“We saw the American Air Force flying overhead,” says Brooks, recalling the sight of more than a thousand heavy bombers heading for Dresden. “It was wonderful. The Germans weren’t happy, but we were thrilled.”
Anthony Acevedo, a close friend of both Brooks and Fellman, who as a medic was allowed to remain in the barracks in order to minister to seriously ill POWs, says that when the bombers went over, he could hear the hinges on the windows shake and feel the building vibrate. He’d look skyward and cross himself, praying that liberation would come soon. And he said the guards—mostly Austrians who were devout Catholics as he was—would also cross themselves. He hastens to add that being devout didn’t make them any less brutal than the Germans.
Death was all around them at Berga. “The Germans were sticklers for book work,” Fellman says. “Everything had to be recorded. So whenever a prisoner died, they had to wait for the medical officer to come by and make a death certificate out. He would only come periodically, once a week, maybe, and so the guys that died in the interim, they would line [their bodies] up on the outside. Remember, now, this is subfreezing weather, so they were stiff in every sense of the word, and they would line them up right alongside of where we lined up to get our chow. And you have to understand, you’re standing there waiting for your food alongside of your buddies who are lying dead on the road, and it didn’t bother you. [That gives you] some idea of what kind of a situation you had sunk into—and it didn’t take long.”
Morton Brooks acknowledges that he didn’t even have the strength to cry at the time. “It was so miserable, unreal. It’s not like sitting here and thinking about it. You’re in that situation, and your behavior’s determined by the situation in which you’re in.”
And the situation? All the niceties of civilized living are absent. Taking a shower, having toilet paper, being able to wash your hands after going to the bathroom or before you eat. Not even having a bathroom, just a perch over a slit trench for months on end, coping with chronic diarrhea and having only straw from your bedding to wipe yourself with. And then wearing the same clothes for months at a time.
Brooks ultimately became a clinical psychologist, and he speaks in the language of that profession. “That’s why I say, the situation determines your behavior, and say it’s a crazy situation, your behavior is crazy. And so, to understand someone’s behavior, you have to understand the totality of the situation. And the human capability of coping with that situation. So you cope. And whatever comes out, comes out.
“You had this piece of bread, and then you try to stretch it. Sometimes if we had the potbelly stove going, you’d take the bread and try and toast it on the outside of the stove. One of our fellow soldiers had stolen someone else’s bread, and we went over to essentially attack him for doing that. I remember going to hit him, and it was like a powder puff. The force with which I hit him, and I remember how striking it was for me, the lack of strength I had at that moment. You just don’t even realize how the strength disappears. It was a shock to me that I had lost so much strength. But that’s how quickly we became weakened.”
Brooks never did really pray. “I don’t know why,” he explains. “Maybe I’d never thought in those kinds of terms, that there was some God up there that would be protecting me or could do anything for me.”
Survival under those conditions required both physical and emotional strength. Fellman says, “I always believed, but I was never excessive about it, and I don’t remember doing any heavy-duty praying, although I’m sure I must’ve. So I can’t tell you where the strength came from. I’m only glad it was there.”
And clearly, it had to be. He says, “I have to reiterate, any time you got the frame of mind that you felt like you weren’t going to make it, those guys didn’t make it. Every one of them.” Fellman says that of the guys who survived, “it never occurred to us that we weren’t gonna make it home.”
He doesn’t know what gave him or the others that outlook, it was just existential, like the barracks humor that buoyed them. “We made jokes about everything, except toward the end, you were so turned in, there was no jokes, no nothing. We used to engage on what we would order when we went to a restaurant, and we would insist that the steak be done a certain way, with a certain number of onions on top. And we’d make damn sure you were listening. ‘Are you hearing me? Are you hearing what I’m saying?’
“You never talk about girls. Women became very unimportant. I don’t remember anybody talking about women, but we talked about food—how it was gonna be prepared.”
The Germans worked most of the Americans in twelve-hour shifts. During their off-hours, they slept—or tried to. Norm Fellman recalls, “We tried, if the lice would let you. If the cold would let you. We slept two to a bunk, tried to keep warm. But it depended. I think we slept no matter what, because we were just so thoroughly exhausted. Between the hunger and the lice and the cold, it was not a guaranteed thing. You did sleep. I’m sure we did; otherwise, we wouldn’t have made it.”
As the days and weeks wore on, Fellman found it more difficult to be an optimist. “Let me tell you, when we first got into camp, the idea was just to hang on. After you’ve been on reduced rations for a while, you would concentrate on food an awful lot. Your concern would be to make it through the next month, the next week, the next day, and when things got toward the end, you were trying to make it through the next hour. And then it was the next ten minutes. You just wanted to survive that much longer. By the time we were liberated, I don’t believe any of us would have lasted another week. I don’t believe I would have lasted another twenty-four hours. I was as close to being gone as you can be and not be.”
Fellman doesn’t remember having nightmares while in Berga. “I don’t know what could happen in a nightmare that could even equal what would happen to us during the day. Your existence was a nightmare. Nobody could believe that something like this could happen, not to Americans, anyway.”
CHAPTER 3
INCOMPREHENSIBLE
APRIL 3, 1945
NEAR GOTHA, GERMANY
130 miles northeast of Frankfurt
Lieutenant Colonel Albin F. Irzyk didn’t find God on the road to Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge; he was already a believer. But he was certain God found him on December 23, 1944. There was no other way for him to explain why a high-powered armor-piercing round fired by a German tank at point-blank range hit his huge Sherman tank, knocked everyone inside for a loop, but didn’t explode. The impact actually split open the turret. As dawn came up, the crew inside could see a long sliver of light. Only after daylight, when Irzyk, the commanding officer of the 8th Tank Battalion, Combat Command B, of the 4th Armored Division, had a chance to crawl outside his tank, did he discover that the round had, with great precision, pinpointed a stubby piece of steel about five inches by four inches by six inches deep and ricocheted off into the Ardennes forest. Irzyk had been a tanker for most of his military career, and he’d never before even noticed that appurtenance on the tracked monster, much less understood why it was there. But it didn’t take him long to figure out that had the round not bounced off that solid chunk of steel, it would have driven through the turret and hit him square in the back, leaving little more than crispy pieces of flesh and bone.
Such are the mysteries of combat: the shrapnel that’s stopped from penetrating all the way to your heart by the miniature Bible or prayer book carried superstitiously in a breast pocket. The land mine you learn is a dud only after stepping on it and hearing a click followed by—nothing. The rifle bullet that slams into your helmet at the perfect angle, so that instead of killing you outright, it runs an orbital path between the steel pot and the helmet liner, resulting in nothing worse than a hellacious headache. Or the incoming shell that bursts in the trees, killing the buddies you share a foxhole with but leaving you alive and unscathed, save for a lifelong case of survivor guilt.
The men of the 4th Armored had experienced all of that and more since they’d landed at
Utah Beach on July 11, 1944, and entered combat barely a week later. To attack the Germans at Bastogne in order to help relieve the besieged 101st Airborne Division—the Battered Bloody Bastards of Bastogne—under orders from General George S. Patton they’d raced into Belgium, covering 150 miles in nineteen hours. Even for an armored unit accustomed to outpacing the infantry and artillery, that’s nothing short of incredible.
They fought hard, crossing the Rhine on bridges built by U.S. Army engineers, heading into the heartland of Germany on March 24 and 25. They went east of Frankfurt and drove north to the city of Bad Hersfeld, the last population center in what would come to be known as West Germany. Then they headed east into the future German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany), toward the ultimate objective of Dresden. The map Irzyk switched to in the turret of his tank covered the Erfurt sector of the country. The Americans gambled on traveling down the Autobahn as far as practical, because it was quick going. They were hit; they fought back and kept going. They went through Eisenach and on the following day, April 4, around midmorning, the 4th Armored Division took Gotha without firing a shot, but only because the town’s burgomaster had been given an ultimatum: surrender the city or see it destroyed by artillery fire. Combat Command B, which included the 37th Tank Battalion, formally accepted the surrender of Gotha.
The commander of one of the 37th tanks was Sergeant Harry Feinberg. A lanky, six-foot-tall Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Feinberg had left home in 1937 at the age of seventeen without finishing high school to tour the country for nearly four years with a vaudeville act called Borrah Minevich and His Harmonica Rascals. He practiced a lot, made recordings, and even appeared in a movie with the child star Jane Withers.
In late 1940, with the glamour of show business fading, Harry returned home to work in the building business with his father. Little more than a year later, he was drafted, sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to learn all about tanks and to discover that training was going to require a good imagination: the entire division had only six tanks; they simulated firing at targets made by painting the word TANK on big Army trucks.
Eventually, while on exercises in the Mojave Desert, the unit got real tanks as well as a commanding general the men loved, Major General John Wood. Feinberg says that prior to deployment Wood was being questioned by reporters who asked him why the 4th didn’t have a nickname like the other armored divisions, such as “Hell on Wheels” or “Old Ironsides.” According to lore, Wood said, “We don’t need a nickname. We will be known by our deeds alone. Name is enough: 4th Armored Division.” And that’s how the division nickname became “Name Enough.”
At the end of 1943, the division sailed for England in a fifty-two-ship convoy and then trained in the British countryside for months until finally being sent to France weeks after D-Day. It didn’t take long for the reality of war to strike home. They were in the Normandy hedgerows, just beyond Sainte-Mère-Église (recall the famous scene in The Longest Day where the paratrooper’s chute is caught on the church steeple next to the clock), and had just jumped off the tanks to begin routine cleaning and maintenance. Feinberg recalls that “As soon as we got off the tank, I hear a whistle. That’s the loudest whistle I ever heard. A plane came over, and right into the next hedgerow, a bomb fell there, and you see a flash, and you hear screaming, ‘Medic! Medic!’ And I started shivering.
“You could hear a lot of excitement. ‘Over here, guys, over here, c’mon!’ And you’d hear another guy say, ‘I can’t feel my legs, I can’t feel my legs.’ And this all came down as a big surprise. You can imagine my head just spinning. What can I do here? Where can I run to?”
Feinberg survived the next several months, which included participation in the Battle of the Bulge. He earned a Purple Heart and screwed up his back for life as a result of the constant jumping down from the tank. By the time his unit stopped in Gotha, he was an experienced soldier, using training, innate smarts, and intuition to survive. But as most war veterans will tell you, it’s when you think you’ve got it figured out that you tend to get careless and take unnecessary risks.
“I was now a tank commander, because our guys were getting killed, so they promoted me. Gave me three stripes. Baloney. I didn’t want those three stripes or any of them. Anyway, we’re on attack, on a paved road. I don’t remember what was on my right side, but on this side I see about eight, ten houses, well-kept two-story homes, and we stopped on the road. We gassed up, oiled up, and greased up and did what we had to, and we’re just waiting for a command to move out. So I said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m going into this house across the road.’ There was a wrought iron fence with fleur-de-lis all on this black fence, and I’m going in there to see what’s in the house, which is the most stupid thing I ever did. I go to the door, and I turn the handle, and the door opens. I go in, I look, and I’m in a big, big living room, and there’s a woman at the other end. She’s dressed from here”—he touches his neck—“down to her ankles, and she had a German honeycomb hair comb. And she says, ‘Come in, come in.’ Being I could speak Yiddish, I was used as a German interpreter, so I understood her. And I looked at her. All I had was my .45 and my grease gun, and I look around, and I see a door here and there, and it didn’t dawn on me until I ran out, what am I doing here? There might be enemy in there. My God, they can make mincemeat of me. Anyway, she says to me, ‘Come in, this is my living room.’ She asked me, ‘Keine Schokolade?’ And I said, ‘Nein.’ She says in German, ‘I’ll make a trade with you. See this lamp here, on the end table? You take this, you give me chocolate, and you can take this home as a souvenir.’ So, I said, ‘Nein, die Schokolade ist für die Kinder,’ because in every town we went to, little five-, six-, eight-year-old kids were not afraid of us, even in Germany. They used to come around to see us, look at us around our tanks. Very poorly fed, very poorly clothed. And the American soldier’s not a tough soldier, he’s a sweetheart, he’s a marshmallow, they see kids, they jump off the tank and give them chewing gum and if we had cookies, oh, these kids would love us. And we’d pick them up and just play with them. They would laugh. And, of course, this is when we’re not firing.
“She said, ‘For a souvenir, take it home with you.’ So I looked at the lamp, and something shuddered over my body. I got a feeling, because the light was still on and I could see through there, and it was sort of grayish yellow coloring. She said, ‘Do you know what this is made of? This is human skin.’ That’s when I turned—I wheeled around and just waved her down and ran out, and the guys said, ‘Hey, what happened?’ I said, ‘I just did the most stupid thing that I ever did. What the hell did I go in there for?’”
It would not be the last time that American troops were confronted by such hideous creations.
Probably around the time that Harry Feinberg was recovering from his Gotha adventure, Lieutenant Colonel Al Irzyk’s 8th Tank Battalion was literally flagged over to the side of a main Gotha road by the commanding officer of Combat Command A, Colonel Hayden Sears, a huge hulk of a man who dwarfed the much more diminutive battalion commander.
Speaking face-to-face on the sidewalk, Sears told Irzyk that intelligence had received indications that the Nazis had built a huge underground communications installation designed for the headquarters of the entire German army in the event Berlin had to be evacuated. The installation was reported to be somewhere near the town of Ohrdruf, which lay roughly ten miles to the south. Sears’s instructions were simple: “Go to Ohrdruf and look for this complex.”
Today, that’s an eighteen-minute drive. In 1945, in Sherman tanks with bad guys shooting at you, it took a little longer. Irzyk’s memory of the day is remarkably clear, and his recitation of the story comes to life when he spreads out his wartime-era map on the dining room table of his historic Palm Beach, Florida, home. The route his tank battalion and accompanying armored infantry followed six decades ago is easy to see. “The minute we left Gotha, we started hitting resistance.” Initially, they were attacked by Panzerfausts—the German antitank bazooka-type weap
on that resembles the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) so common today. Those were followed by mortar and small-arms fire, as well as occasional artillery rounds. Nevertheless, “This is April, the ground is dry. I had my tanks spread out, and we advanced.”
Brigadier General (Ret.) Albin F. Irzyk looks over the map he used to move his 4th Armored Division tank battalion into the area of Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp discovered by American forces.
At the time, he was confident. “If there was a complex, one of my tanks would have found it. You can’t hide a complex, [or] so we thought as we moved. But we got to Ohrdruf, and it was getting dark. I outposted two towns beyond Ohrdruf,” he recalls, pointing at the map. “And then we dug in for the night.”
Joe Vanacore used the bulldozer blade on his Sherman tank to push through the gates at Ohrdruf.
Irzyk had been too busy positioning his troops to focus on chatter that had begun late in the day on one of the tank-commander-to-tank-commander radio channels. They were talking about a lot of bodies being found in the woods.
It was either late in the afternoon of that same day or first thing the next morning—the surviving GIs don’t agree—when a barbed-wire enclosure was discovered by a platoon of tanks from Company A that had been sent to observe the area to the front of the 8th Battalion. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Vanacore, from Queens, New York, was driving the only tank in the battalion with a bulldozer blade. He calls it the dirtiest job in an armored unit. Whichever of the three companies was in the lead, Joe’s tank was in second position. His job was to clear the roads so the unit’s trucks could get through. If, for example, aircraft knocked out a Tiger or Supertiger tank and it blocked the road, Joe had to use his thirty-ton Sherman to move it—a tricky task considering that the German tanks weighed sixty to sixty-five tons.
The Liberators Page 3