Grunts

by John C. McManus

  A couple blocks away, in another house, Private First Class Kenneth Myers’s ears were assaulted by the overpowering explosions of enemy tank shells slamming into the building. “Bazooka men of all kinds moved to the windows and doors, firing right into the tanks of the enemy.” Amid the racket, he could hear the screams of “soldiers and buddies with a half an arm or leg torn off, yelling for medics.” Some were lying outside, in fields or along the roads. Some had been mercilessly crushed by the enemy tanks but were somehow alive “with half of their body left.” Myers saw two German machine gunners and shot them to death.14

  Elsewhere, Private Hugh Burger, the man in I Company, 23rd Infantry, who had killed an enemy soldier by stabbing him to death in the Krinkelter Wald, was now standing next to the second-floor window of a house, manning a machine gun with his buddy Private First Class Willie Hagan. They watched as an enemy tank cautiously rolled forward. The two made for an odd but synergistic pair—the sort of impromptu team that infantry combat often produces. Hagan was an irreverent career soldier in his thirties. To the eighteen-year-old, Bible-reading Burger, Hagan seemed impossibly old to be in combat. Hagan was on the gun and Burger was his loader.

  All at once, a shell from a U.S. tank destroyer pierced the armor of the German tank, setting it afire. In the next moment, five German soldiers came into view alongside the burning tank. As their sergeant paused to give orders, Hagan opened fire. “I thought he would surely burn the barrel up before he stopped firing, but not a Kraut got up,” Burger later wrote. Hagan turned to Burger and, in an almost clinical tone, said: “I got every one of the sonofabitches.” They had also alerted any other Germans in the vicinity to their presence, so they decided to displace to the ground floor of the house. This was a smart tactic for any machine-gun team in this environment and, in this case, it probably saved their lives. “We were making our way down when a tank fired into the wall knocking it out, upsetting our machine gun and showering us with chips of bricks.” This was the only shot, though, and they made it downstairs.

  Later, the tank pulled into the house’s backyard and sat there, its engine idling menacingly. The crew inside was probably searching for targets. Hagan and Burger found a bazooka and some ammunition. The sight for the bazooka was gone but the weapon still worked. Hagan loaded. Burger snapped off a shot. “The projectile hit the ground and skipped over the tank.” Having missed so badly, Private First Class Burger felt like running away. His confidence was down. He was terrified of the tank’s retaliation. Before he could run, though, Hagan tapped him on the shoulder, indicating he had loaded another round into the bazooka. In that nanosecond, Burger’s attitude changed. Instead of panicking, he forgot his natural fear because of Hagan’s quiet, unspoken determination. If Hagan could keep fighting, then so can I, Burger figured. It was a classic example of the unspoken strength that infantry soldiers drew from one another under the most harrowing of circumstances. Burger aimed, fired, and scored a direct hit. “Hot metal sprayed like a cutting torch.” Filled with the exhilaration that often overtook men in the immediate aftermath of such an impersonal kill, Hagan jumped up and roared: “You got him! You knocked hell out of the sonofabitch!”

  This exhilaration soon gave way to horror. A hatch opened on the burning tank and a badly wounded crewman jumped out, collapsed, and lay writhing in the street. One of his hands was blown off and his face looked “like fresh ground meat.” Hagan and Burger carried him into the house, put him on a cot, and tried to help him. The man was delirious and terrified. He kept screaming at the top of his lungs. Neither of the Americans spoke any German. For all they knew, the man was calling to his comrades to come get him. The wounded crewman simply would not shut up. What had started out as a mission of mercy turned into yet another moment of self-preservation. “He will bring every Kraut here in town in here on us,” Hagan said. “If I stop that noise, you won’t ever tell, will you, Burger?” The eighteen-year-old promised he would not. Hagan killed the man (in later years, Burger could not bring himself to say how his friend carried out the grisly business). In the shattered house, Burger hung his head to pray. The two men never spoke of this incident again. But, for Burger, the close-quarters killing brought back haunting memories of his own experience in the forest, when he had stabbed a young German to death. “Shooting a man from a distance is different [from] using a knife. I washed my hands over and over but I could still smell his blood.”

  A few blocks away from Burger, Sergeant John Savard, a Minnesotan, was also playing a cat-and-mouse game with the German tanks. He stepped out the door of one house and “found myself looking almost down the gun barrel of a Mark IV tank. I dived back inside and down the cellar as part of the building exploded. A bazooka team knocked out the tank and we killed the crew as they emerged.”

  In the attic of another house, Staff Sergeant Merrill Huntzinger, a machine-gun squad leader, was fighting as a rifleman alongside one of his section leaders, a man named Eddie. The two men were spread out on either side of the attic. Both had a panoramic view of the streets that led to the house. About fifty yards away, they saw dozens of German soldiers, augmented by a tank, apparently waiting to attack. Sergeant Huntzinger heard the tank engine start up. “Then the tank hatch opened. Someone stood up, took a quick look around, threw out an empty . . . shell casing, and I popped him. Then I opened up on crew members who were outside the tank.” Huntzinger ran over to Eddie’s position and saw him “dropping Germans left and right.” The sergeant was worried that the Germans now knew their position and suggested they vacate the attic. “The hell with ’em,” Eddie replied, “keep killing the bastards.” Staff Sergeant Huntzinger could have ordered Eddie to leave but, like Private First Class Burger in the other house, he was emboldened by his partner.

  No sooner did this thought flash through Huntzinger’s mind than a tank shell hit the roof of the attic, close to Eddie’s perch. The explosion staggered Huntzinger, making him feel “like my head was the size of a pumpkin. My ears were ringing, my head was thumping, my forehead and face felt like it had been sandblasted.” The attic was enveloped in thick dusty smoke. Eddie lay unconscious. As Staff Sergeant Huntzinger tried to revive him, another shell exploded, knocking the sergeant down, giving him a bloody nose. With an act of sheer will, he picked himself up and rushed to the window he had manned a moment earlier. “Germans were kneeling outside our building directly beneath me.” He aimed his rifle and fired. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel.” This rifle fire, in addition to a well-placed grenade, prevented the German soldiers from assaulting Huntzinger’s shattered house. A moment later, he heard a massive explosion as an American tank destroyer scored a direct hit on the German tank, setting it afire. By now, Eddie was barely conscious and moaning that he could not see. “He was seeping blood from several spots on his face and fluid was seeping from his eyeballs.” Sergeant Huntzinger got Eddie out of the attic, to the medics, but Eddie’s sight was gone forever.

  In the heart of Rocherath, Lieutenant George Adams and several members of his 2nd Platoon, C Company, 38th Infantry, were holed up in a two-story house belonging to the Drosch family. On the street outside they saw eleven German tanks approaching, with infantry riding aboard. One of Adams’s squad leaders, Sergeant Richard Shinefelt, fired several rifle grenades at them. The grenades did no damage to the tanks, but they reaped a grim harvest among the infantry. Time and again, the Germans in the twin villages attacked with infantrymen riding aboard tanks, making the foot soldiers ideal targets in such a contested, confined environment. They would have been much better advised to dismount their infantry and place them alongside the tanks, as protection from bazooka men (similar to what the Americans did at Aachen). The vaunted reputation of the SS aside, this revealed an amateurish ignorance among the commanders and troops of the 12th SS Panzer Division. The Americans made them pay by slaughtering the infantry soldiers with impunity.

  Bereft of infantry support, the tanks rolled past the Drosch house. Adams’s men showered them wit
h bazooka shots but did no damage. At one point, several of the tanks stopped and unleashed three or four shots into the house. Masonry, walls, and stairs collapsed. In the recollection of Lieutenant Adams, “visibility was nil in the clouds of stifling smoke.” The tanks moved on to points unknown. For a time, Adams and his men left the house, but they returned when the dust settled. Eventually, they were all that stood in the way of an enemy tank-infantry attack that threatened to overrun C Company’s command post. Adams and his platoon sergeant, Rudolf Kraft, grabbed bazookas and climbed into what was left of the attic. Here was the ultimate infantry hands-on leadership. This platoon leader and platoon sergeant did not order others to do this dangerous job. They took it upon themselves and they did it together.

  They both loaded and, at the count of three, pulled their respective triggers. Adams’s misfired. Kraft scored a hit on the bogey wheels of the tank. Adams threw his defective bazooka aside and reloaded Kraft’s tube. The sergeant fired a second shot that hit the turret of the enemy tank. The lieutenant bent over to reload. As he did so, two tank shells hit the attic, in quick succession. “The first round piled the wall, ceiling, and rubble on top of the two men so that the second which entered the attic and burst did no damage,” a post-battle report later detailed. The tanks pumped round after round into the disintegrating house. As they did so, Adams, Kraft, and the other men simply took shelter in the basement alongside the terrified Drosch family. Between shots, the Americans went upstairs and manned their positions. The standoff benefited the Americans since they were the defenders.15

  The problem for German tank crews in the villages was one of movement versus imminent danger. Their mission was to seize the towns quickly, yet they had to be wary of any forward movement because death could come from any direction. The ruined houses and rubble-strewn streets offered ideal cover for American tanks, tank destroyers, and bazooka-toting infantrymen. A tank crew could find themselves perfectly safe on one corner while their platoon mates a block away were in a kill zone. The streets around the Krinkelt church exemplified this unpleasant reality. As Staff Sergeant Willi Fischer’s Mark V Panther neared the church, he watched American antitank fire hit the tank ahead of his. The commander managed to get out but his loader was cut down by American rifle fire as he tried to exit the wrecked tank. Fischer glanced in another direction and noticed another Panther in trouble. “Brodel’s tank [was] burning slightly. Brodel could be seen sitting in the turret—lifeless. Ahead of me on the road, all tanks were shot out of action, some of them still ablaze.”

  Fischer gingerly withdrew his tank, dodging one near miss from an American antitank gun. A second shot hit his Panther’s side and its track. Nobody was hurt, but the tread came off, miring the Panther uselessly in the mud. Fischer got out. Americans were still in the nearby buildings, shooting at anyone who moved in the streets. “Some of these killed our comrade Bandow . . . shooting him through his heart . . . right in front of my eyes.” Nearby, another German tank commander, Sergeant Gerhard Engel, was gloomily looking at the destroyed remnants of several Panthers when, “at that moment a single Panther tank approaches . . . and, at a distance of a mere 100 metres [sic], turns into a flaming torch.” In just a few hours, his company was almost totally destroyed. Near the church alone they lost five tanks. The Americans lost three Shermans and several other vehicles there.16

  As the battle raged, houses changed hands several times. Some men, from both sides, were captured, liberated, then captured again. Infantrymen learned to take shelter in cellars. Tankers figured out how best to use the buildings and limited fields of fire to their advantage. According to one report, the Sherman crewmen “proved themselves adept at the art of waylaying and killing ‘Tigers.’ From well-camouflaged positions, by expert maneuvering and stalking, tank after tank of the enemy forces were destroyed by flank and tail shots.”

  Maneuvering for such kill shots took nerves of steel, alertness, and, most of all, patience. At times this led to significant tension between the tank crewmen and the dogfaces. The U.S. armor crewmen knew that the German tanks had better guns and thicker armor. They could not afford to go toe to toe with them. The consequences of failure were horrifying. The average tank carried 150 gallons of fuel and over one hundred shells, thus making an ideal tinder-box. If their tank was hit by an armor-piercing round from an enemy tank, they would probably be blasted, shredded, concussed, or, in all too many cases, burned. For these reasons, the crewmen were trained to employ extreme caution, especially within the confined environment of towns. “Some doughboys [infantry] don’t seem to realize that the field of vision of a tanker is very restricted,” a Sherman crewman commented. “Except for the tank commander, the crew have only a narrow slit to look through. This led the tanker to be a bit cautious. We tankers did not lack physical or moral courage. But there were times when courage simply wasn’t the answer.”

  Most of the infantrymen did not appreciate, or understand, the kind of dangers the tank crewmen faced. Dogfaces knew that theirs was the most dangerous job. They had no protection except personal weapons and the clothes on their backs. So, in their view, the tankers were sheltered nicely behind several inches of armor, with the added security of a cannon and machine guns. As a result, they expected the tankers to always come to their aid, no matter the circumstances, just as a fellow infantryman might. “We in the infantry are screwed without you,” an infantry officer once wrote in an article intended for tankers. In so doing he adeptly summed up the infantryman’s mind-set. “You have to realize that your ‘protection’ means jack**** to me as an infantry soldier.”

  If the tankers did not provide the support that infantrymen, in their necessarily narrow view, expected, then trouble soon followed. Sergeant Hunt of the 9th Infantry blamed the loss of his company at Lausdell to the lack of tank support. He claimed that during the battle he only saw one tank. “That tanker stopped at my foxhole, looked down in the valley, saw the German tanks, spun about, and took off for the hills.”

  At one point during the fighting in Rocherath, Lieutenant Adams saw a German tank parked at a crossroads and asked a nearby tank destroyer crew to shoot at it. The destroyer’s commander claimed that he could not see the German tank through his telescopic sights. Adams even offered to look through the sights himself and take the shot. The tankers demurred. Meanwhile, one of the infantrymen, a sergeant, grew so exasperated with this dialogue that he picked up a .30-caliber machine gun and took matters into his own hands. According to a unit post-battle report, the sergeant “draped a belt of ammunition around his neck and walked toward the enemy tank firing his machine gun from the hip.” He did no damage to the tank, and he somehow escaped unscathed. Another time, Adams tried to get a Sherman tank crew to fire on a column of approaching troops. In the confusion of darkness, the tank commander could not tell if the troops were German or American, so he refused to shoot. As it turned out, they were soldiers from E Company of the 38th Infantry. “The tanker probably saved a friendly unit from suffering unnecessary casualties,” Adams later admitted.

  When a German tank closed to within a block of Sergeant Joseph Kiss’s infantry squad, he ran to a nearby tank destroyer and ordered the crew to knock out the enemy tank. They refused, claiming they needed authorization from one of their own officers. “But we need you right now,” Sergeant Kiss pleaded. Still they refused. He was so livid that he reported them to headquarters for refusing to obey orders. He also called them “yellow and other things.” None of this had any effect.

  Captain Halland Hankel, commander of M Company, 38th Infantry, had an ugly run-in with a Sherman crew during the fighting. Supported by a platoon of infantry soldiers, a lone German tank—Hankel claimed it was a Tiger—ended up perched right outside of his command post. Hankel’s machine gunners and some service troops dispersed the enemy infantry troops with accurate fire. A Sherman tank was parked twenty-five feet away from the Tiger, in position for a perfect broadside shot against this vulnerable flank of the behemoth. The captain
was standing right next to the Sherman and he expected to hear the friendly tank’s main gun open up. Instead, he saw “the Sherman tank crew dismounting with well-practiced, precision drill, and explaining in terrified gesticulations that their armor was no match for the Tiger and that it would be suicide to stay in their tank.” The captain had little sympathy for them. In his opinion, the crew was failing to do their job. He attempted to get the crew back in their tank “by physical persuasion.” They resisted the unfamiliar infantry captain, refusing to get back in.

  Meanwhile, other armored crewmen demonstrated more resolve, and this was typical. As Captain Hankel argued with the Sherman crew, an unseen American tank destroyer shot at the Tiger, missing it and hitting an unoccupied American jeep and trailer. The Tiger rolled forward. At that exact moment, the regiment’s supply officer (S4) turned a corner in his own jeep and came face-to-face with the German tank. The officer and his driver ejected themselves “as if by jet propulsion” just as the tank ran over the jeep and completely flattened it.

  The Tiger’s gun was apparently damaged because it did not shoot. In the next few moments, as the tank flailed around, bumping into telephone poles, attempting to escape, it came under renewed assault from the unseen tank destroyer, an antitank gun crew, and a bazooka team. The destroyer scored a fatal hit, the Tiger bursting into flames. This was a rather typical instance. For every tank crew that refused pleas for help from the infantrymen, others remained on the job, helping in their own deliberate way. Together with the infantry soldiers, they all inflicted the proverbial death by a thousand cuts on the superior German tanks, peppering them with main-gun rounds, antitank shells, bazooka rockets, grenades, and even small-arms fire. Combined arms reigned supreme. It was rather like a pack of wildcats attacking an elephant. At the twin villages, it worked very well. For nearly three critical days, they held the Germans off in this fashion, wrecking their timetable completely.17