4
BLOOD BROTHERS
Men are true comrades only when each is ready to
give up his life for the other, without reflection
and without thought of personal loss.
—J. GLENN GRAY
The Channel crossing took the better part of a day and night, as the LST's cruising speed was only ten miles an hour. LSTs were 328 feet long by 50 feet wide; each ship could carry twenty Shermans below in its hull or tank deck, chained in place to guard against rough seas. Navy crews had given LSTs the grim nickname of “Large Slow Targets”—but by the time of the 761st's crossing, the German guns at Normandy had long been cleared, and the most troubling obstacle was rough weather. The LSTs had flat bottoms to enable them to pull right up on the beach, but that meant they didn't plow through the waves as most boats did—they rolled. Leonard Smith was violently seasick.
Early on the morning of October 10, a weak-legged Smith, William McBurney, Preston McNeil, and most of the 761st crowded onto the upper decks of their LSTs to catch their first sight of the coast of France. Typically, it was raining and foggy. They were facing that section of the Normandy coast known by the code name it was given for D-Day—Omaha Beach. The men of the battalion knew, in a general sense, about the Allied invasion, but it was something else entirely for them to view the coast's sheer cliffs. The five-mile-long strip of sand below those cliffs had witnessed the highest casualties on D-Day: 55,000 American soldiers had landed in successive waves beginning at 6 A.M.; within the space of a few short hours, 3,000 had been killed or seriously wounded.
As the 761st drove their tanks down the ramps of the LSTs onto the sand, they stood up in the hatches, looking around them. Though the casualties from D-Day had quickly been cleared, damaged equipment had not—the beach was littered with tangles of barbed wire and burned-out vehicles. What struck William McBurney most were the Sherman tanks. Very few of the specially modified Shermans of the 741st and 743rd Tank Battalions, equipped for the invasion with canvas floats and propellers, had made it onto land. The majority of those that did had been devastated by mines and artillery fire, overturned like so many toys.
McBurney and the others weren't given much time to contemplate these ruins. The beach around them was a hub of activity: Ships were coming in and cargoes being unloaded on all sides. In the four months since the June 6 invasion, the Allies had converted the beaches of Normandy into highly efficient ports, processing the supplies, equipment, and replacement troops for the British and American armies in Europe—handling more cargo per day than did the port of New York City. The 761st was quickly guided off the beach by MPs to make room for the next round of landing craft.
They drove thirty miles west to a temporary camp in a field near the village of Les Pieux. The roads they traveled had been hotly contested in the fighting from D-Day through the August breakout. They passed ruined buildings, broken walls, trees demolished by high explosives. Even Leonard Smith found himself sobered by such sights. It was one thing to be a soldier far from the front in training, and another to be crossing recent battlefields and viewing the aftermath. But the damage was at one remove from him, like the setting of a movie. He was, he thought, exactly where he wanted to be. He was the hero of the war movie he'd been playing in his mind ever since America first joined the fight.
IN THE FIELD AT LES PIEUX, Lt. Col. Paul Bates received the 761st's final assignment for combat. The battalion was ordered to fight beside the 26th Infantry Division of the XII Corps of Patton's Third Army. The Third Army consisted of a quarter of a million men, a massive striking force divided—as per Army rules of organization—into two “corps,” XII and XX Corps. A corps was a tactical headquarters responsible for positioning troops in the field: Patton's XII and XX Corps at the time supervised the placement of five “divisions” apiece, each division containing approximately 15,000 soldiers.
Most American GIs in World War II served in divisions. The 761st did not: It was part of a smaller manpower pool consisting of battalion-sized (500- to 1,000-man) units, including engineer, field artillery, tank destroyer, and tank battalions. These separate battalions were floating entities designed to be assigned to an Army corps; the corps, in turn, would attach them to whichever of its component divisions most needed their specialized services at a given moment. The separate battalions were rotated from corps to corps and division to division, and came to refer to themselves—in typical GI-speak—as “bastard battalions.” In theory, the separate battalion pool provided for greater flexibility and adaptability to changing battlefield conditions; in practice, particularly for armored units, it often proved disastrous.
The separate tank battalions consisted, as did the 761st, of 700 men, 56 medium tanks, and 17 light tanks. The corps headquarters (in their case, XII Corps) would assign the battalion to the headquarters of an infantry division (the 26th Infantry), which would deploy the tanks as it saw fit to aid infantrymen in blasting through enemy lines. The most devastating flaw in this deployment of tank battalions was the marked inferiority of the M-4 Sherman: The U.S. tanks simply lacked sufficient armor for frontal attacks against fixed defensive positions. A second grave flaw was placing tank battalions under the direct command of officers who had no training with, and knew very little about the strengths and weaknesses of, the M-4 General Sherman tank.
Two types of American armored units fought in World War II: the separate tank battalion and the armored division. Armored divisions were vast organizations containing between 250 and 400 tanks; between 10,000 and 15,000 men; sizable artillery, engineer, ordnance, and quartermaster contingents; and their own highly trained squads of infantrymen (known as “armored infantry”). Armored division commanders were thoroughly versed in the uses of Sherman tanks; armored infantry had usually trained for more than a year to fight in close concert with the vehicles. By contrast, most infantry division commanders—the officers put in direct command of the separate tank battalions—knew nothing about tanks. Separate tank battalions had very little training in fighting with infantrymen, and infantrymen had even less training in fighting with tanks. Infantrymen and tankers had to learn—or fail to learn—to work together in the hardest way possible, under fire.
ON OCTOBER 22, the 761st left camp at Les Pieux to begin their four-hundred-mile drive to the battlefront. The division to which they'd been assigned, the 26th Infantry, was already engaged in tough fighting there. The 761st traveled due east for six days, moving through cities and towns liberated from the Germans back in August by the tanks of Patton's 4th and 6th Armored Divisions. The battalion's road march had the feeling more of a victory parade than of a journey into the heart of war. The weather was mild. The men leaned out of their hatches, taking in the sights. When local citizens heard that American tanks were passing through, they crowded into the streets and cried out from upper-story windows, cheering wildly, tossing flowers, waving flags. One town even set up a brass band. The tankers heartily waved back—in particular, of course, at the pretty young women—having a grand old time. Though they hadn't yet fired a single shot, they felt like heroes.
Pop Gates always made time to talk to Leonard Smith when the battalion camped at night. Gates didn't know why it was, exactly, that he continued bothering with Smith: After Smith's troubles throughout training, he should long since have written him off. There was something about Smith, however, that got to him, something he liked and even admired—a stubborn willfulness, naïveté, and a rare spark of life. He was convinced that Smith was going to do something foolish and get himself killed, and convinced, too, that this was one of the last things he wanted to see happen. Every night he lectured Smith with variations on a single theme: “What we're going into, this isn't a movie. They'll be shooting live bullets at you.” Smith had always keenly felt the lack of a father and appreciated Pop's concern. But no amount of talk or concern, however well-meaning, could dissipate the grand adventure tales that had been his principal solace from the age of eight, looking up at the dime-store model planes h
anging by strings from his bedroom ceiling.
The 761st reached their final destination, the town of St. Nicholas-de-Port in the French province of Lorraine, on October 28. The battalion had been instructed to wait there indefinitely. The weather had turned to rain and sleet. The field that was their designated bivouac (or camp) area was a mud hole reminiscent of Camp Claiborne. They were less than twenty miles from the Third Army's front lines, and they could hear the sound of heavy artillery like the rumble of thunder in the distance. Even to the group's more sober-minded members, however, like Preston McNeil and Warren Crecy, the war seemed remote; it was a hypothetical test the young men fully believed they'd pass. Some of the soldiers wasted no time in checking out St. Nicholas—where, like many young American GIs away from home for the first time, they visited the local brothel. Leonard Smith went along with his friend Willie Devore, entranced by the rich chocolate candy that was served, as well as by the women.
THE MAJOR AMERICAN OFFENSIVE for which the 761st unwittingly was waiting—Patton's upcoming attack on the Siegfried Line—was the biggest show going in the European Theater of Operations in late October 1944. Allied forces throughout Europe were at a standstill. Montgomery's British troops were still regrouping after the large-scale failure, in mid-September, of the attempted land and airborne invasion of Germany through Holland known as Operation Market Garden. The Ninth U.S. Army was meeting intense resistance in its drive to breach Holland's southern border. The First French and Seventh U.S. Armies had landed on the Mediterranean coast of France in August and fought their way north, only to be halted by the Vosges Mountains. The First U.S. Army had crossed the Belgian border and captured the German city of Aachen, but had since become mired in a disastrous campaign to clear the Hurtgen Forest. Patton's Third Army, starved of supplies in Lorraine, had thus far made only limited advances toward Germany.
Eisenhower had finally agreed to send the Third Army the supplies and reinforcements Patton had been demanding (first impatiently, then irascibly, then furiously) for two months. The 761st numbered among these reinforcements. Patton intended for his major attack on the German border to begin, depending on weather conditions, between November 5 and 8. The attack was originally supposed to take place in conjunction with renewed assaults by the First and Ninth U.S. Armies—but due to troop-resupply problems they would be delayed in their part until at least mid-November. Patton was only too happy to go it alone. He saw himself as a man of destiny; he was fiercely determined that the Third Army's early-November drive “make real history” and end the war.
In its simplest terms, Patton's campaign would entail a push by the ten divisions of his XII and XX Corps in an east-northeast direction across the German border (approximately forty miles distant) into the Saar industrial region. The Saar, historically a coal-mining district, stood as one of Germany's most important industrial centers. With his combined force of tanks, infantry, artillery, and fighter-bombers, Patton intended to swiftly crack the Siegfried Line (just miles beyond the border) in the Saar, then to continue on to establish a bridgehead over the Rhine River and seize the key cities of Mainz, Frankfurt, and Darmstadt. From there he hoped to drive across the open Rhine plains as far as possible, even to Berlin.
The obstacles facing this grand plan (known as the “Saar Campaign”) were manifold. In its earliest phase—the drive across Lorraine to reach the German border—they were, in fact, formidable. The Lorraine province was composed of rolling farm country, with a gradual slope upward from east to west: Patton's troops would generally be attacking uphill. The terrain was further punctuated by a number of densely wooded ridges providing wide vantage points and ample cover to entrenched defenders. The Germans, determined to defend their homeland to the death, had massively fortified the area during the Third Army's enforced stall from September to early November with roadblocks and demolitions, minefields, pillboxes and machine-gun nests, and tank traps covered with artillery and Panzerfausts. But by far the greatest obstacle was the weather. The Lorraine province had experienced heavy rains throughout the fall. American air support was grounded. As October turned to November, near-constant rain produced the greatest flooding the region had witnessed in a generation. The fields became an ocean of mud, reducing off-road travel to a minimum—and rendering tanks more vulnerable to fire-covered roadblocks, tank traps, and artillery.
AT ST. NICHOLAS-DE-PORT, the men fell into a routine, each day preparing their tanks for battle as they had trained to do at Claiborne and Hood, oiling and re-oiling the guns. The Sherman tank held a massive amount of material in its cramped interior—fire extinguishers, blackout lamps, goggles, safety belts, helmets, a canvas bucket, a tarpaulin, a crank, an ax, a crowbar, a pick, a shovel, a sledgehammer, a track wrench, a track jack and fixtures, a radio, six periscopes, flexible nozzles, and more—and the men were constantly testing equipment and making minor repairs as needed. The maintenance teams of each company worked to attach newly issued “Duckbills” to the Shermans—metal track-extenders designed to distribute the tanks' weight more evenly to prevent them from bogging down in the mud. Drivers went on practice runs in the fields to get used to the feel of them. Despite the cold, driving rain, the men were in good spirits.
This routine was suddenly interrupted on November 2, when the entire battalion was called to assemble in the field in a semicircle formation. A grave-faced Lt. Col. Paul Bates directed the men to stand at attention. Several jeeps full of MPs armed with .50-caliber machine guns pulled up. A three-star general jumped out of one of the vehicles, and Bates gave him a hand in stepping up onto the hood of a half-track. Looking out over the assembled battalion stood George Patton, the Third Army's commanding general.
Though the men wore raincoats against the light drizzle, Patton was without a coat. He was shorter than William McBurney had imagined him to be from newsreel footage, and his voice had a higher pitch. He directed the men to stand at ease. His words were recorded by Trezzvant Anderson, a reporter assigned to the 761st: “Men, you are the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are, so long as you go up there and kill those kraut sonsabitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all, your race is looking forward to your success. Don't let them down, and, damn you, don't let me down!”
Patton then stepped down and more quietly addressed the group closest to him. (He had gotten in trouble for giving similar exhortations to his men in Sicily, but continued doing so.) He told them, “This is war. I want you to start shooting and keep shooting. Shoot everything you see. Whenever you see a German, if it's male or female, eight to eighty years old, you kill them, because they'll kill you.”
Despite Patton's rousing speech to the men, his views about the limited capabilities of black soldiers remained unchanged. That afternoon, he noted in his diary that the 761st “gave a very good first impression, but I have no faith in the inherent fighting ability of the race.”
The men of the battalion were unaware of Patton's sentiments. In fact, they were proud that the legendary general had taken time to address their relatively small group, and his words made them proud to be part of his army. The phrase they repeated most among themselves was “nothing but the best”: After the varied hardships of their training, he had acknowledged them, had specifically requested them, and they were there—as they had for so long wanted to be—to fight. November 2 happened to be the date of Preston McNeil's twenty-second and Leonard Smith's twentieth birthdays, and the impressionable Smith took Patton's sudden visitation as a confirmation of his boyhood notions of glory.
William McBurney started paying closer attention to the rumble of guns to the east. The sound, though faint, seemed abruptly to have taken on a life and personality of its own: He noted very precisely when it started and when it stopped, as did all of the battalion's members. They knew that soon they would be in the thick of it.
AS ONE OF THE STRONGEST proponents of the value of armor in combat, Patton had assigned separate tank battalions to lead and support each of his seven infantry divisions; the Third Army additionally contained three armored divisions. In preparation for the upcoming Saar Campaign, all ten divisions of Patton's XX and XII Corps were arranged along a front—in this case, a vertical north-south line—measuring approximately sixty miles. The five divisions of XX Corps were spread out along the northern portion of the front, running south from the vicinity of the city of Thionville to Pont-à-Mousson: These divisions were the 90th, 9th, 95th, and 5th Infantry Divisions and the 10th Armored Division. The five divisions of XII Corps held the southern portion of the front, extending south from Pont-à-Mousson to Moncourt Woods: These divisions, numbered from north to south, were the 80th, 35th, and 26th Infantry Divisions, with the crack 4th and 6th Armored Divisions waiting in the wings to strike on the battle's second day.
With no sign yet of a break in the weather, the campaign would most likely begin November 8. Patton's plan called for XII Corps to lead off the Third Army's assault (XX Corps would be held back until the ninth). The 80th, 35th, and 26th Infantry Divisions of XII Corps were to start their forward attacks against enemy positions simultaneously on November 8 at 6:00 A.M. The 26th Division and 761st Tank Battalion were specifically instructed to push northeast through terrain marked by wooded hills toward the cities of Rodalbe and Benestroff, key rail and communications centers.
AS THE DATE OF PATTON'S great offensive approached, Able Company's Capt. David Williams became the first to realize just what the 761st's separate, “bastard” battalion status meant. On November 6, Lieutenant Colonel Bates told Williams he was to lead Able Company's seventeen Sherman tanks northeast from St. Nicholas-de-Port to the village of Bezange-la-Grande—less than two miles behind the front line—and there report to an officer of the 26th Infantry Division. Able Company would be under the command of that officer for the duration of the unit's first combat action. Williams had come to rely on Bates's kindly, sober presence and judgment—and was more than a little anxious to be leading an entire company forward on his own, to report to an officer he had never before seen.
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