If You Survive (10 page)

We continued to work down the road, searching each building along the way. All we came across were pitifully scared civilians, usually huddled together in a back room or cellar. They had no way of knowing we wouldn’t harm them. I wondered how many times the war had passed their front doors.

Quite a bit of small-arms ammunition turned up, plus some antitank shells, gasoline, and food rations. And in one shed we came upon the half-track that had towed the antitank gun we’d captured at the edge of town.

Once Private First Class Crocker and another man, who was always very aggressive, spotted a couple of Germans running from a barn into the house with the bicycles parked alongside. Crocker quickly emptied his rifle through the door, reloaded, and then—without waiting for help—jerked the door open. He stepped over a dead German soldier by the door, glanced at the terrified old civilian couple cringing in a corner of the room, and unhesitatingly followed a track of blood up the stairs. There he found two unarmed Kraut soldiers hiding under a bed, and he ordered
them to come out with their hands up or he’d toss in a grenade. They may not have understood his poor German, but they did understand his manner, and they quickly surrendered.

When next I saw Crocker, he was coming down the road with his prisoners in tow. One of the prisoners had blood running down his arm and was begging to lower his arm, but Crocker just prodded him with his rifle and made him keep moving. Winterspelt was a border town, and the prisoners told us they were home on furlough. Later, when I had time, I recommended Crocker for a Bronze Star for his bold actions.

The men were ready to go into action again across the road because they’d heard movement in the basement and couldn’t get anyone to come out, but I restrained them because I suspected scared civilians. I had the interpreter yell down that if they didn’t come up, we’d throw down a grenade. Sure enough, five pitifully frightened old men and women came crawling up the stairs.

They had been told the American soldiers would kill the men and rape the women. We tried as best we could to assure them they had nothing to fear from us. I was grateful my own parents and grandparents would not have to go through this sort of terror.

Just as we were ready to leave town, a tank sergeant yelled at me from his open turret. He told me to take a quick look at the ox team near a farmhouse a half mile ahead. My binoculars showed a team of oxen plodding along with a two-wheeled cart loaded with household goods. Their route passed along across my front from left to right. A careful study revealed signs of another vehicle on the far side of the oxcart, hiding behind it.

I asked the sergeant if he had any idea what the hidden vehicle was, and he said, “Yes, sir. It must be the half-track
we saw going behind a building when we first came up here. We didn’t have time to get a shot off then.”

“Well, you’ve got time now. Go to it,” I told him. The sergeant just grinned. His first round blew up the oxcart, and his second got the half-track, which was trying to streak away. It seemed a shame to blow up the oxcart, but the war was not a game, and the oxcart was not being put to innocent use.

When I radioed in my position at the next road junction I was ordered to hold up and await further instructions. I supposed they were trying to decide which direction we should take. The equipment was pulled over to the edge of the road, and the men had all taken cover in the tall grass on the right shoulder of the road.

Suddenly a German motorcycle with a sidecar appeared on the road coming in our direction. I waited until he was almost on top of us before ordering the men nearest me to jump up and stop him. The motorcycle came to an abrupt halt. Both Germans quickly threw up their hands in surrender. I ordered them to dismount. The driver stood up and came forward immediately.

The corporal in the sidecar rose slowly, stepped up on the seat of the bike, and then fell astride the bike and gunned its motor full speed and headed down the road toward Germany.

He only made it some twenty feet down the road. The sharp, deadly crack of several rifles broke through the roar of the motorcycle, and the corporal slumped over dead. His back was riddled with bullets. The other German just shook his head in dismay and wonderment at the daring but stupid attempt to escape. In any event, the war was over for both of them.

Our next town was Grossbangenfeld, a pleasant little hamlet. We did not find any German soldiers there but did
corne across an English-speaking woman with a two-way radio. She got very indignant—in fact, she cussed me out splendidly—when, for obvious military reasons I ordered her radio destroyed.

Meanwhile, our Private Crocker was having difficulty with the .50-caliber machine gun. It jammed too easily and apparently needed head-space adjustments. I tried my hand at the repair and told Crocker to go out to the edge of town and fire it a few times to try it out. Soon we could hear the .50-caliber machine gun in rapid fire, as expected, but there came some rather insistent rifle fire as well.

It seems that two Kraut soldiers had just rounded a small bend in the road headed for town when the .50-caliber machine gun opened its practice fire. Both of them dumped their bicycles and rolled into the ditch with their hands raised. The one farther back suddenly decided to make a break. He jumped a small fence and ran like hell down through a little orchard. The riflemen opened fire, but the German was too evasive and got away. He probably would have been better off as a prisoner.

The captured man was so frightened he shook convulsively and his forehead was beaded with sweat. Then he began to jabber in a foreign language and gesticulate, as though he were begging for his life. When one of the men began speaking to him in Polish, the prisoner quieted down.

Once the prisoner was convinced he was not going to be harmed, he began to talk. He was a Russian forced into the German Army after his capture. He was told the Americans would shoot him as a spy if he surrendered, and he was threatened constantly by the German who always rode behind him with orders to shoot him if he failed to do his job. He told us he was the lead scout of a bicycle company coming up the road to fight us, and he said they were only
a few hundred yards behind. The poor guy was frantic, almost berserk with fear.

I quickly moved men and tanks into defensive positions, hoping the Germans would blunder over the little hill to our front. When they didn’t appear after a few minutes, I sent a few jeeps with machine guns to explore the road up to the next curve.

In a few minutes they radioed back that they had found a lot of bicycle tire tracks in the road where the Germans had turned around and headed for home. Apparently they had been warned by the clatter of the .50-caliber machine gun and rifle fire. When their scouts disappeared, they knew their bicycles and rifles were no match against us. Especially if they had spotted our tanks and TDs. We could hardly blame them for leaving.

By now we had the feeling that the Siegfried Line couldn’t be too far ahead. We came down a long slope and passed what appeared to be a railroad freight yard with a small station that bore the sign
BLEIALF
. We could see the town buildings about a half mile to the northeast.

The rail tracks led northward into a tunnel, and we discovered the tunnel had been widened for machine shops and appeared safe from bombing. The machinery, plus any war material, evidently had been moved very recently. You could see where machines had been positioned before the wires had been cut so that they could be moved.

Some of us went into the beer hall across the road from the tunnel, and as we entered something made a noise behind the counter. My Browning Automatic rifleman began shooting without questioning. He ripped off his entire twenty-round clip into the bar, but, to his regret, all he hit was bottles.
C’est la guerre
.

When our eyes got accustomed to the dim lighting, we spotted a young woman and an old man, both very frightened
by the shooting, hiding in a corner. They were father and daughter, slave labor from Poland. She had been a teacher, and she spoke several languages, including English and German. Her father was ill, and she had hidden him when the Germans had moved out all of the machines and other people a few days before.

She also told us we were getting very close to the Siegfried Line, which was not much more than a mile away. She had been there several times with German officers. She was sure the line was occupied, and she volunteered that the bicycle outfit had come from there.

We passed all this information back to the rear and then were told to go on into Bleialf with extreme caution. We stayed on the road and went past a rather large butter factory and right on into the center of town, marked by a church and a cobblestone square. I was greatly surprised that we had no trouble, for there were several excellent defensive positions.

The road eastward toward Sellerich was a long, winding incline, and halfway up the hill I stopped the column and very gingerly walked the rest of the way up, taking one man with me. There was considerable cover from underbrush and scrub pine along the way. We had to go a bit beyond the crest before we could get a clear view of our road winding down the hill and across a small valley, only to disappear into the thick pine forest beyond.

I lay on the ground and used my field glasses to very carefully study every inch of the little valley and the edge of the thick woods. At first I saw nothing at all; then a slight movement caught my eye. A couple of German soldiers were cutting wood with an axe partway up the slope, right in the edge of the woods. One guy picked up an armload and disappeared behind a door that seemed to open into the side of the hill.

I fixed my eye on the spot and saw the door open again,
and the man came out for more wood. Now I could clearly make out a mound of earth and the outline of gun emplacements. This fortification was just across the valley and only about one hundred yards from the road. Suddenly my stomach turned a little, and I got a slight chill as I realized I might well be the first American to set eyes on a pillbox in the famous Siegfried Line.

The earthen mounds looked like piles of dirt with tufts of grass and bushes on top. Darker spots apparently were doors or windows cut into the earth. I could not see any cement or guns, but we found out later they were very much there under that pile of earth—cement walls eight feet thick with roofs ten to twelve feet thick.

I was able to spot several more mounds that might have been pillboxes covered with earth and grass. Huge iron doors were slightly ajar, and there was no longer any question in my mind that this was indeed the Siegfried Line.

Using my compass, I took azimuth readings for each pillbox, marking them on my map. Then we crawled back over the hill to our vehicles and radioed headquarters of my find. I was told to wait there for further orders.

Luckily for us, from what I heard later, Colonel Lanham’s original orders never reached us. I never found out if he changed his mind or whether the orders somehow went astray. Friends told me he had originally wanted me to go right over the hill and attack the pillboxes, to find out how well they were defended. I suppose I was flattered he thought my small combat team could do this, but I don’t see how we could have attempted it alone and come out alive.

Finally, around dusk, I received orders to pull back and rejoin E Company south of Bleialf.

Some other unit in our regiment got credit for being first to cross the German border, but I am sure we had to have been the first to see the Siegfried Line. At least our regiment,
the Twenty Second Infantry, got credit for being the first on German soil, on September 12. Unit pride was important in those days.

We did not know how much or how often we would have to fight there in the next few months.

D
uring the night of September 12–13, while I rested from the tense days on point, Colonel Lanham was busy planning to attack the Siegfried Line the next morning. He had maps, aerial photos, and the reports from his two point leaders on the positions of pillboxes, and he would assume the line was fully manned from the information he had received.

Colonel Lanham also had an uncompromisingly aggressive nature. He believed the best way to end the war quickly and save lives was to attack and attack. He also believed wholeheartedly that the boys of the Twenty Second Infantry Regiment shared his spirit, that they could do the job if anyone could. The Siegfried Line was, to him, more an opportunity than an obstacle. He wanted his regiment to be the first Americans through the line, as they’d already been first across the border into Germany. Plans were to attack east from the vicinity of Buchet.

The attack plan was starkly simple. The Third Battalion, led by veteran Lieutenant Colonel Teague, was to jump off
in column of companies—that is, with one company leading the attack as point and the others following one by one in its path. After the penetration, the two other battalions were to follow through the same gap and then turn left and right to attack the neighboring pillboxes from the rear.

It was important to cut a wide swath through the lines because each pillbox was close enough to its neighbors that they had overlapping fields of fire. An attack thus drew fire from the pillbox it faced directly, plus crossfire from the pillboxes on each side.

The vulnerable part of the pillbox was its rear. The crossfire support did not reach back there, and all they had was some barbed wire and whatever rifles and machine guns could be transferred to the rear trenches. The trick was to get behind a pillbox quickly.

The lead attack company faced the worst beating, but it was not simply going to walk into the “jaws of death.” The open ground close to the pillboxes did have some small depressions into which the infantry could duck, and a scattering of small pines and scrub brush offered some cover.

The tanks and TDs also were to come up to within two hundred to five hundred yards of the pillboxes and plaster them with direct cannon fire against their firing apertures and steel doors. Artillery would fire hundreds of rounds onto the same targets. Many of the Germans thus would be pinned down and occupied with their own safety, and thus—it was hoped—would not be very effective against us.