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

by Louis G. Gruntz

  On the night of January 5, 1945, the 712th and the 90th received orders to move to the Ardennes. Their rear guard mission was over. On the morning of January 6 they began the journey toward the Bulge.

  On December 26, the German westward advance had been stopped short of the Meuse River. Although units in Patton’s Third Army had punched a relief column through to Bastogne on December 26, 1944, the enemy still occupied the large amount of territory it had recaptured with its offensive. “The Germans were either pulling back or were stalled. For the moment it was a static struggle. Although the tide had not yet turned, the great offensive had been temporarily checked.”5

  The Allied plan to eliminate the German Bulge called for an attack force from the north and one from the south with both meeting at the town of Houffalize, which was in the center of the Bulge. Patton’s forces were also to attack north between Bastogne on the west and Wiltz on the east in order to reach St Vith. However, Patton’s plans had been stalled by snow, ice, and fierce resistance by the Germans.

  Monument at Café Schumann. (Author’s collection)

  In the period between New Year’s Day and January 4, 1945, the 26th Division and the Germans had been involved in a succession of bitter attacks and counterattacks in the area around Nothum, southwest of Wiltz. The crossroads, one kilometer north of Nothum, is known as Mon(t) Schumann; it was adjacent to a farmstead of several small buildings, the largest structure being an inn called Café Schumann. This crossroads, also identified by some as Café Schumann, was a main point on the road from Bastogne to Wiltz, and had been called the most important crossroads in the Ardennes.6

  A small area of high ground, just north of the village of Berle, was located between the Café Schumann crossroads and Hill 490. “Although this thickly wooded hill was only several hundred feet higher than the surrounding terrain, it commanded the entire area from Café Schumann to Wiltz. Besides its obvious strategic importance, Hill 490 was also an invaluable observation point. It had to be taken.”7

  Plaque on Café Schumann. (Author’s collection)

  On January 2nd the 26th Infantry Division attacked to secure Café Schumann and Hill 490 beyond. Although the 26th, the Yankee Division, had been able to capture Café Schumann, their attempts at Hill 490 were not successful. Despite several attacks to capture this high ground, counter-thrusts by the enemy forced the 26th to withdraw each time to its original positions. The Germans were well entrenched in the village of Doncols at the base of Hill 490. The battle for this real estate was a stalemate.

  The Germans were not only offering fierce resistance to Patton’s attacks, but were continually attacking Bastogne. With each stalled attack toward Houffalize and St Vith there was accompanying loss of men. This did not sit well with Patton, and he pessimistically wrote in his diary, “We can still lose this war”.8

  During the period January 5 to 8, the 26th Division maintained defensive positions in preparation for the arrival of 90th Infantry Division and the 712th Tank Battalion. Historian, John Toland, wrote:

  In the Ardennes not far from the battle-torn hills west of Wiltz an open jeep marked with three stars was slowly pushing through a seemingly endless column of trucks heading north. The trucks held doughs of the 90th Division, chilled to the bone, on their way to spearhead an attack through the tired Yankee Division (26th Infantry Division) to take Hill 490.

  In the jeep was Patton. The next day, January 9, he was to begin another general all-out attack…9

  It was reported that when the men of the 90th had recognized Patton and were leaning out of their trucks, cheering as he passed by.10 He waved, with confidence but realized that tomorrow many of these men, now cheering him, would be dead as a result of his orders to begin the attack.11

  On January 9, 1945, the 90th and the 712th launched an attack to the northwest against the southern flank of the German salient, the jump off area was from the line running northeast from Bavigne to the crossroads north of Nothum.

  The scene that awaited the 712th and the 90th was described in the History of the 712th Tank Battalion:

  Ahead lay steep, unrelated and snow covered hill masses, rising in instances to 2000 feet and manned by a well-equipped enemy with a better than average training and a fairly high state of morale. Successive defense lines were dug-in foxholes along the high ground and in the dense forests. […] The cold was numbing and pierced to the very marrow of the bones. Snow was everywhere, its whiteness setting off the large, green silhouettes of the Shermans (a whitewash preparation was not used until the middle of the month)….12

  Dad described the cold and unbearable weather conditions during January 1945:

  In the Battle of the Bulge, it was so cold plenty of them (soldiers) died from freezing, they froze to death, they couldn’t move and they’d freeze to death. It doesn’t take but a couple of minutes to kill you, especially if you are bleeding. I saw bodies stacked up like cord wood to be carried off to be buried.

  Dad also said it was so cold that the body heat of the crew and the engine heat caused condensation to form inside the tank. This condensation froze and eventually a layer of ice developed on the interior metal walls of the tank.13

  When the 90th and the 712th entered the Bulge, they were under constant artillery barrages and rocket barrages from German nebelwerfers, an artillery type weapon that fires explosive rockets (mortar shells) from a six-barreled mobile launcher in a 12 second period. The nebelwerfers were called “screaming meemies” by the Americans because the incoming rounds made a deafening high pitched screaming noise.

  That day, January 9, was a bleak day for the 712th Tank Battalion. Cpl Walter Hahn, Randolph’s driver recalls:

  We reached Nothum on January 9, 1945 about 4.00 AM. The drive to Nothum was long and very dangerous due to icy roads […] By that time Northum was already subject to heavy artillery fire. I parked our Jeep between two tanks who offered some cover from the shelling. Lt-Col. Randolph told me that he had a meeting with General Van Fleet and his staff in the house across the road.

  712th tankers in the Bulge. (Company B photograph)

  After this meeting Lt-Col. Randolph went to a Tank Destroyer and observed the surrounding area at Café Schumann for a planned attack that morning. After that he was crossing the road, to direct a company of tanks into Trentlehof, in the direction of Pommerlach north of Nothum when suddenly another heavy barrage of screaming meemies (Nebelwerfer) started. Hahn continued:

  At first I looked for cover under one of the tanks and I noticed that Lt-Col. Randolph took cover on the side of a Tank Destroyer. After the barrage was over […] I found Lt-Col. Randolph lying on the ground next to the Tank Destroyer […] He had been hit in his head by a piece of shrapnel…

  Randolph died instantly.

  Jim Cary, the commander of B Company, recalled, “Then we got into this wild march up to the Bulge, over roads that were icy […] It took us two days to get up there.”

  Cary continued:

  The next morning (January 9) we were coming out, I was leading the company, and the line of tanks was supposed to go up this road. The road curved, and as you curved around there was a road junction up ahead. […]

  Just as we were coming up this road, Col. Randolph was waiting, and I stopped and talked to him briefly. He expressed his pleasure that we had done so well in getting the tanks up there and said he was real happy about that. And that was the last time I saw him.14

  Col. Ken Reimers, Commanding Officer of the 343rd Field Artillery Battalion of the 90th, wrote:

  Becker-Dunrot (sic), 9 Jan.: […] The Division lost a courageous and skillful officer at Trentchof (sic) while the 359th was clearing out the town. Lt-Col. Randolph was commander of the 712th Tank Bn., attached to the Division. He was killed by a mortar barrage while directing a company of tanks into Trentchof (sic). He has been with us ever since Normandy and received the Silver Star the same time I did. I believe he was one of the bravest men I have ever known.15

  Major Kedrovsky, assumed com
mand of the 712th and continued with the planned operations. Kedrovsky was later officially assigned the command and promoted to the rank of Lt-Col.

  On that first day, tanks from B and C Company of the 712th made a flanking squeeze on the town of Berle and the neighboring village of Pommerloch. B Company on the right, or east flank attacked from the town of Nothum. Despite the German shells raining down upon the attack force, Berle was seized by the 90th and the 712th. Dad was in one of the B Company tanks that was moving out of Nothum toward Berle.

  Dr McConahey described the 90th Infantry Division’s entrance into the fighting at the Battle of the Bulge on January 9:

  We moved into position between the 6th Armored Division on the left and the 26th Infantry Division on our right, and got set for a surprise attack at dawn on January 9. For many days the 26th had been battering against crack enemy troops on the southern flank of the salient without progress. They assured us that the 90th would be lucky to advance 100 yards.

  At dawn our boys jumped off, and by dark they had driven the Germans back 2½ miles. We caught them by surprise, for so successful had been our secret move that the enemy did not know a fresh division had come into the line.16

  Jack the Russian

  Dad’s first encounter with a panzerfaust in Sainte-Suzanne proved to be disastrous, resulting in the death of Sgt Willinger and the wounding of three others including Dad. Dad knew it was only a question of time before he had another encounter with a German anti-tank weapon. That encounter came during the Battle of the Bulge and with a most unlikely tank mate, a Russian.

  Lt-Col. Vladimir Kedrovsky. (Company B photograph)

  When the 90th and the 712th was engaged in defensive action at the rear of the Bastogne relief column, Lt-Col. Vladimir Kedrovsky of the 712th had gone either to Paris or some other location in the far rear. During that trip to the rear he met a Russian boy, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, who had been liberated from a Nazi slave camp in France.

  “He was a refugee. In other words they took him away from home when he was a kid. When they (Germans) went through these little towns they took them off to work and do things in Germany. The Germans were ruthless, they took mother and fathers and shot them. When we liberated the town in France where he was working, he wanted to go fight the Germans, he hated them,” Dad explained.

  Kedrovsky was of Russian descent; his grandparents emigrated from Russia to America. The Russian kid was from the same village as Kedrovsky’s grandparents. Kedrovsky took this Russian kid under his wings and let him travel back to the unit with him. At first he stayed with the kitchen staff but he wanted to fight with the Americans and he wanted to kill Germans.

  Among the standing: Bob Kellner, Les Vink, John Essenburg, Francis James, Bob Vutech. Crouching: Floyd McBride. Behind the Nazi Flag: Jack the Russian, John Cavalieri. (Company B photograph)

  Kedrovsky let him ride in one of the B Company tanks. That tank happened to be Dad’s. “We were short of men, so he got in the tank with us, his name was Jack.” He became known to the members of the 712th as “Jack the Russian”.

  As Dad and I overlooked the terrain north of Berle, Dad continued his explanation of what occurred on January 9, 1944.

  In the battle out here, we were running toward a gang of woods and the Germans tried to surrender. The Germans were desperate to get out, they were trapped and they came out. The Russian refugee was in the tank with me.

  He was riding in the assistant driver’s seat, located directly in front of Dad’s gunner seat. The assistant driver’s position is also equipped with a 30 caliber machine gun. Dad continued:

  (Jack) started shooting them because he hated them. They ran back and they wouldn’t surrender. So I pulled him off the machine gun.

  And then I had to fire a shot into the woods, because we were told they had big stuff… big guns in the woods. We were right out in the field close to the woods. And just as I fired, a (German) was firing a bazooka at me. And when I fired, I hit him first. The German bazooka shell went up in the air… it went straight up in the air. I would have gotten hit by another bazooka.

  The battle had raged most of the day. As the tanks from B and C Company of the 712th captured Berle and Pommerloch, a platoon of tanks from B Company positioned itself on the small hill north of Berle. The enemy that had stymied the 26th Division fell to the 90th and the 712th.

  Doncols, Luxembourg

  Dad was in one of the platoon of tanks that took positions on a hill just north of Berle. Their position was just on the edge of wooded area that looked out on the open field that had to be traversed to capture the town of Doncols. Lieutenant Mesker, the new replacement lieutenant, was commanding that platoon and was in the tank next to Dad; also in Mesker’s tank was a another replacement a young corporal that Dad befriended. “He wasn’t there that long, a nice little guy his name was (Charles) Cragg. He was in a tank with the new lieutenant (Mesker) that just came in as a replacement.”

  The original members of the 712th rarely became acquainted with the new replacements in other tank crews. The men of the 712th that had trained together at Fort Benning, Camp Gordon, and Fort Jackson knew each other, but when they arrived on the battlefields in France, they were dispersed to various spots, sometimes miles apart. Once in battle, only on occasions were various platoons congregated in one spot long enough for the various crews to talk to their friends assigned to other crews. But, Dad did get to know new replacements assigned to his platoon. Cpl Charles Cragg was one such replacement. He was a gunner, like Dad.

  Mesker was a youthful, brash replacement lieutenant that had come to the battalion just before it entered Dillingen. Mesker was the lieutenant that the infantry colonel referred to as not having any sense, but plenty of guts after he rolled his tank up to the front of the pillbox. Jim Cary, later told me that he remembered Mesker quite well.17 Cary said that when a replacement officer was needed, he normally would have recommended one of the company sergeants for a battlefield commission in order to fill the empty slot. But he had only just returned to the battalion himself and was now in a command of a different company.18 Being unfamiliar with the sergeants in B Company, Cary selected Mesker from the replacement officer corps. During the time Mesker was in B Company, Cary said that he often warned Mesker against standing too high in the turret, as he was often apt to do.

  When Dad’s tank was outside of Nothum, the flanking units had not kept pace with B Company’s advance on Berle and the Germans attacked the flanks of Berle in an attempt to recapture it and also recapture Nothum. Lieutenant Mesker was standing in the turret of his tank while Cragg and the other tank crew members were inside the tank. Dad continued, “We were surrounded. They (a German sniper) shot at him, the lieutenant.” The shot was fired as Mesker was turning in the turret and hit him laterally across his stomach. Being wounded, he either dove or fell back into the tank. “He says to the kid, ‘A sniper just shot at me, see if you can see him.’ And that poor kid stuck his head up (out of the turret) and he got shot right between the eyes.” The fate that Dad had feared being in Mesker’s tank in Dillingen had now befallen Cpl Cragg. Dad was angered, as it was one of those deaths that did not have to happen. Even recounting this story fifty years later, Dad was upset with Cragg’s needless death.

  Jim Cary described other events that day.

  Meanwhile, we continued down the road and got maybe a mile out of town. My sense of distance is very poor because we were moving very slowly at times; I’d say we got at least three-quarters of a mile and the attack bogged down. They were very deeply entrenched in strong positions.

  There were two platoons on the line, one commanded by Sgt Schmidt and the other by Lt Mesker; Lt Vutech’s platoon was in reserve. At about 5:00 p.m., the company kitchen and the gasoline truck was set up in a shattered building. Cary told Sgt Schmidt to send his tanks back one at a time to get food and gasoline. He then gave Lt Mesker the same instructions.

  As Cary was getting back in his tank he was wounded.
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  The fragment didn’t go all the way through and was hanging out of the flesh. At first I thought it took my foot off. That’s what it felt like; it seemed to me that the whole shell hit my right foot and exploded. You had no time to think, and I just dived off the tank to the ground on the other side. I looked down, and I was very happy to see I still had a foot, and I was lying there, thinking about all this, when the heads started popping out of my tank looking around, wondering what happened to me.

  I knew I was finished, so I got in the bow gunner’s place in the tank and started back. We ran into Lieutenant Vutech; he was bringing his platoon up, and I told him what the situation was and turned the company over to him. I went back to the aid station, and about two minutes later they brought Mesker in; he had been shot across the stomach. That was my last day in combat.19

  Lt Vutech assumed command of B Company that afternoon.

  The evening of January 9 was one of the few times that Dad did get to see other members of the Company that he had trained with. In accordance with Cary’s orders, Dad and other crews were rotated to the rear area for a hot meal and to be re-supplied with ammunition and gasoline. During the time that Dad’s tank was rotated back to the rear kitchen Dad saw David Dickson Jr., whom he trained with back in the States.

  “Dickson was a comedian. He was a bartender from Philadelphia.” During basic training, Dad and Dickson had a running gag. “We used to kid one another, he’d say, ‘When they bury you, I’m going to piss on your grave.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, well when they bury you they better bury you face down cause I don’t want to piss on your face.’” That evening, there was no kidding because they both knew the battle that lay ahead. Dad related what Dickson said to him that evening. “He told me ‘Louie, if I make it past tomorrow, I am going to come see you in New Orleans after the war is over.’” Dickson must have had a premonition. He was killed the next morning.

  After dinner and refueling the tank, Dad’s tank returned to the hill on the north side of Berle and Pommerloch to maintain that position during the night.