The Lorraine Cemetery
The Lorraine American Cemetery is located in St Avold, France, between Metz and the German border. With 10,489 graves, it contains the largest number of American dead from World War II interred in Europe. There are several 712th members buried here but only one from B Company, who was a replacement that Dad did not know particularly well, Alfred McLaughlin from the Bronx. I took particular note of the fact that he was killed in action on March 9, 1945, while the 712th was cutting through Germany, and long after it had left the area near Metz. I was curious as to how McLaughlin came to be buried in eastern France; I later learned that when the US Government established the permanent American Cemeteries in Europe there was a policy not to leave any soldier buried on enemy soil, therefore, those killed in Germany were eventually transferred to the cemeteries in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. I would also later learn that there is at least one American WWII soldier who was laid to his final rest on Germain soil, TEC5 Henry Bockhorn of Company D of the 712th Tank Battalion, who was killed in action in France on August 8, 1944. Bockhorn’s mother emigrated to the United States from Germany before he was born; following WWII, she requested that her son be permanently interred in her family’s tomb in the Uthlede Cemetery in Kreis Wesermuende, Germany.
After paying our respects in the Lorraine Cemetery, we headed toward the Saar River and the town of Dillingen.
Crossing the Saar River into Dillingen
A cold driving rain provided B Company with a brief and uncomfortable Thanksgiving meal in 1944. Two days later, the Battalion launched a series of attacks to clean out enemy resistance in the area west of the Saar between it and the French-German border. B Company crossed the border into Germany and occupied the German border towns of Biringen and Oberesch. The Germans retreated behind the natural barrier of the Saar River and the Siegfried Line which was built on the eastern side of the river. On December 3, 1944, after other units had moved through and on toward and across the Saar River, B Company moved south and back across the meandering border into the French border town of Neuenkirchen. The next two days were spent in performing maintenance on the company tanks.
Between November 25 and December 6, the 90th and the 712th moved closer to crossing the Saar. Father Murphy described the fighting, “Many big shells are coming in. We are in the vicinity of the Saar River and the shells sound like big locomotives coming in.”7
By December 1, the tanks had reached the western banks of the river and could see the towns of Dillingen and Pachten located on the eastern bank. The 90th and the 712th were on the left or northern flank of the Third Army’s push across the Saar. Other elements of the Third Army were attacking further south in Saarbrücken and Sarraguemines.
The Siegfried line, Germany’s western defensive wall, consisted of hundreds of mutually-supporting pillboxes, observation and command posts and bunkers. In the area around Dillingen, this line of fortifications came down to the river’s edge.
“Dillingen itself was a fortress, studded with many camouflaged pillboxes. An innocent-appearing jewelry store, a hardware store, a railway ticket office and many other such buildings scattered through the town turned out to be steel and concrete pillboxes.”8
The Siegfried line fortifications varied in depth depending on the terrain and population density of the locale. It had fairly well dispersed strong points from the heavily wooded hills in the Saar region northward. Many small cottages looked like innocent farm dwellings but were actually fortified pillboxes with twelve to eighteen inch thick concrete walls.9
Like the Moselle River which was crossed a month earlier, the Saar River in 1944 was overflowing its normal banks due to the incessant rainfall throughout that November and December. The hilly terrain on the west side of the river provided only a few spots for vehicular access to the short flat river banks. These access points meant there were only a few sites that could be chosen for bridge sites. In addition to this, the troops had to battle the rain and the thick mud.
When Dad and I arrived in Dillingen, the day was bright and sunny and the river was within its normal banks, unlike like the weather and conditions in 1944.
That winter in 1944, the hills on the northern side of Dillingen were occupied by the German observation posts. This allowed the Germans to observe all activity on the river and to direct their artillery fire accordingly. The swollen river and the commanding position of the German artillery, prevented the engineers from constructing a bridge across the Saar. The attack on Dillingen was even more arduous because the Prims River, a small tributary of the Saar, bisects the town of Dillingen.
Again the infantry had to establish a bridgehead on the east bank by mounting an assault in boats, with the tanks remaining on the west bank, where they provided supporting fire upon enemy positions on the east bank. As Dad explained, “The Germans were up on a mountain and we were down by the river trying to cross. They bombed the bridge so we couldn’t get across on the bridge, so we put pontoons in. And they were looking at us and every time we got the pontoon bridge built to go across, they would get the artillery and blow it. Then we put a smoke screen out on that whole mountain for about a week it was covered with smoke so they couldn’t see what we were doing.” The smoke screen was aided by the burning buildings in Pachen and Dillingen
Finally on December 9, five tanks from A Company were ferried across the river. The river suddenly dropped and the ferrying operation was temporarily grounded. To make matters worse, the smoke screen dissipated. On December 12, another smokescreen was laid and the remainder of A Company was ferried across with a platoon from C Company. “One time the hawser that was guiding the ferry broke with the tank on it. The tank was stranded on its ferry for a whole day.”10 By December 14, the remainder of the battalion was ferried across.
B Company was the last portion of the 712th to cross the river. Dad explained his experience upon crossing the river, “When we got into Dillingen, we went straight through the town and outposted the town. There were three American soldiers killed, their bodies were lying right there where we were outposted.”
Dad and I parked our car in the public parking lot near the river. We walked through the shopping district area to a small park area near the town church. When we reached the approximate spot where he was first outposted, Dad told me, “When we were going through town, the people obviously stayed in town until the last minute and then left and hid somewhere. They had a market and sausage hanging up on a hook, so I went in there and grabbed a big hunk of sausage and I had sausage for lunch that day.”
Prior to the tanks arriving, the infantry was fighting house to house and sustaining heavy casualties. Dillingen was later to be called the hottest spot on the Saar. The 90th Infantry Division established a record by capturing or destroying two hundred pillboxes in one day.11
Dad described the destruction of one such pillbox.
Three or four American soldiers (infantry) were dead, they had just gotten shot in front of the pillbox. And we got to it, we fired at it to stop it from shooting the machine gun, you couldn’t get nothing into it because they had steel in front.” Dad was in a tank with a new replacement lieutenant, Lt Thermon Mesker. “(Mesker) started to run the tank up to the pillbox. So I said, “You can’t, you shouldn’t do that, they usually have mines in front of those pillboxes.” We just came out from being blown up by a mine. I was leery about it.
Mesker ignored Dad’s concerns.
So he pulled up into it and they (the Germans) quit firing. … (The infantry) figured out what to do and they told him (Mesker) to come back up because they had other pillboxes firing. So an engineer got on the tank, in the back of the turret where they couldn’t shoot him, so when we pulled up to the pillbox again, he got off and put a dynamite charge in the window and blew it out.
A colonel from the 90th Infantry witnessed this attack on the pillbox. Lt Bob Vutech and the colonel came up to Dad afterwards. Dad was angry at Mesker for not considering the possibility of
the presence of mines, thereby taking such a foolish risk in bringing the tank directly up to the front of the pillbox.
Lt Bob Vutech. (Company B photograph)
That’s when the (infantry) Colonel came up to me and said, “Corporal, who is that lieutenant?”
I said, “Aw, he is new, colonel.” He said, “I thought so, he doesn’t have any sense, but he’s got plenty guts.”
Vutech said “Louie you don’t like this lieutenant, do you?” I said, “No, it’s not that, but if that son of a bitch wants to get himself killed, I don’t want him to get me killed with him.
Mesker was a new replacement. Dad didn’t know if Mesker wanted to make the Army a career and was trying to win medals or be noticed for his action in order to be promoted. But Dad believed that he was being too reckless.
Vutech and the colonel both knew that Dad was right, Mesker should not have run the tank up to the front of the pillbox. Knowing Dad’s concerns over Mesker’s reckless tactics, Vutech later transferred Dad out of Mesker’s tank and put him in another tank.
When the Americans were crossing the river, the Germans wanted to wipe out the bridgehead and in the ensuing battle they threw everything they had at the Americans. Jim Cary described the Dillingen operation as follows:
They were attacking one flank, and the only way that the Americans could stop it was to turn all the artillery they had in the area loose on the German attack. […] I saw what happened afterward and that was the most horrible sight I ever saw in the entire war, and is something that I still visualize at times. […] this extreme intense artillery came down right in the middle of that concentration of troops, both the German and American.
It was very shortly after that that we got our tanks across. […] There were bodies absolutely stacked one on top of the other. There must have been eight or nine hundred bodies in that area with parts of their heads blown off; I remember in one case, a German had fallen face down in the road and it was muddy, and cars were driving back and forth over him, and I kept asking myself, “Why doesn’t this bother me more than it does?” You get so immune to it.12
During our visit in 1994, it was obvious that most of the buildings had been destroyed during the war. The town looked like a blue collar factory town in America. The only structure that appeared to me to have any sense of antiquity was the church on the northern side of the town. Most of the stores in the shopping district did not seem to be European, the architectural style of full plate glass windows in aluminum frames covering the entire store front was reminiscent of American suburban shopping malls built in the 1950s and 1960s. I was struck with the sense that Dillingen had lost its unique pre-war character.
When the German counter attack had begun in the Ardennes, in what was to become known as the Battle of the Bulge, Patton had to withdraw his forces from the east side of the Saar River and move north through Luxembourg on order to breakthrough to the surrounded town of Bastogne. The units of the Third Army that were the southern or right flank of the push across the Saar were the first to withdraw and were the lead elements of the relief column headed toward Bastogne. Patton made a strategic move in designating the 90th and the 712th to be the last to withdraw. The 90th and 712th rearguard action was meant to protect the right flank of the relief column as it moved north on the western side of the Saar.
The Dillingen withdrawal began on December 19th and continued twenty-four hours a day until completed. At the time the enlisted men were not told the reason for the withdrawal. Since B Company was the last unit to cross the river into Dillingen, it was the last 712th unit to be pulled back to the west side of the river. With no bridge the armor had to be taken back by ferry – tank by tank. Roads on the German side of the river “became impassable and each vehicle required winching through the mud and over the steep banks. Enemy artillery destroyed the ferry, and with only a few hours remaining in which to complete the withdrawal, 25 armored vehicles remained on the wrong side of the river. In the darkness and in freezing waters, under continuous shelling the men at the river slaved through the night to salvage what they could.”13
The last of the B Company tanks made it back to the west side of the river at 2:30 a.m. on the morning of December 23. Jim Cary described the 712th’s withdrawal as follows:
Withdrawing from Dillingen. (The History of the 712th Battalion)
Then we got the orders to pull back, and we got into this very slow, very poorly done operation in ferrying these tanks back across the Saar. It’s a good thing the Germans didn’t have anything to throw at us or if they did they didn’t want to waste ammunition, because we were sitting ducks. The infantry pulled out and we were left with our tanks strung out along the Saar River, and I finally got Colonel Randolph on the radio and asked him to do whatever he could to put a smokescreen down. We did get some smoke, and we slowly got the tanks back across the river.14
The few buildings in town, not destroyed in battle, were destroyed by a demolition squad before abandoning the town to the Germans; one such building contained a stock of C-2 explosives which also had to be eliminated. Cary described this event:
And then we did get back across, and I was standing on the other side of the Saar River when they blew that. The whole skyline lit up, it was one of those scenes like, do you remember what the burning of Atlanta looked like in “Gone With the Wind”? Very much like that. The buildings were silhouetted against the sky, and behind the sky there were all these flames, and the sky was red.15
Not all of B Company’s tanks got back across the river. Dad told me that, “Lee Miller’s tank got bogged down and they couldn’t get back (across the river) because the pontoons and the ferries were knocked out. So he had to blow it (his tank) up. He put in some kind of explosive that melted the barrel of the tank, so they (the Germans) couldn’t shoot it. And he had to swim back across the river, and it was cold too.” For this heroic action, Miller was awarded the Silver Star.
Once back on the western side of the Saar, the 90th and the 712th assumed a position of aggressive defense. In Belgium, English-speaking German soldiers, wearing uniforms of captured Americans roamed behind the American lines sabotaging and destroying American equipment, killing officers, and spreading confusion. All units had been alerted to be aware of such tactics. The 90th and the 712th were alerted to the possibility of German paratroopers being dropped behind their position. Check points were established.
Dad explained:
When the Germans attacked in the Battle of the Bulge, they sent men who could speak English and they came through the lines. They were killing American soldiers and taking their uniforms and taking their Jeeps.
And we had checkpoints set up, everywhere you went you had to ask what was the password. And they (the Germans) got so good, we had to change the password more than once a day. Like if the word might have been red beans and rice, it might have been beef stew or leg of lamb, it could have been anything but if the whole Army got the word, that was it. Well, plenty of them were captured.
Soldiers on guard duty were reluctant to shoot what appeared to be another American. Dad explained that guards would ask additional questions to those who did not know the password.
One of the questions they asked a guy, “Where are you from in the United States?” And the answer would be, like say New York and then he would give him a little fictitious question. Then he said “Where did you take your training?” And he (the German) said “I took it at Fort Hood.” Then he said “Have you ever been in Tennessee?” And the guy (German) would say, “Yeah,” and the guard would say, “Have you ever been in Texas?” And the German said, “No, I never did go to Texas.” The guard knew he was a German since Fort Hood is in Texas.
When Dad was on guard duty, he stopped an American GI and was about ready to shoot him. He didn’t know the password and didn’t answer some of the questions. Fortunately for that GI, by questioning him further, Dad became convinced that he truly was an American and he let him pass through the checkpoint.
> These pages: Cpl Gruntz’s copy of Patton’s Prayer. (Author’s collection)
It was also around this period that Brig.-Gen. Edward T. Williams, the artillery officer for the Third Army, gave Gen. Patton a demonstration of a new innovation for artillery shells, a radar operated proximity fuse. Standard artillery shells either exploded on contact with the ground or were detonated by a time device. This new fuse, however, installed in the nose of the projectile, exploded the shell by use of a radar beam which traveled from the fuse to the earth. The shell exploded when the returning ray marked the designated height above the ground. The full blast of the shell showered shrapnel on all ground troops within the blast perimeter. Patton was reportedly pleased, after learning of this new device. Aware of the developing situation in the Ardennes, he ordered that it not be used immediately. He wanted to maintain an element of surprise with the introduction of this new device and use it when battle conditions were most critical. Within weeks, such situations would present itself during the height of the Battle of the Bulge.16
Patton’s Prayer
One of the most memorable quotes from the movie Patton, was when a clergyman asked Gen. Patton, “I was interested to see a Bible by your bed. You actually find time to read it?” Patton replied, “I sure do. Every goddamn day.”
Patton’s flare for using profanity to punctuate his messages made his request for a prayer to be written seem somewhat paradoxical for his persona.
I recall Dad saying the prayer actually existed when he saw the movie in 1970 and I became intrigued by the true facts surrounding the Patton’s request of the Third Army’s Chaplain.
A Tank Gunner's Story: Gunner Gruntz of the 712th Tank Battalion Page 16