War Stories III (14 page)

2nd Armored Division
Morocco, French North Africa
28 November 1942

My father was a farmer who died when I was a baby, forcing my mother to take over and run the farm. The Depression was a tough time for everyone. Because we lived on a farm we always had food—none of us went hungry or had to stand in bread lines. But during the '30s, farm labor only made just fifty cents a day, working from sun up to sun down. That's why I dropped out of high school and joined the army in March 1941, at age seventeen.

I remember December 7 vividly, because it put us on a state of alert. We had just returned from the Louisiana maneuvers—where Eisenhower had first made his name. He was just a colonel in those days, but he really knew how to get things done and everyone was impressed by him.

We started getting in a lot of new soldiers right after Pearl Harbor, and in the late spring of '42 they sent us to Tennessee, on more maneuvers. From there we went to North Carolina, at Fort Bragg, where we spent
most of the summer and the early autumn. Then one night, they backed up a freight train, loaded us up, and took us to Newport News, Virginia. There, we loaded up onto transport ships. Everyone was really concerned, because the German submarines were very active out in the Atlantic at that time.

No one told us where we were going. We all thought that we were headed for the South Pacific. All the war news was about the battles going on there—so that's where we figured we were heading. But, of course, we were wrong.

After we had been out at sea for several days, Captain Whitfield came on the intercom system, and invited everyone to come up to the deck. It was early in the morning, but every direction you looked there were ships. We were told that we were part of the largest convoy that had ever been assembled. There were aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and battleships—all surrounding the troopships—to protect them.

Now, given the weather and the temperature, it was pretty clear that we weren't in the South Pacific, but we still didn't know where we were headed—because the weather was so terrible you couldn't see the sun or the stars. Some guys guessed that we were headed to England through the North Atlantic because the waves were so rough. It was so bad that it broke the chains on some of the tanks that were secured in the hold. One of the tanks broke loose and killed a man.

Late on the afternoon of November 7, we were told to muster for haircuts and then a nice hot meal—that would be our last real food for some time. That's when we were told that we would be landing on the coast of North Africa.

Patton, our commander, was a very colorful character and a good leader. He was a genius in tank warfare and demanded the very best of everyone else who served under him. Later, Patton got the nickname of “Old Blood and Guts.” But he really cared about his men and we all respected him.

My tank platoon landed at Safi shortly after midnight on the morning of 8 November 1942. We were surprised that there weren't any enemy
soldiers on the beach to fight us. When we came ashore we had been told to expect to be opposed by the French garrison in the port and we were all pretty anxious. But none of them showed up so we didn't have to fight them. The invasion was really a walk-in. We could've just pulled up to the docks and unloaded.

Early the next morning we were told to move up the road toward Casablanca. For the next few days, the only danger we faced was from mines that had been planted on the roads.

But then everything changed—the Germans figured out we were in Morocco and we started to get attacked by their air force and as we moved east, toward Algeria, we ran into their patrols. One day we were in a convoy of half-tracks, tanks, and trucks and a shell hit the right side of our line. General Patton came up in his light tank and stopped right where the shell had hit. And he says, “Go get 'em.”

So we did, but then, a few minutes later, a twin-engine plane flew over. The Germans had been strafing our convoy, so everybody was shooting at the plane and it landed in the desert. We sent a patrol out there to check and it turned out to be an Italian major general that had come to surrender. That was our total experience with the Italians in North Africa.

In December, some of us from 2nd Armor Division were sent to reinforce units in Algeria because the Germans were going to start a winter offensive. That's when we found out about the German Tiger tank. It was said to be the best tank in the world, with an 88 millimeter anti-aircraft gun—a rapid fire weapon. But it couldn't “lob” shells like our guns—and it wasn't as mobile in that terrible terrain. North Africa maybe a desert—but it's a mud-hole in winter. The Tiger was so heavy that in soft ground it often got stuck.

The Germans I saw were good soldiers. But they needed somebody to tell 'em what to do, how to do it—and when. The Americans—we were mostly farm boys. If we couldn't whip you one way, we'd whip you another. We had guys inventing things and coming up with practical ideas. One soldier invented a gadget that mounted on front of the tanks to clear
mines. Then someone did the same thing with the half-track—using heavy log rollers and chains to cause mines to explode in front of the vehicle instead of under it.

We might have been green troops when we landed, but we quickly learned everything about our equipment—what it could do, and what it couldn't do. We learned warfare “on the job” as it were. For example, one of our machine-gunners switched out the rounds in the belts of .50-cal ammunition so that one round was standard ball, the next was armor piercing, then a tracer. That way we could shoot by eyesight, not by gunsight. Those kinds of innovations kept a lot of American soldiers alive.

2nd Armored Division
Casablanca, Morocco
29 December 1942

I grew up in the mountains of Kentucky and southwestern Virginia—just a Snowy Mountain boy, from start to finish.

In 1939 when the war started in Europe, I was a senior in high school and was out looking for work when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December '41. I figured that I was probably going to be drafted so I volunteered.

I enlisted in the Army April 1, 1942—and shipped out for armor basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. They were opening schools for everything—tracked vehicles, cooks and bakers, gunnery specialists, radio operators, and technicians.

I was one of 600 men sent for technical training. The school lasted for ten weeks, but we didn't get anything except the basics. Believe me, we were green as grass. The Army knew it, so we were divided up among units that had already been trained, figuring that we could always call on someone with more experience for help.

In December of '42, we shipped out of New York harbor aboard the SS
Argentina
—headed for North Africa. We landed on Christmas Eve, 1942, at Casablanca. On Christmas Day there was a German air raid on the harbor. We were sitting out there, in the open, watching it. That's how “smart” and “well trained” we were. We hadn't dug foxholes or taken cover. At night, when they came back to bomb the harbor again, we were still sitting there.

You can see—we were a young, inexperienced army in many ways. We hadn't developed as much as the Germans soldiers had.

Our cantonment held three separate battalions—Engineer, Medical, and Reconnaissance. I was assigned to the Reconnaissance Battalion. My new platoon commander told me, “You've got the easiest job in the army.”

I asked, “What in the world are you talking about?”

He says, “All you have to do is find the enemy. Then all you have to do is stay alive to get back to tell us what you found. Otherwise, it won't help us.”

That was my introduction to reconnaissance. But it was the truth—in a brutal sort of way.

Our CO, General Lucian Prescott, told us that a soldier carrying a field pack and weapon should be able to cover four miles in fifty minutes. He called it “the Prescott Trot.” It really wasn't a walk—and it wasn't quite a run. It just about killed us to start with, but in time, and after lots of training, we could run
five
miles in fifty minutes. By January we were able to do four miles—take a ten-minute break—and then do four more. That's how we learned to assault a ridge—take your equipment and run to the top and flop down in position all out of breath. Believe me, we might have been in the armor, but we learned to cover a lot of ground on foot.

By the time we left Morocco and headed for Algeria and Tunisia, we were in really good shape. And that was a good thing, because the Reconnaissance units spent a lot of time in the Atlas Mountains—looking for the Germans—while they were looking for us. And one thing was for sure, we had thought the Germans were good—but they were really no better than us. They just had more experience.

The Germans also had a better gun on their tanks than we did—and they knew how to use 'em. What they did, they did well. But they couldn't do anything on their own. They didn't try and figure out things the way we do, and they weren't innovative. Despite our inexperience, we were quick to learn—and we were smart enough to know what we still needed to learn. If we persisted in doing well and learning well, we were really going to be better than the Germans.