The combat engineers weren’t lucky. Both were killed—one in a way that left me with one of those “burned into the optic nerve” memories. When the shooting stopped C.J. and I sneaked down to see what had happened. A helmet lay on the cobblestones open side up near the remains of the truck. The top of owner’s head including one eyeball was still in it. Fifty-six years later I still see it.
That night we carried the pontoons and left them out-of-sight near the Zinzl. The word was we were doing the attack at dawn, and it would be preceded by a “timed on target” artillery barrage. We moved down nearer the river, waited and watched. The horizon far to the south lit suddenly with great flashes—the huge eight-inch rifles so far away that the sound wouldn’t reach us for seconds. Then closer flashes of the 155 mm rifles, followed by the big howitzers, and finally our own regiment’s 105s. Then the air overhead was screaming with the sounds of hundreds of passing shells. A moment later the north half of Mertzwiller erupted into a thunderous chaos of exploding shells. When the shelling stopped we crossed the river without opposition and took the town with only a few brief firefights.
14
The Worst (of Course) Winter Ever
Now winter began getting serious. It was to prove to be the worst European winter in frigidity and snow since an epic bad one in 1902–3—fitting the pattern all World War II draftees remember of always being where legendary records were being set for heat, cold, humidity, mosquitoes, fleas, and general random environmental unpleasantness. I remember mostly endless walking, being cold, occasional skirmishes with no sense of who, where, when, or why. We understood finally that those mid-December days were occupied on a drive toward Wissembourg and the Siegfried Line because we eventually captured a small city with that name on its entry road. We took one prisoner in a brisk little fight at Walburg, slept in a genuine bed with a goose-feather comforter, ignoring occasional mortar fire. Entered Eschbach without resistance. There B Company replaced us at the point and we got eight hours of rest.
The house in which I spent those eight hours in Eschbach was a mansion with lavish grounds, stables, and a racetrack. Its parlor walls bore many paintings, most involving horses, one photo of Joseph Goebbels, one of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, both autographed and inscribed, several of a well-dressed man posing with fellows wearing swastika armbands and, judging from the braid, uniforms of high-ranking officers. Behind one of the horse portraits was a wall safe, which proved flimsy when a grenade was taped to it and the pin pulled. It contained legal-looking papers, keys, and a cigar box holding paper money. Some of this was old Weimar Republic currency in the huge denominations of the devastating German inflation, souvenirs of a national tragedy. Much was Third Reich cash amounting to more than 4,000 marks, which we understood would be spendable at a rate of about 60 cents to the dollar.
Our warm dry hours ended when the rear echelon brass decided the village was safe enough for them. They moved in and we were back in the rain trudging through the woods to Walburg. The word spread up and down the column that Huckins, Hillerman, and Lewis had struck it rich and we improved our status by handing out deutsche marks to the less fortunate. That didn’t last long. A battalion headquarters Jeep rolled past us, its occupant seeking Captain Neeley. Then down the line came the first sergeant, asking questions and getting answers that caused us three to be given a Jeep ride back to Eschbach and turned over to a major. He held in his hand the empty cigar box.
The major, who I presume was an intelligence officer, seemed to have looked the house owner’s wine cellar. He got his eyes focused on a number written on folded paper, sat us at a kitchen table, and told us to empty our pockets and count our ill-gotten deutsche marks. We were in deep trouble, he said. Unless we returned the 4,000 plus number on his paper, it was even deeper. Each of us counted separately, and when the three totals were added it came to a little over five thousand marks—each of us trying to fudge enough to cover our charity handouts and overdoing it. The major dumped the stack of bills into the box, revised the number on his paper, and sent us back out into the rain to resume our walk to Walburg and onward to the German border at Wissembourg.
Charley Company was in reserve there—perfecting our foxholes in a hillside vineyard while the less fortunate units tried to punch a hole though the Siegfried Line. Smith and I roofed ours with fence posts, left a hole for smoke to escape, and found some badly singed rugs from a shattered house for flooring. We didn’t know it but while we were perfecting this Taj Mahal of foxholes the Germans off to our left flank had smashed through General Patton’s Third Army front, their panzer divisions roaring down to Bastogne in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge, and Hitler had ordered “the elimination of all American forces between the Lower Vosges and the Rhine.” That was us. But all the platoon sergeant told us was to saddle up, fall in, and move out. We never got to build a fire to make our foxhole cozy.
We withdrew, spending the next three days and nights alternating between bumping along in the back of the truck and slogging along through the woods, all under perpetual snow. This period produced a single vivid memory. A dark, cold evening, moving fast down a narrow wagon track, a few shells coming in, one exploding in the trees some fifty yards ahead, passing Sergeant Jack Arras, a friend, the nicest non-com in the machine gun section. Arras had been blown off the road. He was slumped against the side of the roadside ditch, helmet off. His expression was stunned, but when I shouted to him he seemed to be trying to laugh. I never saw Arras again but one of his machine gun squad visited him after the war. Cared for by his mother, he was playing with toys in a back room of their home.
The rest of us climbed on trucks again, climbed off at some nameless place, and slogged over the hills to Buschbach, and another version of the war.
Ah, Buschbach!! No lapse of memory here. Home at Buschbach was a farmer’s house by day, but the endless winter night was endured in a hole in the frozen earth about five feet deep and big enough for two men to stand in it. It was on the reverse slope of a hill, offering a view of leafless fruit trees and deep and endless snow. On the lip of the hole rested Gene Halsey’s machine gun, white with frost. The canvas ammunition belt fed into it was frozen cracklingly stiff, the bolt frozen, ice in the barrel. Would it fire if Halsey pulled the trigger? Maybe the round in the chamber would fire and maybe that would produce enough heat so it would continue firing. Probably not.
Now I understand we’d been shifted southward to protect the flank of the Third Army—filling the huge, frozen, snow-whitened expanse otherwise left vacant. Thus Charley Company, its 212-man force reduced to maybe 140 or so by unreplaced casualties, was scattered along about four miles of frozen hills, with no support behind us except—way back there somewhere—some tank destroyers and a battery of howitzers.
I know the tank destroyers and howitzers were there because on Christmas Day, while we were standing in line to collect our rations, our tank destroyers spotted us, decided we were German, and began shooting. This interrupted lunch and so enraged Captain Neeley that he called artillery down on the armored unit (so we believed), quickly ending this intramural battle. One other frigid day in Buschbach our artillery bombarded us with leaflets, printed in German, which urged us to surrender and promised good treatment if we did.
These two incidents caused us to think that Captain Neeley had walked us into one town ahead of where we were supposed to be. This notion was reinforced early one morning, as follows:
We were occupying the last house in the village, which, typical of Alsatian houses, was half human residency–half cow barn. I was just in from one more night in my frozen hole and another man and I were in the barn relieving ourselves. There came a knock on the barn door. At it stands a German soldier, machine pistol hanging from a strap over his shoulder. He begins a question, realizes that these two fellows he is looking at must be American soldiers, spins around and dashes away, shouting an alarm to the soldiers scattered along the street behind him. Everybody runs. We race upstairs
spreading the alarm among our sleeping companions. Weapons are grabbed, but the Germans have already sprinted around the corner and out of sight. We presumed they were returning from a patrol unaware that Buschbach had been accidentally occupied by Americans deficient in map-reading skills.
The German Intelligence forces thus seemed as imperfect as our own. But their planners understood it snowed in the winter and had equipped their troops with modern plastic machine gun belts, white helmets, and white camouflage suits. Our Army had dressed us for snow in olive drab. A few lucky units had stolen mattress covers (used as body bags) from Grave Registration supplies to wear over their clothing, but most of us looked as if the West Pointers who make such decisions had designed us as targets. (Incredible? Remember an earlier generation of academy alums dressed our Army in heavy wool to fight the Spanish in the sweltering heat of Cuba.)
It surprises me still that such a large segment of my memory is devoted to those nine days at Buschbach. Nothing much happened. We lost only five men in that period—four wounded and one with a nervous breakdown. The sole casualties were rifle squad members, who had the job of crunching through the crusted snow on night patrols in their olive drab camouflage to make sure that Germans weren’t up to something in adjoining villages. I was tapped for none of those. Instead, each day about sundown, Gene Halsey and I would urinate and defecate (our last chance to do either for at least fifteen hours), put on every item of clothing we owned, and trudge about a mile and a half through the snow to a hillside orchard, getting there just about 5 P.M—full-dark time in the heart of winter at that latitude. We would relieve the lucky bastards who did day shift, climb into the hole, and try to get comfortable for the ordeal.
Both of us would crawl into our sleeping bags. One would zip it all the way up, slump down into the bottom, and try to sleep. The other would stand behind the gun, watching, waiting, memorizing the shape of every bare tree in the orchard, the shape of the slope where it met the sky, noting where the stars were on the skyline so he would notice if someone in white camouflage blocked some, straining eyes for a sign of movement, imagining the worst, keeping the rifle unfrozen inside the sleeping bag since the frozen machine gun probably wouldn’t work. Then, when the man at the bottom got too cramped, or the man on guard too cold, the roles would be switched. An hour would creep past, but your watch would insist it was only ten minutes. And once in a while Halsey and I would talk, voices very, very low because sound carries remarkably well in the bitter cold.
The first hours of the first night we consider our position. How far away was the next foxhole? We hadn’t seen it, but what we’d been told was maybe as far as a thousand yards. If a German patrol came over the hill would there be help? Impossible. We were merely outposts. Expendable. The shooting would trigger the alarm, reserves would be alerted to the raid, or the attack, or whatever it was. Someone had to do it.
With that out of the way, we talked of girls, of the meaning of life, of the death of this friend or that one, of why two of our high-ranking noncommissioned officers were never around when serious shooting started. We talked about home, about life after death, about the difference between perceptions and reality, about Bishop Berkeley’s question of whether a tree falling in a forest made a sound if there was no one there to hear it. Finally, the faint blush of dawn in the east. More waiting, then the favored ones doing the day watch would arrived, and we’d trudge through the snow over the hills to Buschbach, and food, and warmth, and time to thaw a little before repeating the process.
Finally we were relieved by the Second Battalion and walked through the snow to Diebling to become part of the reserve of the Sixth Army Corps—which put us way back there with the colonels and generals—just as safe and comfortable as it’s possible to get. Nirvana at last. We stay in a house, warm and dry, eat hot food, happy as larks in paradise.
Fools’ paradise, it turns out. While we didn’t know it, the Germans have given up on their Battle of the Bulge campaign. They have shifted armored divisions south to launch the Nordwind offensive—intended to recapture Strasbourg. All we know is we’re told to saddle up and load into trucks. We unload back in Alsace, at a pretty little town named Niederbron. We’re still in Corp Reserve under a three-hour alert as opposed to the fifteen-minute alert in Regimental Reserve. The house we occupy has a grand piano in the living room. Bob Huckins plays Chopin and some show tunes for us. Then back to reality.
“Saddle up,” the sergeant shouts, and within fifteen minutes we’re back in the truck, driving through the sleet to God knows where, or why. We’re seasoned enough to know that if the three-star general commanding the corps is committing his reserve, it isn’t going to be a relaxing place.
It turned out to be the Bois de Sessenheim outside the pleasant little Rhine-and-railroad town of Sessenheim, where Goethe did a lot of his writing. Not far away today there’s a beautiful military cemetery at St. Avold, its headstones bearing names of twenty Charley Company men—and scores more from Able and Baker Companies. The previous night, the Tenth SS Panzer Division had stormed into the town and driven out our Forty-second Infantry Division—none of which we knew then of course.
For this memoir, I dug up the offical reports. Our First Battalion had been peeled off from the 103d Division and sent over to the Seventy-ninth Division to help it recapture Sessenheim; then we are peeled off again and attached to something called Task Force Linden, which seems to have been a jumble of units controlled by the notoriously inept Forty-second Division. During all this card shuffling, we hear reports that a column of trucks loaded with Forty-second Division troops has driven into Sessenheim, apparently unaware the Germans had regained custody of the town. They are captured, trucks and all. The fellows running this show then launched a tank-infantry attack against the town. After all eight of the Shermans involved are knocked out, this was called off and plans changed from offense to defense.
Alas, we had been literally lost in the shuffling. If the 103d brass told the Seventy-ninth Division colonels, the Seventy-ninth seems to have failed to tell the Task Force Linden people that the attack we were about to launch had been canceled.
Sessenheim is where almost everything went wrong. (But thanks to relentless Hillerman luck, it was also the place that involved me in an incident that put me in touch with the woman who persuaded me I should become a writer.) Having read postwar battle histories, I know now that elements of the German Army Group G had smashed through Forty-second Division positions and we were to wage a counterattack to close the gap. But when we climbed off the bed of our truck in the woods and stood in the midnight darkness awaiting orders while the sleet rattled off our helmets, we knew nothing. I recall having an unusual sense of dread as we trudged away into the forest. We were walking toward the sound of artillery fire. When we stopped at dawn to dig in, we were on the receiving end of it.
There was no place in this dense Rhineland forest to avoid tree bursts. I remember digging deep, cutting through roots with my trenching tool, and sitting huddled in the bottom, head down with my arms folded over my helmet listening to the shells coming in, estimating the distance of the explosions.
The sun rose, the sleet stopped. We moved out again, stopping where a wide strip of timber had been cut, forming a firebreak about 150 yards wide. Across this opening we could see the raw dirt of fresh German emplacements inside the tree line. Far to our left, we saw the church steeples of Sessenheim and the smoke of burning Sherman tanks. I counted seven, but the official report says I missed one—that all eight Shermans involved in that part of the attack had been methodically destroyed and that the Germans had only a single Tiger involved in the fight. Our tankers called their Shermans “Ronsons” after a then popular cigarette lighter because “they never fail to burn.”
We dug again and waited, and waited, and waited. Some machine gun fire was exchanged across the firebreak. We fired a few mortar rounds. The shooting stopped. We waited, and waited.
The rumor now was that any minute we wou
ld attack across the open strip, drive the Germans out of their positions, and capture a point where a narrow one-lane road through the woods intersected with the highway and railroad running up the Rhine into Sessenheim. Captain Neeley was back in the woods yelling into the radio. We presumed he was ordering smoke to cover us when the artillery preparation began. I looked across at the enemy woods—across a flat expanse of snow devoid of any cover. I thought of the account in Lee’s Lieutenants of Pickett’s ill-fated attack across the grassy pastures at Gettysburg. On the one hand, the Yankees who slaughtered the Virginians had no machine guns. On the other hand, we would have far better artillery support and, so we were told, Able Company was to be making a flanking attack to our right.
We waited. Time for the artillery to begin laying smoke and dropping shells on the German positions passed. The dreadful word reached us. No artillery support. Why not? Who knew? No one had thought to mention to a borrowed battalion that we were to retreat instead of attack. Captain Neeley was off the radio now. The word was get up and attack.
Here you have another proverbial moment of truth. Would you prefer to charge out of our woods into that snow field and take a machine gun bullet or fail to do so and live with the contempt of your friends and the incurable damage to your fragile nineteen-year-old self-esteem? By now you have answered that question several times. You knew you were going. The secret was not to think about it. You went and so did everyone else. (Except, as we noted when noses were counted later, a couple of our bully-boy tough guy non-coms, who became invisible in the presence of danger.) Fortunately we didn’t know then that the men across the firebreak were the Sixth SS Mountain Division, about whom I quote from an official U.S. Army report of the battle.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 11