The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (39 page)

Christmas morning, Stark got to talking to Wib about the stories he had heard or read from the First World War, when on Christmas the front-line soldiers would declare a truce. “We longed for a lull, for a day of peace and safety.” Instead they got a German barrage, intended to cover the retreat of German vehicles from Verdenne. Stark began cutting down fleeing enemy infantry: “Only on this Christmas Day did I ever find combat to be as pictured in the movies. We blazed away ruthlessly. This action could not be understood or accepted by persons not having combat experience.”

At dawn the following day, German infantry and tanks counterattacked. The remainder of the platoon retreated, but Stark stayed with his machine gun, even when Wib took a bullet in the middle of his forehead. “Now I was alone and for the first time I was sure that I too was going to die. But I kept on firing, hoping to keep them off. By now three enemy tanks were very close and firing their machine guns and cannon directly at my position. I was nearing the end of my second box of ammunition.” A German bullet ricocheted off his machine gun, broke into bits, and slammed into his left cheek, blinding him in the left eye.  He ran to the rear only to bump up against a burning German tank. Then over the hill and back to where he had started three days ago, on Christmas Eve. He had lost an eye and won a Silver Star. In his sector, nothing had been gained by either side in this series of attacks and counterattacks.  Through the first weeks of January, the battle continued. Eisenhower insisted on an offensive that was effective but terribly costly. The total toll of American casualties in the Bulge was 80,987. More than half the killed or wounded came in January. For the period December 16 to January, the defensive phase of the battle for the Americans, the figures were 4,138 killed in action, 20,231 wounded in action, and 16,946 missing. For the period January 3 through 28, when the Americans were on the offensive, the losses were 6,138 killed, 27,262 wounded, and 6,272 missing. Thus January 1945 was the costliest month of the campaign in Northwest Europe for the U.S. Army.  Such figures boggle the mind. Bringing them down to the individual level helps comprehension. Easy Company, 506th PIR, was in the Bastogne battle from December 18 to January 17. Easy’s losses were heavy. Exact figures are impossible to come by; in the hurry-up movement out of Mourmelon the company roster was not completed; replacements came in as individuals or in small groups and were not properly accounted for on the roster; wounded men dropped out of the line only to come back a few days later. An estimate is that Easy went into Belgium with 121 officers and men, received about two dozen replacements, and came out with 63. The Easy men killed in action in Belgium were Sgt. Warren Muck, Cpl. Francis Mellett, and Pvts. A. P. Herron, Kenneth Webb, Harold Webb, Carl Sowosko, John Shindell, Don Hoobler, Harold Hayes, Alex Penkala, and John Julian.  The best description of the cost of the Battle of the Bulge to Easy Company comes from Pvt. Ken Webster, who rejoined the company during the truck ride to Alsace. He had been wounded in early October; now it was mid-January. He wrote, “When I saw what remained of the 1st platoon, I could have cried; eleven men were left out of forty. Nine of them were old soldiers who had jumped in either Holland or Normandy or both: McCreary, Liebgott, Marsh, Cobb, Wiseman, Lyall, Martin, Rader, and Sholty. Although the other two platoons were more heavily stocked than the 1st, they were so understrength that, added to the 1st, they wouldn’t have made a normal platoon, much less a company.” Beyond the wounded and killed, every man at Bastogne suffered. Men unhit by shrapnel or bullets were nevertheless casualties. There were no unwounded men at Bastogne. As Winters put it, “I’m not sure that anybody who lived through that one hasn’t carried with him, in some hidden way, the scars. Perhaps that is the factor that helps keep Easy men bonded so unusually close together.” They knew each other at a level only those who have fought together in a variety of tactical situations can achieve, as only those who endured together the extreme suffering of combined cold, not enough food, and little sleep while living in constant tension could attain.

They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing. Glenn Gray wrote, “The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose. . . . How often I wrote in my war journals that unless that day had some positive significance for my future life, it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost.” They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers. The company had held together at the critical moments in the snow outside Bastogne because 1st Sgt. Carwood Lipton and his fellow NCOs, nearly all Toccoa men, provided leadership, continuity, and cohesiveness. Despite a new CO and new officers and enlisted recruits, the spirit of E Company was alive, thanks to the sergeants.

That spirit was well described by Webster. By this time Webster had been wounded twice and returned to combat after each occasion. He would not allow his parents to use their influence to get him out of the front lines. He would not accept any position of responsibility within E Company. He was a Harvard intellectual who had made his decision on what his point of view of World War II would be, and stuck to it.

He was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, sensitive, level-headed, keenly observant, thoughtful, well educated. Here he was thrown into the most intimate contact (pressed together on an open truck on icy roads in hilly country, sleeping in a foxhole with other enlisted men) with ill-educated hillbillies, Southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and so on among most of the enlisted men in the company. Of those who had been to college, most were business or education majors. In short, Webster was thrown in with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life, he just would not have known them.

Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others.  His description of his truck ride with his platoon to Alsace deserves to be quoted at length:

“We squished through the mud to our trucks and climbed in. McCreary and Marsh lit cigarettes. Martin made a wisecrack about a passing officer. I asked what had happened to Hoobler. Killed at Bastogne. Poor Hoobler, who got such a kick out of war, dead in the snow. And the others? Muck and his buddy Penkala, who had the deepest hole in one position, had been killed by a direct hit. Sowosko was shot through the head attacking Foy. And so on. Some replacements who had come in after Holland had also died. A lot of men had been evacuated for trench foot, too many, McCreary thought. The platoon wasn’t what it used to be.” Webster thought that it was. He had followed a long and complicated route through the Replacement Depots to rejoin the company, a time of frustration and loneliness for him among that host of khaki-clad look-alike soldiers. Now he was home, back with 1st platoon, back with Easy Company.  “It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust,” he wrote.  “Listening to the chatter in the truck, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who had returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest.”

There were missing chairs at home. They belonged to the men who had been killed, badly wounded, or had broken. But as Webster’s reaction indicates, although Easy had lost many members, and gained others, thanks to the former E Company officers now on battalion or regimental staff and to the noncoms, it remained an organic whole.

Not all did. The 29th Division’s saying-We are three divisions, one in the grave, one in the hospital, one at the front-could be applied to more than two dozen U.S. divisions in ETO, including the 101st. And the one at the front consisted of replacements who did not know what to do and war-weary veterans whose fatalistic attitudes suggested that it did not matter what they did.  Fortunately, there was that core of veterans who could teach as well as fight.  It was critical to the victory because by the end of the war men who had been State-side on D-Day made up virtually the whole of the fighting army.  The army was always learning. After the war it conducted surveys among the ETO veterans, including detailed material on their training, rightly figuring that it was the combat veterans who could best judge its effectiveness. A majority of the men surveyed had their training in 1944 and fought in the last six to eight months of the war. Perhaps half of them had been through Repple Depples.  Every combat veteran I’ve interviewed, when asked about training, starts with some version of, “Nothing can prepare you for combat.” Virtually all the men surveyed agreed. The paratroopers commented that they thought they had been put through a training regime so tough that “combat can’t be worse than this,” only to discover it was. There was a consensus among the GIs that training should be tougher, with more live ammunition, and the best way to prepare a soldier for combat was to improve his stamina and physical strength.  The veterans pointed to many additional shortcomings in their training. About 80 percent said they did not know enough about German weapons, how to defend against them or how to attack them. They further felt their knowledge of German tactics was deficient. They wished they had been taught more aircraft identification. Ninety percent were unprepared for mine warfare. No one had said to them one word about trench foot, much less how to prevent it.  No surprise: They felt all those hours spent doing close order drill and learning military courtesy were wasted. They felt their weapons training had been good. But they had not been taught to follow close behind supporting artillery fire, they tended to slow down on making contact, they allowed German indirect fire to pin them down, their noise and light discipline at night was poor, they bunched together when fired on. Those that survived the first few days learned how to do better, but they could have been taught at far less cost back in the States.

Captain Roland remarked, “The marvel is that the draftee divisions were able to generate and maintain any esprit de corps at all. Formed originally by mixing men indiscriminately from throughout the nation, thus severing all personal, social, community, and regional bonds, identified by anonymous numbers and replenished through the notorious Repple Depples, their only source of morale, other than the shared experience of hazard and hardship, was the character and patriotism of the soldiers. Fortunately, that proved to be sufficient.” In an article inArmy History, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 1994, Professor Francis Steckel indicts the army for two reasons:

“First, the replacement system rushed men into combat without adequate preparation and created an unnecessarily arduous challenge of adjustment on the field of battle. Second, the small number of divisions required units to remain in the front lines without rest and beyond the limits of individual human endurance, thus causing an earlier than necessary breakdown of veterans whose invaluable combat experience and skills were lost prematurely.” I’d add a third indictment: failure to pass on even rudimentary information. It was not the job of the front-line machine gunner or tanker to train replacements. The army was supposed to do that and it failed.

16 -    Night on the Line

IN THE WINTER CAMPS of 1864-65, Civil War soldiers drilled, marched in closed ranks, built log shelters, repaired equipment, foraged for food. On outpost duty they swapped tobacco, coffee, and insults with the enemy. At night they cooked and ate, sang around the campfire, and retired to bunks. Night was the best time for Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.

It wasn’t like that at all in the winter of 1944-45 in Belgium, France, or Luxembourg. Night was the worst time.

The difference between 1864-65 and 1944-45 came about because of technological improvements. Civil War cannon seldom if ever fired at night, as the main body of the enemy was out of range and anyway Civil War gunners could only fire at what they could see-and then inaccurately. World War II gunners could fire much farther, arching high-trajectory shells in with precise accuracy to hit targets on the other side of the ridge, using a variety of exploding shells. Civil War soldiers had only limited, crude mortars. World War II soldiers had a variety of relatively accurate mortars and their small arms were much more accurate, with much greater range and rate of fire. Civil War soldiers at night could light their pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, and gather around a campfire with total security. World War II soldiers hardly dared to have even the smallest fire at the bottom of their foxhole or smoke a cigarette.  In the Civil War, communications between the front line and headquarters were by runner only. World War II communications were by handheld radio and, much better, telephone lines running from the front to the command post. Only the most primitive flares, and only a few of them, were available in the Civil War.  In World War II, excellent flares and illuminating shells were readily available. In 1944 small, handheld bombs-grenades-unavailable in any quantity or sophistication in the Civil War, could be thrown across no-man’s-land, which was in most cases narrower in 1944-1945 than in 1864-65.  The internal combustion engine gave armies a nighttime mobility that was not possible with horses. Tanks and self-propelled artillery provided a nighttime firepower far in excess of anything possible eighty years earlier. Combined, the changes in weapons and equipment made World War II commanders far more aggressive at night than Civil War commanders. The people who paid the price for this aggressiveness were the front-line soldiers.  In this chapter I attempt to give some sense of how it was for those who endured and prevailed in the dangerous environment that was life on the front line at night in World War II.

The only visitors to the front lines were sometimes a major or a lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion, less often a colonel commanding the regiment, very occasionally a brigadier general commanding the division. Reporters didn’t go there, nor did the two-star generals and above. Neither did the traveling entertainers. “I never saw a USO show,” Pvt. William Craft of the 314th Regiment remarked. “I heard they were good, but they didn’t come to the front where I was.”