The plan now is to forget the bazooka idea. Hitz will stagger back through the orchard to safety and medical attention. I’m out of pistol ammo and will use his carbine to help Lewis provide cover fire. When Hitz is safe Lewis will cover me while I make a run for it. Then I’ll snap off carbine shots, Lewis will blaze away, and then he’ll run for it. Hitz makes his escape unmolested. Lewis signals Go! to me. I go.
Anyone who has tried to begin what he intends to be the fastest sprint of his life through deep snow wearing rubber-bottomed snowpacks can predict what happened. About five yards beyond the cover of the blessed manure I slipped, landed belly down, couldn’t find the traction to get up, and had panicky visions of the German setting up his machine gun in the open and shooting me multiple times. But he didn’t. Lewis fired off the last of his final magazine and we both made it.
We cleared the rest of Schillersdorf the next day (killed ten, captured twenty-five) and went back to Itterswiller, got three truckloads of recruits to replace men lost the past few weeks, enjoyed a couple of indoor days, and then trucked through a blinding snowstorm to relieve troops in foxholes above Rothbach. A most unpleasant place.
Since I developed a fever, and have hazy memories of Rothbach, I will quote from a chronicle I borrowed from a friend.
“On line at Rothbach within fifty to two hundred yards from German positions. Receive mortar and artillery fire. Lose eight men. Weather warms, ice melts, foxholes fill with water. Lots of trenchfoot cases. Sniping back and forth. We claim ten. They had tanks. Night of sixth we walk back to Itterswiller and through it to Obersultzbach. Go into Division Reserve.”
I was feverish because I was catching pneumonia. I recall being issued a new model mortar by some clean and fresh-faced captain from ordnance and lugging it through the mud to a hillside hole where we replaced other grunts who were delighted to leave.
This new mortar is worth a word for those who seek to understand the military mind. It was produced by sawing about 70 percent of the tube off an 81 mm mortar and then replacing the big knob on the butt cap with a little knob that would fit into our little 60 mm mortar base plate. The only other revision was modification of the bipod to fit the fatter tube. Since the tube was now only an inch or two longer than an 81 mm shell, one fired it at real risk of serious burns and total deafness for the gunner. The shell tended to come out of the barrel wobbling, which made it totally inaccurate, and the tremendous increase of impact on the little base plate drove it into even frozen earth. We only fired it a few times, endangering no one but ourselves. When I returned from the hospital it was gone.
The hole we occupied had been dug deeply into a hillside above a narrow valley. The village of Rothbach was below if we cared to look—which we rarely did because German foxholes were dug into the hillside right across from us. We could see them. They could see us. We could hear their tanks rumble along the road; not always a reliable sound because the Germans sometimes played recordings of tank sounds to amuse us over their loudspeaker systems. But here we could actually see the long 88 mm barrels of their Panthers.
My fever was climbing and I only had a couple of days in this hole. The second evening when our relief came and we climbed down to company headquarters I found Otto Mittag, our aid man, and told him I was sick. Otto ushered me into a room with two other miserable-looking grunts and took my temperature. It was 102. That won’t cut it, he said. Last month they raised the temperature level and now it has to be 103 before I can send you back. He loaned me a pack of cigarettes, told me to chain-smoke, and he’d be back before the ammo Jeep arrived and retake my temp. I did, and he did. Whether or not the smoke added a degree to my body heat or Otto fudged, he put me on the Jeep with his two other patients and I got to visit the Army Medical Clearing Station at Saverne.
A couple of days and the lungs are cleared up and the fever down. Hot food, clean sheets, a shower, total luxury. The young fellow in the bed to my right had a lot of skin burned off him. He was swathed in bandages and too doped up for conversation—just waiting to be well enough to be shipped to a regular hospital somewhere for skin grafts. The occupant of the bed to the left wore a variety of bandages but talked endlessly about his missing right hand, which had been chopped off by shrapnel. He knew it was gone, he told me, but he could still feel it. He would hold up the bandaged stump for me to see. “I can feel the thumb moving,” he’d say, moving the stump as if to show me, “and I can close the fingers like a fist.” And so on for two days until one morning he was gone; back somewhere, I presumed, to get himself fitted for some sort of artificial hand.
Both of these neighbors had lucked out. Headed for the Zone of Interior with the Million-Dollar Wound. Their beds are filled by someone else. For me, no more fever now. I’m back in uniform, with fresh, clean underwear. Feeling fine. Walking around outside. Every hour or so, a huge shell roars over and explodes somewhere out of sight. An orderly tells me it’s from a railroad gun hidden in a railroad tunnel back in the hills, rolling out now and then, trying to hit the railroad bridges in Saverne. When am I going back to the company? No one seems to know. Or care. I walk down to the railroad station and find the “Re-po-dep-o,” the Replacement Depot where new arrivals are taken off the trains, sorted out, and entrucked for whatever rifle companies are being brought up to strength. There I find a truck heading for the 103d Division, now at Obersultzbach, and climb in the back with about twenty or so nervous replacements. The hospital will list me as Absent Without Leave. So what? The recruits are full of questions and I enjoy the prestige of being a battle-hardened vet. Not a worry in the world. Once at division headquarters, it will be easy enough to get a ride to Charley Company. We pull into Obersultzbach and I find the Company is there.
Charley and the entire bruised and battered Second Battalion is in Division Reserve, having its gaps filled with new men. We even have a new division commander. General Anthony McAuliffe, ex of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, who had made headlines with his “Nuts” response to German demands that he surrender Bastogne. The general has ordered a little review, complete with band, to hand out decorations won by various folks. George Rice was getting a Silver Star for his derring-do with the cut-off Third Platoon in Schillersdorf. I’m getting one, too, they tell me for my one-shot, one-grenade defense of the road outside Sessenheim. I’m issued a clean shirt, paraded out onto a rainy field with the other winners, and our new general pins a ribbon on each of us while his photographer records it. Then we entruck, and drive back to reality, Obermodern, and the war and I am wondering what the general would have done had he know he was pinning a ribbon on an AWOL.
But we’re still in reserve. Able and Baker are dug in on the hills outside of town overlooking the tiny eleven-house village of Niefern and the roads that intersect there. We are comfortable in houses with occasional artillery fire coming in but no casualties. Someone arranges to have a movie shown in a school auditorium, a very dark, depressing film about a murder in the Louisiana swamp. Occasional shells passing overhead add a special element to the suspense but the sound track is as bad as the lighting.
February 26 arrives. Captain Neeley, wounded again at Schillersdorf, is back from being patched. The platoon sergeant calls me in from my kitchen police job. He tells me that Sergeant Hitz has been Z-I’ed and won’t be coming back—leaving the squad leader position open. He reminds me that I have been sort of running what’s left of our mortar squad most of the time and instructs me in the duties of a buck sergeant. He stops, studies me for a long moment, and says: “Hillerman, I don’t think you’d be happy as a sergeant,” and tells me to report back to the kitchen.
Thus died my chance to go into the records as having the shortest tenure as squad leader of any man in the Army—approximately ten hours. I returned to my pot scrubbing chores and Dave Hubbell was called in and handed the stripes—in a rare example of military astuteness. Hubbell was a lot better at it than I would have been.
However, had the tech sergeant not had his astute chang
e of mind, I would have been collecting sergeant’s pay, instead of $65 per month, for half a year in hospitals. Because Army Intelligence was about to do it to us again, heading me for my cherished Zone of Interior wounds. We were about to run a patrol into the little town over the hill, into Niefern.
To quote from the chronicle:
“Feb. 27—Bloody NIEFERN!! Unsuccessful night raid by 3rd platoon and part of 4th.”
A half dozen of us survivors of that nocturnal walk into Niefern returned in 1986 with our wives in tow to take a look. Nothing much had changed. It was still a little cluster of farm residences at a junction with a stream running along the main road. A farmer came out of his barn to satisfy his curiosity, then invited us in to sample his schnapps. He, too, had been an infantryman, he told us, and took off his cap to show us the evidence. About at the high hairline on his forehead was an indentation large enough to hold a golf ball. He told us he had joined the Waffen SS and was with a German infantry unit fighting the Russians. He’d been hit in the battle for Kiev. We shook hands and embraced him. The infantry makes brothers of all who have done their term in the valley of death. War historian Stephen Ambrose called service in the combat infantry “the most extreme experience a human can endure.” It’s something that transcends politics.
Unfortunately ethnic politics among Alsatian villagers certainly affected our “unsuccessful raid” on Niefern. The occupants of Obermodern, just over the hill, spoke German fluently and French very little—as did most of the Alsatians we’d met. We’d seen pictures of their sons in German uniforms on farmhouse walls, and heard tales of how residents had pointed the way for German units in their recapture of Schillersdorf. We’d heard on February 26 that we’d be raiding Niefern the following night. So had the local folks. Many of them must have had relatives in the German Army, and relatives over the hill in Niefern. Even we grunts were smart enough to figure that the people in Niefern would know they had visitors coming—and twenty-four hours to prepare for us.
Army Intelligence had it all scouted out. Only a small outpost group occupied the village, maybe four or five men. Our assignment was to take the village and come home with two of those poor fellows as prisoners. To do that, one Third Platoon rifle squad reinforced by four men from the mortar section would wade across the stream below the village, cross the fields, and move in from the back, cutting off escape. The other two Third Platoon squads, with a machine gun squad attached, would move in from the front. All very neat and simple. The rifle squads in theory had twelve men each but actually were down to about six or seven due to unreplaced dead and wounded. Even so, with add-ons from the Fourth Platoon, we’d have them outnumbered five or six to one. Or so it seemed to Intelligence. Plus, so it seemed to Intelligence, we’d have the element of surprise.
If we had any doubts that our surprise raid would surprise anyone but us they disappeared at the top of the hill overlooking the village. We stopped there among the foxholes of Baker Company to wait for a darker jump-off time. One of the mortarmen in Baker was an old friend who went all the way back to Fort Sill, Fort Benning, and the ASTP.
“They’re expecting you,” he said. “They zeroed their mortars in on the road this morning and they’ve been putting out mines all day. If you guys go down there, then we’ll just have to go down tomorrow and rescue you—like we did at Sessenheim.”
But of course we went. Quietly through the dark woods and down an open hill, splitting up at the road with two squads moving toward the village and our group crossing a fence, wading the knee-deep creek, and making a parallel approach, pretending we didn’t know that they knew we were coming and were awaiting us.
(I had a bit earlier climbed upon an unattended tank hoping to find a box of Ten-in-One rations on which soldiers in armored units feasted. No such luck in this one, but I did find myself a Thompson hanging in the turret—which I needed far more than a tank jockey. At least one of the tank crew seemed to agree. When he saw me carrying it a bit later he asked me if I needed any extra magazines and handed me a couple. I mention this because in the version of this raid glamorized by my memory I was a sort of John Wayne figure carrying that Tommy gun. Many years later, when my path crossed that of David Hubbell again, he told me my role was more like Florence Nightingale. I was actually carrying a stretcher. Dave finally stopped getting wounded, became a hydraulic engineer of some repute, and had his profession’s tendency to have his facts and figures right. Whatever I was carrying, we were sneaking through a muddy field toward the back side of buildings when the silence was broken by a series of explosions, screams, machine gun fire, and general chaos in the part of the village the other two squads had entered. At almost the same time, someone began shooting at us. We had been seeing poorly concealed antipersonnel mines here and there, presumed others had been buried more carefully, and were threading our way cautiously. Now we ran. I was just behind Hubbell, buck sergeant since midafternoon. I was trying to run in his boot prints.
I’m told severe trauma causes short-term memory loss. I remember being engulfed in silence—no more sound of the mines exploding down on the road or of gunfire. Just an incandescent flash, sudden silence, and knowing that I am in the air, face down and falling. My next memory was my face hurting, of being on my back in the mud, of knowing that I must have stepped on an antipersonnel mine, probably one of the shu mines we had been trying to avoid, of remembering that these things were designed to blow off the lower leg and, judging from the victims I had seen, usually did. I was aware that I was probably bleeding from this stump (although the only pain I felt was from rips, tears, and burns on my face). I was conscious how quickly hurt men died in the cold.
My most vivid memory of all this is something I have since read about in the recollections of folks who skirted awfully near death. No more pain. Just warmth, comfort, an incredible sense of peacefulness, or moving slowly through a passageway. Of being welcomed. Of God, or one of His delegates, welcoming me.
But I also remember things happening that caused this wonderful sense to fade in and out. I remember being rolled onto a stretcher. Then I fade back into warm, loving peace. Second, Joe Christopherson, carrying the front end of the stretcher, stepped on another mine. His leg was blown off, the stretcher broken, and I’m on the ground again. Next I remember Lyle Kniffin, a Third Platoon rifleman, and Bob Yager, a friend from the machine gun section, talking to me and getting me organized in a “fireman’s carry.” Next memory, I am dropped in the icy water of the little creek. Next memory, I am being arranged across the hood of a Jeep. I can see nothing at all, but some of my hearing is back and I pick up the voice of Captain Neeley, getting things organized, saying undecipherable things to me. (Probably advice about watching where I put my feet.) The blissful warmth and peace goes away, replaced by reality, a sense of disappointment mixed with resignation. Life apparently is not yet over. That last great adventure Mama had promised must wait awhile.
Back at Obermodern I get a shot of morphine and am slid into a bottom rack of an ambulance. My only memory of the ride to the clearing station is of warm blood dripping down on my chin and neck from Christopherson, who was dying in the rack above me. Then morphine brought blessed oblivion.
When I awaken it must be a day or so later. I am strapped into a bunk, jolting and rocking. Both legs are in casts, eyes covered with bandages. I remember exploring with my hand, noticing that bandages are also taped across the back of my other hand and that my head is wrapped like a mummy. And I hurt, big time. I recall thinking Mama would have told me to “offer it up. Get some good out of it in heaven. Build up your endurance. Whining doesn’t make pain go away.” But Mama wasn’t there. I whined. I heard the voices of others around me calling for an orderly. Next a man was getting my arm bare, sticking in the needle. He told me I was on a medical train headed for the Third General Hospital. He told me my legs were broken up and my face had been burned but otherwise I was fine.
How about the stomachache?
That brought on the b
edpan. No luck. An enema. No luck.
How long had it been? Several days, I say, having no idea of the present date. More help is summoned. The bedpan is placed on the floor. Another enema. I am lifted, one orderly supporting each cast leg and a third gripping me under the shoulders. I am suspended over the pan. Shouts of encouragement come from the bunks up and down the railroad car, cheers and exhortations. Having been raised a modest fellow and not cured from that even by barracks life, I found this humiliating. Finally, relief! A loud “boing” from the metal pan, applause from the audience, and the ordeal is over. Even better, I now know I am among understanding friends.
The Third General Hospital occupied what had been an insane asylum on a hill overlooking Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful little city in Southern France. Thanks to more morphine, I don’t remember getting there, only awakening in a bed encased up to my rib cage in a body cast. No more bandages on my hands now, but my eyes are still bandaged shut and I’m wearing other patches on face and under my chin.
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 13