Filthy Thirteen

by Richard Killblane

  He said, “Smitty, you sure know some characters.”

  A DISASTER COMPANY

  In a regiment they always have one company that will be a disaster company. In mission after mission, it will be wiped out and suffer twice or three times as many casualties as the companies around it. Of course there is a reason for this. When they jump in on the first mission, why half or more of their officers and NCOs are killed. So they are replaced with green troops. So the company then has green lieutenants and green NCOs overseeing green troops that do not even know one another. The company enters their second combat in worse shape than it did the first one. They will just get killed right down again. So the losses begin to telescope. In the 506th, the disaster company was C Company. They were killed down to twenty men in Normandy.

  In Holland, C Company had not been in there fifteen days until they had been killed out to twenty-six men. They had lost every officer they had except this Lieutenant Albert H. Hassenzahl. Lieuntenant Lucian H. Whitehead27 was attached to them and he was the primary officer that I dealt with. I had maybe eight men left so they sent me up and attached me to C Company. The regiment would have done anything in the world they could to have killed my ass.28

  I fought up there with Lieutenant Whitehead for the rest of the campaign, until they just about had to rebuild the company. It was a hard-luck outfit but Whitehead and I had developed a pretty close relationship over a period of forty-five days.

  OP DUTY29

  We did not have enough men to man a proper defense except for outposts. C Company had a strip of land from the Rhine River back to our main perimeter of defense. We positioned our outposts along that river anywhere from a hundred to a hundred and fifty yards apart. We did not have enough people to offer any resistance unless a little ole enemy squad would come by with ten or twelve men in it. If a patrol of two or three squads or platoon-size would come through, then our OPs did not even fool with them. They let them go on by and sent word back to the CP. We had a lot of telephones out there and the OPs would call Whitehead or Hassenzahl and say, “A fortyman patrol just passed us.” He would then notify anyone behind us who might be concerned with the German patrol. They would gather up enough forces needed to knock their asses off. We let the Germans come and go as long as they did not directly threaten us.30

  I believe Sergeant Campiello came in as a replacement to C Company after Normandy. I called him “Guinea” because he was an Italian. This Guinea was a small fellow, shorter than I was. He was a real soldier. Boy, he never hesitated. There were German patrols just flooding back through there all the time and Guinea never backed down from anything.

  Well, Guinea would take off two trips a night and I would take two trips a night, eight-hour shifts, and check everyone of those outposts. We would go back and forth between those boys in the foxholes and find out what was happening as to what had come through, their size, and direction of movement. Then we would walk back and feed all this to the company commander in the CP.

  I had this kid named Robert Reeves. He and another guy were out there in a foxhole one rainy night. Man, it was raining so hard that you could not see your hand in front of you. Reeves heard a noise. It was about the time that me or Guinea were supposed to come through and he thought we had missed his location.

  There was a ditch where this noise was coming from. He crawled over to it and looked over in that ditch and there was this German lying there looking back up at him, eyeball-to-eyeball. Reeves did not even have his gun. He had left it over in his foxhole. He said that this German was not making a move, just looking at him.

  Of course, Reeves thought, “I’ve got to get me a gun.” He ran back to get his gun and came back but never did find that German again. He was the only German out there.

  Lieutenant Hassenzahl was the son of a cop up there in Toledo. He was convinced the whole time that the only thing the Germans really wanted to do was attack his CP.

  I had to go in there and make a report one morning about 10:00 and it was raining. I walked up and tried to open the front door but could not. Well, I turned and went around to the side of the house. Just before I got to the corner I heard someone coming. I just took a stance there and laid that Thompson on whoever it was. It was Hassenzahl. When he rounded that corner, he came to a screeching halt and asked, “Are you a demolition man?”

  I said, “Yes I am.”

  He said, “You like to have scared me to death. I heard you at the front door and I ran out the back door. By then I was running right into you.”

  We checked these OPs for about ten days and then I reported in to Lieutenant Whitehead. He said that there were still British Red Devils and Polocks in homes and places being protected by Dutch people who were disgusted with the war. They had sixty of them in one spot over there on the other side of the river and Dempsey wanted to get them out if he could.31

  Whitehead also said that we had contact with them all the time through Dutch civilians. One of them named Pete joined the paratroopers the minute we got on the ground. He was coordinating the communication between the British and the Americans and the people who were hiding them up over there. He was handling the whole show. Lieutenant Whitehead asked me to go out with him and look the situation over.

  Whitehead said, “The British engineers will go over there and get them. Let’s go up here on this dike and look this over.” He then said, “This whole river bank is mined. What we are going to have to do is get some of you demolition boys out in there and clear a path through it. When they get ready to rescue them, you’ll have to take them out through there. You will not cross over. We don’t know when it will be.”

  The Germans had mined and booby trapped all the ground on the south side of the river. The British had a bunch of those rubber dinghies that they used with the engineers, but they were scared to go down through the minefield. The British did not know how to negotiate it.

  It was pretty obvious where I wanted to make the cut. When clearing a minefield for quick passage, you want to stay pretty close to the trees because nobody enjoys digging through roots to bury a land mine. This provides some leeway where there are no mines. You just whip right through it and extend the border out to the width that you desire. I imagined those dinghies were six feet wide. From there we went back to Whitehead’s CP. Whitehead assured the British engineers that he had the assets to clear the minefield.

  Of course those Krauts knew where the mines were. I would watch their asses. If I saw a patrol coming past an OP quite often, I knew the mines were not in that area. Once in a while I would hear them set off a mine. We got to know that patrols were coming through one area more than any other. So Jack Agnew and I picked an area we thought had no mines.

  We pulled back from the area where we wanted to clear the minefield so the Germans would not see any big troop movements. Brock was the only town in that area so it was neccessary to hold it in order to evacuate the trapped paratroopers.

  C Company moved down into Brock and took up residence there, but we really never had control of it at any time. C Company only had about two squads left. I had Agnew, Marquez, Womer, Dinty Mohr, Furtaw, Bini, Dewey, Coad, and Ink Ellefson. I had picked up Nathan Sieger from somewhere. I called him “Cigar.” He had not jumped with us in Holland.

  We occupied Brock along with the Germans. Brock was only about a mile and a half from the Rhine River. It was the northernmost outpost we had. It would have been pretty advantageous for the Germans to have held that town but we needed it. We waited in Brock while the British coordinated the evacuation.32

  CREAM FOR SCHNAPPS

  We were up in Brock for about a week and a half or two weeks. This was late in the campaign and we were so short of men that we really could not mount an offensive. We were just holding that town to keep the Germans from taking full possession of it. There was some real high ground up there that they could have used to advantage over our cover. So we really were not trying to take this town. We were just trying to hold it and all the
civilians had left.

  We had occupied this little ole town just like a checkerboard. A squad of paratroopers would occupy one block where they would make their headquarters. A block or two up the street there would be a bunch of Germans, then there would be another set of paratroopers and then Germans just scattered all over. We had three CPs in there. I had one, Lieutenant Whitehead had one, and I think another sergeant had one.

  It was just like checkers. The whole town of Brock was intermingled with paratroopers and Germans and each one was trying to kill the other. We would only fight at night. During the day we would listen for noises or watch for smoke or movements or anything that would give us a location of the Germans. Then we would attack them as soon as it got dark.

  We would fight all night, then we would all meet back at our place just before daybreak. When we did, why, we were looting houses, potatoes, canned fruit, and canned vegetables. We would find onions once in a while. So we were eating like kings back at my place. I had even butchered a cow and a hog.

  When civilians vacate a city or an area or something, they usually release their livestock so they can forage. They had turned all these cattle and hogs and everything they had loose in this little ole town of Brock. I soon had them hanging up. It was cold up there in late October and the meat stayed fresh. Everyone just cooked for themselves. If a guy wanted a steak or if he wanted a neck bone he just cut himself off a piece. Well, we were eating high on the hog.

  After we fought all night, we would come in early in the morning and we would clean up and go to bed, all of us but two men. I kept two men on lookout all the time. We had found a house that had a pool table in it.

  One morning, Jack Agnew was sitting there eating breakfast and he looked over at me and said, “Sergeant, you’re not taking good care of your troops.”

  I asked, “Is that right?”

  He said, “Yeah.”

  I said, “What’s your big complaint, son?”

  “Well,” he said, “I bet you that those people on ration cards back in the States are eating better than we are.”

  I said, “Well, you think so?”

  He said, “I’ll bet you.”

  I said, “I thought you were eating pretty good. If you like pork or if you like beef, you’ve got it. We have all kinds of canned vegetables. We’ve got potatoes and onions. What is it that your little heart desires that you don’t have?”

  He was eating a big ole bowl of ice-cold peaches and he said, “We don’t have any cream for our peaches.”

  I said, “Well, that’s just real tough son. Do you want cream for your peaches?”

  He said, “Sure, I do. I’m entitled to it. Besides we’re not soldiering.”

  I said, “Well say, is that all? It embarrasses me to think that I don’t have cream for you. I’ll tell you what you do. In the morning when you get back, if you get back, bring me a cow and I’ll get you enough cream to take a bath in if you want.”

  He asked, “How do you get cream from a cow?” He was from Philadelphia. He had probably not seen a cow until he went into the service.

  I said, “Well, you idiot. You just milk that cow in a bucket and just let it set there in the cool weather until the cream rises. It is lighter. You skim it off the top and throw the rest out.”

  He wanted to know how to tell if the cow was giving milk. I said, “You’ve got four faucets right there on her belly. Just squeeze one with a downward motion and if she’s giving milk, bring her in here.”

  The next morning they brought in three milk cows. I took the cows and started milking them. I let that cream rise up, then I would pour that cream over in another container and throw the milk out to the chickens and hogs that were loose. I had everything in the house that would hold liquids full of cream.33

  Lieutenant Whitehead got cut off one morning and could not make it back to his command post which was about two blocks down the street from mine. He knew where we were. So he came dragging in there to our place. We were feeding him and he asked, “Where did you get this cream?”

  I said, “Well, I’ve got three cows outside.” I had every utensil in a two or three house radius that would hold liquid full of cream just sitting around all over the place.

  He said, “Boy, I want some of that cream.”

  I said, “Well, you can have some of it.” Then I asked, “Would you do some swapping?”

  He asked, “Like what?”

  I said, “I know stinking well, Whitehead, that you all have a barrel of schnapps up there at your place. We don’t have a drop of alcohol in this whole side of town. We have looked in every house.” I said, “We would like to have some schnapps and you would like to have some cream. I’ll swap you cream for schnapps.”

  He asked, “What kind of a swap are you talking about?”

  I said, “Volume for volume. If you want a quart of cream, I’ll give you a quart of cream for a quart of schnapps. If you want a gallon of cream, I’ll give you a gallon of cream,” I paused. “For a gallon of schnapps.”

  He said, “Well, that wouldn’t be right.”

  I said, “That’s the only way it will work. You all ain’t going to have time to drink a barrel of schnapps before we either kill them or get killed. Well, you go back and take some of that schnapps you’ve got and see if you think that it wouldn’t be a good swap. I’ve got more cream here than I can use.” So I said, “We’ll deliver. It is supply and demand. What do you want?”

  He thought and said, “Well, all right. If that’s the best I can do then that’s the best I can do.”

  I said, “Do you want some of this cream this morning and an escort back to your place? We’ll do that.”

  He said, “Okay.”

  So we swapped cream for schnapps there for about another ten days. He and I worked out a real good relationship.

  A JEW AND PORK

  When Jewish men engage in combat where there is imminent danger of death, or the supplies are not available for them to eat according to their religion, they can eat anything that is available to sustain their strength. Well, Cigar had never been able to eat pork when he was out of a combat area. He just loved that stuff and would not eat anything but pork while with us.

  This pool table was on the second floor, which provided a good vantage point to watch and observe. One could sit there all day and try to find some indication as to where the next group of Germans was. One day Cigar was on lookout while two or three of us were shooting pool. All of a sudden, he just kind of shuddered. He said, “Now, I know why the Lord won’t let you eat a damn hog.”

  I asked, “What’s the matter with you, Cigar?”

  He said, “Come over here. I want to show you something.”

  Well the street had a lot of bodies of dead paratroopers and Germans. Hogs and cattle and chickens and dogs were just roaming the streets and there was one big ole hog out there that was eating a dead paratrooper. Hogs will eat anything.

  He said, “I’ll never taste another pork again!” And he never would eat any pork again.

  RESCUE THE RED DEVILS

  October 22–23, 1944

  When the British were ready to evacuate the paratroopers, they told us.34 I took a couple of my men out there at night to probe this minefield, map it out, then remove the mines. We just cleared out a path through there from the levy down to the Rhine River while the British waited right behind us. It was about a quarter of a mile from the levy to the bank of the river and it was covered with trees. While sweeping the minefield, I never saw any cattle in the area where the mines were. We worked on that thing for two or three nights. Then we told the British that it was cleared.

  We guided the British in that next night. We led them clear to the river. Then the British engineers took those rubber dinghies out there and went across that river and rescued those sixty Red Devils. We waited until they got their people out. When the boats started coming back to the bank, we guided them out of there.35

  After the British got their paratroopers pick
ed up, we had no more reason to occupy Brock since the Germans were going to cross that river and fight. They had all the high ground and could hold us inside that perimeter. Neither was General Dempsey about to try and attack across that river. Our company received orders to withdraw for evacuation. We went back into OP duty and stayed there until Thanksgiving.36

  MARQUEZ KILLS THE HOG

  We picked up six chickens from somewhere, and it getting close to Thanksgiving, I said, “Let’s have a Thanksgiving Day dinner. We’ve got some real good groceries out of all these houses.”

  They asked, “What are we going to have?”

  I said, “We’ll have chicken. I have not seen any turkeys but we’ll have chicken.” The six chickens were so old that they had scales on their legs like alligators.

  They asked, “How’re you going to cook them?”

  I said, “We’ll boil them, fry them or anything we can do with them but we’ve got to have some grease.”

  Mike Marquez was an extra kid in my section from El Paso, a big strong kid, like a bull. I said, “I’ll tell you what, Mike.” We always had a bunch of stuff that we threw out. These hogs and chickens would come around there and eat. This one hog that had been hanging around had been hit by shrapnel and one leg was nearly cut off. He was just tripping along with that leg dragging. I said, “Mike, get out there and kill that hog and we’ll skin him and get enough grease off of him so we can fry some of this or boil it or whatever.” I said, “Don’t you shoot him. Kill him with your trench knife. If you shoot him out there, we’ll have forty Germans in here on us before the sun goes down. Don’t make any noise—just go out there and kill him with the trench knife.”

  He said, “Okay.”

  I went around there doing something else and I heard the damnedest racket I ever heard in my life. It sounded like someone on a bulldozer was out there in the back yard. I walked over there and looked out the window. Mike had this hog around the neck and he was stabbing and cutting him with his trench knife. Of course the hog was going wild. It dragged him across that backyard a dozen times and hit everything in it.