Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Inspecting his helmet, he saw that the bullet had torn though the camouflage net and made a small dent in the back of the helmet. If it had pierced the steel, the bullet would have struck him square in the back of his head. That fellow could shoot! Werner knew he was damn lucky to have survived his first combat. He told himself he would have to do better next time. He needed to be more careful, quicker on his feet, and more agile, so he started lightening his load. He buried things he didn’t consider essential, like his gas mask, hand hoe, the parachute harness he was still wearing, and the white phosphorus grenade—nicknamed “Willie Pete”—he had been issued that he had no intention of using on another human being, even an enemy. Unlike his one remaining fragmentation grenade, which caused an explosive blast when it went off, the Willie Pete was an incendiary weapon that burned fiercely and ignited cloth, fuel, and ammunition and could burn a man alive.

  When the sun came up, he studied his map and checked his compass. None of the terrain around him corresponded with what was on the map, and he knew he was lost. But he decided to keep heading east, as they had been instructed. After his encounter with the German soldiers, he stayed in the woods when possible, although he had to cross a few roads. Whenever he did, he saw only German military traffic, and waited for it to pass.

  Later that afternoon, he heard voices coming down a path, so he moved over into a thicket and waited. As they drew closer, he saw it was an old lady and a young girl carrying armloads of firewood. He stepped out in front of them, forgetting his face was still covered with soot and grease.

  They took one look at him and shrieked.

  “Je suis parachutiste américain,” he said in his schoolboy French.

  Although they seemed delighted to hear he was a U.S. soldier, the old lady still trembled as she answered his questions. She said the next village was Videcosville, about a quarter mile away, and that Werner should be careful because Germans were stationed on the other side of town.

  After they left, he found Videcosville on his map and saw it was twelve miles north of Sainte-Mère-Église. Their drop zone was supposed to be a few miles south of Sainte-Mère-Église. He had been dropped more than fifteen miles off target! Recalling the pilot’s wild, evasive flying after the plane was hit, he now wondered if the entire stick had jumped in the wrong place. In their prejump briefing, they had been told that the pilots were under orders not to deviate from their assigned course for that reason. What about the rest of his regiment? And the division? If there had been other similar mis-drops, there could be stragglers all over Normandy.

  After lying awake all that night, he walked most of the next day without seeing anyone. Late in the afternoon, he came across a farmer who was milking his cows in a barn. The Frenchman didn’t seem at all surprised to see an American soldier. He gave Werner a cup of warm milk fresh from one of the cows, followed by a glass of amber liquid. Werner thought it was apple juice, but it was actually calvados, a Norman apple brandy. The liquor hit his empty stomach like a punch. Werner realized how exhausted he was and knew he needed to sleep before continuing. The farmer led him to another barn, where Werner collapsed in a haystack.

  Around midnight, he was awakened by a teenage boy who said there were two U.S. soldiers nearby. They had been briefed to expect assistance from French civilians eager for their liberation, but they were warned that others could be collaborating with the Germans, and would gladly turn them in for a reward. Holding his Luger at the ready in case it was a trap, Werner cautiously followed the boy to a hollow in a field surrounded by a dense hedge. Sure enough, hiding there in the bush were two lost paratroopers with the “Screaming Eagle” shoulder patch of the 101st Airborne. Happy to no longer be alone, Werner greeted them enthusiastically, and suddenly found himself looking into the business end of their carbines.

  Realizing that his German accent had alarmed them, he rapidly explained that he was an American GI just like them, even though he was of German descent, and that he had escaped from the Nazis some years ago and was now serving as a prisoner interrogator for the 82nd. But they also spotted his Luger pistol—the favored sidearm of German officers—and Werner had to do some additional explaining. Luckily, though, one of the men, a Jew from Brooklyn, finally believed him and helped Werner convince his buddy, an Irish redhead from Boston, that Werner was a fellow U.S. paratrooper.

  Once Werner had convinced them that they were on the same side, the two privates pointed out that since he was a sergeant, Werner was in charge. His first order was that they should each take turns standing two-hour watches at night while the other two slept.

  Over the next several days, the teenager brought to their hiding place other American stragglers he found. By June 10, the group numbered more than two dozen paratroopers from both the 101st and 82nd who had been scattered over the countryside and had not been able to find their own units. The senior officer was a captain, and he decided they should strike out in an effort to reach their divisions and catch up with the war.

  They could hear the sounds of artillery and bombs in the distance, and they headed toward the fighting, moving only by night to lessen the chance of being spotted. They heard German troops, trucks, and armor hurrying northwest, away from the invasion beaches and toward the German-held port of Cherbourg. They took it as a sign that the D-Day landings had gone well and the Allied troops were pushing inland.

  Werner was the only one who spoke French, so he took on the responsibility of getting food from the local farmers. And he had to approach them cautiously and be sure they weren’t collaborators. Some of the farmers gladly donated the food they could spare to their liberators, but in most cases, he purchased it with invasion currency printed up by the Allied command. The French had never seen this kind of money and only begrudgingly accepted it because they weren’t able to spend it while under German occupation; the currency would only be good in the event the Allies were victorious. With a diet of mostly milk and bread, and never in ample quantities, hunger was a constant for the lost paratroopers.

  On June 15, Werner found a farmer who agreed to use his horse-drawn wagon to deliver cans of milk and loaves of bread for which Werner paid him in advance. The farmer had said he would bring them at 10 P.M. to the edge of the woods where they were encamped. But he never showed up; instead, he reported their position to the Germans.

  Not long after the appointed hour, a large number of German troops began firing from a wooded hillside toward the paratroopers’ hidden positions, and a fusillade of bullets whizzed overhead. One enemy machine gun had pinned Werner down at the edge of a field, and he thought the hissing of its bullets only inches above his head was the nastiest sound he had ever heard. He rolled onto his back and lobbed a grenade in the direction of the gun. The firing stopped long enough for him to crawl back into the trees. As the paratroopers returned fire—they had no machine guns, mortars, or other heavy weapons—the Germans paused only briefly before opening up again.

  Soon came the distinctive ack-ack of a 20 mm antiaircraft weapon, which had been brought up and leveled to fire at the tree-tops above the paratroopers, who were showered with hot shrapnel and splinters.

  When the tree above him exploded, Werner went momentarily blind and deaf. He knew he was still alive when he felt a sharp pain from a shrapnel wound in his upper left thigh and the warmth of flowing blood, both of which he found oddly reassuring.

  Even with his ears ringing, Werner could hear orders being barked in German.

  “What are they saying, Sergeant?” asked the captain.

  “They’re going to feed us shrapnel for as long as it takes,” Werner replied.

  The booming, earth-shaking shelling continued.

  The captain decided—rightly so, Werner thought—that their situation was futile. They were low on ammo and surrounded behind enemy lines by a larger force with greater firepower. Fighting back would only result in a senseless slaughter.

  Werner Angress asked for a new set of dog tags before going overseas, replac
ing the “H” for Hebrew with a “P” for Protestant (lower right corner). (Courtesy Holocaust Memorial Center, Farmington Hills, Michigan)

  “You speak the lingo, Sergeant,” said the captain. “Tell those sons of bitches we surrender.”

  Werner told the officer that if the Germans heard him speak their language they would know he had grown up in Germany. What he left unsaid was that their captors would likely think that any German fighting for the Americans was Jewish. Many of the Ritchie Boys had requested and received new dog tags before going overseas, removing or altering the single letter on their ID tags that designated a religious preference. Werner had changed his from “H” for Hebrew to “P” for Protestant.

  “Well, goddammit,” the captain hissed. “How do I go about it?”

  Werner told the captain to yell “Kamerad, Kamerad,” which he did, and after a moment the firing stopped.

  The twenty-eight American paratroopers dropped their helmets and weapons to the ground, clasped their hands behind their heads, and walked from the woods into captivity.

  After all the training the U.S. Army had put into making Werner Angress a prisoner interrogator, he was now a prisoner of the German army.

  Victor Brombert returned to his beloved France two days after D-Day with Hell on Wheels, the first U.S. armored division to land at Normandy.

  The bulk of the 2nd Armored had loaded onto LSTs (Landing Ships for Tanks) at the docks in Southampton, England, on June 7 and started across the Channel. They arrived off Normandy late that afternoon and spent the night onboard, many crews remaining inside their tanks. In the darkness, one of the four-hundred-foot-long LSTs struck a mine, setting off such a powerful explosion that it rocked nearby ships. It sank quickly, taking with it seven men along with thirty tanks, trucks, and half-tracks.

  When daylight broke, the LSTs were beached, their bow doors opened, and their ramps lowered. The men of the 2nd drove their tanks and other vehicles onto Omaha Beach, a seven-mile-long stretch of curved shoreline bookended by rocky cliffs. Although they arrived at Easy Red sector forty-eight hours after the first assault waves hit the beach, they could see the horrific evidence of D-Day still strewn across the sand.

  Victor drove a jeep down the LST ramp onto wooden planks stretched across the beach so vehicles wouldn’t get stuck, past overturned landing craft, demolished vehicles, abandoned equipment and ammunition belts, and what remained of the German defenses: broken poles that had supported mines, and V-shaped antitank ditches pointing their teeth toward the sea. Dead soldiers lay in shallow trenches dug in the sandy ground, temporarily shrouded in cotton mattress covers. The gently sloping tidal flat, which had offered no cover for the attacking troops, extended three hundred yards from the low-water mark to a masonry seawall, where wounded GIs, evacuation tags tied to their buttonholes, leaned. One had his head swathed in bandages with only narrow slits left open for the eyes.

  From exhausted engineers working to open winding beach exits through the barren and forbidding dunes for the troops, vehicles, and supplies pouring off ships, Victor heard eyewitness accounts of the chaos of Omaha Beach on D-Day. How many of the soldiers who stepped from landing crafts were blown apart by mortar rounds or mowed down by machine guns firing from strategically placed concrete pillboxes. How the wounded were pulled under by the turbulent surf. How the engineers had been unable to clear all the booby traps and obstacles in the water near the beach because infantrymen under heavy fire used them to take cover. How body parts washed up everywhere and the sea turned red with blood. How many assault troops, pinned down and paralyzed by panic and confusion, refused to budge from the beach.

  Victor drove tensely along a steep, pebbly path up a two-hundred-foot bluff to a brush-covered plateau where his team of French interpreters assembled. One of their jeeps pulled a two-wheel trailer covered with a tarp and filled with their duffel bags and Military Intelligence documents, including a bound copy of German Order of Battle. They headed into the village of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer to start questioning the nearly two hundred residents and find out what they knew of German troop strength and defenses inland.

  His first night on French soil in nearly three years, Victor, too exhausted to dig a foxhole, wrapped himself in a blanket and stretched out at the edge of an open field. A few hours later, he was jolted awake by the shriek of a low-flying German plane plunging earthward under the bright light of an aerial flare. A line of rapid-fire bullets tore across the field as Victor hugged the damp earth. With no place to hide and unable to summon a prayer, he made two promises. If he survived, he would consider life a precious gift and would never complain about anything. And he would never sleep outside a foxhole in this war again.

  Victor and the other interrogators soon discovered how challenging it would be to get accurate information from the farmers and peasants in this area. Some were openly uncooperative, while others were overly zealous in trying to please the French-speaking Americans by telling them what they thought they wanted to hear. When one of the interrogators asked a French gentleman, “Where did the Germans lay mines?” he emphatically pointed to the left side of a road while saying, “Off that road to the right.” Even eye-witness accounts could be unreliable, with descriptions varying widely. Victor and his team would learn that the key was to speak to as many people as possible, and compare their answers to filter out inaccuracies and exaggerations.

  Victor was surprised that not everyone in Normandy was delighted by the Allies’ arrival. On the surface, there was enthusiasm for libération, but there was also a current of resentment among some locals because the invasion had caused the deaths of innocent French civilians as well as the hated Germans, les Boches, and the indiscriminate Allied bombing had damaged their homes, churches, and stores. Also, the Calvados region exported dairy products, cider, apple brandy, and cattle, and its prosperity had not suffered under German occupation. Due to shortages elsewhere, the local black market had flourished, which was why Normandy had been less fertile ground for the Resistance.

  The Normandy landscape, with its endless hedgerows, posed special problems for military operations, particularly the armored units. It was the one type of terrain the tank drivers of the 2nd Armored had not trained for during maneuvers in England. (To have done so would have revealed to any watchful spies that Normandy was to be the location of the landings.) A countryside dotted with small fields surrounded by thick hedgerows, sunken roads, and many intersections was excellent defensive ground but placed added burdens on an attacking force. It was perfect terrain for German snipers and hidden machine gun nests that could wait until infantry and armor were within one hundred yards before firing. After losing scores of tanks when their underbellies, not protected by armor, were exposed to antitank guns as they climbed over the hedgerows, the division tried without success to use satchel charges to blow holes in the dense vegetation. Then someone thought to mount a set of bulldozer blades on the front of a tank to cut through the hedges. That worked so well that special blades were fashioned and attached to scores of tanks, which became known as Rhinoceroses.

  The men of the 2nd Armored quickly learned other ways to adapt to fighting in the hedgerows. When the Germans stayed hidden in the hedges and allowed the lead tanks to cut their way through, then open fire on the foot soldiers following, the tankers came up with a new, deadly trick. They loaded their main guns with canister shot, an antipersonnel ammunition consisting of lead or iron balls, and pointed them to their flanks. As the tanks crashed through, they fired parallel to the hedges, annihilating anyone who might be waiting in ambush. This strategy earned the grudging respect of the Germans, who nicknamed the division “Roosevelt’s Butchers,” a moniker the men of the 2nd gladly accepted.

  Victor’s team customized their jeeps after they heard reports about drivers being decapitated by wire strung across narrow roads. Since they were supposed to drive with the front windshield folded down to prevent the sun’s reflection from attracting snipers, they installed vertical wire-cu
tters with sharp teeth placed several feet above the front bumpers.

  In Normandy, Victor was disabused of the notion that war was heroic or noble. As his Alsatian friend had prophesized aboard the Rangitata, he had quickly lost the “bug” for war. On their first night in the field, he had discovered that heroism was fine in literature, but it meant little when the lead was flying. The big picture carried far less importance than he could have imagined. Rather, the focus had to be on What was happening now? Then, What was going to happen next?

  As he made his way through Normandy, questioning the residents of newly liberated towns for any valuable information about the German defenses, any booby traps the Germans had left behind, and their troop movements, Victor seldom passed an orchard or pasture or crossing free of dead soldiers and lifeless animals. Germans were easily identifiable in spite of the condition of the corpses, if only by their hobnailed boots. One sight that seared into his memory was of a young German lying under an apple tree with his mouth agape in apparent agony, as if echoing Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The number of dead livestock in the region was also staggering: cows bloated in grotesque positions, usually on their back with legs stiff in the air, their rotting heft often serving as cover for soldiers.

  Victor was particularly horrified by the corpses of 2nd Armored crews with their tanks; the tank commanders, their bodies folded over the turret, or the drivers, gunners, and mechanics trapped inside who had tried to crawl out the escape hatch of their burning tank but did not make it and were scorched beyond recognition. Victor thought the demolished tanks tipped onto their sides or overturned looked like mutilated prehistoric beasts with gutted bellies. And then there was the stench: spilled fuel and cordite from spent ammunition, mixed with burnt human flesh.

  While he kept in mind the greater cause—the fight against Hitler and the Nazis—these awful scenes were tough to bear. A poem he wrote in Normandy and sent home to a cousin began: