We first found the grave of Frank Krusel. In June of 1944, Dad was twenty-five years old, and was several years older than most of the men in B Company, but he was not the oldest. Frank was several years older than Dad. In civilian life Frank was a university professor, yet in the Army he was a Private First Class. Dad, a corporal, outranked Frank; he asked him once, “Frank, what are you doing being a Pfc.? With your education you could be an officer.” Frank replied, “I don’t want to go any higher than this. I have a better chance of surviving the war as a Pfc. than as an officer.” Frank was killed less than one month after landing in Normandy. Dad spent a few moments in quiet conversation over Frank’s grave and as we walked away he said, “I can still see him with his cigarette in a cigarette holder that he always had while smoking.”
We next went to the graves of Nicholas Milczakowski and Tullio Micaloni, which are within one grave site of each other. Milczakowski, who was shorter than Dad, was known as “Little Nick” and played the bugle. He and Krusel were in the tank commanded by Sgt Tullio Micaloni.
Throughout training in the United States and in England, Dad went to church regularly. After landing in Normandy the opportunity to attend church services became rare. However, a couple of weeks after landing in Normandy, the town of St Jores was captured with the town church relatively undamaged. During the lull in battle, a Mass was being celebrated in the church for any soldier who could attend.
Dad said, “The day before Micaloni heard there was going to be a Mass, and he asked if he could come to Mass with me. So I said yes. We came to Mass and when we got to Mass, the Catholic Chaplain was there with the French priest and they said Mass. And the Chaplain said any of you soldiers who want to go to communion, say a good Act of Contrition and then go to communion. In those days to go to communion, you should go to confession first and fast from midnight. But the Priest dispensed that and he told us to go to communion and to go to confession the first chance we got.1 Micaloni said, ‘Louie, you think I can go to communion?’ And I said, ‘Sure you can go, just say an Act of Contrition.’ So we said the Act of Contrition and went to communion. The next day he went out and his tank was destroyed and he and all the crew were killed.” Dad spent another few minutes by himself over the graves of Micaloni and Milczakowski.
We next walked along the path and the stone wall overlooking Omaha Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The view that day was spectacular and the silence of the cemetery was only broken by birds chirping in the nearby trees. I thought to myself that the serenity and sunlit beauty of that day was in sharp contrast to the overcast and brutal conditions on D-Day. There were certainly no birds chirping at that location on the morning of June 6, 1944.
Beach obstacles. (Author’s collection)
Since every soldier had a dog tag, I asked Dad how could there be so many graves marked “Unknown”. Dad said that many times the explosion of a bomb or artillery shell would fall directly upon a soldier and the upper part of the body would be blown away; the only portion of the body recovered was the bottom half of a torso, or maybe just arms and legs and there would be no dog tag. I was embarrassed by how naive I had been to the realities of combat; the answer was so obvious to anyone who realized the full destructive capabilities of the weaponry utilized in World War II.
As we departed the American Cemetery, I realized that this trip with my father was not a European vacation – it was a pilgrimage.
Utah Beach
Dad and I departed the Omaha Beach area and proceeded to the beach at St Marie du Mont, which is now known by its military code name, Utah Beach. This is where Dad and the 712th Tank Battalion landed on June 28, 1944. B Company and part of Headquarters Company were the first to disembark late in the afternoon and early evening but then the tide went out and the rest of the battalion had to wait until the next morning to come ashore.2
The Battle Route in Normandy to Hill 122. (The History of the 712th Tank Battalion)
Dad remembered the night of June 5, when the invasion began for the Allies, as they were embarking for the landings the next morning, June 6. “The night of the invasion (June 5) we were out on maneuvers in a field all night. The planes start going over and there were thousands of them. We knew something was up. As soon as it got daylight they called us in and said ‘OK pack up we’re moving out. We’re going down to the coast to load on LSTs to go to France. The invasion is on.’ So we got everything ready, we got the tanks gassed up and started down the road to Dartmouth. Man, we were flying, a couple of tanks had trouble and broke down because that was a long haul down there. We had to stop and fix them.
“And when we got down to the coast they said ‘OK we’re going to load up in three hours.’” But then the orders to load up were postponed; at the time Dad had heard that while they were not scheduled to be in the initial wave, they were scheduled to go in on one of the succeeding waves on either the first or second day after the invasion, but their debarkation had been delayed due to the experiences of the tank crews that were in the first wave on D-Day.
“We were supposed to come in… we had snorkels on the tank so we could go under water.3 But the tide changed, they had two tides, at the beach, Utah Beach. And they had calculated only one tide so that when they (the initial tanks landing on D-Day) came in they went underwater and many of the tank crews drowned. So we couldn’t go in, they told us to stay in England – ‘We’re going to wait awhile.’ – and then when we were ready to come in the weather got bad. That’s when the storm came up on the Channel.” No doubt the change in command from Lt-Col. Miller to Lt-Col. Randolph on D-Day may also have played a part for the delay in the 712th moving across the Channel.
The landscape of Utah Beach is in no way similar to Omaha Beach. There are no cliffs or bluffs; the land abutting the beach is flat and easy to traverse. The landing site at Utah Beach now houses a military museum. Dad and I spent about an hour reviewing the artifacts and film. Utah Beach is also the site of several war monuments, one of which is dedicated to the 90th Infantry Division and its supporting units, including the 712th Tank Battalion.
Also on Utah Beach is the first Borne de la voie de la Liberté, a small marker, designating the “Way of Liberty”. These milestones of liberty are dotted along and mark out the route of the liberating US Army from Utah Beach and St Mère Église to Bastogne in Belgium.
From the site of the 90th Infantry Monument, we could see a house several hundred yards down the beach. Dad said that he remembers seeing a house at that same distance when he landed in 1944 and it perhaps was the same house.
After landing early in the evening of June 28, 1944, the 712th Tank Battalion removed all of the waterproofing material and moved to an assembly area in Picauville, where the entire battalion bivouacked after coming ashore.
Louis Gruntz Sr. and Louis Gruntz Jr. (Author’s collection)
90th Infantry Division Monument at Utah Beach. (Author’s collection)
Before Dad and I left Utah Beach on our way to Picauville, about 9 miles inland. I asked what the beach was like in 1944. Dad replied, “They had equipment and everything all over. It was just about dark and they had balloons up in the air to keep the German planes from diving. We were the first tank battalion to land intact.”
Dad also said that when he landed he remembers the strong sickening smell of death, the odor of dead and rotting flesh. I said that I would have thought that the bodies of American soldiers would have been buried by then. He said that Americans had been buried. “Grave Registration would come along and pick up the bodies and take one dog tag off. That’s how they knew who got killed. And then they took them back and put them in areas where they were ready to bury them. They identified them and the other dog tag stayed with the body so they would know who they would bury.” But Dad was uncertain if all the Germans had been buried by that date. He also said that the smell that hung in air when he landed was probably from the dead livestock that were lying all around that had not yet been disposed of or buried.
Dad’s first entry onto the European Continent was clearly memorable, just not pleasant.
CHAPTER 5
The Hedgerows
The best tank terrain is that without anti-tank weapons.
Russian military adage
“We are now in hedgerow country,” Dad explained as we left the Utah Beach area and headed inland. The terrain of the Normandy countryside is generally level farmland separated into patterns of small fields. For centuries each small field was bounded by an earthen mound or wall 8 to 10 feet in width and 4 to 6 feet in height, which served as fences for the enclosed fields. The hedgerows are covered with brush and other undergrowth; along the top of the wall there is a row of trees and along the base of the hedgerow runs a small ditch.
“Notice they run about 100 or 200 feet deep and they have hedges all around and mud piled up in bunkers like. Now we had to fight through those hedgerows. On the other side the Germans were dug-in in foxholes. When we got a hole in the hedgerow, we ran the tank through to get the next one. Then they (the Germans) fell back and we had to do the same thing all over again. They had machine guns and infantry men in there. A few years ago, Henri (Levaufre) told me they found a skeleton in one of the hedgerows, an American soldier. He crawled up in there (during the battle) and he died up in there. He wasn’t discovered until over forty years after the war.”
Father Murphy, a Chaplain in the 90th Infantry Division, wrote a similar description in his diary and added that the hedgerows “…made a complete screen – something the enemy could use for cover. We were walking targets. Many of the fields were marked ‘minen’ (mines) signs probably put there by Germans to scare us […] The fields were not more than a hundred yards square, but the sad part of it was that each was bordered on four sides by these high fences of dirt and shrubs. In French we found the word for them – ‘Bocage’.”1
Hedgerow lined road. (Author’s collection)
Alongside the fields are narrow, winding, sunken roads, which run between the hedgerows. As Dad and I drove, we had to stop on one occasion as a French farmer moved his cattle across the road from one hedgerow enclosed field to another.
The Allied forces had not made the expected advances into the French countryside that had been hoped for prior to D-Day due to the natural defenses that hedgerows provided the Germans. Stephen Ambrose called the failure of the Army to prepare the troops for fighting in hedgerows one of the greatest military intelligence failures of all times. The aerial photography of Normandy before D-Day revealed the hedges, but photo interpreters, looking only straight down at them, thought they were like the small hedges in England and had missed the sunken nature of the roads entirely.2 Military intelligence personnel relied solely upon aerial reconnaissance in formulating battle plans; they overlooked other means of information, such as the writings of the nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright, Honoré de Balzac. In his writings, over one hundred years before D-Day, de Balzac described in graphic detail the hedgerows of the Normandy terrain:
a raised bank of earth about each field, forming a flat topped ridge, two meters in height, with beeches, oaks, and chestnut trees growing up the summit. The ridge or mound, planted in this wise, is called a hedge; and the long branches of the trees which grow upon it almost always project across the road, they make a great arbor overhead. The roads themselves, shut in by clay banks in this melancholy way, are not unlike the moats of a fortress.
Tanks were intended for use in open fields. Tank crews were not wild about the idea of running their tanks along these sunken roads because of insufficient room for the turret to traverse any more than a few degrees; furthermore, the hedgerows impaired visibility thereby making long range use of the 75-mm gun and the tank’s machine guns ineffective. The hedgerows also gave the Germans a defensive advantage, if the tanks tried to enter a field through the gate on the hedgerow, it was easily knocked out by mortar fire and panzerfausts hidden a short distance away behind the next hedgerow which had zeroed in on the gate. If a tank tried to climb over the embankment, it exposed its unarmored belly to enemy fire and was soon disabled.
It was not until American ingenuity entered the picture that the problem of the hedgerows would be solved. Someone suggested making hedge-cutters and attaching them to the front of the tanks. They were simple in design, and made by pieces of steel angle and T-iron, sharpened on the front edge. There was steel in plentiful supply in Normandy left by the Germans. The landing craft obstacles that the Germans positioned on the beach were made of just the right size iron beams. Those cutters struck the earth hedgerows about two and a half feet above the surface of the ground. With one lunge a hole was cut in the hedgerow and the tank kept on going before the Germans could take aim upon it.3
When the hedge cutter was first being tested behind the lines, a group of officers were observing the demonstration. One of those officers was Gen. George S. Patton Jr., who would soon take command of the Third Army. Capt. Belton Y. Cooper of the 3rd Armored Division described the scene:
A tall officer standing in the middle of the group could be identified immediately. […] General Patton had come to witness the demonstration, but because his Third Army had not yet been activated, his presence in Normandy had been kept a secret.
Patton was a fine-looking man with rugged features and piercing eyes. In his Eisenhower jacket, brightly polished riding boots, riding britches, and leather belt with a brass buckle and holding ivory-handled pistols, he looked every inch a soldier. Although some felt that he looked overdressed, this was part of his mystique. One could not help but stand in awe of him, and he dominated the conversation by his bearing and presence.
[…]
The test worked beautifully the first time; the tank went through the hedgerow without a problem. […] When Patton nodded his approval, we knew it was a go situation.4
German collaborator. (US National Archives)
During those first few days in combat, Dad said almost everyone was a little jittery and trigger happy. One night they heard something outside of the tank, Dad yelled out for whoever was there to identify themselves but there was no response. The other members of the tank asked Dad, “‘ What are you going to do?’ I said ‘I’m going to throw a grenade out there.’ I threw it out there.” The tank crew heard no more noises around the tank the rest of the night, Dad said, “The next day there was a dead cow on the side of the tank.” It seems that the many cows in Normandy did not fare well during the initial months after the invasion, as Father Murphy wrote: “There is fresh meat in many of the companies. ‘The cows did not know the password.’”5
Further remembering an event that occurred in a hedgerow, Dad said, “We knew they (the Germans) were usually in the corner. One time, we fired a round from the big gun into that corner and all of a sudden I saw a pair of high heels fly up into the air. He (a German soldier) had his girlfriend in the foxhole with him.
“When we started going through these little towns, every time you saw a woman with a bandana on her head, that was a woman who was fooling with the German soldiers. As soon as they liberated a town, they (townspeople) grabbed them and shaved all their hair off. To let everybody know they were collaborators.”
After the Allied forces successfully established beachheads on D-Day and consolidated their positions in the succeeding days, the Germans withdrew to fallback defensive positions away from the English Channel coast. One such defensive position the Germans occupied was Forêt de Mont Castre, designated on military maps as Hill 122 – its height above sea level measured in meters. The Romans had utilized this hill as a fortification during the Gallic Wars. This ancient fortification with its natural steep slopes is located in the middle of the Cotentin Peninsula; it was the most “commanding terrain feature of the entire peninsula, and the enemy used it to good advantage.”6 The Germans could see not only the Atlantic Ocean, about 8.5 miles to the west, but they also had a commanding view of the area between Forêt de Mont Castre and Utah Beach, about 17 miles to the northe
ast, the countryside occupied by the United States Army. From this position, the Germans were able to spot American forces and direct artillery fire upon American troops. Dad said, “So after that we came on in and at that time they (the Allies) only had a couple of miles (occupied). And the Germans had Hill 122, that was the military name. The Germans controlled that. We couldn’t move there, they looked down on us. In fact I stayed in my tank for seven days without getting out. They would fire either artillery fire or mortar fire at us.”
Although, the 712th did not officially enter combat until July 3, 1944, they were subject to enemy artillery fire beginning that first night ashore and remained subject to constant artillery barrages.
Tec 5 Fred Becker was an early casualty. He was killed on July 8, 1944 in Fortaire, France. Fred Becker was in the tank commanded by Sgt Orin Bourdo. Becker had gotten out of the tank to get some fresh air. As he was sitting on the front of the tank, a German artillery shell landed nearby and he was killed by a piece of shrapnel. The driver of the tank, Cpl Richard Gosselin, who was half out of the driver’s hatch had an arm blown off. Gosselin was evacuated to a field hospital, the 76th Evac. Hospital, where he succumbed to those wounds on July 16. Orin Bourdo, who was standing in the top hatch and witnessed the unfolding tragedy, was unharmed.
In conformity with its status as an independent battalion, when the 712th entered combat, it was attached to the 90th Infantry Division, except for A Company, which was attached to the 82nd Airborne Division.7 After these initial days in the Normandy campaign, the 712th was almost exclusively attached to the 90th for the remainder of the war. Although the 712th Tank Battalion was never made a part of the 90th Infantry Division, by war’s end, the 90th considered the 712th as its own and the members of the 712th considered themselves as part of the 90th.
A Tank Gunner's Story: Gunner Gruntz of the 712th Tank Battalion Page 8