The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (40 page)

The front line belonged to the men who worked there-riflemen and machine gunners, mortarmen, forward artillery observers, communications men, and medics.  Its depth varied, depending on the terrain, but generally it was about one half a kilometer. Company CPs were 250 meters or so back from the main line of foxholes and were not considered front-line by the riflemen. Pvt. J. A.  “Strawberry” Craft of the 84th Division defined a member of the rear echelon as “any son of a bitch behind my foxhole.”

Outposts were anywhere from ten to fifty meters in front of the line of foxholes. The enemy outposts were sometimes almost within touching distance, more often up to fifty meters away. The friendly observation posts (OPs) were the edge of the known world.

Most of the time, the principal characteristic of the front line was how quiet it was. Artillery boomed in the distance and the “thump” of mortars sounded sporadically, but otherwise unless the enemy was shelling or attacking there was little noise.

Nor was there much movement. It was as if the earth had swallowed up all the human beings-as indeed it had, because on the front line men lived most of the time below the surface. Life-threatening violence was always present. Thousands of eyes searched their perimeters. Thousands of fingers were ready to pull triggers, thousands of hands were prepared to throw grenades or fire mortars at the slightest motion, or at night at the least noise or the light of a burning cigarette.

In early December the 84th Division was just inside Germany, near the border with Belgium, at Lindern. Pvt. Chalmers Davis, a mortarman, found an OP on top of a wrecked house. From it he spotted a haystack moving across an open field.  He got on the phone to tell the CP that there was a camouflaged tank out there.

Just then a German soldier jumped out of one foxhole and ran to another.  Davis decided to have some fun. “He never should have been out in the daytime,” he told his crew, down below behind the house. “He made a mistake.” The crew fired two mortar shells and got a bracket on the foxhole. The third shell was a direct hit. A combination of luck and skill was involved, but whatever the cause the German paid for his mistake with his life. American artillery, meanwhile, got a bracket on the haystack, then knocked out the tank inside.

(Reading this story inCitizen Soldiers prompted one of the gunners on the 105s that did all the shooting to write. He said the gun crew thought it was all a joke and for the remainder of the war, and at postwar reunions, they would get a laugh from remembering the time they shot at a moving haystack. Not until fifty-three years later did they discover there really was a target and they had knocked out a German tank.)

The first rule of life on the front line: Don’t move around because someone is watching. Stay in your hole whenever you can.

Depending on the length of the line a rifle company was holding, the foxholes were anywhere from a few to a hundred meters apart, occasionally even more. In this, World War II was markedly different from World War I. In the 1914-18 conflict, the trench line was continuous. You could walk from the Swiss border to the English Channel without ever showing your head above the earth’s surface.  The walls were lined with logs. Zigzag trenches ran back from the front to deep in the rear, so food, ammunition, and messages could be brought forward without exposure.

To man those extensive trenches, however, took hundreds of thousands of men, indeed millions. In November 1918 Marshal Foch had commanded three times more men than Eisenhower did in November 1944, on a front of approximately the same length. Hindenburg had commanded three to four times more men than Rundstedt.  Necessarily, foxholes replaced trenches.

Soldiers in the Great War didn’t know what a foxhole was. For all the terror of their daily existence, they at least had the comfort of being with comrades, seeing men around them, sensing their own power. World War II soldiers didn’t know what trenches were. In their foxholes they had one, at most two companions.  Otherwise they felt isolated-as in fact in a spread-out company they were.  Compounding the isolation was the unnatural situation of living below the surface of the earth plus the physical misery of digging a hole big enough for your coffin at the end of an exhausting day. But it had to be done, a lesson quickly learned.

Digging the hole was often arduous, sometimes exhausting. A typical position would be in or on the edge of a wood, which meant many roots, as most of the trees in Belgium were planted in rows, close together. During the second half of December, when the nighttime thermometer began to go down to near or below zero, the ground was frozen to the depth of a foot or more. Pickaxes were hard to come by on the front and even when available they weren’t much help. Sometimes it took hours to chip away enough frozen earth to get to unfrozen ground. Men used grenades or satchel charges to blow away the frozen earth.  Often it was just impossible. On the night of December 18-19, near Echternach, Sgt. John Sweeney of the 10th Armored Division tried to dig in, “but the ground was made up of heavy wet clay and our entrenching shovel couldn’t dig into it.” After penetrating a few inches, he and his buddies gave up. “It was so cold that the rear echelon brought up some overcoats (2 for every 3 soldiers). We placed one overcoat on the ground and three of us lay on it and covered ourselves with the second overcoat. The only one who was warm was the middle guy so we changed places every twenty minutes or so.”

The holes were usually rectangular, under the best conditions four or five feet deep, two or three feet wide by six feet long. When the men were in them for more than one night, or if they were veterans, they got them covered.  Sgt. Leo Lick of the 1st Division, a veteran of Sicily (where he won a Silver Star) and the Normandy invasion, moved into the line near Butgenbach at twilight of December 17. He and two buddies worked on their hole for a week. They got some logs which “we put over the hole and then put branches over the logs and then covered that layer with soil and camouflaged the top with snow. We also put six inches of evergreen needles on the bottom of the hole for comfortable sleeping. The opening to the foxhole also served as a warfare trench from which we could shoot or stand guard.”

Just one night in a foxhole in Belgium in December 1944 was memorable. Ten, twenty, thirty nights was hell. To begin with, night lasted so long in those northern latitudes. Dusk began to come on around 1600 or 1615. By 1645 it was full dark. First light didn’t come up for sixteen hours. It was bitterly cold, even for the GIs from Montana or North Dakota. It was frequently below zero and generally damp, with low clouds blowing in from the North Sea and a fog that penetrated everywhere-when it wasn’t snowing. Then the wind blew like a gale, driving the pellets of snow into their faces. It was Northern Europe’s coldest winter in forty years.

Col. Ralph Ingersoll described the cold: “Riding [in a jeep] through the Ardennes, I wore woolen underwear, a woolen uniform, armored force combat overalls, a sweater, an armored force field jacket with elastic cuffs, a muffler, a heavy lined trenchcoat, two pairs of heavy woolen socks, and combat boots with galoshes over them-and I cannot remember ever being warm.” Ingersoll was lucky. Although it was windy in the open jeep, it was dry, and he was much better dressed for the cold than any GI on the line. The infantrymen’s clothing was woefully, even criminally inadequate, because of a command decision General Bradley had made in September. He had decided to keep weapons, ammunitions, food, and replacements moving forward at the expense of winter clothing, betting that the campaign would be over before December. As a consequence, the men in the holes had few of the items Ingersoll wore. Their footwear-leather combat boots-was almost worse than useless. Whenever the temperature went above freezing, they were standing in two to twenty inches of water, which the leather soaked up.

There were good boots available in Europe, of the type made popular by L. L.  Bean after the war-well insulated, with leather uppers but rubber bottoms-but to the everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel, who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December, not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed. Maj. Gen. Paul Hawley, the chief surgeon for ETO, commented bluntly, “The plain truth is that the footwear furnished U.S. troops is lousy.”

Three days before the Bulge began, Col. Ken Reimers of the 90th Division noted that “every day more men are falling out due to trench foot. Some men are so bad they can’t wear shoes and are wearing overshoes over their socks. These men can’t walk and are being carried from sheltered pillbox positions at night to firing positions in the day time.”

In place of boots, the men got directives on how to prevent trench foot. They were ordered to massage their feet and change their socks every day. Sergeant Lick recalled, “We would remove our wet socks, hang them around our neck to dry, massage our feet and then put on the dry socks from around our neck that we had put there the day before. Then a directive came down stating that anyone getting trench foot would be tried by court martial.”

Senior officers threatened court-martial to men who got trench foot, or took disciplinary action against junior officers whose units had a high incidence of the malady because they suspected the foxhole dwellers were getting it deliberately. They thought it was almost the equivalent of a self-inflicted wound.

The best way to avoid trench foot was to lace the boots lightly and take them off at night before climbing into the sleeping bag or covering yourself with a blanket. But, Lick said, “we couldn’t take our boots off when we slept because they would freeze solid and we couldn’t get them on again in the morning.” The obvious solution, quickly learned by thousands of men, was to take the boots off but keep them inside the sleeping bag. Still there was another reason for keeping the boots on, the possible need for instant action.  Men wrapped their feet in burlap sacks, when available, but the burlap soaked up the snow, so the boots got soggy, the socks got wet. Sergeant Lick lost all his toenails, but through regular massages and a rotation of his socks he avoided trench foot. Thousands of others got it. Trench foot put more men out of action than German 88s, mortars, or machine-gun fire. During the winter of 1944-45, some 45,000 men had to be pulled out of the front line because of trench foot-the equivalent of three full infantry divisions.  First a man lost his toenails. His feet turned white, then purple, finally black. A serious case of trench foot made walking impossible. Many men lost their toes; some had to have their feet amputated. If gangrene set in, the doctors had to amputate the lower leg. It has to be doubted that many men did this deliberately. A shot in the foot was much quicker, less dangerous, and nearly impossible to prove that it hadn’t been an accident.  One private in Lt. Lee Otts’s platoon shot himself in the foot and there was no question of accident. The man had been talking all night to his mate, Pvt.  Penrose LeCrone, about doing it. LeCrone had the flu and was so depressed he just wanted the guy to shut up, so he told him to go ahead and do it. Otts commented: “It was three miles by trail to the aid station. The two medics who went with him made him walk all the way-there was no free ride for those with self-inflicted wounds.”

During those long nights it was impossible to keep out of the mind the thought of how easy it would be to shoot a round into the foot. Sgt. Bruce Egger considered it, but “I did not have the nerve to shoot myself. . . . I thought about dropping a case of rations on my foot, but I did not want to live the rest of my life with that on my mind. I decided to stick it out and trust in the Lord.” A man in Lt. Harold Leinbaugh’s platoon begged his squad leader, “Do me a favor, sergeant, shoot me in the leg.”

Captain Roland of the 99th Division recalled, “Men began to wound themselves one way or another in order to get away from the front. Sometimes this was intentional. Sometimes it occurred through a gross negligence born of fear, exhaustion, and misery.”

“There were two things in front of you always,” Cpl. Clair Galdonik of the 90th Division remarked: “the enemy and death. . . . Sometimes morale was so low that you preferred death instead of a day-by-day agonizing existence. When you were wet, cold, hungry, lonely, Death looked very inviting. It was always close at hand and I found myself being envious of a dead comrade. At least he suffered no more physically or mentally.”

Pvt. Bert Morphis of the 1st Division remembered that on Christmas Eve he was “on an outpost right in front of the German lines where the choice seemed to be between moving and being shot, or lying perfectly still and freezing to death.” Most of them stuck it out. Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd Airborne was one of hundreds who refused to be evacuated because of trench foot. But when he also came down with dysentery and the flu, his CO ordered him to the rear. He commented, “I secretly experienced a great deal of guilt about going to the hospital for anything other than a bona fide wound. Anemia, bronchitis, dysentery, and trench foot seemed to be an easy way out. In hindsight, I understand that if you are sick you don’t belong on a battlefield, but when you are an immature kid trying to be a hero it is something of a problem, particularly when you are trying to prove your courage to no one other than yourself.”

Getting out of there honorably was every man’s dream-thus the expression “million-dollar wound.” Sgt. John Sabia took five machine-gun bullets in his right thigh. His CO asked if he could make it back to the aid station on his own, as the company couldn’t spare a man.

“Hell, yes, I can do it.”

Sabia took a tree limb to use as a crutch and began hopping awkwardly in the snow. After ten meters he stopped, turned around, waved his limb in a gesture of defiance and exuberance, and bellowed to his buddies in their holes, “Hey, you bastards! Clean sheets! Clean sheets!”

Pvt. Donald Schoo of the 80th Infantry Division recalled seeing one of his buddies, named Steehhourst, take a hit from an 88 that blew off his right hand.  “He was crying and running around yelling, ‘I’m going home! Thank you God, I’m going home!’ “ Steehhourst was lucky, at least according to the standards of the men of the Bulge and specifically to Sgt. Richard Wallace of the 90th Division. After one shelling Wallace told his squad, “Boys, I’d give my right arm up to here”-holding it at his elbow-“if this war would end right now.” The shelling resumed. Shrapnel tore into Wallace’s face.