Honor Before Glory

by Scott McGaugh

  Higgins relied on Blonder to monitor his waning battery power as much as Higgins and the other lieutenants gauged the declining combat strength of the 1/141. Several men had been killed shortly after being surrounded. German artillery fire wounded others. They had suffered additional casualties on earlier probing attacks and patrols. The severely wounded needed stretchers in order to be moved. A number of trench-foot cases were developing.

  Higgins had already sent a major breakout force the night before to flank the enemy’s roadblock and attack it from the front. He calculated that the forty-eight-man breakout patrol he had dispatched represented half his firepower. How many men could he now spare on Dahlquist’s orders for another assault on the roadblock and still retain a passable fighting force against the next German attack? So far, the attacks on his men had been measured, but Higgins couldn’t know if an all-out assault on his position was imminent. What types of weapons could he spare? Which weapons would be more effective in his defensive position? Who had the most ammunition? Who was critically short? Which of his men were the toughest? The most reliable?

  The previous night’s breakout patrol was led by Second Lieutenant James Gilman of Company C and Sergeant Harold Kripisch of Higgins’s Company A. Moving slowly, eyes scanning the forest ahead, the patrol had inched across and down the slope on primitive game trails toward the valley. They approached some land mines they had uncovered the day before. They had already been reset by the Germans. But now, if they could navigate their way down off the ridge to the south and reach Harime, a cluster of farmhouses at the edge of the valley, a trail there would lead them back up to the front of the roadblock. About one thousand yards from Higgins’s position, the breakout patrol spotted more land mines. They were planted in the soil and nestled along narrow paths where dense vegetation forced advancing soldiers into a single predictable line.

  When a member of the patrol tripped one of the mines a few minutes later, the blast rocked the forest. Germans quickly appeared uphill of the patrol, pinning it against another minefield. Enemy fire shredded troops and tree trunks. The Americans flopped into the mud or dove toward the nearest cover. The firefight blistered the forest and echoed across the valley. Gilman and Kripisch yelled over the cacophony, ordering small units to make flanking attempts and to search for a tactical advantage in the dense stands of timber. Men fell wounded, gasping and crying out in agony.

  Meanwhile, Higgins sent another patrol of an unspecified number of men back on the logging road. It met an estimated force of about fifty Germans only about four hundred yards from Higgins’s perimeter. They were defending a major roadblock. It now appeared the Germans had constructed at least two major roadblocks, one at Col de la Croisette and the other at Col des Huttes.

  At 1337 Higgins asked for artillery support. He also updated his casualty total to twenty-eight injured men. That left him with fewer than two hundred men inside his perimeter, with one patrol near the new roadblock nearly a third of a mile away and the breakout patrol on the southern slope whose exact position and status were unknown.

  Only three minutes later, Lundquist issued new orders to Higgins, presumably dictated by Dahlquist: “Move troops through to Point 30, contacting our king [Company K] three hundred yards SE Point 30.”5 That location was approximately two miles away! It was inconceivable that either patrol Higgins had already dispatched, much less the remaining combat troops and injured men within his perimeter, could fight their way through the Germans that far away, not with dehydrated and hungry troops critically low on ammunition.

  Higgins refused. He radioed a reply an hour later, stating he could not move his men one-third of a mile by sunset, much less two miles through enemy territory. Higgins asked for permission to remain in place until the following morning. He also needed to know the fate of the breakout patrol dispatched the night before.

  Higgins’s depleted force apparently didn’t matter to those in charge of the rescue mission. A few minutes later, Lundquist told Higgins another major attack by the other battalions of the 141st would be launched at 1600. It would be preceded by ten minutes of heavy artillery fire by two battalions, each gun firing fifteen rounds. Further, Higgins was to continue his attempt to break through entrenched German positions at Point 9 and to fight his way to Point 30.a Lundquist also ordered Higgins to acknowledge he had received the order.

  COLONEL WALTER ROLIN’S 993RD GRENADIER REGIMENT WAS among those units that stood between the rescuers and Higgins’s men. His was a crippled German fighting force. He had lost more than 2,000 men in the two months since the 36th Division had come ashore near Marseille. With only about 350 combat troops, the veteran Prussian combat officer drew on his experience that dated back to World War I, where he had earned First and Second Class Iron Crosses. While his regiment had been fed generally unfit replacements in recent weeks, Rolin was typical of the battled-hardened senior officers that Dahlquist, Owens, and Lundquist faced. He knew how to bleed an enemy.

  On an intimate battlefield such as a mountain ridge, his MG-42 machine guns were priceless assets. They had an effective range of four-tenths of a mile and could fire eighteen hundred rounds per minute. At twenty-five pounds, they were as mobile as they were lethal and perfect for a rubbled battlefield of foxholes, stacks of logs, and ravines. A handful of MG-42s, strategically placed, had pinned down most of the 2/442 nearly all day.

  The Germans called them “Hitler’s bone saw.” To GIs, they were the “buzz saw” that sounded like a zipper when firing. Before attacking it, Sakato and others usually waited until a 42’s barrel overheated or its crew ran out of ammunition, or they waited until an American tank arrived. On Hill 617, there were few options in the face of the “buzz saw.”

  Rolin was fighting what military strategists call a delaying action: slow the American advance, and make it pay for each step forward. German doctrine called for constant contact with the enemy in such circumstances. Never give the enemy a chance to regroup. At each strongpoint, establish multiple machine-gun positions, support with heavy mortars or self-propelled guns if possible, and liberally plant land mines.

  It seemed to the 2/442 that German S-mines were buried everywhere. Steel cylinders six inches tall and about four inches wide, they were positioned in irregular patterns in roadbeds and alongside roads as well as on game trails and logging paths. Each was fitted with either a pressure-plate igniter or a trip wire. Sakato and his men knew that when they stepped on an S-mine, they had only about a half-second to hit the dirt face first. The mine shot three to five feet into the air and detonated, sending 360 steel balls or rods or scrap metal in every direction. Its lethal range was 60 feet, but even a soldier 460 feet away could suffer injuries from a single S-mine. Sometimes an S-mine caused “sympathetic detonations” of others nearby. The French called them “silent soldiers.”

  Another type of antipersonnel mine, the Schumine, was equally dreaded. The small six-inch-square wood box concealed a detonator and a piece of TNT. It was nearly impossible to locate with metal detectors and tended to cut the lower legs off soldiers rather than kill them.

  Rolin relied heavily on these strategically placed mines. They were relatively easy to install and significantly extended the line of defense from south to north across the ridge that his beleaguered men had been ordered to defend. It was the 2nd Battalion’s assault on Hill 617 that demonstrated how lethal mines could be to the newcomers on the battlefield.

  Veterans like George Sakato and Mitsunori Masunaga had learned to spot a thin wire stretched across a game trail that was connected to an explosive device under a bush. Under leaden skies and constant rain, trip wires were nearly invisible. When one was discovered, it required enormous discipline not to dive for cover when someone whispered “Mines!” A soldier could easily dive onto an unseen trip wire or detonator a few yards away. In a split second, a half dozen men could be killed or wounded. One or more medics would be necessary to treat them, and more men might be taken off the line to carry the wounded on stret
chers back to an aid station. A single mine could nearly destroy a squad. Instead, newcomers to the 2nd Battalion were told to freeze when a mine was spotted and wait for a combat veteran to either disable it or find a path to safety.

  “BATTERY RUN. FIRE FOR EFFECT.”6 WHEN THE GERMANS PINNED down the 2nd Battalion with ground fire, mortars, and mines, Sakato, Matayoshi, other infantrymen, and medics looked to their artillery to break the deadly stalemate. Forward artillery observers from the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion batteries were attached to each of the 442nd’s battalions and fought alongside infantrymen. They notified their artillery battery when support was needed and “walked it” onto the enemy. Artillery support had been valuable in Italy, but in the Vosges more intimate combat made it less effective. Yet throughout the day both sides fired artillery at very steep angles to drop the shells onto precise targets on the congested battlefield.

  Nelson Akagi was one of the observers attached to the 442nd’s ground troops. He had grown up in a relatively prosperous farming family in Lindsay, California. His father, Jack, made sure each teenager had a small plot of farmland for which he was responsible. The family’s prize possession was a forty-acre hillside plot. All the youngsters in the family had worked from dawn to dusk in the summer to clear it of rocks and make it arable. In early 1942 they had lost all their possessions—farmland, planted crops, equipment, trucks, a pool hall operated by one of the boys, and home—when they were forced to evacuate to an internment camp in Idaho. Akagi figured the farmland and its tree crops were worth close to thirty thousand dollars; the family sold it for two thousand. A few months after arriving in Idaho, Akagi volunteered for the 442nd. He was nineteen years old. Two years later, the farmer was crawling from bush to tree, looking for enemy positions a few yards ahead.

  Under ideal conditions, the 2/442 typically had four-man forward- observer teams. One man was a spotter, another ran telephone wire back to headquarters, a third operated the phone, and the fourth, an Officer, decided when to ask for artillery support. On occasion a lone forward observer accompanying a patrol used a radio to send instructions to his artillery battery. When an enemy position in the Vosges was spotted, a single artillery shot from a 105mm howitzer was requested.

  If the first shot missed the Germans on Hill 617, a “Battery adjust” call was made with corrections, such as “Right 100 [yards].” If the next shot was on target, “Battery run. Fire for effect” called for three or four more shots, within sixty seconds, on the hapless enemy position. Kats Miho, a gunner corporal with the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion battery assigned to Sakato’s company, was one of those men who translated forward-observer reports into precise fire by the battalion’s howitzers.

  He was part of a five-man team at each gun firing in support of the 2nd Battalion. The crew’s job was twofold: harass the Germans surrounding the stranded battalion and support George Sakato’s Company E and the rest of 2/442. As the 2nd Battalion advanced, artillery crews had to adjust their range to stay a few dozen yards in front of the infantry. Then at night the crews fired just outside the perimeter of where the battalion had dug in. The youngest of eight children, Miho had grown up in Kahului, a Hawaiian port town that shipped sugar and pineapples to the mainland. As the son of a bookkeeper and store manager, his boyhood had been filled with swimming, fishing, crabbing, playing marbles, and glimpses of the outside world during Boy Scout outings.

  “Artillery had to guard the perimeters of the infantry at night. About the only time that we got . . . emotionally involved was the Lost Battalion. We knew that we had to be extra, extra careful. We were firing maybe fifty yards in front of the boys, our own boys, fifty, twenty-five yards in front,” he said later.7 Throughout the day on the twenty-sixth, Miho’s battery had fired on precise targets less than two hundred feet in front of Sakato.

  Not only did the artillery have to be deadly accurate, but it also had to be perfectly timed to be effective. Other men in Miho’s battery had to know the precise amount of time each shell required to reach its target and then set the timing fuse on each shell so that it exploded about seventy-five feet above the ground. “This was our forte in the 522,” recalled Miho, proud that his crew’s accuracy and timing precision rained shrapnel on enemy positions in front of the 2nd Battalion. When forward artillery observers and their artillery batteries two miles distant worked in perfect unison under enemy fire, “We could drop it right into a foxhole,” forward observer Akagi boasted after the war.8

  Artillery accuracy aside, the 2nd Battalion firefights taking place across clearings only twenty-five or fifty yards wide made artillery fire extremely dangerous. By early afternoon the 2nd had advanced a mere two hundred yards, the equivalent of a single city block. The rescue mission was quickly proving to be an unequal battle between enemy machine guns and small-arms fire.

  Replacement troops haunted Kelly Kuwayama, Sakato’s medic, that day. He had come from an affluent New York family in which all the children had gone to college and whose parents had allowed a daughter to marry a Caucasian. He had graduated Princeton University with a degree in politics, economics, and history before being drafted. Through a quirk of transfers, he had become a medic without completing all the required medic-training courses. Combat in Italy had taught him to pay particular attention to the 2nd Battalion’s replacements.

  “I would shake the hands of the guys coming in knowing that by the next day I might be picking them up dead. They were replacing our men who had been hit that day. I knew these guys were scared. They were also very anxious not to let the unit down. When you’re advancing on the line, the guy in the front is going to get picked off. They were so anxious . . . to be the first to go and [then] would be the first to get killed,” he recalled after the war. “When I looked at them and their eyeballs didn’t move, I knew they were dead. That was tough.”9

  Mines and enemy ground fire might be evaded, but it was impossible to escape German artillery. The approaches to Hill 617 forced most of the 2nd Battalion onto well-known paths. The Germans had been preparing defensive positions for weeks in the Vosges and knew precisely where paths of advance were located near Hill 617. That greatly increased the accuracy of their mortars and artillery. “Anytime the [Germans] felt there was movement, they would start lobbing those [mortar] shells or they would call in the 88s [artillery]. And they would pound the heck out of where we were. So we had to lay low. Otherwise, you know, we’d get killed,” scout Matayoshi recalled.10

  Sakato and the others had learned to ignore the spooky whistling sound created by enemy artillery fire. If a soldier could hear a whistling sound, the shell was far-enough away that it posed no threat. “Wooom, wheeee,” they told newcomers, was the sound of enemy artillery passing by. At most, they said, you could hear a brief “swish” for a split second before the first incoming artillery shell exploded on your position, never enough time to dive into a foxhole or ravine.

  Another member of Company G, Kenji Ego, saw exactly what a well-targeted enemy mortar shell could do. His unit dug temporary foxholes, simply called “holes” by soldiers, when their advance had stalled. The foxholes were little more than trenches frantically dug before the enemy’s mortars and artillery began pulverizing their position. A German mortar shell landed on one of Ego’s friends during an attack. “But none of us could leave our holes. After it stopped, we ran to the hole. There was smoke drifting up. I looked in the hole and the first thing I saw was his helmet. He was giving his last death rattle. I couldn’t help him,” Ego remembered decades later.11

  As darkness settled on the forest, the commanding officer of the 2/442, Lieutenant Colonel James Hanley Jr., had endured a brutal day. The son of a prominent judge who was also a battalion commander in a federalized National Guard unit, Hanley had accompanied his father as “mascot” when it searched for Pancho Villa in Mexico. He was eight years old. By the time the battalion was recalled, Hanley had decided to become a lawyer and serve in the military. He had earned his law degree from the University o
f Chicago in 1931. Hanley started his career as a justice of the peace, was elected state’s attorney, and then became an assistant attorney general of North Dakota by 1941.

  At one point during the day’s fighting, Hanley had moved the 2/442’s command post forward to a point where he planned to send two companies on a flanking maneuver against the enemy. But when he discovered an accompanying communications platoon had taken a spool of telephone wire with them but had not laid it out as they advanced, he had to hand off command of the two companies to another Officer, who led them on the counterattack mission. Unexpected enemy resistance and inconsistent communication and coordination had stymied the 442nd’s first day’s attempt to reach the 1/141.

  Hanley’s men had advanced only a few hundred yards that were littered with empty ammo belts and medical supplies. Throughout the day, when men had called “Medic!” Kuwayama ran to them. Months of battle experience had taught him how to assess and triage. He knew that enemy bullets and shrapnel powerful enough to enter and exit a man’s chest or torso were more deadly. Those soldiers usually were not in a great deal of pain, and some sensed their death was near. They often laid still and were silent. Kuwayama likely gave those men morphine but could not do anything about internal bleeding. He could say little more than “We’re going to take care of you,” the one thing every wounded soldier that day wanted to hear.12

  Wounded soldiers who rolled over onto their stomachs and curled up probably had wounds slight enough that they remained alert and instinctively positioned themselves to protect their stomachs and genitals. They tended to be more aware of their wounds, could be vocal, and certainly were scared. It was up to the medics to maintain calm in a forest of chaos.