig in, "but the ground was made up of heavy wet clay and our entrenching shovel couldn't dig into it." After penetrating a few inches, he and his buddies gave up. "It was so cold that the rear echelon brought up some overcoats (2 for every 3 soldiers). We placed one overcoat on the ground and three of us lay on it and covered ourselves with the second overcoat.

The only one who was warm was the middle guy so we changed places every twenty minutes or so."

The holes were usually rectangular, under the best conditions four or five feet deep, two or three feet wide by six feet long. When the men were in them for more than one night, or if they were veterans, they got them covered. Sgt. Leo Lick of the 1st Division, a veteran of Sicily (where he won a Silver Star) and the Normandy invasion, moved into the line near Butgenbach at twilight of December 17. He and two buddies worked on their hole for a week. They got some logs which "we put over the hole and then put branches over the logs and then covered that layer with soil and camouflaged the top with snow. We also put six inches of evergreen needles on the bottom of the hole for comfortable sleeping. The opening to the foxhole also served as a warfare trench from which we could shoot or stand guard."

Just one night in a foxhole in Belgium in December 1944 was memorable. Ten, twenty, thirty nights was h.e.l.l. To begin with, night lasted so long in those northern lat.i.tudes. Dusk began to come on around 1600 or 1615. By 1645 it was full dark. First light didn't come up for sixteen hours. It was bitterly cold, even for the GIs from Montana or North Dakota. It was frequently below zero and generally damp, with low 148 clouds blowing in from the North Sea and a fog that penetrated everywhere-when it wasn't snowing.

Then the wind blew like a gale, driving the pellets of snow into their faces. It was Northern Europe's coldest winter in forty years.

Col. Ralph Ingersoll described the cold: "Riding [in a jeep] through the Ardennes, I wore woolen underwear, a woolen uniform, armored force combat overalls, a sweater, an armored force field jacket with elastic cuffs, a m.u.f.fler, a heavy lined trenchcoat, two pairs of heavy woolen socks, and combat boots with galoshes over them-and I cannot remember ever being warm." Ingersoll was lucky. Although it was windy in the open jeep, it was dry, and he was much better dressed for the cold than any GI on the line. The infantrymen's clothing was woefully, even criminally inadequate, because of a command decision General Bradley had made in September. He had decided to keep weapons, ammunitions, food, and replacements moving forward at the expense of winter clothing, betting that the campaign would be over before December. As a consequence, the men in the holes had few of the items Ingersoll wore. Their footwear-leather combat boots-was almost worse than useless. Whenever the temperature went above freezing, they were standing in two to twenty inches of water, which the leather soaked up.

There were good boots available in Europe, of the type made popular by L. L. Bean after the war-well insulated, with leather uppers but rubber bottoms-but to the everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel, who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December, not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed. Maj. Gen. Paul Hawley, the chief surgeon for ETO, commented bluntly, "The plain truth is that the footwear furnished U.S. troops is lousy."

Three days before the Bulge began, Col. Ken Reimers of the 90th Division noted that "every day more men are falling out due to trench foot. Some men are so bad they can't wear shoes and are wearing overshoes over their socks. These men can't walk and are being carried from sheltered pillbox positions at night to firing positions in the day time."

In place of boots, the men got directives on how to prevent trench foot. They were ordered to ma.s.sage their feet and change their socks every day. Sergeant Lick recalled, "We would remove our wet socks, hang them around our neck to dry, ma.s.sage our feet and then put on the dry socks from around our neck that we had put there the day before. Then a directive came down stating that anyone getting trench foot would be tried by court martial."

Senior officers threatened court-martial to men who got trench foot, or took disciplinary action against junior officers whose units had a high incidence of the malady because they suspected the foxhole dwellers were getting it deliberately. They thought it was almost the equivalent of a self-inflicted wound.

The best way to avoid trench foot was to lace the boots lightly and take them off at night before climbing into the sleeping bag or covering yourself with a blanket. But, Lick said, "we couldn't take our boots off when we slept because they would freeze solid and we couldn't get them on again in the morning." The obvious solution, quickly learned by thousands of men, was to take the boots off but keep them inside the sleeping bag. Still there was another reason for keeping the boots on, the possible need for instant action. Men wrapped their feet in burlap sacks, when available, but the burlap soaked up the snow, so the boots got soggy, the socks got wet. Sergeant Lick lost all his toenails, but through regular ma.s.sages and a rotation of his socks he avoided trench foot. Thousands of others got it. Trench foot put more men out of action than German 88s, mortars, or machine-gun fire. During the winter of 1944-45, some 45,000 men had to be pulled out of the front line because of trench foot-the equivalent of three full infantry divisions. First a man lost his toenails. His feet turned white, then purple, finally black. A serious case of trench foot made walking impossible. Many men lost their toes; some had to have their feet amputated. If gangrene set in, the doctors had to amputate the lower leg. It has to be doubted that many men did this deliberately. A shot in the foot was much quicker, less dangerous, and nearly impossible to 149 prove that it hadn't been an accident. One private in Lt. Lee Otts's platoon shot himself in the foot and there was no question of accident. The man had been talking all night to his mate, Pvt. Penrose LeCrone, about doing it. LeCrone had the flu and was so depressed he just wanted the guy to shut up, so he told him to go ahead and do it. Otts commented: "It was three miles by trail to the aid station. The two medics who went with him made him walk all the way-there was no free ride for those with self-inflicted wounds."

During those long nights it was impossible to keep out of the mind the thought of how easy it would be to shoot a round into the foot. Sgt. Bruce Egger considered it, but "I did not have the nerve to shoot myself.

. . . I thought about dropping a case of rations on my foot, but I did not want to live the rest of my life with that on my mind. I decided to stick it out and trust in the Lord." A man in Lt. Harold Leinbaugh's platoon begged his squad leader, "Do me a favor, sergeant, shoot me in the leg."

Captain Roland of the 99th Division recalled, "Men began to wound themselves one way or another in order to get away from the front. Sometimes this was intentional. Sometimes it occurred through a gross negligence born of fear, exhaustion, and misery."

"There were two things in front of you always," Cpl. Clair Galdonik of the 90th Division remarked: "the enemy and death. . . . Sometimes morale was so low that you preferred death instead of a day-by-day agonizing existence. When you were wet, cold, hungry, lonely, Death looked very inviting. It was always close at hand and I found myself being envious of a dead comrade. At least he suffered no more physically or mentally."

Pvt. Bert Morphis of the 1st Division remembered that on Christmas Eve he was "on an outpost right in front of the German lines where the choice seemed to be between moving and being shot, or lying perfectly still and freezing to death." Most of them stuck it out. Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd Airborne was one of hundreds who refused to be evacuated because of trench foot. But when he also came down with dysentery and the flu, his CO ordered him to the rear. He commented, "I secretly experienced a great deal of guilt about going to the hospital for anything other than a bona fide wound. Anemia, bronchitis, dysentery, and trench foot seemed to be an easy way out. In hindsight, I understand that if you are sick you don't belong on a battlefield, but when you are an immature kid trying to be a hero it is something of a problem, particularly when you are trying to prove your courage to no one other than yourself."

Getting out of there honorably was every man's dream-thus the expression "million-dollar wound." Sgt.

John Sabia took five machine-gun bullets in his right thigh. His CO asked if he could make it back to the aid station on his own, as the company couldn't spare a man.

"h.e.l.l, yes, I can do it."

Sabia took a tree limb to use as a crutch and began hopping awkwardly in the snow. After ten meters he stopped, turned around, waved his limb in a gesture of defiance and exuberance, and bellowed to his buddies in their holes, "Hey, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Clean sheets! Clean sheets!"

Pvt. Donald Schoo of the 80th Infantry Division recalled seeing one of his buddies, named Steehhourst, take a hit from an 88 that blew off his right hand. "He was crying and running around yelling, 'I'm going home! Thank you G.o.d, I'm going home!' " Steehhourst was lucky, at least according to the standards of the men of the Bulge and specifically to Sgt. Richard Wallace of the 90th Division. After one sh.e.l.ling Wallace told his squad, "Boys, I'd give my right arm up to here"-holding it at his elbow-"if this war would end right now." The sh.e.l.ling resumed. Shrapnel tore into Wallace's face.

150 "I can't see!" he cried out. "I can't see! Oh, my G.o.d, I'm blind." He never saw again and the war was a long way from over.

Sleep deprivation was a universal experience. Two, three, at the most four hours of fitful sleep was about it. But no matter how sleepy a man was, he lived in constant tension. The men in the front line s.h.i.+vered in their foxholes, attempting to stay alert, straining to see, straining to hear, straining to stay awake. They would chew gum or tobacco. Pvt. Ken Russell of the 82nd Airborne remembered chewing one or the other "very slowly. I didn't want to finish too quickly and have nothing to do but think of the precarious position I was in." Lt. Glenn Gray calls this "the tyranny of the present." In a foxhole, the past and, more important, the future do not exist. The only thing in the world that matters is the moment. Gray says that there is "more time for thinking and more loneliness in foxholes than [anywhere else] and time is measured in other ways than by clocks and calendars."

Pvt. Dave Nutt of the 99th Division recalled, "The cold, the snow, and the darkness were enough to set young nerves on edge. The thud of something as innocuous as snow plopping to the ground from a tree branch could be terrifying. Was it snow? Was it maybe a German patrol? Should you fire at the sound and risk giving away your position, or worse hitting one of your own men? But did the Germans have us surrounded?"

Lieutenant Otts heard a "thud" one night and went out to investigate in the morning. He found a dying German soldier who murmured over and over, "Oh G.o.d, I meant no harm, I meant no harm." The boy was unarmed and wore no helmet, so he may well have been coming in to surrender when he set off the b.o.o.by trap. But the Germans often went on patrols unarmed so if they were captured they could say they were coming in to give up. Otts commented, "I imagine quite a few [Germans] would have surrendered but it was impossible in the daytime, as their own men would shoot them, and at night they were afraid to try and run our gauntlet of b.o.o.by traps and machine guns."

An experience shared by many foxhole soldiers was the screaming of a wounded man in front of the outposts. Otts recalled "a h.e.l.luva night. . . . Someone out in front of us was screaming, 'Help! Help!

Can't anyone hear me? For G.o.d's sake help!' This went on all night. You can't imagine what it does to you to be sitting in a foxhole with the black night all around and someone yelling for help in a mournful voice." Otts knew that there were American wounded out in front, but he also knew that the Germans used such calls to trick the GIs and would ambush anyone going out to give aid, so he ordered his platoon to stay put.

Tension was at its most p.r.o.nounced when changing guard. Every two hours the platoon sergeants would get two men from a foxhole and lead them to the outpost position, to relieve the men on duty. "The trip out to the OP was always eerie," Sgt. Burton Christenson of the 101st Airborne remembered of his nights outside Bastogne. "You eyed all silhouettes suspiciously, skeptical of any sound. Reluctantly, you approach the OP. The silhouettes of the men in their positions are not clear. . . . Are they Germans? The suspense is always the same . . . then finally you recognize an American helmet. Feeling a little ridiculous, yet also relieved, you change the guard, turn around and return to the main line, only to repeat the entire process in another two hours." "You always slept with one eye open," Pvt. Arnold Lindblad of the 104th Medical Battalion recalled. "Unless you were on duty, you hit the hole when it got dark and stayed there till full light. There was no walking around in the dark, no talking from hole to hole. You never got used to it." On his first night in a foxhole, Pvt. Richard Heuer, a replacement with the 84th Division, was suffering with dysentery. "I didn't want to c.r.a.p in my helmet," he related, "so I decided I'd crawl outside at night."

As he wore two pair of long johns beneath his wool pants, "it was a real ch.o.r.e getting down to the point where I could do my duty. As I was doing my duty I heard some noises behind me. I thought they were Germans. I jumped into the hole without pulling my drawers up. That really startled my foxhole buddy. I had c.r.a.pped in the first pair of drawers, so I had to stand there in the middle of the foxhole and cut it out.

151 This wasn't easy, because I had to do the cutting with my bayonet." Sh.e.l.ling made foxhole living worse.

Mortars and artillery could come in at any time. The Germans would watch the GIs take up a position at the end of a day, mark it on their maps, and sh.e.l.l it at night. Pvt. Arnold "Ben" Parish of the 2nd Infantry Division remembered a night during the Bulge when he and a buddy had dug a hole long and wide enough to accommodate both men, but only about eight inches deep. As they worked on it, sh.e.l.ling began. "It was raining sh.e.l.ls and they were exploding all around our hole. The air was full of shrapnel and spent pieces were hitting us as we laid on our backs with our helmets over our faces. The noise was unbearable and the ground was shaking and we were shaking from fright and cold. We didn't dare raise our heads. It would have been impossible to survive outside of the hole."

Cries of "Medic!" Tree limbs hurtling through the air. The smell of powder. The bangs and flashes and booms and screams, red-hot bits of metal zooming through the air. The only movement you could make was to press ever closer to the ground. Those who endured such a cataclysm were forever scarred by it, even if untouched by shrapnel.

"We were helpless and all alone and there was nothing we could do, so I prayed to G.o.d. . . . The time went by very slow. I tried to keep warm but that wasn't possible. I thought about my mother and hoped she didn't know where I was or what I was doing. . . . Maybe this is the end of the world, I thought."

Feelings of helplessness were universal. Cpl. Stanley Kalberer, a college student at the beginning of 1944, was by December a replacement in the 84th Division. During the Bulge he, too, got caught in a sh.e.l.ling and described his experience: "I never felt so alone, frightened, forgotten, abused and degraded. .

. . I truly believed I would never survive, or if I did I would be maimed by the weather or killed by the enemy, or both."

When men got out of the holes, they looked like slaves coming up from a coal-mine shaft. In February 1945, C Company of the 395th Regiment "was relieved in position by the 69th Division after living in holes in the ground for almost three months," recalled Pvt. Vernon Swanson, 99th Division. "When we popped out of the ground, some of the green 69th Division troops pa.s.sing by were convinced that they were relieving an all black infantry battalion." G.o.d-awful though the conditions were, men endured and prevailed. How they did so differed with each individual. But all had a sense of fatalism. Pvt. Ken Webster expressed his feelings and insights in a letter to his mother: "I am living on borrowed time. . . . If I don't come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machine-gunned in the face. You have to keep going. It's not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected." ("There was no time to mourn the dead," Capt. John Colby remarked, "even if they were good friends.") When his mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this att.i.tude, Webster replied, "Would you prefer for somebody else's son to die in the mud? . . . Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy.

Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroops. If the country all had your att.i.tude, n.o.body would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of a country would that be?"

Carwood Lipton was a sergeant in the 101st Airborne on D-Day, a lieutenant with a battlefield commission during the Bulge. By the end of the war he had been involved in many different kinds of combat. Asked to comment on how he managed to cope with the challenges of combat, and insofar as he felt he could to speak for others in his answer, Lipton said, "When men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become calloused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger.

Enemy bodies and wounded don't affect them.

"Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that 152 impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment that it was not them. There is still work to be done, a war to be won, and they think about that."

According to Lipton, it was only later, when a man got off the front line, that he had time to think about how buddies were killed or wounded, or about the times when he personally was inches from death. Out of the line, far from combat, "death and destruction are no longer inevitable-the war might end, the missions might be canceled." Such thoughts made men nervous about going back into the line. But, Lipton insisted, once back in it, all doubts and nervousness disappear. "The callousness, the cold-bloodedness, the calmness return." Fifty years later I remarked to Lipton that in December 1944 the stockade was preferable to a foxhole. He turned on me and snapped, "Come on, Steve. No man would choose disgrace. If the stockade was preferable the stockades would have been full, the foxholes empty, and we would have lost the war." Just there is the point. In the face of conditions scarcely equaled anywhere for fear, degradation, and misery, the great majority of front-line soldiers in ETO in 1944-45 stayed in the line and did their duty, and prevailed. There are no unwounded foxhole veterans.

Sgt. Ed Stewart of the 84th Division commented decades after the war that he had "never known a combat soldier who did not show a residue of war." Stewart's mother told him that he "left Europe but never arrived home." Sgt. George Thompson said that when he came home the sounds of war came with him. Decades later, "when I'm home by myself, at nighttime, it all comes back. I'll hear the noise, the sh.e.l.ls exploding. I stay awake thinking about it. I guess it comes from being in a foxhole-the long hours of nighttime."

17 - The Rhineland Battles

THE GERMAN RETREAT out of the Bulge was slow, stubborn, and costly to the Americans-but to the Germans also. Hitler, always insistent on holding captured ground, refused to consider pulling out of the Bulge and returning to the Siegfried Line, as his generals urged him to do. Instead, he ordered a "hold to the last man" policy in the Ardennes, and an offensive in Alsace with the idea of preventing further American reinforcements from moving north to the Ardennes. Operation Northwind, starting January 1, hit Lt. Gen. Alexander Patch's U.S. Seventh Army. Eventually a total of fifteen U.S. divisions with 250,000 men were involved in the fighting, which took place along a front that ran almost 150 kilometers from Saarbrucken in the north to a point on the west bank of the Rhine south of Strasbourg. This was a natural salient along the bend of the Rhine, so the battle was something of a mirror image of the one going on to the north in the Ardennes.

Behind the salient, the Alsatian Plain stretched westward from the Rhine to the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. It was unsuitable to the defense. The textbook response to the Northwind attack would have been to fall back on the rough country and leave the plain to the Germans. That was what Eisenhower wanted to do, but politics intervened. French leader Charles de Gaulle told the Supreme Commander that if they were cadets at military school he would agree with Eisenhower's opinion, but as the French leader he absolutely could not accept abandoning Strasbourg, not only for reasons of national pride but also because of the fearful reprisals the Gestapo was sure to take on the citizens of Strasbourg.

Eisenhower reluctantly agreed and the order went out to Seventh Army: hold your ground. As a result, bitter battles were waged through January at Wingen, Philippsbourg, Herrlisheim, Rittershoffen, and 153 elsewhere. Col. Hans von Luck's 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division had the mission of breaking through the American lines on this northwestern base of the salient, cutting across the eastern foothills of the Vosges, and thus severing the American supply line to Strasbourg. That required, of all things, breaking through the Maginot Line. It ran east-west in this area, following the Rhine River bend.

The Maginot Line, built at such great expense, had seen no fighting to speak of in 1940-the Germans went around it-but in January 1945 a part of the line was used for the purpose it had been designed for and showed what a superb fortification it was.

On January 7, Luck approached the line south of Wissembourg, at Rittershoffen.

"Suddenly we could make out the first bunker, which received us with heavy fire. Our leading men and the accompanying SPV landed in thick minefields; the artillery stepped up its barrage of fire." The Americans, composed of men from the 79th Infantry Division, the 14th Armored Division, and elements of the 42nd Infantry Division, utilized the firing points, trenches, retractable cannon, and other features of the line to the fullest. They stopped the Germans cold. Over the next two days the Germans reinforced the attack, with new 88s and some tanks, along with the 25th Panzer Division. They again a.s.saulted the line. At one point they managed to drive the Americans out by getting close enough to throw grenades into the embrasures, but they were immediately driven back by heavy artillery fire.

Still the Germans came on. At times the battle raged inside the bunkers, a nerve-shattering experience made worse by the ear-shattering noise of explosives. Eventually Luck got through. On January 10 he moved his regiment forward for an attack on Rittershoffen, preparatory to a.s.saulting another part of the Maginot Line from the rear (the French defenses were all pointed east), in order to widen the breach.

That night he got into the village but was not able to drive the Americans out. They held one end, Luck's men held the other. The situation in nearby Hatten village was similar. There then developed a two-week-long battle that Luck, a veteran of Poland, France, Russia, North Africa, and Normandy, characterized as "one of the hardest and most costly battles that ever raged."

Both sides used their artillery nonstop, firing 10,000 rounds per day. The sh.e.l.ling was a curse to both sides, as the lines were never more than one street apart, and sometimes they were on the same side of the street, occasionally in the same house. Pvt. Pat Reilly of the 79th recalled, "It was a weird battle. One time you were surrounded, the next you weren't. Often we took refuge in houses where the Germans were upstairs. We heard them and could see them and vice versa. If they didn't make a move we left and if we didn't make a move they left." Flamethrowers were used to set houses afire. Adding to the horror, the civilian population had hidden when the battle began and now the women, children, and old folks huddled in the cellars. There was no electricity. The pipes had frozen so there was no water. The soldiers, on both sides, did what they could to feed and care for the civilians.

Individual movement by day was dangerous. At night trucks rolled up, on both sides, bringing ammunition and food, carrying out wounded. The houses, public buildings, and the church were in ruins.

The dead, including some hundred civilians, lay in the streets. There was hand-to-hand fighting with knives, room-to-room fighting with pistols, rifles, and bazookas. Attacks and counterattacks took place regularly.

On January 21, Seventh Army ordered the much depleted 79th and 14th Armored Divisions to retreat from Rittershoffen. The Americans abandoned the Maginot Line and fell back on new positions along the Moder River. Luck only realized they had gone in the morning. He walked around the village, unbelieving. At the church, he crawled through the wreckage to the altar, which lay in ruins. But in its place behind the altar, the organ was undamaged. Luck directed one of his men to tread the bellows, sat down at the organ, and played Bach's choraleDanket Alle Gott . The sound resounded through the village. German soldiers and the civilians of Rittershoffen gathered, knelt, prayed, sang. Fifty years later I 154 was in Rittershoffen with Luck and a half-dozen of his men, along with some American veterans of the battle. The mayor invited Luck to the new church, sat him down at the organ, and once again he played Bach. Overall, the Northwind offensive was a failure. The Germans never got near Strasbourg, nor could they cut American supply lines. It was costly to both sides: Seventh Army's losses in January were 11,609 battle casualties plus 2,836 cases of trench foot. German losses were around 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing (Seventh Army processed some 5,985 German POWs). For the front-line infantry, armor, and artillery of U.S. First and Third Armies, it was one of the most G.o.d-awful offensives of this or any other war. All but forgotten today, the battle that raged through January was for the GIs among the worst of the war, if possible even more miserable than Hurtgen or Metz. There was no glamour, little drama, zero maneuver. It was just straight-ahead attack, designed to eliminate the Bulge and then return to the German border. It was fought in conditions so terrible that they can only be marveled at, not really imagined. Only those who were there can know. More than once in interviewing veterans of the January fighting, when I ask them to describe the cold, men have involuntarily s.h.i.+vered. These were the combat soldiers of ETO. At this time they numbered about 300,000. Perhaps half the enlisted were veterans, including replacements or men in divisions who had come into the battle in November or December and many who had been wounded once or twice. In the junior officer ranks, the turnover had been even greater, almost three-quarters. Still there was a corps of veterans in most of the divisions, including junior officers who had won battlefield promotions-the highest honor a soldier can receive, and the source of outstanding junior officers-and sergeants, most of whom by this stage were the privates of Normandy, St.-Lo, Falaise, Holland, and the Bulge, survivors who had moved up when the original NCOs were killed or wounded. These newly made lieutenants and sergeants, some of them teenage boys, most of them in their early twenties, provided the core leaders.h.i.+p that got the U.S. Army through that terrible January.

Two themes dominate the memories of the men who fought these battles: the cold and American artillery. Every veteran I've ever interviewed, from whatever side, agrees that this was the coldest they had ever been, but disagrees on firepower: Each man insists that the other guy had more artillery. GIs can remember sh.e.l.lings that never seemed to have an end; so can the British troops. The GIs and their division, army, and army group commanders complained of a shortage of artillery sh.e.l.ls (to which complaint the War Department answered, you are shooting too often), but in fact the Americans had twice as much and more artillery ammunition than the Germans.

This was a triumph of American industry and of the American way of war. This battle was raging along Germany's border. German sh.e.l.ls had to travel from a hundred to only a couple of dozen kilometers to reach German guns on the front line. American sh.e.l.ls had to travel thousands of kilometers to get there.

But such was American productivity, many more American than German sh.e.l.ls were arriving. The German attempt to cut Allied supply lines with their submarines had failed; the Allied attempt to cut German supply lines with their Jabos had great success. So the Americans banged away, confident that more sh.e.l.ls were on the way. The Germans husbanded their sh.e.l.ls, uncertain if any more would ever arrive.

As to the cold, all suffered equally. How cold was it? So cold that if a man didn't do his business in a hurry he risked a frostbitten p.e.n.i.s. So cold that Pvt. Don Schoo, an anti-aircraft gunner attached to the 4th Armored Division, recalled, "I was due on guard and went out to my half track to relieve the man on guard. He couldn't get out of the gun turret. His overcoat was wet when he got in and it froze so he couldn't get out." It was so cold the oil in the engines froze. Weapons froze. Men p.i.s.sed on them to get them working again, a good temporary solution but one that played h.e.l.l with the weapon. Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd Airborne wore layers of wool sweaters and overcoats and cut holes in his mummy-type sleeping bag so he could wear that, too. He had modified his wool gloves by slitting the 155 fingers and sewing them together, except for the thumb and trigger finger, thus making them modified mittens. "Even with all this d.a.m.n clothing, I never was warm," he recalled. Good luck: He acquired a long-haired German dog from a company of German soldiers his platoon had ambushed in a railroad cut.

Schlemmer named the dog Adolph. He was Schlemmer's sleeping companion: "We'd curl up against each other wherever we could find a place to sleep."

Nights ranged from zero degrees Fahrenheit to minus ten and lower. Men without shelter-other than a foxhole-or heat either stayed awake, stomping their feet, through the fourteen-hour night, or they froze.

Maj. John Harrison had as one of his most vivid memories of that January the sight of GIs pressed against the hot stones of the walls of burning houses, as flames came out of the roof and windows. They were not hiding from Germans; they were trying to get warm for a minute or two.

The GIs, and the Germans opposite them, went through worse physical misery than the men of Valley Forge. Was.h.i.+ngton's troops had tents, some huts, fires to warm by and provide hot food. They were not involved in continuous battle. By contrast, the conditions in Northwest Europe in January 1945 were as brutal as any in history, including the French and the German retreats from Moscow in midwinter, 1812 and 1941.

Another characteristic of the January fighting was the horror created by a high incidence of bodies crushed by tanks. Men slipped, tanks skidded. The wounded couldn't get out of the way.

Twenty-year-old Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 82nd Airborne saw a fellow paratrooper who had been run over by a tank. "If it hadn't been for the two pair of legs and boots sticking out of all the gore, it would have been hard to tell what it was. I looked away and thought for sure that I was going to vomit. I just wanted to throw my weapon away and tell them I quit. No more, I just can't take no more."

There was an awfulness about the fighting on the Western Front in 1945 that cannot be exaggerated.

For the Germans, old men and boys mostly, it made no sense to be fighting the Americans while the Red Army invaded their homeland from the east. For the Americans, it was obvious that they had won the war, except that the d.a.m.ned Krauts kept fighting. For the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, it seemed unfair that after having stopped the Germans cold it fell to them to undertake offensive action to finish the job. When replacements arrived at his company CP, bringing it up to strength in preparation for an attack, Sgt. John Martin of the 101st confessed, "I could not believe it. I could not believe that they were going to give us replacements and put us on the attack. I figured, Jesus, they'll take us out of here and give us some clothes or something. But, no, they get you some replacements and 'Come on boys, let's go.' And then that's when we start attacking."

It was the policy of the U.S. Army to keep its rifle companies on the line for long periods, continuously in the case of the companies in infantry divisions, making up losses by individual replacement. This meant the veteran could look forward to a release from the dangers threatening him only through death or serious wound. This created a situation of endlessness and hopelessness. Combat is a topsy-turvy world.