Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Werner could not shake his feelings of loss and guilt. If he had driven the captain, he would still be alive. Werner had drawn the mine locations onto the maps and would have taken care not to drive over the mine, information the substitute driver did not possess. Instead, the captain had let him sleep and now the captain was dead. It was the second time in the war, coming after Sig’s death, that Werner had felt such personal loss.

  And then, word reached Werner of still another loss. His friend and tutor from the 116th Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, Staff Sergeant John G. Barnes, who had helped him learn English by reading aloud the New York Times with him, had been killed on D-Day at Omaha Beach in the first three minutes of the invasion. He never made it up from the surf line and died twelve days short of his thirty-eighth birthday. Werner had written Barnes a letter, which he received the day before D-Day, and Barnes had hurriedly written back to Werner that same day. Werner was grateful for their final exchange, in which he had been able to thank John for his friendship. Werner was deeply saddened by the death of a man he would always remember for being a wonderful friend and human being.

  A little more than a week later, the 82nd Airborne was relieved after thirty-three days of combat since D-Day. The men were taken by trucks to Omaha Beach to board troopships back to England.

  Along the beach, Werner passed large barbed-wire cages, behind which hundreds of German prisoners were waiting for their own boat rides out of Normandy. He thought of his German guards during his final days of captivity in Cherbourg, recalling how they had hoped, as POWs, that they would be sent to America. Werner knew there was a good chance some of them would get there before he made it back.

  It had only been one month, and already he had jumped on D-Day, been captured and interrogated by the Germans, been liberated after nineteen days as a POW, captured and interrogated German prisoners, and lost three friends. As he left Normandy, Werner wondered if the whole war was going to be like this, and if it was, how would he possibly get through it?

  7

  THE BREAKOUT

  Martin Selling made it back across the Atlantic in early June 1944. It had been a long time coming for him—from the night he was dragged from his home and taken to Dachau, to his time as a refugee in England, and then to America, where he had been designated an enemy alien when the U.S. entered the war.

  By the time he returned to Europe with the U.S. Army, he was an American citizen. A few days after his transfer to Camp Ritchie in February 1943, Martin and thirty other immigrant soldiers had been trucked to the Hagerstown courthouse, where they went before an octogenarian judge recalled from retirement to help officiate the great number of naturalization ceremonies for the foreigners from the army camp. From the bench, he peered at the GIs. “Are you prepared to take up arms in defense of your country?”

  “No!” piped up a joker in the back, to much laughter.

  The judge slammed his gavel to stop the frivolity in his courtroom. “Shut up, wise guys! Everyone raise your right hand and repeat after me the Pledge of Allegiance.” When the group was finished, he banged his gavel again. “You are now all citizens of the United States.”

  Martin’s final field exercise at Camp Ritchie in spring 1943 had gone badly. His group missed finding its assigned destination in the countryside in the middle of the night, and tramped on aimlessly through rocky and hilly forest until they came to a steep canyon. Without a flashlight, all they could do was wait for dawn. Martin’s team would have to repeat the exercise. Despite this setback, Martin, who received a grade of 99 in Order of Battle and 95 in Interrogation, graduated in the IPW Fifth Class in April 1943.

  Martin had hoped to make it to Europe to take part in the D-Day landings. But two lengthy assignments to participate in maneuvers and war games in Louisiana caused delays, and he was not officially released from Camp Ritchie until a year after graduation. Two weeks later, Martin, by then a staff sergeant, finally set sail across the Atlantic aboard the British liner Andes.

  Former Dachau prisoner Martin Selling, who became a Ritchie Boy and served in the 35th Infantry Division. (Family photograph)

  Once he reached England, Martin’s IPW team was assigned to the 35th Infantry Division, attached to the U.S. Third Army, which had recently changed from a training command to a combat-ready army with the arrival of its new commander, Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. Rumor had it that Patton’s army would be held out of the D-Day invasion to save them for an all-out push of infantry and armor across occupied France.

  The evening before D-Day, as Martin looked into the skies above southern England at the unending formations of bombers crossing the Channel, he couldn’t help but feel he was missing out on the main event. Ever since America’s first days in the war, when he tried to join the U.S. Army Air Corps to become a bombardier, he had wanted to be in one of those planes, delivering deadly payloads to help win the war. So he was doubly frustrated when he was sent to London for a two-week course on document analysis, where he heard little that he didn’t already know from his courses at Camp Ritchie.

  On June 13, his classes were interrupted when the first German V-1 rocket bomb struck about a mile away, and everyone was evacuated to an underground shelter. Although the Allied high command had suspected their existence, when more than one hundred bombs hit London over the next hour, civilians and military personnel alike were shocked. The V-1s were soon nicknamed “buzz bombs” because of the distinct sound made by the pulse-jet engines powering the bombs, which, with wings and a tail, resembled a small aircraft.*

  Martin, glad to leave London and the buzz bombs behind him, departed on July 6 with his IPW team. They crossed the Channel and landed on Omaha Beach, which was now protected from air strikes by hundreds of tethered barrage balloons floating overhead. Even after a month, he could see the evidence of June 6 on Omaha Beach: wrecked ships and landing craft, and a new American cemetery on the windswept plateau above the shore.

  The 35th Division was deployed twenty miles inland, just north of Saint-Lô, where the IPW team was split up, with three men each going to two different regiments. Martin’s half team was dispatched to the 320th Infantry Regiment, a unit that was seeing combat for the first time. Surprised by the interrogators’ heavy accents and fearful of having spies in their midst, the regimental officers debated aloud whether to disarm them and assign them to permanent KP duty. But Martin, as the senior noncom, spoke up, explaining that he and his team were specially trained and showing their official orders assigning them to the regiment.

  “We’ll be useful,” Martin promised, “when you want intel from German prisoners.”

  He persuaded the regimental staff to let the team do its job.

  Martin was fortunate with two of his early interrogations. Both prisoners were privates, glad to be out of the war and willing to answer his questions. The first described in detail what was going on behind the nearby hedgerows where his company of about one hundred infantrymen were dug in. Two days later, an even more useful prize arrived: a captured German medic who provided details of the Germans’ strength and casualties. He had been moving around the Saint-Lô sector treating the wounded, and as a result he knew more about the terrain and defensive positions than most infantrymen. He worked with Martin to draft a map of all the German positions. It was tedious going, and the map they drew had unusual geographical markers that the medic remembered: a fallen beech tree here, a stinking cow cadaver there. When they were finished, Martin gave the map to a sergeant with the reconnaissance platoon who had viewed the area through field glasses for several days, and he recognized the terrain. The sergeant took the hand-drawn map to regimental headquarters, then to the division’s artillery company, where they carefully marked the enemy’s positions on a military map that had quadrants used for calling in artillery and air strikes.

  The final ground attack on Saint-Lô kicked off the next morning after a massive aerial bombardment. The 320th broke through the area mapped by Martin and his prisoner. After
ward, the reconnaissance sergeant told him that by using his map to select their targets, their howitzers had been deadly accurate and destroyed everything from enemy machine gun nests to their command post. The regiment’s commander recommended Martin for a battlefield commission, and from then on, the colonel and his staff were champions of their German-speaking interrogators.

  Martin became a student of the art of interrogation. Not every interrogation was successful, as not every prisoner could be convinced to answer every question. Martin decided that the elements of interrogation could be taught, but they had to be practiced under field conditions with real prisoners to be perfected. What had worked in the classroom didn’t always work out here. Special-trained interrogation teams were a new element of modern warfare, first used by the British and U.S. in North Africa in late 1942. So everyone was learning on the fly, sometimes under fire.

  Most German prisoners were infantrymen captured at the front. The goal was to interrogate them soon after their capture to find out what they knew that could be used against the enemy, and convey it as clearly and speedily as possible to the proper places. This was usually done by messengers, or interrogators reporting their information directly to a command post, as radios were short ranged and unreliable, and field phones required hard wiring, which wasn’t always possible to string between frontline units because they moved often.

  Tactical information could be outdated within days, if not hours. So it was important to interrogate prisoners before they were processed and moved farther back to large POW cages. These first interrogations became the focus for IPW teams like Martin’s that were assigned to regiments, which traditionally were closer to the front—where prisoners were captured—than division or army headquarters. Also, newly captured prisoners were often frightened and confused, which made them more likely to talk. That was what Martin and the other interrogators had been taught at Camp Ritchie, and they were finding it to be true in combat.

  It didn’t take Martin long to decide that the native German speakers on the IPW teams—mostly German Jews but also a sprinkling of Austrians—were far superior interrogators than Americans who had learned the language in school or had been raised in a German American family. The native Germans’ mastery of the language, including vocabulary and jargon, was part of their advantage, but they also understood the culture and psychology of the men they were interrogating. They knew the country, the people, the history. When Martin started a new interrogation, many prisoners looked up at him in surprise, not expecting an American soldier to sound like them. Sometimes, he even resorted to some choice Bavarian invectives to make his point. The use of appropriate colloquialism was effective because it conveyed his familiarity with German customs as well as linguistic competence.

  In time, Martin developed his own unique interrogation style. He found that starting out with the standard questions of name, rank, and serial number was not the best approach because it reminded a prisoner that under the Geneva Conventions he did not have to say anything else. Instead, Martin began by asking the prisoner how he had been captured, which got most of them talking. It felt more like a conversation, and nearly all of them answered instinctively and in detail, pleased that someone was interested in them. The response to Martin’s opener allowed him to size up the prisoner and, once they were talking, to follow with more specific questions. He always gave them easy ones first to get them talking, saving the difficult ones for later. Convinced that the single most important thing an interrogator could do was develop a rapport with the prisoner, he always avoided asking a question that they wouldn’t know how to answer—for instance, asking an infantryman a technical question about an artillery gun or asking an artillerist about the operations of a Panzer tank. That could end a conversation or, even worse, cause a prisoner to spin a fanciful yarn, which was a waste of Martin’s time and could result in bad information being passed on.

  Whenever Martin sensed he was being given incorrect or misleading information, he asked a question to which he already knew the answer. If the prisoner lied again, Martin’s demeanor and tone shifted abruptly, leaving no doubt he could get nasty if necessary. Usually, he only had to raise his voice and most would snap to attention, as they had been taught to do in Hitler’s army. As Churchill said in his 1943 speech to Congress, “The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet.” Martin, who had experienced both, preferred the latter.

  Martin Selling questions German prisoners near the front in France, 1944. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  Ever since Dachau, Martin had carried with him a smoldering hatred of the Nazis. He had been elated by the assignment to Camp Ritchie, and dreamed of returning to the continent as an army interrogator to wreak revenge—physical and emotional—on the captured soldiers of Hitler’s Third Reich. He sometimes fantasized about repaying all the sufferings and degradations he and other Jews had experienced. Of course, he didn’t mention this to anyone at Camp Ritchie for fear of being thrown out of the training program, but that motivation had secretly driven him every step of the way.

  Now that he finally had his chance to exact revenge, he made a surprising discovery: He was really a softy at heart. He could not work himself up to become mean and angry at individual Germans without provocation, and only an arrogant few provoked him. As for the temptation to use physical force on a prisoner, he considered brutality a waste of time. At Dachau, he had seen it used by the cruelest against the most helpless, and it had accomplished nothing. Furthermore, any intelligence obtained during torture was suspect because most people would say just about anything to stop their pain and suffering. Now that he was in the field interrogating enemy prisoners, Martin wanted only to do his job well and complete it in a manner that allowed him to retain his own humanity.

  That said, there were a few times when he did slap a prisoner. Usually, he respected someone’s right to be silent, and would quickly have him taken away by MPs and another prisoner brought in for questioning. However, Martin did not tolerate any back talk or lectures from staunch Nazis, particularly those in the SS. Occasionally, when he was interrogating an especially difficult prisoner, Martin would imagine aloud what would have happened to him if he had confronted an SS guard at Dachau with such audacity. “At Dachau, we were slapped around or worse for much less, or even for no reason at all, Jews and non-Jews alike.” Whenever Martin let drop his having been at Dachau, most prisoners answered his questions without further hesitation. One obstinate prisoner asked in an accusatory tone just where exactly Martin had learned to speak German so flawlessly. “In Germany,” Martin said curtly, “where I also saw how the SS interrogate prisoners while I was in Dachau.” The realization that he was facing a former inmate from a Nazi concentration camp was such a terrible shock to the German that he lost control of his bowels right then and there.

  Martin learned to rely on the prisoners’ innate fears, unquestioning obedience, and instant reaction to sharp commands. Most of them had lived a brutal life during the war, and they had been mistreated by superiors and subjected to severe punishments for the smallest indiscretions. They had watched their own countrymen behave deplorably in conquered territories, carrying out executions of military, civilian, and political opponents. In some cases they, too, had doubtless participated. So when they were captured, they often expected equally grim treatment from the U.S. Army, which Martin tried to play to his advantage. Time and again, Martin saw how shocked they were when he spoke in a calm voice and their willingness to keep answering his questions if it meant he would maintain this civilized approach.

  The day after the fall of Saint-Lô, a young German soldier was brought to Martin to interrogate. During his interrogation, he told Martin that before his capture he had taken part in laying a minefield in their sector. Martin casually asked if he would show where the mines had been buried. The prisoner agreed to do so. With Martin accompanying him, they strolled through the entrenched hedgerows toward the battle-scarred front lines. They were repeatedly stopped by
exhausted and wary U.S. soldiers who wanted to know what the hell they were doing walking around in no-man’s-land. With the German in his Wehrmacht uniform and with Martin’s heavy accent, they had wisely brought along an American-born MP, whom Martin let do the talking.

  It was the first time Martin had seen an actual battle zone so soon after the fighting ended. It had been recently bombed by aircraft and bombarded by artillery and little had been cleared away. Dead German soldiers were lying in the trenches next to disabled German tanks. Warned about booby traps as well as mines, they trod cautiously.

  Martin, armed with a .45 pistol, walked a distance behind the prisoner, and was careful to step into the impressions left by the German’s hobnail boots. The MP was behind them both with his rifle at the ready. If this was a bogus story, that was one thing. Martin would simply take the prisoner back and return him to the cage. But if this was a ploy to kill a couple of U.S. soldiers by leading them into a minefield, Martin wanted to be sure the prisoner stepped on the first explosive.

  They came to a road running through an open field where U.S. Army engineers from a bomb disposal unit were carefully probing for live German mines; those they found were set aside for controlled detonation.

  The prisoner sauntered over to the engineers and, with Martin following and translating, showed them the general pattern that had been used in laying the minefield. Then he went over to the excavated mines and nonchalantly dismantled a dozen of them. The engineers watched how he did it, then joined in. By the time they finished, the German had made fast friends; the GIs gave him chocolate and cigarettes and shook his hand.

  For Martin, the scene at the minefield made an indelible impression: The best interrogations were not only about collecting intelligence so as to kill the enemy. They were about saving lives.