Grunts (26 page)

It was like a father-son talk. The general, bald and in his late fifties, looked like the wizened elder he was. The youthful McKinley looked little different from the men he was leading. He was quite popular with his fellow officers and his soldiers. “He was a fearless and thoughtful commander,” one of his soldiers said. “Our welfare was always his first consideration.” He loved to sing, and had even written a 9th Infantry fight song. He was the grandnephew of President William McKinley, whose name he carried on. As a West Pointer who was born into an Army family, and an infantry officer who had earned many combat decorations, young McKinley was the embodiment of a warrior. Like any good officer, he never asked his troops to do what he would not. “Many times he did the dangerous himself, rather than risk the lives of his men,” Steele later wrote. He had known General Robertson and Lieutenant Colonel McKinley for several years and greatly admired them. “Both Robertson and McKinley were soldiers all the way through and neither of them flinched or questioned the other. To me [watching them converse] was like viewing a movie.”

When the conversation ended, Lieutenant Colonel McKinley placed his companies on a forward slope astride the crossroads. The soldiers dug shallow foxholes, through snow and earth, along little hedges that offered some bare semblance of concealment. Most of the men were in a foul mood. For almost five days they had been in combat, in the cold, with no hot food and little rest, watching their friends get killed or wounded. Now they had been sent on this boondoggle to stave off what they thought was only a local counterattack that some other unit could not handle. Combat units invariably see the world narrowly. Most believe they have a harder, more dangerous job than any other unit. They often perceive that it is their unhappy lot to succeed where other units have failed (“so then we had to bail out this other outfit” is an oft-heard phrase, as is “why do we always get the crappy jobs?”). Although these notions are usually false, built as they normally are on incomplete information, biases, and ungrounded assumptions, they do help build unit pride.

Hence, McKinley’s men resented the situation they were now in, but they accepted it and were determined to do their job. If nothing else, they knew they must hold this position. McKinley had already lost almost half of his battalion in the Wahlerscheid attacks. His C Company was even down to fifty men. Fortunately, he had some help from K Company of the 9th, a unit that General Robertson had previously placed around a farmhouse near the crossroads. McKinley and his Manchus also had some assistance from a few machine-gun sections, along with three antitank guns from the 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion that were covering the road. In all, he had about six hundred soldiers. Among them, they had fifteen bazookas. Artillery forward observers had been out of communication with their batteries from the 15th Field Artillery Battalion farther to the rear for much of the day but, just as the battalion settled in, they reestablished contact and planned defensive fires along the likely routes of enemy attack. The infantrymen also had some antitank mines but they did not yet put them in place because they correctly believed that American armor and vehicles would still migrate along the road for much of the night.
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A shroud of foggy, inky darkness descended over the area. The air was cool and crisp, albeit fraught with the tension of anticipated combat. The dogfaces crouched in their holes and peered into the darkness. Shivering fingers hovered near triggers. Snot ran from noses. The body heat of each man caused the snow around him to melt, making it hard to stay dry. Some of the men lined their holes with straw in an effort to provide a semblance of dryness and warmth. They fought off sleep. Stomachs growled with hunger. In even more cases, stomachs were queasy with the bile of fear.

Some men, like Sergeant Herbert Hunt of A Company, hungered for tobacco. After digging in and lining his hole with straw, he was down to one soggy cigarette. He plopped to the bottom of his hole, placed his tommy gun on his lap, and lit the cigarette. “As I sat there, savoring each precious puff of the cigarette, I began to hear the distant rumble and clanking of moving tanks.” Like many of the other men, Hunt had been told by his officers to be on the lookout for American tanks. But another NCO, Sergeant Billy Floyd, a combat-experienced man, peered into Hunt’s foxhole and voiced the opinion that the tanks sounded German. The two sergeants walked a few dozen yards and stood by the side of the road, listening. A moment passed as the vehicle noises got closer. They could see a column of infantrymen approaching. Another moment passed. Then they heard German voices.

The truth hit Floyd and Hunt at the same time. They were actually standing right next to SS Panzergrenadiers who were walking along the road, with tanks rumbling right behind them. The two Americans stood frozen in place. Hunt’s heart was beating wildly. “What followed made no sense. The German infantrymen passed by, scarcely looking in our direction. Some were laughing and joking. One German, with a very foul breath . . . leaned over and looked in my face as he passed. Then the German tanks passed by, splashing Billy and me with mud and slush.” A German tank commander, standing in his open hatch, even flipped them off as his tank drove past them!

Stunned by this surreal experience, Hunt and Floyd took off to warn their company commander, Lieutenant Stephen Truppner. On the way they ran into another GI and, together, they heard the German tanks stop and shut off their engines. The three Americans got to Truppner’s dugout, on the west side of the road, and told him what had happened. The lieutenant decided to radio for artillery and mortar fire while the three enlisted men warned the company of the German presence. Hunt and his friends left the dugout and took a few steps in the direction of the road. All at once, the night exploded with enemy fire. Machine-gun tracer rounds zipped along the road. To Hunt, it seemed like the tracers were about to go right through him. The other two men clutched their throats and fell dead to the pavement. Sergeant Hunt went back to the A Company CP and found out that Truppner could not get his radio to work. “Lieutenant Truppner wants you to go back to D Company and get the artillery turned on,” one of the men told him. Their CP, he learned, was in a building behind a barn, just across the way.

By now, the shooting was intense. Tracer rounds were still buzzing in every direction. Sergeant Hunt heard the tanks firing their main guns, answered by American rifle and machine-gun fire. The barn was on fire (Hunt found out many years later that Captain MacDonald and a few of his men were taking shelter inside). Hunt made his way to a house behind it. “German tank shells were exploding against the front of the house, sending terrifying flames of light into the sky, and filling the air with hot, sharp, and deadly hunks . . . whirring shrapnel.” Somehow, Hunt did not get hit. He made it to D Company and “told the company commander [Captain Louis Ernst] . . . that we had to have artillery, mortar, and tank support, immediately!” Ernst did so immediately and got quick results. A lucky shell scored a direct hit on one of the enemy tanks, cooking off the ammo inside. A spontaneous explosion blew the turret off.

From here, the battle turned into a confused struggle in the darkness and the shadows of burning fires. Generally, the Americans were fighting from within holes and buildings. The Germans were usually in the open, on the road, or outside of houses. American artillery and mortar shells were coming down on the whole Lausdell crossroads area. The effect was devastating, especially to the Germans. For instance, a new German armored column, with infantry, attacked B Company’s position, immediately astride the junction. An American artillery forward observer walked his rounds up and down the road, toward the woods where the Germans were coming from. “This fire continued for about 10 minutes while B Company raked the infantry with machine gun fire,” Major William Hancock, the battalion executive officer who helped coordinate the fire, later said. “The enemy tanks stopped when the artillery came in on them, and the defenders could hear the screams of enemy wounded.” Fragments laced through the exposed infantrymen, cutting some of them into shreds. Others dispersed as best they could. Seldom did the rounds score direct hits on the tanks, but they did not have to. Near misses had the effect of spooking the enemy crews into immobility or retreat, especially when their infantry support melted away.

A couple hundred yards to the west, the same thing happened in A Company’s sector. The shells even destroyed, or immobilized, four German tanks. Three more kept rolling forward, like menacing nocturnal monsters, until they were among the company foxholes, shooting up the Manchu infantrymen with their machine guns and cannons. The explosions and anguished cries were horrible. Screaming into his radio, Lieutenant John Granville, a forward observer, made a desperate plea to the distant batteries for maximum support: “If you don’t get it out right now, it’ll be too goddamn late!” His ear was pressed to the receiver, but he could hear no response. Convinced he was dead, he leaned back and, in his own words, “reached out for God to take me by the hand.” Three minutes later, a huge barrage from seven full battalions of artillery came cascading down, prompting the German tanks to retreat in a hurry.

Under the protective shelter of the artillery, the infantrymen dealt with the tanks as best they could—mainly with mines, rifle grenades, and bazookas. When Sergeant Ted Bickerstaff and Lieutenant Roy Allen of B Company heard the tanks in the distance, they placed mines on the road, right along their likely avenue of approach. “As we armed the eighth mine,” they later wrote, “the German tanks were 400 yards away.” They placed bazooka teams to cover the mines. “The tanks were stopped by the mines and the others proceeded to go around them through the fields.” The bazooka teams destroyed them.

In a K Company foxhole about one hundred yards from the road junction, Private First Class Frank Royer, a rifleman, was awed by the sight of yet another attacking group of tanks. “They are big and really imposing to a Private in a foxhole with a rifle. I could make out the black hulk of a tank running over our foxholes and heading right for me.” He and his foxhole buddy, Private E. J. Sanders, felt totally helpless. Just ahead, the tank ran over the foxhole of two other men from the company. Soon theirs would be next. This was like something out of a nightmare. Then something, or someone, hit the enemy tank, blowing it up. “It burst into flames. I could hear the crew screaming.” The German tankers could not get out of the tank so they burned to death. Royer and his friend crawled closer to help a couple other K Company men dig out from under the burning German tank.

At the junction, in B Company’s position, First Lieutenant John Melesnich, the company commander, personally destroyed one enemy tank with a bazooka. Two of his soldiers, Sergeant Charles Roberts and Sergeant Otis Bone, put their lives at extreme risk to attack a tank that was lacing the company with accurate fire. The two sergeants retrieved a can of gasoline from a nearby vehicle and then somehow sidled up alongside the metal monster. “[They] poured it on the tank, and set it afire” with thermite grenades. “The crews were picked off by American riflemen.”

By midnight, the fighting died down a bit as the Germans withdrew, probably to reorganize for more coordinated attacks. Lieutenant Colonel McKinley sent a message to his regimental commander: “We have been strenuously engaged, but everything is under control at the present.”
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In the morning, just before sunrise, the SS renewed their attacks, this time with even more ferocity. A chilly curtain of fog and drizzle hung over the area, concealing attacker and defender alike. The Germans threw nearly two battalions of tanks and two battalions of Panzergrenadiers at the Americans, particularly McKinley’s hard-pressed outfit. American artillery and mortar shells practically showered the Lausdell crossroads. Some exploded as close as twenty yards in front of the American holes, if not even closer. “The men of the battalion engaged the tanks and infantry with every means at hand,” a post-action report stated with laconic accuracy. As the report hinted, McKinley’s infantrymen offered near-suicidal resistance, pouring machine-gun, rifle, and grenade fire at the approaching hostile shapes. “The riflemen of ‘B’ Company fired at the turret men of the enemy tanks as they proceeded to come down the road,” Lieutenant Allen wrote. He watched as two enemy tank crewmen made the fatal mistake of abandoning their vehicle. “One was shot by ‘D’ Company and I shot the other.” At this point, a bazooka gunner scored a hit on one tank but did no substantial damage. The menacing steel monster turned its turret in the direction of the bazooka men. “Four hits were obtained at a range of thirty yards without effect. Then one of my men approached the tank from the rear, poured gasoline on it, and ignited the gasoline with an incendiary grenade, thus knocking out the tank.”

From the vantage point of a foxhole near the crossroads, Sergeant Hunt of A Company watched as German tanks, accompanied by groups of foot soldiers, cautiously moved west, right past the company holes. Some of the attackers were on the road, some not. All were under shell fire that Lieutenant Truppner was calling down in a last-ditch attempt to avoid being overrun. “Then . . . the G.I.’s of A Company—all at the same instant—opened fire into the backs of the German infantrymen, killing them by the dozen,” Hunt recalled. The terrified German soldiers careened around, looking desperately for cover. Few escaped the barrage of bullets. The .30-06-caliber rounds smashed into them, presenting the odd sight of torn holes in their winter uniforms (not to mention their bodies underneath). Threads hung crazily in all directions. Blood poured profusely from some of the worst wounds. Steam rose from others.

The shooting, though effective, gave away the location of A Company’s positions. The enemy tanks, minus any infantry support, turned around, rumbled right up to the holes, and began blasting them with cannon and machine-gun fire. Hunt was transfixed by the horrendous violence of A Company’s mortal struggle. “A G.I. leaped from his foxhole, lobbed a grenade onto the deck of a tank, and set it afire. Another G.I. was trying to rip open the hatch of a tank with his fingers. Three other G.I.’s were running behind the tanks, trying to set them afire with burning straw. Far to the right, a G.I. was trying to jam his rifle between the cleats of a moving tank.” None of this extraordinary valor was enough to stave off the tanks. Two of them simply took up station adjacent to the foxholes and methodically shot up the occupants. Gradually the sound of American small-arms fire died off as, one by one or two by two, the soldiers of A Company got killed. Somehow, Hunt and a few others managed to escape to Lieutenant Colonel McKinley’s command post in a dugout at the crossroads. The young commander draped his arm around Hunt’s shoulders and exclaimed: “Thank God, Herb, you got out of there! I thought I had lost all of Company A.” Hunt’s eyes glistened with tears.