We were a staff sergeant and five riflemen from the second platoon, plus Huckins and me. We walk down the hill, well spaced, strung out behind the sergeant, staying in cover as much as we can and aiming to hit the road below a vineyard—which allows us to move into the first buildings of the village without being sitting ducks until the last moment. Army Intelligence seems to have it right for once. No one is shooting at us. But as we walk past the vineyard, within twenty yards of the first building, we learn Army Intelligence is operating as usual.
I remember hearing engines being started in the village ahead and simultaneously a voice, just above and behind us, shouting something in German. A soldier is standing among the vines, pointing a rifle at us. A sentry, probably. He must have been sleeping or he would have seen us coming. Huckins shoots him and he tumbles down among the vines. We sprint toward the village. Two men rush out of the first building, looking surprised, see five or six rifles aimed at them and stop. One raises his hands high. The other jerks off his helmet and bounces it on the cobblestones, cursing. Here the entry road makes a ninety-degree turn to become the main street of Itterswiller. Pressed against a wall, I can hear more motors coming alive but I can’t see what’s going on. The squad leader sends the prisoners out across the open space toward our company’s position in the woods, tells them to go there and surrender again. Then he disappears around the corner. We spend a very tense few moments, fingers on triggers. The two soldiers we’ve bagged trot toward Charley Hill, hands atop heads and disappear among the trees. Did they ever get all the way to Charley Company to declare themselves prisoners of war? I never heard, never asked, and never cared. But I doubt it. The sergeant reappears with the happy news that the Germans (probably a rear guard at best) were going, going, gone.
The encounter at Itterswiller was over. But it needs a couple of footnotes—the first one to illustrate the baffling irrationality of the military and the second to suggest that some levels of compassion survive in our species even in the heat of combat.
About six months after the affair I learned that I had been awarded a Bronze Star by the U.S. Army for “action on a daylight recon patrol on 29 November 1944.” Since I was only a tagalong I presumed that everyone who went was awarded those five points toward going home, with maybe something higher for the sergeant. But I learned later that Huckins, the only one of us except for the sergeant who actually did anything, got no medal, so I presume the others didn’t either. Why me? Who knows? Maybe names are drawn from a colonel’s hat.
That’s the irrational example. Here’s the compassion.
One of the eighty casualties Baker Company suffered that day was John Walters, who’d been a friend of mine in basic training, and had become a BAR man in B Company. I located Walters, now a retired oil man living in Durango, and he told me his story. Baker Company had run into a stiff close-quarters firefight with dug-in German infantry on that infamous hill. Walters found himself engaged in a sort of one-on-one affair in the woods, his BAR against an MG42. Walters suffered a face wound. He remembers sitting against the trunk of a tree, sort of collecting himself, then becoming aware again and discovering that the top of the tree had been blown off, that three hours have passed, and that he has a huge splinter sticking through his thigh muscle, the worst of a multitude of less important injuries. Walters hobbles toward the rear, meets Lieutenant Boyle, is put on a Jeep, and taken to the headquarters farm building. There the splinter is removed, various wounds are bandaged and Walters waits with other wounded in the basement for what happens next. He remembers hearing tracked vehicles arriving, hoping they are U.S. tanks, hearing some shooting and shouting and then a call down the stairs.
“This is Lieutenant Remington,” the caller shouts. “If there’s anyone down there, come on up.”
“It sounded like perfect American English,” Walters told me. “We thought he was an American officer.”
So Walters and others able to climb stairs became prisoners and were herded through our lines to Itterswiller, thence over the Rhine, where Walters concluded his war by helping clean up bomb damage in Munich. It was standard practice to deal with questionable basements in such situations by tossing down a grenade first, and then asking questions. One stays alive by not taking chances. We did it, and I’m sure it was equally routine in the German infantry. Those in that basement owe their lives to the phony “Lieutenant Remington,” who preferred to take a risk rather than kill a bunch of wounded men.
One finds humanitarians in every Army and brutes as well, but the brutes tend to shy away from danger and accumulate, like slime at the bottom of the bucket, in rear echelon units. I was sprawled beside a mountain road one afternoon awaiting word to move out when two men from the regimental headquarters came along with two prisoners they were taking to the rear. They stopped for a smoke and decided that guarding their charges was onerous. They pointed their rifles at the two—boys about my own age—and ordered them to run up the hill. The two ran and were shot in the back—the only prisoners I saw murdered. We reported the incident and were told the men from regimental headquarters were arrested and stood court-martial. I hope they were shot.
I have only vague memories of long walks and truck rides for several days after Itterswiller—moving south as part of a regimental combat team sent to help the French First Armored, which didn’t seem to be doing much. My only recollection of this visit was seeing a truck loaded with ammunition blown up by a mine—producing a spectacular explosion and a gaping crater. The first week of December our First Battalion drew Regimental Reserve near some Maginot Line forts. The purpose of reserve is to give exhausted combat troops some rest. Instead we were put through a regime of close order drill—an exercise useful when troops were armed with flintlock muskets but obsolete (everywhere except West Point) since the Civil War. We also were strafed by a couple of our fighter bombers, which came in too high to hit anything. (To complete this account of our air war, the only casualty C Company suffered from air attacks was a rifleman hit in the back by an empty 20 mm shell casing, which came from a British Spitfire shooting at something far ahead of us.) On another occasion a single sneaky German Focke-Wulf flying just over the ground terrified a bunch of us into diving into an icy stream and after we had crossed the Zinzl River, two P-47s showed up and bombed the pontoon bridge our engineers had just installed, dumping a Sherman tank into the river. They made a second pass and the tankers shot down one of them.
Our holiday in reserve also produced the high point of the winter. Two huge tents and an oil-burning water heater were installed and Charley Company took a bath. We marched into tent one by platoon, stripped off our outerwear (field jackets, helmets, wool caps, waterproofs, snowpacks, etc.). Clad in underwear and socks now, we marched down a boardwalk through a mixture of snow and sleet into the shower tent. There we doffed underwear and socks, tossed same into bins, were handed bars of soap, and marched under a row of nozzles spewing hot water. A minute or so to soap up, a minute or so to rinse off, and we were at the other end of this process. There we were handed fresh underwear and socks, reclaimed our boots and clothing, donned same and were back out in the muddy field in well under ten minutes. It was a combination of car wash and sheep dip, and the first—and the last—bath I had between getting off the troopship at Marseilles and getting out of a body cast months later in the Third General Hospital. How had we smelled? Terrible, I’m sure, even worse than one would imagine since this was also our first change of underwear since leaving the U.S.A.
Here, too, came our only formal and official encounter with U.S. Army organized religion in the combat zone. A Catholic chaplain arrived, set up a makeshift altar on a tank repair rack, and all concerned—Catholic or not—were invited. On another occasion, neither formal nor official, Bob Lewis and I saw the same chaplain’s Jeep, found the priest (a captain) was saying Mass in the village church, and—with his driver—formed a congregation of three for the ceremony. Our only other chance to attend Mass came the Sunday morning before a S
unday afternoon fight to recapture Shillersdorf. We noticed villagers going into the little local church, walked in to join them, and were stopped at the door by the usher who told us in a mixture of German and gestures that we could not bring our weapons into the building—leaving us with a choice of whose rules to respect. The U.S. Army lost that one. My pistol and Bob’s tommy gun waited for us at the door.
13
Life in the Mertzwiller Convent
For the Fourth Platoon our next stop after the memorable bath was a convent. We were trucked off to Pfaffenhoffen, unloaded and walked some fifteen miles to Mertzwiller and back to the war. The last miles were through a woods under artillery fire—not a heavy barrage but enough to tell us our four days in Regimental Reserve were over. We wait in the forest for darkness and move into the town, replacing an exhausted, evil-smelling bunch from the Forty-fifth Division’s 160th Infantry, who looked as if they hadn’t had a bath in months.
Mertzwiller is divided approximately in half by the Zinzl River. The 160th Regiment had captured the south half. The Germans held the other half and, alas, the Zinzl was only about thirty feet wide. That set up a situation which causes a mortar gunner once again to thank God he’s not in a rifle squad.
We set up our mortar behind a thick stone wall that connected a large Catholic church and the convent—a perfect place. The church steeple provided a perch for a lookout with easy communications. The basement of the convent, long since evacuated by its residents, provided a convenient place to sleep dry and warm—and all this on a hill from which we looked down on the hostile side of the town. Wonderful! The only drawback was the slope of the land exposed the basement wall to the Germans, and the Germans, we soon learned, possessed a 76 mm antitank cannon and two flak wagon half-tracks armed with dual mounted 20 mm antiaircraft guns. The flak wagons were to make life miserable for the rifle squads posted in the shot-up houses along the river but were no real worry to us. The cannon, however, caused those using the basement as a dormitory to sleep light, nervously aware that at any second a German cannoneer might decide to punch one through that exposed convent wall just for luck.
The only fiction I’ve written about the war was based on incidents at Mertzwiller—where we lingered (a verb appropriate for those of us in the mortar section but not for the rifle squads) four memorable days before evicting the Germans from their half of the town.
The first of these short stories was stimulated by the fate of one of a gaggle of replacements sent up to replenish our depleted ranks. Huckins was taking him down to turn him over to a rifle platoon by the river, which involved crossing two exposed streets. In the “take a deep breath, pray, and sprint” dash across the second of these the replacement had dropped something. He stopped, jumped back to pick it up, and was shot. His body lay on the street until early winter darkness made it prudent for someone to drag it to shelter.
The fact that no one knew the replacement’s name until they retrieved the corpse and looked at his dog tags inspired my story. I made my protagonist one of two men waiting on the back side of the town to guide the crew from headquarters, who would, when darkness fell, be carrying ammunition in from the woods. He is trying to get the names of replacements who, not knowing the survival tricks in the land of death, didn’t last long enough to make friends. I have this chain of thought interrupted by the distant sound of machine gun fire, which provokes the required three rounds of retaliatory mortar fire, which is followed by silence, into which appears a man walking down the access road in full daylight, in plain view of the flak wagon that lurks in the battered buildings across the river. He interprets their “take cover” signals as welcoming waves, but the Germans are napping. He arrives safely—a second lieutenant replacing the recently deceased leader of a rifle platoon, which he is fated to be leading across the river come dawn. My story, if you haven’t guessed, ends with my protagonist making sure he has this poor fellow’s name memorized. That was the only one of the three ever published. Another one was influenced by the minimalist fad and dumped unsubmitted when I regained my taste, and the third one is still somewhere in my files. In it, the spotter with the binoculars in our church tower notices that a motorcyclist arrives about dawn each morning in the German side of town, enters a building, stays a while, and then putters off. A messenger, he presumes. Could our mortar reach him? Yes. So we pick a point the cyclist passes on his daily route, we establish the exact charge and tube setting to drop a round on the street there, we count off the seconds required to deliver the shell from tube to street. In the bell tower of the Church of the Good Shepherd our spotter is dealing with his end of this conspiracy, clicking off the seconds it takes the cyclist to get from the railroad crossing where he is first visible, to the place we have chosen for him to die. We test this formula one afternoon during our random “keep their heads” down shooting exercises. We have it precisely right. Tomorrow morning the spotter will signal “crossing tracks,” we will count off eleven seconds, and then we will fire three rounds and wait.
But how do you end that story? In real life, when C.J. Smith (assistant gunner) and I discussed doing exactly the above, we were spared making such a life-or-death decision ourselves by orders sending Charley Company storming across the Zinzl to take the rest of the town, including the house the messenger visited each morning. In the short story, one ending had the execution performed and the protagonist walking past the cyclist’s body later in the day. In another, I had him deliberately lower the tube a notch to overshoot. In still another I had the spotter describe both the cyclist and the cycle, converting the messenger from enemy to fellow human and the motorbike to one much like the machine his cousin let him ride. My question now (as a memoirist trying to get reacquainted with the who I was in 1944) is whether C.J. and I would have actually killed this fellow had fate not intruded. It was exactly what we were being paid $65 a month to do. I don’t think we would have done it.
It must sound odd, but Mertzwiller sticks out in my memory as another of the few pleasant places in the winter of 1944–45. For the first time we were consistently dry, warm, and moderately clean, sleeping each night under a roof. While our platoon’s machine gun section was posted along the river, providing support for the rifle squads in a series of shooting scrapes with German snipers and the prowling flak wagons, we mortar gunners were conducting our comfortably abstract sort of war.
Each of our three squads had its tube set up behind a wall—making it hard for the Germans to spot the flash and smoke that normally gave away our location. We had a spotter located where he could give us guidance, since the Germans hadn’t bothered to knock down our church steeple. Our daily routine was comfortable—collecting our supply of ammunition, collecting our rations (canned C-rations here, instead of the dreary K boxes), firing occasional harassing rounds or trying to outguess one of the flak wagons when it was prowling the riverfront shooting at our rifle squads.
In contrast with this I present a bit from the notes of E.E. Reed, a rifle squad scout, who spent those days in the basement of a house beside the Zinzl bridge. The night before we attacked across the river Reed was one of six sent over to check on German defenses. They ran into a firefight and five of them got back across the stream.
“Spivak was missing, so Link, Copeland, and myself went back across to look for him. We found him badly wounded in the head, lying in a ditch, losing so much blood we thought he was a goner. We started swimming back through the icy water when the Krauts shot up a flare and opened up . . .”
I skip now to the official U.S. Army citation by which Sergeant Copeland received five points toward going home and a Bronze Star for “actions reflecting the highest traditions of the military service.”
“Sergeant Copeland crawled seventy-five yards through the hostile fire, dragged the wounded man to the edge of the river, and placed him in a rubber boat. Fired on by riflemen only a few yards away, he returned the fire with his rifle and threw two grenades, killing and wounding several of the enemy . . .�
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My point:
Note that Reed and the others involved in that midnight shootout didn’t collect the five going-home points or the Bronze Star. Compare that patrol with my own walk into Itterswiller—which netted me the medal. Military justice was not equal then, and it has gotten worse. When we had our little scuffle with a Cuban workforce on Grenada in 1983, Bronze Stars were issued, literally, by the hundreds, many of them to high-ranking swivel chair officers who never left Washington. Or consider the affair in Kosovo, when a patrol of our Peacekeepers stopped to buy candy bars, took a wrong turn, drove into Serbian territory, and were arrested. The soldier who took a poke in the nose in that silly affair received a Purple Heart.
While the riflemen were living dangerously along the Zinzl, our only serious scare came the afternoon before we all crossed the river. As usual I blame the goof-up that preceded this crossing on Army Intelligence. Whatever the cause, a truck towing a trailer loaded with pontoons rolled into Mertzwiller in broad daylight and stopped at the road junction in front of our convent to ask directions. The vehicle got into town somehow without drawing German attention but that didn’t last long. The sight of the truck parked on the street was all the warning a seasoned grunt needed to dive for his foxhole, which we did. The first German mortar shell fell right in the middle of the street and the next ones covered the area surrounding it, sending shrapnel whining all around us. One of those steel fragments cut through the cardboard tube in which my mortar rounds were packed, cut through the small individual tube that holds a single shell, cut the plastic fuse device off the top of the shell, and exited.
I mention this because the container was right behind my foxhole, about three feet away from from my head, when it happened. Mortar fuses are set to explode at the slightest pressure. If this one had done its duty it would have detonated the other rounds in the container. C.J. and I would have been fragments. We found the fuse mechanism. The shrapnel had hit the little firing pin and severed it. When I claim to be unreasonably lucky later in this memoir I hope readers will remember this.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 10