If You Survive

by George Wilson

  It was near Soissons, after dark, that we heard our first buzz bombs fly overhead. We had been reading about their hitting London, and now we heard them roar over and saw the afterglow of their rocket motors. It was spooky.

  Our advance continued toward Belgium and Germany, retracing the paths of the Allies of World War I. Near the French-Belgian border a German regiment came out to stop us. In this particular action my outfit enjoyed the luxury of being spectators. We stayed right in our trucks and watched our fighter planes dive at the enemy ahead with all eight 50-caliber machine guns blazing away from each plane with a fearful, deafening clatter. We also heard our tanks joining in with their cannon and machine guns. The terrifying noises pressed upon our senses, and I think we would have been almost paralyzed had we been on the receiving end.

  The battle was over in what seemed only a few minutes, and soon a babbling mixture of local civilians and wounded Germans streamed toward us in carts and wagons. Everyone was confused and excited, and there seemed to be no order. Some women wearing Red Cross armbands and aprons hurried out of a nearby village to help the wounded. Some of the litter cases were carried into houses, and the walking wounded cluttered around outside awaiting their turns. At the height of the turmoil our truck column began to move ahead through the village, and this only stirred up the weltering mess.

  The German regiment that met up with our Air Force and tanks had been in the woods north of the village, and as we came among the trees I could hardly believe my eyes. Dead German soldiers and dead and wounded horses and wrecked wagons were scattered all along the road. The equipment for this unit must have been left over from World War I. Everything was horse-drawn.

  The equipment may have been dated, but it was beautiful, and this I appreciated, for I had been partly raised on a farm. I was amazed at such superb draft horses and accouterments. The harness work was by far the finest I had ever seen. The leather was high polished, and all the brass rivets and hardware shone brightly. The horses had been groomed, with tails bobbed, as though for a parade.

  Some of the horses were still alive, though crippled, and our men mercifully shot them as we drove by. This was one of the worst massacres I ever witnessed. I’m sure even the fighter pilots had no idea of their awesome destructive power. We were lucky our own columns had not been attacked by German planes, though the closer we got to the Fatherland the more we expected it to happen.

  Many of the Germans had run deep into the woods to escape our planes, and our regiment now had the job of surrounding the huge area. Our company had to cover a wide stretch of meadow farmland along one perimeter of the forest, and we dug foxholes for the night. Fences divided the pastures, ending at the edge of the woods.

  We placed machine guns to cover the fences, because they were partly overgrown by small bushes. In this way we could defend the only escape route for the enemy, straight through our lines.

  A herd of beautiful Holstein cows was grazing peacefully along the edge of the woods. Toward evening the Belgian farmer, his wife, and a hired man came out into the pasture dragging carts loaded with ten-gallon milk cans, and they began to milk the cows right out there in the open field.

  One of our GIs grabbed his canteen cup and ran over and asked for a cup of fresh milk. He mixed in some K ration chocolate powder, took a sip, and broke out into a big grin. More GI Joes decided this was good deal, and soon a line formed from the cows back across the whole platoon area.

  Men from neighboring platoons also got the idea, and before long the farmer had given away all his milk. He seemed pretty philosophical about it, however, as he headed back to the farmhouse with his empty milk cans.

  Before he left, I had my interpreter suggest to him it would be better if he moved his cows elsewhere for the night. I told him we expected the trapped Germans to try to break through us during the night, and that some of his cows might get shot. He expressed his thanks but added that he didn’t have any other place to put them.

  During the night a few Germans actually did try to escape. One even got all the way through our lines, and the last I saw of him he was running like a deer, clearing the fences in stride as rifle bullets whizzed all around him. I don’t know where he was headed, but it was in the wrong direction to get home.

  I was up repeatedly during the night to check on the gunfire by my men. The machine guns pointed down the fence row were very busy. The guys were trigger-happy, nervously firing at any sound to their front. Most of the time I could not find anything they thought they were firing at, and I cautioned them to be careful of the cows.

  At daybreak we found we had killed two cows and wounded two others. I sent the interpreter back to break the news to the farmer, with the suggestion that he bring the equipment to butcher them and thus save most of the meat. Our medic took a look at the wounded animals, a change of pace for him. His professional opinion was that one cow would have to be put way, but that the other would recover from a small flesh wound.

  We were very distressed about this nice farmer’s losses, for he had been kind to us. Some our men helped him butcher the cows, and he was able to save most of the meat. There was nothing more we could do.

  Just about then I was ordered to lead a patrol into the woods to see what could be stirred up. We didn’t find any more Germans, but we did find out why they had thrown up so much resistance. Deep in the woods a series of tremendous log warehouses had been dug in the ground. They were filled with all kinds of supplies, plus a lot of ammo. The spiffy horse and wagon unit must have been attached there. With some difficulty we discovered a small network of very cleverly camouflaged roads and a rail spur that serviced the huge arsenal.

  I reported the storage depot to the CO, but no one seemed interested, and soon we were back on the trucks again, headed generally northeastward across Belgium.

  At one small town in Belgium we arrived just a few minutes too late.

  The Germans had rounded up a dozen or so people, mostly teenaged boys, and shot them down in cold blood. It seems the victims were suspected of being in an underground group, and their fate was intended as a lesson to the community.

  It was getting dark by then, so we stayed in the little town overnight. I slept in one of the homes as a guest. Much to my dismay, I heard later that it was a house in which one of the dead boys had lived. They had not mentioned their loss when we asked to stay. You could tell there was some grief, but I assumed it was for all of the poor kids slain. They did not mourn as you would expect a family who had just lost a son to do. They tried very hard to make us welcome. When I learned of their loss the next morning, I expressed my regrets as best I could.

  After a K-ration breakfast, we moved on. I did not know then that we were very close to where the Battle of Waterloo had been fought between Napoleon and Wellington. Much blood had been spilled there in three wars in little more than a hundred years.

  Our orders were suddenly changed shortly after we crossed into Belgium but before we reached Bastogne. Perhaps we were getting closer to Germany and a stronger defense, or maybe our trucks were getting low on gas. Regardless of the reason, most of our regiment now had to move on foot. My platoon was not so lucky, as we were given a new job.

  The new assignment required me and my men to get out in front of the rest of the infantry and clear out any pockets of resistance we found as quickly as possible. To add to our punch we were given a platoon of five Sherman tanks and four tank destroyers, plus enough jeeps for my forty-man rifle platoon to ride in. Most of the jeeps had .30-caliber machine guns mounted on the hood, but one had a pedestal-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Thus, all of a sudden, I found myself the rifle platoon leader of a miniature task force under the command of Lieutenant Toles.

  We moved out on a winding easterly course toward the Siegfried Line from near Saint Vith, Belgium. I had no idea how far we had to go or how soon we might get some action. I was also not aware of the overall situation and so did not know at the time that we were the point of the right column
of our regiment, and that another unit was in a similar position a few miles to our left, north of us.

  Our column went through one small village after another. The people there, as in much of Europe, seemed to draw their houses together in small clusters two or three miles apart. They would farm the outreaching fields around them. Most of the population of the villages stood by the side of the road and waved as we went by. In this area of Belgium we were most welcome, and the faces of the men and women showed their warmth. It was interesting to see the changes in expression as we moved closer to the German border—the faces by the side of the road grew much tighter, and smiles became rare. Then nervous uncertainty appeared in their expressions, and a hint of fear. At first the fright was evident in only a few, then it showed in about half the expressions, and finally nearly everyone stared straight ahead with frozen faces, too afraid to look us in the eye, fearful of more fighting in their village. The Germans had overrun the same area in World War I.

  After a while we came to the tiny village of Auel on the banks of a branch of the Our River meandering through a valley in the village. As we approached its small bridge there was suddenly a quick flash, and a ripping explosion, and the bridge disappeared in a cloud of debris.

  As soon as the sounds of the blast died away we heard the roar of a heavy motor speeding away. At that moment I was standing near the front of one of our tank destroyers staring at the road ahead, and I was almost knocked flat by the concussion when its 90mm gun started rapid fire. Windowpanes in the houses were shattered all around. I staggered to the rear of the TD to get away from all that noise.

  The blasting stopped in a few seconds, but it was some time before my hearing returned and I could understand the TD commander’s report. It seems they had picked off an enemy half-track speeding away up a winding road. The range was sixteen hundred yards, nearly a mile, and the target must have been tearing along about forty miles per hour. To me it was incredible marksmanship, better than a rifleman might have done at four hundred yards. I really didn’t believe the claim until I saw the smoking half-track.

  After we forded the small river, we became very cautious indeed as we pushed ahead. It seemed highly questionable to me to be leading the column with defenseless jeeps, but the tankers and TD men argued that jeeps were faster, more maneuverable, and more expendable. This did make sense, though I didn’t like the word expendable. I put the jeep with the .50-caliber machine gun in the lead with Crocker, my best scout. My jeep was next in line, followed by the other jeeps and then the armor. Crocker stayed about two hundred yards ahead of me, and the other vehicles followed at thirty-yard intervals.

  Our pace was now a discreet twenty miles per hour with frequent stops to check out potential enemy positions.

  Once, when we came around a curve in the road, we spotted a few Germans in the woods to our left. The men piled out of the jeeps and started shooting. At the same time someone swung the .30-caliber machine gun on my jeep to the left and opened up without looking. This stream of bullets knocked the rifle out of the hands of one of the other men, scaring the devil out of him but not touching him otherwise. He lost all his color, and I thought he was going to faint, but instead he quickly snapped out of it and got really mad. Then someone laughed, and the tension was broken. Meanwhile, the enemy took off back over a hill, and we resumed our advance.

  Having seen enemy soldiers at Auel and again on the ridge beyond, we now approached the next town, Winterspelt, with extreme caution. This was fairly open country—easy for long-range enemy fire, I was thinking—so I decided to hold up the column about a half mile out and sent Crocker in alone in the lead jeep.

  As Crocker’s jeep got close to the edge of town it stopped, and everyone scrambled out and ran up to a small orchard on their right. A moment later one of the men ran back to the jeep and radioed for us to come on in. He said they had just caught a German antitank gun crew asleep and captured all of them.

  I couldn’t help wondering how many men we might have lost if that gun crew had stayed awake. Our luck was still with us. An antitank gun would disintegrate a jeep with one shot.

  The rest of the unit moved into the town immediately, and the men began a house-to-house search for enemy soldiers. There was no sign of civilians, and there were no white flags showing, as there would have been had the military left. We could all feel the enemy’s presence, and the eerie sensation built up as we nervously awaited the first shot.

  The spell was partially broken by a crusty old German-Belgian farmer who issued from a house on our left and began to saunter across the road in front of us, clanking a couple of empty milk cans. We stopped this character, and our interpreter asked him where the Kraut soldiers were. He spat on the ground, shuffled his feet, and said that they had all left the day before. This old rascal was a pretty good actor and wasn’t about to give us any info, so we let him go.

  I still felt that there were Germans close by, and I began to examine the road ahead through my binoculars. A building stood about two hundreds yards ahead, and against its side were some German bicycles with the usual gas mask canisters on their rear fenders. German soldiers did not usually leave their bicycles behind.

  We continued to work down the road, searching each building along the way. All we came across were pitifully scared civilians, usually huddled together in a back room or cellar. They had no way of knowing we wouldn’t harm them. I wondered how many times the war had passed their front doors.

  Quite a bit of small-arms ammunition turned up, plus some antitank shells, gasoline, and food rations. And in one shed we came upon the half-track that had towed the antitank gun we’d captured at the edge of town.

  Once Private First Class Crocker and another man, who was always very aggressive, spotted a couple of Germans running from a barn into the house with the bicycles parked alongside. Crocker quickly emptied his rifle through the door, reloaded, and then—without waiting for help—jerked the door open. He stepped over a dead German soldier by the door, glanced at the terrified old civilian couple cringing in a corner of the room, and unhesitatingly followed a track of blood up the stairs. There he found two unarmed Kraut soldiers hiding under a bed, and he ordered them to come out with their hands up or he’d toss in a grenade. They may not have understood his poor German, but they did understand his manner, and they quickly surrendered.

  When next I saw Crocker, he was coming down the road with his prisoners in tow. One of the prisoners had blood running down his arm and was begging to lower his arm, but Crocker just prodded him with his rifle and made him keep moving. Winterspelt was a border town, and the prisoners told us they were home on furlough. Later, when I had time, I recommended Crocker for a Bronze Star for his bold actions.

  The men were ready to go into action again across the road because they’d heard movement in the basement and couldn’t get anyone to come out, but I restrained them because I suspected scared civilians. I had the interpreter yell down that if they didn’t come up, we’d throw down a grenade. Sure enough, five pitifully frightened old men and women came crawling up the stairs.

  They had been told the American soldiers would kill the men and rape the women. We tried as best we could to assure them they had nothing to fear from us. I was grateful my own parents and grandparents would not have to go through this sort of terror.

  Just as we were ready to leave town, a tank sergeant yelled at me from his open turret. He told me to take a quick look at the ox team near a farmhouse a half mile ahead. My binoculars showed a team of oxen plodding along with a two-wheeled cart loaded with household goods. Their route passed along across my front from left to right. A careful study revealed signs of another vehicle on the far side of the oxcart, hiding behind it.

  I asked the sergeant if he had any idea what the hidden vehicle was, and he said, “Yes, sir. It must be the half-track we saw going behind a building when we first came up here. We didn’t have time to get a shot off then.”

  “Well, you’ve got time now.
Go to it,” I told him. The sergeant just grinned. His first round blew up the oxcart, and his second got the half-track, which was trying to streak away. It seemed a shame to blow up the oxcart, but the war was not a game, and the oxcart was not being put to innocent use.

  When I radioed in my position at the next road junction I was ordered to hold up and await further instructions. I supposed they were trying to decide which direction we should take. The equipment was pulled over to the edge of the road, and the men had all taken cover in the tall grass on the right shoulder of the road.

  Suddenly a German motorcycle with a sidecar appeared on the road coming in our direction. I waited until he was almost on top of us before ordering the men nearest me to jump up and stop him. The motorcycle came to an abrupt halt. Both Germans quickly threw up their hands in surrender. I ordered them to dismount. The driver stood up and came forward immediately.

  The corporal in the sidecar rose slowly, stepped up on the seat of the bike, and then fell astride the bike and gunned its motor full speed and headed down the road toward Germany.

  He only made it some twenty feet down the road. The sharp, deadly crack of several rifles broke through the roar of the motorcycle, and the corporal slumped over dead. His back was riddled with bullets. The other German just shook his head in dismay and wonderment at the daring but stupid attempt to escape. In any event, the war was over for both of them.

  Our next town was Grossbangenfeld, a pleasant little hamlet. We did not find any German soldiers there but did corne across an English-speaking woman with a two-way radio. She got very indignant—in fact, she cussed me out splendidly—when, for obvious military reasons I ordered her radio destroyed.