The wounded tanks, men pierced with holes,
Images of the war nobody wanted. . .
A week after the 2nd Armored arrived, it was given the task of rooting out enemy defenders in Cerisy Forest, a woodland in Calvados. With its abundant growth of beech, oak, and Scotch pine, the forest seemed to Victor like a fine place for walks and picnics in normal times. But the overhead canopy turned deadly when struck by bursts from enemy shells that exploded upon contact with treetops and showered shrapnel. Even slit trenches did not provide protection when the assault came from overhead. There was a common chorus, day and night, as shrapnel fell from airburst shells: loud explosions and sharp crackles from disintegrating trees followed by shrieks of “Oh God! I’m hit!”
During the fighting in Cerisy, Victor was pulled into a mad and dangerous scheme by his division’s intelligence officer (G-2), a West Point graduate who had commanded a tank battalion under Patton in Sicily. The colonel decided that the enemy troops facing them might be convinced to surrender if they only had some encouragement. He wanted Victor’s team to address the enemy troops in German over loudspeakers aimed at their outposts. When he was told that only two members of the French team were fluent in German, he called them both—Victor and Willi Joseph—to headquarters and briefed them on his harebrained idea. They were to broadcast three times a day to the Germans about the “wonderful opportunity” they had to surrender. He believed the German commanders had brought up young and inexperienced replacements who might be convinced to give up.
Victor knew there were mobile Psychological Warfare Units that had special trucks equipped for just such work. These teams had been trained at Camp Ritchie, and they were now drafting propaganda leaflets that were air-dropped over enemy positions and were trained to broadcast propaganda messages while playing popular German music over loudspeakers. But their large trucks could not easily get up to the front lines and, in any case, the colonel decided that Victor and Willi were the men for the mission.
“Get yourselves out there,” he barked, “and do your job.”
So that Victor’s and Willi’s voices could be amplified to reach the enemy soldiers, signal company technicians were ordered to install a public address system close to German lines. One of them climbing up a tree to install a speaker was shot and killed by a German sniper.
After locating the infantry company nearest the front, Victor and Willi set out toward enemy lines. They had been told they would find an American platoon dug in past a sunken road one thousand yards from the Germans. When they cleared the trees and reached the sunken road, they crawled the rest of the way, past bullet-ridden corpses and steel helmets.
When they reached the public address system set up for them, Victor began delivering a cajoling message. He had given some thought to what he would say. No threats. Above all, he wanted to express a shared feeling of complicity. War is horrible. We dislike it. You dislike it. Peace is wonderful. We have come to liberate Europe. You will be treated well when you come over.
The enemy’s answer soon came in a barrage of mortar fire.
Yet the two Ritchie Boys still crawled up to the front lines three times a day for two successive days and delivered their message over the loudspeakers. Each time, the response was a mortar shelling.
Not a single German surrendered.
Guy Stern tried to control his fears as the landing craft he was on pushed through the heavy surf toward Omaha Beach three days after D-Day. He was pressed shoulder to shoulder with other GIs, all of whom he was certain had their own apprehensions. No one in his right mind approaching Omaha Beach by sea in early June 1944 was free of them.
One worry had lingered with Guy since his training at Camp Ritchie. What would happen should he be captured by the Germans and they identified him as a German Jewish “traitor” who was now working for U.S. Army intelligence? Captured traitors and spies were usually shot.
That wasn’t his only fear. He was also concerned about his lifelong squeamishness at the sight of blood. Since boyhood, if someone even cut their finger in his presence, he would run out of the room. How would he fare amid war’s carnage? And would he be able to perform, dispassionately and professionally, the tasks for which he was trained? The Nazis had been responsible for his parents sending him away when he was fifteen, and they had taken his family from their home in Hildesheim and shipped them off to the Warsaw ghetto and an unknown fate. Given the hatred he carried for Hitler and his henchmen, could he control his emotions enough to do his job?
On the beach, Guy’s jeep passed a line of wounded soldiers heading in the opposite direction toward the landing craft. They were the walking wounded, able to carry themselves off the beach. To a man they looked not only bloodied, but shattered and dazed. Farther up the beach they drove past bodies being processed by graves registration personnel. The dead apparently did not have priority for evacuation. Guy surprised himself by being able to see the grotesque display of corpses with a kind of detachment. Somehow, his lifelong squeamishness had left him.
“Get the hell over here! We’ve got too many prisoners!” yelled the team’s leading noncom, Master Sergeant Kurt Jasen, a German Jew in his mid-thirties who fled Berlin with his family after the Nazis came to power. He had changed his name from Jacobowitz when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and graduated in Camp Ritchie’s Eighth Class with Guy.
Guy’s six-man IPW team had been split up before the invasion, with three of them arriving the day after D-Day and the other three today. Sergeant Jasen had come in with the earlier group, and they had been overwhelmed by the number of prisoners taken. Awaiting the arrival of the rest of the team, he now directed them to the path up to the plateau above the beach to start interrogating prisoners.
Driving to the top of the overlook, they came to a barbed-wire holding pen where hundreds of captured Germans were guarded by eagle-eyed MPs until they could be loaded onto empty LSTs heading back to England, bound for POW camps. The interrogators were to get as much information about coastal defenses as possible before the prisoners left.
In an open field, Guy set up an improvised desk using overturned crates. The first prisoner he came face-to-face with was a tough-looking German whose uniform had a red collar insignia, which Guy knew from his Camp Ritchie training was worn by artillerymen. The prisoner’s artillery rank, Wachtmeister, was equivalent to sergeant, and his age, rank, and grizzled looks suggested he had experienced his share of battles and campaigns in the war. To Guy’s initial questions, the German responded with only his name and rank. No matter what tack he took, the prisoner didn’t budge, and Guy dreaded failing in his first wartime interrogation.
Just then, an artillery shell whistled overhead, landing nearby, and both men hit the muddy ground.
Guy bounced up right after the explosion, not realizing that one incoming artillery round was almost always followed by others. The Wachtmeister knew better and stayed flat on the ground, anticipating a barrage from his own howitzers.
“Krieg deinen verdammten Arsch hoch und antworte auf meine Fragen, du Feigling!” hollered Guy, ordering the prisoner to get his “damned ass up and answer my questions.”
The German rose cautiously. He seemed incredulous at Guy’s foolish action, somehow assuming it was due to bravery, not just inexperience. He now began answering Guy’s questions. Luckily, that single artillery shell was not followed by more, as the Wachtmeister had expected, but the one that did land had changed the dynamic of the interrogation and put Guy in charge. He may not have fully understood the reasons why, but he knew he had taken control of his first wartime interrogation, which gave him fresh confidence that he could do his job after all.
Within a week, Guy’s IPW team had moved four miles inland to a large POW camp outside the town of Foucarville. A few days later, the officer in charge of the team, Captain Melvin Rust, a Texan who had learned his German in Brownsville, pulled Guy aside and told him they had three Spaniards who had escaped from German captivity on the Channel Isl
ands off the coast of France. “You have Spanish in your record,” Rust said, “so I’m assigning them to you.”
When Guy joined the army, he had noted on a form that he had taken two years of Spanish at Saint Louis University. But his interrogation of the Spaniards got off to a rocky start as they began talking all at once at a much faster clip than he could decipher. Guy was eventually able to get them to speak slower, one at a time, and he learned they were veterans of the Spanish Civil War who had escaped to France, where they were captured by the Germans. All were engineers, and they had been shipped to the Channel Islands—British Crown dependencies in the Channel near the coast of Normandy—after the Germans occupied them in June 1940. They had been forced into labor by the Germans to help fortify the islands’ defenses. But beyond that, much of what they were trying to tell Guy he didn’t understand. His Spanish vocabulary in college had not included military terms.
The Spaniards wanted to help, and they asked for pencils and paper. Guy left them in a tent, and when he returned they had drawn sheets of detailed schematics of where every antiaircraft weapon, artillery gun, machine gun, and other military installation was located on the Channel Islands.
When Guy took the drawings to his captain, he was awestruck. “Quite an interrogation, Stern,” Rust said in his slow Texas drawl.
Guy didn’t tell Rust he hadn’t been able to speak to the Spaniards in great detail about the military defenses or that it had been the engineers’ idea to make the drawings. But he had succeeded in getting a complete picture of German defenses that would be critical should the Allies attempt to retake the islands, the only part of Britain to be occupied by the Germans during the war.
As a result of Guy’s “brilliant work” with the Spaniards, Rust decided he had another job for Guy. They were getting questionnaires from headquarters, Rust explained, asking about strategic tactics. What was the best way to estimate the morale of German troops? And what were the most and least effective U.S. propaganda leaflets?
“I need a survey section to conduct and review interrogations and prepare detailed answers to these types of questions,” Rust said. “I’ll reassign some interrogators to Survey. You’ll be in charge, Sergeant.”
In high school and college, Guy had enjoyed researching and writing term papers. From the sound of it, his new job would essentially be no different, except he would be gathering data not from books but from captured German soldiers.
One of the few female war correspondents on the continent arrived at Foucarville the following month to do a story. Guy recognized the thirtyish brunette in fatigues and helmet as soon as she walked into the IPW tent. She was Virginia Irwin, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and he had served her lunch many times at the café where he waited tables to pay his way through college.
“You look a lot different in those GI pants and that tin hat,” Guy said, smiling, “but I remember you, Miss Irwin. You always wore a black dress even in summer and had your hair fixed up way high in the front.”
She laughed and said she remembered him, too, but they had never been properly introduced. She wrote down his name and address, and the names of his aunt and uncle, all of which she later included in her article for their hometown newspaper.
She arranged for Guy to serve as her interpreter for a tour of the camp. One German, self-conscious of his unshaven face and dirty clothing in front of the woman reporter, said he was sure the war was hopelessly lost for Germany. He also said he wasn’t surprised by the news of the July 20 attempt to assassinate Hitler, adding that he believed Germany’s only salvation would be to establish a new democratic government that would favor the working class.
When Irwin stopped to speak to another prisoner, he told the reporter through Guy that when he was captured and taken through the American lines and saw all the equipment moving forward that he knew “we were no match for that.”
Before she left, Irwin asked Guy what he thought of the morale of German fighting men. He told her he thought 90 percent of them “believe the war is hopeless but that only 75 percent will admit it.” The discrepancy, he told her, could be chalked up to a combination of German pride and Nazi fanaticism.
ONLY PRISON CAMPS ARE LIGHTED
Stand Out in Normandy Darkness Like Hollywood Premier
By Virginia Irwin, a War Correspondent of the Post-Dispatch
SOMEWHERE IN NORMANDY, July 24—In the absolute blackout that is enforced here in Normandy it is a strange and eerie sight at night to see prisoner of war cages lighted up like a Hollywood theatre marquee for an opening night of “Gone With the Wind.”
These prison cages are the only places on the peninsula where even a glimmer of light is to be seen after dark. Jeeps and trucks crawl along roads without lights of any kind so as not to provide targets for military planes; it is a military offense to smoke cigarettes outside after 10 P.M. and flashlights can be flicked on only in case of absolute emergency.
But inside the prison cages, Germans move about their barbed-wire enclosures in the white glare of tremendous floodlights—a glare heightened by the pitch-black of the surrounding countryside.
Today I visited a German prisoner camp. Thousands of Germans have been evacuated to England through this one enclosure alone, 4000 to 5000 passing through every 24 hours in the days immediately following the fall of Cherbourg in late June.
When I reached this enclosure word spread quickly that an American woman was in camp, and the Germans crowded eagerly against the barbed wire for a glimpse of this oddity.
Through an interpreter, who turned out to be Staff Sgt. Guy Stern of 1116A Maple Place, St. Louis, I talked with several Germans who had been captured in the early stages of fighting for Saint-Lô. . . .*
Not long after Irwin’s visit, Guy received word of a newly captured German who had been a concentration camp guard. As there was neither the time nor the manpower to interrogate all of the thousands of prisoners pouring into the POW cage, it was the responsibility of trained IPW screeners—after asking one or two preliminary questions—to identify prisoners likely to have valuable information and give their names to the interrogation teams for close questioning.
Guy had the former guard brought to him, and he turned out to be a fresh-faced enlisted man who had worked at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp, twenty miles north of Berlin. He told Guy about the conditions at the camp, which he said held several thousand inmates, many of them Jews but also communists, criminals, and homosexuals. Inmates were forced to work in SS workshops manufacturing aircraft parts and other war-related materiel. Camp punishments were harsh; one common tactic, the former guard explained, involved suspending inmates in the air by ropes tied to their wrists, which were cinched tightly behind them. Those caught trying to escape were publicly hanged. Other executions were carried out by firing squads.
“I frequently volunteered for the execution squad,” the young man added with no discernible emotion.
“Why did you volunteer?” asked Guy, keeping an even tone.
He shrugged. “If I hadn’t, someone else would have.”
The former guard explained there was a bonus for volunteering. “I would get a pass to go into Berlin. The great concert halls were still open. I love concerts, especially Beethoven and Mozart.”
Guy pushed a paper and a pen in front of him and told him to write out a statement, which he did and then signed as a confession.
He then had the man taken out of his sight, back to the cage.
Guy was shaken by the prisoner’s admissions, and especially by his matter-of-fact demeanor—so conversational, with little prodding, and no apparent guilt. So imbued with Nazi ethics, the German was unable to recognize the enormity of his own actions. What he said was nearly beyond belief, but Guy believed every word.
After Guy finished his report on the interrogation, he sent it to First Army headquarters and other commands. He expected to hear something back, but he never did. As yet, there was no mandate to document war cri
mes or identify war criminals. It was still too early in the war. The most valuable intelligence was actionable, tactical information that would save American lives and help the Allies win the next battle. Guy never found out what became of the prisoner who found it so easy to confess to executing innocent people so he could attend his favorite symphonies.
Guy made a practice of sifting through stacks of German army pay books taken from new prisoners to see whom he might want to interrogate. Unlike U.S. identification papers, which gave away nothing, German pay books—called Soldbücher—contained all kinds of useful information, such as unit number, previous assignments, and date and location of the last leave taken by a soldier. When Guy came to the pay book of Günther Halm, he recognized the name. Now a Wehrmacht Oberleutnant, Halm had been in the same youth sports club in Hildesheim that Guy had belonged to until all the Jews were kicked out. Companions growing up, they had often competed in athletics. Here was someone who might have information about his family, from whom Guy had still not heard anything more since their last letter in summer 1942. Halm’s pay book showed he had gone home to Hildesheim on leave. Perhaps he would have some information?
Guy waited until midnight to have the prisoner brought to him. In the darkness of the tent, with only a torchlight shining on Halm’s drowsy face, Guy started the interrogation by commenting that because of Halm’s athletic appearance, he surmised that he had been an excellent athlete. Guy knew Halm had been a star in every sport. That got Halm talking about sports. Guy next asked him about their hometown to test his veracity. The prisoner was meticulously precise in his descriptions of Hildesheim.
The youth Guy remembered as being rather quiet and passive had turned into a warrior; he wore on his tunic the coveted Knight’s Cross, which he had won for bravery while serving with Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Guy would later learn that Günther Halm of Hildesheim was, in fact, the youngest Africa Korps soldier to be awarded the Knight’s Cross.
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