If You Survive

by George Wilson

  All the gratification of this triumph was taken away by one of our discoveries. It seems that after the Germans had retaken the hill with their vicious counterattack earlier in the day, they had taken a small number of prisoners and tied them up with telephone wire, probably for safekeeping. At the outset of our tremendous shelling the Germans had apparently rushed to their bunkers and abandoned the prisoners. It probably would have been too much to expect a German to risk his life to save a prisoner, and thus some more Americans were killed by their own shells. It was small comfort that only a few were found there.

  The defense was all set up for the night, and we had just finished our K-ration supper when Captain Newcomb received word from Colonel Kenan to report to Batallion for a company commanders’ meeting. Much to my surprise, and some consternation, the captain asked me to go in his place. He should have been flushed and excited from the afternoon’s great achievement, but instead he was just quiet and reserved. Never before had I known him to beg off anything at all. But I didn’t ask questions.

  The company runner and I walked back down the hill to Sellericher-hohe and battalion headquarters. The moon was bright and the countryside so serene and peaceful that we almost forgot why we were there. We turned right at the road and soon were close to the scattering of buildings that was the hamlet.

  Several men seemed to be loitering in front of one of the buildings, and they didn’t bother to challenge us; this slackness irritated me. As I came closer, all set to bawl them out, I realized they were Krauts and quickly turned my rifle on them and yelled at them to put their hands up. They did at once, being as surprised as I. I found out later they had been on patrol; they were lost in the darkness and had been too busy talking to recognize us. We took them prisoner.

  Then, to further ruin my disposition, the guard at battalion headquarters only fifty yards away also failed to challenge. I grumbled to Colonel Kenan. He was pretty upset, because almost anyone could have captured his headquarters. One of his staff went right out to check, and I’m sure someone caught hell.

  The Colonel asked briefly about Captain Newcomb and then got right down to business. The next day, February 8, F Company was to wait until it was relieved by another company and then swing down the northeast slope into Obermehlen, now controlled by G Company. F and G then were both to attack eastward across the swollen river to the high ground beyond while another battalion would attack abreast of us on the south side of Hill 553 and go on to take Niedermehlen.

  Captain Newcomb, still somber and very quiet, gave the briefest of routine instructions to the platoon leaders. He then led the forward elements in a wide semicircle to the rear and cut right around to the long, wide slope into Obermehlen. Enemy artillery began to pick them up as they reached the edge of town, but most of the men found safe shelter in or behind the buildings. It was my turn with the rear elements of the company, and I pushed them ahead as rapidly as possible over the exposed hillside. The shells soon started to drop in, forcing us to take cover. After each salvo, we got up and moved quickly forward, and we always managed to stay ahead of the next volley.

  Suddenly the great good luck, the almost sensational good fortune that had blessed me for eight months, abruptly left me there on the open road to Obermehlen. I clearly heard the whistle of the shell and could tell by its sound that it was falling on me; I threw myself flat on the frozen ground so hard that my chin strap broke and my helmet flew off.

  At that, I had a little luck left, for the shell hit about twenty feet directly in front with a blast that seemed to split my head. In an instant I heard the shrapnel whipping past and also got a sledgehammer blow on my left foot. I shuddered with the impact as I lay there stunned by the concussion.

  The top of my snowpak had a jagged hole with blood showing, and I wondered if my toes were gone. The whole foot was numb, for which I was thankful.

  Everyone else seemed okay, so I yelled at the men to keep going and to tell Captain Newcomb I had a slight wound in my foot and would call him from the aid station. Some of them looked a little surprised, but they kept on toward town as I began to limp back to the battalion aid station.

  I was interestedly watching the medic cut off my boot and expose the wound when I heard Lieutenant Lee Lloyd announce over Colonel Kenan’s radio that Lieutenant Wilson had been wounded and Captain Newcomb had been killed. I lay there in tears. I had no idea what the medic was doing to my foot, and I only vaguely heard the colonel fill in Lieutenant Lloyd on the attack plan. Nothing really registered with me.

  During my months of front-line combat death was something that came and went. I had lost some very good friends and had had to keep going, but never had the loss been so close and personal. Arthur O. Newcomb was my best friend in the Army, and I’ll never forget February 8, 1945.

  Captain Newcomb was by far the best company commander in combat that I ever knew, though he really didn’t look the part. He was short and of slight build, with a sober, unprepossessing personality, but with a quick, dry wit and an exceptionally sharp mind. He took everything in stride, thinking ahead all the time and never giving way to panic. His men and officers grew to love him because, for one thing, they knew that if anyone ever could get them through, it would be Captain Newcomb.

  Lieutenant Colonel Kenan, who was also terribly unsettled by the tragedy, later observed that Captain Newcomb was of that rare breed that can act and can inspire others to act courageously on a battlefield. He was an exceptionally able, brave, and gallant soldier. It was difficult to imagine any harm coming to him.

  He was, I believe, an ROTC officer, and he used to talk a lot about the good times he’d had at the University of Wyoming and in the West. He also mentioned quite a bit about his family and their sheep ranch in the hills.

  Some time later friends at F Company told me that shelling forced them to take cover in buildings as soon as they had reached Obermehlen. Captain Newcomb had been entering a building when a shell hit the doorway. A battle-wise veteran, Captain Newcomb should have taken any cover available, yet witnesses said he had made no effort to protect himself.

  The Twenty-second Infantry Regiment went on a few days later to take the important rail center of Prum, the main mission of that campaign, but of this I am not able to give a firsthand account.

  XVI

  EVACUATION

  As I sat flat on the floor of the battalion aid station my mind was on Captain Newcomb, and I was only dimly conscious of the medic sprinkling sulfa powder on my foot and dressing it. I returned to reality when a jeep took me to the rear battalion aid station, although I was still deep in shock. A medical technician used some surgical forceps to remove the piece of shrapnel from my big toe, telling me that the toe was broken and that I’d be going back for a nice long rest.

  At the next stop down the line, regimental aid station, a doctor looked at my foot and decided to leave it alone. He ordered a medic to put a tag on me with a brief description of the wound. A short time later I was loaded into an ambulance with three other wounded men, then the driver headed for the field hospital fifty miles farther back. The trip was very bumpy over torn-up roads. The medic riding with us had to spend the entire time sitting or kneeling beside a casualty in an attempt to keep plasma flowing into him.

  He was typical of all the medics I saw. They did their best willingly and unhesitatingly. We infantrymen knew that if we got hit, a medic would run out and drag us back in if at all possible. They were so dedicated, it seemed they simply ignored bullets. Actually, they were just as scared as we were.

  It was almost dark when we reached the field hospital, and our stretchers were lined up on the floor of a large receiving room that must have been a gym. The place was unheated, and someone threw a blanket over each of us. Medics walked up and down the lines of stretchers weeding out the most urgent surgery cases, and my turn came after about a two-hour wait. As I looked out across the gym at row after row of stretchers the scene reminded me of one in Gone with the Wind. It is always the in
fantryman who suffers worst in war.

  I was stripped of all my clothes and personal belongings by an orderly. Nothing was ever returned. Perhaps it was a bit of poetic justice—the most valuable object I had was a gold watch with a diamond marking each hour. I had taken it from a fifty-year-old German who had been sent to the German infantry as a replacement when we first attacked the Siegfried Line in September, 1944. He had formerly been stationed as an interpreter in Paris, where he had taken it from a shop. Though offered as much as $300 for the watch, I had decided to keep it. I wonder if the orderly ever got home with it. I also lost a very good Luger pistol.

  Surgery was a small room with a few gas lanterns and the usual table. The young surgeon who worked alone there looked extremely tired. He gave me a local and quickly began to clean out the wound. Then he began to cut along each side of my toe to get at the ends of the severed tendon and tie them together. He told me there was nothing he could do about the bone, which was cut almost through.

  I tried to sit up to watch him in action, but he firmly pushed me back and said, “Sorry, but you can help me more lying down.”

  He finished tying the tendon, sewed up the wound, and then taped a protective wire cage over the foot.

  Early next morning we were moved by train to a nice, large hospital not far from Paris. There-my wire cage was replaced by a walking cast. We stayed about two days and then were put on a train to Cherbourg, where we were loaded on a hospital ship for the crossing to England.

  While on the English Channel headed for Plymouth, England, my stomach got very upset, and I vomited. At first the doctors thought I had the usual seasickness, but when it persisted after my arrival at the 101st General Hospital near Bristol the doctors became quite interested. Three were assigned to work on my problem. After experimenting for three or four days with the usual tests and remedies for stomach ailments, with no cooperation at all from the patient’s stomach, they gave it all up and decided to start from scratch.

  They went into my medical history right back to childhood, particularly about digestive problems, of which I had had none. Then they came up to the recent past and asked about my eating habits in the Army. They probed and found out I had been almost entirely on K rations since June, 1944. That they couldn’t believe, so I explained that I’d been on the front continuously for eight months and that we received normal food from our kitchen trucks only when it was safe to bring them close to the front. That had not happened very often. I said it was a safe bet that about ninety percent of my total meals had been Ks and that there were stretches of several weeks at a time when we never saw our kitchens.

  The doctors explained that they had had a great many combat veterans come through, but never anyone who had been in combat so long. I felt they were being polite, that they really didn’t believe me, so I told them to check my records.

  They finally took my word for it and decided the long siege on K rations had gradually changed my stomach so much that it couldn’t readjust to regular food. Then they put me on pap, and my digestion cleared up right away, though not my disposition. I was starving, and they wouldn’t help me. The other men in the ward got deliciously loaded trays, and all I received was a little dab somewhere in the center of my plate. After about a month they relented and put me on a regular diet. I never thought hospital food could taste so great!

  While my toe wound was legitimate enough, about twenty other men were in the ward, and every one was in worse shape than I, which made me feel somewhat out of place. A couple of them had been riding in jeeps that were blown up by mines, and their bodies had been shattered. Worst of all was a soldier who had nineteen fractures in his arms and legs. He was strung up in traction with several pins through each leg. His condition was so bad the doctors couldn’t even move him into the operating room for the setting of still more fractures, so a team of doctors and nurses worked on him in the ward. I watched in fascination as they knocked him out with a shot and then used a bone drill and put more pins in his legs. We could hear the bones grate as they were being set.

  That night this poor fellow, who never complained, had a bad dream. He screamed and thrashed around in the bed and yelled at his men as he fought a battle all over again.

  I rang for a nurse, who was elsewhere, and then hobbled over to his bed and tried to rouse him out of the nightmare by talking to him and very gingerly shaking him. He didn’t respond, so I slapped his face quite gently, which brought him around. I hated to do that, but the nurse later told me he was probably doing himself a lot of damage tossing around.

  The doctors worked on him for several more hours the following day then kept him under heavy sedation for the next few days.

  After the war, I met our ward nurse near home, much to our mutual surprise. She told me the poor fellow was in her ward for over a year but finally did recover.

  About a week after my cast was removed, I was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital near Barnstable. There we went through a program of exercise, some pretty darned severe, but it did have the salutary effect of getting us back in shape. For recreation we played volleyball and ping pong, and after a while we were given passes to Birmingham, eighteen miles away.

  While there I also managed a short orientation course under the exchange program at Birmingham University, and I even wound up living in a very posh private boys’ school adjacent to the university. There, despite the war, everything was most formal.

  As part of the course, we also visited some public schools, a government slaughterhouse, and the city’s water system. This last was a major problem because the water for that city of over two million came over open viaducts from rivers in the hills seventy-five miles away. The Germans had sabotaged the system for a while, and the people suffered shortages. Water had to be trucked in.

  Most interesting of all was our trip to the very old city of Coventry, the site of the immortal King Arthur and his legendary Round Table. Less than one hundred yards from the King Arthur collection was a church dating back to A.D. 500 that had been hit by German bombs. About seventy-five percent of the church was in ruins, but the local people had pledged to rebuild it.

  In mid-April I must have been in a most peculiar state of mind because I actually passed up a chance for a brief vacation in Ireland. It seemed I was silly enough to want to get back to the Twenty-second Infantry before the war ended. Soon I found myself in a replacement center—“Repple-Depots,” we called them—near Birmingham; because my records showed I’d been a company commander in combat, I was given command of a company of two hundred black troops and was told to get them equipped and delivered to France.

  For a staff I had five white officers and one black, and I should mention that at this time in history there was no such thing in the Army as integration. All the officers had been wounded and were returning to duty. Of the two hundred enlisted men, only three had been wounded in battle; the rest were mostly V.D. casualties.

  It was something of an adventure to keep the men equipped. What was issued one day might be gone the next. Every day thefts were reported to me. Some of the men sold, traded, or gave away their personal equipment. I soon learned that some of the local Englishwomen were available for cash or goods.

  Most of the men had had very little schooling, and their ringleaders, most of whom had decent educations, seemed devoted to keeping them stirred up. The black first sergeant was very good, however, and he soon had the ringleaders picked out. Our job then was to try to keep them so busy they didn’t have time to bother anyone. Nonetheless, I did have to break up one knife fight, and I also had to stop dice games, which usually led to combat, though not the kind we were in Europe to fight.

  At last we were ordered to stand final inspection before embarkation, and some of these actors went all out to louse up the inspection and delay returning to their units. One character even lipped off to the inspecting major when ordered to turn in his personal luggage to the sergeant for shipment home. This black soldier, a really huge man, delibe
rately addressed the major as “captain” and told him he’d have to come and get the luggage himself if he wanted it so damned bad.

  Without an instant’s hesitation, the major jerked the luggage from the man’s hand and tossed it to the sergeant. The big soldier just sulked as his cardboard suitcase was taken away. Later the major confided to me that he thought the soldier wanted to be thrown into the brig, and that the best punishment for such men was to return them to the front.

  Next the doctors lined the men up for “short arm” inspection, and, of course, that also had its antics. Some of them still had V.D., and when these souls were pulled off the list for shipment out they laughed and clapped their hands with glee and sometimes did a little jig.

  A few days later, our group did indeed reach Le Havre. France. To my immense personal relief, the unit was broken up, and the men were shipped out to their own units, mostly service or truck companies. My stint as their commander had lasted only ten days, and I very much doubted I could have coped much longer. Keeping the men in the proper equipment was a constant worry. Lack of cooperation can be immensely more frustrating than some days of actual combat.

  I was immediately assigned to a replacement pool. Next day we began a series of moves back to our outfits. If this had been the time of the Bulge, we could have been shot back to the front by express, but now we had no great priority, and the Army seemed in no hurry to return us to our units.

  Our first stop was a French military base behind the Maginot Line, and we stayed there for three or four days in nice brick officers quarters much like the permanent buildings on the main post at Fort Benning, Georgia.