*
Somehow the November dawn broke, gray, rainy, and cold, Thanksgiving Day, 1944, in that miserable little town just over the border in Germany. The men dared not move. Red knew it was just a matter of time before the Germans moved in to finish the kill, if not with a direct artillery hit, then with an anti-tank grenade, a round from an enemy tank, or simple infantry grenades. And the shelling continued.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
We were shelled all day long the next day. We don’t move, we can’t move. We were shelled all the next night. If you had to go to the bathroom you could use your helmet to pee in, try to get that hatch open and throw it out. That’s all you could do. I think we had, you know, those K-rations. They were packages you’d have canned with like meatloaf or something, cheese, bad stuff—you could hardly chew it. Anyway, we were shelled all that day and all the next night. And then the following day, I can’t remember now if it let up a little bit... but we moved from where we were. You know, that rubble was all around. And we went to a great big building and I think all the tanks went in with me, like a big airplane hangar of some kind. I don’t know what it was, but we got in there under cover. And you know, planes would come over and they couldn’t see you. I think we got so shelled those two days after we moved in, that it was over. But you were a little shaky after that because they were so methodical you could time it. They were famous for that…you’re probably aware of that, aren’t you, that they were famous for being methodical in what they did… here’s this little dump of a hamlet—why did they keep shelling? What did they think was there? Maybe they thought that there was a plan by our units there to have a big push from this place, so they were going to break up or stop the attack of several divisions or something.
Red and his crew returned to their quarters, weary but alive.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
I loved Schultsie, but he just had had it. And you know, when you’re in combat, a week is a long time and a month is a long time. You’re there for months until you almost forget what life was like before. He’d been there for a while, and of course by that time, we all had a lot of experience so we could handle things, despite the fact that Schultsie was doing nothing; he couldn’t do anything. Schultsie got so he couldn’t eat, he was vomiting. And I remember we finally went to the captain and said, ‘Gee, it’s going to kill this guy. Give him a break, take him out.’ So they did, but he stayed with the outfit; he stayed there for the rest of the war, so we continued to see him. I really loved that man and he was no coward, don’t get me wrong, it just was too much for him, just absolutely enough.
As November turned into December, 1944, the Germans had shown that they were not about to roll over. Thanksgiving packages and letters arrived for the men from home. The parcels addressed to the tankers recently killed went unopened.[*] And a new offensive by the Germans was about to usher in the costliest battle in the history of American winter warfare.
The Battle of the Bulge was about to break.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Bulge and Beyond
On that beautiful day in July 2001, I left the Connolly house after having interviewed Judge Walsh armed with George Gross’s contact information. A now-retired professor of English Literature at San Diego State University, Dr. Gross was delighted to learn of my interview with his old friend.
George Gross had enlisted in the Army in September 1943, after watching his friends and family go off to the war, giving up his deferment and his job in a California parachute factory. George joined up for many of the same reasons as Walsh, though it was clear from their first meetings that they were as different in deference to Army life as night and day. Where Red disdained Army rules and regulations, George seemed to thrive in it, earning a reputation for seriousness and respect among his fellow soldiers, even if Red would sometimes tease and tell jokes at his expense.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
When I became the tank commander of that crew, and I tell you, when we were engaged in something, they were serious and followed things and would do what had to be done. But otherwise, they wouldn’t pay any more attention than you guys [to students in classroom] would pay attention to me. I became the tank commander and Gross stayed as the gunner, and that’s when my friend Bruce ‘Ace’ Leyda became the driver and Peter ‘Hot-Lips’ Haverlock became the bow gunner. And Hot-Lips got mad at me… he’d been at headquarters company and he wanted to see more combat. I said, ‘You want to see more combat, Hot-Lips?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Okay. So, we’ve got an opening for you. We’ll put you in on Tank number 13, 2nd Platoon, Company D, 743rd Tank Battalion.’ So now he was the bow gunner, and had a .30-caliber machine gun that goes out through the front of the tank. You see, there are hatches for the driver and the bow gunner, as well as a turret, but through the portal we had the .30-caliber machine gun. And we were called one time to help get some wounded guys who had been pinned down and fortunately there wasn’t any big, major armor[*] in the area. So, anyway, we were called upon to go up to rescue these wounded, get them out of there, we could get some on the back of the tank and whatever. So, we start across this open area, and now we all got to fire a little bit, you see, so old Hot-Lips, in his first experience he’s firing that .30-caliber… There was an opening between the tank commander, where he stood on this basket and turret, and the bow gunner; he could give signals by kicking the guy in the head or something. ‘Fire that gun there, Hot-Lips.’ So he starts firing the .30 caliber. Well, if you’re not careful, that gun’s going to rise, you see… and anybody who’s handled guns knows that it’s going to kick up. And you can watch it go, because every fifth bullet is a tracer[*] and you can follow how you’re doing. So anyway, there goes Hot-Lips and he’s firing it, and boy, it’s going right up in the air, and I said, ‘Nice going, Hot-Lips, you shot down two ducks. We’re lucky! We’ll eat good tonight!’ And Hot-Lips got so mad at me [laughing] and refused to fire anymore—he sat down and he wouldn’t fire anymore! Oh, man! That’s some good stuff! [Laughs heartily] Oh, he was so mad at me! So angry! But that was a great crew. That was a great crew, but they were fun.
Now George, our gunner, he was quite serious. Ace Leyda was our driver, Ace was quite the character and Ace and I would have fun; George was a good boxer back home and [within his earshot] we would say, ‘Say, did you hear about Gross?’ ‘No, what about him?’ ‘Well, I hear he is a boxer, a champion boxer.’ ‘You don’t say?’ ‘Yeah, he could box more oranges in California than anybody else!’ [Laughs] But George was more serious, a good companion, fine, but he was a little more serious, and we called him ‘GI George’…well, you know, he came from a military family. His father I think was a career Navy man, as I recall. So he was ‘by the book,’ and he didn’t always approve of some of the behavior of the tank commander because I was really a—I was a civilian in an army uniform. I chafed a little bit on some of the discipline of things.
We were delayed one time, and I was very annoyed because we were supposed to help some infantry out, and we weren’t moving. Something was holding it up, and I remember being quite annoyed thinking about these poor guys waiting for help. So anyway, here comes some brass. You know what I mean by ‘brass.’ Brass means like generals, or colonels, higher officer guys. They were very ‘in charge,’ I can tell you. And I didn’t have the same feeling as George about the brass. So, as it so happened, one of the guys that was coming along to investigate what was going on, I don’t know whether it was General Hobbs or not, who was you know, the head of the 30th Division, but it was a general, and I guess he saw that I was so annoyed. I think he came along, he said something, and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I wish they’d find out what the hell was going on up there because we want to get out of here, we want to help them out, and you better come back and tell us what’s going on.’
Matthew Rozell: Did you know he was a general?
I guess—but in combat, Matt, you’ve got to remember, who cares in combat? But there was a gasp beside me from ‘GI George
,’ and he never forgot that. You ask him about that encounter with the general sometime. He still gasps over that! [laughs] He couldn’t believe that nothing happened! But that general was a regular guy. And he knew that there was no time for that nonsense, you know, that ‘GI’ stuff, really. I remember that, yeah. So there were moments… you had to do some things to kind of make yourself laugh a little bit.
George C. Gross
Carrol kept me sane through nine months of combat.
Recently married to his high school sweetheart Marlo, George left California to ship out to Fort Knox in Kentucky for armored training. He arrived in Normandy shortly after Red, and after the battle for Aachen, they found themselves sharing the same tank. Initially they clashed; bottled up in the same tank, sometimes they would lay out shells between them to delineate boundaries on occasions when they could not leave the confines of the tank during periods of rest. But the stress of combat also forged the bonds of battle. Cramped inside the tank during the two-day shelling at Fronhoven, the men both realized that their tank commander had reached his limits. Shortly thereafter, both Carrol and George received battlefield commissions to second lieutenant and command of their own tanks.
Unbeknownst to them, or anyone in the Allied ranks, Hitler’s last gamble to counterattack between the advancing American and British forces in northern France and the Low Countries was in the staging phase of execution. The incredible magnitude of American industrial capacity dictated to Hitler that somehow the supply lines had to be cut, and he chose the Ardennes Forest for the avenue of attack in the hopes of reaching the port of Antwerp, combining the elements of surprise, rough ground, and bad weather for a quarter-million man offensive. On December 16, 600 tanks broke through the thinly manned American lines after a tremendous artillery barrage, creating a bulge or pocket they hoped to exploit to the sea, and sowing desperation, panic, and confusion. The 30th Infantry Division and the 743rd Tank Battalion hurried south and found themselves in a desperate struggle for survival as temperatures plunged to the coldest in European memory during the winter of 1944–45.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
It was muddy and cold, but we were doing okay. Then the Bulge came. We were doing just great, and then December 16 came.
We came back out, waiting to cross the Roer River. The Germans had the dams up there and we were hoping to get across the Roer before they burst the dams. While we were waiting to do that, we were getting everything together, and we were poised [to attack] when the Bulge hit. They were trying to get to the coast, to take Antwerp, to split the British and American forces to the north with the American forces to the south. We were in the Ninth Army then. We had been the First Army until September, I think, and then we joined the Ninth Army. We were in the north, and they were going to cut us off and annihilate us, they were going to let us have it. We were at Malmédy, Stavelot, St. Vith, and La Gleize. That is when we fought in the snow and cold. It was cold, and we had no winter uniforms. We didn’t have any overshoes, and of course we couldn’t wear any overcoat on a tank anyway.
Matthew Rozell: So you slept in the tank?
Oh yeah, in the Bulge we slept in the tank.
*
On the northern front of the German offensive, on just the second day of the attack, the spearhead of the ruthless Joachim Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Division captured 150 Americans. Herded into a snowy field, the unarmed prisoners were mowed down by the SS with their machine guns, their Tiger tanks blocking any escape. More than eighty men were killed, the Germans moving through the field, kicking and delivering coup-de-grâce pistol shots to the wounded. News of the Malmédy massacre steeled an unwritten American response: take no SS troops prisoners.[*] The barbarity extended to the civilian population as well. In the nearby hamlet of Stavelot, where more than 20 men, women, and children had been murdered, Joseph Couri of the 743rd Tank Battalion recalled:
I observed an elderly man with a little covered wagon. He was pulling it and going into a garage directly across from my tank. He had made several trips down the street and when he came back he stopped at my tank. Since I could not speak Belgian, he pulled the cover from the wagon. I have never forgotten the sight of the two children’s bodies. There they were, frozen with the older child’s arms around the other as they were shot by the SS troops—they were still frozen in that position.[55]
Only days after this incident, the 30th Infantry and the 743rd Tank Battalion would repeatedly tangle with Peiper and their old SS nemesis from the battle of Mortain, regrouping and counterpunching as the tide of battle slowly turned. Peiper was denied his immediate target of Liège, on the way to Antwerp, having failed to breach the American line past Stavelot and Malmédy.
*
The German offensive collapsed by Christmas 1944 as the skies cleared and Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower brought to bear a quarter-million troops of his own at lightning speed. Although the Americans were now on the offensive, the US Army would suffer most of its battle casualties in pushing the Germans back through the sub-zero cold and waist-deep snow, artillery attacks, and enemy mines. Tanks ground slowly in low gear along snow-covered roads in the mine-free ruts of previous vehicles, any uneven surfaces liable to send the tank skating sideways without traction.[56]
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
Of course, it wasn’t very comfortable being in the tank in that cold, on cold steel. You were not very warm. We would take our boots off sometimes to rub our feet so they wouldn’t freeze. It was so cold, but we had no winter clothes. They hadn’t figured on that, you see; winter clothes were not a priority when they got the ports because the army was moving so well that the attitude was, ‘The hell with that, we’re going to get through with this [the war] by Christmas.’ And they put the priority on food and shells and ammunition and things like that, and so we had no overshoes.
I was lucky; I had an undershirt like a sweatshirt and I had OD[*] pants, you know, wool uniform pants. I had a pair of coveralls and I had a sweater, and my combat jacket. And I found a scarf. We had gloves but they weren’t warm. The funny thing was, my father was a leather sorter in a glove shop in Johnstown and he sent me a beautiful pair of heavy mittens and that was great. I wrote to him and I said, ‘Gee, Dad, that was great. They’re nice and warm… the only problem, no trigger finger!’ [Laughs] But the gloves they issued us were not warm enough in that climate.
Now some guys that came in later as replacement troops, they had more heavy clothes and they gave them overcoats. Of course they couldn’t wear overcoats with the tank! You could not maneuver; you couldn’t get in and out of the turret or out of the bow gunner’s side door with a heavy overcoat! Oh, so cold… oh, man alive! I was never so cold ever in my life—ever! And it just stayed cold day and night. I mean, how are you going to get warm? The infantry guys were digging their holes—that was tough because the ground was frozen. Boy, they had to chop. That’s where they lived. They lived in their holes and we lived in the tank.
George C. Gross
The tanks were so cold, our breath would freeze into little icicles about an inch and a half long on the roof of the turret, and our hands and our feet would be cold all the time. Once in a while we would come across some infantrymen who had built a fire. We would get out and warm one side of ourselves on the fire and then turn around to warm the other side and get back into the tank and freeze again. Occasionally we would be able to go into a house and stay in a house for a day or two and be warm but that would be it.
Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh
While we were in Malmédy, things had quieted in the latter stages of the Bulge. We would go out during the day—it was like going to work. About eight o’clock in the morning we’d be called and we’d have to go someplace, like to relieve troops.
I remember one day there was some infantry who had run into a firefight with some Germans. All infantry and, I guess, no armor, because they didn’t want to send our light tanks against German tanks, because 37-millimeter guns were all we had on t
he light tanks, 75-millimeter on the mediums. Those Germans had the 88. That gun was the greatest gun that ever was, the 88. They used it for anti-aircraft, they used it for artillery, and they used it on the tanks, anti-tank gun, everything! They could fire an 88 and I guess it could go two miles and still go through a tank! I think so; it was a long way.
Anyway, there was a group of Americans wounded and they were pinned down somehow. So we were told, ‘You have to go up and clean out that nest of Germans and get those wounded back.’ So we’d go up and we’d have our armored firepower and infantry, and then we’d give help. But then we’d pull back at night, and it got to some point we were able to pull back into Malmédy, and they said, ‘Look, if you can find a place to sleep or stay, go ahead.’
We went to this house, three stories and everything. We went there and I can remember I could speak a little French from high school. We had our bow gunner at the time, ‘Hot Lips’ Havelock—he could speak some German, so we were in good shape. So I said, ‘Avez-vous un lit pour quatre hommes?’ (Have you got a bed for four men?) This woman was very nice and we stayed in her home. We hadn’t had a bed in months! My God, she had those big comfortable featherbeds or whatever. [Laughs] When they could get rations to us, for the tankers…we could have 10-in-1 rations in a big box and they’d have things like bacon in one and some kind of meat or something in another. They weren’t bad rations, [but sometimes] we could hardly eat some of that crap! Well, she was in bad shape because they didn’t have much to eat in those areas and everything. So she would take that stuff and fix it up—she would fix it and cook for us, and we’d stay there. I think I can remember that she had two sons, and they were in the German army! Of course, that’s where Malmédy was, that is, sort of on the border between Germany and Belgium. And I think that the two sons were on the Russian front, so you can imagine what that was like… But anyway, that woman was so nice to us, and we were nice to her too. And you know, we gave her as much food as we could get. We were there about maybe three or four days, I guess. Wasn’t that something? There she was, taking care of us, with two boys in the German Army!
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