A Tank Gunner's Story: Gunner Gruntz of the 712th Tank Battalion

by Louis G. Gruntz

  I took the chicken and wrung his neck. I skinned him and fried him. We never had any cooking oil, I just put him in my skillet. And I cooked some potatoes. I had chicken and french fries, right outside next to the tank.

  Whenever Dad had the chance he always wanted something other than Crations or Krations.3

  Bob Kellner was the mess sergeant for B Company. The kitchen was usually set up near the Company HQ where hot meals could be cooked. The men either rotated back to the kitchen from the front line or hot food was sent up to the front line in insulated cans.

  During the time Dad was recuperating and being transported from the field hospital back to the 712th, the battalion had advanced east of Paris. While Dad and Bill Nick were being transported, the transport trucks had to travel along the Seine River. On one occasion when the transport trucks stop, Dad wanted to clean up.

  I was outside of Paris and I hadn’t had a bath in a long time. It was on the outskirts of Paris sometime in September and I hadn’t had a bath in a long time, so I took me a bar of soap and a towel and I jumped into the Seine River and I got me a bath in about fifteen seconds. The water was so cold, I couldn’t get out of it fast enough.

  I had asked Dad about how soldiers changed into clean clothes while out in combat. He said occasionally they had showers set up when a Company HQ was established.

  When I had a chance to take a shower, I went to the supply sergeant and said “I need a set of clothes.” So he’d give me a whole set of clothes, I’d take a shower and put the new clothes on and bring the dirty clothes to him. He’d have them cleaned and give them to the next guy my size that came up.

  When the question of what happened to damaged tanks arose, Dad said that they were taken to the rear and repaired if possible. If a tank was too badly damaged, sometimes they took parts off of it to repair other slightly damaged tanks. Dad’s good friend after the war, John Ockenga was in charge of the minor repairs and maintenance of B Company tanks. Badly damaged tanks were handled by Service Company.

  There was one other occasion when Dad didn’t mince words with someone of higher rank, Dad explained:

  One night we came to a town and we had an outpost to protect the town. And we had first contact with the Germans. This lieutenant (Lt Otto Kreig) jumped out the tank and said, “I’m going back to Battalion Headquarters to check on something, I’ll be right back.” So all night he was gone while we watched the town. So the next morning when he came back, I said, “Where have you been?” He said, “I slept back there.” I said, “You had no business being back there, you should have been here with the tank to help pull guard at the outpost of the town.” Well he didn’t like that. I said, “You are supposed to stay here, we’ve got five men in the tank and five men are supposed to pull guard.” He said, “I would have known about it if anything happened.” And I said, “Yeah, if I would have called back there on the radio and told you. You’re not supposed to leave this tank.” He wouldn’t talk to me for about three days. After the third day, he said, “You know, you are right.” I said, “OK.”

  Dad and Kreig got along fine after that.

  I asked Dad if he ever saw Gen. Patton up close. He said no but that once Patton passed right by his tank, he had come up to the front to assess the situation.

  I was inside the tank and someone outside says, “Hey, there goes the Old Man.”

  We had stopped on a hill overlooking a valley with a platoon of infantry and had dug in. A tank column from an armored division had stopped on a road at the entrance of the valley. When Patton asked the commander of the column what was the hold up, the commander replied that the valley was under enemy observation and subject to shelling.

  Patton was furious and pointed to my tank on the hilltop in the distance. He told the armored division commander to get his tanks moving, that if one tank and a platoon of infantry can hold that hill, the armored division could go through the valley. The armored division immediately rolled through the valley.

  That’s what one of the officers told us later.

  Patton regularly went to the front and wanted all commanding officers under him to do likewise. One of his sayings was, “If you want an army to fight and risk death, you’ve got to get up there and lead it. An army is like spaghetti. You can’t push a piece of spaghetti, you’ve got to pull it.”4

  I asked about how the tanks were re-supplied. Dad answered, “At night the supply truck and the gas truck would come up. They had to bring it to us because we were going into enemy territory.” Depending on how far the unit traveled dictated how often the tanks needed fuel. “It depends on how we were running. Like when we started moving through France we had to get gas pretty often. About every one or two days they would come up with ammunition.”

  Dad said that the American supply trucks became known as the Red Ball Express. The drivers of these trucks rarely got involved in combat actions and sometimes the delivery of supplies became humorous.

  We got about 3 miles out of Mayenne and we stopped to outpost the town. The supply trucks came up. The infantry said you can’t go there, this is the front line. Boy, when they said that, they turned those trucks around and went flying back.

  It is said that during the war, of the millions of American soldiers in the military, only about one out of six actually was involved in combat. The rear echelon troops, supply troops, etc. did not experience the constant threat of death like the front line soldiers did every day. Dad commented, “Every soldier had a job in the army. Every soldier. But that man that was out in the front he was the man that was in danger at all times of being killed.” The vast majority of the casualties were experienced by the front line troops.

  Even though the supply drivers and the rear support troops were not in constant combat, their service was still just as vital to the war. As Gen. Patton once said:

  An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. […] All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain. […] Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns and machinery of war to keep us rolling. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up food and clothes because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the one who heats our water to keep us from getting the ‘G.I. Shits.’

  Dad mentioned that when there was fighting in or near a town, the civilians usually fled into the countryside. “We didn’t want to stop inside a town we wanted to get past the town and get out of the town. (Usually) there was nobody around, you would never think anyone lived there it was like a ghost town.”

  Dad also shared his thoughts about being a corporal. “I was like poor (Frank) Krusel. I thought being a corporal improved my chances of surviving. I wasn’t interested in promotions or winning medals. I only wanted to do the job, do my duty and go home. I never volunteered for anything and I never declined anything.” The desire to do their duty, accomplish their job, and go home was a sentiment shared by most GIs.

  I also asked Dad about the souvenirs he brought home. Did he get the pistol, the bayonet and the field glasses from the body of a German soldier? Dad said he didn’t retrieve those items from a body. “Toward the end of the war, the battalion captured a German weapons warehouse. Someone from the battalion distributed items such as the P-38 automatic pistol, the bayonet and the field glasses to anyone who wanted them.” Dad took them up on the offer, he said that during battles and the brief lulls afterwards, it was only the infantry soldiers that had opportunities to search for souvenirs among the bodies of the enemy, the tanks usually had to keep on moving.

  I had also noticed that Dad’s photographs taken during that time were eith
er shot during the months of training or after the war during occupation. Did he take any photographs during battle? He said that the soldiers were under orders not to take photographs or have cameras in battle, neither were they supposed to keep a journal of where they had been. The reason being that if they were ever captured, the Army did not want the enemy to have this information to determine the American Army’s troop movement. Even his letters home to Mom could not reveal any information on his specific location in the event the mail trucks would be captured by the enemy. I had noticed that many of Dad’s letters home began with the date and the words “Somewhere in France”. Even though they were under orders not to have them, some of the rearguard troops in the battalion had cameras and took pictures. After Joe Roush was wounded at the Falaise Gap, he returned to the battalion as a cook; he acquired a camera when he became a cook and took quite a few pictures after that.

  Dad found a German camera at the end of the war. During occupation, he was able to get film and took a few pictures in and around Susice Czechoslovakia and Amberg Germany. Dad said besides the orders against taking pictures during combat, he never had the time to stop and take pictures, he and the other members of the tank crew were too busy with the duties of operating the tank and firing upon the enemy. The last thing on their minds was to take pictures. And, as I learned, combat soldiers would not need photographs to remind them of battle; those pictures would be indelibly burned into their minds for the rest of their lives.

  Fortress Metz

  Dad was hospitalized for approximately two weeks until the third week in August, all the while the 712th along with the rest of the Third Army were rolling across France with the Germans in retreat. After Dad’s discharge from the hospital he was temporarily assigned to a replacement battalion and traveled with it for approximately another two weeks until the exact location of the ever moving 712th could be determined.

  September 7, 1944, Mom was back home “celebrating” her 22nd birthday, not knowing too many details of Dad’s wounds, worrying about his condition and whether he had returned to combat. Meanwhile Dad was still traveling in a troop truck with the replacement battalion and trying to catchup with the 712th.

  By the 7th of September the battalion had passed through the World War I sites of Verdun and the Argonne Forest and had reached a bivouac area near the small crossroads town of Mairy. A German scout plane flew over the 712th at approximately 3:00 p.m. By nightfall, all of the battalion’s companies were in the wooded areas on both sides of the road and within 1000 yards of each other. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of September 8, the Germans launched a surprise counter attack against the combined 90th and 712th. A full column of the enemy struck toward a 90th Infantry Division Command Post situated near the area of the 712th A Company tanks. Five Mark V tanks, one half-track and a German reconnaissance car broke through and came down the road that ran between the tanks of A Company and B Company. Both companies were unable to immediately fire on the enemy for fear of hitting each other with friendly fire, but C Company tanks quickly moved into position to defend the 90th Command Post.

  Normally full tank-on-tank battles occurred between armored divisions. This battle between the 712th and the 106 Panzer Brigade is the only recorded encounter between an entire panzer brigade and an independent tank battalion attached to an infantry division. German documents captured after the battle indicated that the Panzer brigade’s mission was to “annihilate the armored spearhead of the 90th Infantry Division.” By the end of the day, the German 106th Panzer Brigade was completely destroyed, through the combined efforts of the 90th infantry, its artillery and tank destroyers and all elements of the 712th. Thirty tanks, sixty half-tracks, and over one hundred miscellaneous vehicles were either captured or knocked out, and 764 prisoners were taken. From that date forward, the 712th was known as the “Armored Fist of the 90th”. When Gen. McLain was later offered the use of a Combat Command of one of the Armored Divisions, he rejected the offer, jokingly boasting, “No thank you. I have the 712th Armored Division.”

  Dad finally arrived back at the 712th Battalion HQ shortly after the battle at Mairy. He was not disappointed in having missed the action.

  Dad had not yet been reassigned to a tank, he related the following incident.

  I don’t know how in the hell I got mixed up with the 1st Sgt (James L. Bennett) because he wasn’t in a tank, but I was with him in a cellar. I believe it was right after I got back from the hospital … and caught up with the company. They (the battalion) were moving kind of fast then.

  It was about 12 o’clock at night. He wanted the kitchen crew to come up there by him because he didn’t like being alone. He was scared, but everybody was scared. So he said to me, “Corporal,” – that’s how he talked – “Corporal, go tell Kellner to come on up here with the kitchen crew. They’re down the street.” So, I said, “OK” and I started down the street and I hear Germans speaking on both sides of the street. I turned around and walked back and I said, “Sergeant, if you want Kellner to come down here you go down there and get him yourself, they’ve got Germans out there, I ain’t going out there.”

  When Dad had returned, Capt. Jim Cary was commanding B Company. Capt. Galvin had been wounded. Jim Cary had commanded C Company when the battalion landed in Normandy but he was wounded during the first few days. Following his recovery, he was assigned to B Company to replace Galvin. After the war, Jim was an Associated Press reporter and for a time was a member of the White House Press Corp. He is a distinguished and refined gentleman and by all accounts was an excellent officer.

  By the beginning of September the rapid advance was slowed and eventually stopped; not so much by German resistance but by an increasing shortage of gasoline and supplies. Since June 6, all gasoline and supplies were shipped across the English Channel and loaded on trucks and sent to the forward positions. When the forces were in Normandy, the distance between the landing points on the coast and the front lines were relatively short distances. In the eastern part of France, supplying the front line troops was a logistics nightmare. Supply lines were stretched to the limits.

  The Germans were routed and fleeing back to Germany but to Patton’s dismay he could not advance because of the lack of fuel. To his further dismay, most of the fuel and supplies landing in Normandy were being directed to Gen. Montgomery for use in his offensive plan named Operation Market Garden. Montgomery’s plan was to take bridges over the main rivers of the German-occupied Netherlands, thereby enabling the Allies to advance into Germany and end the war. Patton argued unsuccessfully to Eisenhower that if he was given the fuel, the Third Army could advance on Berlin in a matter of weeks and the war would end before Thanksgiving of 1944. Montgomery countered that his plan would end the war by the end of October.

  The task of opening of the port of Antwerp, Belgium fell to Gen. Montgomery. The British troops liberated Antwerp but the port could not be used for unloading supplies because the channels to the coast were still subject to attack by isolated pockets of German resistance. If the port of Antwerp were in use, the shortages of supplies coming through Normandy would have been resolved and both Patton and Montgomery could have advanced.

  Gen. Eisenhower decided to temporarily forego eliminating the resistance near Antwerp and to allot most of the fuel and supplies to Gen. Montgomery and to allow his troops to concentrate on Operation Market Garden. The territory that Montgomery’s plan would capture contained the launching sites of the German V-2 rockets that were bombarding London.

  Operation Market Garden failed and the Allied forces suffered sizable casualties. 1,400 British soldiers were dead and over 6,000 were taken prisoners of war.

  Before the supplies to Patton were diverted, advance scouting parties had entered Metz, and gone through the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line. They were empty, the Germans had retreated back into Germany. Patton’s forces could have punched through these defenses if he only had the gasoline. In a letter to his wife on August 30, Patton wrote, “If I could on
ly steal some gas, I could win this war.”5 US troops first entered Germany on September 11, 1944 – the Operation Overlord plans did not anticipate Allied forces to reach the German border until May 2, 1945. Patton had reached this point 233 days ahead of schedule.6

  Because of Operation Market Garden and because the fuel for the Third Army had to be landed in Normandy, rather than Antwerp, Eisenhower called for a pause in the Allied advance in order to regroup. When Patton was given a minimal amount of fuel in mid-October, it was, unfortunately, too late. The Germans also had regrouped and re-manned the network of fortifications that comprised the Maginot Line in and around the City of Metz.

  Metz is an ancient walled city with narrow streets that today has expanded beyond its walls and become a modern bustling urban area. Although Dad never came within the city during the war, he and I drove to the Place d’Armes in the center of town for a brief visit.

  Fortifications around Metz began in medieval times, the first set of modern fortifications began in the seventeenth century. Over a dozen forts were built around the city. One such fort on the outskirts of town is open for tourists. Dad and I visited this area as well. This fort reminded me of the fort I visited as a boy back home, Fort Pike.

  In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Metz and the entire Alsace-Lorraine region were ceded to Germany at the end of hostilities. The Germans increased these fortifications between that time and World War I. After WWI, France regained control of the territory, and the French government built a series of new fortifications along the French/German border in order to prevent a German invasion. These fortifications were mainly underground and connected by a series of tunnels.